A Dubai Chocolate theory of the internet

Garbage Day's Ryan Broderick traces the rise of this goopy green chocolate, and explains how Chinese social media is beginning to tug on US culture in unexpected ways. Support Search Engine! https://searchengine.supercast.com

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

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

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• 2:28PJ Vogt?

  Check, check, check, check, check. Hi, Ryan.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Hello. Hey, nice shirt. PJ, did you also buy this on Amazon?

• 2:36PJ Vogt?

  I did.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Are we wearing the same shirt?

• 2:39PJ Vogt?

  I think we're wearing the same shirt. We got a discount because the sleeve monster ate our sleeves.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I just, I'm done with sleeves, you know, I'm, I'm done.

• 2:48PJ Vogt?

  This is not the part of the summer where sleeves are working for me. There's not, I don't have very good AC here. And it's not that I think that everyone's just like whistling at my biceps as I walk down the street. I'm just like, I've thrown in the towel on anything but comfort.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's, that's smart.

• 3:04PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so why don't you introduce yourself?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Sure. My name is Ryan Broderick. I write a newsletter called Garbage Day and I host a podcast called Panic World.

• 3:15PJ Vogt?

  And what you do in both of your projects and like your entire professional life is you survey, explore and catalog the internet, but particularly you have an affinity for like, like if it were a Star Wars movie, it's like the outer rim, far away from the empire. Like you like the places where things are weirder, darker, stranger, the marginal edges of the internet.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  I do, but I also have like a grand fascination with where culture comes from, which typically is from the outer rim, you know, and it kind of makes its way in. But I, I feel like I never really understand what's going on. So I always like to just sit down and be like, okay, like, why is everyone talking about Sydney Sweeney and jeans right now? Or why is everyone talking about these disgusting little dolls that look like little monster rats on TikTok? I feel like even when I was younger, I just never understood like how everyone knew about something. And so the internet makes that easy. You know, you can just spend some time figuring it out.

• 4:17PJ Vogt?

  And do you often, this is something that I've sometimes wanted to ask you, reading your work, is like, for me, the weird rat dolls, Labubu. My first encounter with Labubus was, I was walking down the street in Manhattan, and I passed what any other month would have been one of those sidewalk kiosks where they sell newspapers. And because the Labubu craze had hit such a fever pitch, the person who ran the kiosk had converted to just selling Labubu.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:44PJ Vogt?

  And so it was just an entire little side store of knockoff Labubu. And I was like, oh, this is a thing that I don't know anything about, and like, kind of worked backwards. Do you, like, when you're trying to understand how a trend has happened, is it like, you work out and in? Like, do you often watch things bubble from outside to the center? Or is it more often, something becomes popular, and then you work backwards to figure out how it got that way?

• 5:08Speaker 01

  It's like a bit of both. I mean, every once in a while, I'll catch something four or five weeks later, and I'm like, I don't know what this is. And I have to, like, fight the very millennial urge to, like, dismiss it. So I'm like, okay, like, let's, like, engage with whatever this is and figure it out. But then, I feel like because of the internet and doing this job for so long, I do see things fairly early, and that causes like another problem where it's like you don't want to over-index. So there's like a sweet spot where like, if you hit it, you're early, but it's still relevant.

• 5:39PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  But it's a constant, sort of, talking to myself about like, okay, like, I gotta do something about this now, or I gotta look into this, and, and, and fight the urge to just not care, which is hard.

• 5:53PJ Vogt?

  I often give in to the urge to not care these days, but that's why I'm glad that you exist, because I can borrow your mind.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Happy to help.

• 6:00PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so, the reason that I wanted to talk to you today is, I wanted to ask you about one of these things, like, one of these waves that sort of seemed to come from nowhere and then be everywhere. I feel like six months ago, I had never heard the words Dubai and chocolate next to each other. Now, I, like, in the world, online, I'm just like constantly seeing the phrase Dubai chocolate. I would just like to know, like, what even is the origin story of Dubai chocolate? Like, where does it come from? I have a safe guess. You could tell me I'm wrong, and I would believe you.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  So, it was created in 2021 by Sarah Hamouda, who was an engineer living in Dubai.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  And the story goes that she was pregnant and she had cravings for like specific kinds of food. And she kind of imagined this idea of like combining chocolate and pistachios and tahini and canaffa, which is like a Middle Eastern dessert, basically. And so you put them all together and you get this chocolate that when you bite into it is full of green pistachios. And it has quickly taken over the world, basically.

• 7:11PJ Vogt?

  I think I've seen the patient zero video for this where it's like, she's not the creator of it, but some influencer somewhere is just eating one of these candy bars. And can we actually, can we watch the sort of like original video together?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Sure, I've got it right here as well. Uh, let's see, here we go.

• 7:36PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so tell me what we're looking at.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  So this is Maria Vahara 257 in 2023 on TikTok.

• 7:43PJ Vogt?

  She's like a woman, she looks like she's in her twenties, she looks like an influencer. And she's eating the candy bar and then just like green sort of like sludge is coming out of it in a way that I can't quite tell whether it makes me want to eat it or avoid it, but it's very visually striking.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  This video is gross. Watching her eat, this is gross.

• 8:06PJ Vogt?

  Why? It's, it's really gross and it's looping.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  It's not looping.

• 8:10PJ Vogt?

  Oh, it's not?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  This video is a minute and a half long. Yeah, no, she's eating different chocolate bars, but she's letting it all drip and ooze out of her mouth like some kind of dog. It's awful. I don't like looking at this.

• 8:20PJ Vogt?

  It's funny because it's like, I can't tell if the effect is supposed to be like disgusting or like sexy or like she comes across as someone who's not very good at eating mainly.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, this is the first food I've ever had kind of thing. And she's doing, I mean, she's in her car, you know, it's like, it's like a woman in her car eating and like doing the like ASMR like pull apart thing that now everyone does with those mozzarella sticks from Chili's.

• 8:45PJ Vogt?

  Wait, I'm sorry, what is the ASMR pull apart thing?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. So like if you watch a lot of food videos on TikTok.

• 8:52PJ Vogt?

  I don't.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  There's a lot of things they all do.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  So one is like, there's the thing sometimes where like the women will tap stuff with their fingernails to make an ASMR noise into the compressor mic on their phone.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Finally got the gooey gummies off of TikTok shop, so let's do a taste test. These literally look so good, you guys. Okay.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  And then if it's gooey, there'll be like a pull apart shot, which is, like I said, how Chili's mozzarella sticks went viral recently.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  Let's eat some Chili's mozzarella sticks. Let's eat some Chili's mozzarella sticks. Hoy vamos a probar los fried mozzarella stick de Chili's.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  The idea is to just emphasize the sensory aspects of the food you're eating.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  I've been craving this for the longest time. 10 out of 10.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Which I think is the important thing here for trying to understand why Dubai chocolate is everywhere. If a thing doesn't look good now, it won't be as popular as something that does because of how popular video apps are.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  So the fact that you bite into this chocolate bar and it oozes out effectively like delicious looking green slime is the marketing. Like it's the, the marketing is literally baked in.

• 10:09PJ Vogt?

  Right. It's like, it's gooey and the, and the goo itself is kind of like a surprise. It's not the goo you expect.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  The visual of it though, like I can't help but think just looks exactly like guacamole or like salsa verde. And so like on camera, it looks like you're just biting into chocolate and a bunch of like guacamole is coming out. I think that every time I see a Dubai chocolate thing.

• 10:27PJ Vogt?

  It does look like a chocolate bar filled with guacamole. It doesn't look like something, if I just saw this video, I wouldn't stop scrolling. And I also wouldn't necessarily want to eat the chocolate. I would think this person's deliberately eating something gross. And the thing that's green is pistachio cream.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like a spread made of pistachio.

• 10:47PJ Vogt?

  And who is this person in the original video? And what does she have to do with the person who actually invented the chocolate?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  So this video is posted by Maria Vahara. She's a beautiful woman on the internet and people send her food to eat because that's like a job you can have in the 21st century. I'm not even kidding.

• 11:04PJ Vogt?

  Unlike a normal and real job, which would be commenting on the significance of a beautiful person.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Here, so like here's her channel. So she's got 3 million followers. She basically just eats food in the United Arab Emirates. And so the Dubai angle to this, I think, is what's important to kind of wrap her head around, which is like, there are like a couple of major cities now that seem to have an entire industry based around creating viral food for viral people to eat to go viral. I mean, there's a section of New York now that has, I had one of the worst burgers of my entire life at a chicken joint I went to that I had to wait two hours in line for. And it was like a donut chicken burger and it was awful, but like everyone in there was only eating it to film it, to put it on Instagram. And so, you know, if you think of Dubai as like a giant shopping mall, sort of like the nexus of all late stage capitalism.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  She's just trying like viral stunt food in her car and then going viral on TikTok for it. If you want to go very high level with this, the fact that you're watching this beautiful, very skinny woman eat gigantic desserts. That is aspirational. You know, it's this idea that like all video on the internet as a form of pornography. Because like algorithmic platforms have reduced it to that.

• 12:21PJ Vogt?

  And when you say a form of pornography, do you mean that it's all sexualized or that it's all fueled by desire or what?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's sort of like you're watching someone else do something that you wish you could do and you're gratifying yourself that way. So you are watching this super, super skinny, fit, beautiful person eat junk food in their car. Because like that's not possible, like it's not possible to live that life and stay that way. I mean, the word for this is mukbang. Maria, she's effectively doing mukbangs, but-

• 12:53PJ Vogt?

  Give me just for like my mom listening, literally, what is mukbang?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Mukbang started in Korea. It's a Korean word. It's a portmanteau of the word for eating and a broadcast. And so you basically watch typically beautiful women eat gigantic amounts of food.

• 13:12PJ Vogt?

  And it's like, the reason this works as internet content is because, one, you're like, oh, I'm surprised that the thin person's eating the food that I try to avoid as a not-thin person. But also, it's like, when you say pornographic, it's almost like aspirational. It's like, we want to believe in a world where we could eat tasty food and be thin, young and beautiful.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Sure, yes. And it's like, okay, for most of the existence of video, we only understood what certain kinds of video made people feel. Pornography being one of the first ones. We realized like, you could watch porn and you'd get horny. Cool. With the advent of user-generated video, you know, in the 21st century, we're now learning that there's more kinds of gratifying, stimulating video you can watch. You can watch people make slimes, or you could watch like hours of temple run footage, or you could watch, you know, a live stream of a woman eating nothing but french fries for eight hours. Or you could watch ASMR content. Like, it's stimulating for reasons that it just is.

• 14:13PJ Vogt?

  So let me just make sure, because I think you're, I think this is an insightful theory, and I just want to make sure I fully understand it, which is like, when you say that everything on the internet is pornographic, you don't mean that all the video people watch, they watch to be sexually aroused. What you mean is that like, before the internet, when people watched videos, usually, more often than not, they were watching stories. And like, we thought we'd watch stories because they had a beginning, middle and end, and like, they had morals and feelings and whatever. Because with the internet, people make things purely to an attentional algorithm, not like to a production studio that has ideas and nodes. We've learned that the same way porn is not really a story, porn is like, people will watch images of naked people because it arouses them.

• 14:56PJ Vogt?

  There's lots of images people watch that they're drawn to because it activates- Feeling they like to have. And those images don't need to be stories. They're just like stimulating in different and surprising ways. And what the internet has discovered is lots of things that work like porn, even though, you know, if somebody walked into the room when you were watching it, you would not slam your laptop.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've reduced video content on the internet to raw stimuli.

• 15:20PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  And so if you're watching like a beautiful woman eat a really expensive chocolate bar in a really fancy car, there's like a bunch of different parts of your brain that light up. And you just want to watch more and more of it, which is how this woman, Maria Vayara, has tens of millions of views on this video. And it's her just eating fancy desserts that ooze all over her as she eats them. And that's her whole job.

• 15:50PJ Vogt?

  So this is part of Ryan's theory of the internet right now. In the old world, we watched TV shows, which showed us stories interrupted periodically by commercials for products like candy. Today, we don't really watch TV. And a lot of the online video we watch isn't quite story. It's sometimes closer to raw stimulation. A beautiful woman in Dubai eating a gloppy visually arresting candy bar. That content itself, a kind of infinite commercial.

• 16:20PJ Vogt?

  After the break, Ryan expands on this Dubai chocolate theory of the internet a little bit more. How does an idea for a viral chocolate bar go from the mind of an engineer in Dubai to a food influencer to seemingly everywhere at the same time? How is the virality we get from Chinese social media different from the viralities that came before? That's after these ads.

• 16:54PJ Vogt?

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• 20:18PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. I wanted Ryan Broderick to just trace for me this chocolate's path through the internet to see what we could learn as we watched it gloop through the pipes. I asked him to start at the first step. How does Dubai chocolate go from the person who invents it to the influencer eating it in her car?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  So companies send influencers these products for free. So in this case, the influencer, Maria Vahera, she was sent those bars by Sarah Hamuda, who was the original engineer that created Dubai chocolate.

• 20:51PJ Vogt?

  Oh, got it. Okay, so it's the inventor of the chocolate is like, I should send out free samples.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  To this viral woman, exactly.

• 20:57PJ Vogt?

  And hopefully she'll want to make a video.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  But the chocolate had been around for a couple of years, but they're like, here, have a promotional chocolate bar. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 21:04PJ Vogt?

  God, she must be so happy she sent that chocolate bar.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  You should send her search engine to listen to in her car.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  I bet there's a fee.

• 21:14PJ Vogt?

  I bet there's a fee and I bet I can't afford it.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  But I bet it's worth it.

• 21:18PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Could have a bunch of like Dubai teenagers listening to search engine.

• 21:22PJ Vogt?

  Honestly, nothing would make me happier.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but if you're trying to understand like how TikTok is involved here, you have to understand that TikTok is not primarily a video platform.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  TikTok is based off Douyin, it's Chinese sister app. And it's part of what would be called like social shopping or like social e-commerce platforms in China, which are very popular. And the way they function is like they let people post stuff on there, but they also want to sell you stuff. And so TikTok doesn't want to create culture with trends, which is like the American misunderstanding. It's the misunderstanding that fuels like all of the moral panics about TikTok, like at the highest levels of our government right now. TikTok doesn't give a crap about whether or not it's like influencing culture. It wants to influence you to buy the same product and talk about it.

• 22:15PJ Vogt?

  Wait, and help me understand because like I really take like I've said this before in public on this podcast, but like this generation of internet, I have just mostly sat out. Like I don't go to the bathroom and get on TikTok. I don't get on TikTok on the subway. I'm not on TikTok when I should be paying attention to the dinner table. Like I've skipped it. How is, when you say like, it's not, this is a social media platform that doesn't want to drive culture. It just wants to get people to buy stuff. How is that different than Instagram, like Twitter, when it was Twitter, even Facebook? Like, what's the meaningful step change here?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  It's the reverse. So let's do YouTube or Instagram. I think it's the closest. So YouTube and Instagram, the idea was we could destabilize Hollywood by allowing anyone to make video content, visual content. And that would mean we have an infinite television that can produce, you know, things that could have never been produced with a studio system. And then we can get a lot of people hooked on that and watch it all day long. And then we could put ads on it. TikTok's the reverse. So it's like, if we can get everyone to make ads, then those ads can become culture.

• 23:24PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  So instead of making culture to sell ads, it's what if we got people to make ads that happened to create culture? It's the total inverse of it.

• 23:34PJ Vogt?

  It's funny, it's like the way TikTok consumerism works is you see a commercial for something and then you're offered the opportunity to film your own commercial in which you are the star.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 23:42PJ Vogt?

  And then you wonder if that commercial might also go viral. And what does that look like functionally?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Dubai chocolate, La Boo Boo's, matcha, Stanley cups. It is become more and more pronounced actually since the pandemic. Although recently TikTok has kind of fallen off in a really weird way. Like there aren't as many memes happening on there. There's not as much sort of like high level cultural discourse. And there's a theory that my researcher Adam and I have been kicking around that actually TikTok is throttling itself in the US to fly under the radar of the possible ban that still hovers over them, but we're not really sure yet. But for the last, let's say, four or five years, once a quarter, there'll be some product that emerges out of TikTok that just takes over the whole country.

• 24:23PJ Vogt?

  But how is that a good business model for TikTok as a company? Like, my assumption is that the woman who invents Dubai chocolate, her business does well. The influencer who gets more attention going viral on Dubai chocolate, like that's good for her business. But if I buy a trendy chocolate bar on the street where I live, how does that help TikTok?

• 24:46Speaker 01

  So like, in most social shopping apps in China, the first wave is getting users to create their own ads for trends, right? The second wave is you build Amazon. Like, this is the problem that like, most Americans can't really wrap their heads around, which is that TikTok is not competing with Facebook, it's not competing with YouTube, it's competing with Amazon.

• 25:06PJ Vogt?

  Oh, so it's like the playbook for American social media companies, which I'm used to, is you make something that grabs people's attention and you make it free. And the way you sweep up money later, usually if you're doing your job right, is brand advertisers want to be where attention is, and so they show up and spend money.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:25PJ Vogt?

  TikTok's plan to turn the money machine on later is, no, no, no, you're not selling advertisements or not primarily, what you're doing is you're selling products directly on platform.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yes, and TikTok Shop, which launched one or two years ago, is that. So like, the first wave is you get everyone on and you have them make free advertising in the form of trends. And then the second wave is you buy directly through their business. I genuinely think Americans can't wrap their head around it because we just, we don't have the same internet landscape. Like on my, my show Panic World, we did an interview a couple of months ago about like the differences between Chinese and American internet. And like, Americans just really can't wrap their head around how consumerist Chinese social media is. And I, I think it's sort of tied to the lack of free speech online that they have. So it's like, well, what else are you gonna do? And obviously they have workarounds and like code words and all that. But like, Chinese internet is a shopping mall.

• 26:21PJ Vogt?

  Hmm.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  And ours, even though we like to think it is, is not even close to, to how consumerist Chinese social media is.

• 26:29PJ Vogt?

  It's funny that if you're right, I mean, when American politicians started being really worried about TikTok and like its cultural influence, my read wasn't moral panic. It was more just like, I think it might be reasonable to worry, but I think you guys are under worrying about the influence of domestic social media. And I'm not saying government should control speech. I'm just saying like, treating these things as powerful cultural forces and thinking about who's in charge of them and what their motives are, doesn't seem like a bad idea for a country. But like, your view is that American politicians thought the kind of like final level of TikTok was going to be that all of a sudden, somebody in the Chinese government hits a switch and American consumers are getting political

• 27:14PJ Vogt?

  messages that make America look more like however China wants it to look. When in fact, your theory is that the final switch, somebody wants to hit a TikTok, just sells Americans more stuff, which feels like the most American thing a final switch could do.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that has been my read from the get-go. And that is just based on my experience using other Chinese social apps, which have all, for the most part, become social shopping integrated, if not just completely social shopping apps.

• 27:45PJ Vogt?

  Huh. And when you say social shopping, you mean like the same way Spotify is like a social music app and that I pick songs to listen to, but I can like see what songs you're listening to. These are places where you buy products, but you can see what your friends or influencers are buying. It's a catalog with commercials in it.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  It's closer to like, an app we have now, just like pick a random, like let's say Instagram. But everything on Instagram is purchasable. And most of the time, when you click like, I want to buy whatever's in this picture, it's sold through either the app itself or a third party that they're partnered with.

• 28:22PJ Vogt?

  It's funny, I've often wished Instagram would do that, like.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, like imagine if Instagram ads were then taking you to an Instagram store that you could just buy them from.

• 28:31PJ Vogt?

  Can you show me just like TikTok's social shopping feature? Like if I wanted to buy something on TikTok, what does that actually look like?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. I think it works on desktop. Yeah, okay, so this is TikTok Shop. It launched a couple of years ago and it looks exactly like Amazon. And it's selling stuff that you would buy on Amazon.

• 28:52PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  But if you click on, let's see, uh, do you need?

• 28:56PJ Vogt?

  Let's say I want to buy Acetel L-Carnitine, which I think it's like an exercise supplement.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  You want to buy this supplement? So you go to the supplement.

• 29:02PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Look in here, it's got reviews. Now here, what we can do is go down and here's all the videos.

• 29:10PJ Vogt?

  Oh, and then there's videos for the product.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  And these videos are making commission, by the way.

• 29:13PJ Vogt?

  So if I watch a video of someone telling me to take this supplement and click through, they get a percentage?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then if you go down, you can see that people also search for ham for Christmas, Flint Mint review, Alfredo crispy chicken pasta, best diaper cream for face? What?

• 29:29PJ Vogt?

  Best diaper cream for face mask? Why are you putting diaper cream on your face mask?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Let's find out. Okay, so yeah, you got, here's a diaper bomb. You go to TikTok Shop.

• 29:40PJ Vogt?

  But there should be a video of someone explaining why you want diaper cream for your face mask, I imagine.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Well, let's, you know, let's, oh, and it's even suggesting K-pop Demon Hunter's costume? I bet that's huge. Yeah, that's huge on TikTok. So yeah, you're getting a sense of how this all works and you're getting a sense of what they're trying to build.

• 29:57PJ Vogt?

  And why, why have American social media companies resisted that so strongly?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  I think it's because we don't manufacture any of our own goods. They all come from cha-cha China. See how this works?

• 30:08PJ Vogt?

  Right. Okay.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  And then you also see the flip side of this, so like, um, the Temu takeover last year in America, which actually was the largest Chinese app for most months on the App Store, which is an app that no American politician seems to be freaking out about, which I think is funny. They are a Amazon-style, traditional e-commerce site, but it's full of social features and giveaways and gamified stuff. Because like the sort of end stage of most modern social platforms in China is this combination of socializing and shopping together. And particularly, outside of America in general, this is becoming more popular. Like, when I was living in Brazil, this was becoming super popular. But it's definitely starting here as well.

• 30:53PJ Vogt?

  So, so, okay. So like, the thing that I'm experiencing as weird and somewhat rare or new, which is that all of a sudden, there's this physical good that everyone I know seems to be consuming, and they're consuming it because they saw it on an app. That happens in American culture like a couple of times a year. Like Dubai chocolate is one, La Boo Boo right now is another. The Stanley thermos thing, like, I don't even remember how long ago that was. A year, two years now?

• 31:23Speaker 01

  About two years, I think, yeah.

• 31:23PJ Vogt?

  That was one. But like, we're just getting little earthquake tremors of something that in China and Brazil and other internets happens all the time. That like, consumers are just rushing to and fro because the trends there are not about like, hashtag joke somebody's making, or like, a song everybody's listening to. It's also about products going viral at a much higher rapidity.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say it's not like in Latin America or like in Asia, there's no culture going viral online. It's more just like, because of Chinese social shopping becoming popular there, it's a frequency that's much higher. And so, yeah, you can have a drink like matcha, which is going viral right now in a similar way, or boba tea, or La Boo Boo's, or Dubai chocolate, or Stanley cups, or whatever it is. Well, there's one of those happening as often as there is like a meme or a hit song or whatever.

• 32:14PJ Vogt?

  I will say like, the theory of this interview is that this doesn't often happen in America, or as often. And I believe this theory. And we were having this conversation while wearing, as we mentioned.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  The exact same shirt we bought off Amazon to go on? Yes, yes, exactly. Right. So this is happening. Like, this is clearly happening.

• 32:33PJ Vogt?

  How did China get so much better at like, hyper consumerism than America? I thought we were kind of the heavyweight champion on this stuff.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  So, uh, basically imagine if America went from the largely rural society it was in the 1910s, 1920s.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  To the extremely online information economy that it was in the 2000s, but it did it in the span of like 20 years, not even.

• 33:00PJ Vogt?

  Oh, wow.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  So China came online super, super fast. And because Chinese manufacturing like just completely took over the global economy in the 90s and 2000s, they are able to do stuff with direct to consumer goods that America cannot do. Like, we just can't actually do it. This is actually the anxiety that Trump is sort of focused on because we can't actually compete with what Chinese internet and Chinese manufacturing are doing together right now.

• 33:33PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Like, there's no way.

• 33:35PJ Vogt?

  Right. And so the theory of why this is happening in this particular way, why, like, when you describe the Chinese internet, I feel the way I used to imagine people felt looking at America, this place that makes so much stuff, maybe too much stuff, but a lot of stuff you also kind of want. The reason I now have that reverse vertigo looking at China is because the theory is their rate of change was so much higher, and it happened at the time where they became the world's manufacturer. So you both have people moving into consumerism more quickly, factories that can serve them, and the sort of like

• 34:14PJ Vogt?

  excitement and joy of a society just experiencing the wonders of consumerism before its hangover. Like, they're not in the ad buster stage of things for the most part.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  To a degree. And like, I'm not a China expert. I only have been to the country once, incidentally, in December 2019, where I traveled through Wuhan on a train. Fun fact.

• 34:33PJ Vogt?

  Not really.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  No, I'm not kidding. That did happen. I went from Beijing to Hong Kong on a train, and it, all the trains in China stop at Wuhan. It's like they're Chicago. So, yes, I was...

• 34:41PJ Vogt?

  Hey, Ryan, thanks for everything.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, you're welcome. So, I'm not a China expert by any means, but I did spend some time talking to people who work online there, people who sort of work with technology there, and I have a better sense than I did before. And I'm not going to say that China is some sort of like consumerist utopia. And in fact, there are a lot of rough edges that like they're sort of papering over as they continue to economically expand, but they have made a lot of progress and their internet is a vastly different shape than ours. They cannot communicate freely the way we can and culturally, they think that that's not a bad idea. I had one executive at a Chinese tech company say, yeah, we don't have free speech online, but we don't have Trump either. So that's how they see it.

• 35:24PJ Vogt?

  Oh, that's so funny that we're a bad advertisement for free speech right now.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Yes, we're a terrible advertisement.

• 35:30PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, we're a hyper polarized society that is not figuring out how to handle truth and misinformation or like extreme viewpoints like.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:39PJ Vogt?

  So they're like, what if the internet was just shopping and sort of?

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. What if the internet was a was a mall that could distract you from wanting to talk about why your town's water is full of crap in it, or why the police arrested someone they should and or, you know, any sort of political thing you'd want to talk about on our internet, they're like, we're going to focus on other stuff.

• 36:00PJ Vogt?

  Just to say, I support democracy and free speech. I prefer to live in America. I also see how for them right now, where like the friend who's trying to convince you to try psychedelics, who is a drug addict and doing really poorly.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 36:14PJ Vogt?

  Okay. So to go back to the story that brought us to like, just trying to understand what TikTok seems to be doing to American culture and world culture right now. Just like, there's a viral video. It's posted by an influencer named Maria Vieira. She puts it online. It kind of sits there for a little bit. It goes viral after a couple of months. The world is introduced to, I don't want to say like photogenic, but like visually striking candy bar. What happens from there?

• 36:44Speaker 01

  It blows up. There's a pistachio shortage. It's so popular. There's a bunch of copycats that hit the market and they don't disclose like what kind of nuts are in it. I mean, it's all of the things that you can imagine happening. Every brand creates their own knockoff. It is.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  A typical food trend in the sense that like everyone is doing it and it's getting worse and worse over time, but Dubai chocolate has been going on for almost two years now, and it feels like it's only peaking right now.

• 37:14PJ Vogt?

  Wait, Dubai chocolate has been going on for two years?

• 37:16Speaker 01

  The video we watched of that beautiful woman eating it in her car, I think was filmed in 2023.

• 37:21PJ Vogt?

  Oh, my God.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2023.

• 37:23PJ Vogt?

  And the candy bar itself is invented...

• 37:26Speaker 01

  2021. And like Dubai chocolate's having a huge moment in the last, let's say, four or five months because it's snowballed together with a bunch of other trends that people are realizing are algorithmic. So like, you're gonna see, if you type into your search bar of, you use AOL, you go to your AOL homepage and you type in, you could type in Dubai chocolate, La Boo Boo, matcha, if you want. According to Know Your Meme, here's like how all of this stuff started to spread. I think this is a good ticking timeline here. So here's one post from April, which reads, on X, the everything app, it reads, "Dude, the way you use that Digicam while drinking matcha with the La Boo Boo hanging off your

• 38:07Speaker 01

  carabiner attached to your Japanese selvage denim is so tough, twin." And then another post a couple of months later said, "I got my matcha, Dubai chocolate, my La Boo Boo, and my Murakami book. What should I get next, Mr. Algorithm? Please tell me, please." And then people started making Dubai chocolate La Boo Boo matcha, which is like a La Boo Boo made of Dubai chocolate that's dipped in the matcha.

• 38:33PJ Vogt?

  And the joke just being, let's take all these things that are so popular, that the thing that they represent more than anything is just popularity, and that the last joke about them always ends up just being, what if all the popular things were in the same place?

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, or, or to think of it like the pornography idea, it's like, at the end of the algorithm is just all this cultural detritus, you know, because it's all these people just jamming keywords together to get your eyeballs.

• 39:01PJ Vogt?

  Right, right. It's like, it's like the, the thing that you see at the end of super spammy quotes where it's just like 50 hashtags.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's the edge of the trend. So this, I think, is actually like the big story of Gen Z, which is that they are desperate to understand how coolness works, but because they've only ever lived in a world with social platforms, they do not understand it. So they can't figure out, like... And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense where it's like you and I knew a world in which you could not immediately see how many other people had looked at or enjoyed or shared or commented on a piece of culture.

• 39:42PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Now, every single thing, even TV, when it's eventually uploaded to YouTube, has a number underneath it that tells you exactly how many people consumed it. So if you come across a restaurant and you're Gen Z and you want to be a hipster and you're like, "This is a cool restaurant." And you take a video of it and nobody watches it. Well, that's not gatekeeping. Nobody watched it. So like, how do you gatekeep in a world where the only value attached to things is popularity? And you can see this conflict in all Gen Z culture and it's clearly causing them distress. And like, they don't know what to do.

• 40:16PJ Vogt?

  Because what you're saying is that for coolness to work, you need to find something obscure before everybody else does. But then you want people to notice that you found the obscure thing.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Right. In an attention economy, which we now live in, if you don't tell anyone, it's worthless.

• 40:32PJ Vogt?

  And so what you end up having instead is a bunch of people trying to signify who they are and what cool is using like incredibly popular mass market signifiers. And so you end up with a lot of conversations about the new chocolate everybody's eating or the new doll everybody's buying, because that's kind of all anyone has.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  And if you think about the stuff about, you know, Chinese manufacturing and Chinese social shopping, there is a vested interest in making this even more pronounced, like making more products for more people to consume. And so, yeah, Gen Z doesn't really know, they don't seem to know what to do.

• 41:09PJ Vogt?

  It's funny, I feel bad for them.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  I always feel bad for them, yeah.

• 41:13PJ Vogt?

  Like, I feel like we gave them a more broken internet than the one we encountered and one that seems like harder to navigate, frankly.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know, they clearly need to create a sense of coolness, just to like survive and to create their own culture. And that's how culture works, but they can't. So you get a lot of stuff like Dubai chocolate happening, you know, like I said, once a financial quarter.

• 41:39PJ Vogt?

  And is the candy any good?

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Never had it.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Never had it.

• 41:46PJ Vogt?

  You've never been curious enough to try to eat the digital thing in real life? After two years of having to hear about it and think about it and theorize about it constantly? Like, there's been no part of you that just wants to take a bite of the chocolate?

• 41:56Speaker 01

  No, I've had the Middle Eastern dessert it's based on, a canafé. I like it. I like Middle Eastern pistachio candy, but I don't, I'm not a big chocolate guy, to be very honest.

• 42:10PJ Vogt?

  Ryan, thank you for mapping this insanity.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  No problem. I hope my theories are correct. I think I understand what's going on, but also I'm 35 years old, so I could be wrong.

• 42:29PJ Vogt?

  Ryan Broderick, his newsletter about the internet is called Garbage Day. I'm a subscriber. He also has a podcast about the internet called Panic World. Actually, appeared on the show a couple of episodes back. It was very fun. Ryan made me pretty uncomfortable. You should check it out.

• 42:56PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by the new book from Michael Lewis, Blockers. For 30 years, Michael Lewis has written about the people behind the stories in character-driven bestsellers like The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Fifth Risk. Now, in his new book, Blockers, Michael Lewis tells the story of six civil servants who devoted their lives to public service that matters. One kept Americans' most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands. Another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods. Another helped uncover the mysteries of cystic fibrosis. There was also a security guard. In the new Washington, these federal employees discovered that their high standards were their greatest liability.

• 43:39PJ Vogt?

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• 44:02PJ Vogt?

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• 45:08PJ Vogt?

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• 45:53PJ Vogt?

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• 46:17PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pinamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. This episode was fact-checked by Claire Hyman. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Vazarian. Special thanks this week to Matt Lieber. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. And thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Moira Curran, Josephine Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. If you'd like to support our show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and some bonus audio -- we released some bonus audio this week, in fact -- please consider signing up for incognito mode.

• 46:59PJ Vogt?

  You can learn more at searchengine.show or you can sign up directly in Apple Podcasts. Follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.

• 47:32PJ Vogt?

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