00:04:07.780or the main weapon and fighting back of the left.
00:04:11.120And so if Trump captures American culture, it's a lot easier to convince people, if the culture is on your side, that what is happening is normal and right and should be happening, right?
00:04:25.500So if we have a culture in this country that health care is an individual concern and not a government concern, whereas so much of the rest of the industrialized world considers providing health care a government, a core government function.
00:04:42.460And so if he goes through with this budget and we see these massive cuts to Medicaid and Medicare and the ACA is further stripped out of Americans' lives, but he is able to propose and promote a culture that says that that's both right and fair and just and people believe that, then they don't really know to push back.
00:05:05.720They don't know that things could be better or different.
00:05:07.620Like, culture sets our boundaries in this really profound way.
00:05:10.700And then also, so that's really problematic. And then also like the left, whether that means Democrats or that means something more revolutionary than Democrats, have always used culture, have always used visual language, cultural language, have always used protest songs and protest anthems, cinema, television, whether it's Norman Lear or Bob Dylan.
00:05:35.140use culture to change America, to push America, to make America more progressive, to more fair,
00:05:43.020more equitable. The civil rights movement had a massive cultural component to it. The gay rights
00:05:48.080movement has had a massive cultural component to it. It is how we understand and start to socialize
00:05:54.680ourselves around change. And so him using those levers and using those tools and tactics is really
00:06:03.060quite concerning. Yeah, I mean, it was easy for me to be like, oh, it's just the Kennedy Center,
00:06:09.560like with everything going on, that's so trivial. But in your piece for the Rolling Stone,
00:06:14.760Trump's cultural power grab, why his Kennedy Center takeover matters, you actually argue that
00:06:19.360this is not disconnected from this larger, you know, power grab of democracy. In fact,
00:06:24.540those things are like ultimately connected. Yeah. I mean, culture provides really powerful
00:06:29.900headwinds um and you look if you you know if you look at fascist italy if you look at fascist
00:06:37.240germany you know like arts and culture and propaganda is a cornerstone is like the go-to
00:06:45.120like fascism relies on spectacle because it actually is quite hollow from an ideological
00:06:50.600perspective and it's actually quite hollow from a policy perspective right it's not truly about
00:06:57.820making government work better for individuals. It is about changing an individual's belief
00:07:04.840so that they are convinced that government should just be wanton and do whatever it wants and really
00:07:10.420only serve a tiny, tiny select portion of a population. And they are able to accomplish
00:07:16.300that through spectacle. And so the Kennedy Center, the nation's art, this iconic, beautiful building
00:07:23.560on the river in D.C. that we've seen lit up in beautiful ways that has the best view of the
00:07:29.420fireworks in D.C., like that building being turned into sort of a MAGA parade ground
00:07:35.220is really, will be very potent, will be very powerful.
00:07:40.360Something that you point out in your piece that I love is that Trump has not really had any real
00:07:46.580connection to the Kennedy Center. You're right. Despite not having attended any of the Kennedy
00:07:51.220Center's marquee events or any events at all in his first term or since, Trump installed himself
00:07:56.180as chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center, promising to usher in, quote, the golden age of
00:08:01.200arts and culture. And I guess part of me wonders, like, why does it matter that he is taking over
00:08:07.260this thing that he doesn't really have any kind of like real connection to? He really, as you said,
00:08:11.980ignored it in his first term. Like, do you think it's just what you were saying, that he sees the
00:08:17.380incredible power that culture has and sees what the Kennedy Center represents to culture. So he's
00:08:22.800like, I got to control that. Yeah. I mean, basically. And I have to stop it from supporting
00:08:29.260a culture that is opposed to me. And I have to move it into supporting a culture that reinforces
00:08:36.380my value, my power, my centrality. I think he I think he has targeted the Kennedy Center because
00:08:44.840it's so successful, because it's so powerful, because it is such an important part of our
00:08:49.040national fabric, not because he doesn't think it's important.
00:08:53.340Culture is important, and it can be used to reinforce or challenge power.
00:08:58.500As part of Culture House Media, Carrie produces television and film projects that connect0.83
00:09:03.300pop culture to political change, like Hairtales on Hulu and Ladies First, Netflix's docuseries0.96
00:12:14.540Like, I even remember seeing the Cheerios commercial, the little biracial girl, like, pouring the cereal on her dad's heart and just being like, oh, my God, you know, like, I'd never seen.
00:12:24.560Right. And it was so memorable because you've never seen anything like that.
00:12:27.940I'd never seen anything like that before.
00:12:30.560And so that those types of moments are really, really emotionally resonant for me.
00:12:38.500And then finally, I think that there's just we've seen it.
00:12:41.820We've seen the proof is in the pudding.
00:12:43.140We've seen it over and over again. It's not a coincidence that the number one show in television in the years preceding Barack Obama's election was 24, where the president was a black former senator, a basketball star with a with like a high moral compass.
00:13:00.280And then years later, like, you know, 70 million people watch the show every week, week after week for years and years and years. And then Barack Obama shows up and people are like, oh, he actually seems familiar to me.
00:13:15.300That doesn't feel like this massive departure from something that exists in my life and in my world. Will and Grace, Rosie O'Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, when we started trying to advocate for gay rights and for LGBTQ equality and for marriage equality, all of these things, there was this cultural precedent that let people know what was on the other side of the change that we were asking them to make.
00:13:38.700And that these people who loved these characters were like, I want the best for them. And therefore, I would I refuse to deny them rights any longer. And so culture shows up and allows us to imagine what is possible and why it should what our values truly are or could be. And then we can legislate and policy make around them.
00:14:01.360So I think both from my own personal experience, but also what I've seen in governor's office, like from serving governor's office, we've been in the White House. If there is a cultural precedent to something, it is a lot easier to create laws and legislation around it than it is if you're asking people to embrace a change that they don't know what's on the other side of.
00:14:24.240right there was all this sort of white space in the cultural imagination around what the ACA could
00:14:30.560be what Obamacare could be what national health care could be and so the right filled that white
00:14:35.160space up with like Sarah Palin talking about deaf panels and that was so easy to do because people
00:14:40.920didn't know what it was there wasn't it wasn't like ER was do it was like you know what we should0.70
00:14:47.120have nationalized health care all of these problems would be solved gray's anatomy isn't
00:14:51.940about that. But if they had been, maybe that would have been a little bit easier and less contentious
00:14:59.080of a policy to implement. Well, I've never really thought about that before, but that makes so much
00:15:03.560sense that really the job of culture can be to help people imagine a future that it's better
00:15:10.900than the future that we have now and what it might look like, what it might look like to have
00:15:14.260marriage equality, affordable health care, like all of these things that we want. But maybe it's
00:15:20.340a little hard to imagine what it would actually look like or be like or feel like if we had these
00:15:25.700things. It's about future, like world building and future looking. Or the opposite, right? Like one
00:15:30.220of the most popular shows in the country right now is Yellowstone. And that's been true for years
00:15:34.540and years. And what is that show about? That show is about a patriarch who runs for governor,
00:15:39.260who operates outside the law, murders people, does whatever he wants, but still gets to be the hero.
00:15:45.100right and like that's a hell of a show I love Yellowstone I've seen every episode but is it
00:15:51.360good for society probably not I mean it makes Donald Trump and figures like him seem familiar
00:15:58.740seem reasonable seem like the hero when they are not it's all fun and games on a cattle ranch in
00:16:04.260Montana but like we're talking about real people's lives and yet we are allowing the John Dutton
00:16:09.700and not even as good of one to be the president?
00:18:04.420They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:18:08.880But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:18:12.340They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:18:15.940Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:18:24.400If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:18:30.340This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:18:42.800I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:18:49.920I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:19:32.760A few years ago, it was kind of a given that people who made and cared about culture,
00:19:37.680the kind of culture that anybody was really paying attention to anyway,
00:19:40.780were not people on the right. But today, things have really changed. They may not have Beyonce
00:19:46.600or Taylor Swift, but from podcasts to streaming, a lot of the most powerful voices at the forefront
00:19:52.480of culture are right-wing internet personalities that you might not have ever heard of.
00:19:57.720Tell us about this new cultural celebrity ecosystem, because I feel it. I see it. It's
00:20:04.300hard to verbalize, but you know it when you see it and you feel it when it's there. You know what
00:20:10.440I mean? Yeah. I mean, so Trump is actually not even particularly individually responsible for
00:20:16.580But ages ago, not ages ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, the best and brightest sort of thinkers in the conservative movement understood that the things that made Democrats powerful and meant that they would win elections was culture and the cultural narrative of the country and people.
00:20:39.480So storytelling and unions, basically. And they systematically have tried to either dismantle or take over both. So unions have never been less potent in American life than they are right now.
00:20:54.100And then two, they started making these massive investments in culture, that they understood that culture reinforced progressive values that leaned more towards Democrats.
00:21:08.940And so they started creating their own distribution platforms. They started creating their own stars and farming talent and investing in people like Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire, who then built these massive audiences for and shifted consumer demand.
00:21:26.880We know that the average American spends four to six hours watching video content today. And so the right started meeting that demand and giving them content that would bring them further, bring your generalized audience further and further and further to the right.
00:21:44.220and we've seen it work extraordinarily well with young men but we're also seeing it in things like
00:21:49.620trad wives and like very kind of conservative takes on how women should be and how we should
00:21:55.980dress and makeup tutorials and all of this stuff and so they did it over digital and then it really
00:22:01.020sort of created the self-fulfilling the self-feeding machine where Hollywood which is a commercial
00:22:07.320enterprise Hollywood is not a social good uh like none of these television studios care about social
00:22:13.480good they care about making money and they saw that there was this demand for these more kind
00:22:17.980of conservative-esque worldview types of shows programming talent and so they started getting
00:22:24.260into the game as well and we started seeing it show up in tv and movies and so that donald trump
00:22:30.880because he's such an entertainer say what you want i have a lot of critiques and criticisms
00:22:35.420of this man but like he is entertaining and he seems fun and he seems like he's having a good
00:22:41.620time. And so he understood very quickly and very intuitively the power of these entertainers. And
00:22:48.880he always has. He was always on WWF or WWE. He was always he's on The Apprentice, right? He was a
00:22:54.560massive, massive television star. He was doing the cameos in Home Alone. Like he understands the
00:23:00.940power of popularity and the power of sort of mass media and pop culture to ensure a particular
00:23:08.200outcome or at least vastly increase the likelihood of a particular outcome. And so he really doubled
00:23:14.760down and his campaign really doubled down. They recognized that his celebrity and his ability to
00:23:19.380be like Johnny Goodtimes on a four-hour live stream was this massive strength of his. And so
00:23:26.300they had him out there. They had him showing up. They had him really participating in the rules of
00:23:33.100the game of the digital sphere and sort of broader culture and entertainment. And they just understood
00:23:38.960it a lot better than we did. Andrew Breitbart, who's again like this kind of founding father
00:23:45.260of the modern conservative movement, understood culture in a really potent way. And they have
00:23:51.160very quietly over the course of the last 15 years been taking over culture in a way that we have
00:23:58.420not we have on the left been really passive about right for so long culture was just
00:24:05.700inadvertently on our side without there having to be much interaction or intervention on our
00:24:11.700on our part and so we just sort of allowed it to happen um and so now you see these guys with
00:24:19.180these massive platforms the logan paul's the joe rogan's the nelk boys um all of these guys
00:24:27.320Theo Vaughn, right? And they're all really, really good at what they do. The Aiden Rosses of the
00:24:33.660world. It might not be your taste, but they are incredibly good at what they do. And they operate
00:24:41.160in incredibly sophisticated ways. They platform each other. They interact with one another. They
00:24:47.880seem like they're having a great time. And President Trump is just like, I will give you
00:24:53.340all the time and attention you want. You can come to the inauguration. You can come to these parties.
00:24:56.720You can fly around on the plane. It's going to be great. And it works, right?
00:25:02.460I am in the middle of a research fellowship at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center studying exactly this phenomena, right?
00:25:09.340Like I'm a podcaster. You're a podcaster. When you go on Apple Podcasts, the top 50 podcasts are all the shows that you've just mentioned.
00:25:17.320And the thing that gets me is, and I could talk all day about this, is I do think that specifically in podcasting, we let these voices and these platforms grow to be astronomical in size, in reach, in influence, while simultaneously being like, oh, well, what happens in these spaces doesn't really matter.
00:25:37.500or it's just two guys in a garage talking, who cares?
00:25:41.320Meanwhile, I would argue that some of those guys
00:25:45.540with microphones in their garages or in their dorms
00:26:10.220Like, there are still people who don't recognize the massive power that these platforms hold while they continue to build that power and influence.
00:26:19.640Wait, if you're not recognizing the power of these guys and like you're just not a serious person, like, I'm sorry, you don't know what's going on.
00:26:26.720You're out of touch or you're naive or you're just in a closed loop of information because it's incredibly obvious and very serious people.
00:26:35.500And there's all the data to support it. Like, it's not my intuition. This it's it is fact. And so if people are taking that seriously, then it's like because they're not serious. I mean, I don't know what to say. Sorry. You can send me an email. We can talk about it.
00:26:51.880um and so but you're right i think that for too long and i'm guilty of this too a couple years
00:27:00.280ago i would have been like who cares about any of this but about a year and a half ago it's like oh
00:27:05.000my god it's a disaster you know um but that's but we all want to you know liberals want to read the
00:27:11.100new york times and the washington post or whatever um semaphore and overly rely on journalism and
00:27:19.120really poo-poo culture and really poo-poo entertainment and that's just where that's
00:27:23.660where everyone is like i i don't it's been a massive judge or it's been a massive uh wrong
00:27:30.460choice that we have made around how we how we think about how information moves through the
00:27:36.600country and interacts with individuals lives and to be perfectly honest even when we do quote
00:27:43.720unquote get it. We don't. We still don't. As a podcaster, I was deeply fascinated watching the
00:27:50.980role that podcasting played in the last presidential election. People even called it the podcast
00:27:55.820election. And I kind of agree. Trump recognized the power of podcasts early on, from Joe Rogan
00:28:01.380to Theo Vaughn's This Past Weekend to the Nelk Boys' Full Send podcast. Say what you will about
00:28:06.160Trump and Lord knows I do. He used the podcast ecosystem effectively to get himself out there.
00:28:12.300Vice President Harris got points for an appearance on Alex Cooper's super popular sex and relationships podcast, Call Her Daddy.
00:29:58.920and so Kamala came on and she broke the form she she made the show conform to her she went on
00:30:07.100Charlemagne and didn't obey the rules of the show she made the show fit her rules she went she
00:30:14.020talked about talking points and Charlemagne tried to get her he's like he called her out for it and
00:30:19.040like she gave a peppy sassy answer I get it like that's called discipline I get it you're right
00:30:24.240And you are not actually doing yourself any favors by going on a show that viewers have anticipated operates in a certain way, that has rules about how it is governed, that has a structure about how it works, and then breaking that form.
00:30:43.020It actually makes it much more difficult for people to hear what you're trying to say, and they're not tuning into Charlemagne for a policy lesson.
00:30:53.200like people know where to go if they want a sermon they know where to go if they want a lecture
00:30:58.000and it's not charlemagne the god show and it's not call her daddy and so that was really i think
00:31:05.020really poorly executed on behalf of the campaign she got bad strategic advice about how to appear
00:31:10.720on those shows and it did her a real disservice because we know she's that girl we know she loves
00:31:16.240talking about dud we know she can kiki we know she can sit with the girls and do the thing we know0.62
00:31:21.300she can sit with the brothers and do the thing and they didn't she didn't she did not get the
00:31:25.140advice to do that you can contrast that with how donald trump showed up and he would show up i've
00:31:30.780listened to him on the north boys i've listened to him on aiden ross right he shows up he's like
00:31:34.480what are we doing here you tell me how we're gonna do this am i here for three hours okay do
00:31:39.960like what are we like and he's just like kicking and having great time and he's showing up with
00:31:47.340some respect and consideration for these massive things and these massive entertainment properties
00:31:52.740that these individual talents have built and is like i will do what your audience has said that
00:31:58.200they want by tuning in every week and i will i will conform to the to the boundaries of the form
00:32:03.940and it works and that's why his appearances on these things are so much more successful
00:32:09.320not only did he do volume he did way more than she did but he also did it in the right way
00:32:15.240and we have got to be training our candidates and our leaders and our spokespeople to do a better
00:32:23.820job of this AOC spectacular that she gets it she's intuitive she's like if she's gonna show up on
00:32:29.580something she shows up appropriately she should she knows what the audience wants she gives she
00:32:33.840understands the assignment and she aces it right but that she can't do it by herself like she can't
00:32:40.920put the Democratic Party on her back and climb us up the hill.0.79
00:32:45.000Same with Jasmine Crockett, same with Senator Chris Murphy.
00:32:48.220So the small number of people who get how this works, like, needs some more help.
00:32:55.740I know that you see a bunch of influencers going to the hill
00:32:58.740and trying to get these Congress people to get it together, which is great.
00:33:02.340But, you know, at least for this round, it's too little too late.
00:33:06.300Yeah. And I think I think you're really on to something about how it shows a further devaluing of or misunderstanding of the power of this of culture and the power of these spaces.
00:33:20.160Because Call Her Daddy, for instance, the platform that she has built has so much power.
00:33:26.080What do you get from going on the show and leaning away from the power of that platform being like, oh, the little things like like what do you get from that?
00:33:36.300As if anyone like because I think there's this this this obsession that Democrats have that is really I mean, I remember this in the Obama era.
00:33:46.700It was just like this this continued pathological belief that if only people understood the policy better, they would know that we were the right pick.
00:33:57.860And it's like, if anyone cared, if the American voter cared about policy or enough American
00:34:03.980voters cared about policy, Elizabeth Warren would be president.
00:34:53.200And it's like, it doesn't come from the mess. It comes from the right place. I get it. People should care about this stuff. We want them to care about this stuff. The problem is that they don't. And so, like, play the game that's actually on the table, not the one that you wish was on the table.
00:36:02.300When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.
00:36:08.100I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:36:14.560I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files.
00:36:18.040I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything.
00:36:26.620Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:36:30.880I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:36:35.440I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:36:42.880They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:36:46.700But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:36:50.360They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:36:53.940Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:37:02.380If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:37:08.300This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters,
00:37:14.480pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the
00:37:19.060same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books,
00:37:24.480the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:37:27.900I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:37:31.480From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments,
00:37:36.340nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling
00:37:42.480characters, and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart
00:37:47.760pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much,
00:37:52.840you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app,
00:37:57.480Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages.
00:38:01.640let's get right back into it everyone is talking about the role that culture can play in shaping
00:38:13.240politics for better or worse now but carrie's been talking about it for a really long time
00:38:18.160since she was in the obama white house and it's those conversations that seeded her newest project
00:38:23.900the podcast twig and jenkins it really sets at this very interesting intersection of politics
00:38:30.520and culture are through the show are you trying to sort of shape both i mean i guess honestly brad
00:38:37.940jenkins and i shared an office at the white house for five years and so he's the homie you know like
00:38:42.460that's the that's the that's my big dog and so he and i just yap all the time anyway and terrorize0.89
00:38:48.980each other with our opinions and so we just sort of inflicted up decided to inflict it on the on
00:38:54.400the public. And I think in these times when there isn't, there's so, there's very, very few binary
00:39:03.840right-wrong answers in this moment, right? There's a lot of analysis, a lot of data, a lot of ways
00:39:08.520of interpreting what's going on. And a country this big and this complex often almost doesn't
00:39:14.760have a right answer. And so I think a huge part of what Brad and I are doing on the show is as
00:39:23.600much for us as it is for anyone else which is just like teasing out what some of those different
00:39:29.300ways of interpreting what's going on are and then meaning making of them like trying to make sense
00:39:35.600of what's actually happening and then also sharing a perspective that doesn't get a ton of
00:39:40.900a ton of play right like I'm pretty upset or on I not upset it's not the right word but I feel
00:39:47.880pretty underwhelmed and unserved by political coverage i feel incredibly poorly served by
00:39:57.980cultural coverage and so the i think there there are just obvious realities to both brad and i
00:40:08.200because we both sit we both were in politics serving the obama administration left and went
00:40:13.360into culture work and so there are things about politics that feel really obvious to us but don't
00:40:18.720seem super obvious to people who don't come to it from a cultural lens and then there's stuff about
00:40:23.220our culture that seems really obvious to us that isn't obvious to people in culture because they're
00:40:28.720not coming to it from a political lens and so I think we just are trying to almost serve as a
00:40:35.920bridge between the two it's like the people over here like people in culture you guys need to be
00:40:41.920paying attention to like this particular part of politics and this particular thing we recognize
00:40:46.900that no one's paying attention to all of it but like here's something we want to point and signal
00:40:52.420to something that you shouldn't miss or that you should be flagging and then in politics we want to
00:40:56.480do the same right so like serve as a bridge to culture it's too much to try and follow all of
00:41:01.440it you're not going to we all have a limited ability to to think about everything when you're
00:41:08.640trying to like live your life and drink your water and get your electrolytes or whatever
00:41:12.980you're doing, plus do your career, plus, you know, plan for fascism. So like here are the0.55
00:41:19.220handful of things that you should be paying attention to that are showing up in culture
00:41:23.280that you're going to have to interact with at some point down the road. So I think we very
00:41:28.660much think of ourselves as like a bridge between the two, just to bring them a little bit closer
00:41:32.820into dialogue and or be a cheat sheet if you are further on one end of the spectrum than the other
00:41:39.380and just sort of like, here's a couple of things that you should be paying attention to.
00:41:43.520I love that term, a bridge, because I do think for a long time there was this attitude where
00:41:49.060culture was over here and like politics was over here. And the reality of how people live their
00:41:54.840lives is that it's like a Venn diagram or that Venn diagram is a circle where culture and
00:42:00.380politics are borrowing from each other and they're in a lot of ways are like the same thing and
00:42:03.800I think you're right that we don't have a lot of media that reflects that in the way that I think
00:42:09.700that it needs to be reflected like under unserved something about that word really speaks to me
00:42:15.020because it's like a it's like a hole in my diet that I didn't even kind of realize needed to be
00:42:21.160filled yeah totally totally and Yossi Sargent we had him on the podcast a couple weeks ago
00:42:27.760And he said something really interesting, which is, you know, politics is where some people are some of the time, but culture is where everyone is all of the time. And I think we lose sight of that, especially those of us in politics full time. I think we really lose sight of so much anyone is paying attention to anything related to politics.
00:42:51.240I remember I grew up in Ohio and I was working when I was in the White House at the time
00:42:55.520and I was home for something and you know ran into somebody I knew or was talking to one of
00:43:01.460my girl's boyfriends or something and they were like so what do you do and I was like oh I work
00:43:05.460for the president and they're like the president of what and I was like right like that doesn't
00:43:12.220mean any like and I was like oh President Obama and they were like oh cool I was like I usually
00:43:19.160get a different response you know i usually get a little bit more feedback but that's because i'm
00:43:24.520usually telling people that in dc right right and that means something but it doesn't mean anything
00:43:29.900to people in columbus ohio like not really other than like oh god is she gonna talk to me about
00:43:35.060politics you know so i think we underestimate how how little we're how little they're thinking about
00:43:44.280us when it comes to cultural impact is it over for us have we given up too much of the game when
00:43:49.860it comes to culture do you see us gaining any ground here well there's nowhere to go but up
00:43:54.240from where we are so yeah i mean they are running the board um we don't live in a monoculture right
00:44:01.940and so there's no one there's no one winner at any given point in time but i think that the trend
00:44:09.060lines are trending towards them and have been for a while much longer than we've been comfortable
00:44:14.880or willing to admit and i think they have a lot of momentum and trajectory on their side
00:44:20.160that said trends change really quickly like i'm wearing baggy pants again you know what i mean
00:44:25.520um and like side eye people in skinny jeans so like check a picture of me from five years ago
00:44:32.360it's like who knew that was you know trends can change really really quickly but not on accident
00:44:39.940like we need to start investing way more cash into these cultural into culture makers
00:44:47.840into platforms beyond tiktok and instagram we need to be investing in podcasters like you
00:44:55.280like twig and jenkins we need to be making sure that we're all appearing on each other's shows
00:44:59.160that we're all representing and bigging each other up that we're working on big projects together
00:45:04.040that we're paying attention like getting rid of these like hold my nose and and be sanctimonious
00:45:11.600and uppity about other people about what they've done on the right like though if any i don't care
00:45:19.920if a podcast has 700 subscribers every single elected official every single person that cares
00:45:27.760about anything to do with making the world a better place
00:45:33.460should be doing two, three hours of podcast time a week.