Ep. 1783 - I Found The Exact Moment In Time When The Monoculture Broke

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One of the side effects of doing the real history series is now I'm tempted now to begin every show with a historical anecdote, especially since when you read enough history, you start to realize that a lot of the bad ideas were actually pretty reasonable in hindsight. Here's a story about one of those allegedly bad ideas that you probably haven't heard before. In the 17th century, a medical student in Switzerland named Johannes Hofer identified a strange but serious new illness, afflicting people living far from their native country, particularly soldiers and students studying abroad. Whatever the cause, maybe it was a parasite or an unknown pathogen of some kind, symptoms were pretty stark. Sufferers took on a lifeless and haggard countenance. They lost their interest in eating cheese, which is a big deal for these people, for anyone, really. Sometimes, they thought they were hearing voices or seeing ghosts. They also lost track of time and confused past and present. In his dissertation, Hofer noted that he couldn't figure out how to cure the disorder, but various remedies were attempted. According to Harvard University doctors would induce vomiting. They would administer toxic laxatives. They'd give patients opium. They'd stick leeches on their bodies to drain their blood. Hopefully, they're not doing all these things at the same time. They'd serve emulsions, usually containing sedatives and narcotics intended to knock the patients unconscious. In 1733, a Russian Army officer came up with his own preferred method of treating this disorder when he buried one of his soldiers alive when he began showing symptoms. All these approaches, however, turned out to be highly counterproductive. That's because the disorder that Hofer identified, as it turns out, was not actually caused by a parasite or an unknown pathogen. Instead, it was caused by loneliness and isolation. 100% of cases were solved by just shipping the patient back home. Hofer coined the term nostalgia to describe the disease, which of course is not a disease at all. And today there's broad agreement in the medical community that nostalgia is not, in fact, a public health emergency. The scientific consensus is that nobody should be buried alive or suffer any other horrific punishment disguised as treatment, no matter how badly they're overcome with nostalgia. It's actually a little surprising, given that the medical community today medicalizes everything, so maybe they'll swing back around to that eventually. And really, I've come to the conclusion that maybe they should. Maybe we need to revisit this scientific consensus. Because as you may have noticed, nostalgia has officially reached catastrophic levels in this country. We need to declare a pandemic, bring back the press conferences with Fauci, shut down the country until we figure out what the hell's going on. Nostalgia has overtaken entire generations, especially my generation, millennials, and the signs of millennial nostalgia obsession are everywhere. We're all familiar with them. Rebooted TV shows from the 90s, endless remakes and sequels, newer shows that are built on nostalgia like Stranger Things, podcasts dedicated entirely to rewatching old shows like The Office, Disney, adults, consumer products from the 90s making a comeback, fashion trends cycling through again, and on and on and on. But if you think it hasn't reached pandemic levels, a point where we may need 15 days to stop the nostalgia spread, take a look at this local news report out of Texas about the revival of Pizza Hut, or at least the old Pizza Hut supposedly. A franchise owner who owns around 100 franchises has converted a third of them to this new format and he's presumably going to convert a lot more in the near future. Watch. Alright, this is the big trend right now. Restaurants going retro to try to bring customers into dining rooms. Bradley Blackburn got a taste of how they're putting nostalgia on the menu. In the hills of Tunk Anak, Pennsylvania, a familiar red roof catches the eye. Inside the vinyl booths, Tiffany style lamps, and yes, the salad bar you may remember from decades ago. I mean, it's amazing the comments we have about they have the red cups. Yes, we do. Tim Sparks got his start working at a Pizza Hut that looked like this. He's now president of Dayland Corporation, which owns this franchise and more than 80 others around the country. We've redecorated many restaurants to rewind the clock. It looks exactly like the one that I remember from when I was a kid. Yeah, that's what we were after. Some Pizza Hut classics are now top performing locations. Customers show up for a piece of their childhood. It's just breaking like memories. To share with their own kids. When you finally find something that tastes how you genuinely remember it tasting, like you can't let it go. People come from two and three hours away and I'm not making that up. The restaurants are serving up nostalgia. Franchises like Burger King and KFC returned to old school logos and packaging in recent years at Pizza Hut. They even brought back Pac-Man. Yes, they're saying the new Pizza Hut looks and tastes just like it did 30 years ago. And first of all, just as a factual matter, we all know that isn't true. The quality of the product has declined and you're not going to change that by painting the roof red and installing vinyl booths and Pac-Man. And we talked about this before, but one of the biggest changes when it comes to the quality of the food and in the pizza industry generally took place when all the pizza joints started getting their cheese from the same source. Prior to that, restaurants like Pizza Hut would grate their own cheese in-house. Today, a company called La Prina controls about 85% of the market for pizza cheese. They secured a patent for quality locked cheese or QLC in 1986, which is basically bioengineered mozzarella that's created via some Frankenstein practice in the factory, then flash frozen and shipped out. You can see the inside of one of their cheese facilities here. So no matter where you get your pizza, whether it's Pizza Hut or Domino's or the frozen food aisle at the grocery store, the odds are overwhelmingly high that the cheese comes from the exact same place. And given that that's one of the three main ingredients of a pizza, it means that all the pizza ends up tasting basically the same. Now of course, the cheese isn't the only thing that's changed since the 1980s. Take a look at this Pizza Hut ad from 1982. Watch. Now this was back in a decade where you could have a lot of white people in ads and they didn't appear only as the burglars in a home security ad. They would appear and do other things. They would eat pizza with their families happily with a little nice jingle in the background. There's no cynicism or irony to it. Not trying to be funny. It's a pro family ad, which you rarely see anymore. And there are some other differences in how Pizza Hut makes its pizza. They used to make the sauce in house two, which was uncommon at the time. I saw a former employee of Pizza, eat pizza in, which is a competitor of Pizza Hut post this message in response to a Pizza Hut ad quote, I worked at a pizza in in college during this timeframe at night, made the next day's dough was all very basic ingredients, yeast, sugar, water, flour, uh, uh, salt and a spice packet. It was given some time to rise them parked in a cooler. If memory serves the sauce was in cans from the headquarters. There was this post adding more confirmation quote. Yes. The sauce came out of cans. In the late eighties, I worked one in California and two in Washington. So it's pretty remarkable things considered that multiple people were claiming in that local news reports that the food is just like they remember it because it's like it's not. That's a pretty big clue that they're not actually nostalgic for the food because the food is completely different. Another clue is that the nostalgia trends, trends extends, of course, far beyond restaurants. There's now a fairly large movement to bring back blockbuster and, uh, which a lot of people are talking about online right now and it's gaining traction. This is a post with around 2 million views quote. If Pizza Hut can return, then we can resurrect blockbuster and we should. While Netflix made things more convenient, we lost something irreplaceable. The ritual of going to a place with your family or friends to choose a story together. That experience was special. Now this is an idea that was first floated around three years ago, leading to a flurry of news reports, um, and, and, uh, speculation about blockbuster's resurrection. Here's one of them. Could blockbuster be making a comeback? The video rental store's website quietly came back online over the weekend with a simple message. We are working on rewinding your movie. The fondness of the company never really went away despite the chain all but entirely going out of business. Even with the rise in streaming services, the brand has remained popular among nostalgic millennials and young Gen Zers who have had an increase in affinity for all things 80s and 90s. There is still one remaining blockbuster store in the U.S. It's in Bendor. Now, nothing ever came of this, but the blockbuster website is still up in teaser format. So who knows? But we could say with absolute certainty that if blockbuster returns, it will be a disaster that business schools will study for generations, sort of like how flight schools teach, you know, blimp pilots about the Hindenburg. No matter how nostalgic you are, you are not actually going to get in your car and walk around a store to rent a DVD of a movie that you could find on streaming in 10 seconds. You're not really, you might do it once just for the, just for the nostalgia, just for the charm of it. You're not going to actually do that on a regular basis. And besides blockbuster, unlike Pizza Hut, was, you know, you might argue never actually a very good product. Everybody hated the late fees, disks would often be scratched, tapes would sometimes break or you'd have to rewind them. And what was a good product though by comparison was Netflix's DVD by Mail Service. And in case you weren't around for this, all you had to do was pick a plan and Netflix would mail you, this is Netflix in its early days, it'd mail you the DVDs from your queue in order of your preference. And then when you were done, you just send the disk back in its little return envelope and Netflix would immediately mail your next disk in the queue. There was a slight delay on occasion, but the benefit was massive. You could rent pretty much anything you wanted. In 2005, there were more than 35,000 DVDs you could rent on Netflix. By 2010, there were 100,000 on the platform. Selection was enormous. Now by comparison today, there are only around 8,000 titles on Netflix's streaming service, which is the only service they offer. They actually have less selection now. People don't realize that. If you combined every streaming service that's currently available, Netflix, Disney Plus, Max, Prime Video, Peacock, all of them, you wouldn't come close to the selection that Netflix was able to offer 15 years ago via the DVD by mail service. And the reason for this comes down to a legal doctrine called the first sale doctrine. And basically, when you buy a physical product, you're allowed to resell it or rent it out for whatever price you want. It's yours. The creator of the physical product has no control over the product anymore. So Netflix could buy any DVD they wanted on the open market, whether or not the studio wanted Netflix to offer it. And that's how their DVD by mail selection was so huge. If 20th Century Fox didn't want Netflix to offer rentals of predator, let's say, too bad, Netflix could simply send its employees out to go buy a bunch of copies and then rent them out. But streaming rights are completely different. In order to stream copyrighted content like a movie or a TV show, you need the explicit approval from the creator of the content. In practice, you have to sign a contract that's going to limit your distribution rights to a select period of time. And you're going to have to pay a lot of money for that privilege. With music, this hasn't been a big deal. All the major labels have simply allowed their songs to be used on Spotify and Apple Music. But the value of a TV show or a movie is much higher than a song. People watch TV shows for days or weeks at a time. They obviously cost a lot more money to make. So the studios have more leverage than the record labels, and they take advantage of it. And this is the massive downside of streaming services that people don't talk about nearly enough. There are plenty of other downsides. This is one people don't mention much, which is actually you end up with a more limited selection. It's kind of the worst of all worlds because it's this never-ending scroll of content, so it's hard to make a choice. It feels like you have too many choices. But you also have fewer than you would have had 15 years ago at the same time. The physical media is actually a lot cheaper for the consumer in the end because it strips away all the expensive, complicated licensing headaches and all the rest of it. Now all this to say, Netflix's DVD by Mail Service was, which only existed for just a blip on the radar. It didn't exist for very long. But you could argue it was the best way to rent movies. For just one monthly fee, using just one service, you could rent pretty much anything you wanted. The downside is that you might have to wait a day in order to watch it. Blockbuster never offered that convenience. They had late fees on like Netflix and each blockbuster store, depending on the size, only offered between 7,000 and 10,000 titles, a tenth of what Netflix was offering. So if people should be nostalgic for anything, it's probably a DVD by Mail Service from Netflix. That was a far better product than Blockbuster. There are very few industries more committed to charging absurd prices for no reason than the wireless industry. At some point, Americans just accepted that paying $80 or $90 a month for phone service was normal. If you actually stop and think about it, it's completely ridiculous, especially now that Pure Talk is offering unlimited high-speed data for just $34.99 a month. Their unlimited plan used to cost more than that, but instead of constantly raising prices like the major carriers do, they pushed the price down. Now you're able to get that unlimited high-speed data for $34.99 a month. Customers are tired of paying more every year while getting worse service and spending half their lives arguing with automated customer support systems. Pure Talk keeps it simple, no contract, no cancellation fee. 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Instead millions of people are pining for the return of Blockbuster, even though the reason Blockbuster went out of business is because nobody was going there anymore. It's like we all decided we didn't want to go to Blockbuster anymore. That's why they went out of business. And now 20 years later, everyone's saying, oh man, if only I could go to Blockbuster again. Well, you could have gone to Blockbuster 20 years ago and you didn't and that's why it doesn't exist. But it's not hard to figure out what's going on here. This is a post that I think gets to the core of the issue, although it misses one very important aspect. Quote, you don't actually miss Blockbuster. You miss hanging with your crew. You miss the adventure. You miss the discussion about whose house we're going to. You miss not having everything instantly available through cable or internet. You miss actual physical contact. You miss the gossip and the midnight pranks. You miss living in a somewhat peaceful neighborhood. You miss being able to have a great night with five bucks in your pocket. You miss not having to perform all the time. You miss having true friends. Now, actually sounds a little bit like that was chat GPT that you never know anymore. I can't trust anything that I see. It's really bad. Maybe that was his original idea. It sounds a bit chat GPT. I have no clue. But either way, the point is correct. This is the Blockbuster experience that Netflix's DVD service didn't match. With Netflix, you just make your decision on the computer, add the movie to your queue, and forget about it. That's the solitary experience for the most part from beginning to end. With Blockbuster, you had to physically leave your house, which required human interaction. You would debate over movie selection, often a difficult debate, given that Blockbuster didn't always have the movie you wanted. You kind of family and friends planned their night around a Blockbuster trip. Blockbuster was a shared experience from a time when we had a shared culture. That's the point. Now, at the same time, just keep things grounded a bit. A lot of people who do have rose-colored glasses about the experience, I saw one former Blockbuster employee write, quote, Blockbuster was not a social meeting hub or anything like what people are saying. Everyone wandered the aisles in solitary silence, even if they arrived together. The latest promotional video clip was on loop and blared through the store the entire time. It was so obnoxious you couldn't think, which was probably the point. On the rare occasions when people remained in groups, they would often argue about why they don't want to see one movie over another. This would inevitably end with someone being humiliated publicly for having out-group tastes and cinema-style trends, etc. Check out was like playing roulette, customer anxiously waiting to find out the amount of accumulated late fees from their last movie rental spree, from which an entire new set of calculations on what to rent that night would soon formulate in their minds. So I don't know, that might have been Cheshire BT2. Everything is now. Everything is. So maybe adults are nostalgic for the kinds of experiences they think they had at Blockbuster, now that most people are buried in their cell phones all the time. Memory is kind of a funny thing. People have a lot of pleasant memories, real or not, about their childhoods, about their time at Blockbuster. But this is a common theme. Millennials are overwhelmed with nostalgia for things that, in many cases, wouldn't judge done their own merits in a clear-eyed and objective way, weren't actually all that great. Just as one example, consider the reboots we mentioned earlier to all these iconic 90s shows. Several years ago, Netflix launched its full house reboot, which I think was called Fuller House. And the show was canceled after a few seasons. The audience generally found that it lacked the charm of the original series. They didn't really like it. Nobody cared. No one remembers it now. I think it went off air three or four years ago. It's like it didn't exist. But if we're being totally honest about it, the original series was not exactly an artistic masterpiece. I mean, it was cliched. It was corny. It was poorly acted. It's not terribly well written. It was kind of a punchline for most people at the time when it was on the air. It was not... There's no full house episodes you can point to and say, this is a classic of the form. This was great art. No, it's like pretty bad for the most part. But millennials miss shows like Full House not because the shows were always great or even good, but because they miss the culture that these shows and movies and music and blockbuster stores and pizza hut restaurants existed in. They miss the shared cultural experience of these things. Right? They miss what the things represent. Scott Greer posted this analysis on X. He said, quote, there's a reason why millennials are obsessed with childhood nostalgia. They're the generation who did its homework and wasn't rewarded for it. Their expectation got shafted by either the recession or COVID or both. Their childhood stands as a utopia when their dreams still had a chance and the disappointments of adulthood were far away. Now, where I disagree with Scott is that I don't... I mean, there's a lot of truth to that, but I don't think that COVID or the Great Recession are the only causes or even the main causes for this new trend where you've got adults who are obsessed with all the stuff from their childhood and going to Disney World and pining for the days of blockbuster trips. It's certainly reasonable to conclude that these events led to a lot of problems and resentment, but I actually think you can identify a different cause. One that, like the Great Recession, began nearly two decades ago. So all of this nostalgia points towards and longs for a time when we had a shared cultural experience, a monoculture. We've talked about this a few times in recent months. There was a time when we all existed within the same culture. We all had basically the same cultural experience, but those days are over. One of the biggest movies in the box office right now is the Michael Jackson movie, and this is another remnant of a culture that no longer exists. Michael Jackson was, whatever else you want to say about him, was a superstar of a kind that simply does not exist anymore and cannot exist because we don't have enough of a shared cultural experience for a superstar like that to come into being in the first place. And so that's the thing that people miss. They cling to these avatars, these mascots of the monoculture, but it's the monoculture that they actually are pining for, not the things themselves. Now I've laid out my theory as to when the monoculture died and was supplanted by what we have today, which is a fractured culture, a culture split into a billion tiny pieces, an anti-culture. And I've previously identified 2007 to 2008 as the time when the shift happened. A lot of things hit at the exact same moment in history. Smartphones, the recession, as I just mentioned, the Obama era, and these things arose from a culture, but the culture didn't survive them. Within a few years, the culture as we knew it would be gone. But as I've thought more about this and read more into it, I think we can get more specific because there was something else that happened around this time about a year later that may have been, more than anything else, the most devastating and ultimately fatal blow to the monoculture. So let's zoom out a little bit and go back to the beginning of social media in the early 2000s. Social media often gets blamed for killing the culture, destroying the culture, which I understand, and I've indicated similar things plenty of times. But it kind of misses the point to some degree because in the early days, social media wasn't just more rudimentary than it is now. It was actually, it was fundamentally different. It was a different kind of thing. It was designed to do something that it doesn't do at all anymore. In fact, it does the opposite of what it was originally designed to do, you could argue. At the time, it was a way to connect and interact largely with people that you know in your real life. Now, this is a concept that's totally alien to young people who grew up on post-2010 social media, but it's true. Originally, kids, social media was like, think of it like a giant group chat with your family, friends, and classmates. That's what it was. For example, take a look at what MySpace looked like in 2008. At the very top of the webpage, it says MySpace, a place for friends. You're prompted to find friends on MySpace. At the bottom of the page, it states view profiles and add friends to your network. You can browse some content related to movies and musicians, but otherwise, it's presenting itself as a platform where you primarily interact with people you know in real life. Now, it did also give you seemingly personal access to famous people and celebrities, which at the time was revolutionary. It gave us kind of access to public people that had never existed before. But generally speaking, it was you went on MySpace and you got connected with the people that you know. Along the same lines, here's Facebook in 2007. Quote, Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you. And then below that, it reads, get the latest news from your friends. Tag your friends. Join a network to see people who live, study, or work around you. The pitch is explicit. You're joining these platforms in order to socialize with people that you know in real life or who live in close proximity to you. That was the whole pitch. Nobody wanted to hear from strangers. You could follow pages for celebrities where you could find information about their upcoming appearances, tour dates or something like that and maybe feel like you had some kind of connection with them. But that was about it. You know, there was no parasocial component whatsoever. But then a change happened in 2009 that was actually one of the most consequential shifts of this century. One of the most, one of the shifts that will define this century. And it's hardly ever discussed. Man, whenever I use a sports book during the soccer world championship, I feel like I'm getting robbed. Dude, delete that app. You need to be using Polymarket. Polymarket. Polymarket is a prediction market. Not a sports book. You trade against other fans, not the house. That means more money for you and less for greedy sports books. Even during the world championship, especially during the world championship, whether you're trading on who wins the next match or who lifts the trophy in the final sports books take around $9 on a $100 position and pay out around $500. Polymarket pays out $650 on that same position. What's the catch? No catch. And it's available in all 50 states. Polymarket is so confident. They're giving you $50 free on your first trade. How do I get started? Download Polymarket now and use promo code PASS for $50 free on your first trade with the world championship heating up. Stop letting sports books steal from you. Download Polymarket and use promo code PASS for $50 free on your first trade. Use promo code PASS. Trading not available in all jurisdictions. Check local regulations before trading. Restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Man, whenever I use a sports book during the soccer world championship, I feel like I'm getting robbed. Dude, delete that app. You need to be using Polymarket. Polymarket is a prediction market, not a sports book. You trade against other fans, not the house. That means more money for you and less for greedy sports books. Even during the world championship, especially during the world championship, whether you're trading on who wins the next match or who lifts the trophy in the final sports books take around $9 on a $100 position and pay out around $500. Polymarket pays out $650 on that same position. What's the catch? No catch. And it's available in all 50 states. Polymarket is so confident. They're giving you $50 free on your first trade. How do I get started? Download Polymarket now and use promo code PASS for $50 free on your first trade. With the world championship heating up, stop letting sports books steal from you. Download Polymarket and use promo code PASS for $50 free on your first trade. Use promo code PASS. Trading not available in all jurisdictions. Check local regulations before trading. Restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. And that is that Facebook switched to an algorithm driven newsfeed. And within a few years, every other social media company, eventually streaming platform followed. Um, and now feeds are personalized by this invisible and mostly mysterious algorithm. Social media very quickly stopped being a place to connect with real life friends and family. It became your own universe serving you content. No matter where it comes from or who's posting it, that the algorithm thinks you'll engage with. Now I wasn't able to find many news reports from 2009 on this topic, but I did because I mean, at the time when it happened, it wouldn't have seemed as this, it wouldn't have seemed like an earth shattering world shaping change, but it was in hindsight. I did come across this contemporaneous report from a random grandmother who was upset about what she was seeing. And I have to say she was ahead of her time. Watch. Hi, Grandma Mary here. And I'm talking today about the changes in Facebook. What's going on? Do they have to change things all the time? How about us older people who just like things status quo, keep them as they are. So what we have now is the live feed and the news feed. And I'm here on my granddaughter's site here, Andrea, and I'm just going to demonstrate on this site. So the live feed, what they've done is you used to have a little highlights area over on the side. And what they've done now is the live feed is that highlights area. It's what it thinks. I'm sorry. The news feed is the highlights area. Don't it? I'm getting confused. The news feed is like what the highlights area used to be. So the news feed is kind of what they think are popular. Like the certain things people have commented on or things that you might think are interested, interesting based on your previous use. And I don't know how it's tracking that, but who knows. Uh, who knows what data is out there on us. You know, kind of crazy. So the news feed, the problem with the news feed is you're going to miss some stuff. You're not going to see updates that are happening. So what is going to be more and more important here is your lists and how you're grouping your friends. So you're making sure you're not missing things. And that's here on the side. Now you can see, you can create lots of different groups. And I've, and my granddaughter here has one from moms. She's, you know, a mom. So she wants to see her mom friends and see what they're doing. So that's a video from, uh, like 15 years ago, it has like 300 views that my producers found somehow. I don't, I don't know how, but we, you know, we, we, uh, we dig deep on this show to, uh, get you, get you, get to paint the picture for you. But her complaint is that Facebook introduced an algorithm driven news feed where they show you content that they think that you'll like. They show you popular posts that get a lot of engagement instead of say a status update from a relative that nobody has liked. And as you just heard, the only way to opt out of the system was to manually switch to the live feed and create various lists of people that you care about. Similarly, the system X uses now where you have to manually toggle away from the for you tab to get rid of the algorithm. Wasn't user friendly. And that was by design. Facebook wanted people to gravitate towards content that was not necessarily relevant to their personal lives. They wanted, they wanted, you know, it was, it was no longer about staying connected with people that is no longer about connecting with friends, right? And that's why by 2013, Facebook's front page looked, uh, somewhat different. Quote, it says, quote, connect with your friends and the world around you. That was the new pitch. Instead of talking only to people that you knew, talk to anyone. And by extension, anyone could talk to you. That's how influencers were created. It's how Facebook became a trillion dollar company. Corporations started popping up in the news feed. They pay a lot of money for the privilege. This was one change by Facebook and then Instagram and Twitter and ultimately TikTok, uh, all followed. And it's one that perhaps more than any other single factor, I would argue led to the destruction of the model culture. It allowed various different subcultures, which would have been isolated and irrelevant on their own to gain massive influence on, on our culture and politics to connect everyone with a custom curated stream of content designed to appeal to their specific interests, actually to shape their specific interests and then appeal to those interests as opposed to the kind of general interests of the culture at large. And now, as we all seen, the change has made us incredibly susceptible to manipulation from political entities, corporations, advertisements, et cetera. And our social feeds are increasingly fake and manipulated. You know, we, we live now in a culture almost entirely shaped by the algorithm, which is to say that we have no culture. I mean, this, this is at the end of the day, but this is how this is the primary, this is the window that almost everyone is looking through to see the world around them. It is the algorithm. You, you couldn't possibly overstate the significance of it. This is the primary way that people learn about the world, connect with people. Uh, express their viewpoints. All of it is being done as being filtered through an algorithm. Now, when I made this point the other day, I received this criticism from Michael Brendan Doherty at National Review Online. Actually, he makes a good point. He says, quote, although I'm often nostalgic for it and wonder if I could have succeeded more in it, I'm not sure we should mourn a time when six companies, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corp, uh, GE, Sony and Disney basically viewed themselves as programming the entire culture. Now I'm sympathetic to the broader point, which is that it's obviously not ideal for six companies to have that kind of cultural influence. The problem is that today, rather than having a culture programmed by six entertainment companies or six, you know, companies, it's now programmed by three basically big tech companies. And it's done through algorithms and increasingly AI. So weirdly, while the monoculture has been exploded into a billion pieces, our cultural experience has also been narrowed in a sense. It kind of goes back to the Netflix thing where they, it's like, it seems like they're giving you more options. They're actually giving you fewer options. It seems like you're in this infinite space now. You're actually in a narrow hallway and you don't even realize it. That's why now, you know, if you interact with a piece of content about a certain subject, your whole feed will be inundated with that subject for two weeks. Like the algorithms only goal is to keep you staring at the screen. It doesn't care at all what you watch or why. So if you watch something, the algorithm says, oh, you like that? Here's a billion more of that. And then this thing that, you know, you weren't like obsessed with, you just, you just, you saw one, whatever. You maybe it's, um, it's a, I'll tell, I'll give you an example for personally, I guess the rapper Drake dropped an album last week and there was like one tweet about it that I was, I'm not going to listen to it, but I'm, I'm, you know, it's, there was like a tweet that said, oh, he's got an album coming out. And so I briefly hovered over that tweet about the Drake album, but I'm not that interested in it. It's just like, it's a thing that's happening in pop culture. Oh, okay. He's got an album coming out. Fine. And the next thing I know for the next five days, I'm getting nothing, but Drake fans in my, it's all just, the algorithm saw me hover over the Drake thing. And then it assumed that, oh, you must, the only thing you want to hear about is Drake, apparently. And I can't reason with the algorithm. I can't say, well, no, no, no, I didn't, I don't care that much. I just, I cared for five seconds. That's as long as I cared. But this is what it does. Now, 30 years ago, there were human beings at Viacom or Time Warner or Disney or your local radio station making decisions about what kind of music and shows and films you and everyone else in the country would be exposed to. They shaped the tastes. They programmed the culture, as Dougherty puts it. And he's right. They programmed at least pop culture. And there are plenty of problems with that arrangement, but I don't think any of those problems have been solved now. And most of them have been made considerably worse. Because now the programming power rests with an even smaller collection of much more powerful companies. And as I said, they're using an unhuman, soulless algorithm to do the programming. An algorithm that doesn't care at all, at all about the artistic quality of the content it puts in front of you. It doesn't even care what kind of content it is. The only thing that matters is that you keep watching it. And unlike the entertainment companies 30 years ago, the algorithm knows how long you're watching it down to the millisecond. And it knows a lot of other things about you that the cultural programmers decades ago would not have known. And that's why our cultural output has been nondescript for a very long time. I talked about this last week, every decade in modern American history, every decade, you know, can be identified and defined by its own style, right? Its own approach to music and film and fashion, its own aesthetic. And that seems to have stopped right around 2010. The 2010s don't really have their own unique feel, even in retrospect, certainly not as vividly as the 70s and 80s and 90s do. When I say 70s and 80s and 90s, if I say any one of those decades, there's like a feel of it, the sound of it, the look, the feel, everything comes rushing into your mind, you know, exactly what it looks like and feels like and sounds like. If I say 2010s, there might be a vague, you might have a vague idea of certain things like, oh, yeah, skinny jeans and hipsters, maybe sort of at the beginning. Uh, and then a couple other things, but it's not nearly as vivid. And then you get to the 2020s, the decade we're in right now. And there's no, doesn't really have any defining cultural characteristic at all. We were more than halfway through the decade. What are the movies, music, style and trends of this decade that it will be remembered for, right? If in 2035, if someone is throwing a 2020s party, um, and they tell you to come dressed up like it's the 2020s, what, what, what was that? What's that going to mean? That's like we fell into some kind of cultural black hole. And some people would say the culture froze earlier, like at the turn of the millennium. Um, but I don't think that's true. You know, the 2000s definitely had their own feel. If I refer to an early 2000s comedy or an early 2000s music, you kind of know what I mean, the shift happened later at the end of the 2000s into the 2010s. And I think that this, that this shift, so it started with the existence of social media, but not that alone, because social media, when you were just connecting with your friends, it was a way of participating in the shared cultures, a way of sharing the shared culture. You know, that, that's what my space was in 2006. Um, but that was the start of it. And then it was the smartphones that came along. So now you can carry this stuff around your pocket with you all the time. And then finally, the algorithm and this decision by Facebook, I think is the genesis of the entire transformation. That's not to say that some other company wouldn't have done the same thing and led to the same result. It's not about Facebook specifically. And TikTok and Twitter would have taken us down a similar path, but Facebook was the first by a wide margin and they were by far the biggest driver. At this point, half the country is on some kind of daily regimen, cabinet full of pills, five different subscriptions, maybe even different doctors telling you different things. And most people still feel like they're guessing, especially when it comes to cholesterol health. A lot of people are hesitant when they're told they may need to start taking something that they're not comfortable with long term. People want options and some say, some say in how they take care of themselves. 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Although a few people realized it at the time, Facebook was changing the purpose of social media. If you remember, social media was sold to us as a kind of new media that empowered ordinary people to challenge established orthodoxies and big media. A lot of people still describe it that way, especially former big media stars who moved their platforms to the internet. Glenn Reynolds wrote a book about it, notably titled, An Army of Davids. And to some extent, that's true, I guess. We've done our fair share of shifting the Overton window on our show and through movies and that sort of thing. And however, there's a lot of evidence that the algorithm is now increasingly so inorganic. I mean, it was never organic, it's an algorithm, but it's becoming increasingly artificial and manipulated. So consider this in the New York Times quote, in the past year, journalists have uncovered numerous payments to influencers to shape public opinion or lobby government officials, including efforts to protect sugary sodas from regulation, block proposed state and federal AI legislation, promote Israeli interests to American audiences. And last month, undermined a congressional candidate before primary. Some of the payments to influencers in particular, the marketing firms that specialize in political social media, are disclosed in public records. One of those firms, Crater Grid, has received almost $875,000 from the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Correctional Committee since late 2023, including a payment of $35,840 in February. On its website, Crater Grid says it connects Republican candidates with the internet's most powerful conservative influencers, but other political social media agencies scarcely appear in FEC records. In part, that's because much of the money to the creators originates from nonprofit advocacy organizations that are not required to report their spending rather than from campaigns or political action committees. Now, before 2009, it's true that a handful of major corporations controlled this type of influence, and they used their power to function like a kind of hidden hand that dictated the course of world events. The news media united to destroy Richard Nixon, who had just won 49 out of 50 states in the 1972 presidential election in a coordinated takedown that wouldn't be nearly as effective today. And we know that because they tried it on Trump. If X existed during Watergate, people would wonder about the CIA connections of those Washington Post journalists. They'd point out that Nixon was raising questions about the U.S. government's possible involvement in Kennedy's assassination. And the narrative would collapse, just like the various Trump hoaxes that ultimately fell apart, leading to Trump's reelection. But at the same time, just because these major corporations abused their influence, which they did, that obviously doesn't mean that any replacement is automatically better. Prior to 2009, there was the official narrative, and then whatever you and your social circle chose to believe. Post 2009, there's the official narrative and a million other narratives from all over the world. And if no one in your real life social circle buys into the other narrative, you prefer that you can go online and engage with strangers who do. And the more you interact with them, the more the algorithm will bombard you with the same content over and over again. The result has been the rise of demented fringe ideologies like transgenderism, a significant increase in political violence and hysteria, breakdown of friendships and community. The mass adoption of cell phones and broadband internet accelerated the trend. Yes, but they weren't the root cause. All the nostalgia we see today in truth is not about red cups at Pizza Hut or or, you know, late fees at Blockbuster. People are not exactly pining for a more inconvenient analog lifestyle. They're pining for a world that is not shaped by faceless, mindless algorithms. They're pining for a culture that for all its problems was at least shared. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed. Martin Luther King Jr. is an American icon, widely considered one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. A man who had a vision for a colorblind society post-racial America. He had a dream. It's just not the dream you thought it was. Or his true aims, a colorblind society or something far more radical. Who bankrolled him. What unfolded behind the scenes in Birmingham, Alabama? Was civil disobedience actually peaceful? We wanted to show you a clip of the I Have a Dream speech, but according to our lawyers, we can't. In fact, King's family has made a lot of money suing media outlets. They want to silence critics like us. What they're doing makes it very difficult to judge Martin Luther King Jr. not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. Is America today stronger, more unified and more unique? Is America today stronger, more unified and racially equal than before King's rise? These questions demand answers. And as Americans, we are entitled to a full accounting of the civil rights movement and its consequences. King's movement fundamentally transformed our country and our system of government. I speak as a citizen of the world. Each day the war goes on, the hatred increases, though the cause of evil prosper. First part of our two-part special on the civil rights movement, a new constitution available now on Daily Wire Plus. Who helps America go farther? Fly higher. Dream even bigger. People do. Since 1879, our people have been more than a source of energy. They've been a source of progress. Today, that same progress is helping deliver record U.S. energy production, fueling the workers, the makers, the boundary pushers and risk takers who sparked the breakthroughs that move America forward. Learn more about what our people do at chevron.com slash USA 250.