Diabolical Lies - ＂Ethical Consumption＂ & the History of ＂Selling Out＂

00:00:00.000 Today's episode was brought to you by the Keep America Beautiful anti-littering campaign,

00:00:05.280 Amazon Web Services, the Marxist professor who agreed to be interviewed on short notice about

00:00:09.960 his opinions on the Riyadh Comedy Festival, Napster and MTV, Taylor Swift's $100 million

00:00:15.380 check for her 2024 Spotify streams, the statement t-shirt industry, which has become somehow

00:00:21.000 central to this conversation, which gave us hits such as Kurt Cobain's corporate magazine

00:00:26.040 Still Sucks shirt that he wore on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1992, and the This Is What a

00:00:31.560 Feminist Looks Like shirt that mainstreamed a conversation about ethical consumption under 1.00

00:00:35.620 capitalism, and finally, Airbnb. Ooh, shivers. Shiver, shivers. 1.00

00:00:44.080 This episode was actually brought to you by you, our Dirty Little Liars, people who support this

00:00:48.260 show, so we don't have to run ads of that nature. A quick note on the housekeeping front, the

00:00:54.020 Colorado Liars have selected the organizations that they would like to give their $30,000 to.

00:01:00.420 Caro, do you want to give the update?

00:01:04.220 Okay, so we will be giving $10,000 each to the following organizations.

00:01:08.480 The first is Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, a statewide membership-based coalition of

00:01:13.360 immigrant, faith, labor, youth, community, business, and ally organizations founded in

00:01:17.960 2002 to improve the lives of immigrants and refugees by making Colorado a more welcoming,

00:01:22.680 immigrant-friendly state. The second organization is the Colorado Doula Project, a grassroots

00:01:27.600 nonprofit organization that provides free logistical, financial, and emotional support

00:01:31.940 for people accessing abortion in Colorado. We'll hold off on announcing the third one

00:01:36.700 because we're just trying to make sure that we can make the donation. But I also just wanted to

00:01:42.300 shout out Colorado liar Katie, a great name, love it, who has just, you know, melted my face off 0.51

00:01:51.580 with her competence in all of this. And to Leslie of the Diabolical Queers, who is kind of taking 0.97

00:01:57.820 that lead for their group moving forward. Yeah, it's really, really exciting to see this kind of 0.99

00:02:04.280 take off the way that it has. And I don't know, I kind of was worried about you and I handing over

00:02:09.420 the ring. It just felt very like, oh my God, not only are we giving money away, but like now we're

00:02:13.780 just telling someone else to decide what to do. But I don't know, this has been the coolest

00:02:17.980 experience for it to start this way where people who are more competent than I am personally be

00:02:22.360 like, yeah, we actually know where to put it. And I'm like, thank God. No, I agree. I feel like the

00:02:27.820 blind leap of faith has really been rewarded here. So yeah, full steam ahead. Okay. This is an

00:02:35.140 episode that I have wanted to do in some capacity for a long time. I feel like this episode is like

00:02:41.980 our pre-cancellation TikTok video. Why? What do you mean? Because it's like you and I privately

00:02:50.660 talk so much about the ethics of being alive, the ethics of being an author, the ethics of having a

00:02:55.260 podcast, the ethics of earning money. And I feel like you and I are constantly over-analyzing this

00:03:00.560 to one another. So to finally have the conversation on main, I just feel like I'm prepping myself in

00:03:05.520 advance. I also made a note of all the brands I would sell out for, and I would like to discuss

00:03:09.120 that at one point. Okay, I would love that. Yeah, I mean, just start prepping the NoTap apology now,

00:03:13.920 I guess. On that note, I just watched your recent TikTok where you were talking about five things

00:03:21.280 that exist for you in this little sanctuary of stuff that you love that you just cannot be

00:03:27.180 bothered to care about. You're not interested in critically analyzing them for like why they're

00:03:32.240 problematic or not. You just want to enjoy them and move on. So the inherent flaw of a platform

00:03:37.600 like TikTok for a cultural critic like me, but also just for anyone, is that you look on someone's 0.99

00:03:41.800 feed and you only see the shit that they care about. And you get this impression that a person 0.98

00:03:45.580 is constantly chronically online and that they care about everything. And that makes me feel

00:03:50.240 tired with other people and it makes me feel really tired with myself. So I thought that I

00:03:53.540 would cleanse my feed a little bit by sharing five things that I couldn't be bothered to care about,

00:03:58.420 five things where I constantly just go, it's not that deep, even though it probably is that deep,

00:04:02.980 as a means of just creating a small, small sanctuary for myself in a world that is rapidly 0.98

00:04:07.660 falling to shit. So I'm going to share my five, and if anyone else wants to share their five, 0.52

00:04:11.260 I would certainly be interested in hearing it. Okay, number one, Alex Earle. I am an Earle girl

00:04:15.380 through and through. I could spend the rest of my life and probably will thinking about feminist 1.00

00:04:19.160 topics, thinking about heteronormativity, thinking about the beauty standard, and I would probably 0.98

00:04:23.240 never apply any of those criticisms to Alex Earle because I just enjoy watching her videos. I like

00:04:29.140 watching her little get ready with me. I like, you know, getting makeup tips from her. I like

00:04:32.840 her cute little pit bull. I like having a parasocial relationship with her and her 1.00

00:04:36.040 boyfriend, NFL man. I could create depth around any element of Alex Earle through a cultural

00:04:40.620 criticism, and I never will because that is a little pocket of my life that I'm keeping sacred.

00:04:44.600 And the response that you got was basically like, this is so refreshing. Or honestly,

00:04:50.840 this was a delightful reframing. Like, I scrolled through so many of the comments and people were,

00:04:55.140 you know oh this is how i feel about real housewives this is how i feel about the bachelor

00:05:00.180 the kardashians this is how i feel about suvs somebody was like this is how i feel about the

00:05:05.440 nfl i know it has a ton of issues i know it's racist i know it's like problematic but like

00:05:09.800 it is an escape for me and i'm not interested in thinking about those elements of it someone else

00:05:15.180 said listening to music of problematic canceled musicians someone else was like i love copaganda

00:05:21.760 like law and order taylor swift rap music like it really really ran the gamut and so in the

00:05:28.720 context of the conversation that i want to have today how do we yeah how do we have values and

00:05:35.420 still locate ourselves on the spectrum between no ethical whatever under capitalism and you are a

00:05:43.640 person with agency so when i find when you you you have some free will you certainly have some

00:05:50.100 So when I finally decided to explore the subject for this show, I knew that I needed to attempt to reconcile some conflicting ideas that I had.

00:06:01.940 And there were three simultaneous conversations in pop culture that made me decide it was finally time to try.

00:06:09.480 So the first was, of course, something we've already covered ad nauseum.

00:06:14.500 and I promise everybody we're not going to really talk about it today,

00:06:17.460 but Taylor Swift's 12th studio album.

00:06:20.340 You fail, you fail, you're my, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.

00:06:26.660 I'm going to let you keep going.

00:06:29.760 Which some have pointed to, some being the two of us, in so many words,

00:06:34.680 as an example of what happens when an artist becomes too famous, too successful, too focused on money,

00:06:40.700 and that, like, something has shifted for Taylor Swift,

00:06:43.400 where, for the first time, this feels different,

00:06:45.520 that the music finally feels like a billionaire wrote it.

00:06:48.820 The second was some much smaller niche literary world drama.

00:06:54.820 My fave kind of drama.

00:06:56.060 In which the journalist Gia Tolentino did a paid partnership with Airbnb,

00:07:01.260 a company that she has written critically about in the past,

00:07:04.200 and which is a boycott divestment sanctions target

00:07:06.880 because they list homes in the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

00:07:10.760 And the third was the Riyadh Comedy Festival, in which the Saudi regime paid American comedians, in some cases more than a million dollars each, to perform for the Saudi royal family, but under an intense contract that outlined the jokes that they were not allowed to make.

00:07:30.140 So, I'm kind of watching all of this unfold over the course of, I don't know, give or take 10 days, and I'm just thinking to myself, what is the calculus of selling out, and what does no ethical consumption under capitalism really mean?

00:07:48.920 And so I wanted to explore our cultural and our historical relationship with these ideas, but I also want to have the conversation in a way that doesn't feel moralizing, because the moralizing version of this conversation to me is a little bit uninteresting, actually, because I think that in some respects it's pretty clear.

00:08:10.720 And so I'm more interested in how these ideas have functioned in discourse and whether they're useful anymore, whether they've ever been useful.

00:08:20.180 I told you that I went into this research feeling two very strong yet almost diametrically opposed feelings, two statements that, to me, feel true, even though they sound pretty contradictory on the surface.

00:08:31.340 So, statement number one is consumerism. Shopping our way to a better world is a pretty naive way to think about this problem. And to put the responsibility for system-wide change on individual consumers to just, like, buy different stuff is not a productive way to approach the challenge of exploitation.

00:08:53.500 Statement number two is that in a broken democracy where our interests are actually not being represented by the people that we are electing to represent us, withholding our money from the economy is one of the only ways that we can exercise real power.

00:09:11.460 I knew we were going to at some point talk about like the no ethical consumption under capitalism claims. And I am interested in that. But I also think the question is, is there no ethical salesmanship under capitalism? Because consumption is very different from salesmanship. I think there is a big difference, although you can argue the morality of both. There's a difference between buying an Airbnb experience and selling the Airbnb experience or amplifying the validity of that product.

00:09:38.860 and so I'm curious how we're going to get into that

00:09:40.980 because I know we are.

00:09:42.560 Totally.

00:09:43.160 The reason that I wanted to talk about these two things

00:09:45.040 at the same time is because to me,

00:09:46.540 they feel like opposite sides of the same coin.

00:09:49.500 But to your point, I agree there is a different valence.

00:09:53.480 So fair warning that I am going to be doing

00:09:56.100 a lot of annoying point counterpointing today

00:10:00.160 and by the end of this, you're going to be like, 0.97

00:10:02.100 this is fucking obnoxious. 0.98

00:10:03.800 So as your disclaimer up front, 0.99

00:10:06.060 I don't have a sweeping prescriptive conclusion today

00:10:08.700 about like, this is the correct way to sell or buy in our current system.

00:10:13.280 Time for me to think of one quickly to make those like three subscribers who can't stand

00:10:16.940 when we do that really pissed off. Don't worry, I'll come up with something.

00:10:22.220 So, Caro, you can choose your own adventure. Would you like to start today with consumption

00:10:27.360 or selling out?

00:10:29.180 Ooh, selling out for sure. Selling out for five, Bob.

00:10:32.820 Okay. Okay, well, actually, we're going to start with consumption because I'd rather

00:10:37.340 talk about consumption. Okay. Me opening the door to find that it's just a wall behind.

00:10:44.580 I was like, 50-50 shot, she chooses a thing that I'm actually just going to talk about anyway. So

00:10:50.100 yeah, a little peek behind the curtain, folks. What a manipulative relationship. 1.00

00:10:54.240 I'm giving Caroline the toy steering wheel to be like, yeah, this works. 1.00

00:11:00.860 Never actually giving up control. Okay. Gun to head. Consumption.

00:11:04.620 Gun to head. No ethical consumption under capitalism. So with this particular phrase, where I started my adventure for this episode is I was really curious like where it originated. When did this become something that people said and what was the context that they started saying it in? Do you have any sense for its origins?

00:11:24.660 Ooh. This is either going to be, like, unbelievably old, like it was on, like, a tablet in Egypt, or I'm going to guess that it was maybe during, like, the 90s Riot Grrrl era.

00:11:37.240 You're definitely closer with that guess than Egyptian tablet. It was 2014, so...

00:11:42.960 Oh, wow. Okay, so it was Girlboss era. Interesting.

00:11:46.500 So in order to get you in the correct headspace, I am now going to play Two Minutes of Dark Horse by Katy Perry featuring Juicy J. 0.94

00:11:52.800 Let's rage!

00:11:53.560 I want to shout out Amanda Lee McCarty of the podcast Close Horse who called my attention to

00:12:02.360 the origins of this phrase on social media and was like, what kind of gave me the starting point

00:12:07.020 to look into this. So we are going to go back to 2014. I'm going to show you something and I want

00:12:11.780 you to tell me if you have ever seen this before. I can't think of any time period I want to travel

00:12:17.160 back in time to less than 2014. Really? There were so many good Chainsmokers songs back then.

00:12:23.560 Wow. Is this Benedict Cumberbatch?

00:12:28.240 Can you describe what you're looking at?

00:12:31.140 Benedict Cumberbatch, right?

00:12:33.800 Okay, I'm looking at Benedict Cumberbatch, who's wearing just an awful shirt, just a really terrible shirt. 1.00

00:12:39.500 And it says in like faux chicken scratch, this is what a feminist looks like. 1.00

00:12:44.260 Oh, was that back when we were like, we still thought that we could get anyone to care about feminism? 0.95

00:12:49.200 This was right before it ended, I think.

00:12:50.500 I think this was near a time period where Taylor Swift was like, Lena Dunham educated me on what a feminist is. I remember this.

00:12:56.780 So culturally, you are spot on about where we were. So there was this brand from the UK called Whistles that partnered with Emma Watson to make these This Is What A Feminist Looks Like t-shirts. They were selling for around 60 US dollars. And it became a scandal because the Daily Mail did an expose that claimed that these shirts were made in sweatshops by women making less than a dollar per hour. 0.97

00:13:26.280 So it's pretty clear that, like, the intentions of the Daily Mail were not pure.

00:13:30.880 They had not made a habit, we'll say, of covering abuses in the garment industry before.

00:13:36.400 But the reaction was pretty telling because I think in retrospect, as I reread a lot of the articles that came out to try to debunk the Daily Mail,

00:13:46.400 is that it actually sort of served to highlight how common those conditions were in the garment industry,

00:13:53.760 how there was like actually nothing atypical about this particular factory in Mauritius where they

00:14:00.780 were made. And so regardless of how common those poor conditions were, I think in this particular

00:14:07.640 case, the hypocrisy just felt really, really stark. Yeah. This is also just like the general

00:14:12.940 exhausting of communicating any sort of progressive or good faith belief, because as soon as you do so,

00:14:18.880 you now are held to account for everything else in life, which is like probably the

00:14:23.360 the end result of this conversation.

00:14:25.180 You know what?

00:14:25.860 I'm so happy you clocked that immediately.

00:14:28.360 As someone who does not want to be held to that standard

00:14:31.120 and is, like, actively tired of it.

00:14:33.520 You're like, I am a bad person, okay?

00:14:37.260 Stop expecting me to be a good person.

00:14:39.960 Please, everyone.

00:14:41.540 You can take the Kevin Hart playbook,

00:14:43.160 which is if the check clears, I'm there.

00:14:45.320 And then you just set the expectations

00:14:46.980 really low for everybody.

00:14:48.300 Okay, so one debunking effort came from Dazed,

00:14:52.920 who quoted a sustainability researcher and blogger who said this, if you will please read.

00:14:59.600 Low wages in communal dorms may be an unpalatable contrast to the t-shirt's empowerment message,

00:15:05.240 inflated price tag, and celebrity endorsement. But the reality is that work on this unglamorous

00:15:10.000 side of the fashion industry has been a way out of poverty for many millions of women and men,

00:15:14.440 and a first rung towards industrial development for many countries.

00:15:17.860 So, online, this created a pretty extreme environment that sometimes culminated in shaming or taking a sort of moral high ground around going out of your way to purchase things that were produced, quote-unquote, ethically or, quote-unquote, sustainably.

00:15:35.840 And this idea that purchasing anything else was essentially you cosigning exploitation.

00:15:41.800 now obviously like we look around you know the sheen halls on the horizon like we still live in

00:15:50.580 a very consumer driven culture that was just part of what i want to discuss today so it's not as

00:15:55.200 though this shaming effort was very effective from the standpoint of like making people consume

00:16:00.400 less but the original intention of the phrase there is no ethical consumption under capitalism

00:16:06.720 which emerged as like a Tumblr meme, seemed to be a response to this push for quote-unquote

00:16:13.380 ethically produced goods, which suggested that some consumerism was permissible and other

00:16:19.100 consumerism was evil. Do you follow Derek Guy on Twitter? Oh yeah, the like fashion guy? The clothing

00:16:25.620 guy. Yeah. Yeah, I just, I think of him now because it's like the flip of this, the no ethical

00:16:29.900 consumption under capitalism, is that if you tell people what things actually cost and go,

00:16:34.280 no, actually, you should spend $60 on a sweatshirt. That's actually the minimum cost it takes

00:16:38.500 for ethical means to be made at 100% cotton, blah, blah, blah. As soon as you say that,

00:16:42.800 people go, you're classist. And so it's like, it's such an exhausting circular conversation.

00:16:47.720 I think part of the pushback really came from that reality, which is that there is no moral

00:16:54.360 superiority to having the money or the time to purchase all, quote unquote, ethically made

00:17:01.000 stuff in this system, which does tend to cost more, to your point, and the time to do the

00:17:07.760 research on the supply chain of every single thing that you're buying. Beyond that, because

00:17:12.860 of how totalizing this system is, supply chains that are ethical from start to finish are like

00:17:19.000 pretty much non-existent. Katie, this is, I just realized that this might be like the episode that

00:17:25.620 we air before we announce our own merch so i was right my instincts were right this is a pre-tiktok

00:17:32.860 cancellation video timing wise not the best not the best and there's all this all just ends up 0.91

00:17:38.800 being a big merch ad oh my god bite or don't bitches it would be really funny at the end 1.00

00:17:44.060 be like so with that uh we are actually launching a line of feminist t-shirts our swag will go 1.00

00:17:50.120 harder than that swag so but our swag is also like we are using a good fat like people like

00:17:55.440 we're not using like a shitty wait you wanted to go the ethical route i'm so sorry i've been

00:18:00.440 going in the wrong direction i've actually been seeking out sweatshops i'm in touch with an

00:18:06.140 eight-year-old bangladeshi orphan and he's been giving me amazing prices

00:18:09.760 i'm not going to just bail on him now i've been talking to him for months yeah and now we have

00:18:17.200 merge, but I swear these two things are not connected. It is ethical. You're good. Go on,

00:18:20.760 go on, go on. Okay. So to find a truly exploitation-free supply chain, I don't even

00:18:27.420 know how you would go about doing that, honestly. It's so opaque. But the big point, I think,

00:18:33.380 crucially, is that it was intended to communicate this underlying truth that we cannot shop our way

00:18:40.700 to a better world. So it was supposed to shift the focus back to the system. Now, to complicate

00:18:47.020 this a little bit, I do think that the reflex of pointing to the system has had the practical

00:18:53.220 effect of just serving the inertia of the status quo. Passivity in this context is often disguised

00:18:59.680 as profundity. Like, you can be like, oh, well, there's no ethical consumption, and so here is

00:19:03.320 my Sheehan Hall. One of the people that I spoke with for this episode was like, yeah, the phrase

00:19:08.240 sort of, like, equalized all of these things. Like, well, if it's all unethical, then I might

00:19:12.740 as well just do whatever the fuck I want, and who cares? I think that the key thing that it did, 0.97

00:19:17.220 and why we're talking about this today, is that it mainstreamed a debate about consumption and

00:19:24.100 how individuals should be consuming. So Andrew Hartman is somebody that I spoke with for this

00:19:31.240 episode. He wrote a book called Karl Marx in America. He's a history professor. And so this

00:19:37.800 book is really about the history of Marxist ideas in the United States and how the dawn of

00:19:43.500 neoliberalism is what initially focused people's efforts on consumption. So Hartman writes this.

00:19:53.560 The two most influential libertarian thinkers of the 20th century, Friedrich Hayek and his teacher

00:19:59.560 Ludwig von Mises, were Austrians who, along with like-minded colleagues, assembled in Geneva in

00:20:05.660 the 1920s and 1930s to plot a self-described neoliberal revolution. Good stuff. It's like

00:20:12.060 abundance. Thanks, guys. The first abundance. Derek Thompson was there. He was one of the

00:20:19.120 panelists. I can't time travel to find Bernie Sanders, but he can time travel to find Ludwig

00:20:23.300 von Mises. So these Austrians were like Milton Friedman's daddies. So where Marx was focused 1.00

00:20:31.520 on the means of production, who owned them, for whose benefit they were being used, the conditions

00:20:36.720 of the labor that was being performed, etc. Von Mises focused on consumption. And so I would love

00:20:42.360 for you to read from this lecture that he gave in 1952, where he was basically like shit-talking 0.90

00:20:48.760 Marx and being like, here's why Karl Marx is wrong. What really destroyed Marx was his idea 0.83

00:20:53.400 of the progressive impoverishment of workers. Marx didn't see that the most important characteristic

00:20:58.720 of capitalism was large-scale production for the needs of the masses. The main objective of

00:21:03.600 capitalists is to produce for the broad masses. Nor did Marx see that under capitalism, the

00:21:08.900 consumer is always right. In his capacity as a wage earner, the worker cannot determine what

00:21:14.160 is to be made. But in his capacity as a customer, he really is the boss and tells his boss,

00:21:19.280 the entrepreneur, what to do. Ah, supply and demand.

00:21:22.560 Uh-huh. Yeah. Basically, what he's saying is even though Karl Marx would tell you that the owners of capital and the bosses have all the power, that's not actually true because they're only going to make shit that the consumers will buy. And so the consumers are the ultimate boss.

00:21:40.700 And Hartman writes, quote, by the time Mises gave his Marx lectures, so again, this is in the 50s, consumption was arguably the category of analysis and debate.

00:21:52.400 So when we are talking about this and how we solve these problems by focusing on how we're consuming, we are sort of like inherently playing into like the neoliberal way of thought, because it's not only downstream from the ideology of the original neoliberal thinkers, but it also really emphasizes the choices of the individual as the level at which change happens.

00:22:15.900 So whereas Marx might say, well, who controls the production and the generation of the desires that we have because the production is still the point at which the choices that you can choose from are being provided, the emphasis on consumerism and consuming ethically and what Marx would have called commodity fetishism, this instead is focusing on like the end product itself.

00:22:39.740 And so I'd argue that that is definitely still where we are. That is still the context that this conversation is most often happening in. And so the t-shirt thing was 2014. Philosophically, all of that can be true. But like I told you at the beginning, there are still some challenges that I have with dismissing consumer choice completely.

00:22:58.740 And it came into clearer focus for me when I learned about the anti-littering campaigns that were happening at the same time that von Mises was giving those lectures.

00:23:09.280 So, Caroline, what do you know—

00:23:10.740 Is this when we talk about how plastic recycling isn't real?

00:23:14.560 What do you know about an organization called Keep America Beautiful?

00:23:19.260 Literally nothing.

00:23:20.940 Okay, great.

00:23:21.920 There are some things that I personally would just never do, even if you made the rational case to me for, like, why my doing or not doing it doesn't make a difference.

00:23:31.720 Littering is one of those things.

00:23:33.180 I have never thrown garbage on the ground.

00:23:36.400 Oh, Katie, there are four years in college that you cannot fully account for.

00:23:40.320 I swear to you, Caroline, my mom imbued me.

00:23:45.480 I just listened to our Bama Rush episode where you were like, I remember nothing.

00:23:48.820 quick montage cutaway to Katie just like tossing, tossing, tossing, just like Cheez-Its, Cheez-Its,

00:23:55.900 Cheez-Its. Okay, let me rephrase. I have never, while sober, thrown garbage on the ground.

00:24:03.320 Thank you. I will allow it. How's that? I will allow it. Okay. Now, is my not throwing garbage

00:24:09.220 on the ground going to do anything to save the planet? No, of course not. But it's just the

00:24:15.380 personal line that to me, like, the benefit or the convenience that I might gain while sober

00:24:19.540 of throwing trash on the ground is dwarfed by, like, the self-disgust that I would feel from

00:24:26.040 littering. It just feels wrong, so I don't do it. My choice not to litter is an individual moral

00:24:33.600 choice. And there's a lot of shaming still around it. Like, unless you're at big group events,

00:24:38.760 like stadium events or something, like, it's pretty shameful to be caught throwing something

00:24:44.200 away. I think the same is true with dog poop. Like, the shame I feel if I have to, like, run back to

00:24:48.800 the house and get a doggy bag, that is, like, significant. Like, I have caught someone's eye

00:24:52.640 and said to them, even though they said nothing to me, I'll be right back. And they're like,

00:24:56.800 I don't know you. I'm just walking past. But I feel so nervous about it because of the social

00:25:00.700 contract. Right. I was thinking about that social contract and why it feels so shameful.

00:25:06.340 We're going to watch an old scene from Mad Men. Oh, hell yeah. This is the TV show that made

00:25:13.660 Riley want to get into advertising? Like a thousand young white boys? What was the TV show 0.63

00:25:18.920 that made him want to get out of it? Captain Fantastic. I already talked about this. We both

00:25:22.780 watched Captain Fantastic and we were like, who's Noam Chomsky? So I'm going to set the scene. The

00:25:27.180 Mad Men family, the Draper family, is at a picnic and they are about to clean up and leave the

00:25:35.720 picnic. Okay. So I just want you to watch this and then explain to the listeners what happens.

00:25:40.940 check their hands

00:25:44.120 okay that's it oh my god wow that was electric okay so um so don draper played by john ham

00:26:07.940 tells Betty Draper, his wife, played by the incredible January Jones,

00:26:12.280 and he tells her to, like, check the kids, and then he's going back to the car,

00:26:15.540 and so she checks the kid's hand, and they walk away, and then she lifts the picnic blanket,

00:26:19.460 shakes it, all the trash goes everywhere, and then they just all walk up to the car

00:26:23.360 and leave the trash everywhere.

00:26:25.280 Yeah, it's extremely jarring.

00:26:28.380 Is that common?

00:26:29.500 It was. It used to be.

00:26:31.840 This is really interesting, because also in the 1940s and 50s,

00:26:35.360 there wasn't the same type of like takeaway containers and people didn't like I don't think

00:26:39.720 there was the same type of trash so I guess that they could have like managed this to a certain

00:26:43.340 extent for several years because you didn't have like plastic coffee cups and like to go salad

00:26:49.120 containers like I don't think there was that type of environment in the same way but that's kind of

00:26:52.740 blowing my mind right and so that scene is pretty famous for Mad Men because it was it was so subtle

00:26:58.160 but it really got it something that was different back then the other thing to think about I think

00:27:02.540 And I was kind of looking into, like, okay, why, how did this work?

00:27:05.660 Like, how is there not just, like, garbage everywhere?

00:27:08.320 Like, did they have people that picked up stuff that, like, came around and cleaned every day?

00:27:12.320 Like, how did that really work?

00:27:14.460 And somebody had pointed out that, like, population density was also a lot less, too.

00:27:18.360 So you just had fewer people throwing trash on the ground. 0.98

00:27:20.820 We had unions and shit, right? 0.98

00:27:23.200 We had paid workers. 0.99

00:27:24.780 The social contract and why it feels shameful.

00:27:27.620 I was thinking about this, why it feels so just unthinkable to me and why that scene feels so

00:27:33.380 jarring. And then I remembered something that my mom used to tell me all the time when I was a kid.

00:27:38.800 She would say, don't be a litter bug. And so I started to look into where did this come from,

00:27:44.600 this like litter bug idea. And I think that this is a useful example for the thought experiment

00:27:50.120 that I want to get into today. Because the big push in the late 20th century for individual

00:27:56.820 consumers to embrace recycling was supported by companies like Coca-Cola, who had just begun

00:28:04.040 producing a shit ton of single-use plastic. The term litterbug was popularized by this group

00:28:10.920 called Keep America Beautiful, which was created by essentially like beer, beer can, beer bottle

00:28:17.580 manufacturers, soft drink companies, candy companies, cigarette manufacturers. They were

00:28:22.100 like funding this org to shift the public debate away from legislation that would have controlled

00:28:28.460 those companies right to produce the amount of plastic waste that they were producing and

00:28:34.000 continue to produce today oh my god this is making me want to scream this is from the plastic

00:28:40.120 pollution coalition website dude big coca-cola is so real like like i feel like 99 of the world

00:28:51.400 that we live in right now is funded by big Coca-Cola. Okay. And thank God, because gotta

00:28:55.880 Diet Coke on a cool summer day. Okay. The pure genius of this highly emotive campaign was that

00:29:01.940 it bought a social license for mass production of disposable packaging by championing action

00:29:07.300 to clean up the pollution it led to. The exact same strategy still sustains the plastics industry

00:29:13.320 and is being used by groups like Plastics Europe, 100 Plastics Manufacturers, and the 69 Plastics

00:29:19.140 organizations and allied industry association in 35 countries behind marine literate solutions.

00:29:25.800 It is a beautiful, if evil, strategy, simple and elegant. Once underway, it is even cheap to run,

00:29:32.020 as it is powered not simply by petrodollars, but by the active, voluntary participation of people

00:29:37.100 who care about environmental pollution. This is true genius. It co-ops the energy, goodwill,

00:29:43.040 and emotional commitment of these—this is going to break me. This is going to be the thing that

00:29:46.360 breaks me today. It co-ops the energy, goodwill, and emotional commitment of those people,

00:29:51.280 especially the young, who care enough about birds choked on plastic and beaches littered in plastic

00:29:56.220 waste to spend their time at their own expense picking up the industrial detritus that the

00:30:01.000 plastic industry creates. Oh my god, I want to like take a nap right now. So it completely

00:30:06.520 reframes the problem, right? The problem is littering or not disposing of your plastic

00:30:12.160 products appropriately, rather than the fact that so much single-use plastic can be produced and

00:30:18.140 sold. So in that sense, the problem ceases to be about overproduction altogether. It's not garbage

00:30:23.540 because it's garbage, Caroline. It's litter. And it's litter because you are putting it somewhere 0.99

00:30:28.440 it is not supposed to be. You know how Smokey the Bear was like,

00:30:32.460 only you can prevent forest fires. Do you know that? Consent. So now I'm thinking about a huge

00:30:39.940 bug being like, only you can keep shit off the road. The shiny bug variant. Okay. So all of this 0.83

00:30:46.920 started because Vermont got pissed in the 1950s because people were drinking their glass bottles

00:30:53.960 and then tossing them out the car window. And so they were shattering in fields and then cows and

00:30:59.800 other grazing livestock were like ingesting glass and dying. And so the state of Vermont was like,

00:31:04.680 yo, we need to like do something about this. So please read. This is what Vermont did.

00:31:12.200 In 1953, Vermont's state legislature had a brainwave. Beer companies start pollution.

00:31:18.500 Legislation can stop it. That optimistic little state. They passed a statute banning the sale of

00:31:23.960 beer and ale in one-way bottles. It wasn't a deposit law. It declared that beer could only

00:31:28.980 be sold in returnable, reusable bottles. Anchor Hawking, a glass manufacturer,

00:31:33.720 immediately filed suit, calling the law unconstitutional. The Vermont Supreme Court

00:31:39.040 disagreed in May 1954, and the law took effect. That October, Keep America Beautiful was born,

00:31:46.080 declaring its intention to, quote, break Americans of the habit of tossing litter into streets and

00:31:51.020 out-of-car windows. The New York Times noted that the group's leaders included, quote,

00:31:55.340 executives of concerns manufacturing beer, beer cans, bottles, soft drinks, chewing gum,

00:32:00.820 candy, cigarettes, and other products. These disciples of disposability, led by William C.

00:32:07.100 Stolt, president of the American Chan Company, set about changing the terms in the conversation

00:32:12.420 about litter. By 1957, Vermont was pressured into dropping its reusable bottle law, and

00:32:17.760 disposable drinks containers grew rapidly throughout the 1960s. In 1962, Michigan considered a ban on

00:32:24.820 no-return bottles. Keep America Beautiful openly opposed it. Throughout the 60s, Keep America

00:32:30.320 Beautiful and the Ad Council battled a growing demand for legislation with an increasing

00:32:34.400 vilification of the individual. They spawned the slogan, every litter bit hurts. Every litter bit

00:32:40.220 hurts. They spawned the slogan, quote, every litter bit hurts, obsessed, and popularized the term

00:32:48.820 litter bug. In 1967, meeting at the Yale Club, they decided to go negative. Quote, there seemed

00:32:55.620 to be mutual agreement, wrote campaign coordinator David Hart, that our soft sell used in previous

00:33:00.840 years could now be replaced by a more emphatic approach to the problem by saying that those

00:33:05.000 who litter are, quote, slobs. The next year, planners upped the ante, calling litterers pigs. 0.98

00:33:11.340 The South Texas Pork Producers Council wrote in to complain. Okay, this is, it's so funny, 0.93

00:33:16.360 because this is, on the one hand, the most evil shit I've ever heard of in my life, 0.99

00:33:21.300 And on the other hand, there is something so domestic and banal to it. 0.99

00:33:26.960 Like, it almost feels like a Parks and Recreation episode that you have, like, all these...

00:33:30.860 I mean, it's...

00:33:31.600 Have you seen the movie Thank You for Smoking?

00:33:33.640 No.

00:33:34.480 Oh, you should watch it.

00:33:35.480 It's about, like, cigarette and alcohol and tobacco lobbyists in D.C.

00:33:38.680 It's hysterical.

00:33:39.460 But, like, it satirizes this.

00:33:40.840 Because, again, it's like, it's so evil that it's actually hard to take seriously.

00:33:45.120 Like, it's almost funny. 0.97

00:33:46.600 Yeah, it's just, like, silly. 1.00

00:33:47.680 It's like Disney villain shit. 0.99

00:33:48.940 The part that jumped out at me was, like, the recycling org, like, opposed the ban on the single-use items. I was like, oh, okay, so that's what we're doing here. 0.99

00:34:00.520 There was 2019 reporting from The Intercept that basically got a hold of some recordings of calls that were happening between some of these organizations that found Big Coca-Cola, which produces more than 100 billion plastic bottles every year.

00:34:17.940 actively undermines the efforts of the recycling organizations that they fund because they don't

00:34:25.200 actually want recycling to work too well there was something about how like the virgin plastic

00:34:30.140 industry really heavily influences them so like plastic that is not recycled and because they're

00:34:36.260 funding these organizations the the solutions that the organizations can pursue are sort of

00:34:41.400 beholden to the limits of what the corporations are are cool with and it's not just coke i mean

00:34:46.980 there's other companies too um coca-cola is like not all soda bottles yeah like so there's like

00:34:51.940 like the plastic producers as well so back to me uh i personally don't want to contribute to this

00:34:58.800 problem of plastic overproduction by littering unquestionably i think it is still a good thing

00:35:04.060 to stigmatize littering or like leaving dog shit on the ground but and this is the key i am not

00:35:11.460 solving the problem by not littering. Do you see what I mean?

00:35:15.680 There is an argument that allowing it to become a problem would allow it to enter the public

00:35:20.080 consciousness again.

00:35:21.420 Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

00:35:22.580 It's just me always looking for, like, the non-nonviolent intervention. Me being like,

00:35:27.660 what if we were violent, though, with plastic bottles? 0.98

00:35:29.940 What if we were shitty? Perfect segue. There was actually a Slovenian philosopher 0.98

00:35:36.300 who I came across who used the phrase

00:35:39.720 repairing with the right hand what you ruined with the left.

00:35:43.640 He talks about consumer activism,

00:35:45.860 quote-unquote consumer activism.

00:35:47.300 And I felt like that kind of encapsulated the whole thing.

00:35:50.460 Like, in an abstract sense,

00:35:51.920 it is, of course, better than nothing,

00:35:53.460 but he actually compared it to slavery.

00:35:56.140 And he said something to the effect of

00:35:57.780 the worst slave owners were the ones who were nice

00:36:00.440 because they prevented people from recognizing

00:36:02.820 and acting on the undeniable injustice of the system.

00:36:08.000 And so, like, the nice multinational corporations

00:36:10.640 who are lobbying behind the scenes

00:36:13.240 to weaken labor law, skirt taxes,

00:36:15.860 and, like, prevent these bans on single-use plastics, 0.87

00:36:19.280 they are the nice slave owners in this case.

00:36:21.740 Or being like, oh, yeah, and, like, recycles. 0.95

00:36:23.560 There isn't shit all over the ground, 0.64

00:36:24.940 but we don't have to stop making

00:36:26.480 100 billion plastic bottles every year.

00:36:29.260 So next time you pick up a plastic bottle

00:36:31.040 and throw it into trash,

00:36:31.860 just think in your head, I am a nice slave owner. I'm the problem. Yes, I'm going to make sure that 0.99

00:36:40.120 no matter what you do, you feel bad about it by the end of this episode. And that's the

00:36:43.760 diabolicalized guarantee. Talk about merch that fox. Okay. For some people, I think shopping at

00:36:53.920 Amazon gives them the same feeling that I would get if I threw garbage on the ground. And I want

00:36:59.520 to talk about Amazon today because I was trying to think of, besides Shein and fast fashion,

00:37:03.960 like what is the most universally reviled big corporation that kind of becomes shorthand for

00:37:09.920 every problem with modern capitalism? So you have like monopoly power, unfair labor practices,

00:37:15.780 union busting, waste, you name it, they have gotten shit for it. And I think Amazon is 0.98

00:37:21.540 more ubiquitous than Shein is. So I'm going with Amazon. But as I told you, I am not really 0.99

00:37:27.600 interested in having the like moralizing ethical consumption conversation about Amazon. But I did

00:37:32.120 learn some things about Amazon in my research for this episode that I do think complicates this

00:37:36.680 narrative a little bit in a similar way that learning about the origins of the anti-littering

00:37:41.100 campaigns complicates the narrative about plastic production a little bit. So we have to start with

00:37:46.800 where Amazon's profits come from. So Caro, did you hear about the Amazon Web Services outage

00:37:53.080 that just happened?

00:37:54.480 Yeah, it actually impacted our Substack page.

00:37:56.860 Oh, did it?

00:37:57.840 Yeah, I check our Substack page

00:37:59.260 every 15 to 50 minutes on average

00:38:02.120 when I'm at my computer

00:38:03.020 because I am psychotic

00:38:04.540 and I couldn't get access to it

00:38:05.960 and I was pretty stressed.

00:38:06.940 The thing about Amazon Web Services

00:38:08.920 is that one estimate that I found

00:38:11.060 said that it has one-third

00:38:13.140 of total global market share

00:38:15.200 of web infrastructure.

00:38:17.000 Wow.

00:38:18.140 So it's pretty ubiquitous

00:38:20.340 in powering the internet.

00:38:21.560 I actually don't really think

00:38:22.560 there's a way to use the internet without using AWS at this point. And only between 16 and 20%

00:38:31.920 of Amazon's total revenue comes from Amazon Web Services. But between 60 and 75% of their profit

00:38:42.280 is AWS. So for every like $3 and $4 of profit that Amazon makes, it is coming from AWS,

00:38:50.460 not the delivery service.

00:38:53.020 Wow. I did not know that.

00:38:54.380 Yeah. It just kind of contextualizes, like, how this business is operating and making money.

00:38:59.240 I talked to the aforementioned Marxist historian about this question, and I was like, hey,

00:39:04.460 what do you think about consumer choice as a means of hurting a company like Amazon? Like,

00:39:09.000 what is the proper role for that? And he was like, yeah, it's a fine and, you know,

00:39:14.600 maybe moral choice not to support Amazon in that way, but, like, an individual moral choice is

00:39:19.900 not necessarily a meaningful anti-capitalist choice. And so he really emphasized that consumer

00:39:25.780 boycotts, more broadly, that do not affect or make demands of the company with regard to their

00:39:33.460 supply chain or production by plugging into a labor organizing effort, for example, don't really

00:39:40.240 change anything. And this, I think, is where it gets a little bit tricky. Because when you have

00:39:45.320 a boycott that is making specific demands of a company. So one thing that he brought up was like

00:39:52.000 people canceling Disney when they were gonna like put Jimmy Kimmel on ice and everyone was like, 0.99

00:39:57.540 fuck that. That actually made an impact, right? Because there was a specific pressure campaign. 0.98

00:40:02.880 Or if the consumer boycott is designed to support a union. So like the way that Starbucks workers

00:40:09.540 are going to go on strike in a couple of weeks and you not going to Starbucks in an explicit

00:40:15.920 act of support of that union, like that sort of consumer boycott actually can be very effective.

00:40:21.800 But without those specific levers being pulled, it's really not going to move the needle.

00:40:27.560 Well, and I would also say that's where the value of a physical picket line becomes so

00:40:32.340 important.

00:40:32.980 Like it's this is true across the board.

00:40:35.420 This is true with so many aspects of our life that it's just really hard to create the type of community and conversation necessary to get anything done. And the shame factor is crucial for strikes. There's a picket line. You don't cross it. If you cross it, you're a scab. There are all these different elements of social contract that you understand. And if you walk past, people will talk to you about what's happening. But when you're at home and you order something online, it's just too easy to get away with it.

00:41:01.140 And again, ordering something on Amazon may feel to you the way that throwing litter on the ground would feel to me. And so that puts us into more interesting territory to make that distinction between an individual moral choice and a choice that has consequences for, like, things improving and kind of teasing them apart a little bit.

00:41:23.740 Now, beyond that, though, if we are applying this traditional lens of like, well, it's production, not consumption that needs to be central to this conversation. The other thing is a lot of the time refusing to shop on Amazon means redirecting that consumerism somewhere else.

00:41:39.260 And so I think this is where things start to get a little bit murky for me, because for most Americans who do not live in, like, dense, walkable cities with abundant local cooperatively owned businesses and transportation that's public and electric and whatever, like, you're probably getting in your car and you're driving across town to buy the same product from another retailer who probably received it the same way that an Amazon warehouse would have, which is that it was shipped there on a plane or a truck.

00:42:08.880 And so in that sense, like the real problem with that thing that you're buying is not the retailer you're buying it from, but the supply chain of how that thing was produced in the first place. Like the final retailer is like the last like 5% of its journey to you.

00:42:24.940 So like, is it possible to maximize ethics for that last 5%? Of course it is. And of course, that is better. Those moral individual choices are better. But that does not change the fact that we are still just talking in many cases about like the final 5% of the equation.

00:42:40.480 Yeah, this is also something I've experienced quite a bit over the last few weeks. I've been kind of moving around. I was in Denver seeing you and going to a booksellers conference and then I was in New York doing some book stuff and now I'm abroad. And so there were a few moments where I had to get something. Like, for example, I had to get an adapter and I wanted to get it before I went to the airport. You can't order things like, but it wasn't even me being a good person. It was like, I can't order anything online.

00:43:01.360 And so I went into a few different stores and a lot of them were out of stock because all of these companies have basically adjusted to the changing consumption patterns. And so like this has happened to me several times where I live in Virginia where like you go to a Best Buy and they have to order it for you because they're so used now to people ordering like the two-day shipping online.

00:43:20.120 And I think that there are certain bucks to this trend, and I think that clothing is one of them because some people still enjoy going into a clothing shop and buying a nice piece of clothing or trying it on. It's hard for me to believe that we are going to reverse this trend in any way because you just see so many other companies, like you're saying, either buying it from the same large corporation or no longer stocking it themselves and doubling down on something else.

00:43:44.120 To your point about having to go to multiple stores to find what you needed, if I were really stretching the limits of devil's advocacy here, like I said, I'm pointing counterpointing all the way through today. Extend this to your entire neighborhood.

00:43:56.500 Is it really better, all factors considered, for each person to get in their car and drive across town to multiple stores to buy the consumer goods that they need than for one probably electric Amazon truck with the most optimized route planned because they're trying to save fuel because that makes them more money to deliver the packages to all of those people?

00:44:17.660 I don't know. That's not rhetorical. I'm just trying to stretch the limits here of this thought exercise a little bit to make a point that sometimes opting out is more about individual fulfillment of a moral code than a different effect on the outcome or the ripple effect in the world.

00:44:34.620 And I do think that someone could fairly push back and say, like, well, not littering and not shopping at Amazon are different.

00:44:41.700 Because by withholding your money from Amazon, you actually are impacting their bottom line.

00:44:46.060 I could argue, well, as long as you're using the internet, that bottom line impact is always going to be a little bit limited by the nature of how they're actually making their money.

00:44:55.540 Whereas what you do with your Coke bottle when you're done with it doesn't really impact Coca-Cola.

00:45:00.580 But I think what this does, though, again, is functioning as, like, a distraction from

00:45:04.080 the core challenge of what makes Amazon and every other multinational corporation capable

00:45:11.100 of exploiting their labor and the Earth's resources in the first place.

00:45:16.160 And it doesn't mean that, like, oh, well, the only solution here is communist revolution

00:45:19.960 or nothing.

00:45:20.480 I am talking about, like, basic labor law stuff, basic environmental law stuff, some

00:45:25.180 of it's moderate, some of it's radical.

00:45:26.720 But in order to hurt Amazon by withholding consumption from them, considering where their profits are actually coming from, we would need an unthinkable number of people to stop using Amazon altogether. And even then, I'm not totally convinced it would really make a difference. I am not advocating for the like, well, it's all equal, who cares, buy whatever you want. I'm not saying that.

00:45:49.860 I mean, I think this gets into the kind of conversation where it's like, well, where do I buy something? And I think something that I learned earlier on in my life, I was a nanny for this like very crunchy family in LA. And the mother was actually incredibly good at educating me where she was like, no, we're not recycling anything. We're just not consuming anything. And the kids would have like little wax papers for their sandwiches and they would put them in their lunchbox and bring them home every day and she would wash them and use them the next day.

00:46:19.180 And it was an expenditure of time, absolutely. But I think the thing that I come back to is like, I agree with you. I think it's really interesting to kind of balance out the ethics of all of this. And I think what I come down to, especially with like the recycling or the throwing away, is the single best thing you can do in your life is just consume less. It's not where you consume. It's just bring less Stanley Cubs home.

00:46:38.420 Yes. I think there are still excellent reasons, moral and otherwise, to personally abstain from, like, you know, ordering stuff on Amazon. But the focus of the conversation, if meaningful change is the goal here, should not be on where consumers are buying things.

00:46:55.360 it kind of comes back to this idea of who is actually defining the choices that you're able

00:47:00.160 to make in the first place and you may still be thinking and just totally fair like okay katie

00:47:06.260 sure but like let's get real here we need to be realistic about what we can practically achieve

00:47:11.320 when it comes to labor and environmental law and consumer abstention is super practical it's like

00:47:16.860 easy for the most part you know compared to these other things that you're talking about

00:47:20.960 At least it's something, right? And so I was curious about how other thinkers that I respect

00:47:27.140 think about this question. So Grace Blakely, the author of Ultra Capitalism, she has talked about

00:47:32.860 this in the past where she basically says your identity as a consumer is not an identity that

00:47:39.040 can be mobilized to resist capitalism, inherently speaking. The primary function of these so-called

00:47:46.580 ethical consumer goods is that it basically alleviates the people who can afford to make

00:47:51.980 them from feeling guilty about that consumption. So to continue my journey into figuring this out

00:47:57.940 and how I feel about this, because like I said, I do, I feel conflicted about it.

00:48:01.880 Do you?

00:48:02.560 I do, because I do think that like there's still something about watching a Sheehan Hall 0.85

00:48:07.700 that just pisses me off, where I'm like, what are we fucking doing? 0.73

00:48:11.440 Do you experience that conflict in your own life or just in watching the actions of others? 0.90

00:48:16.580 No, guys, my consumption habits are perfect, actually. Just like I'm the only person that thinks about Taylor Swift the exact correct amount, I'm the only person who consumes goods the exact correct amount.

00:48:29.900 So it's like the gamification of it online, the way that people will, like, turn consumption into sport that really bothers you?

00:48:35.560 Well, it's like when it shocks the conscience, I think. You ever follow those people on TikTok who, like, I call it single-use plastic TikTok, where they, like, buy all the single-use packages and then, like, make the ASMR of, like, putting them into the containers?

00:48:49.220 Oh, is this clean talk? Okay, I really liked clean talk at first, and then I did, like, a video about this because at first I thought it was really soothing, and I'm naturally not organized at all.

00:48:58.260 So at first I was like, oh, my God, these people are teaching me how to be organized. And then someone commented on one of my TikToks being like, Caro, girl, no, this is like consumption talk. And I was like, oh, I didn't even realize it at first.

00:49:08.900 Okay, well, to be fair, I also find it soothing because the performance of competence will always comfort me. But I do think that sometimes I'll watch those videos and watch them, you know, it's a person who lives by themselves putting like a hundred single-use, like, fruit snacks contained, and I'm like, oh my god, like, this is so, I can just, like, feel the ocean crying, you know?

00:49:30.080 But I think that that rage, again, is misdirected. Again, if we're focusing it on the person who's

00:49:35.700 buying the stuff, we've lost the game here. I ended up reading this piece in the Harvard Business

00:49:41.620 Review, and I think this is what really cracked the case for me. It was called Ethical Consumerism

00:49:46.660 Isn't Dead, It Just Needs Better Marketing. And so immediately the framing struck me as interesting,

00:49:53.620 And then I noticed when it was published, it was published in January 2015.

00:50:00.100 Caroline, do you remember the year that the feminist t-shirt debacle happened? 0.76

00:50:04.140 2014.

00:50:05.140 Like, literally within months, we are getting articles that are like, it's not dead.

00:50:10.520 It can totally work still.

00:50:12.060 I'm like, oh, that was fast.

00:50:14.000 Okay, so I'm going to have you read from this article.

00:50:17.400 Ethical consumerism is the broad label for companies providing products that appeal to

00:50:21.900 people's best selves.

00:50:23.000 For example, fair trade coffee or a purchase that includes a donation to a charitable cause.

00:50:28.820 Now that the general idea of combining ethics and shopping has become a mainstream concept,

00:50:33.480 there is a developing backlash against the idea that consumers might affect change through their purchasing habits.

00:50:39.360 This pessimistic stance stems primarily from the lower sales of ethical brands.

00:50:44.480 If consumers cared about moral issues, the argument goes,

00:50:47.740 then companies and brands that did the right thing would have a larger market share.

00:50:51.140 It is clear people must not care about these issues, and so ethical consumerism is going to fail. We cannot shop our way to a better world. And yet, the hopelessness of ethical consumerism is echoed everywhere. In the business press, in some of my students' resistance to studying moral issues in a business framework, and in conversations I have on airplanes, at parties, and with colleagues.

00:51:13.440 An often quoted 2010 Wall Street Journal article, The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility, laid out the argument clearly.

00:51:22.300 Quote,

00:51:22.540 The fact is that while companies can sometimes do well by doing good, more often they can't.

00:51:27.940 Because in most cases, doing what's best for society means sacrificing profits, end quote.

00:51:33.480 Indeed, regulation would be a more immediate and effective solution to unethical consumerism than hoping for market change.

00:51:39.660 but let's be honest widespread sustainability regulation is not coming anytime soon jesus 0.93

00:51:44.720 fucking christ katie and would likely have some negative consequences even if it did wow this is 0.94

00:51:50.540 this is low-key pretty dark this marketing professor is like look would regulation obviously 0.99

00:51:56.620 be the better option yeah but like be honest you don't think they're actually going to regulate

00:52:01.420 anything do you i actually love the honesty and then one last piece from this article because i

00:52:05.760 felt like it sort of like gave the whole bag away. In another paper, published with Christine

00:52:13.300 Eric in the same journal, we showed that people who care about ethical issues such as child labor

00:52:18.400 will, strangely enough, avoid finding out whether their products are made using child labor.

00:52:23.480 But then if you give them the information, they will incorporate it into their purchasing.

00:52:28.000 Ethical information is difficult to process, and it is common for consumers to want to remain

00:52:32.220 willfully ignorant of it. I myself behave in this manner at least once a week.

00:52:37.100 Okay, so at that point I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a second,

00:52:42.100 what? This is an argument for the potency of ethical consumerism as the most practical way

00:52:47.660 forward in the Harvard Business Review that straightforwardly admits I myself remain willfully

00:52:55.480 ignorant of ethical information about the things I'm buying at least once per week?

00:53:01.380 How do you think he made that conclusion of one per week?

00:53:04.620 I'm like, okay, if the person who cares about this enough to write an article about it is like, yeah, you know, I myself purchase things made with child labor about 52 times a year.

00:53:13.300 But like, I'm like, dude, this is what I'm hearing when I read this.

00:53:17.940 Hey, regulation is too impractical, right?

00:53:21.720 So what if instead we just tricked everyone into making perfect choices all the time with marketing nudges?

00:53:29.260 I'm like, that's your practical solution?

00:53:32.060 That's the thing that you think is going to work?

00:53:34.240 It just, like, really shows we have a ways to go.

00:53:39.220 Okay, so I have a plot twist for you.

00:53:41.380 Thank God. 0.87

00:53:42.000 Because I'm reading this, I'm like, well, damn, this Wall Street Journal piece sounds sort of based. 0.92

00:53:47.240 Like, I actually love when super pro-capitalism publications just, like, accidentally say the quiet part out loud, 0.98

00:53:54.500 where they're like, well, obviously corporations are never going to do anything because they don't give a fuck about you, 0.94

00:53:58.640 And it's silly to pretend they knew otherwise. So I go to read this piece, right? And I was 0.94

00:54:03.920 actually pretty shocked at how the spirit of the point was completely misrepresented in the Harvard

00:54:11.380 Business Review article. So I'm going to have you read from this 2010 Wall Street Journal article in

00:54:16.560 question. Very simply, in cases where private profits and public interests are aligned,

00:54:22.280 the idea of corporate social responsibility is irrelevant. Companies that simply do everything

00:54:26.900 they can to boost profits will end up increasing social welfare. In circumstances in which profits

00:54:32.380 and social welfare are in direct opposition, an appeal to corporate social responsibility will

00:54:37.280 almost always be ineffective because executives are unlikely to act voluntarily in the public

00:54:42.040 interest and against shareholder interests. Irrelevant or ineffective, take your pick.

00:54:47.900 But it's worse than that. Great. The danger is that a focus on social responsibility will delay

00:54:53.020 or discourage more effective measures to enhance social welfare in those cases where profits and

00:54:58.040 the public good are at odds. As society looks to companies to address those problems, the real

00:55:03.160 solutions may be ignored. This is basically the nice slave owner thing. This is the, if you just 0.76

00:55:08.280 litter, people will start to give a fuck about plastic again. Same goes for why corporations 0.66

00:55:13.680 are often so quick to embrace these changes and this, this like ethos of like, do well by doing

00:55:19.300 good and, like, play along, because it means they won't be regulated. It means that the

00:55:23.320 conversation is going to continue to emphasize consumers' decisions and preferences and not

00:55:28.020 the legislation. And very tellingly, this is how the Wall Street Journal piece ends.

00:55:35.480 The ultimate solution is government regulation. Wow. Rare moment for the Wall Street Journal.

00:55:40.960 Rare dub.

00:55:41.300 Its greatest appeal is that it is binding. Government has the power to enforce regulation.

00:55:47.600 No need to rely on anyone's best intentions.

00:55:51.380 But government regulation isn't perfect, and it can even end up reducing public welfare because of its cost or inefficiency.

00:55:57.680 The government also may lack the resources and competence to design and administer appropriate regulations, particularly for complex industries requiring much specialized knowledge.

00:56:06.800 If the government lacks the resources to deal with an industry, that feels like a bigger problem, but okay.

00:56:11.280 And industry groups might find ways to influence regulation to the point where it is ineffective or even ends up benefiting the industry at the expense of the general population.

00:56:19.960 Outright corruption can make the situation even worse.

00:56:22.700 What's more, all the problems of government failure are exacerbated in developing countries with weak and often corrupt governments.

00:56:29.040 Still, with all their faults, governments are a far more effective protector of the public good than any campaign for corporate social responsibility.

00:56:36.320 Wow.

00:56:36.720 I just had this moment that I was staring at these two arguments side by side on my screen.

00:56:43.660 One that on its surface sounds very Milton Friedman apologia about how like, well, shareholders and profits are the highest good.

00:56:52.620 That is always going to be what corporations are going to pursue. 1.00

00:56:55.580 Expecting them to not be shitty is naive and dumb. 0.99

00:56:58.540 And the other one being a little loftier, a little more woke, being like, no, no, no, people don't show up ethically. 0.99

00:57:04.120 You just have to market the stuff better.

00:57:06.060 You just need to make it easier for people to consume responsibly. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, wow, even though you can tell they're very skeptical of government, they do not have like a Pollyanna perspective of the government's ability to fix things. They're like, yeah, it can be corrupt. Yeah, sometimes they don't have the expertise. Like, all that considered, still better than like trying to manipulate corporations and consumers into just, well, you should behave better. You should just choose better.

00:57:33.160 Well, I also I do think that there's a little bit of the what you have talked about in recent episodes about the conservative framing kind of like defining this conversation, because the assumption inherent in all of this is that like consumption will continue and people will and want to buy things. And that is not like a given. People don't aren't born wanting things. Someone isn't born wanting like a pair of like acrylic sweatpants from Aloe. You are conditioned to want things.

00:58:00.380 And so any sort of, like, leftist argument about this, I think, would start way past regulation or whatever and be like, well, why do we buy things? We buy things because we're advertised to and because we're conditioned to and because it allows us to signal things to one another and, frankly, also because a lot of us are lonely and because we no longer get dopamine hits from other elements.

00:58:19.340 Like, there are all these different ways in which consumerism and the rise of it has been mapped to a thousand other things taking place with humanity.

00:58:25.980 And so I think even starting with the assumption that consumerism is a constant in human society, I think, gives away a lot of the bag.

00:58:33.560 That's a really good point.

00:58:34.920 And the more we isolate people, the more you buy things because it makes you feel good. 0.99

00:58:37.920 That's why people buy 99% of the shit they buy. 0.99

00:58:40.240 You don't need most of the things that you buy. 1.00

00:58:43.280 You just think you need them.

00:58:44.840 Except for me, because my consumption habits are perfect.

00:58:47.060 Right, right, right, right.

00:58:47.800 And completely internally originating, and I'm not manipulated by advertising at all.

00:58:52.920 No, you're a pure little egg.

00:58:54.680 We are going to flip the coin now. We're going to talk about selling out.

00:58:58.080 Nice.

00:58:58.900 This is where I feel like more of the tension came in for me, because I think cards on the table—

00:59:03.720 You wonder why. Can't imagine why.

00:59:06.100 It feels to me like there is a difference between buying a product that has exploitation in its supply chain somewhere

00:59:13.380 and accepting payment to use your personal reputational capital to promote or endorse

00:59:19.760 that thing. So this kind of comes back to your original question at the outset of this episode,

00:59:24.760 which is, are these things the same or are they different? But I wanted to interrogate that a

00:59:30.800 little bit because I was suspicious that my feelings about it weren't inconsistent. I was

00:59:35.000 much more willing to focus on the system, on the consumption side of the coin and on the

00:59:40.140 selling outside of the coin. I was like, well, no, now that's agency. Now that's you just being

00:59:44.100 shitty. So when I began digging into the history of selling out, the first place I visited was the 0.97

00:59:50.440 1990s. Have you ever seen this before? Can you describe for me what you're looking at?

01:00:00.500 Yeah, I feel like I have seen that before, but I don't really have much

01:00:03.020 thought about it. But I feel like I've seen this. It's a Rolling Stone cover of Nirvana.

01:00:07.020 Yes. Okay. So this was 1992 cover of Nirvana. And can you read what Kurt Cobain's t-shirt says?

01:00:17.300 RIP. Bless up. He's wearing a white t-shirt underneath the cardigan and the white t-shirt

01:00:22.060 says corporate magazines still suck, which is edgy because he's on the cover of a corporate magazine. 0.57

01:00:27.880 That's right. Okay. So there is a book by Chuck Klosterman called The 90s. And he told Vulture something that jumped out at me. He said, quote, 0.85

01:00:40.680 It feels as though the 1990s weren't just the last decade of the 20th century, but sort of the last decade, period. The last decade with a fully formed and recognizable culture of its own.

01:00:54.700 Ooh, pre-internet culture.

01:00:57.180 And in this interview, he is describing what selling out used to mean.

01:01:03.160 The idea of selling out was something that had existed in the 80s, but the idea was almost that the obvious way to think, if you were an entertainer or an artist, was to try to be successful.

01:01:13.100 The 90s was kind of a confusing time to want things or have aspirations or any desire to succeed.

01:01:18.740 Like Reality Bites, the whole movie is about the problem of selling out.

01:01:22.700 There was never a time when people were like, I want to be poor.

01:01:26.120 They just sort of wanted to be rich with the trappings of someone who never wanted to be rich.

01:01:30.220 But there's a limit to how long that could happen.

01:01:32.580 People see through that.

01:01:34.080 Yes.

01:01:35.040 And every single thing that I read about selling out in the 90s,

01:01:39.500 all of them mentioned Kurt Cobain and Nirvana.

01:01:41.600 Because it sounds like this was sort of like central to the conversation, central to this shift,

01:01:47.520 this story about who was a sellout, who wasn't a sellout.

01:01:51.400 I read one critic who said that Cobain's lyrics about hating fame and being very unhappy

01:01:58.220 were seen as a branding exercise until he committed suicide.

01:02:04.360 So I'm going to have you read another quote.

01:02:06.560 What is so profound about Nirvana is that the relationship ended up becoming real.

01:02:11.500 The song, I Hate Myself and Want to Die.

01:02:14.100 The idea that a person who writes that song also does commit suicide.

01:02:17.660 That is so on the nose.

01:02:19.460 People would say things like, if that guy hates fame so much, why doesn't he just stop?

01:02:23.960 We did not fully believe that Kurt Cobain was actually unhappy.

01:02:27.480 And then when he killed himself, it made that music suddenly weirdly true.

01:02:31.620 He was presenting ideas in a culture where irony was the central understanding of all messages.

01:02:36.000 And he seems to have had no ironic distance at all.

01:02:39.380 It actually was incredibly sad and depressing to him that people he didn't like loved his music.

01:02:44.620 It legitimately bothered him that, say, homophobes liked his music.

01:02:48.960 It bothered him in a way that for other artists, it would have been seen almost as branding.

01:02:53.500 This idea of sellout culture, it did not start in the 1990s.

01:02:57.060 The 1990s is just sort of when it peaked.

01:02:59.620 A 2017 piece in Slate reflected on sellout culture's quote-unquote recent fall from favor and outlined the history of the idea.

01:03:08.800 A sellout was a slur that rose to prominence in the 1950s and early 1960s, and it meant a betrayal or a con.

01:03:17.920 And the author of the slate piece, I really liked this. They said, it's a specifically American idea because it befits a country young enough to retain a faith in its own ideals. I was like, oh, that hits.

01:03:33.040 But it was particularly bothersome to people when rock bands would cozy up to corporate sponsors, because rockers were seen as being inextricable from this idea of telling truth to power. They were counterculture, and nothing is more culture than, like, commercial interests.

01:03:50.460 I would argue that journalists and comedians both fit this same idealistic view as truth-tellers, whose ability to entertain you or inform you, like, fully depends on them retaining a reputation as somewhat uncorrupted in that way.

01:04:06.080 What's sort of funny about this idea is that if you go back far enough, artists have always needed patrons of some kind.

01:04:14.880 Somebody has always been paying the people that make art.

01:04:19.400 So I'm going to have you read this from this slate piece.

01:04:22.060 The once explosive accusation of calling someone a sellout, aimed at artists who make accommodations with commercial industry, has come to seem obsolete and a little naive.

01:04:32.420 But it once had career-threatening power.

01:04:35.320 Anxiety over the interplay of art and commerce is evergreen.

01:04:38.900 Shakespeare's sonnet 110 laments,

01:04:41.020 Alas, tis true, I have gone here and there and made myself a motley to the view,

01:04:46.620 gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear.

01:04:49.820 And the condemnation of monetary compensation for abandoning one's values goes back as far

01:04:54.540 as the Bible and Judas' 30 pieces of silver. Musicians had depended on patronage for centuries,

01:05:00.220 though, and until the rise of mass culture industries, the relationship between artist

01:05:04.220 and patron was considered pragmatic and natural. Okay, thank you for bringing this up because this

01:05:08.640 is something that I talk about and that kind of just like fuels me all the time is that there is

01:05:13.200 such an obsession in the writing community with like purity and with like you shouldn't care about

01:05:18.500 money you shouldn't care about trying to make money as a writer and there is this like willful

01:05:23.220 obfuscation of the reality and the history of art and finance and how artists used to actually be

01:05:28.960 way more honest and beholden to patricians and there's a reason why all of the art in the Louvre

01:05:34.700 is either of battle or of famous people. And it's because all of those artists were commissioned

01:05:39.700 to paint certain things by either the church or by rich people. And so, like, quite literally,

01:05:45.300 the art that we have access to is literally evidence of that propaganda. And there are

01:05:49.580 reasons why you very rarely see a woman at a bakery or a poor person on the side of the street

01:05:55.180 because people weren't paid to do that. That is fascinating. It also makes me think on that note

01:06:00.720 of writing and purity. That Graydon Carter book, When the Going Was Good, about journalism and how

01:06:07.640 people used to file like two stories a year and make half a million dollars to do that.

01:06:14.320 Yeah. Super different now.

01:06:16.080 Yeah. So the idea, though, took on like this populist and kind of leftist tone in the early

01:06:21.980 1900s, quote, as progressives fought against the growing influence of money and industry in

01:06:28.700 government. And then in the 1930s, it took on a more specifically anti-corporate usage. I've read

01:06:34.920 somewhere that Black jazz musicians would be criticized if they added non-Black musicians

01:06:39.840 to their bands, because the idea was like, oh, you're only doing that to make your sound more

01:06:44.000 palatable or slick for commercial reasons. You are prioritizing commercial success over artistic

01:06:50.160 integrity to form, basically. So just one more blurb from Slate.

01:06:57.620 Musicians for the next few decades found themselves in the paradoxical role of having to self-consciously manage perceptions of their authenticity.

01:07:05.420 The Who's 1967 The Who Sellout, with its ironic faux endorsements and jingles, may be the first example of a backlash from the performers themselves.

01:07:13.900 It was a perfect confluence of the mainstreaming of both incendiary leftist political language and the mass production of countercultural musical merchandise.

01:07:22.880 Class identification remained a crucial undercurrent.

01:07:25.800 In 1968, the jazz musician David Amram said,

01:07:29.320 defensively, my erudition didn't make me a sellout.

01:07:32.100 I mean, it really gives new context to the way you and I list our sponsors at the beginning of each episode.

01:07:38.000 It's like backlash. It's like our The Who backlash.

01:07:41.740 Yeah, like it's our album of like performing how not about it we are.

01:07:45.440 Like, meanwhile, my newsletter is like brought to you by this actual sponsor who's paying for this newsletter.

01:07:50.720 It's a self-consciously managing perceptions of your authenticity and how that actually gets absorbed into the commercialization itself.

01:08:01.240 To sell out could mean anything from doing a commercial for Buick or just signing with a major label.

01:08:10.680 Nirvana's version of selling out was just signing to a major label, which like today seems so quaint by comparison.

01:08:18.400 Cobain gave a quote to Rolling Stone about understanding why his 17-year-old punk rock

01:08:22.640 fan would be pissed and think he was a sellout, but that as the kid grew up, he'd probably come

01:08:27.400 to understand that, quote, there's more to life than living out your punk rock values as purely

01:08:32.100 as possible. The concept of selling out has disappeared in some sense from our collective

01:08:36.940 values in the 21st century, except recent events have made me wonder if maybe the pendulum is

01:08:43.200 starting to swing again, which is like kind of why we're here. So I talked to Emily Topping,

01:08:48.560 who is a writer for Current Affairs. She's an associate editor for Current Affairs.

01:08:53.680 After I found two articles that she had written recently, both about selling out and the Riyadh

01:08:59.260 Comedy Festival, which I'll link in the episode notes on Substack. But she pointed out that A-list

01:09:05.840 stars used to have to travel to Japan to film ads in secret because it was so shameful to do so at

01:09:14.720 home. It was just tacky. That feels very far away now. And there are a lot of theories about what

01:09:22.260 sort of seeded this shift, but I'd say there are two major ones that came up a lot. The Dawn of

01:09:30.020 Napster and the dawn of MTV. Most people's like historical accounts of how things changed were

01:09:37.580 pointing to these two things in order to explain why our attitudes about selling out, we were a

01:09:43.440 lot more comfortable with it. Can you please read this 1989 headline from the New York Times for me?

01:09:52.420 The Media Business, How MTV Has Rocked Television Commercials.

01:09:56.960 MTV's impact, first and foremost, is as a teacher, said Philip B. Dozenberry, chairman and chief executive of BBDO New York, the ad agency for Pepsi-Cola and Apple Computer. It has educated people, particularly young people, to accept lots of information in a short period of time. Interesting.

01:10:15.580 it. Yeah, so basically like the theory is that the proximity of the ads with the music and then

01:10:22.480 eventually the music in the ads quote-unquote educated young viewers about the closeness of

01:10:29.780 this relationship and encouraged them to accept it. Then you have Napster in 1999, which allowed

01:10:36.540 people to share music files with one another for free, which was obviously then followed by the

01:10:41.000 streaming era, which totally just changed the business model for music entirely. And so as it

01:10:47.160 became clearer that it was harder to make money on your music, alternate streams of revenue were

01:10:53.000 then pursued. So if you will read from Slate again. Post-Napster, the music world's self-righteousness

01:11:01.660 dried up along with its giant pools of money, and the patronage model was revived in the forms of

01:11:07.320 commercial licensing and Kickstarter. Stravinsky, for one, would have approved. Let me say once and

01:11:13.080 for all, he wrote in 1966, that I have never regarded poverty as attractive, that I do not

01:11:18.700 wish to be buried in the rain unattended, as Mozart was, that the very image of Bartok's

01:11:23.640 poverty-stricken demise, to mention only one of my less fortunate colleagues, was enough to fire

01:11:28.920 my ambition to earn every penny that my art would enable me to extract from the society that had

01:11:33.700 failed in its duty towards Bartok as it had earlier failed with Mozart. On that, both artists

01:11:39.860 and labor organizers could surely agree. That reminds me of a very famous in the writing world

01:11:45.140 New York Times op-ed that a writer named Jessica Knoll wrote about this. Can I share it with you?

01:11:49.960 Oh yeah, please do. So this was written in 2018 and Jessica Knoll wrote a novel called

01:11:56.880 Luckiest Girl Alive. It was like gangbusters viral. It has since been turned into a movie

01:12:01.720 with Mila Kunis. And she has also written, she's written three books total, but her most recent one,

01:12:07.120 Bright Young Women, was a really, I thought, clever reimagining of like the Ted Bundy serial

01:12:11.860 killing from the perspective of the women and basically like turn this whole idea of serial 0.67

01:12:16.820 killers being ingenious men into like, no, they weren't ingenious. There was just an entire system

01:12:21.380 that wanted men to look smart. And it was just a series of failures by police. I really admire her

01:12:26.520 as a writer. And I thought this third novel of hers really, really kicked her up into another

01:12:30.460 level. But anyways, she wrote this New York Times op-ed, and the title was I Want to Be Rich and

01:12:35.560 I'm Not Sorry, and I just want to read a section of it for you. Success for me is synonymous with

01:12:41.120 making money. I want to write books, but I really want to sell books. I want advances that make my

01:12:46.720 husband gasp and fat royalty checks twice a year. I want movie studios to pay me for option rights,

01:12:52.360 and I want the screenwriting comp to boot. To accomplish this, I spent months researching the

01:12:57.560 publishing marketplace before sitting down to write my first book. I pushed to be the one to

01:13:01.740 adapt it for the studio. Now I'm working towards producing, directing, or running my own show.

01:13:06.800 TV is where the money is. I don't think that's true any longer about the time it was. And to be

01:13:10.560 perfectly blunt about it, I want to be rich. Rich is still a man's world. The Geena Davis Institute

01:13:16.280 on Gender and Media, which is devoted to increasing female representation on screen,

01:13:20.560 has a motto that may explain why. If she can see it, she can be it. Until recently,

01:13:25.400 much of the content we consumed was by and for men. If the women movie makers created cared 0.98

01:13:30.620 about money, they showed it by scheming to marry rich, rakish antiheroes. If she can see it, 1.00

01:13:35.920 she can be it. I want to be it for little girls whose parents aren't saving for their educations,

01:13:40.560 whose friends make fun of them for wanting too much from their lives. I want to make the kind

01:13:44.740 of money that allows me to jet to Mexico on a Tuesday, to meaningful contribute to nasty

01:13:49.080 politicians, to afford a shark of a lawyer if any man ever lays a finger on me again, 1.00

01:13:53.960 she famously wrote about her own sexual assault. If anyone calls that obnoxious, I want to do what 0.86

01:13:58.200 men do and shrug. This was a huge op-ed for writers. People argued about it for days and 0.80

01:14:05.720 days and days because as a writer— When was it published? 2018. Oh, okay. You cannot talk about

01:14:11.360 wanting to make money. If you talk about being a writer and wanting to make money, you are

01:14:15.120 immediately kind of sidelined as like not a serious thinker or writer. And people talk about

01:14:20.580 this op-ed all the time so it feels like a really interesting echo from the one you just made me

01:14:24.060 read it does sort of remind me of like the ethos though at the time that maybe wasn't common in the

01:14:29.720 writing world but was common in the business world which is like if individual woman gets rich then

01:14:35.960 progressive benefit to all gender and like i almost there's a part of me that wishes

01:14:41.160 she would have just left it at i just want to be rich because i want to go to mexico on a tuesday

01:14:46.720 and not made it about like, so other little girls can see that it's like, isn't it about those

01:14:53.000 little girls or do you just want to be rich? That tension though, between like what you desire for

01:14:58.480 your life and your values and how you hold that tension, we're going to get into that because I

01:15:05.000 think that that's one of the most interesting dynamics that's at play here. The last thing that

01:15:10.320 I wanted to show you from my deep dive into sellout culture more broadly is this piece that I found

01:15:18.220 that was written by a guy named W. David Marks, The Age of the Double Sellout. And he wrote about

01:15:25.760 how skepticism or suspicion of commerce transitioned into something more of like a defensive resignation

01:15:32.220 to it as like a necessary evil, but that people would still have their limits with it. So I'm

01:15:39.360 going to have you read a couple passages from that piece. At this point, the new ideal for an

01:15:44.760 artistic career is what I would call the single sellout. The artist was allowed to make a few

01:15:49.700 commercial compromises to gain attention in the increasingly competitive marketplace,

01:15:54.040 but once they achieved fame and fortune, they were expected to use their vaulted platform to

01:15:58.240 provide the world with meaningful and groundbreaking art. Ooh, this is interesting.

01:16:01.840 This actually did happen. The Neptunes leveraged their strong track record of pop hits to push

01:16:06.820 legitimately bizarre minimalist tracks like Clips's Grindin' and Snoop Dogg's Drop It Like

01:16:11.420 It's Hot. Beyonce's formation was musically adventurous and the video is now considered

01:16:16.180 the best of all time. The writer basically argues that like you were allowed to produce

01:16:21.340 market-friendly slop to achieve fame but then if you didn't take bigger swings then with that fame

01:16:28.140 that like that was shameful. I don't know if you and I talked about this but Addison Rae talked

01:16:32.840 about this in her New York Times pop interview. She basically was like, yeah, I was a poor girl

01:16:38.480 in Louisiana. I was like the blandest version of myself on TikTok because that was what was going

01:16:44.200 to get me out of there. And so she basically was very blunt about it and was like, of course I

01:16:48.300 didn't show you my obscure preferences in music. Of course I didn't show you all of the niche

01:16:53.280 aspects of my personality. That was not going to get me a big enough TikTok account to get to LA.

01:16:58.160 And so she essentially showed the specific commercialized packaged version of herself that would succeed on TikTok, which is like a commodified, bland white woman doing reusable TikTok dances. She has since launched, I think, a very interesting pop star career. I really like her album. And my hot take is that her album is what Life of a Showgirl wanted to be, but that's for another time. 0.99

01:17:22.260 We promised we wouldn't talk about Life of a Showgirl again.

01:17:24.580 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

01:17:25.700 so if you can just read this other little bit for me the 20th century taboo against selling out

01:17:33.980 was at its heart a communal norm to reward young artists who focused on craft and punish those who

01:17:39.800 appropriated art and subculture for empty profiteering now the culture is mostly

01:17:44.500 exemplified by people whose entire end goal appears to be empty profiteering oh i don't

01:17:51.620 disagree so you see this shift from don't sell out to well it's okay to sell out because like

01:17:57.520 we understand that you need to accommodate some commercial interests to actually judging someone

01:18:03.540 for selling out is wrong so it kind of feels like the moral stance like like swung to the other side

01:18:09.440 the problem though is that as this writer puts it this profoundly shapes the type of culture that we

01:18:15.980 yet profit-maxing art will shape our culture.

01:18:20.660 This is really interesting, the single versus the double sellout.

01:18:25.280 And as I think about it, I mean, obviously, I guess I'm bringing my own bias into this

01:18:29.080 because I guess you and I both probably agree with what I'm going to say by nature of what

01:18:33.660 we've done with our careers.

01:18:34.600 But I would actually argue, I don't even think the single sellout, I don't even think that

01:18:39.660 that is a true sellout.

01:18:40.920 I think that, like, anyone who has ideas or is an artist or wants to make movies or wants to write books or wants to educate, I don't know a single person who is in that field and who doesn't want to reach as many people as possible.

01:18:55.120 And I personally don't know a single person who has actively rejected the opportunity to reach a wider audience.

01:19:04.020 And so I think like the stepping stone I think that Addison Rae talked about so eloquently was like it's not the first step I don't personally think is selling out. I think it's getting into the game of like doing what you want to do and being able to whether it is whether you want to be a politician or whether you want like Mom Donnie. Mom Donnie making all these compromises this summer in order to secure his mayoral nomination.

01:19:25.420 Someone might call that selling out, but I think he's done a very good job of being like,

01:19:28.800 no, this is what politics is.

01:19:30.240 And I think you could say the same argument for art or for communication, where it's like,

01:19:34.300 no, no, no, this is actually part of what my craft is, is finding a way for my paintings

01:19:40.040 to be seen or for my book to be read.

01:19:42.060 I agree with what this guy is saying here.

01:19:43.800 I actually would go a step further and be like, the first sellout, what Beyonce did

01:19:47.860 in Destiny's Child, that's not selling out, that's getting your foot in the door.

01:19:52.040 And once your foot is in the door, then you get to be in the room.

01:19:54.440 And then you get to make decisions. But if you never get into the room, nothing actually matters to begin with.

01:19:59.800 I do think that part of the reason I clocked this and wanted to include it was because it did remind me a little bit of the debate that we got into in our Taylor Swift album review where it was kind of like, you are the room. You're not just in the room, you are the room. So like, do something interesting with that.

01:20:17.800 And my argument only holds water if there is an implicit assumption that once you get into the room, you are going to say what you want to say, you are going to paint what you want to paint, and you're not just going to be a profit maxing. So yeah, inherently, it's like, it's almost like I'm defensive of selling out, but I'm also holding the idea of the sell it to the higher standard, which is like, if that's your goal, and if you really are trying to, then you actually do have to hold yourself to a really high standard. So we're both.

01:20:42.660 Well, that is the spirit of the episode, which is point-counterpoint. So if you will please read this final bit from this article.

01:20:51.940 If we want different outcomes, we can change the norms, which conveniently cost no money.

01:20:56.800 If we want culture to be culture and not just advertorials for a sprawling network of micro-QVCs pumping out low-quality goods, an easy step would be to reshift the norms towards, at least, don't be a double sellout.

01:21:08.440 This is already a quite generous compromise in that it blesses artists to be conventional to stabilize their income and try to win over large fanbases. But this esteem must be given on the promise that the money and fame are used in pursuit of artistic or creative innovation. Yes. Double sellouts don't deserve our esteem as creative people. They should be content with the reward they chose. The money extracted from fans who snap up their mediocre commodities out of Paris social loyalty.

01:21:34.440 loyalty. I just thought that that piece about esteem really jumped out at me, like the difference

01:21:42.380 between reputational capital and actual capital. And the more I thought about it in the context of

01:21:47.460 music, I think there is, again, point counterpoint, going to complicate things a little bit.

01:21:52.820 There is an interesting paradox at play here where it is absolutely true that the compensation model

01:21:59.820 on a platform like Spotify or Apple Music

01:22:02.060 has completely obliterated the financial model

01:22:04.300 for most musicians who used to make money

01:22:06.180 selling physical albums.

01:22:07.840 Some estimates say that one stream is worth on average

01:22:10.580 between like one half and one tenth of a penny.

01:22:13.420 So like to make a dollar,

01:22:15.080 you would have to get anywhere between 200 and 1,000 streams.

01:22:19.800 And also, meaningful ad revenue from sponsorship deals

01:22:25.080 really only go to the artists who are already so famous

01:22:28.680 that they are putting up the sort of streaming numbers

01:22:30.980 that would constitute a meaningful income.

01:22:34.220 So like, for example,

01:22:35.980 one estimate put Taylor Swift's 2024 Spotify earnings

01:22:38.820 from streaming at around $100 million,

01:22:41.060 around the same for 2023.

01:22:43.680 I ended up going down a useless rabbit hole about this

01:22:46.400 because the Spotify compensation model

01:22:48.760 is really interesting.

01:22:49.880 So allegedly they actually bundle revenue by plan type

01:22:54.260 and then they distribute around 70% of that money

01:22:58.600 as royalties according to your share of total streams on the platform. So one reporter I found

01:23:06.640 who did the math found out that Taylor Swift probably received around 1.3% of all royalty

01:23:12.140 payments that were paid by Spotify, again, because it is a share of the total. There is this really,

01:23:18.540 really strong power distribution where the most streamed artists are making the most money,

01:23:23.240 and those also happen to be the artists that are going to get the deals with Pepsi and Capital One

01:23:27.020 and whatever. And like the money that you're sending those small artists is fractions of

01:23:31.860 fractions of cents. Yeah. I think you just get into this weird thing where like the conditions

01:23:37.620 that made selling out most understandable don't even end up applying to the people who sell out

01:23:47.280 the hardest. On the one hand, it felt very just to me that we're calling this what it is. But then

01:23:54.520 on the other hand, it also felt pretty reminiscent of the whole like plastic isn't garbage, it's

01:23:59.020 litter thing. Yeah. Zadie Smith talked about this in an interview with Ezra Klein. It was a while

01:24:04.140 ago, but she was saying how like when you think about the way that younger generations use

01:24:09.600 language online as a weapon, I think you and I have talked about this. It's like it's easy to

01:24:14.000 make fun of that or infantilize them and be like, well, what's the point? You're just complaining

01:24:17.840 online. But these are generations who have grown up knowing that language is the only weapon they

01:24:22.000 have. Like they've grown up in a world where there just really isn't much of an impact with

01:24:25.900 their vote. They don't really see much of a changing world. And so complaining online is

01:24:30.220 a way to sort of maintain power and to, you know, grab that power. And so whether it's an end goal

01:24:36.300 or not, I do think it's a little different than the trash thing because it's like a way of sort

01:24:40.780 of creating a small amount of currency online. If you comment on someone's, you know, post and

01:24:45.660 complain about them, then you get some likes and then you have a moment of being like, I matter.

01:24:49.680 And like, oh, maybe we'll get them to take the post down or maybe they'll cancel the whatever. But even if they don't, you have a moment where like your voice almost has, quote unquote, equal weight to theirs. And also like no one cares more about this conversation about being a sellout than the artist who is being accused of being a sellout. There is a reason why a lot of famous people now limit their comments, don't allow like because it actually does bother them.

01:25:12.880 How do you feel that way so confidently?

01:25:14.600 First and foremost, like following so many musicians and actresses and like you see that like Taylor Swift has responded to this before. Taylor Swift has made full fucking albums. Taylor Swift wrote mean about a critic who made fun of her singing voice at the Grammys. Taylor Swift is an example. Selena Gomez is an example, I think. And I would go into the writing, but I don't want to name writing names. But like no one is more defensive of their art and the legitimacy of their art than the artist. 0.99

01:25:41.200 I do think that that is important that like we might think someone commenting on like a famous person's Instagram post and writing something that gets 18 likes on it, like who gives a shit? But you never know that the artist doesn't give a shit. Like think of Kurt Cobain being so sensitive to which type of people liked his music. A lot of artists are deeply within their own demographics and very aware of how people are talking about them and how people are engaging with their work and often to a detrimental degree. It's like the inherent narcissism of being an artist or a communicator. 0.99

01:26:10.560 I think this conversation about esteem matters, how much value people put on it. Kara, what do you know about the Riyadh Comedy Festival?

01:26:17.720 Oh, my God. I actually learned about this through Marc Maron. He kind of called out these comedians who were going to, I guess they were going to Saudi Arabia for this comedy festival. Was it put on by the Saudi Arabian royal family?

01:26:29.240 It was. It is time to talk about our treasured economic partner, Saudi Arabia.

01:26:33.600 we are gonna watch this video from actor and comedian zach woods guys it's that special time

01:26:42.240 of year it's the riad comedy festival and all of your favorite comedians are performing at the

01:26:48.460 pleasure of turkey i'll shake and he is the head of the entertainment authority over there and he

01:26:54.780 has so many people thrown in prison because they tweeted stuff he didn't like about the soccer team

01:26:58.660 or whatever, that there's a wing of a prison

01:27:01.900 nicknamed after him where they hang people

01:27:04.180 by their heels from the ceiling. 0.96

01:27:05.880 Now there's a lot of drips, killjoys, and dweebozoids

01:27:08.540 who are saying, oh, they shouldn't do comedy over there

01:27:11.380 because it's whitewashing a regime that just in June

01:27:15.060 killed a journalist and killed Jamal Khashoggi

01:27:18.280 and played a big role in 9-11. 1.00

01:27:20.880 Shut up. 0.97

01:27:21.960 Name one comedian who hasn't whored themselves out 1.00

01:27:24.120 to a dictator.

01:27:25.000 Sinbad in the 80s would go perform

01:27:29.120 for dying Nazis hidden out in Argentina. 0.51

01:27:32.000 Mr. Bean would do private shows for Idi Amin.

01:27:35.240 Me and Bibi Netanyahu have collaborated.

01:27:37.880 I pitched him a prank show called The West Bank

01:27:40.460 where it's hilarious, like people in masks show up

01:27:44.080 and eject people from their homes and they're terrified.

01:27:47.040 They just traumatize these families

01:27:49.080 and then they can never come home.

01:27:51.040 And it's been going on for years,

01:27:53.120 But this season has been, like, action-packed.

01:27:55.460 And it's a prank show, but there's also a true crime element

01:27:58.180 because it violates international law

01:27:59.840 and people have been killed a lot.

01:28:01.200 Let's not get our, you know, moral panties yanked up,

01:28:05.560 wedged high in our rumps.

01:28:09.320 Human Rights Watch has been begging the comedians

01:28:12.880 not to participate in the whitewashing

01:28:15.760 of the horrors that are ongoing in Saudi Arabia.

01:28:20.340 Ugh, what a cock block Human Rights Watch is for comedy. 1.00

01:28:24.500 Let's have some fun. 0.98

01:28:25.640 Let's have some yucks.

01:28:26.940 And let's not look too closely at anything. 0.99

01:28:29.180 I'm a hypocrite, too. 0.82

01:28:31.960 I saw that TikTok and I'm obsessed with it. 0.73

01:28:34.280 I do have a question for you, though, in the name of Point Counterpoint.

01:28:38.500 Let's go.

01:28:39.160 I saw a comment on this that was like, yeah, this is all true.

01:28:43.120 But also, this is what artists are always doing for the U.S.

01:28:46.560 like actors are constantly like doing movies about the military industrial complex or just

01:28:52.100 performing at the Super Bowl normalizing the NFL and I think I'm curious what you think about this

01:28:57.140 even with publishing where like Sally Rooney refused and a lot of I mean Lorde a lot of

01:29:02.660 artists have refused to allow their work to be distributed in Israel but they can't do that with

01:29:08.200 North America even though North America is as imperialist and violent so what do you think

01:29:12.340 about that. I think this is a case of two things can be bad at the same time. I asked the Marxist

01:29:17.140 professor what he thought about this. And he basically was like, yeah, I mean, if you want to

01:29:21.120 be mad at Bill Burr, go ahead. But like, would you be mad if they were doing this for the British

01:29:26.380 government? He was like, Riyadh is blood money for sure, but the British government is like

01:29:31.340 centuries of blood money. So these things are more similar than they are different. So yeah,

01:29:36.440 I absolutely think that that's true. With this Riyadh Comedy Festival, just to give some like

01:29:40.680 background on what's really happening here. This was part of a public relations effort by the Saudi

01:29:45.740 regime called Vision 2030. And the goal was to, like, make the regime look cool, fun, normal,

01:29:51.240 and not murderous. So the Saudi royal family paid for this festival. So to be clear, this wasn't a

01:29:56.660 comedy festival that was just, like, happening in Saudi Arabia for its citizens. This, to me,

01:30:01.400 was sort of the perfect example of this broader point of, like, the people who need the money

01:30:06.160 least seem to be the ones most willing to like take a check for anything. And so I guess that

01:30:11.140 there's there is a question of like, well, maybe that's how they got so much money in the first

01:30:15.580 place. Kevin Hart, for example, Kevin Hart did this festival. He's worth almost half a billion

01:30:21.420 dollars. Yeah. And so I'm kind of like, did you really need an extra million? Like and so I guess

01:30:28.020 it just brings me back to this point of it can't be about the money after a certain point. It just

01:30:34.120 wouldn't make sense for it to only be about the money. I completely agree. I don't think it's

01:30:38.660 about the money. I think it's about the reputational clout. And I was actually thinking

01:30:42.960 about like a lot of the comedians who are going. I think that a lot of famous people, especially

01:30:47.720 who are in the middle of their careers, are really unnerved by how nothing matters anymore.

01:30:54.320 Like actors have talked about this a lot, like the weirdness of being like in your mid-40s and

01:30:59.160 like getting in just in time for the golden age of Hollywood or for a time when people cared about

01:31:03.900 movies and then working really hard on a film with a bunch of other Oscar-nominated actors,

01:31:08.700 and it doesn't even make a dent in the cultural consciousness. And I think it's a really weird

01:31:13.120 shift. And I think that the same is true for a lot of singers and comedians. And I think about

01:31:17.760 Louis C.K. and Kevin Hart and Pete Davidson and all these people who my best guess,

01:31:24.860 if I were to put myself in their shoes, would be that you are trying to grab at relevance far more

01:31:29.840 than you are at money and if you can no longer maintain relevance in North America you have a

01:31:35.920 new demographic and it's like maybe I can get relevance in Saudi Arabia or maybe in doing so 0.52

01:31:40.840 these people I mean God knows Saudi Arabia is in bed with the U.S. in every way possible yeah for

01:31:45.480 all we know the Saudi Arabia has been like yeah and then we'll also fund a tour for you in the U.S.

01:31:49.360 and we will make sure that the seats are filled or we have it in with Netflix and we're going to

01:31:54.100 turn the Riyadh Comedy Festival into a whitewashed documentary about comedians on Netflix and so I

01:31:59.240 think that it's more about that. And I think a lot of these famous people are constantly trying

01:32:03.060 to calculate how to maintain attention capture more than they are about trying to maintain money.

01:32:08.560 Okay. I'm glad you said that because I think this idea of nothing

01:32:11.160 mattering and basically the idea that actions no longer have consequences, positive or negative,

01:32:18.040 we're going to come back to that. There was only really one major comedian that I saw that turned

01:32:22.360 it down. Shane Gillis, I guess, was offered. He called it a significant bag. Some reports say,

01:32:29.240 he was offered more than a million dollars to do one show and then when he said no they allegedly

01:32:34.660 doubled the offer he turned it down again right he called it a principled stand and then he followed

01:32:42.160 it up with you don't 9-11 your friends and I was like that's that's about the most Shane Gillis

01:32:49.660 way of handling that that I can imagine he should do a Netflix special on the Riyadh Comedy Festival 0.91

01:32:54.880 that would be like the cool fucking artist thing to do even the fact that he's talking about this 0.82

01:32:59.360 on his paid podcast i'm like he's gonna turn it into content he's gonna make money on this 0.96

01:33:03.960 right but i also think that like that's how politics work that's how politicians

01:33:07.540 operate yeah if you're gonna be an artist with a principled stance then like yeah yeah i actually

01:33:12.380 think you owe it to a certain extent to people to not just say no but to communicate it and to

01:33:18.180 have it i mean sally rooney is the ultimate example of how she weaves this constantly through

01:33:22.320 she has it in her novels, her frustration with Gaza, and then she decides to donate her proceeds

01:33:28.060 to Palestine for Action. And then she writes an op-ed about it. Like, it's not, I don't think

01:33:32.260 it's like not cool or it's like selling out to shout about how you're not selling out. I think

01:33:37.840 that's actually very much part of the game and I respect it. So, okay, I think we're saying the

01:33:41.920 same thing. Cool. My point is when you don't sell out in the context of the Shane Gillis

01:33:47.960 turning down the Riyadh comedy festival the long game that he could very well be playing here could 0.97

01:33:53.020 actually be more financially beneficial totally than like somebody that goes and gets shit for it 0.98

01:33:59.960 and then you know somebody goes oh bill burt like well fuck bill i'm not a fan of his anymore i'm not 0.93

01:34:04.400 gonna stream his whatever and like they share they can't share their clips on social they're 0.97

01:34:07.960 gonna get annihilated i actually don't know to the point of whether there are consequences or not

01:34:13.520 I don't know how much the short or long game here is really going to impact anybody or how quickly it's just going to not matter. But I do think that there is a case to be made for, like, when you don't sell out, that actually can become marketable, too.

01:34:27.900 Keep in mind, too, throughout this whole conversation is that comedians and artists are famously mentally ill and self-obsessed. So you're, like, posing these ethical dilemmas for people who, like—

01:34:39.240 So listen to us, two mentally ill, self-obsessed women. 0.99

01:34:44.080 Famously mentally ill and self-obsessed. 1.00

01:34:46.440 And hold no hypocritical opinions. 0.98

01:34:49.440 My beliefs and my actions always aligned.

01:34:53.140 That is my promise to you.

01:34:55.060 Okay, that brings us to the Gia Airbnb discourse.

01:34:59.300 Do you want to give us just a quick explainer of what happened here and then what the backlash was?

01:35:05.960 Yes. So Gia Tolentino is like a household name for Katie and I, but I should describe her to other people who have, I don't know, lives and kids. Gia Tolentino is a writer for The New Yorker. She's also a screenwriter. She wrote the essay collection Trick Mirror, which was a huge deal when it came out in 2018.

01:35:22.100 she is beloved for her writing, but she is also just beloved as a writer. Like, I think that she

01:35:26.940 holds a very singular place right now in the zeitgeisty universe. And she has written at

01:35:34.400 length about anti-capitalist beliefs. And in particular, in Trick Mirror, she wrote a lot

01:35:39.280 about the nightmare of living inside a world that is constantly trying to basically like

01:35:44.180 turn your brand and turn your personality and turn your identity into something commodifiable.

01:35:49.200 She's also been very outspoken about Gaza. So last week or two weeks ago, she shared a post

01:35:56.120 online where she said that she was breaking her RIDGID, in all caps, ban on SponCon to announce

01:36:02.140 that she was doing a collaboration with Airbnb Experience. And it was going to be with McNally

01:36:06.420 Jackson, which is a beloved independent bookstore in New York where a select number of people

01:36:11.040 throughout November would basically get to walk up to her and say, I would love for you to like

01:36:14.920 customize a bundle of books for me and people were very upset about this number one because

01:36:20.380 she is known as a writer who is I think whose brand of writing is like inextricably connected

01:36:25.840 to her strong ethical beliefs that she communicates through her writing and also in particular because

01:36:31.980 the post that was right next to this one was a video in which she shared that she was going to

01:36:36.980 be doing like a one-day fast as a way to spiritually atone for the horrors of Gaza and so I think a lot

01:36:43.440 of people were looking at these two posts and being like, this is, you know, this is not a line

01:36:47.420 or these are very, very contradictory claims. And so then a whole conversation was kicked off about

01:36:53.160 who deserves to get their bag? What type of bag should you be getting? Does Gia Tolentino need

01:36:57.560 the money? How much do we really know about her finances? What does it say that she's doing this? 0.85

01:37:01.640 And then a few days ago, she deleted the post. That was remarkably comprehensive. I really

01:37:06.700 appreciate that. She has also written critically about Airbnb in the past. She has given the Gia

01:37:13.300 essay treatment to the housing crisis as it pertains to Airbnb and how they are essentially

01:37:18.520 monetizing a very bad situation and making it worse. This entire discussion felt insanely

01:37:26.460 emblematic to me of the conversation that we've just been having for the last two hours. It kind

01:37:30.900 of mirrors these themes that we've been talking about, which basically splits the response into

01:37:35.280 two camps. One was of the mind that Tolentino is one of the most lauded millennial writers alive

01:37:41.600 and could easily command a six or seven figure book advance just to write something. So like to

01:37:47.600 debase herself by partnering with a company like Airbnb is totally unthinkable and like doesn't

01:37:52.220 make any sense. Then the other half, I would summarize as people who basically take the

01:37:56.960 don't hate the player, hate the game stance, just because she is a talented cultural critic who has

01:38:02.960 written disparagingly in the past about Airbnb and believes in anti-capitalism doesn't mean that

01:38:09.020 she is exempted from the pressures of capitalism. 0.99

01:38:12.220 She still needs to earn a living wage like anyone else. 1.00

01:38:14.780 Have you ever been offered like a branding deal, SpawnCon? 0.99

01:38:18.200 Oh, yeah, of course.

01:38:19.380 Oh, I didn't know.

01:38:20.200 I mean, I've done sponsored content on Instagram.

01:38:22.000 Yeah, for like newsletter sponsors, yeah.

01:38:24.200 On your personal account?

01:38:25.760 Oh, no, no, no, not on my personal one,

01:38:27.660 but for Money with Katie.

01:38:28.980 No, no, no, I'm not talking about Money with Katie.

01:38:30.680 I'm saying personally as a person.

01:38:33.820 Not since I've become somebody with a platform, no.

01:38:37.460 Back in the day, when I was a fitness instructor in Dallas, there would be like brands that would give me product to post about for free. Like, oh, here, we'll give you discounts on this food if you share about it. But I had like 4,000 followers at that point. I have not been offered money to post ads on my personal Instagram.

01:38:58.700 Can I share the five brands that I would sell out for currently?

01:39:01.240 I would love that. Who are your brands you would sell out for? Just warning everybody,

01:39:06.420 these are the brands that Carrow would sell out for if a check came knocking.

01:39:10.180 No, even without a check, I think I would probably do it. Okay. So number one is Loewe,

01:39:17.340 which I used to think was spelled low, but they're just like my favorite designer and I love them.

01:39:21.260 Celine. I would love a Celine campaign within my 40s.

01:39:24.200 Joan Didion.

01:39:25.160 Yep. Miu Miu, I really like. Chamberlain Coffee. I'm a huge fan of Emma Chamberlain.

01:39:29.720 and then rothy's i really love rothy's loafers and they feel very writerly so i wanted to go

01:39:34.980 like mid to high tier so you can get a rothy's deal right now i can make that happen for you

01:39:41.380 this afternoon no no no i'm not talking about a deal i'm talking about i'm in the campaign i'm

01:39:46.880 thinking way higher i'm saying lending my my brand and my face like this is for like 10 or 15 years

01:39:53.280 if i'm like successful this is like really lending yeah and amplifying oh well then like

01:39:58.520 aim bigger than like D to C slip-on shoes. Come on. Okay, but I said, okay, I have my three

01:40:08.000 designers and then I maintain Chamberlain copy because I really love Emma Chamberlain.

01:40:12.160 Do you have any that you can think of? It would be faster to name the brands I wouldn't sell out

01:40:16.540 for. What are they? I'm like, oh, you want to put my face on anything. I'm there for it.

01:40:21.980 Then that's on narcissism. If a brand was like, we want you to be the face of a campaign,

01:40:25.680 I'd be like, incredible. I'm so happy someone is finally recognized. You know what I would love to

01:40:30.560 do actually in my problematic fantasy? My most problematic fantasy is getting the hot girl 0.94

01:40:36.720 spread, you know? Like the way that like Alex Cooper gets photographed for things where it's

01:40:41.320 like she's successful and look at that bod. I'm like, that's what I want. I'm like, let me get

01:40:46.980 like a Victoria's Secret fashion show cameo. Katie, I'll just get you a boudoir photo shoot

01:40:52.740 for your birthday. I'm gonna make a calendar of sexy pictures for you. The one thing that I would 1.00

01:41:00.300 do in feed, I actually tried to do this when I was more like a baby influencer, Shinola notebooks,

01:41:05.380 they usually make watches, but I love their notebooks. And I reached out to them being like,

01:41:09.100 dude, I'm obsessed with your notebooks. Can I get a discount for my followers? And then they like

01:41:12.940 enrolled me in this weird influencer program and it never panned out. But like, I would actually

01:41:16.680 put that in feed because I love their journals. Anyways, I wanted to actually think about it this

01:41:21.320 week. This week, what would I pull the trigger on? I am kind of acutely aware that like there is a

01:41:26.200 elephant in the room here of being someone that does work with brands for things and does take

01:41:31.740 corporate money for things. I have multiple deals with traditional publishers and then a film rights

01:41:36.680 deal with Amazon. What I'm trying to tease out here is I don't think like a purity stance is

01:41:43.800 really workable, but I also obviously have a vested interest in believing that because how I make

01:41:49.860 money in my career, it does include sponsorships of my newsletter product and like selling things

01:41:56.180 to publishers. I also want to be clear that I don't think it's, again, me showing my own bias

01:42:00.420 here, but I don't think it's hypocritical. I think the fact that we have chosen to create a space of

01:42:04.040 our lives where we don't include advertisements by no means precludes us from working in other ways

01:42:09.560 in other industries. Like, I think that diabolical lies is a very, very special thing. And I also

01:42:15.360 feel that way with other podcasters where I'm like, no judgment. Like, I'm not saying that

01:42:18.940 every podcast could do what we are doing. I think it's very distinct and very special and it means

01:42:23.860 the most to me and I know to you and I know it's like unbelievably precious to us and that's why

01:42:28.220 we put so much time into it. But at no point do I think that you or I have ever claimed to be

01:42:33.500 able or interested in existing like outside of the world of commerce altogether. And I want to

01:42:39.920 make that clear that I don't intend to do that moving forward. Totally. With my Celine ad.

01:42:44.240 catch me on sunset boulevard bitches oh oh also road road road hayley bieber call me 1.00

01:42:51.880 i want to do a lip peptide thing oh oh my god call me hayley okay back to gia b&b a writer 0.98

01:42:58.460 named freddie de boer weighed in pretty quickly on why this felt off-putting and he compared

01:43:04.180 tolentino to ta-nehisi coates in the sense that both of these writers in the 2010s achieved a

01:43:10.180 sort of status in the media and literary world in which they were fairly untouchable. You really

01:43:16.300 could not criticize them without being dogpiled. Online, that is. Obviously, private conversations,

01:43:22.700 I'm sure, were had, but he was talking about how the online environment was, like, very protective

01:43:26.980 of these two thinkers. So, contrasting Tolentino's Airbnb partnership with Ta-Nehisi Coates' version

01:43:34.000 of untouchable artistic celebrity.

01:43:36.440 DeBoer wrote this, if you will please read.

01:43:40.660 Indeed, this is what I admire about Coates.

01:43:43.220 He reached a pinnacle of untouchability

01:43:44.900 like we've never seen in this industry,

01:43:46.980 and he's come back throwing uppercuts

01:43:48.860 in the political debate

01:43:49.840 that is still the single most dangerous live wire

01:43:52.020 in American life.

01:43:53.340 He could have made millions of dollars

01:43:54.780 doing a few ideas festivals a year,

01:43:57.020 giving speeches and pretending to listen

01:43:58.800 to questions at cocktail parties,

01:44:00.880 writing books when he felt like it,

01:44:02.180 and being fast-tracked to the Pulitzer shortlist regardless of how hard he tried.

01:44:06.360 Instead, he stuck his finger right in the Israel-Palestine electrical socket

01:44:10.180 at precisely the moment when that issue was the most salient and controversial in his lifetime.

01:44:14.680 That's integrity even if you are, unlike me, a critic of his particular stance on the issue,

01:44:19.180 and it has not gone unnoticed.

01:44:21.320 Gia Tolentino is doing SponCon for Airbnb.

01:44:24.220 Everybody reacts to getting tenure in different ways.

01:44:27.480 Some people immediately set about protesting the college administration,

01:44:30.500 and some stop showing up to teach class.

01:44:33.120 We're all on our own journey,

01:44:34.740 or perhaps, I should say, our own experience.

01:44:38.180 I thought that was clever.

01:44:39.520 I want to know your thoughts about this.

01:44:40.720 I was immediately struck by the parallels

01:44:42.700 of the conclusion in the

01:44:44.240 Can the World Make Taylor Swift Speak Now episode

01:44:46.480 that some people are going to become rich and famous 0.89

01:44:49.700 and do what Angelina Jolie did.

01:44:51.520 Others are not. 0.99

01:44:52.520 Some artists are going to use their stature

01:44:54.480 and their industry to take even bigger swings.

01:44:57.540 Others are not.

01:44:58.760 Some comedians are going to go perform for the Saudi prince if the check clears, and others are not.

01:45:04.020 I really admire Freddie DeBoer, and I think it probably goes without saying,

01:45:06.860 but you and I both deeply admire Ta-Nehisi Coates and Gia Tolentino.

01:45:10.580 And I think Gia in particular is someone we discuss all the time

01:45:13.860 because I think that we, number one, admire her so much, and number two, have similar ambitions.

01:45:18.160 We want to be writers and thinkers.

01:45:19.500 And I think that it becomes really difficult when you become that kind of archetype for other people

01:45:26.320 because it becomes really hard to have any type of frank conversation about what's happening

01:45:30.600 because everyone is projecting their own insecurities onto you and being like,

01:45:34.560 well, what would I do if I were to achieve what I believe she has achieved without any real

01:45:39.900 knowledge of her situation? And in that sense, I do think it's very similar to Taylor Swift,

01:45:44.100 because again, that conversation about Taylor Swift in Palestine is much less about

01:45:48.000 how much money she's given or what she's done, because we will actually never know that. It's

01:45:51.780 about like wanting to believe that your feelings about someone are true and then therefore wanting

01:45:56.360 to believe that your feelings about yourself are true. Yeah. So how do we deal with all of that?

01:46:04.600 How do we make decisions in this context? And ironically, reflecting on this question actually

01:46:11.400 reminded me of the core critique in that infamous Lauren Euler review of Trick Mirror. Lauren

01:46:18.240 Lauren Euler's review of Trick Mirror, I think, planted a seed years ago that has only finally

01:46:25.120 germinated for me in this conversation that we are having right now. So can you give us a quick

01:46:29.580 little background on Lauren Euler? Who is she? Why did this become such a notorious cultural touch 0.82

01:46:35.380 point for a certain niche of weird nerds? Yeah, so Lauren Euler is another literary cool girl, 0.99

01:46:41.220 so I think that's why people cared so much when she wrote this review of Gia Tolentino's Trick

01:46:44.780 Mirror. So, like I said, Trick Mirror was released to immense fanfare. It was critically received. It

01:46:49.800 won several awards. And beyond that, it was commercially celebrated. Like, again, I think

01:46:53.560 it cemented Gia as being, like, very much a voice of her generation. And she was largely subject to

01:46:59.240 only positive reviews. And so Lauren Euler has made her name as, like, a very, very sharp critic

01:47:04.560 who wrote scathing takedowns of Trick Mirror and also of Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist. And she 0.99

01:47:11.520 basically was the person who said the thing, quote unquote, said the thing that no one else

01:47:15.580 was willing to say. And I will also say to Gia's credit, she handled it perfectly and was like,

01:47:20.520 basically directed people to it and was like, I've been subject to a lot of

01:47:23.380 attention and here's a review and go at it. I guess I would summarize by saying Tolentino

01:47:29.320 is a very talented writer. Euler is a very talented critic. And the end result was magnetic.

01:47:36.360 the result was incredible it's really exciting to me when like when people do it when they touch

01:47:43.500 the live wire when something i love actually does get criticized and i can sit there and be like

01:47:50.120 i agree with these criticisms i still love the original work but actually you've helped me see

01:47:56.280 it in a new way the core nugget of oiler's review actually felt pretty prescient given the events of

01:48:04.120 the last couple of weeks, which I think is basically, what does it mean when awareness

01:48:08.460 of a problem is being treated as, like, absolution from participating or, like, contributing to the

01:48:15.020 problem? And so I'm going to have you read kind of a long excerpt from that piece, and we're

01:48:20.960 going to talk about it. This reminds me, there's a great Bo Burnham quote where it's like,

01:48:24.760 self-awareness does not absolve you of anything. We'll get into it. Here you go.

01:48:28.800 That you can, as we say on the internet, just not, occurs to Tolentino as a theoretical

01:48:33.740 option but not an actual one. In Always Be Optimizing, one of the essays in the collection,

01:48:39.580 Tolentino uses the fad for expensive custom salad chains and boutique pure bar exercise classes to 0.99

01:48:44.900 show how women are, quote, genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy, 0.99

01:48:49.640 two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success comes at the expense of

01:48:54.360 collective morality. Another quote, I think the full essay, which is twice as long and probably

01:48:59.340 twice as nuanced, gets more clearly at the fact that, of course, this is all optional, of course,

01:49:03.620 of course, she tweeted in reply to criticism of an abridged version. That's part of the reason

01:49:08.660 it's so confounding as it takes hold, end quote. The excerpt had been published because of what

01:49:13.060 Tolentino elsewhere called, quote, the soul-crushing, if also very fortunate, machine of book promotion.

01:49:18.480 And the full essay exhibits a similar dismissal of the likelihood of individual agency when the

01:49:23.120 individual is tempted with social and financial capital, which she correctly identifies as the

01:49:27.640 same thing. I agree up to a point, but that point is far away from the examples she chooses.

01:49:33.580 Concerning, quote, the endlessly proliferating applications of the idea that women's bodies should increase their market performance over time, the essay describes, quote, the psychological parasite of the ideal woman, who can be, quote, whatever she wants to be as long as she manages to act upon the belief that perfecting herself and streamlining her relationship to the world can be both a matter of good work and of pleasure, of lifestyle.

01:49:54.660 I like trying to look good, Tolentino writes, but it's hard to say how much you can genuinely

01:50:00.300 independently like what amounts to a mandate, end quote. Parentheses. I get the sense that

01:50:05.400 she must feel overwhelming pity for ugly women if she has ever met one. Yeah, Gia Tolentino is hot 1.00

01:50:09.940 for anyone listening. Tolentino's elective self-confinement is supposed to make her seem 1.00

01:50:13.960 like a martyr, but what she sells is not herself. It's a shoddy mode of thinking that says everything 0.92

01:50:18.760 a person does carries a heavy moral burden but also remains a matter of quote survival rather

01:50:23.600 than a demonstration of priorities and desires. Okay. It was that little last bit that everything

01:50:30.100 a person does carries a heavy moral burden but also remains a matter of survival rather than

01:50:37.220 a demonstration of priorities and desires is, I think, the central tension of why our current 0.93

01:50:45.100 cultural attitudes about these things, like selling out and consumption, feel so fucking

01:50:50.460 unsatisfying because we are aware of the problems. We are aware of the seriousness of what is 0.58

01:50:56.100 happening. And yet we don't seem to have a meaningful theory of how to fix any of it.

01:51:00.900 And so our solutions are often individual and insignificant. On one hand, there is a tendency

01:51:06.080 then or a temptation to minimize our agency. And on the other hand, to quote Tolentino in the essay

01:51:12.000 in question, always be optimizing, quote, resistance to a system is almost always presented

01:51:17.000 on the terms of the system.

01:51:19.040 So, like, the choices that are available to you

01:51:21.340 do feel somewhat prescribed.

01:51:23.740 The most interesting part of this, I think,

01:51:26.020 is ultimately this criticism of

01:51:27.860 the thing that you can alternately feel repulsed by

01:51:31.020 and attracted to.

01:51:32.660 So, she's still going to Pure Bar.

01:51:35.960 She's still eating at Sweetgreen, right?

01:51:37.840 Like, there's something about it

01:51:39.420 that she feels attracted to, obviously.

01:51:42.000 It's the same way that I feel so strongly

01:51:43.740 about beauty culture as a destructive force in our lives,

01:51:46.200 and I still put makeup on before important video calls.

01:51:49.540 I was also listening to an earlier episode of Diabolical Lies, not because I'm narcissistic,

01:51:53.420 but because I'm doing like a QA before Yesteryear comes out to make sure

01:51:56.740 any slurs didn't pass by unnoticed. I was listening to one of our earlier episodes where

01:52:02.640 you talked about this, that like the more proximity you have to a certain type of standard,

01:52:08.000 sometimes the more like obsessed with it you can be versus someone who simply opts out.

01:52:11.940 And I think that Gia is similar to you and I, where it's like we are very embedded in the systems that we are constantly thinking about. And sometimes I personally have to take a beat or am forced to take a beat and remember and be like, oh, some people actually do not go to a pure bar. Some people actually do not feel the moral burden of dealing with it.

01:52:29.540 And I'm saying this, like, again, as someone who goes to pure bar, but I think that that kind of gets into Lauren Euler's critique, which is like, no, some people actually do make the decisions not to participate in this.

01:52:38.480 They don't escape from capitalism, but they also do not feel as coggy and machiney as some of us do feel.

01:52:45.460 And that's like the inherent, I guess, grind of like actually still caring about those systems to a certain degree.

01:52:51.420 Mm-hmm. Well, and I was telling you, Caro, that I often feel a lot of this internal conflict

01:52:56.560 about what amounts to an attraction to or my comfort with my girlbossitis.

01:53:03.680 I think part of the reason Tolentino's writing and that essay in particular are so popular is

01:53:09.320 because I think a lot of people, and maybe not just women, whether they realize it or not,

01:53:13.960 also feel that tension where you recognize that something is bad, bad for the world,

01:53:19.580 also probably bad for you and yet there's something about it that like keeps pulling you back in the

01:53:27.500 rewards the rewards of being a part of it you do feel good when you leave a pure bar class you do

01:53:31.600 feel hotter if you do it for 30 days i'm not convinced that you or i or maybe even gia hates

01:53:36.540 it as much as we claim we do i think we hate the idea of it and the systems behind it but i think

01:53:40.300 the experience is actually quite addicting so airbnb experience of this being successful in

01:53:45.360 this system i guess just to close that section out yeah victoria's secret call me i have been

01:53:50.400 lifting weights i will look so good in your next show as the hot smart girl

01:53:55.320 she reads books in her underwear take up her glasses she's actually hot yeah yeah yeah like 1.00

01:54:03.780 the the the hassan piker gq spread like i want to i want the hassan piker treatment where they're

01:54:09.180 like putting him in the bathtub and being like look how hot this progressive is i'm like yeah

01:54:12.680 I want that media attention.

01:54:17.080 So there was a quote that in my digging I stumbled upon that Gia gave in the press surrounding the publication of Trick Mirror to The Guardian in a 2019 article called The Journalist as Influencer, How We Sell Ourselves on Social Media that I want you to read.

01:54:35.160 A good amount of my book is about how capitalism, the internet, the monetized self are all destructive to our functioning as real humans.

01:54:42.680 Yet, the better I express those ideas, the better I become a marketable object myself,

01:54:47.820 she explained. I've spent a lot of time while promoting Trick Mirror, wondering if the work

01:54:52.280 that brings me the most meaning in life, writing, will always necessarily bring me deeper into the

01:54:56.640 clutches of the things that I hate, capitalism, and a way of being in which external incentives

01:55:01.420 seem more important than internal ones. This is going back to what I was saying earlier, which is

01:55:06.000 people will use terms for what they like to do, which is writing or making movies or talking about

01:55:12.400 finance or anything in between, but there is always an asterisk that no one wants to acknowledge,

01:55:16.740 which is to as many people as possible. Because what she's talking about does not have to be

01:55:21.280 connected to capitalism, but of course it is because she wants to be read by as many people

01:55:25.360 as possible. I do too. That is why I am working with the publishers I'm working with. That's why

01:55:31.220 I sold my film rights. It's because I don't want to be read. I don't want to be a writer.

01:55:35.560 I want to be a writer who is read by as many people as possible. I'm not claiming that she

01:55:39.900 intentionally left it out. But I think that is the space. That's the tether between writing

01:55:44.420 and capitalism. It's, no, I actually do want to make money. It's the Jessica Knoll. It's,

01:55:48.380 no, I do want to be rich. I do want as many people as possible to buy my book.

01:55:51.980 But I think it's hard to communicate that without basically stepping out of the values that you are

01:55:56.740 trying to square yourself within. Because I don't think that those values are not real.

01:56:03.160 It's not that I think that people don't earnestly hold those values as far as not wanting to be

01:56:09.800 a sellout or believing that something about the system is wrong and should change. I think that

01:56:14.200 people genuinely do believe that. I'm interested in the ways in which we can continue to like and

01:56:19.460 do things that would appear on the surface to live in contradiction with those values.

01:56:25.600 I think, too, something that I'm thinking about right now is like, in the name of like,

01:56:29.220 oh, well, everyone lives under capitalism. I think that implies a sort of momentum that people

01:56:33.620 all kind of fall victim to, which is like, yeah, it is easier to consume. It is easier to do these

01:56:38.380 things. But I think the important thing to note in this conversation is that anyone who is a

01:56:42.480 musician or a podcaster or a writer or a director, you have to be so nakedly ambitious to succeed in

01:56:50.460 these industries. Every single day, all of the momentum is taking you in the opposite direction

01:56:55.260 to not continue to do what you want to do. To become a staff writer at The New Yorker or to

01:56:59.360 sell a book that allows you to write more books or to run a financial platform or to

01:57:05.400 write and direct your own movie that appears in Cannes, that is so hard. It is so competitive.

01:57:11.340 And you have to make decisions constantly that set you up for financial viability. And so you

01:57:16.800 are always opting in. And I think the game is that part of opting in is that most people have

01:57:21.760 to also pretend or feel they have to pretend that that is not a part of it and that there is like a

01:57:26.600 sort of purity at play. And I think that that is part of the performance of being an artist in the

01:57:31.460 same way that politicians get into the game and go, I never thought I'd be president or like,

01:57:36.000 I'm just, I'm just in it to change people's lives. I just want to help people. I never thought that

01:57:40.180 I would be in this position. And it's like, dude, you've been positioning yourself for three

01:57:43.160 decades. What are we talking about? But it's part of the contract because people don't actually like

01:57:47.100 when you are honest. I should add that like Jessica Knowles op-ed was not received well

01:57:51.680 by writers. People don't like being honest about what's taking place here, even if they're also a

01:57:57.500 part of it. And I think that those are just like the point-counterpoint rough waters of trying to

01:58:01.660 be heard, is that you have to be unbelievably cutthroat and frank about what it means. And

01:58:07.840 then you have to kind of like sweep up the path behind you and pretend that it was effortless.

01:58:13.100 Interesting. Okay, so I told you at the beginning, I don't have any

01:58:16.700 grand sweeping conclusions. I don't have any prescriptions for you.

01:58:19.660 Read Trick Mirror.

01:58:20.140 in conclusion pre-order yesteryear and also between all the sticking points that we talked

01:58:28.680 about today i get the sense that people are sort of reaching a breaking point again they are starting

01:58:34.040 to notice and care again there are a lot of people liking the video about the riyadh comedy festival

01:58:39.280 being fucked up there's a lot of tiktoks about this album there's a lot of comments on the airbnb 0.59

01:58:44.180 spawn con right and i i told you that i feel like the tide is turning again but what it left me 0.99

01:58:49.680 wondering is, does it matter? Does it even matter that people care about sellouts again? Because I

01:58:58.500 think to some degree, we are being confronted with the reality that selling out, taking the check or

01:59:03.900 not taking the check, it doesn't seem as though there are meaningful consequences, positive or

01:59:10.060 negative anymore, because a lot of these A-listers in their respective industries are too entrenched.

01:59:15.800 I was thinking about it from the context of the monopolization that multinational

01:59:20.020 corporations have achieved over our economic system. It kind of feels like the A-listers

01:59:24.920 have achieved something parallel in our cultural system. And I think that there is somewhat of a

01:59:31.760 recognition of that. Taylor Swift's 12th studio album was pretty widely criticized for being a

01:59:36.920 low-quality rush job, and it is the best-selling album in the history of music. People were angry

01:59:44.380 that Gia Tolentino did a partnership with Airbnb and it sold out in an hour. So like when I asked

01:59:51.160 Emily Topping of Current Affairs, what she made of all this, she used the term cultural apex

01:59:55.940 predators. And I was like, I think that's actually kind of spot on. What I would give. 0.99

02:00:01.880 Yeah. She, um, goals. She referenced, uh, in Shedification, like on tech platforms too,

02:00:07.340 how like, again, once a, once something becomes so inescapable, it kind of doesn't matter what

02:00:13.520 we think about it anymore. And also in particular for Gia, like she's the last, she's the last one

02:00:18.880 that you have all these writers who have established brands and like really established

02:00:22.700 platforms and weight to their reputation. And that is over. There isn't even media the way

02:00:27.720 that there was when she was coming of age and writing essays. So I think there is also like

02:00:32.680 a kind of chokehold that people who are famous now currently have, because we are not seeing

02:00:36.860 the same up and comers rise up. And you're, we're certainly seeing that with novelists and with

02:00:41.760 nonfiction writers. The mechanisms that used to allow people to gain a foothold in the cultural

02:00:46.240 consciousness are gone. What do you think those mechanisms are? It used to be Twitter for 10

02:00:50.960 years or so. I mean, Twitter was where writers went for like 10 or 15 years. And then really

02:00:55.900 hot and smart people had to go to TikTok and start making TikToks in order to become important.

02:01:00.940 And now that's changing. And now people are leaving TikTok. I think we've just seen a

02:01:04.560 dissemination and a kind of like how media is collapsing in on itself. There will, of course,

02:01:09.280 always be like famous people. But I think that she also holds a very special place because

02:01:14.880 the essayist is kind of something that we don't know. We don't know if that's going to be extinct

02:01:19.420 in 20 years. I don't know if that'll be a thing the way that it was.

02:01:23.160 Okay, but let me publish my book of essays first.

02:01:25.280 Yeah, hurry up, babe.

02:01:26.280 I'm going to get ahead of the extinction.

02:01:28.860 Get in there. You're going to be like Tomb Raider.

02:01:31.060 While people can still read.

02:01:33.180 Tomb Raider rolling under the dropping wall.

02:01:35.540 much like my bell to ring on this show is it's always been this way your bell to ring on this

02:01:42.700 show is zoom out yeah widen the scope and point out that while these little micro shifts over

02:01:48.600 the years or decades between the 90s and the 2010s feel so stark and obvious and different to us that

02:01:54.500 like when you're looking at the 200 year view or 300 year view like i think everything about this

02:02:00.140 period is going to look the same, which is part of this phase where everybody is trying to

02:02:06.160 individually negotiate with and retain integrity in a system that makes that essentially impossible

02:02:12.080 before realizing that we've all just been focusing on the symptoms and not the cause.

02:02:16.620 Culturally, so much, if not all of this discourse and debate is downstream of the fact that we are

02:02:22.340 essentially seeing the equivalent cultural effects of multinational global stage of capitalism

02:02:29.460 as we are the economic effects. And it is the same pattern of like in shitification,

02:02:34.560 offshoring, lack of consequences. I don't know what to do with that.

02:02:38.400 I don't think it's good. But in the name of zooming out, when you said that, it was like

02:02:42.680 so clear to me where it's like, all right, if I zoom out a month, I'm like, yeah, let's talk

02:02:47.160 about the GA Airbnb discourse. If I zoom out like five years, 10 years, 15, I'm like, thank

02:02:51.940 God that bitch is alive. That's like all I care about where you're just like, oh my God, like 1.00

02:02:57.120 women publishing books is such a recent phenomenon, let alone like them having like actual 1.00

02:03:03.840 significant influence at like significant media publications. That is a helpful reminder that 1.00

02:03:09.640 this has been such a quick collapse of like what, three decades or so from the launching of the

02:03:15.660 internet to the total collapse of all context and culture. Literacy rates. Yeah. I think it's small

02:03:21.020 fries but it's definitely like an indicator of bigger fries the more that i more time i spent

02:03:27.200 with all of this the more kind of futile like getting mad at individuals for like who's paying

02:03:33.140 them i think that where i will get to is like i don't care about it but i also don't care about

02:03:38.320 people being mad at it and i think that that's part of it is being like yeah no it's also in

02:03:41.820 the same way that like some of the smartest thinkers of our time get to partner with

02:03:46.500 corporations, well, a lot of other people get to complain about it. And that's like,

02:03:50.420 that's the game. That's also the end result of having won the game. So that's a really

02:03:54.140 important thing to remember. How will you know that you've won?

02:03:56.620 My Celine ad, my road campaign.

02:03:58.740 What Hayley Bieber finally calls you.

02:04:00.480 Yeah, my road ad. I mean, I'm going to be honest. I feel like I have one.

02:04:04.660 Oh, why? Because you're friends with me?

02:04:06.220 I'm being dead ass. Like, yeah, honestly, I am always aware that there are so many writers out 0.98

02:04:10.560 there and so many thinkers and so many TikTokers and so many podcasters. And like, I'm sitting

02:04:15.560 here with you recording a podcast where we like get to do this ethically and make a living and

02:04:19.700 i have a book coming out in fucking over 20 countries i won this is it if anything else 0.79

02:04:24.940 beyond this is is gravy but like i i don't know this is like eight-year-old caroline is like 0.96

02:04:29.740 fulfilled oh okay well everyone put in the comments the most problematic brand that you

02:04:35.720 would accept a check from mcdonald's yeah i would also fountain soda i would do any sort of um

02:04:41.740 Spawn Con with Diet Coke, Fountain Soda.

02:04:43.980 Oh, big Coca-Cola.

02:04:45.480 The truth comes out.

02:04:47.260 Techno-dharma, baby.

02:04:48.480 The truth comes out.

02:04:50.900 Yeah, I love Diet Coke.

02:04:52.560 Also cigarettes.

02:04:54.960 There's no going back. 1.00

02:04:57.060 She's a beast. 0.99

02:04:58.780 I call her karma. 1.00

02:05:00.300 She eats your heart out like Jeffrey Dahmer.

02:05:03.960 Be careful.

02:05:05.240 Try not to lead her on.

02:05:07.300 Shorty heart is on steroids because her love is so strong.

02:05:10.300 you may fall in love when you meet her if you get the chance you better keep her

02:05:14.100 she sweet as pie but if you break her heart she turns cold as a freezer 0.99

02:05:17.600 that fairy tale ending with a night and shiny armor she can be my sleeping beauty 1.00

02:05:23.080 i'm gonna put her in a coma 1.00

Diabolical Lies - November 02, 2025

＂Ethical Consumption＂ & the History of ＂Selling Out＂

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