Mike Rugnetta: Hey, folks. A little news right up front here
before we get to the mail. We are in the midst of our member
drive, and holy moly, y'all are crushing it. We still have a
while to go to hit our goals, which we're gonna mention soon
during our member drive stream week. Please imagine that
emblazoned on a big LED screen, perhaps surrounded by igniting
pyrotechnics as though you are at a monster truck rally.
Maybe Jason can pitch me down here and put a MIDI guitar solo
in.
Mike Rugnetta: Member drive stream week. That's right,
folks. Starting at 10AM eastern on Monday, August 18 and going
until Friday evening, August twenty second, the Neverpost
team will be streaming. Not the entire
Mike Rugnetta: time because we have families and need to eat
food and stuff, but for a lot of that time
Mike Rugnetta: Streaming. Do you wanna know how we write music
for the show? Do you wanna see inside Georgia's closet in a
Mike Rugnetta: not at all creepy way, but with, like, permission?
Mike Rugnetta: Do you wanna find out what the best quote in the
world is? Do you want to see Jason play NBA Jam? He's so
funny.
Mike Rugnetta: Then join us for Member Drive Stream Week. Full
schedule to follow. Admission is free, but you can get a bundle.
Follow us on Twitch at twitch.tv/theneverpost.
Mike Rugnetta: Okay. I'm not gonna lie. When I sat down to
make this topper for the mailbag, I did not expect it to
go in the direction of fake monster truck rally, but here we
are. Member drive stream week, the week of August 18.
Twitch.tv/theneverpost.
Go follow us now so you get notifications when we go live.
See you there. Friends, hello, and welcome to the Never Post
Mailbag episode four, Dog Days twenty twenty five, in which we
respond to listener emails, comments, voicemail, and voice
messages about our segments. We love hearing from you. Well,
most of you.
Hans Buetow: You know who you are.
Mike Rugnetta: You know who you are.
Mike Rugnetta: Is it Mom. Please
Mike Rugnetta: just kidding, mom. Love you. You send an email
whenever you want. Do get in touch. Tell us your thoughts on
our segments.
All the ways you can get a hold of us are in the show notes.
Drop us a line and maybe Hans will respond with some of the
things he ate most recently at the state fair. Anything
anything sticking out to you as a teaser?
Hans Buetow: Well, we haven't we haven't gone yet. I mean, it's
we're gonna wait. It starts twentieth.
Jason Oberholtzer: So
Mike Rugnetta: Oh, really? Oh, I thought it already started.
Hans Buetow: No. Twelve days Mike, come on. It's the twelve
days before Labor Day.
Mike Rugnetta: Every Like, we all know that. We We do so.
Mike Rugnetta: Know. Wait. How far in advance of the state fair
do they publish the menu?
Mike Rugnetta: Quite a while. It's a it's a big old deal.
That's hilar okay. I had no clue. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: Alright. Yep. I'm your host Mike Rugnetta. Joining
me today paired with who I assume their go to characters in
Mario Kart world are are Never Post producer Georgia Hampton.
I'm calling Dry Bones.
I'm gonna say Dry Bones.
Mike Rugnetta: Yes. Wow.
Jason Oberholtzer: Got it in one?
Georgia Hampton: Yes. Yes. I love tripods. Love
Mike Rugnetta: and I love my little skeletal boy.
Mike Rugnetta: I'm going entirely on vibe here, not like,
Yeah. You know,
Georgia Hampton: This is more just like who each of us are as
people.
Mike Rugnetta: What a
Mike Rugnetta: well, okay. We'll see how Jason responds to this
next one. Never post executive producer, Jason Oberholzer,
Waluigi.
Georgia Hampton: So I'm right.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. It's either Bowser or one of the was.
Mike Rugnetta: My brother-in-law is a big Bowser devotee, and I'm
gonna say he's probably right. Bowser is actually probably the
correct choice.
Jason Oberholtzer: It is. But, you know, I'll take any of the
bad boys. I like to be a bad boy when I'm on the track.
Mike Rugnetta: And finally, never post senior producer Hans
Buto, lack it too.
Hans Buetow: I do love to drop a spiny shell. Love it. You're not
wrong.
Georgia Hampton: Wait, Mike. Who are you then?
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. My go to is Shy Guy.
Georgia Hampton: Nice. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: I'm a
Mike Rugnetta: little upset. Seems like you can no longer
pick the color of your Shy Guy, which is sad to me. Sorry, bud.
You know what's gonna help me take my mind off of this?
Bagging some mail.
Okay.
Hans Buetow: Okay. Kick us off. We wanna set the mood. We wanna
settle us into kind of the vibe of the day. And let's see let's
see if we can do this with Michael Bukino, who sent us this
poem saying that has been rattling around in their head on
long bike rides around.
Well, I'll let you guess where.
Clip: The bugs in my beard I bring back from my bike ride are
just souvenirs from failed attempt flybys, buzzing and
bumping and flipping and flapping, jittering, jumping,
slithering, slapping. One proboscis, two antennae, 6,000
or so limbs, shiny shells, wondrous wings, and a slimy
trail of mucin. Each camouflage colorful, cute, creepy crawly
hitching a lift on the fuzzy face trolley can look like a lot
at the end of my hall, but these little critters don't bug me at
all.
Mike Rugnetta: Bug beard. Bug beard.
Mike Rugnetta: Bug beard. Bug beard. Michael. So good. Is that
Jason Oberholtzer: fuzzy face trolley? What's that?
Mike Rugnetta: Into it. Good mood set.
Hans Buetow: That's I feel like we're ready to go.
Mike Rugnetta: Okay. Let's bring it right down.
Georgia Hampton: I don't get too excited.
Mike Rugnetta: So we got a few comments about AI Mike, who
everybody will remember took over for me while I was on
vacation. One thing regarding AI Mike that we, I guess, did not
make clear enough is that Jason wrote the words. Yes.
Jason Oberholtzer: I am at fault. I did it.
Mike Rugnetta: There were some folks who were concerned that
maybe we had used an LLM. We didn't. Jason wrote it. It was a
script. Mhmm.
I also like I don't know how much LLM output you've seen, but
I encounter a fair amount of it online now. And I don't think I
think Jason's far funnier than a than a than a computer.
Jason Oberholtzer: I love to clear a low bar. The
Mike Rugnetta: voice of AI Mike was AI generated based on, I
assume, me reading the news. Hans, is that true?
Hans Buetow: You know what? It's actually a model made of you
reading copy for the first pilot segment that we ever did that no
one but us has ever heard.
Jason Oberholtzer: Interesting. Oh, interesting.
Hans Buetow: Yeah. I I mess with it a lot.
Mike Rugnetta: Why did you why that as raw material?
Hans Buetow: That's just the one that I made, and I feel like it
doesn't quite sound like you in a way that I really, really
love. Like, it kinda it sounds enough like you that it's
recognizable, but I really like pushing it and making it sound
weird. One of the things I enjoyed about this instance of
using it use Eleven Labs to do it, and they are they have an
they're an alpha for a brand new version of it, which allows you
to add in tags for mood. And so I got really into using the
wrong mood tag for your for what you were supposed to be
experiencing in that moment and just seeing what it would do.
And I turned the variability, like, all the way up and, like,
the comic express or, like, I don't remember all the the the
different things, but, like, I really ratchet it.
And I really believe in that. Like, I really believe in having
Mike AI Mike announce itself Yeah. As AI, and that it was
done with permission. You gave us permission to make an AI
model of you. And then just like messing with it because it's I
think way more funny that way.
Mike Rugnetta: Jay Springit on Blue Sky asked, could you speak
or reflect a little bit on how it felt to listen to and
experience AI Mike like as me? And I think that factors into
factors heavily into my experience of it, which is that
it's I enjoy it, maybe not entirely, but significantly
because of how strange it is. Mhmm. I wonder I was wondering
as I was listening to it. I was like, could we ever actually use
this as a tool when we like have to retract something?
I would be curious to know what you think Hans, but my feeling
is that it might not be as easy as one might think it should be.
Mike Rugnetta: I think that's right. I think
Hans Buetow: at the moment, no. Yeah. And I wanna be clear
parenthetically that we actually had access to you. We chose to
make
Mike Rugnetta: Yes.
Mike Rugnetta: That is true.
Hans Buetow: Even though we had full access to you to
Mike Rugnetta: be able to record this. We thought it was funny.
Yes.
Jason Oberholtzer: And it was out of deference to your
vacation. You did the thing that, you know, you're not
supposed to do.
Mike Rugnetta: Took a real vacation.
Jason Oberholtzer: You took a real vacation. Yeah. And you
should
Mike Rugnetta: be punished for that. Yes.
Georgia Hampton: You were.
Mike Rugnetta: And you were. Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer: No. The thing you did that you're not supposed
to do is you brought a microphone on vacation just in
case we needed any punch ins or anything there. And when we did,
you were going to set up and we said, no. You go have your
stupid vacation.
Hans Buetow: Go enjoy your
Jason Oberholtzer: family. Yeah. That we instead we're gonna do
this because it would be fun for us and would force you to not
stop vacationing.
Hans Buetow: And I think that this would be hard to to
earnestly make a mic because it just doesn't sound enough like
you. No. I think we retrained it on a little bit better copy, it
would work like we're more in gave it more intentional
training material
Mike Rugnetta: It could get closer.
Hans Buetow: Than yeah. To make it closer to you, and then
really like worked at it maybe, and definitely in like a year,
because a year ago, the technology was wildly different.
This is also why I like to use it is because I think it's
really important to kind of understand what state the the
technology is in, and it changes so quickly that I mean, I was
making fun of the the emotion tags, but it's pretty incredible
what it can do. It can sigh. It can laugh.
It creates mics laugh weirdly. It can, like, cluck. It can do
all sorts of things. I can make it sing. I made it sing.
Mike Rugnetta: What mood is Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: Feeling barnyard.
Hans Buetow: And that's just gonna get more that's just we're
gonna have have more and more nuanced control where we're
gonna be able to do more and more nuanced things with it. So
I think eventually, yes. I don't think it's there yet.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer: To me, there's a distinction where this
does not feel like generative AI. I would not call this
generative AI. Yeah. To me generative AI is something that
is performing the facsimile of creativity. Yeah.
That is being marketed as AI. This to me is an audio tool
wielded by humans, the same way that the iZotope suite of
plugins includes a lot of audio tools that are AI marketed and
motivated that are used by us to do things that we cannot do on
our own.
Mike Rugnetta: And that's you mean things like, you know,
that's noise reduction.
Mike Rugnetta: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Jason Oberholtzer: Like finding the profile of the
reverberations of a room and then showing me that profile so
that I can take it out.
Mike Rugnetta: I mean, I do realize the intrusion of AI into
everything is incredibly frustrating. You know, we hate
it too. So I hope it's balm enough to know that we didn't
use any big gross generative AI tools in this episode nor any
other episode. So, you know, we understand. I totally
understand.
We only got a few emails about this, but, you know, I wanted to
make sure that
Jason Oberholtzer: we take them seriously. Let's dive back into
more meta mailbag action. As predicted, mailbags beget
mailbags topics. In response to the previous mailbag, there were
two emails I wanted to pull out. One, a piece of gear
recommendation.
Hans Buetow: Wait. Dude, you just lifted your cat over your
head when you said that. Was that is that is Robert being
recommended to us?
Georgia Hampton: He's Bluetooth enabled.
Jason Oberholtzer: We got an email from Manuel who says,
friends, I wanna share my dumbified, I'd rather use that
term, not frictionless, way to consume audio media. I got one
of those bone conducting earphones which are also
waterproof, so I can use them while running or swimming. They
have an internal memory, so I can go around and listen to
stuff without having to constantly carry my phone with
me, which has drastically reduced how much time I spend
looking at it. But I think the best feature, in my opinion, is
how little options this device has. Volume up, volume down,
skip forward, skip backward, pause.
No shuffle, no playlist or anything. As soon as the last
file is played, the loop starts from the beginning. This forces
me to regularly curate my content which I find very
refreshing. It still feels weird not to have the weight of the
phone in my pocket, or not having to worry about how far
from the phone I'm going before the Bluetooth signal drops, but
I'm getting used to moving freely.
Hans Buetow: I've had to get
Jason Oberholtzer: getting used to moving freely. The only
downside listen, this is important. I get this. The only
downside is that I can't skip ads. But oh no, wait.
This is not an issue at all. Because for only $4 a month, I
can get Never Post without ads. And I can guarantee you that
listening to pet sounds while underwater is really something.
Mike Rugnetta: Oh, Manuel. Oh, Manuel. VIP.
Mike Rugnetta: That is
Hans Buetow: incredible with the plug. Mhmm.
Jason Oberholtzer: That's so rad. I've never heard of that.
Hans Buetow: Have you have you ever experienced have you have
you has anyone ever tried bone conduction headphones?
Jason Oberholtzer: People have told me this happens. I've never
done it.
Georgia Hampton: I've never heard of this before. I'm so
curious.
Hans Buetow: So this is if you ever look at, like, if you
watch, like, military movies and stuff, these are the headphones
that they often have on. So what they do is it it attaches to
your jaw or around your jaw, and it sends the vibrations of the
audio through your skull, through the bones, which keeps
your ear canal open so you can fully hear everything that's
still happening with full fidelity. But what happens is
your head becomes a resonating chamber, and you hear the
whatever's happening kind of in the center of your
Mike Rugnetta: head. What?
Hans Buetow: Yeah. I used to wear one I used to wear one when
I was a bike messenger so that I could keep my ears clear and I
could hear traffic, but I could still hear the like, whatever
was happening on the radio.
Mike Rugnetta: I think of them as being popular for folks who
work in offices. Right? And you can't, you know, you have to be
present and like, listen listening to your environment,
but also listen to Neverpost and the ad free feed only $4 a
month.
Jason Oberholtzer: This actually relates in some ways to the
other email I wanted to pull out that responded to last mailbag
from Oliver, who is responding to a comment Mike made while we
were chatting that said, there is no knowing things without the
body. The body is so really intimately involved in
knowledge. This made Oliver think. He says, it made me think
about how much of our communication online is
flattened to the written word or to emojis, and the added
importance of good written communication education and
literacy. Years ago, I wrote my master's thesis on written
education and literacy, ostentatious title incoming.
Mike Rugnetta: Yes. Let's go.
Jason Oberholtzer: Writing do. The way of writing, the
instructional effectiveness of kinesthetic teaching methods as
called from martial arts.
Mike Rugnetta: That sounds sick as hell.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. In it, I discussed how physical
movements can inform our methods of communication, and you can
take the teaching methods from a physical art like karate,
capoeira, or tai chi, and transfer them to the analytical
art of written communication, or learning critical pedagogy, or
learning eco composition. The big thrust of my argument, which
I still stand by decades later, is a punch and a sentence are
fundamentally the same thing. As both are delivering an idea or
feeling from the creator to the recipient. Both speaking and
sparring are dialogues.
For many students, thinking of grammar is tricky, but when you
tell them that when a happens, do b, much like when punch comes
to chest, do this block, the simplicity can click for some. I
firmly believe that more people should learn the distinction
between learning and knowing. My best example is a physical one.
You can learn that a knife is sharp all you want by studying
it, by looking at the blade profile, but the moment you
accidentally nick yourself, you know it is sharp, and that will
stick with you for all your days.
Mike Rugnetta: A sentence and a punch are fundamentally the same
thing, goes hard.
Mike Rugnetta: It really does.
Hans Buetow: In two ways.
Mike Rugnetta: True.
Mike Rugnetta: I think about this sort of thing all the time,
because I I read a lot, and over the last couple years, I have
really gone to great lengths to try to cut down on how much I
read that's like important to me. Like, I I wanna know it
just, know, for my own knowledge or for work on a screen. I try
really really hard to not read things on a screen that I need
to remember because I find that I just don't remember them as
well. Mhmm. Mhmm.
And I was actually thinking about this, like, this morning.
I gotta go get a book from the library, and I was thinking
about, like, my schedule of, when and how I'm gonna read it,
and, you know, how I'm gonna fit it into my day. And I started
thinking about I was like, am I should I choose somewhere unique
to go and read this in the hopes that that lets me remember
things about it easier. I wonder if my, like, embodied knowledge
of this text will have, like, greater resolution if I'm
somewhere that I am not normally. Is Hans is making all
kinds of hand motions.
Hans Buetow: Yeah. My this is a thing. This I find this amazing.
I think about it all the time. My editor at the New York Times,
who's incredible, she would not take notes when she would
listen.
So I would send her audio of something, and then she would go
and she would walk. We all know about, like, how walking
stimulates the brain and all of that, but she would geolocate
her notes. So when she got back to her computer, she would
remember her walk and be like, okay. Green Volkswagen. That was
the part where Hans did this thing, and I wanted to change it
to this thing.
Broken mailbox. Okay. Like, that's how she did her notes was
by locating them geographically in physical space, which I
always, like, is so fascinating to me to, like, really embody,
really locate information in space.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. I think this is really interesting
thinking of the way communication exists in
different three d or four d forms. Because I have a version
of this sometimes with music where I can remember things
better because I was listening to a certain part of a song when
I was writing something, or if I was taking notes on something.
Like, it it, like, recalls that memory to me easier because of
the auditory connection I've made.
Mike Rugnetta: Mhmm. Yeah. I believe that.
Georgia Hampton: And I'm also curious, Oliver, if in your
writing in this piece, like, if at all and how maybe dance can
be another example of this. Because to me, like, dance is an
interesting physical version of this where it's less
confrontational. You're not physically fighting each other,
but you are still physically communicating to each other. It
is also something you can do by yourself in the way that you can
be talking to yourself. You can be dancing alone.
And I don't know. I'm I'm interested in knowing more about
the physical manifestation of communication beyond just
physical fighting.
Jason Oberholtzer: Well, this is not gonna be the last time we
talk about dance. So dance heads, get ready. Because
there's a bunch of emails that came into Georgia about dance
we'll do later. The final thing this reminds me of, I haven't
thought about this in a long time, Back when I had to
remember more phone numbers because you just had to remember
more phone numbers. I started linking the numbers to notes of
the scale, so that I could sing somebody's phone number and
that's how I remember them.
Hans Buetow: What? You'd make a melody out of it?
Jason Oberholtzer: You would make a melody out of it. Oh.
Georgia Hampton: I love that.
Jason Oberholtzer: Because you're only ever getting up to
like a tenth. Right? Yeah. I would make a little melody and I
could the melody or if it's like an easy to remember harmonic
structure, I'd remember that and someone's number would be a
harmonic structure.
Hans Buetow: Cool. Next up is a comment from Matt Storm, who
sent us a voice mail message about the story that I did about
animating photos using AI. So taking still images, moving them
into moving images.
Matt Storm: And this reminds me of something I've been seeing a
lot on TikTok lately, which is this AI tool that turns people
into mermaids or makes your pets dance. I've seen them both, and
I block every account I see using them because they just
unsettle me. There's something about forcing an image, even if
it's your own image, into a situation that's not real
through AI that just makes my skin crawl. And I don't even
know that I could tell you why. Right?
And Hans talks about this in his piece. But I'm curious if you
guys have seen this trend and what you think about it. You
know, I just there's something about manipulating images. The
one that really gets me that I've seen on TikTok is making
two people kiss in an image. Like, that goes against
everything that consent represents.
Right? You are forcing two people who you cannot ask if
they wanna kiss to kiss. It drives me bonkers. Sorry. I'm
getting heated.
Anyway, I'm curious how you think this connects to consent
and basically your thoughts on that as well. Thanks. Keep up
the awesome stuff.
Hans Buetow: Matt, incredible. That is a huge part of the
reason that people have been talking about making a new
Humphrey Bogart movie or something or, like, animating
our historical figures into things is, oh, well, the dead
can't consent. But, like, I think we've seen it's not just
the dead anymore who, can you consent or not consent? Do you
have to this is the thing that that Tory brought up. Do you
have to actively opt out of having anything done with your
image?
Do we have to make this a part of our wills? Georgia, have you
seen these? You're our you're our TikTok maven. Have you seen
these things that Matt is talking about?
Georgia Hampton: So I haven't actually seen videos of, like,
people turning themselves into mermaids or making people kiss
as much, but it reminds me a lot of this music video that Kanye
West did, like, years ago called Famous, in which he portrayed
himself in bed with a bunch of other famous people, including
Taylor Swift, and it engendered this huge response and a lot of
controversy. And I believe Taylor Swift maybe taking legal
action against him, or there at least being this very huge
outcry against this kind of act. And it reminds me a lot of this
because there is a question of consent here. And at the time, I
think there was so much fixation on like, oh, well, you're super
famous. Like, do you own the image of yourself?
Do you have to like, do you have the right to tell someone that
they can't represent you in a certain way? Yeah. If you're
making someone kiss or do anything, frankly, there's this
question of consent. And what makes me even more uncomfortable
is this suggestion that maybe consent, like, isn't required
for someone to do this, especially if they think it's
funny. So up next, we got a very interesting message from Josh,
in regard to a segment I did on tactility and the general lack
of buttons on our devices and how interfacing with the
smoothness of technology leaves us wanting.
Josh: A couple years ago for Christmas, I got this fantastic
gooseneck kettle electric kettle for boiling water that you can
program to set the water to specific temperatures for your
various snobby high end coffees and teas. This gooseneck kettle
is perfect. It does exactly what I needed to do. Nothing more,
nothing less. However, the buttons on the front of it,
they're not touch screens, they're, touch capacitive
buttons that don't actually go down.
But they also look like buttons and feel like buttons and that
there's crevices and they're different shape and color than
the surrounding area of the the base of the kettle. So there's a
very serious design flaw here that I didn't discover until I
had the thing for a couple weeks, which is water makes
touch capacitive buttons get touched. Yes. So, like, anytime
water from the kettle or was coming into or out of or close
to the kettle would drip down, it would touch the button and
make it go off. And because it was wet and it had crevices like
a real button, the water would just sit in there and I had to
wait for it to dry itself out before I could actually make the
thing work again, which often postponed getting my water to
the perfect temperature for five or ten minutes and, being a very
frustrating experience.
Mike Rugnetta: Oh my god.
Jason Oberholtzer: I'm so proud of Josh for not just screaming
that entire time.
Georgia Hampton: I mean, again, it's it's this hubris of
technological quote unquote advancement. The blind trudging
forward of certain kinds of technological fads, which I
think honestly is what this is, is it just is endlessly telling
on itself. Like, it's ridiculous. That doesn't make
any sense. Like, yeah, it it should be something wherein,
product testing that comes up immediately.
Hans Buetow: I think it's so interesting that they don't
actually save anything. Like, the whole point of being touch
sensitive is you wouldn't have
Mike Rugnetta: to have the you wouldn't have
Hans Buetow: to make it look feel like a button, but they
wanted it to look and feel like a button, but also have that
like, why not just make them buttons then? Why Yeah. Why make
Mike Rugnetta: it a
Hans Buetow: different thing?
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. But you can't market a kettle with a
button in the description on the Amazon page. It's kettle with
touch sensitivity that goes right in Yeah. The title
description, which is how we buy things now.
Hans Buetow: Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: It's a psyop. It's a psyop.
Mike Rugnetta: It's a psyop. Psyop.
Mike Rugnetta: It's unraveling society. One cup of coffee at a
time. Speaking of psyops, I did a segment a little while ago
about how everything is increasingly feeling like a
gamble or like gambling, and that feeling is really prevalent
online. And we got a voice mail from Tom about this.
Hans Buetow: As an artist, you know, I feel like over the last
decade, we're being bombarded with all these different, you
know oh, if you wanna make a living online, you need to be
posting at these times. You need to be posting this often. Use
hashtags. Don't use hashtags. Go.
Twitter's blocking hashtags. Go. X hashtags. In the blue sky,
they work. It's it's this this constant deluge of information.
At a certain point, it starts to feel like, does anyone actually
know what these what you know, if these tips work? Like No.
Because the platform changes how the rules work from one day to
the next without even letting us know. It just feels like we're
we're sort of thrown to see, I guess, dealing with all this.
And at a certain point, for your own mental health, I feel like
you need to just say fuck it and just post what you want to post
when you wanna post it.
You know, if if you if you worry about all of the different
possible factors, then you're gonna be so petrified. You wanna
be able to to create anything. It's sad out here, but but not
caring about those things had done wonders for my mental
health. And my followers have gone up. So yay.
Mike Rugnetta: Yay. I think yay. Yes. Yay. Yay.
Yay, Tom.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. I agree. I think trying to imagine the
world that the algorithm wants, wherever algorithm it is that
you're, you know, trying to imagine is just such a trap. I
think if you're like a really particular kind of person, it
can be like a fulfilling challenge. Like if I think, you
know, there are some people who I've met in my life online who
are really good at just figuring out, like, having an intuitive
sense of like what to put up when and where and with what
metadata around it.
Mike Rugnetta: But
Mike Rugnetta: like, that's what they do. You know what I mean?
Like, they really really invest a lot of time into building that
skill and staying up on, like you say, all of the algorithm
changes. And I think that's not for everyone. I think it's not
for the vast majority of people.
I think the other secret to this is that it's like, you I don't
necessarily think that making and posting things that the
algorithm likes, wherever that is, is going to be the thing
that makes a particular poster or account popular. It is
something that can assist in reach on a platform and thus
help you become more popular, but it's not like the make or
break thing. And in that way, it really is just so much more
fulfilling and less crazy making to just focus on the thing
itself. And then, you know, let all that other stuff just sort
of like, if you can't think about it, sure, why not? But
like, don't force yourself to do it.
You're just gonna you're just gonna go nuts. We also got a
voicemail from user friendly sounds.
User Friendly: Before I start, I would just like to sort of make
it clear that I generally agree with what Mike is saying in the
piece and overall think social media is bad. With that out of
the way, being somewhat of a semi pro content creator, I
suppose, and more from an artistic standpoint, I just
wanted to mention a couple of things. In regards to the few
times that it seems like there's a suggestion that maybe posting
is just a slot machine like as scrolling. I think I kind of
agree with the idea in some ways, but to other creators out
there, I just sort of wanted to to at least defend it a little
bit. And the main point is that it is fairly low effort to
scroll.
It's really high effort in a lot of cases, obviously not all
cases. In a lot of cases, it's high effort to post. And
regardless of how many views or clicks or likes or whatever the
thing is that you get, you still made the thing and that's
valuable. And if you continue to make the thing, it's gonna
improve over time just by default. But I think, this sort
of idea of a writer or a painter or a musician practice your
craft every day, write something every day, make a beat every
day, whatever the thing is, that is a really good technique.
But I think it can actually be improved if you make a thing
every day and then show it to people. Because you're gonna
create a little bit differently when you know that you're gonna
be putting in front of somebody, whether that's 50 people or a
million people, it doesn't matter. It's for a lot of us,
it's gonna we're gonna think a little bit differently about how
we're making what we're making if we're planning on sharing it.
Mike Rugnetta: So first things first. If you don't know, User
Friendly's work, he's on Instagram, I think mostly, and
his work rules. User Friendly Sounds is great. He's like a
great glitchy sound designer, like music maker, makes great
visuals. So one, highly recommend User Friendly's work.
Second, like I agree broadly with all of these things. I
think we were generally in agreement. I know that it
doesn't seem this way, but I don't want the point of that
segment at least to fully come across as like social media is
bad. I think the thing that I'm trying to figure out how to say
is that it's like, social media is bad when you surrender too
much of your agency to it. It's really really easy to forget
that like, we have agency in these relationships that we have
with technology, and like that's the thing that's bad.
And it's bad that the software is designed on purpose to like
siphon that to siphon that agency away from you or to give
you excuses to give it up and to reward you with these paltry
things to do so. I can understand the idea that, like,
posting is high effort and scrolling is low effort, But I
think the moment we're in now, we have a lot of people who talk
about just like getting trapped in social media. You know, this
started as like, oh, I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, right,
like a decade or two ago. And you like lost a bunch of hours
reading interesting things. Now, it's like, well, I'm, you know,
really just deleted two hours scrolling through TikTok, which
is itself, I think, a kind of high effort activity.
It it's a it's a lot of energy being spent, But, yeah, it
doesn't have the outcome of like, well, then at least you
made something. I think sometimes we like dilute
ourselves a little bit and thinking like, well, now I know
more about what's happening on the Internet or like, I've
experienced the sort of media or information environment for a
little bit, and that's good for me for reasons. But, yeah, for
the most part, you don't come out with anything, but you do, I
think, expend a lot of effort.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Oh my god. Yeah. I mean, we've talked
about this before specifically with TikTok. And I know I've
said the thing that I experience all the time with TikTok where
I'll just be sort of sucked into it and then kind of zap myself
out and be like, what am I looking for right now?
Yeah. Because I've realized that over however long that I've been
on TikTok, I feel this, like, growing frenzy, within me of,
like, where is it? Where is it? Like and, like, I'm not looking
for anything, but there is yeah. This sort of boiling a frog
situation where maybe at first, scrolling through TikTok
especially seems low effort, kind of relaxing, just like I
wanna kind of go down the lazy river of my mind.
And then it it changes. It never stays like that.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. The yeah. The feeling I get is like, I'll
be like, where am I going? Where do I Yeah. Think I'm headed?
And Yes. Have I have I arrived there?
Georgia Hampton: Is there a destination at all, in fact?
Mhmm.
Jason Oberholtzer: I also think that his point about repetition
of showing creativity to people, or in this case, a defensive
posting, which I'll allow. Showing it to people in the form
of a post is well taken. That is true. You do create differently
when a perceived audience stops being imagined and starts
becoming real.
Mike Rugnetta: 100%.
Jason Oberholtzer: And I think it's probably beneficial whether
or not your endgame involves showing things to people as
posts for remuneration. I think it's probably valuable even if
it's just to make better paintings or whatnot. So I think
it's about taking point. There's one more email in here about the
gambling segment from Gustav. He says he's been thinking about
the old expression, the house always wins.
Gustav says, the reason why casinos design their spaces and
games to keep people playing is because they, over the long run,
get more out of you than you get out of them. I think it holds
true for online platforms though as astute media savvy folks, e g
listeners have never post, $4 a month if you don't remember. We
might believe we're gaming that system in some way. Like because
we maybe use ad blockers or VPNs and curate our feeds well, we
can get more out of the platform than it can extract from us. On
an individual level, it might be true.
Even casinos will have customers who get in when a small amount
get out in time. But on a societal level, the level of
these massive platforms, those cases are probably
insignificant. The question then is, what does winning look like
for the owners of these platforms? If Google decided to
weigh their algorithms to favor anti regulation messaging, or
Meta decided to subtly back right wing reactionaries, would
we have any way of stemming the tide of public opinion? Would we
even know what was going on, and could we prove them culpable?
I think what's happening with Elon's takeover Twitter might
just be a more visible and incompetent version of a process
that is shaping world politics already in less obvious ways.
Gustav, I think the question of what does winning look like for
a particular platform is a very good question. The extent to
which we can guess about what is already happening, I will leave
to any individual mind. But I think it's very instructive to
think about, whereas a casino has a very obvious definition of
what winning is, extracting money from people who walk in
their doors. Platforms, I think have a more complicated version
of what winning ends up looking like.
Ultimately, course, separating us from our money, but there are
a lot of other games they are playing, especially as their
vestigial tendencies from their ZERB funded beginnings still
play themselves out.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. I mean, to it's I think the comparison to
the house holds and I think yeah, Jason, your point about
like, really they separate people from their time and their
money, separate them from their their time to get their money
Mhmm. Is true. But like the big difference is that a casino,
it's not like gray goo. You know, like it doesn't the casino
doesn't grow.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Casinos rule.
Mike Rugnetta: That's the difference.
Georgia Hampton: You can smoke cigarettes in there.
Mike Rugnetta: In defensive casinos. Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer: I never smoked a cigarette in my phone.
Mike Rugnetta: Just, you know, imagine if, like, Caesar's
Palace just grew one inch every minute and just swallowed
swallowed the entirety of The United States and then the
world.
Georgia Hampton: I mean, that's kind of what it is. Right? Like,
thinking about this when, Jason, you were reading it, it feels
very much like, yeah, that the notion of winning when it comes
to online platforms is exists in my mind as the way that universe
is endlessly expanding. There is kind of no end point. It's
always growing in the same way our individual experience on
platforms is this feeling of kind of chasing something or
following something.
There's no satisfying, I've reached the end of the stack of
stuff, like, that's never going to happen. I think the same is
true for platforms,
Mike Rugnetta: but in
Georgia Hampton: a more evil way.
Jason Oberholtzer: Well, you know one thing that does have a
clear ending? The first half of this podcast episode.
Mike Rugnetta: We're gonna go to a break
Jason Oberholtzer: and come back with more emails and voice
messages. Welcome back, gamblers. We have an email from
Crow in response to the leaving social media roundtable. Crow
says, whenever I feel the urge to check Instagram and Twitter,
I have to do it through my phone's browser app, because
Crow has deleted the applications themselves. The
browser app, which is a terrible experience just because of how
bizarre it feels.
And I think it really works for me because I'm just so much more
aware of how awful social social media is when the act of
browsing is also awful. Twitter is already a terrible website,
but intentionally making my own user experience worse is
actually kind of liberating. I know y'all have talked about the
tactic of using your phone screen time function to limit
social media use, but that's still a product of design. I
think maybe we should be using anti design tactics. Yeah.
Georgia Hampton: This is like using hostile architecture on
yourself. Yeah. Exactly.
Mike Rugnetta: I used to do this and it works really well.
Jason Oberholtzer: Okay.
Mike Rugnetta: I use Firefox Focus, which is the mobile
browser that only has one tab. You can't open more than one tab
in it. And when you quit What? It's and it's a permanent
private mode. So it doesn't save any cookies.
It doesn't keep you logged into things. It deletes your history.
When you quit the app, it loses the page, and when you reopen
it, it's just blank. There's nothing there.
Hans Buetow: It roots out the page code, deletes the page
itself. It comes to
Mike Rugnetta: your house and smacks
Mike Rugnetta: you around a little.
Hans Buetow: It goes back in time.
Georgia Hampton: Cheese your car.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. It
Mike Rugnetta: rules. I it is like, you know, I worry about
the day that it is no longer maintained because it is the
fact that it has no features is its best feature, and it does
really help me, like, deal with, you know, this kind of thing,
like staying off of stuff.
Hans Buetow: So like you open something up into this delicate
ecosystem that you know will fail. Like, does that change how
you interact with it? You can't be like, oh, I'll come back to
this later, or oh, saving this, and like letting it like, do you
have to resolve everything as you're doing it? What does it
change for you?
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. I don't well, like, means that I'm not,
let's say, like, logged into Bandcamp constantly. Right? So I
can't if I wanna buy a record, right, I have to log in to
Bandcamp and add it to cart and then what what you know, I can't
just go to the tab where I have Bandcamp open already logged in.
Yeah.
So like that's just a recent example of like, you know,
putting putting roadblocks in my way so that I don't like spend
too much money, so that I don't spend too much time online.
Georgia Hampton: I feel like what we're kinda talking about
here is just removing convenience.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. I think so.
Georgia Hampton: It turns things into this featureless, smooth,
frictionless experience. And I I really like this idea of of
adding friction.
Mike Rugnetta: You gotta get yourself a browser that stands
in your doorway and goes, uh-uh.
Georgia Hampton: No. No. No.
Jason Oberholtzer: Gotta get you a bone conducting earphone. It
has its own memory.
Hans Buetow: This conversation actually ties into the next
comment that we got, which is from our friend, best friend, we
love you, Tom Lum.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yes. We love you.
Mike Rugnetta: Love Tom. Tom.
Hans Buetow: Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom sent us something saying, quote,
I wanted to share these two TikToks that I leave the app on
whenever I need to focus to stop myself from mindlessly opening
the app and scrolling. And Georgia, you are the resident.
Mike Rugnetta: TikTok I'm already there, baby.
Hans Buetow: Can you
Hans Buetow: tell us tell us what I haven't even opened these
yet. Tell us what's going on.
Georgia Hampton: Okay. The first link. It's person on a couch.
The text above them says, that moment when you're done rotting
and ready to be a human. It's exactly what I've described.
Basically, what they're doing is sitting there and then they
kinda go like, and throw their phone like onto the floor or
just stand up and are like, alright. Alright. Alright.
Alright. That's enough.
And yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what it feels like. And then the
second one interesting. Okay.
Mike Rugnetta: This is good. I like this.
Georgia Hampton: Single image of a big old block of what looks
like cheddar cheese with text over it that reads, if you're
looking at this block of cheese, you have scrolled to the bottom
of your FYP, and it's time for you to get off TikTok and go to
sleep. Your eyes are getting heavy, and you need to go to
sleep and get some rest for whatever you're doing tomorrow.
You have been on TikTok way too long. I hope you sleep well and
have sweet dreams. Good night.
Jason Oberholtzer: Perfect. Perfect. There's typos, which
make it even better.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. They're sure. It's even better.
Hans Buetow: Yep. Thanks, Tom. In our next set of questions, we
got some questions slash stories from some folks asking about how
many cameras are there. From the segment, how many cameras are
there, where I ask the question, how many
Jason Oberholtzer: How many
Hans Buetow: cameras are there?
Jason Oberholtzer: Keep it going. One more time.
Mike Rugnetta: Just how many cameras are there?
Hans Buetow: The first one was anonymous, and they said, I
worked at a small location with a very small number of
employees, about three to five, and an overbearing micromanaging
boss who was there almost every day. About a year into working
there, he installed cameras in the store, ones that he could
view the feed from his phone. Shrugging it off as security, we
went about our workdays just like normal. He would come into
the store less, and when he was away, we would talk shit as
coworkers often do. Somehow the tension and horrible vibes in
the store became increasingly worse than usual whenever the
boss was in.
One day, I was complaining about him when one of my coworkers
pulled me aside and showed me a sheet of paper that said, quote,
I think he's listening to us. The immediate shock I felt,
exclamation point. I felt embarrassed too because, of
course, I had said things that I wouldn't say to his face. I then
looked at the laws in my state regarding surveilling employees
and found out that, yeah, it was in fact okay to listen in on
employees.
Hans Buetow: Oui.
Hans Buetow: The idea of him watching and listening to us on
his phone, found upsetting. It was a real invasion of privacy
in my opinion. What I wear, whether or not I can use my
phone at all, and the time I have to be at work and confined
to a specific building are already controlled by my
employer. My speech being controlled as well felt like an
insult to injury. I think a time before security systems like
that was a time where you could be more human, slack off a
little, joke around with coworkers.
I don't want to be forced to be a robot just because I know
someone is watching. I think this is harrowing. Like, that's
just really, really hard to realize how much you're being
surveilled, And there's a lot in this. There is, however, one
thing in here that I wanna point out that I think is important
for people to think about that people probably know, but I
think people know but don't know, which is what is a
reasonable expectation of privacy? I think we get really
it's it's a thread that I think goes through some of the things
we've already talked about in this episode.
But when anonymous tells us that it was they looked up state laws
regarding surveilling employees that, yeah, it is okay, in fact,
okay to listen in on employees. That's true. If you're in a
public space or if you're in a privately owned space with rules
to that says it is possible, if there's a sign at the door, it
depends on where you are. These things are completely legal and
allowed to happen. What is your expectation of privacy is quite
low, actually.
And places that we haven't really figured out is what if
you bring a device in or is giving away a bunch of data an a
breach in privacy in other ways. I can for example, Minnesota,
where I live, is a one party consent state. Not all are,
which means if I do an interview, I can legally record
it as long as I know I'm recording it. One party in the
conversation has to know it's being recorded, and that party
can be me doing the recording. Please note I would never do
this.
This is not a tactic that I use, but it is legally allowed. And
that's just one example of many of how the right to privacy is
pretty sticky, and actually when you confront where we are
allowed to be surveilled is is pretty gross and doesn't feel
good.
Mike Rugnetta: It should be a law that you can talk shit about
your boss. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's just put it right in the
constitution.
We're we're working. That thing's a work in progress right
now anyways. Let's just put it in there.
Georgia Hampton: For real.
Mike Rugnetta: I feel
Hans Buetow: like it's I feel like it's open.
Hans Buetow: We could
Hans Buetow: somebody opened the door.
Mike Rugnetta: Maybe it's a requirement, actually. Article
one. You are legally required to talk shit about your boss.
Jason Oberholtzer: Article one. Your boss is a herb.
Mike Rugnetta: Fuck that guy.
Hans Buetow: Anonymous also pointed us to a website,
instacam.org, which is insecam, instacam.org, on which anyone
can access any video feed of any unsecured surveillance camera
that has a connection to the Internet, which I have not
looked at and cannot verify, but woah. Click Let's all go check
that out. Yep. Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer: Everyone click until you can see Georgia.
Hans Buetow: We also got a comment from Stevie, who said in
response to a comment that Carl made in the in the two mailbags
ago about counting 11 cameras in a famous vegetarian restaurant
and musing about what do they need all of that surveillance
for.
Stevie: So I used to work in fine dining, and we used to have
cameras essentially over every table in the dining room so
that, we could see the rate at which people were eating. We
served, like, tasting menus. We served, like, prefix menus. So
we wanted to know as soon as people were done, so we could
clear their tables and drop the new dishes.
Hans Buetow: There you go, folks. Reasonable expectation of
privacy. Woah.
Mike Rugnetta: God. Woah. Fuck
Mike Rugnetta: that. Yeah. Oh my god.
Jason Oberholtzer: This sucks, dude. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: Talk about a seafood dinner. Hey.
Hans Buetow: Oh my god.
Mike Rugnetta: It's good now. I like it now.
Hans Buetow: The last one we got on this was from Dean, who sent
us a, something about phone cameras.
Dean: The phone camera has obviously become ubiquitous, and
I think a angle that I can't remember if it was in the
original story or not, is this fear that comes with the phone
camera of, at least for me, ending up viral without
noticing. The idea that has, like, escalated since, like,
twenty ten's prank videos of anybody could be filming you for
their funny TikTok or making fun of you or something. And yikes.
Georgia Hampton: Well, dude. Oh,
Hans Buetow: You great minds. Georgia, why don't you take
this?
Georgia Hampton: You got a big storm coming.
Mike Rugnetta: I think just as a quick aside, I think about every
time I'm walking around the city carrying something weird. Yes.
Where I'm like, am I gonna be am I gonna be a what is New York?
Is this the time that someone from their window is taking a is
taking a video of me? Yep.
Georgia Hampton: This is the perfect transition to the
submissions that we got about my segment, about why nobody dances
at the club anymore. And the answer, obviously, is because of
this exact thing of people either being on their phones and
just scrolling through Instagram or TikTok or whatever, texting.
But also that people are on the dance floor recording things,
recording each other, recording the DJ, recording someone
dancing, perhaps, a little too extravagantly for their taste.
And before we get into it, I will tell you guys, I literally
lived this this weekend.
Jason Oberholtzer: Okay.
Georgia Hampton: I went out dancing with my friend. It was
early in the night. The dance floor was, you know, pockmarked
with people. It wasn't super busy yet and there was this
couple that had come together and we're standing on the
outskirt of the dance floor, just recording the dance floor.
People dancing.
And my friend and I both noticed it and we're like, this makes me
super uncomfortable. What are you doing? Why are you doing
this?
Hans Buetow: You said this to them?
Georgia Hampton: No. No. No. No. No.
Hans Buetow: Oh, you just said this to the to the air.
Georgia Hampton: No. I'm not trying to get got. But it was
no. Was my friend and I were basically just commenting on
that to each other of how instantly uncomfortable it is to
actually witness this. And it was kind of the first time I'd
really seen it myself.
I knew this was a thing, but it was it's incredibly unsettling.
Jason Oberholtzer: God, that sucks.
Georgia Hampton: Anyway, I wanna start us with a voicemail we got
from Travis at about a potential form of dance that might be a
nice balm for this.
Dean: My spouse, Ruby, and I go to contra dancing, which is like
a country style dance. It's like line dancing and square dancing
kinda combined. It's very nerdy and queer, but there's a lot of
diversity in age. It's one of the things I like about it. And
it's something where, like, it's partnered dancing, but you're
actually encouraged not to dance with the person you came with.
You absolutely can. But you're encouraged to do new partners
every song. But one of the things that we've really liked
about this is that it's, like, two and a half hours that we
just don't think about our phones. We put it in a bag and
just forget it. And even when people take breaks in between
dance like, you know, if they're skipping a dance, they don't
look at their phones.
Like, people just, like, engage with each other. It is, like, so
fantastic the way that that works.
Jason Oberholtzer: Love it. Line dancing is the solution for
everything. Every problem we've outlined in this mailbag so far.
Hans Buetow: Yeah. I can't think of one that won't be solved that
way. Yeah. Good call.
Georgia Hampton: We also got a message from Kay who writes, as
a DJ, phones are a double edged sword. I want people to feel
connected to the music I'm playing, but I also do need
videos of people capturing the tracks I'm blending together.
It's important so that I can, a, hear how it sounded on the sound
system if I'm not recording the set with other means, and b, use
it to advertise myself for gigs. Performative, for sure. However,
here's my experience as someone in the Chicago scene.
Oh my god. Hi, first of all. Hello. They continue saying,
dance floors of people from diverse backgrounds with house
and techno playing have little issue with the lack of dancing.
While the lack of dancing generally is due to phones to
some degree, in my view, any lack of dancing or communal
engagement with the DJ is a straight people problem.
Or wait, is it a straight people problem?
Jason Oberholtzer: Got them.
Georgia Hampton: There's a feeling of collective joy with
the DJ as the leader, but it's a much more relational experience
than simply being analogous to an audience viewing a band on
stage. The DJ is selecting tracks and responding to the
dancers, But it's a relational bond that I and many other DJs
view as sacred. The biggest difference I've noticed is that
as electronic music becomes more mainstream, beyond dubstep, you
find at EDM festivals, some bastardization of house, techno,
and rave music, I've heard DJs call it corporate techno, has
emerged that you can find young, white, straight, West Loop types
playing. It is a straight people problem. Those are the
environments where people don't dance out of fear of being
watched or captured on video.
Or they really want to be seen on video, as Tim articulated,
for influencing purposes. I think there's something here
about performance and wanting to signal to people online that you
have done something interesting. There's this currency that
starts getting generated when you see online a way of
performing as cool. And it's being the person in an
interesting outfit next to the DJ booth who is live streaming
their set. And that is so much more about the performance of
being at this event, of looking interesting at this event, of
acting in a way that suggests that you're the kind of person
who would know about this, but blah blah blah.
Like, it's it's this play acting. It's not actually
participating.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Which seems to actually be a
particular loss because there are things that as I'm learning
from like the beautiful responses some folks are sending
us, as well as what you articulate in your piece. Like,
there are some things about these clubs that are, to some
people, sacred. I don't think that's like, you know, an overly
ambitious word they're throwing around. But also like, these
spaces like have jobs to do outside of just being the
backdrop for people's social lives.
Georgia Hampton: Definitely.
Jason Oberholtzer: One one email that we got that stuck out to
me, that sort of helped me understand this about these
dance faces was from Philip, who grew up in a small town in
Germany. And it was actually a very nice accounting of what it
was like going to clubs when you were growing up in a small town
in Germany, and the ways we would do photo dumps, usually on
the Facebook at the end of every night out with our shitty little
digital cameras, which is certainly something that I
remember. He says, because of that, the first time I went to a
club with a no photo policy, it felt strangely serious. No
foolery, no innocent fun. This is a place for grown ups, I
thought.
You're allowed to be whoever you wanna be, but there are rules.
Rules I had to abide by, rules everyone else seemed to already
know and silently agree to follow. I was 25 years old and
still doubted whether I was even old enough to be here. I was
nervous and afraid of doing something wrong, but once I was
on the dance floor, I had one of the best nights of my life. He
then goes on to describe how in contemporary German culture, the
club scene has started shifting a little bit to his read of it.
He says that beyond substance only, the no photo policy helps
reinforce club culture as a safe space for marginalized
communities, especially the LGBTQIA plus community. I've
noticed that the standard German club experience tends to be
catered primarily to a gay male able-bodied audience. Because of
that, more and more events are working to include all people,
establishing broader guidelines to improve well-being and safety
for everyone. It's common for clubs to have accessible
entrances, gender neutral, and flinta toilets, awareness teams
patrolling the premises, dedicated rest areas, free water
stations, and medical staff on-site. Does it all work?
Possibly not. It only takes one bad actor and things can go to
shit, but it helps to know there's someone you can turn to
for help. All of this exists to create a space where people can
be who they are and do what they love with no shame or guilt
attached. That's only possible when no cameras are allowed. No
pictures are taken and there's no social media aftermath to be
dealt with.
Disregarding these rules, especially by taking and posting
photos online feels almost sacrilegious. There it is again,
the sacred. So for me, the no photo policy has become not just
a rule, but a seal of approval for a proper night out.
Georgia Hampton: I'm so glad someone wrote in from Germany,
specifically. Yes. Because
Jason Oberholtzer: The subject matter experts.
Georgia Hampton: In general, it's just it's an incredibly
powerful and efficient practice in terms of self expression in
general, especially for marginalized communities. To be
able to be like, yeah, you can come here and dress how you
want. You can engage in certain kinds of sexual activities if
you want to. You can come here and do drugs with your friends.
Like, you can act out things you'd like to act out and behave
how you wanna behave, dress how you want, and there's no
documentation of it.
That agreement is crucial for this kind of self expression.
Mike Rugnetta: There's some interesting thing here about,
like, how in a location where all of those things happen, you
know, the engagement in so many different vices, the thing that
is truly profane ends up just being a document. Yeah. Like,
wonder if that's like, you know, there's there's maybe an
interesting line of thought there about the sacred being
sort of necessarily ephemeral. And that as soon as it becomes
fixed in a way, it's you've you've ruined it or dirtied it.
Jason Oberholtzer: Alright, kids. There is one last thing to
do. You know it. You love it. You were waiting for it even
though you can't remember the rules.
It is one word graffiti.
Mike Rugnetta: Wow. Chase and
Mike Rugnetta: Come on.
Jason Oberholtzer: I gotta be fair. Were you appropriately
chastised after the last mailbag because you all did a much
better job sticking relatively close to the prompt of one word
graffiti that is funny. Starting with Taylor from Oklahoma City
who sent in two.
Georgia Hampton: Okay. First one, we got your standard
residential sign that has a picture of a bicycle, and then
underneath it, it says, may use full lane. So bicycles may use
full lane. But someone has taken it upon themselves to cross off
the picture of the bicycle and just write the word punks under
it. So it says punks may use full lane.
Mike Rugnetta: Do we think this is celebratory of punks or
trying to dunk on cyclists?
Jason Oberholtzer: Oh. I never even considered it. And you know
what? I support it either way.
Mike Rugnetta: Why does he have to
Hans Buetow: do only one?
Jason Oberholtzer: He's gonna drill once. Alright.
Georgia Hampton: And we're down to the second submission.
Personally, my favorite of the two, in which we see a little
pyramid guy with some shoes and two little stick arms, both
reaching upwards, one closed eyelid and a bit of a a jagged
smile. And right next to it, it just says, forget about it.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yes. As one word, they slammed those letters
together to make one word out of it, which makes this admissible.
Mike Rugnetta: Yes.
Jason Oberholtzer: I love it.
Mike Rugnetta: You know, I never would have expected when I woke
up this morning, I would see a happy pyramid doing the two
step. But here we are.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yes. Next, we got one in from Lily. Mike, what
do we got going on here?
Mike Rugnetta: So this is it looks like we're looking in the
window of maybe a ceramics shop and underneath that window on a
piece of stone has been scribbled a picture, a side view
of a rat inside the body of the rat. It says, rat with the
Anarchist There
Mike Rugnetta: you go. Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer: And I've got a suspicion that this might be
one of those Anarchist listeners that we have. Because they also
included this little snippet of text under the image. Mike?
Mike Rugnetta: Kind gut, kind stat, kind patriarch cat,
patriarch chat.
Jason Oberholtzer: That's better than I could do.
Mike Rugnetta: Kind, kind, kinda, kinda means none. No.
Right? No god, no state. Yeah.
It can mean no, not not any, none, nobody, no one. So no god,
no state, no patriarchy. Alright. It's a good rat. It's a
very
Mike Rugnetta: It's a
Jason Oberholtzer: great rat.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. It's a really, you know, approachable
rat.
Jason Oberholtzer: Next up, friend of the show, Talia, who
always follows the rules, sends in w e r m s worms.
Mike Rugnetta: Worms. Worms. Worms.
Georgia Hampton: Worms.
Stevie: Worms.
Jason Oberholtzer: Hans, what's next?
Hans Buetow: Next, we have on a salmon dirty salmon colored
wall. This does not qualify, Jason. I'm so sorry.
Matt Storm: Hang on.
Mike Rugnetta: You gotta say it the way it's written too.
Hans Buetow: Yes, please. It is no. La Polizia. No. La Polizia.
No. No. No.
Jason Oberholtzer: And then, like, sort of half a raised
penis.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You gotta
Mike Rugnetta: get one in every show, you know.
Jason Oberholtzer: Delightful. Technically, words. Technically.
This is balanced out by Tedder who sent the purest of all
submissions.
Mike Rugnetta: This is pretty good.
Jason Oberholtzer: One letter. This is good. Yes. Apparently,
there's a lot of streets. I believe these to be around
Portland.
Hans Buetow: Laurelhurst is what I'm reading.
Jason Oberholtzer: Northeast Flanders Street. Northeast, N E
Space Flanders Street. Into which space you can drop a
single letter d. Ned Flanders Street. One letter graffiti.
Tedder's the
Dean: winner right now.
Mike Rugnetta: It's good. It's funny.
Jason Oberholtzer: The final two we have here, I think our first
for us, two people decided to send in their graffiti in the
form of a video. The first one I don't think really needs it, but
there's something kind of nice about the ambiance of the slow
crawl of this across the screen and the scoring of what I assume
they were listening to in the car. Georgia, what's going on
here?
Georgia Hampton: First of all, I am attacked by the sound of Fade
Into by Mazi Star. And then, yes, we're we're seeing sort
Mike Rugnetta: of a
Georgia Hampton: skyline, a billboard upon which someone has
written what does that say?
Mike Rugnetta: I think it says Oprah.
Mike Rugnetta: I think it
Georgia Hampton: says Oprah. Oh my god. Of course, it says
Oprah. Oh my god. Says Oprah.
Sorry. Sorry, guys. Fonts aren't
Mike Rugnetta: my It's
Mike Rugnetta: a it's a whole billboard.
Mike Rugnetta: Oprah's huge. It's huge.
Georgia Hampton: Would have been done with, like, like, a rolling
like a paint roller.
Mike Rugnetta: It's
Georgia Hampton: like, this is enormous. Takes up the entire
rectangle of the billboard. Oprah. I find
Jason Oberholtzer: it deeply satisfying. I just keep looping
this. I find this very nice.
Mike Rugnetta: I don't know. Some of
Georgia Hampton: us aren't ready to receive as it turns out.
Jason Oberholtzer: And then the final one here is three words,
which made me not want to include it because that makes me
mad. But what made me happy is
Mike Rugnetta: It's the same two words twice in a row.
Jason Oberholtzer: You know, no matter how you slice it, I hate
it. But you went to the effort and this can only really be seen
by taking a video of it. Jordan sent in this video. Mike, what's
going on?
Mike Rugnetta: We're in a car and the car is on the highway
and we see a sign that says Nikolai Street and a building in
the background, in front of a hill that says Montgomery Park.
We're approaching, we are in the left hand lane with the Jersey
barriers right next to us. We approach a bunch of green
bollards that are on top of the Jersey barrier and on the first
four are spelled out one letter per bollard f u c k bollard
bollard y o u. Three more bollards, another fuck. Two more
bollards, another u.
Looking almost like they were painted while in motion. Yeah.
Georgia Hampton: Is like scary serial killer font also.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. It's like white paint. It's all drippy.
It's a very Yeah.
Georgia Hampton: It's all lowercase.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. So, yeah, driving by six miles an hour or
whatever it is. Fuck you. Fuck you.
Jason Oberholtzer: Fuck you. Very dangerous. Four words. Hate
everything about it. But gotta give it up to you for putting in
the effort.
So thank you, Jordan.
Georgia Hampton: Now, who's the Polizia?
Mike Rugnetta: No.
Jason Oberholtzer: Alright. Before we sign off, there is one
more very important thing we have possibly learned. You know,
we all know the thing that we all say at the end of every
episode. Right? Do their claws find my flesh?
May they drown in my blood?
Georgia Hampton: Oh, yes. Of course.
Jason Oberholtzer: Well, Daniel t says the only place that they
can find this online is at techteesusa.com.
Mike Rugnetta: This website is horrible.
Georgia Hampton: Very American. Sounds legit.
Jason Oberholtzer: Most American of websites were in the
description for a t shirt that says exactly that. It says, the
should their claws find my flesh, may they drown in my
blood shirt is a powerful and evocative statement of defiance.
This bold declaration adorns a shirt that serves as a wearable
symbol of courage and resistance. The words attributed
to legendary warrior, queen Budoka, reflect a fierce
determination to fight back against those who would seek to
harm or oppress. We have a potential candidate here for who
has said this phrase which we were not able to find.
I have looked no further than this website considering it the
universal source source of truth.
Hans Buetow: If you can find better, let us know.
Jason Oberholtzer: Please do. And until that time comes, all
together now kids.
Mike Rugnetta: Should claws find my flesh. May they
Georgia Hampton: drown in
Mike Rugnetta: my blood. Bye, everybody. Bye.