Boomer brain rot started long before Facebook

Why did boomers “go crazy” — and was the internet actually to blame? Ryan is joined by Sam Seder to trace the long history of boomer radicalization, from the Fairness Doctrine and Rush Limbaugh to Fox News, 9/11, Alex Jones, and the algorithmic media ecosystem that followed. Together they argue that the internet didn’t create boomer brain rot so much as supercharge a worldview that had already been built by decades of grievance-driven mass media. Our guest Sam Seder hosts The Majority Report, whose past episodes can be found here, on YouTube, and all major podcast platforms (or check it out live Monday to Friday from 12-2:30pm). Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our exclusive Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:28Ryan Broderick?

  I remember the first uses of like, "OK boomer" happening when I was in college still, so like, late 2000s. I was like, entering the workforce, 2010, 11, 12, and like, I didn't like boomers for reasons I didn't totally understand. Like, I knew that you made fun of them, like, that was the point, I think.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  I distinctly remember somewhere probably around 2016 or 17, when my daughter started saying that to me. She was like, 12, or 13, or 14.

• 1:00Ryan Broderick?

  Do you remember what she would "OK boomer" you about?

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Anything. So, right now, for instance, I'm Skibidi.

• 1:24Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, you're a Skibidi toilet.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  I'm Skibidi, I'm Skibidi toilet, I am definitely not Sigmar Riz.

• 1:31Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, I'm sorry to hear that.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  And that could be in any context.

• 1:34Ryan Broderick?

  I feel like not being Sigmar Riz is fine. Uh, you know, I think that's fine.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  I found it disappointing.

• 1:40Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, well, I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, that's too bad. I like to think I'm a Sigmar male, but maybe, maybe only some days. I'm Ryan Broderick. Joining us throughout the episode will be our producer, Grant Irving, who pops in from time to time. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually, reality. And today, we are questioning the very premise of our show, which is, we're gonna try to answer the question, uh, was it the internet that made boomers go quote-unquote insane? And I have a different theory I'll be sharing a little later, but joining me is, uh, so Grant wrote this, and I'm really sorry for how Grant described you here, I just wanted to be clear, this is from Grant, "The left's hippest Gen X-er."

• 2:19Ryan Broderick?

  Host of The Majority Report, destroyer of many recent viral videos, Sam Seder. Hey, how are you doing? Welcome.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Uh, thanks for having me, Ryan, and then thank you, Grant, for... Are there other Gen Xers?

• 2:32Ryan Broderick?

  I think there's a few on YouTube.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  I am very, very early Gen X.

• 2:39Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Does that mean young Gen X or older Gen X?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Oh, uh, well, I'm not even sure what that means. But I am like, you know, like a year away from being a boomer.

• 2:52Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, okay, I got you. So I'm oriented to that.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  A lot of my friends, I guess, which I didn't realize, are boomers. But not the boomer boomers.

• 3:02Ryan Broderick?

  Not the boomer boomers, sure. Do you remember the first time you thought maybe the boomer mindset was aging poorly?

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, in the 80s.

• 3:12Ryan Broderick?

  Really?

• 3:13Speaker 02

  I mean, there was something wrong in the 80s, and I had a feeling it had to do with the people like, uh, Wall Street, Michael Douglas' character.

• 3:24Ryan Broderick?

  Right, of course, greed is good, Gordon Gekko, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Yes. I think I perceived him as a boomer. I don't know if Michael Douglas, per se, would have been, but I think so.

• 3:32Ryan Broderick?

  I do think you've touched on something really important about sort of talking about generational politics, which is that it can get very fuzzy. I think the further you kind of like go down this rabbit hole, you're kind of like trying to put people into boxes that might not actually exist, maybe.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  I think our generations have gotten appropriately smaller in this era, but probably needed to be a little bit smaller. There needed to be another generation, you know, somewhere between Gen X and boomers.

• 4:04Ryan Broderick?

  That's interesting. Yeah, because I do feel like millennials run right up against Gen Xers. Like, I had Gen X coworkers and Gen X bosses. Like, that was like, that was my introduction to the world coming out of college. And then my parents are boomers, but the difference between the Gen X and the boomer line just feels, it feels drastically different to me in ways that I think are interesting. But I feel like my concept of like the baby boomer culture as a culture as it exists would have been like when I discovered Jon Stewart and like cable news. I feel like it was like very post 9/11 to me of like, okay, this is a cohort of people that have different views of reality than I do.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  That Jon Stewart was a boomer.

• 4:44Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, no, that, that it was like, like discovering the Daily Show in, in high school and college, like, learning about cable news and the world of it through the Daily Show, through that lens, kind of introduced me to the idea of baby boomer culture, as something divorced from my life, in a way.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, the funny part is that Jon Stewart is a boomer. And he's

• 5:04Ryan Broderick?

  Damn.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  I mean, it's weird.

• 5:06Ryan Broderick?

  It is weird.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Because I do think that he is in that cohort that really should be between Gen X. And although, like, I sort of feel like I'm actually Gen X and the people after me are not. Because the Gen X, like, when, in the early 90s, I understood, you know, you had Copeland's book, but I understood Gen X to be the guys in Slackers.

• 5:34Ryan Broderick?

  I, I would say so, too.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  And they are actually, probably boomers.

• 5:40Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, this is wild.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  They're a year or two older than me.

• 5:44Ryan Broderick?

  This is already getting off the rails. I love this.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  And I hung out with people like that. And so I feel like there's a cohort in between boomers, which should take some of the, like, sort of, late hanging fruit, would maybe the highest fruit or the lowest fruit?

• 6:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  From the boomer, and, and, and maybe a year, sort of like, younger than me, that should be really the Gen X. Because we were the ones in the shadow of the boomer generation. The problem with the boomer generation was they, it was their size. And the sort of, like, intersection with their size with, I would say, probably, our subsidizing corn.

• 6:34Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  In the early 70s, Nixon's Commerce Secretary, they made an active decision to subsidize corn, so that people would have more disposable income.

• 6:47Ryan Broderick?

  Oh.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  It would, it would drop the price of food. And that's the era where everything went to shit.

• 6:58Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Not just because of the corn, not because of the, not exclusively because of subsidy.

• 7:03Ryan Broderick?

  But it was the disposable income.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  It was the disposable income and it was also the era when lawyers got to, got to advertise.

• 7:14Ryan Broderick?

  So, okay, yes, yes.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  And, and now boomers are now like in their like early twenties, their thirties around that time. They came into Wall Street also, I think, like just the generation, just a little bit older than, like, you know, started doing a lot of like the financialization, but they're the ones who really juiced it, I think.

• 7:36Ryan Broderick?

  I also, I mean, tell me if I'm off base here, but I feel like there's something very unique, mirrored by millennials to a degree, actually, where the boomer generation, you know, as general terms here, remembers a world without really a modern idea of mass media and then kind of comes of age during the full corporatization of mass media. And I do think they're like a very unique generation in that way, more so even than millennials, where they, their viewpoint, their sort of sense of reality was canonized by the television, by mass Hollywood appeal, by popular music as a concept, which like, you know, didn't really exist before, let's say, if you wanted to be simplistic, like Elvis into the Beatles

• 8:19Ryan Broderick?

  era, like, all of their lives were sort of reflected back to them as like this homogenized media reflection, which I think is like kind of important for thinking about their politics now. Like they, that's my read on it.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  I think that's true. And I would add to that by saying, it wasn't just that it was homogenized, because arguably, I think in their minds, it was, um, counterculture in some ways, but it was a perfect reflection because.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  They were the first to have that commercialization and they were such a big generation. That's the whole point. They were such a big generation that their whole perspective, as it's like dictated by context, and in those days, context was much more narrow, right? Like you only had three channels of television. You only had so many, you know, musical options, right? Like, things were just more narrow and so their tastes, as defined by their context, was completely and almost it was the exclusive product of culture.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  And so like, that's how you get the me generation because it really is completely centered around your perspective in a way that like, A, you may not have had mass culture in the same way prior to or commercialized mass culture prior to that generation. You do have it today, obviously, but it's far more fragmented. And so even the millennials who have that sort of buying power to dictate, they're still on some level, we're still all living in the shadow of the boomers because everybody was selling to them.

• 10:14Ryan Broderick?

  And that is a perfect tee up for, so we try, we try to figure out like when the idea of like the boomer brain rot concept started, or like how it began, like how did we get here? And it's kind of, it's a hard story to tell, but where we start, I think, which makes sense, I think to me, is August 1987 when Reagan and the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine, which for our listeners required national TV and radio networks to give airtime to both sides for controversial topics. And then about a year later, we see the emergence of a local conservative radio host. I'm sure you're a big fan of this guy, Rush Limbaugh?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  I'll tell you something, I actually have listened to probably more Rush Limbaugh than anybody you will ever interview. I would, I would.

• 11:02Ryan Broderick?

  Take that bet, absolutely. Here is a Wall Street Journal op ed that directly connects his success to mainstream media now being able to sort of take sides. And they write, "Many people say, 'I need to be balanced with equal time,' Limbaugh said. I don't need to be balanced with equal time because..." And then the, the crowd, uh, you know, that he's speaking to starts cheering, "I am equal time." And I do feel like this is sort of the most important domino, you know, in this story. So now by 1990, Rush is the most popular radio show in America. And the New York Times writes, "His persona, comic blowhard, his style, a schizoid spritz, balancing between earnest lecturer and political vaudevillian."

• 11:46Ryan Broderick?

  So what are your sort of earliest memories of Rush? And, and, and more importantly, I think the world before Rush and then after, because I feel like that is the, the watershed moment here for a lot of this stuff.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Well, I'll tell you what I do remember. I remember George Herbert Walker Bush having to apologize to Rush Limbaugh. I can't remember what it was about, but he had to go on there and apologize.

• 12:09Ryan Broderick?

  Wow, like a real kowtow moment. That's wild.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  I think, I don't know if it was like 91, 92. I don't know if I had the sophistication to understand exactly all that was going on, but you know, Herbert Walker Bush was sort of like the balance to Ronald Reagan's ticket. And Ronald Reagan was so ascendant by that point that Herbert Walker Bush needed Limbaugh's blessing. Yeah. And it was really just bad comedy mixed in with like this, uh, you know, sort of almost like coast to coast quality conspiracy theory. But the Republicans had to kowtow to him.

• 12:46Ryan Broderick?

  Cause he was so powerful? Yeah.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:48Ryan Broderick?

  Before we go any further in the timeline here, I do want to ask a question because I think it's, I want to pin this question across the whole episode. Cause it's one that I, I truly don't have the context for, and I'm hoping to get an answer maybe, or at least come to some sort of conclusion, which is, do you feel like people were waiting for someone like Rush Limbaugh? Or were changed by someone like Rush Limbaugh? Like, cause I feel like if we can answer that question.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  I think there was, I think there was a little bit of both because Limbaugh's big thing was do not doubt yourself. Limbaugh's number one job throughout, you know, and having listened to him probably from. You know, early 90s to at least through 2010, 2012. But his big thing was do not doubt yourself. Do not let the creeping doubt in. And it was basically his way of saying like, if you start thinking that you're being racist, no, you're not. If you think that, if you think that, if you think that like, hey, is this a bad thing that we're doing this to the planet? No.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Like, all of the things he was basically telling boomers, reinforcing this notion of like, the world is in your image. Sure. Which is like, you know, what they were learning from commerce. Like, you're seeing yourself reflected back on television because you're the biggest market. And you're important, right. Do not doubt that there's any experience outside of that that is valid. And that was it, basically. I mean, I remember this one segment, and this must have been sometime around like 2007. I'm listening to Rush Limbaugh, and he's talking about how the loony left environmentalists,

• 14:45Speaker 02

  and he's got this great story, and he starts to read the story. And I know like what he was doing, because I do, you know, this is what I would do on radio too. Like, his producer had given him, you know, a story, and then yellowed it for him. And he's reading about the Swiss Alps. And these loony lefts are putting on a, and he's reading it, they're putting like tin foil on the mountain because they're so afraid of global warming and that it's melting. And then as he reads it, he inadvertently reads the part which says that this was done by the corporation that owns the mountain because they were worried about losing profits. And then he quickly goes to break.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  But the idea was that everything he would do, and people would call in and he would say, don't doubt yourself. Do not doubt yourself. And that was the big thing that they wanted because this is an era, a cohort of people who live through... And by cohort of people, I mean white men.

• 15:47Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Yeah, you're too specific here, yeah.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  And women, white women.

• 15:50Ryan Broderick?

  The unfortunate women married to them.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Prescribed to white, yes. And they're going through a tremendous amount of social change that necessarily places them lower than they were in the social pecking order. In other words, you know, it's more egalitarian. They were on the top and Gen Xers of my age, we were on the sort of like, just on the other side of it. Where like, the idea that women can make money is not like a revolutionary.

• 16:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, is that gonna end the world?

• 16:36Speaker 02

  There was a cohort of people who just like, resented the fact, like Brett Kavanaugh.

• 16:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Although he's more a Gen X, I guess, but he, the idea that like, hey, when I was born, I was sort of bequeathed to something.

• 16:51Ryan Broderick?

  And it was taken away from me, exactly.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  And it was taken away from me. And Limbaugh was there, basically, the people he spoke to didn't quite have it taken away from them. It was just being threatened. And so, they had to be, like, their perspective on the world had to be maintained.

• 17:12Ryan Broderick?

  So I won't torment you with Rush Limbaugh clips, but I am gonna show you one in just a second. And I think it's a really fascinating clip to look at, because I had, I had heard this argument last year, that I hadn't really considered, and I, I kind of like it, which is that, when you have something like the sexual revolution happening to, let's say, baby boomers in their teenage and early twenties, and then you see the rise of mass media corporatizing it, homogenizing it, sanding down the, the counter-cultural, you know, aspects of it, what you're left with is what you said earlier, the me generation. The idea that, you know, everything can be found inside, everything can be found within. And we found this ad from Rush Limbaugh, that I think is a fascinating artifact, because

• 17:51Ryan Broderick?

  it, it does sort of tie to this idea that boomer conservatism is based around a, a weird sexual politics, let's put it that way. So, tell me if you can hear this.

• 18:04Speaker 03

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• 18:17Ryan Broderick?

  Now, for people who cannot see the clip, that is three people, a man and two women, showing off their Rush Limbaugh shirts as they pop champagne and I believe that this is heavily implying that you can tell people that you're a swinger if you wear Rush Limbaugh merch. I believe that's what I'm looking at right now.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm not sure. I, I think what's more, I think, listen, I think what's more relevant is less that they're swingers, but that the white guy is literally centered.

• 18:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he's in the middle of both women, that is true. Yeah.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  He is, and they are both sort of clocked to him. That is the dynamic.

• 18:59Ryan Broderick?

  You said that like politicians at his height, let's say in the early 90s, were sort of appearing on his show, apologizing to him. Do you feel like that fundamentally did change the Republican Party as an institution?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Absolutely. His ability to move people, he put conservatism on steroids.

• 19:21Ryan Broderick?

  Well, when we're talking about the 90s though, we do have to introduce one more character here before we get any further. So in 1996, a couple of years after the Rush Limbaugh explosion, Austin, Texas is getting very popular and they have a local public access TV show full of weird freaks. And at the time, a 22-year-old weird freak, possibly the comedian Bill Hicks, who faked his own death and then reinvented himself as a, as a talk show host, a man named Alex Jones appears on TV and the Observer at the time describes it thusly, "On his early shows, Jones would sit behind a desk in front of a star map of the universe and take calls, ranting red-faced into a camera about the police state, the new world order and exposing shadowy elites." And he quickly gets a radio show, the final edition. Was this on your radar in the mid 90s?

• 20:06Speaker 02

  I had a buddy who was into him. He, I don't know how he heard him at that time.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  But it had to do, maybe this was the early aughts, with David Icke. Because the funny part is, is that Sure. Yeah. Alien conspiracy theory. Yes. Yes. Lizard. Lizard reptilian guy. Funny thing is that, I've seen a clip of Alex Jones saying that David Icke is the turd in the punch bowl. Uh, that basically, you know, he's put out there to, to make the truth that people like Alex Jones were exposing seem like discredited conspiracy theories. Oh, that's funny. In fact, we just played this clip on the show, that clip of Alex Jones recently on the show, because

• 20:55Speaker 02

  it is also extremely reminiscent of a clip of Tucker Carlson in 2000 saying that Bill O'Reilly was a fraud and he was gonna get uncovered at one point. And I think what happened to both Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones is they both realized, like, wait a second. No, these guys are just succeeding, succeeding. And so, you know, I think Tucker Carlson realized, like, nobody's ever going to blow Bill O'Reilly's Everyman cover, it doesn't matter what he does. And I think Tucker Carlson adopted that, and I think Alex Jones, uh, to the extent that he,

• 21:36Speaker 02

  you know, was conscious of what he was doing, saw that David Icke was, like, this is where we're gonna go. And he, he followed that conspiracy thing. But I would also argue that it's not inconceivable to me that Limbaugh was drawing from Alex Jones in terms of conspiracies, or that Jones was drawing from Limbaugh in terms of the idea of conspiracy selling. I mean, this was always out there with the John Birch Society, I mean, there is a, there is a long tradition of these type of conspiracies on the right. But monetizing them You know, this is the era when that happened.

• 22:13Ryan Broderick?

  I even say like figuring out how to package them into something like, you know, I compared a lot to WWE. I think a large part of that is figuring out like the irony levels there, the sort of like, how do you make it theatrical? And one sort of interesting Alex Jones subplot I love to bring up when I talk about him is that there's this feature, I think it was like Vanity Fair or something, many, many years ago about this couple in Brooklyn that kind of got sucked into a cult and they eventually commit suicide by walking into the ocean together. And it's like, it's a great story and we'll link to it in our show notes, but if you read it, it's a fascinating sort of artifact of its time because it talks about this weird shock jock from Austin that moves to Williamsburg and gets like ingratiated with like the Vice

• 22:56Ryan Broderick?

  magazine set and they think he's like this cool renegade. And I think it's like a very fascinating example of like how irony kind of played cover for Alex Jones at the beginning. In fact, he ties up for a local poll for best talk, talk radio host in 1999. He gets fired because the radio network doesn't like him. And the Austin Chronicle wrote at the time, Jones, who hosted the final edition, so named because you never knew when the government might shut down, might show up at the station to force you off the air, was instead forced off the station by station management last week. And the reporter in this thing seems to kind of be into Alex Jones. They write, "I still at least appreciate the fact he was tackling political topics and from a different perspective than the right wingers

• 23:40Ryan Broderick?

  who dominate talk radio such as G. Gordon Liddy. And unlike much of the so-called black helicopter crowd, he isn't racist. He saves all of his ire for government and corporations." And I feel like that is a very important innovation from Alex Jones is like tapping into this like keep Austin weird freaky deaky Gen Xer kind of mentality and like taking that torch from Rush Limbaugh in a lot of ways. But it's also interesting to think that like they were, they were sort of aware of each other.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I gotta imagine that they were. I mean, the radio's not that big. They also probably were very, very aware of Art Bell. And you know, Art Bell, coast to coast.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  That show was also, you know, would, would, I mean, you know, a lot of times it was more like paranormal or a UFO, but they would occasionally, there would be some like, you know, somewhat like Bilderbergery stuff that would come in. And so all of that is in that mix at that time. And the, one of the things that the fairness doctrine, the repeal of it did, and then I would also say with Clinton's Communications Act in 96.

• 25:06Ryan Broderick?

  Right. This would have been right around when Alex Jones launches, yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  One of the things that it did is it just started to like ramp up the ability for corporations to monetize this stuff. That all played into it. There was like a, there was a business model that was driving a lot of this stuff.

• 25:24Ryan Broderick?

  After the break, we're going to be talking about what I think is probably the biggest next important moment in our story here, which is obviously 9/11. But before that, here's a word from our sponsors, commemorative gold coins. Check out some commemorative gold coins and we'll be right back.

• 25:41Speaker 04

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• 26:13Ryan Broderick?

  I think we can kind of all agree that like 9/11 is a mass radicalization event for America. Like it is, it is, it is the line in the sand of the 21st century. I've been trying lately, because we just did an episode about like people whose parents are being radicalized by the internet. And so I've been spending a lot of time like putting myself, trying to empathize with like the mindset of someone who gets sucked down a rabbit hole, you know, someone in their 60s, 70s. And something that I keep coming back to is this idea that, you know, if you were born peak Cold War paranoia, and then you see 9/11. I have some sympathy for the for the for older people who have now since just gone off the deep end. I mean, do you feel like that that experiencing like that kind of, you know, environment throughout your life, that does create paranoia naturally, right? Like, that's

• 26:58Ryan Broderick?

  not totally out of control, out of the question.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there was already this sort of like thing in the air from that generation, from the Reagan era, right? Like, because remember, Bill Clinton in his first term, he only won 45% of the vote. He didn't even have a majority of people.

• 27:18Ryan Broderick?

  Typical Clinton behavior, stealing an election, you know, those people.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  Day one, it was Limbaugh was talking about impeachment on day one.

• 27:25Ryan Broderick?

  Do you get dizzy watching the same things happening over and over again like this?

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Well, just to take a tangent, in 04, on on Air America, I got to interview with Janine Graffalo Gore Vidal multiple times. And he would come in and he had just written The United States of Amnesia. And his whole argument was like, we this country doesn't remember anything. Like, nothing. And I couldn't fully grasp what he meant until I see like the reformation of of George Bush. And I mean, you know, all the like, the Lynne Cheney's, I mean, like, nobody remembers anything. It's it's it's so disturbing. But the what

• 28:10Speaker 02

  9/11 did, I think, is like, you still had in the air this sort of anti hippie sentiment. And and a lot of the hippies were, again, the the silent generation. They weren't actually boomers.

• 28:25Ryan Broderick?

  That's so wild to consider. But you're right, yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  The boomers saw the the hippies get like more disillusioned and really just came down and got the sort of like.

• 28:35Ryan Broderick?

  Like the scraps of it, yeah.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  The me focused part of it. What was left for the boomers was just the more material aspects or the individual individualized part. And the part that was bad was like the sort of McGovern hippie part. It was set up for us to be attacked was a function of some, you know, like, sort of national weakness.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  And so a lot of people, you know, just decided like, I get to get muscular. I mean, that's like what turned Bill Maher into Bill Maher. Guys like that really sort of lost their minds a little bit.

• 29:15Ryan Broderick?

  And to tie it to sort of this idea that the boomers, like mass media is to baby boomers what the internet is effectively to millennials. It is this like massive new technology that they are growing up with and alongside and reflecting themselves back to themselves. And if you spin through like some of the crazy controversies, well, first, actually, nine 11 is, I had a, I had a, I had a history of terrorism professor in college once called it the, the most perfect spectacle ever devised by human beings. There's nothing more impactful visually than the nine 11 was. But then its effect on mass media is also fascinating to sort of look back on. So here's a quick, you know, list of a few things that happened here. You know, there's a massive list of songs that Clear Channel basically doesn't allow

• 30:00Ryan Broderick?

  stations to play, including Benny and the Jets, Green Day's Brain Stew, In the Air Tonight, and Great Balls of Fire. I get it, you know, that must've been a fun job for someone to put together. Sequels to the movies True Lives and Forrest Gump are both canceled. The idea of Forrest Gump stopping nine 11, I think would have probably not made a great movie. Could make that now, though, maybe. There's nonstop news on terrestrial TV. Cable news kind of comes into its own at this moment. Baseball games are canceled for the first time since D-Day. And obviously, everyone assumes that The X-Files predicted it because of that one episode with the lone gunman where literally nine 11 does happen like several months before it actually happens in real life. It feels like the moment where mass media is no longer just reflecting our tastes and

• 30:44Ryan Broderick?

  our interests or the taste and the interest of baby boomers. It's now like dictating reality and what they're able to even sort of like experience. Like it's, it's like, almost like the moment the machine turns back on them in a weird way.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I mean, I think that's true and I don't know.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  I don't know how conscious I was of that in the moment because you know it was scary. It is scary. It really was actually scary and you know I I lived in the city and I lived almost next door to a National Guard um I don't know what you call it not a base but a building where like they were bringing the bodies and so there was so many photos that went around I feel like it was like 26th Street uh between uh Lex and Park maybe just plastered with photos of people looking for their loved ones and that you know I did probably existed only a couple of months maybe but it felt like it was an eternity but yes I think that's

• 31:45Speaker 02

  true I know like being in New York I just remember thinking I mean we had to evacuate I was living in a building on on on Park Avenue in 29th Park Ave South we had to evacuate because they thought another plane was gonna hit the Empire State Building like I don't know five or six days later and just there was this idea of like one guy could walk into Macy's with one stick of dynamite blow himself up and half the city would would would would leave I mean so there was definitely like this definitely subsumed the the consciousness of of the nation for I you know like at least up into the run up to the Iraq war I mean

• 32:24Speaker 02

  I remember going to Nebraska that same guy actually who who was an Alex Jones fan and going to Nebraska and getting off the I guess going from the Omaha Airport to Lincoln and seeing this massive and this had to been in 2002 and driving on the highway and seeing a big billboard of a fireman like when others ran out he rushed in and I'm like we're in Omaha Nebraska like why is there all this sort of like oh and there was also just intense like uh security at the airport and I'm like they're not gonna hit Omaha they did it in

• 33:07Speaker 02

  New York because all the cameras are there um but yes it changed it it mass media I think like basically

• 33:16Speaker 02

  It definitely defined the constraints of what the conversation was. In fact, Janine Garofalo was one of the few people who was allowed at that time in that run up to the Iraq war to go on television to say, "We should not invade Iraq." They would not let anybody else on. She was just, she didn't want to do it, but she was recruited because they literally would not let anybody else on. And then she would go on and they would say like, "What are you doing here? You're an actress. Why, like, what, what possible expertise do you have?" This was like, people were constrained and, you know, even like Trey Parker and the other

• 34:00Speaker 02

  guy, you know, who did, uh, South Park. Yeah, they were attacking anybody who was anti-war, who was weak in that way.

• 34:09Ryan Broderick?

  Fox News, it's existed since 1996 at this point. The internet is in its, like, infancy.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  This is the year they start to make money.

• 34:18Ryan Broderick?

  This is the year Fox News becomes Fox News.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  They were completely subsidized by Murdoch, I think, up until this time.

• 34:24Ryan Broderick?

  That's insane to consider, actually. In 2004, a poll of New York residents finds that half of them believe that there was some sort of foreknowledge from the government of the attacks. Conspiracy thinking is everywhere and Alex Jones is having just a field day with this, obviously. You know, he's got all kinds of predictions that he's now saying, you know, that it was an orchestrated bombing from the government, the European Union will become the most powerful government on the planet, that Iraq should be nuked, that Osama bin Laden wasn't behind this at all, that maybe Germany was behind it somehow. I mean, it is, he just goes and goes and goes for hours.

• 35:06Ryan Broderick?

  And, you know, we've come around to this point a lot in our show, which is like, the combination of cable news and the internet and now a entire sort of generation of American politics, an entire American political cycle through the lens of Limbaugh and now Alex Jones, it just felt like, like very fertile soil for conspiracy theories as we now think of them.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Conspiracy theories, but also sort of just like, I mean, what Limbaugh was doing at this time was... Calling Guantanamo Club Gitmo.

• 35:37Ryan Broderick?

  I forgot about that, yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  They had a whole merchandise line of Club Gitmo stuff, like they are.

• 35:44Ryan Broderick?

  Grant is wearing one of those shirts right now, which is sort of embarrassing, but like we can't. It's, yeah, okay, great. Uh, but yeah, no, I forgot all about Club Gitmo, that's.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Don't you understand vintage, Ryan?

• 35:55Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, okay. It's a Brian. We're selling them on the Panic World store now.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  They probably are worth something now, but I don't know that most people are wearing, the people who have them are even wearing them ironically still.

• 36:06Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  These type of conspiracies grow, right, when there's a sense that we're not getting, or at least then, that we weren't getting the real story. And I, you know, like, I, I,

• 36:21Speaker 02

  I think that was the case, that we were not. It was really just, Bush really dropped the ball. But the interesting thing that happens, like, over the course of the next, really, 10 years, and I think part of it, frankly, was also like the, the 2001 election, to be honest with you. I mean, excuse me, the 2000 election. That was like, I, I, I think 9/11 overshadows it, but it was huge. It was, it really.

• 36:50Ryan Broderick?

  We're talking like peak hanging Chad, uh, what is it? The, uh, the, what, the riot, the, um.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Brooks Brothers riot.

• 36:56Ryan Broderick?

  The Brooks Brothers riots, yeah.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  But all legal people like, like, were like, that shouldn't have happened based upon our system. And there was this sense that like, and part of it was because of the, the, the ascendance of the Federalist Society, the underpinnings of the things that kept

• 37:17Speaker 02

  us within the norms ended. And so by the time you get to Benghazi.

• 37:23Ryan Broderick?

  Into 2012, yeah, and it sort of drags out until into the.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  I think the story of Benghazi was, there was a CIA outpost, outpost there that was maybe shipping weapons to maybe Syria or something to that effect. I can't remember the details now. But nobody wanted to talk about that. And so the Republicans seized upon that vacuum of information. Like, why was, why were, what were they doing there? Why did the, this guy from the consulate run to, you know, run to this annex in Benghazi? And they knew that, I mean, I feel like part of this also happened with like the investigation of, of, of, of Trump in some way.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  That there is, uh, stuff that the government doesn't want to really come out. And there, some people take advantage of

• 38:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  the lines that different people, and, and that's how you build these conspiracies. And it was just so effective for the Republican Party.

• 38:28Ryan Broderick?

  And what I think is like super fascinating, when you look at this sort of post nine 11 period, not only, you know, you, you now have the world that Rush Limbaugh created, and you have this like very, very active boomer audience. Fox News is now profitable. They are figuring out how to create a dozen Rush Limbaughs that can talk to you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And then you have the appearance of Facebook in 2006, which appears like it's promising an alternate ecosystem. But what it actually does is sort of just lay on top of the existing structure. Because by 2011, you have the news feed, which launches. It's the first algorithmically curated feed like it. And by 2011, there's an academic study that's sort of tracking American polarization. And it finds quantitatively offline audiences may be less polarized than some would have

• 39:14Ryan Broderick?

  suspected. 13% of Fox News's audience is liberal and 26% of New York Times readers are conservative, consistent with the view that the internet will increase segregation. The most extreme internet sites are far more polarized than any source offline. So it's, it is just automating what had started effectively in the eighties. And we're going to talk about what happens when you do that and you get a guy named Donald Trump, uh, on the scene right after the break. Uh, but before that, a word from our sponsors, more commemorative gold coins.

• 39:46Speaker 04

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• 40:19Ryan Broderick?

  When was the moment you kind of thought like, oh, Trump might actually become president?

• 40:23Speaker 02

  I was an MSNBC commentator at the time. I was going on Chris Hayes's show. I was in the green room. And I can't remember, there was a couple of like weekend anchors in there or something. And they were showing him come down the escalator. And I'm like, that dude, he has completely turned the race upside down. I didn't think he could be the president, but I thought for sure that he could be the Republican nominee. And I think, if I remember correctly, Hayes and I, I think it was shot like Mystery Science 3000 and we watched him come down on the escalator.

• 41:05Ryan Broderick?

  And you're like commenting on it?

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Yes. And at the break, I turned to him like, dude, this is serious. Like, he, they had built a suit. You know, George Bush was the CEO president. And Paul Ryan and the rest of them. I mean, the whole Republican sort of, and Limbaugh did this too. Being rich was morally righteous. Being poor was morally unrighteous. If being rich is morally righteous, then the billionaire on the stage is always correct.

• 41:39Ryan Broderick?

  He's gonna win.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  You can't argue against him. And... The other thing that that I understood because of how much right wing radio I had consumed is that Trump was 100% right wing radio. He was just getting everything from guys like Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham and Hannity and Limbaugh, for that matter. Like, it was all right wing radio talking points. That's where the anti-immigration stuff came from.

• 42:10Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, that's that's that is really interesting because it does feel like by the time we get to Trump, he's now fully in the pocket, as you said, of conservative media. But also importantly, his campaign is the moment, it's the beginning of conservative media digitizing effectively. Like, obviously, there was right wing websites, Forever Drudge Report, you know, all that stuff.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  That was huge, though.

• 42:32Ryan Broderick?

  Huge.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  But the difference is this: Drudge was a conduit to mainstream. So, like, all the producers at, like, ABC or the cable news, they'd all read Drudge.

• 42:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  And then they, and that's the way that the right would launder their narrative. They would do it through Drudge. By 2016, they no longer need to launder their narrative into mainstream media because their media world was self-sufficient.

• 43:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, in 2015, Alex Jones is now fully online, you know, streaming non-stop Infowars, and he has Donald Trump on as a guest, as he's a candidate. And I want to read a segment here from from the interview. "Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down," Trump tells Alex Jones. And then Jones replies back, "My audience, 90% of them, they support you." Then Trump wins, and there's, we have another study here that sort of shows that by this point, there is effectively, like, no right wing trust in media. They don't really understand mass media anymore. And the study reads, "As political

• 43:49Ryan Broderick?

  scientist Christian Hosam explains, what Trump does is..." Connect that that type of opposition to the media as into a form of conservatism that just wasn't around before. And one byproduct of that is that medium mistrust is more central to conservatives' group identity than it was before Trump. Or as Lee put it, signaling media distrust is much the same as wearing a red MAGA cap. And for many Republicans, that might mean distrust of the media is better thought of as a way to understand the centrality of the partisanship to their identity. So it's like, this is the moment where the mass media generation, it's all ending. And now, like, they don't even understand that they're still consuming mass media. It just, it has changed, it's different.

• 44:34Ryan Broderick?

  And the mass media president, the guy who shaped from The Apprentice and from Howard Stern appearances and Letterman appearances, it's all morphed into politics. And like, in many ways, it feels like the final stage of sort of the boomer story is like, mass media just created their president.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I would still contend that, like, what happened was that mass media no longer existed in the way that we understood it 20 years earlier.

• 45:01Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  And you had 50% of the media being consumed was just like a self-enclosed bubble. And they no longer had to filter it to ABC because it doesn't matter. Because there are people that aren't watching ABC. They're just watching, they're watching Fox, they're watching all these different internet plays, whatever it is. Like, and the Republican Party did the same thing. People forget, Mitt Romney went to go kiss Donald Trump's ring in the run-up to the 2012 election.

• 45:37Ryan Broderick?

  Is that that haunted photo of them at dinner together?

• 45:40Speaker 02

  No, no. That's the, that dinner is one where Trump invited Romney to, "Maybe you'll be my Secretary of State." That was 2016. People forget that Mitt Romney made a special trip to New York City to literally kiss Donald Trump's ring in 2012. Because Donald Trump was the one who did the whole birther thing. And he needed, he needed Trump's blessing. And so, you know, Trump was already sort of like this, he was the equivalent of like...

• 46:15Speaker 02

  The liberal left never understood the power of right-wing media. And so they couldn't understand who Donald Trump was in this alternate universe.

• 46:27Ryan Broderick?

  What he meant to those people.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  They barely understood that there was this alternate universe. And they thought it was still the universe, as opposed to, you know, and he's just like this ding-dong fake billionaire on TV. But in this different universe, he was not. He was a different guy. He was the guy who was telling the truth on, you know, about Obama.

• 46:52Ryan Broderick?

  Well, it's funny you talk about how like the liberal left like didn't understand the alternate universe, because it does feel like after Trump is elected the first time, you see this, I mean, I, you know, I was working in newsrooms at the time and I was doing these stories where there's just a rush of stories about like millennials not really understanding why their parents have voted for Trump. Like I, you know, it's a common theme. It's, it feels like almost a defining millennial experience in a lot of ways. And Luke O'Neill, who writes Welcome to Hellworld, which is, is great, collected a bunch of stories like these, and I want to read one, which, which, an excerpt from one, which reads, "Another person told me that Rush Limbaugh sent his father on the path to isolation before eventually mainlining Fox News on a regular basis. Eventually, out of the blue, his mother filed for divorce.

• 47:36Ryan Broderick?

  He was crushed, couldn't understand why, and took comfort in drinking while watching his friends on TV. She is happier than I have ever seen her, and he is sad and angry, living in the basement of a rented house, still watching The Five, Tucker Carlson, Jane Piero, etc." And that is it in a lot of ways. It's like the, the ecosystem got so big and so vast and so comforting for people, and then we didn't see it forming. Like, obviously, it's clear now to look back, but at the time, I mean, did you see?

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:08Ryan Broderick?

  When did you sort of start to worry that this stuff was like becoming bigger than the alternative or even sort of mainstream journalism?

• 48:18Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I started, you know, I was in show business and then I sort of fell into radio in 2004. And that was when there was like the blogosphere. And so the thing that we were, you know, sort of like railing against was like, why is ABC News getting its, like dictating the news from the Drudge Report? So that was the worry there, you know, at that time.

• 48:43Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  But in 2006, Stephen Sherrill and I wrote a book called FUBAR, which was essentially, you know, the tagline could have been, this is not your father's Republican Party. Like, the, the, if you listened to talk radio and believed in it, like believed it was actually moving people, which I did. I mean, that's why I went into talk radio. You saw this coming in the aughts and maybe even the late 90s. Like, this was, it just was growing and growing and growing.

• 49:19Ryan Broderick?

  Can I ask kind of a, maybe a silly question? But it's one that I've been sort of wondering recently. It feels like in many ways, the radicalization of talk radio in the 90s and early 2000s, you know, it's something you experience in your car alone, probably. It's in the air, like literally. It feels very similar to the way we talk about radicalization with something like TikTok now, where it's very personalized, your TikTok feed and my TikTok feed, never two shall meet. How did you get the sense that this stuff was permeating culture? Like, what sent up the antenna for you? Because I do think that that is like a major roadblock in talking about this stuff now, when we're talking about algorithms, which honestly are sort of the same.

• 50:01Ryan Broderick?

  It's this thing that is just ethereal and out there, but it's clearly doing something to people. So how did you clock that talk radio was having an impact?

• 50:09Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I lived in, I grew up in Massachusetts. I lived in Boston. I grew up in Worcester.

• 50:15Ryan Broderick?

  Hell, yeah. North Shore. Let's go.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Well, not quite North Shore.

• 50:18Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I'm from the north. Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Dawnlights on Marblehead.

• 50:22Ryan Broderick?

  I'm from Marblehead.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 50:27Ryan Broderick?

  Grant is shaking his head. He's so pissed right now.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  Let's just get Dave Portnoy in the, in here.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Don't say that.

• 50:34Ryan Broderick?

  Don't speak Dave Portnoy's name.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  Strange thug, thugginess that exists in Massachusetts that belies its reputation.

• 50:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  And I feel like that's where I got a lot of like my awareness of that. Like, you know, just sort of, just dudes you just talk to and then all of a sudden like they're going into these weird rants, but I know where it's coming from because I listened to right wing talk radio. I mean.

• 51:05Ryan Broderick?

  I have said this exact thing about Joe Rogan, like in the last few years where I'm like, I'm at a bar.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  Rogan in, uh, in the, the early nineties. He was a comic in Boston. No.

• 51:16Ryan Broderick?

  Any good?

• 51:16Speaker 02

  No, he throws like he's throwing with his not right, not correct arm.

• 51:21Ryan Broderick?

  Incredible. No, but I would be at a bar in my hometown, you know, for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and I'd be talking to, you know, some guy in high school or whatever. And all of a sudden he launches into a bit. And I'm like, I know that that's from Joe Rogan. That is so funny that you notice the same, like that is, maybe it is like a New England sort of like, you're breaking the, the, the barrier of what's acceptable casserole conversation into like a New England bar and you're like, and if you know what they're talking about, it's like, you've clearly heard that somewhere.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Like it just so happened that I listened to a lot of right wing radio. So in conversation, if I had I not, I'd just be like, wow, this guy's weird. Like what, what the fuck is he talking about? Like. Like you can't believe what he was saying. Like, like Hillary Clinton, like drag a body into a park and, I don't know. The guy was wacko. But as soon as you hear that stuff, again, you're like, I know exactly what the source of that material is.

• 52:15Ryan Broderick?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  With Trump, they were building essentially this suit and he just fit it perfectly.

• 52:24Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  This is all, at the end of the day, about a, a cohort of people, white men, who lost something real. I mean, in addition to the broad based hollowing out of like, uh, rural towns and manufacturing, which impacts everybody.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  They lost social status. You know, like, you know, when I'm a kid, every TV show I watch is about me in some fashion. It's either about like when I'm older, or as a kid, or, you know, like, women exist there as a my mother, or my girlfriend, or my future wife. And now, all of a sudden, like, I'm watching Cialis commercials, and it's like, what's that black dude doing? Like, that's supposed to be me there.

• 53:21Ryan Broderick?

  He's taking the

• 53:22Speaker 02

  He's taking the

• 53:22Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  medication. Wait, wait, wait. What is this lawyer is a woman? And, you know, that's, that was the story of Reconstruction, right? Like, the, the way that they, uh, the idea was like, how can we convince? And there was, there was some sector of the white population that, that, that, that didn't bite on this, like, some of the, you know, populist, um, uh, didn't bite as hard as others, but like, how can we convince these poor white people, um, that there's a problem with black people actually taking political power? And, you know, we will stoke the fact that, like, okay, you're poor, but at least you used to be higher in the pecking order than black people.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  And i- it is, we're watching the fallout of, like, these liberation movements that happen in the seventies, in the eighties, you know, and really come to fruition in the nineties, and, uh, in the aughts. Uh, maybe not even the aughts, really, just the nineties.

• 54:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  The, the resentment that's generated there. And they've figured out how to sort of maintain that resentment, and sort of like, give this vision to like, Gen Z, in my estimation, of like, your inheritance has been stolen from you. You should just know.

• 54:43Ryan Broderick?

  And, and I think, like, one last piece of this, that I, I do think is important to touch on before we sort of end, wrap up here, which is that, like, as the internet became more corporatized, website as a concept doesn't really exist anymore. And the platforms that most of, you know, you know, people my parents' age are using are closer in construction to cable news, they're closer in construction to radio, they are just endless content factories that now know what you want, and know how to sell it to you. And it, you know, that is, I think, the final piece of it. And I think this is why a lot of people say like, oh yeah, boomer brain rot, you know, like they're on all these apps making them crazy. And it's like, no, like, the apps figured out that you can have someone stare at them 24 hours a day if they just tell you what you want to hear.

• 55:28Ryan Broderick?

  And so it doesn't surprise me that the generation we have the most information on in terms of what they like, all of popular culture as it's ever existed. I can just beam AI-generated videos of the Beatles reuniting into their brains and at the end say, don't put fluoride in your water and I can become a billionaire. Like, yeah, we know what they like. They are the most targeted generation that's ever existed, probably. I, that's why I don't buy the idea that the internet did something here. It's, it's that, these, as you said, these, these stories have been playing out for decades now and, and this is the, the, I assume, the final kind of chapter here, you know, in terms of human longevity is concerned, uh, for them specifically. Uh, you know, we are sort of hitting the Twilight era for them.

• 56:13Ryan Broderick?

  And yeah, it's not, it's not surprising to me that the internet plays a role, but I don't think it is like Facebook made my dad crazy.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  No, it's not Facebook did it. I think, I, I don't think it's the internet that did it. I think it was really just, again, maybe it was a steroid on some level, but we also, I would add-

• 56:32Ryan Broderick?

  It's like Cialis. It's like a Cialis pill for-

• 56:34Speaker 02

  It's Cialis, yes. Like a time-release Cialis.

• 56:38Ryan Broderick?

  It's a time-release, yeah, exactly.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  But I would also say that like, you have to remember, the boomer brain was completely-

• 56:46Ryan Broderick?

  I have one in a jar.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  The boomer brain was completely formed without a tool to deal with a digital world.

• 56:58Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  We would go to the library. We wanted a book. We would have to go through a whole, like, file of, of cards and then get a number and then go to the other file and go, it was so linear that you could not at ever any point get diverted sideways. And I think that like is, if you grow up without any- You know, we have a generation of kids who I think have like ADHD because of this stuff. But I suspect that down the road, we're going to figure out how, and kids are going to figure out how not, how to maintain focus in some way. They're going to readjust their signal to noise ratio, um, you know, detector in a

• 57:44Speaker 02

  way that like you didn't have to employ when you were that age. And now they can't. All the dopamine hit stuff aside, which I think is true, et cetera, et cetera. I think they're just more vulnerable to not knowing they're being fed this stuff in the way that they are. Like, you know, you can hear people your age complain like, my Instagram feed sucks now because, or, or, you know, my TikTok feed sucks because I did this and that. And you're not going to get that level of savvy from, you know, a boomer necessarily.

• 58:21Ryan Broderick?

  No, they're just like, oh, nothing's on.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  It is, is what it is. Yeah.

• 58:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I want to thank you for coming on the show. This is a great, I could keep talking about this stuff for hours and hours. I, I assume everyone listening knows where they can follow you, but where can they follow you if they don't already?

• 58:36Speaker 02

  If you are a boomer, let me explain that I live on YouTube.

• 58:40Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, WWW dot.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  You can, uh, you can, uh, just, you can find the majority report as a podcast every day. Um, you can watch it live on YouTube or Twitch every day. And you can find, uh, the show on, uh, YouTube or Twitch after, uh, the, the show. We do noon to like 2:30 ish.

• 59:04Ryan Broderick?

  That's, that's, that's good. That's like a good block, you know? The, these Twitch streamers now, they're doing like seven, eight hours, they're wearing diapers in their chair. I don't know how, Hassan, I don't even know if he goes to the bathroom during the day.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  I don't think he does.

• 59:15Ryan Broderick?

  What's going on?

• 59:15Speaker 02

  I don't think he does.

• 59:16Ryan Broderick?

  I don't think he does.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  He's got a catheter. I have a catheter too.

• 59:18Ryan Broderick?

  Just like Donald, yeah.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  I have a catheter. I've actually peed myself like three times during this.

• 59:22Ryan Broderick?

  No, we know. We can see your face.

• 59:26Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and national managing director and executive producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing. YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer, Samantha Hallows. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the

• 1:00:06Ryan Broderick?

  one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/panicworldpod. And please, give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

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