TRASHFUTURE - Bolsonaro and the Bandits: A Minion Adventure feat. Ryan Broderick

Episode Date: November 6, 2018

It’s election season in America, which means terrible racist memes shared by people you hate. In that spirit, Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Nate (@inthesedeserts) spoke with Ryan Broderick (@broderick), Buzzfeed’s Deputy Editor of Global News, about his recent article on how American tech companies radicalised the world. We talk about his experience reporting on the Brazilian elections, why Jair Bolsonaro wants to kill bandits, and how the future looks an awful lot like rich people reading the Economist and everyone else listening to Joe Rogan. You can read Ryan’s article here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-facebook-elections During the episode, Ryan referenced a David Wong article for Cracked, which you can read here: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/ Also, remember that your favourite moron lads have a Patreon now. You too can support us here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/overview Don’t forget that you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/. Get whichever slogan you want, but get the damn shirts!

Um, right. So I just got back from Brazil. Boy, am I, I was tired. Um, I was there for a month covering the election. JR Bolsonaro, just one. He is not like Trump. He was probably closer to Duterte or some crazier thing. And from what I can tell, the big difference between him and the other candidates to really put him ahead of in the polls is that he's just very vocally, uh, wanting to kill all the bandits, which in Brazil is a very realistic political strategy. You can be like, I really don't have any other political insights other than I want to kill bandits. And everyone's like, yeah, all right, let's kill bandits. So like, I have a couple of friends who said that like every uncle they have in their WhatsApp

was just like, I don't know much about this Bolsonaro guy, but like, he's going to make guns legal so that me and him can get in a car together and kill bandits. He's going to paint fake tunnels on all the cliff faces in Brazil. Yeah. He's just got like a big box and then it's held up with a stick and they can just go in and kill bandits. So for me, it's like the dream sequence in a Christmas story. When he thinks about getting the rifle and then the men with the masks and the striped shirts come over the fence. He's a very American reference. Uh, but you got this guy got it. Um, you know, like, I think as like a kind of understand bandit

is sort of a general term in Brazil for like law breaker, but like particularly ones like in like favelas and low income areas that like kind of take over a bit and like they're just like, you know, bandits, I don't know why, why are you being such a liberal about this? Kill bandits. No, you, you say it was like that scene in that movie. I'm saying, no, this is like Bolsonaro has decided to grind his character to level 99 by just collecting bandit belts. He's just collecting hundreds and hundreds of bandit belts in the first level stage of Brazil. I think we talk a lot about like, you know, mega platforms influencing elections, but

actually truly, I think it's just if you, uh, go on Facebook and you tell people, I'm going to kill bandits, people will vote for you. And that's just the, that's the lesson. That was the problem really with Hillary Clinton's campaign. She was incredibly pro bandit due to a big corporate donor. She was really unwilling to nail her colors to a mast on the bandit issue. The problem, the problem is she was deep in the pocket of big domino mask. What? Oh, the Dharma mask is the, that's the name of the mask. The bandits were in 1950s crime

dramas. Yeah. Yeah. Opponents motto is you'll never take me alive. And joining us is the deputy global head of news for BuzzFeed, Ryan Broderick. Hi. I shot the global head of news, but I didn't know. My title is very long and complicated. Yeah, it's really long.

I changed up every time I said it. You just call yourself Chief Bandit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Chief Deputy Bandit. Chief Bandit. Well, no, in Portuguese they called me like something like Segundo Commando. It was like a very, very long translation.

Dude, you're a fucking news commando. I think it was Stephen Seagull's newest film, Segundo Commando. I think Segundo on commando means second command, but it sounds way cooler in Portuguese. Yeah. He's a very white person. Yeah. Well, yeah. No, definitely.

It's just gringo. It means you, you are what guys like David Eranovich think they are, which is a news commando like fighting untruth with like the power of their words. I'm a more beautiful version of Anderson Cooper. I have a face for TV unlike him. Yeah. Oh man. So on, on last Sunday, as of the time of recording, far right evangelical fascist, a gyre or higher?

Jair. Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil in the era of being surprised at this kind of politics is over you, Ryan, have written. Now we all have to live with what we've done. Yeah. That's the whole show. We're all fucked. Yeah.

I will say like the argument on Twitter about like calling him like a fascist versus a populist versus far, right? I'm not sure. One, he hasn't started yet, right? So like fascism, much like love is a verb. So, you know, you really, you really can't be accused of it. You know, he's probably going to be pretty bad. I basically, everything he said or done in his entire life.

So he's a point of direction that he's going to be really, really bad. In addition to being anti-bandit, what else, what else are, what else is he saying? Basically like in the Brazilian political sphere, crime and punishment is a huge deal. Obviously they have a huge. They love Dostoevsky. They love Dostoevsky. All of them. And they're just like, they want, they want someone who's going to be like a strong man.

And that's the thing. So basically Bolsonaro was just very anti-bandit. There's also anti-women, anti-gay, anti-the Amazon rainforest. Famous bandits, Amazon rainforest. You know, he's got a very moderate political position of paving a highway through the Amazon. So, you know, he's going to attract bandits. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And let's go flamco in the middle of the Amazon.

It's to hunt them down, I think, you know, just to shoot people on his Amazon jungle highway. And then this, just this week, there's been like rumors that he might immediately try to go to war with Venezuela. So, you know, things are, things are looking pretty good over there. John Bolton, U.S. National Security Advisor, has already basically said that he's very excited about attacking the like Troika of dictators. Troika of tyranny. Troika of tyranny, as Nate has correctly pointed out, down in South America. Oh, that's what that was. So, okay, I've been off the internet like most of the week just resting.

I saw Troika of tyranny trending or whatever. And I was like, maybe that's a band or like, I don't know what that was. I didn't think it was real until I actually saw a Washington Post article quoting it. Because, like, that's so dumb that I was like, that must be a joke. That must be a meme. I thought it was a meme. And no, it's real, apparently. So, it's what, Cuba, Venezuela, and there's a third country they hate, and I can't remember.

Oh, the geopolitical big timers of Cuba and Venezuela. Yeah, I can't remember what the third one is. Is it Bolivia they hate so much or Ecuador? I can't remember. Yeah, let me actually be a journalist and look it up. Wow. It's like when one boomer band from the 70s gets in a feud with another boomer band from the 70s in 2018. It's just like, wow.

Nicaragua. Nicaragua. Oh, wow. Wow. A famous country, America's had no hand in doing anything to ever. Yeah, those are all independently bad. I don't really know very much about South America, to be honest with you, but I know a lot about Central America because I worked there at one point.

And so, like, hearing that, I was like, oh, fuck's sake. As a side note, before we go back to Brazil, just FYI, there was an American who literally tried to annex Nicaragua to be a slave state in the 1850s. His name was William Walker and George H.W. Bush, appointed an ambassador to El Salvador, which that whole region hates this guy and hates America for this, whose name was William Walker. And they're like, why is it already so mad? And it's like, it's like, new U.S. ambassador to Israel, Adolf Hitler.

That is such an American thing to do. Dude, what? Yeah, what's your problem? Dude, what the fuck? No, especially this guy, he was a dude from Tennessee and he was like, slavery is good. We need more slave states. I'm going to lead an army into Nicaragua to take over the country, which he did. And then he's like, all right, Spanish language is banned now.

Everyone speaks English. And needless to say, people weren't happy with among the fucked up things that he did. Having a normal one. Exactly. But he's the only Tennesseean to be a head of state abroad. Well, we know why there haven't been other ones. Exactly. And so, yeah, needless to say, this would be like the 17th or 18th time we've done something

fucked up to Nicaragua. So, not surprised he named it. So anyway, Troika of Tyroneil, hand it back to you, Riley. Well, so, excitingly, well, not excitingly, really, but that's what the Moscow equivalent of the oyster card is called, the Troika. So they might be in line to get sued because I feel like that is the Troika of Tyroneil, the original. So, one of the, one of the, we were talking before the show, one of the things you were

saying is like, is one of the reasons that sort of Bolsonaro was so popular is that everyone's uncle thought that they were going to like cowboy up with him, get into a sidecar and just fucking take a browning machine gun to like every poor person. Yeah. I mean, that's sort of like what happened with Trump too, right? Right? Where like every like, you know, dude who blew out his knee, you know, and like lives in a small town and thinks like he'll be the Trump of his town.

I think with all of these dudes like Bolsonaro, like Trump, like Tommy Robinson, like people just assume that the success of them would fall back on that. It's like trickle down, like trickle down friendship. You know, it's like trickle down like masculine power. Like you assume that like this strong man will make me strong too. Speaking of which, on the train here this morning, I actually sat in a train with Tommy Robinson fans because there was no space and I survived. So that officially makes me a member of the Democratic Football Ads Alliance.

Yeah, congratulating them the special version of Hallelujah where none of it scans. So I just wanted to, I just wanted to make it very clear. What are they doing in town today? Is there a thing again? It was like a Millwall game today. So it's a game. They're doing the football as opposed to the democracy. I always forget that they also like football.

Yeah. But the thing is like Millwall games aren't really football games. They're really like there. So you go get really pissed off and drunk. And then you start, you know, you fight afterwards and then you go grab a kebab. And that's different from a football game. How in the UK? Oh, that's true.

That's true. I guess like when international people like see English football, they tend to think of like Arsenal or they tend to think of like one of the big teams of the big stadium where they play football and it will cost you anywhere between 90 to 150 pounds to get a ticket in there. Whereas if Millwall, you can pay like a couple, you know, about 10, 20 quid. And get your nose buddied afterwards. That's cool.

That's cool. That's normal. Which is, yeah. Very cool. A report that I've seen about Brazil every like sort of thing, since let's say 2014, even before Dilma Rousseff was impeached, has basically said that like there's a lot of outrage about crime. I wasn't sure if you could like speak to that.

So what I can say is the thing that I heard multiple times is that so I've looked at Brazil. So I've been to Brazil three times now. And I sort of use Brazil as like what I think the Western democracies will look like five years from now. I sort of think they're actually ahead on the timeline. And Brazilian politics for the last like 15 years has sort of been 20 years has been sort of based on this idea of a savior politician.

So like populism is kind of built into their culture in a really bad way. Like the dude who was going to run from jail and if he had probably would have beaten Bolsonaro Lula like was their savior and people are pissed because he was also super corrupt. But he was he was also like even like a mild social Democrat, right? So the other big thing about about all of this is that like Bolsonaro won one because he wants to kill bandits. Cool. Two because he wants to bulldoze the Amazon.

And then three, the workers party who is like their labor but like even I think they're even more left of labor. They were heavily implicated in Lava Jato, which is the biggest corruption scandal in human history, which is a crazy sentence to say the biggest corruption scandal in human history. What was it? Right. Okay.

Here's a get into the episode notes, but I want to know what it was. Here's my tight five on basically what happened was there's a ton of nationalized oil companies in Brazil and they were using a currency exchange at a gas station. No, no, there was a car wash gas is a combination car wash gas station. Is this breaking bad? Yeah. Yeah. And they were using the currency exchange to launder several trillion dollars.

Wow. Yeah. I thought that was a car wash. Yeah. And I think like 150 people have been arrested and the impeachment movement that came after that really wasn't connected to it at all. It just sort of got hijacked. And so Geoma Rousseff, she was impeached, but it's really not clear why other than that

she was just president when it happened. I was going to say she was the PT successor to Lula, right? Right. She was like, well, right. Because I mean, I have only seen this through intercept headlines, so I don't pretend to be an expert. But I just remember hearing people be like, wow, they're just going to use as an excuse to impeach her.

And it seemed like a lot of stuff that was happening in Brazil was sort of like if the North Carolina GOP ran America, just the sheer volume of like, oh, fuck it, we're just going to take power because we can. What I do think is really funny about PT is that like they're still so like crazy, not good at this that like they're being like, we're not corrupt anymore. Everything's fine. Also Lula should be legally allowed to run for president from jail. Okay.

He can't. Then this is real. They, the guy who ran instead was Hadaji. They put his face on one side of a little like, you know, a face holder thing and Lula's on the other and you could spin them so their faces would blur together. And then all of the campaign posters were Lula like standing behind Hadaji, like literally almost looking like he's pulling the strings. Like it was so clearly just like, please vote for our party even though Brazilian politics

is face off. Yeah. Basically. So yeah, all the polling seemed to indicate that Lula would have won had even allowed to run. Hands down. Basically, all, all of it said that he would have won. He's still beloved.

Equally, the guy who, the, the, the judge who sort of signed Lula's relatively shoddy arrest warrant was immediately made a minister by Bolsonaro as well. This is if the North Carolina GOP was just like doing favors for their friends. It's like if, if Rob Ford, the Toronto crack smoking mayor who died was running stuff because he used to just think that being elected to a political position meant you now get to do corrupt stuff and he didn't think you had to hide it. And something, there's something I've been thinking about, which is like if Brazil is a environment of pure populism on both the left and the right, I think it's really interesting

how quickly like everything sort of just falls apart and it becomes like the political machine has no spectrum anymore. So it's almost like an all you can eat buffet of just like whatever you want. And it's been really making me think a lot about like, okay, if we are entering into a like, let's say the next decade where the majority of democracies on earth have a populist leader. That means another populist will probably have to run against them, which means that we're probably looking at like a 10 year period where politics aren't anything.

You know, it's just like whoever is the loudest, craziest asshole on YouTube becomes president. At the same time, you can just kill the bandits. Toge in 2024. Toge in 2024. Toge in 2024. 2020. There is, there is, there is a, well, there's a dark and a light version of that just like there's Jomney Sun and the Joker.

Jesus Christ. Okay. No, no, no, no, Jomney Sun is the light side Joker. But what we had, like you could say in fact that pitting a populist against a populist, if they are genuinely representing the left and right is a sort of departure from what you might call post politics, where we think of politics as merely managerial and that where we're actually articulating opposed interests, right? So there is, there is, you could say that in fact has that left populism gives people

renewed hope in an improved society, you know, and that, and that we are trying to go beyond a sort of dry technocratic liberal post politics that's basically failed us. Yeah, that's true. I mean, we definitely saw left populism in Mexico. Also fun, weird central South American political fact. I didn't know this was true. Apparently for the last like 15 elections, every time Mexico goes left or right, Brazil will go the opposite.

Huh. And no one knows why. Well, I kind of want to get into some of this article that you've written there, right? Just imagine Mexico having a very pro bandic government right now. Well, actually sort of, yeah, Amlos, one of his big things that he was criticized immediately for was that he said he wanted to fight the narcos with hugs, which is literally hugs not drugs. So you've said, you've called the, the, the Brazilian election sort of the first Facebook

election. So people, maybe I wrote this wrong. I don't understand why people are, okay, wait, it's the, it's the last of the first wave. The last four years we have Facebook elections, this is now the new normal. That's sort of what I meant. Okay. Can you tell a what do you mean by a Facebook election?

So I've been thinking a lot about algorithmic, let's say algorithmic election, right? So for the first time, maybe ever in human history, we have pieces of code that are automating world views. And we didn't really know what that would do to populations. You know, we've basically done the largest social experiment of all time. And what we're now seeing is that if a population of people have the world views automated by algorithms that they can't control or regulate or see, they're going to start to do really wacky shit real fast.

And so I would say that from 2014 to 2018, which is sort of a four year cycle that happens all the time of just democracies going through elections. We have now been able to stop after Brazil and go because so the next big election is India in April. And if you go from India to India, Modi to Modi, you do see a really definite pattern of just political chaos. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that like people aren't really in control of how they consume information anymore.

And it's really fucking with people's brains. Yeah, that's very interesting because this whole, you might say that the transformation of media to social media had the chance to be truly democratizing, but instead it seems to have created a kind of oligarchic chaos. So I have a friend named Jamie Kohn. Hey, Jamie, what's going on? He does a lot of meme research in like the academic field. And we were having a conversation the other day about whether or not social media is inherently

fascist, which isn't too different from Steve Bannon's idea that social media is inherently feudal, which is totally bonkers, but kind of smart in a weird way, like wearing two shirts for no reason. And we were talking... It's cool because you don't have to change your shirt. No one else do this. What we don't realize is Steve Bannon, it's isn't wearing two shirts as a fashion choice. He's like just a homeless guy and he's wearing all his shirts.

No, he just doesn't want to pay for checking a bag on a plane. He's an efficiency dude. Like in any other world, he'd be making YouTube videos about if you wear two shirts, if you sweat under one, you just have another, you don't have to go down to the store and buy one. You can use that time, but you save to be more productive for your boss. But wouldn't you wear two shirts to make you sweat more? Can you like just shut up?

I don't want to say. Just checking on Shane's dreams. Sorry. Sorry. Anyways, so Jamie and I were talking about... Jamie's become very obsessed with the idea of reality television being like the alpha test to social media. And the idea that reality television is sort of inherently fascist and like the idea that

we were talking about how Instagram is sort of like a personalized like real housewives of New York for you. So like we've sort of let mass media evolve in a way where now it's pretty much top down super personalized broadcasting and we can't seem to break out of it. And I think it is scrambling people's brains. And this is why they think that Tommy Robinson's going to have a beer and go beat up a grooming gang with them or that Trump is going to come down to their jet ski store and say they're running a tight ship or like on both of those things will totally happen.

Those things happened to me this week or that they're going to cowboy up with Bolsonaro and you know, just ride along the Amazon highway just spraying bullets. Yeah. Me and Duterte are just going to ride around in a speedboat killing drug dealers. Like it's cool. My happy vice. Yeah. It's cool.

It's like the Amazon highway is totally something Jeff Bezos is going to build in the next 10 years. I mean, if you even think about the way we're talking about this right now, like it's like the Pokemonification of political leaders. Like we're literally like there's like a whole, I don't think this was ever really true before up until maybe the axis of versus the allies. Like people are now collecting political leaders. It's really weird.

It's a weird thing to be like, oh yeah, Boris Johnson, Duterte, like all my boys, Erdogan, what's up like Putin. Like it's a really weird time where we've sort of commodified populist leaders as like a, I don't know, there's sort of a perverse entertainment value and watching countries go berserk. There was this snippet from that article where the Brazilian sort of version of the Daily Show was like, yeah, we kept having Bolsonaro on, kept showing him to be this clown, kept trying to laugh at him in this way.

And you know, now he's in charge of all the guns. Yeah. Well, that's the thing is like, and I wrestle with this every single day, which is like, how do you de-platform fascist and far right thinkers, but also not allow them to operate completely in the dark, like un-vetted and unregulated and un- Black Ops fascism. Yeah. Because that's a social media thing for them.

Do you want a Mercer or do you want a Tommy Robinson? But then we find out that the Mercer's are probably funding all kinds of Tommy Robinson's all over the world. So I don't really know even what the difference is between, you know, it's sort of an existential crisis, I think for journalists, because it's like, if you shine a light on these people, then they get more followers and fans. But if you don't, they're still going to make the same money from the people who are in the dark.

Well, maybe also George Soros funds everything now, so, you know, like, no, but it's fucked up. We have this cool office of microphones that work all the time. Yeah. But we also, we talked about how this wasn't just a Facebook election, it was also a WhatsApp election and a YouTube election. Yeah. It is scary powerful.

And one of the first things Bolsonaro said he would do is somehow, he didn't explain how this would happen, but he's going to try to make WhatsApp more powerful in Brazil by altering some of its key, like, like, like platform stuff. He's going to give it the spirit bomb. Yeah. He literally said that he's going to go inside of the app and change it for Brazilians, but he also wants to run it like a secret police. And this is something that I think is, we have to really think about, which is the idea

that he has basically decided that he can have hundreds and thousands of encrypted groups just feeding people information and no one would ever know. So it's, it's like a whisper network, which is like, this is what I was talking about the idea of like blurring left and right in a populist environment. It's like, that is straight up China playbook. That's like social credit score hijacked into what's, you know, poured it into WhatsApp. The idea that a leader like Bolsonaro's first instinct was, oh, let's build a whisper campaign and set a WhatsApp to control people or, and one thing that we did, I was trying to nail

this down when I was in Brazil for a story, but no one would talk about it for, because they were scared. But we do, I do think that a lot of the fake news that's spreading about people in WhatsApp is actually being spread by bandits that you owe money to. So it's already happening where like you could be targeted on WhatsApp by someone that you owe money to, and then, you know, someone comes and burns down your house and then the bandits come to you later and say, probably should have paid. And so that's already happening.

So I would push back slightly that on the assertion that that is a sort of a populist blending of left and right. Again, I mean, I wouldn't call, I would call China sort of a authoritarian capitalist system at this point. Yeah. You know, and, and also the idea that we don't have a social credit score here that's just coded in your race or gender or class. Although the Fitbit insurance is coming and I'm very excited about that.

No, you're right. And it's, but it's, it's crazy that these, these guys immediately figure that social media can help them do whatever they want. And so, you know, the question of is social media fascist, I don't know. So there was, if I remember correctly, in Brazil, or this is just worldwide for, for WhatsApp, there's a limit on how many people can be in a group, correct? Or how many messages you can send to a group, something like that. Yeah.

So, okay, Helen, you can do, it's not, you can be a member of infinite groups. You can make 9,999 groups yourself. It's a max of 200 people per group. And you can forward something, a total of five or seven times simultaneously. But also, Brazil has a weird thing that no other country I've been to has, which is that on Facebook, you will see on your newsfeed, share to WhatsApp. So the, the, the apps are connected. Oh wow.

Way more heavily. I'm just laughing because like the thing that, the thing that WhatsApp put in place to stop your aunties from sending you like lots and lots of prayer messages on WhatsApp has now been there. Like, no, this is bad because it also stops us from being allowed to send fascism. Right. Because... It stops us from messaging about the bandits.

My wife gets lots of relative WhatsApp messages. I get all the time. Like all these kind of really glittery, like Arabic, like Quranic verses, which all loosely translate to like, either get married, otherwise you're going to die, just, just, just, just for anything. Did you tell them that it's no fat November and you can't get married right now? This is exactly what I've said. All they said, all they said, you're going to die anyway.

So why don't you... So it's all like loosely like related around death, but the funniest thing about these WhatsApp messages is just like how they remind me of like those, those gifts that you'd see on like really early social media platforms, like, like Pixel and stuff, you know, like those weird pages where like you'd go onto the homepage and there's be like glittery, like, you know, images, that's what, that's what they are. Really that's what WhatsApp is. It's just like a pixel page, but in message form.

Now it's used for spreading, for killing bandits and spreading rumors about gay conversion kids. WhatsApp is even used for aunties to hook up, hook, hook up, like, you know... Local aunties in your area. Yeah. Want to hook you up. Like to hook you up with like, you know, women back home or it's used for fascism. That's really it.

One cute WhatsApp thing that I think is like a kind of adorable is that all of the like baby boomer era, like they're not baby boomers in India, but like that generation would wake up every morning and WhatsApp each other. Good morning. At such a scale that it was actually slowing down WhatsApp servers because every old person in India would wake up and just text every other old person. Good morning. I thought that was like kind of an incredible idea.

I was wondering because you were mentioning about the share to WhatsApp thing from Facebook, correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seemed like I had seen a lot of reporting that there was a ton of the sort of 2016 American style shitty news on Facebook being spread false or misleading news being spread on Facebook in Brazil, specifically in Brazil. And that like, I imagine that those two apps working very well together would then put you in a situation where like it must be very easy to share bullshit news and things along those lines about politics. Yeah.

Like there's tons of hoaxes and rumors, especially on WhatsApp. Facebook tried to be really proactive and they shut down like huge, huge pages, like hundreds of pages with like millions of followers before the election. But then what we found was that all those dudes just moved to WhatsApp where it was easier to spread stuff and no one can track them. And in fact, we talked about Lava Jato a week before the second vote in October, there was a scandal that came out called they were calling Lava Zap short for WhatsApp Lava Jato and they discovered that marketing firms were texting thousands of people anti leftist propaganda

on WhatsApp and they had stolen or bought or somehow ascertained Bolsonaro's voter database and we're basically just pumping them full of propaganda on WhatsApp. If you're not using our car wash, you're a bandit, but I'm actually still fantasizing about the idea of the WhatsApp secret police like bashing down your door and be like, we have intel that you are subversive. Your WhatsApp status is not high there. I'm using one. What is the meaning of this?

You didn't forward this to five people and you're going to die here. So one thing that I tried to address in my piece is that like what is becoming very clear is that like fake news will probably stop being a problem for rich people. Like they also scrubbed to tortoise. Yeah, exactly. That's why we're like fucking true of it, right? Like poor countries. No, no, no, you're right.

You're right. No, you're right. The smarties like us, you're right. We get our news from the Plymouth Herald comments section. That's the feature of media. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The feature of media is like towards this message. Was Bolsonaro getting his guys to post on the Plymouth Herald comments section?

The really scary future of media is like, you know, rich people reading the economist and everyone else listening to Joe Rogan. You know, that's what it is, right? You ever go to Bandit? Yeah. Again, I see a sort of challenge there, which is if we remember the sort of elite establishment paid media were the same people that sold us the war in Iraq. They're the same people that sold us the sort of that austerity was politically necessary.

Not a choice. It was politically necessary. They're even the same people who hacked phones, all this stuff like I don't see the sort of establishment wealthy media as necessarily more trustworthy than the fake news. It's just one is very respectable. I guess the best thing I could, the best example I could use is sort of like the idea of a food desert, which is like McDonald's moves into your neighborhood, they undercut all the local businesses, they start pumping everyone in your neighborhood for like delicious, delicious,

delicious food. But then everyone fucking gets fat. Everyone gets that fucking filet au fish. Yeah, everyone gets the fucking best thing of all time. The filet au fish is inherently fascist. I'm sorry. It's Catholic. It's what me and Daredevil eat.

So the superhero or boss. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking Matt Murdock, dude. Irish Catholic guy. Yeah. Hell yeah, dude. They're devil single handedly saving Boston from the Vietnamese.

Jesus Christ. He went blind because looking at Boston was too beautiful. No, he went blind because he had to look at girls who are healthy for too long, dude. I'mma tell you. No, so basically, I'm not arguing that we should all read Murdock papers because that's fucking loony. But I'm thinking more along the lines of corporations replacing how local communities communicate.

So Facebook is essentially a McDonald's and the mom and pop shops that replace would be like your local newspaper, like DNA info, basically, exactly, or Gothamist, or, you know, and we saw on the internet, we saw a really great moment where like not so much in the UK because like fucking Jesus, I don't know what's wrong with this country, but blogging never happened here really. But there was a great moment in like the early 2000s where local blogs were like flourishing in America. And there was a feeling that like, oh yeah, like people knew what was going on.

And it's probably not an accident that that was dovetailing with the Occupy Wall Street movement. But there was a moment where like local organizing and local reporting was really strong and solid. But now we've just seen people get lazier and basically coca-cola-fi their information sources. I wish they'd be in my hand. Adam Curtis voice.

And this set the stage for the emergence of the most powerful blogger of all time, Greedo Forks. Oh, fun fact. I have never been able to talk about Adam Curtis without mixing him up with Richard Curtis, who is a very different person and the director of fucking like, love actually. Richard Curtis' films have a lot more narrative coherence than Adam Curtis. Someone should do a cut of love actually, but in an Adam Curtis style. Richard Curtis just has like Kira Knightley talking to Vladimir Putin about like the information

like. No, no, no. It's the silent, it's the, it's a silent sort of film of the, of the guy filming Kira Knightley's wedding, just sort of like staring at her, but like with Brian Eno playing over it. Yeah. Massive attack. Yeah.

And then just cutting. Wedding guest. Arrived. At that moment in a different borough of London, someone who didn't know this person, but was only two degrees of separation from them in the broader social circle was doing something else. I love trying to recommend to Adam Curtis, someone to be like, do you have a three hours of your time and access to a BBC iPlayer?

I'm going to be straight with everyone here. I fucking love Adam Curtis. I will be also very honest, hyper normalization gave me a panic attack that lasted almost an hour. Oh, I'm still a third of the length of that movie. I still, I'm still having a panic attack about hyper normalization. That's what I call value. That's my favorite Christmas film.

Like, you'll know. Yeah. Did you know hyper normalization is a Christmas film? One time my buddy and I got really, oh, Luke Bailey, friend of Trashfield Jarron, I got insanely drunk and he's like, you've ever heard of the movie Bitter Lake? Which is Adam Curtis talking about the birth of Afghanistan. And I was so like, just, just strot after, and it was like three in the morning, I'm like, Luke, I got to go to bed.

This is just, this is horrible. What have you done? Wait, have you ever seen Santa goes to Bitter Lake? If I'm a, if I'm in a relationship with someone, how they know it's getting serious is when we watch hyper normalization together. Oh yeah. That's me and the entire run of full male alchemist brotherhood. But going back to your article, going back to your article, you say the arc of history

doesn't always bend toward what I think of as progress. Society's regress, the difference now is that all of this is being hosted almost entirely by a handful of corporations. And this is sort of that coca-cola-fying effect where we had this potential for a genuinely local media in sort of the blogs like Gotham-Ester DNA info that would come up, but that it has, we've been given instead this kind of fake democratic control where in fact, three guys more or less administer everything we see. Yeah.

And so I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm hosting a panel next week at the web summit and it's about children using at home assistance. And in getting ready for it, I was talking to the people that are going to be on the panel. And one thing that kind of made me really nervous is the idea that algorithmic elections are the first wave, but we're getting really close to the idea of an AI generation. Kids who've grown up with Alexis and Google Homes, which are the same three people, you know, Siri, Alexa, Google Home and, um,

Daredevil and Mark Wahlberg. Daredevil and Mark Wahlberg. Hey, I'm Mark Wahlberg. Want me to, uh, fucking like buy some for you? Hey, what do you want? What do you want? What do you want? Will this is Spotify?

Want to hear, want to hear, want to hear Mark, Mark, can they have a funky bunch of Spotify? Hey, it's me, Mark Wahlberg. You're 530 prayer alarm. Hey, hey, I'm your ad home assistant, Mark Wahlberg. Fuck you. Would it be like a two a.m. Prayer, like prayer alarm? Yeah, he went, yeah, because he's been saying he's actually slowly transitioning to being

really, really woke Sharia law because he's just like, the man gets up to pray that he works out, he eats, he sleeps again. You know, it's all by the clock. Yeah, he has a wife. I have a very fixed gender roles. Hey, I'm a assistant, Mark Wahlberg, and I've actually taken on a body. I'm Ultron. I'm Mark Wahlberg.

Ultron now. It's crazy. Look how jacked my robot body is. Oh my God. Oh shit, I committed another hate crime. So, but basically, like the idea that three companies more or less control the way that we see the world through our black mirror screens. Do we live in society?

Do you guys realize that the black mirror references your phone being turned off? It's crazy. Oh my God. You guys want to smoke TMT? So they benefit of the listener. Ryan Broderick has just shredded himself. This really is like now just with Joe Rogan. Yeah, I've turned trash feature to the Joe Rogan show with my my centrist bro ideas.

Dude, you know, it's legal, man. It's legal. We spend all our time sharing. Why do we need driver's license? You don't need a license to use a toaster. That's a libertarian money conference talking point. Dude, you just blew my fucking shit. We spend all of our time sharing on Facebook when we could be sharing what books we have

our face in. We live in society. That was fire in the booth. Sound of breaking glass. It's kind of amazing. Put the rapper ones in there. You're listening to trash. You should want extra.

I was going to make a joke about like, was that really worth all that work ever? What do you mean? Have you never listened to radio one extra? No, is that how one extra is? Oh, man. It's just Charlie's stuff going bam, bam, bam, bam in the booth. He's such a white man. He's such an incredibly white man.

And then the whole appeal of like fire in the booth is that it's just like a white man going off, right? Like Tim Westwood. And he just keeps playing the sound of breaking glass and air horns. Like an explosion constantly. I've lived here for four years and I'm no closer to understanding what or who Tim Westwood is. Right. So Tim Westwood is British Adam 22.

He's the son of like a priest. Cool. I am the son of the official theatre bra to pin this London Black cab for a guy who used to be on celebrity big brother. The funniest like fire in the booth is like when they have a rapper who like just can't freestyle, right? Yeah, like they're really slow. We're just like reading stuff off their phone like you would read in a normal way.

And then like in between the sentences to it was just like, yeah, go off. But he puts like the sound effects on. It's like there are a few YouTube videos that are like that. One of the funniest things is going to be an MP. Eventually, definitely soon. Absolutely. Tim Westwood will probably be an MP at some point. Tim Westwood is going to be Prime Minister.

Tim Westwood MP, the new app. We'll be like leader of the Lib Dems like during the resurgence. Tim Westwood is he's a what's it called the Michael Rappaport of the UK. Putting the rap into Michael Rappaport. No, right. Michael Rappaport put the rap into Michael Rappaport himself. Well, you put the rap into that Michael Rappaport. One of the difficult things was bringing up Michael Rappaport because how do you

dissociate Michael Rappaport, the actor who's in a lot of Spike Lee movies from Michael Rappaport, the guy online who can't stop fucking losing his mind at people and being like having his son do like a sock puppet account to back him up when people are dumping on him. He's Jay Rock. He's Jay Rock. He's real life Jay Rock. He's Tim Westwood.

They're all Jay Rock. He's a guy about like Prime Minister Jay Rock. He's the guy who goes to extreme lengths just so he can save the Edward. Like he will go, he will go over distance. So he doesn't go the distance. Has he got, we should make sure we have if he has gone the distance, we make any claims like that. You guys should have a libel siren.

We actually put a log aside when I wasn't living here, our libel siren was them just screaming, nay, be libeled. Anyway, I think that might be libel. We're wearing our libel diapers, thankfully. To save this, to answer your question, the idea that three companies could basically, you know, change the way you see the world. Right now, they're not influencing politics directly,

but there's nothing in place to stop that. Well, so how would that happen? Like, give me a work it out for me. Well, so I've been asked this question a few times, like conferences or like, you know, people on the street stop me and they go, Ryan, how would you moderate algorithmic election integrity? When you're in a hipster coffee shop. I'm in a hipster coffee shop.

They're just asking you to freestyle. When I'm when I was in Gregg's this morning. They asked to Gregg's. Yeah, hipster Gregg's. So Gregg was. There aren't any good answers for that because the EU is trying, but also every time they try, it's stupid. Like their meme fucking laws that they're trying to pass.

And these companies are gigantic. So, I mean, in the last century, trespusting was like the easy way to do it, right? But trespusting hasn't really been applied in a thoughtful way to tech companies. And with a lot of like political and economic theory of the last century, I'm terrified that it's it's these companies are beyond it. And so I don't know how you would say to something like Google or elect, you know, how, how is it possible that Google can have this much control over our lives legally? No company's gotten this far.

So we're sort of in uncharted territory. Well, it's only one solution. AI Mark Wahlberg. We have to pull the rich people from their homes and eat them. Something that has really gotten me recently was, I mean, I host another show and I got it. Just going to flex, dude. Like, yeah, exactly.

I'm really, really important. I bring it up because I've gotten a huge argument about what is to be done about sharing disinformation and specifically sharing insane right wing disinformation. And one of the things that got me is there are people who are like, well, no, we need to like criminalize this. But I mean, I don't what you want. You want the cops to police who's sharing right wing stuff. They're like, oh, yeah, I'm definitely going to arrest myself.

And so it's like it's one of these things where my argument is going after the platform. And but I share this concern. What you're saying is it like, how do you go after the platform when, for example, like they're they're basically beyond tax law because we've created a situation where like they can avoid normal tax law. Well, so among other things, the closest the closest thing I've come up with is like thinking continuing the idea of like social media as junk food companies. I think that if an if you experience an algorithm on the internet,

you should have the legal right to see how it works. Like the back of a bottle of soda or a bag of crisps. Like you should know what's in it, because like it should be unethical to consume media that you don't understand what it's doing to you. And the other thing is that I think that we need to have a more diverse internet. But the problem is that like the smartphone is an inherently bad device. You can only use one app at a time on a smartphone. You can't use multiple windows.

You can't use multiple tabs. So like we have to sort of reimagine how a phone works, which I don't know how we would do that. But I think the first step is just transparency as a way to just have kind of like the GDPR, which is super annoying, but also like incredibly validating to tell a website like, fuck you. You can't do any of this. Leave me alone. Well, because it's because the fundamental thing about GDPR that I think makes it a progressive law, just a quick note for listeners, the general data protection regulation. It's an EU regulation that applies.

Can you play your GDPR siren? But basically what it does, it puts new obligations on organizations that hold personal data and gives data subjects new rights that basically means like, no, you own your data and any company using it is using it with your permission and in a way that you can know and have rights over. It's also the reason why you can't read the Los Angeles Times in the UK or from the EU. Yeah, which I like actually, I prefer that. Basically, all of the trunk newspapers refuse to comply with GDPR.

And the GDPR is also an interesting one because like, OK, I've been thinking a lot about the idea of an evil EU. Because like right now, like there's a lot of populist dudes in Europe who want to get rid of the EU or leave the EU, which is actually the least scary, is less scary than the alternative, which is them going inside of the EU and turning it into like a fascist block. Right. So the idea of the GDPR is putting the ownership on the person and it's like almost like human rights style language. I think it's smart because that means it can't get hijacked later. And maybe now I'm just completely traumatized from like growing up as a millennial

through like the new fascism wave. But that to me is the only way to stay safe from like, you know, totalitarian states is like you have to own it. Well, like the idea in the US of you being able to view a website and not share your data for like tracking is just unthinkable. I mean, there's new sites in the US that like, well, you can't read them if you use an ad blocker. Right. They're literally like, nope, you're not allowed to. I think CMBC is like that when you're trying to like read an article, like every time you go down, it's like, you know, do you accept cookies? Do you accept cookies? You have to accept cookies. I have an ad blocker that replaces all the ads on news websites with the sexy anime babe cell phone game.

It's like, do you want to go on a quest? I think the other thing to remember, right, is that the the tech giants, I mentioned this before on the show, is like they're they're 15, like they're 15% of the sort of American economy and 99% of their income comes from advertising. Right. So really, what is they're not spreading? They are not these sort of they are not abetting the spread of fascism for any other reason than it generates a lot of engagement. It gets people to look at ads for a t-shirt that says you wouldn't get it. It's a Gemini trucker thing. Dude, that's that's a good shirt.

Killing bandits is a Gemini trucker thing. No, and what's even scarier is that like right now, fascism is very good for time on site metrics. Yeah, it gets people really engaged in the platform. But this, you know, what if what if war is better? Like right now, we're basically being like led down a path that we don't know where it's going. And it seems to only be benefiting the people who just want to create a feedback loop that we're stuck in. Well, the goal for what I'm saying is World War Two had a very high audience engagement. Also, American Idiot is a pretty good album.

So I think Iraq War was worth it. It's all worth it. You know what, guys, wake me up with some runs. The Iraq War was pretty good for the Korean day's career. So I feel like, you know, Tommy Robinson version of American Idiot don't want to be a Muslim caliphate. You're giving your own Benjamin free ideas now. Do you want to be told by any mom that I can't masturbate? Especially in November.

That scans too well for a Tommy Robinson song. I'm sorry, I've let him down. Immigration uncontrolled by Soros. So the the other thing is what we have to remember is the CNN was was like created in part to be like a giant media company that it is by the first Gulf War. It was that was war as action movie and video game that they were able to show and they're able to get people to look at advertisements by just sort of broadcasting night vision wholesale slaughter of Iraqis. So like what what would happen with like war as Fortnite? That's that's war as Twitch. Like that's what we're looking at now.

I noticed this in 2014 Gaza war that it's very different to be a supporter of some side of some belligerent when information access is controlled. But like, there are a lot of folks who are losing their minds because you know, you could share fucking GoPro footage of like Hamas guys killing Israeli, you know, Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint or something like that. And Americans haven't really had to deal with that yet. But like if if if we were in a war with like people that were savvy on this stuff, like what are the propaganda effects? What are the morale effects both like in terms of lessening people's support for a conflict or also making them a hell of a lot more bloodthirsty when the when the enemy can be like, oh, here's your hometown boys getting fucking killed on Facebook. I mean, we saw this with before I was covering this stuff before the election wave. I was doing ISIS stuff and it was in Europe and it is the same thing, you know, and it's just as technology gets more sophisticated, more intimate and personalized. The videos are just going to be way more cool to stream with your bros, you know.

At what point are you going to be able to cheer your favorite soldier 500 bits? I mean, at what point can you, you know, like a Gerard Butler film that was like that? Yeah, it's called Gamer and it rules. It fucking rules. Gerard Butler is a convict that gets put in a massive multiplayer RPG, but it's real life. And then like a teenager like controls his body. And then at one point he, I think drinks his own pants or something. It's sick. It's a great movie.

It's a really dark Ender's game. It's similar. Yeah. Yes, we should watch it. Gamer rules. Gamer rules. Dude, do not not gamer rules. What are you back from Portugal? You want to watch Gamer for a bonus episode? Dude, after November, do you want to watch Gamer jerk off?

Do you want to have like a classic Beatles jerk session? Do you want to drink fucking Platinum Monster and you drink and watch Gamer jerk off? It's not okay if you're drinking your own piss. We'll get some Mountain Dew. We'll get some Mountain Dew and it'll be fun. I like the idea because I'm sure there's a plot point involved with him drinking his own piss, but I like the idea that you just are controlled by a shitty teenager. He's like, I'm going to make this guy fucking take his clothes off.

So the twist is that he gets in control of like that universe's version of Ninja. So he's like being controlled by the most talented gamer. But it turns out the gamer is end... Is PewDiePie. It's all making me say the end of it. Turns out the gamer is the one that's being played. Whoa. What?

Dude, was this Black Mirror? Dude, your cell phone when it's not on, it has a screen that's black and it looks like a mirror to your own face. We live in a fucking society. I didn't realize that. That's why I'm so horrified by it. There's this whole thing has made me think of Walter Benjamin as most things do. Walter Benjamin, if you haven't listened to... Breaking Bad Guy.

...Kami Book Clubs was one of the sort of early Frankfurt school theorists who was trying to understand why the German working class didn't develop a left class consciousness. There was no revolution there. I always thought Walter Benjamin was like a SoundCloud rapper. No, that's Lil' Benjamin. I also feel crucially, if your name is Walter, you have to pronounce your surname Benjamin. You can't go Walter and then like Benjamin. You'd have to be like Walthor or something.

Walthor. Yeah, Walthor. Walthor. Riley just can't be Walthor. Riley realizes that the perfect apex of being pretentious is saying Walter Benjamin and not Walter Benjamin because it's just a little too much there. That just gets you pissed when you try to say it. There's Walter Benjamin.

Anyway, here's what he said. He said, the growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations. Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.

The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics to political life. Like vaporwave. But this is what I see when I read your article, when I look at these sort of sharing, when we re-radicalize one another through constant propagandistic disinformation, we're not real danger of this. It's the threat it poses. It's not one of being wrong factually, but of it being fascist self-expression. It's not that they really believe that Hadasz is going to be distributing gay conversion kits to schools.

They might do that, but it's incidental if they really believe that. What they're expressing is a kind of hatred and contempt of people they think are impure and degenerate. I love the idea of a gay conversion kit. You're going to need certain supplies. Look, we've been out here converting homosexuals for a while, and what I can tell you is you're going to need to start with the rudiments. You can't be going out this half con. Can we get a little detail on the gay conversion kit story because I really want to know about this meme?

Yeah, it's sort of a misunderstanding. There's just a book. If I remember correctly, it's a book that they have for elementary school kids that teaches them that gay people exist, and photos of it spun out of control, and it became a whole meme about the idea that it was going to make you really want to clean up a lower-class income neighborhood and go to brunch. Yeah, it was going to be a queer eye for all of Brazil. Yeah, they thought that it would just...

Everyone was going to be Jonathan Van Ness. I love the idea that in a country where you can't walk down the street, they're getting hit in the face by an ass video. People are like, oh, but this book's going to make people gay. No, but... But that's what it is. Do you guys always have asses? Men, it's gay.

But it is gay this whole time. It is ultimately a form of self-expression. It's like drawing some homophobic graffiti on a wall. Yeah, I mean, it's... Basically, it's like stan culture. I mean, it's like K-pop fans. It's like Ariana Grande fans, Bolsonaro fans. That just doesn't work the same way.

You want to express yourself on the street. You go attack somebody because your guy says you should on Facebook Live. People want to be part of it. It's like that. It's like for other movies. It's in group singling. It's like for other movies. The one with James Franco's brother and Machine Gun Kelly.

I don't know that. I didn't know that. It's a really bad movie. Because it starts Machine Gun Kelly. It sounds like he should be like one of those crazy World War II soldiers. It's basically that. It's Facebook Live feeds and you have people who basically do all these really weird and like dangerous tasks.

Oh, the Dave Franco movie. Every time they do it, they get paid. And for some reason Machine Gun Kelly's in there. Oh my God. Yeah. I don't know why. I don't know what his purpose is. But the film is really bad.

It's definitely one of those really weird cyberpunk movies that like still imagine this kind of liberal utopia even in the most dystopic situations. When in reality, like if you had a system like that, everyone would just be being racist. Yeah. Because that's where I think the internet, like any sort of like strand of the internet heads to, like it just heads to racism. But I also like this idea that like Jair Bolsonaro's fans are basically like a darker version of the beehive that like if you post Beyonce's overrated, you'll just get stormed by people.

And similarly, if you say Jair Bolsonaro completely overrated, like a bunch of dudes who are somehow really good at speaking English, but all have Brazilian flags are just gonna begin their thing. Just like telling you to go fuck yourself. We don't want Venezuela, etc. The same thing happens. You heard about the Palovo thing, right? Oh, I don't know.

Oh, this is good. So the Bolsa Minions are what they're called. And they run up. There's bots that run on Twitter all day. And are they minions? Well, there's photoshop of Bolsonaro as a minion. You're looking for cover art. He's not even like the mastermind.

He is one of the minions. No, he is his own. He is his own Bolsa Minion. So the people use nicknames for Bolsonaro to get away from the bots. So like Balsa, Bulsar, but they keep changing his name. But the bots have basically decided to only track people using BOL. Palovo is a Brazilian version of a Scotch egg. And the largest newspaper in the country, like the day before the election, tweeted

like the best Bolovo's in Sao Paulo. And it was just completely astroturfed by Bulsar Minions attacking this article about Scotch eggs. It was fantastic. And that's what that's saying. That's the future of politics at this point. Getting mad about Scotch eggs. Getting mad about Scotch eggs because you are whipped into such a frenzy by the

constant, by disinformation that you're getting from everyone you've ever met in the form of minions. And the scary thing is that like it's fun. It's like fantasy football. It's fun. Fantasy football racism. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

It's unlike fantasy football because it's fun. Oh, yes. Yeah. Wait. Hang on a second, guys. I'm just going to tweet that I've never seen a Scotch egg killer bandit and see what happened. I mean, I just say this because I noticed this with soldiers that like I served with

and I got out of the military and we stayed friends on Facebook. And then about 2013, 2014, it started to get darker and weirder, but there did seem to be like a fun aspect to it. It was just like, haha, owning the SJWs, but it was like getting darker and more racist and more anti-Islam and stuff like that. And it's just, in a way, I didn't realize, it's naive to assume like, oh, that's not going to be weaponized for politics. Obviously, it has been, but it seems like the gutters are off or whatever the bound,

like there's much more. Barriers. The barriers are off in places like Brazil. It's like more shit that you can get away with. Or like, in the same way that I remember this is dumb, but remember people saying like, oh, remember when, when Benjamin Netanyahu was like sending out robocalls about like the Muslim Obama is calling all the Arabs, telling them to vote, like people are like, wow, you could never do that in America.

That's too racist. And I was like, oh, really? It's like, actually, it turns out you can. And like, what are we going to see in America, like more of this sort of dystopic shit? Well, the fun game, and by fun, I mean deeply depressing game I was playing at bars in Brazil with people who would really, really feel bad about talking to me in the first place after I did this was I would say like, you know, name a thing that is bad about Brazil and I can definitely point you to that same thing happening in America or the UK.

Particularly America though, because like there are places where you cannot drink the water, like most of Michigan. There are places where like it is basically constant gun violence and like militarized police, most of Chicago. There are places where we have porn stars and reality TV show hosts, like running for office and winning. We have super hyper partisan fake news. We have, we have an immigration crisis that we're basically responding to with the military.

Like the idea that America is like first in the world, we have, we have walled off suburbs of rich people living with helipads and you can't go in there because they're, they have walls and barbed wire, so almost people can't get in. The idea that America is some sort of like, you know, what is beacon on a hill still, like we have more in common with a place like Brazil than, than we don't. Damn, Aaron Sorkin was right. Yeah. Oh man, the newsroom is the best show though.

Like it's so good. Like I know it's bad, but it's like fucking crack to me because it's like as a journalist you're just like, yes, that is not how journalism works even in the slightest way, but that is badass. I just remember seeing what effectively amounted to like a graph showing the level of poverty in Brazil. Vice like it's different like strata of economic classes and that comparing this to the United States, basically what they were saying was the rich in America and the rich in Brazil

live at about the same standard, but the poorest in Brazil live at a standard that's probably more in line with like the absolute developing world. And it's like the thing about it is that people say, Oh, well, America's not that bad. It's like, yes, but in 20 years at the continued rate of unequal growth, who's to say it won't be like, I'm from Massachusetts, which is like one of the opioid crisis epicenters. And like, I was so my meme researcher friend. Hey, Jamie, we, we both were talking in our conversation yesterday and we agreed that the best piece I've ever read about all of this was around the election in America and it

was by David Wong for cracked. Yeah, I read that as well. It's, it's a breathtaking piece. And I went back and I read it yesterday and I was like, this dude figured it out and he paints this picture where it's like, you know, you graduate from high school and you take out a bunch of student loans and you go to a nearby college and you don't really do anything good there. But you also like probably have a sports related injury and you get addicted to painkillers

and then you like get a shitty underpaid job. And then you, your shitty underpaid job either lays you off or like gives you less hours and you get more addicted to oxycodone or whatever it is. And then a man on TV says, we can blame all of this on black people. And you're like, I already wanted to be racist and now I can feel better about being racist because also I'm incredibly ashamed of the fact that I am like definitely a drug addict at this point. I am super miserable.

You know, I'm in debt from a college I didn't need to go to or want to go to in the first place. And so, yeah, I can't remember the name of the piece, but I recommend it to anyone who's interested in this stuff. We'll put it in the, in the description. So I guess what we're saying is readcracked.com In the, in the, in the future, that's, that's the solution.

That's the media now. But in, in the future, American elections are more and more going to be decided on the basis of who is going to make the best minion killing bandit memes. Yeah. I think like if, if politics does become all minions, like that's good. Minions are great and they're super hot. Anyway, I think it's Brazil's is going to be minions with huge asses.

Minions, messes, But just with, I think you've just seen the assertive bunch of videos that it's a Brazilian thing where it's like they do a video where a girl hits you in the face with their ass and like it's painful. It looks really uncomfortable. I thought that was Jamaica. No, they do it in Brazil too.

Oh, I think you're daggers. Daggers, daggers, another good one. It's like, imagine that, but a minion's big yellow ass just pummeling you. And while it's going, and then after the end, you find out it was a dude minion the whole time. Anyway, it's a good thing this political process hasn't, you know, determined what's going to happen to like the largest carbon sink in the entire world. That's, that's great.

Yeah. It'll be good. It'll be a carbon sink. It's lighter and stronger than my regular sink. I mean, in my news, he's a carbon sink. In good news, like Mike Cernovich's movie comes out soon. Oh, you guys think that if we all rip started a bunch of diesel generators, we could get 12 years left of civilization down to nine.

No, so I'm actually hoping that climate change happens quick enough that none of this matters and we all just die. That would be fun. Wait, is Mike Cernovich's movie the triumph of the will, but it's about a guy called Will who finally gets laid. That's the true gorilla mindset. Yeah. All right.

We've been going for a bit. I think it's time to, to wrap this shit up. Ryan, thank you again for coming on. It was a real depressing pleasure. Please edit this with as many sirens and air horns as possible. Yeah, we'll do every time I say something really depressing, just be like. And as always, we have a patreon. You can subscribe to it.

If you want, if you want to have a very irrational argument with Hussein about what kind of manga the spectator is, then you have to sign up for the debate meeting here and the payment has to go through. And you also have to send a picture of your feet. Yeah. You have to send a picture of your feet. It's a place of life, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Also, you can come on. You can come on and find your descent with a t-shirt from little comrade. Maybe you can get a Bolsonaro dressed as a minion on one of the t-shirts. I'll try it myself for you. Edie will not do that. Edie will probably not do that, but maybe you can. And finally, thanks as ever to Jinsang for the use of our song.

Here we go. You can find it on Spotify. It's extraordinarily good, and I strongly recommend it. Also, thanks to everyone who came to our live show last week. That was great. We had a lot of fun. Thank you especially to Guy Household, who became much more of a linchpin of the show than he was expecting.

Also, I'm running a comedy night on the 7th of November, which is this coming... I don't know if this episode will be out by then. Yeah, it will be. It will be. It's on Wednesday, the 7th of November at 8pm at the 34th Street in Farringdon. Please do come. We've got a great lineup of Ben Pope, Archie Henderson, Zoe Tomlin, and Hugh Davies. It's going to be great.

Oh, and I want to thank Daredevil for making me feel okay to be Catholic. Good night, everybody. Good night. Good night.