The Death of Cringe (LOL Cows are Boomer)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
169.44359
Summary
In this episode, we talk about fringe psychology, lolcals, horror cows, and how fringe psychology works. We also discuss fringe psychology in general, and why it's important to understand how the mind works.
Transcript
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cringe is over. Cringe is boomer. Lulcals are boomer. Like cringe is, um, actually it's probably
00:00:07.040
more Gen X, both of them. Yeah. Boomer's just shorthand, I think, for old. You cannot be based
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without being cringe. Yeah. And by that, what I mean, we're based is defined as without fear of
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societal expectations, do what you think is right, say what you think is true and interpret reality
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in a way that is logically consistent within whatever value set you have determined for
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yourself. I actually think that we saw this reflected in the Trump-Hillary election.
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Trump was cringe in many ways. It is almost impossible to say Trump isn't cringe, but he
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passed through the valley of cringe to base where he combined cringe and self-satisfaction,
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but self-comfort. The comfort was the ways that his value system was different from society's
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value system. Would you like to know more? Word. Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be talking to you
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today. Hi, Malcolm. Today, I am going to be talking about something that one of our fans
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said in the Discord when I was chatting with them, and it really led me to reflect. I was
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talking about lolcals and like the joke that, oh yeah, we want to be lolcals. It's the prior
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thing that we've never had like a Kiwi farm made about us or something like that, given the number
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of times we've gone viral. We have two Know Your Meme entries about us. But we've never really done
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anything actually egregious. It's more like we are egregious from an extremist leftist perspective,
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which just doesn't really make us traditional lolcals anymore than, I don't know, some other
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individuals like Ben Shapiro could be seen as more lolcally than us, to be honest. But it got them
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talking about lolcals and they're like, lolcals are so boomer. And then I started thinking about it
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because I interact with a few different types of communities online. I see the way different people
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interact online. And I realized I do not see lolcals discussion amongst Gen Alpha, or really
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amongst younger Gen Z people. And then it got me thinking, wait, why is this? So first, let's talk
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about what lolcals are. Do you know what lolcals are, Simone? My understanding is a lolcal is an online
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figure, someone who's public enough online to be fairly well documented, who has done enough
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cringeworthy or egregious things that the community on Kiwi Farms has decided to begin creating detailed
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posts, categorizing and cataloging their various embarrassing behaviors and exploits so that
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everyone can sit and laugh at them. Yes? Yes, it is. So there's a couple of categories. There's lolcals
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and there's horror cows. Horror cows are like, they're just truly a horrifying human being. And
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then lolcals are, they are funny. Chris Chan is probably the number one lolcow, although I think he
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kind of borders on a horror cow now with the, you heard what happened to him, right? No. Oh, so he was
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in jail for a bit. I think he might be out now. But he was in jail for sleeping with his mother.
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Oh, no. His dubious consent. It looks like he's very elderly. Yeah. So that's where somebody becomes
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a horror cow. I think I'm gonna vomit. But anyway. Oh, god. But it also brought me to another topic,
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which I think. So there's like, why do people engage with these sorts of people? Like, why do
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they watch them? And it is because they like the emotional subset that these individuals trigger in
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them. And I think that there's a few, justice that a bad person had bad things happen to them,
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an opportunity to troll someone that you see as lesser than you, the feeling of cringe at another
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person, and the feeling of disgust at another person, and also the feeling of learning how fringe
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psychology individuals work. Which is actually the thing that's most interesting to me. Okay. So
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I'll explain what I mean by that's interesting to me. I find it very interesting to study how the human
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mind works when it is breaking. Because through that, like through studying how something like a car
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breaks, you can understand how the car might be put together. And as a former neuroscientist who
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specialized in like abnormal psychology and stuff like that, when the evolution of the human cognition,
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this is really interesting to me, because it does help me understand when I see novel conditions,
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where especially where I see convergent behavior patterns across different locales, I can be like,
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oh, this is an unusual behavior pattern, but it comes to convergently. So something in our society
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must be pushing it, or it must be some sort of pre-evolved pathway, or a way that some system can
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break, which can then give me more insight into myself. But the other subsets, I think,
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are what drama is people. The cringe and stuff like that. Which I never got. Also, you don't,
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even if you see cringe comedy, for example, in a TV show, both you and I can't take it. So I think
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it's something I have a lot of different things to do. I find it very painful to watch. Yeah.
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And then this brought me to another thing, which is the statement that I was thinking, and I was like,
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this is true. Cringe is over. Cringe is boomer. Low cows are boomer. Like, cringe is,
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actually, it's probably more Gen X, both of them. Cringe is Gen X, and cows are Gen X,
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which are new boomers, right? Yeah, boomers just shorthand, I think, for old.
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Yeah. But remember when, like, our cringe used to be a thing, and like, things being cringey used to
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be a thing, and you just wouldn't hear a young person call something cringe anymore? Like,
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we interact with young people, and they don't use the term that much when they're talking about
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things. And so I think what we're seeing here is a cultural shift, where when the internet first
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began to proliferate, and the first generation of genuinely online natives, which was really our
00:06:03.600
generation, we realized, oh my god, you can find people doing crazy, insane things on the internet,
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and then a culture arose following, mocking, and laughing down at these individuals. For the
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generation under us, they don't find this to be the novelty that our generation did, and they find
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the behavior patterns around this to be quite disgusting. Like, you could say, I don't want to
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say, like, low class, but pathetic. Like, laughing at somebody who barely has their life together and
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clearly has major psychiatric conditions, is not cool, though, within Gen Alpha. Ah, yes.
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To speak like the young people do, because they say things like, cool. I gotta make up terms,
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because I don't know what they're saying. Yeah, we shouldn't even try. But that makes sense to me
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when I think about the things that Gen Alpha values. This reactionary, and status hierarchies built around
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mocking those who are weaker than you, is just like, why would you do that? I think from the
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perspective of this generation. Yeah. I think part of it's also because poor mental health has
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proliferated so much that there's this, I'm not okay either. Why would I, I, who identifies as someone
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who's struggling mentally, take pleasure in seeing the mental languishing of someone else?
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I think that has something to do with that. Yeah, but you also gotta think about the politicization
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of the online space into leftist and rightist spaces, which was not as much the case when we
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were younger. And as the online space has become politicized, most spaces and most status hierarchies
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within most places identify as either left or right-leaning status hierarchies, which means you're
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now playing by the moral codes of each of these status hierarchies. And while they are different moral codes,
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neither of them would elevate targeting an individual who is mentally unhealthy and doing
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cringy things. On the left, this would be seen as bullying a disabled person, right? You know,
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why would you do this? Like you're a horrible person and you are like the definition of evil
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on, which is often there's lots of performative masculine communities. There's lots of communities
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around self-improvement. There's lots of, but if you're in like a self-improvement community,
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you think that they're going to elevate you for saying that somebody is cringy for anything other
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than their like political beliefs or failures at self-improvement? No, they're going to look at you
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like, why would you do that? Like, well, why are you just randomly targeting someone? You should be
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focused on yourself, which is why I think that you've got the elevation of the haze community. It's
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still one of the low-cal communities that it's seen as really acceptable to hate on because it's
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acceptable to hate on it within this self-improvement niche as they are seen as the
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antithesis of self-improvement. And for people who aren't familiar with the haze community,
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it's a healthy at every size community, which promotes the idea that no matter what weight you
00:09:06.780
are, you can be perfectly healthy and that you should do things like intuitive eating, which just
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means eat whatever you want, whenever you feel like it, and that you will be more healthy if you are
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doing that because your body knows what it needs. And obviously these things are true and they
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represent a complete sort of mirroring of what everything you get in within these fitness
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circles so that they make fun of these communities. But then you also have the masculine, the performative
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masculinity right-leaning communities. Like they're not going to like laughing at the low-cal, so you're
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not going to get it there. You're not going to get it in the intellectualist communities because why does
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that help anyone in that community? They're like, why are you doing this? This is a sociopathic waste of
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your time. And so I also think, ironically, as the internet sphere has become politicized,
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there just are not spaces where this is elevated as much except when the lolcows are explicitly
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political or explicitly high profile. I have a slightly different theory. Can I share it before
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you go forward? Okay, great. My slightly different take on this is that lolcows or cringe watching
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has shifted into hate watching. But hate watching and love watching are closely related and often
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simultaneous. So I don't really hear about people doing much cringe watching anymore. But what I do hear
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from people again and again as they're commenting on others online is, oh, I follow this person or this
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group or these types of people online religiously. Like they're always following them on Instagram or
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YouTube or whatever it may be. And I hate them. But I love watching them. And I also now have this
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parasocial relationship with them whereby I care about them. And I think what's going on here is that,
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yes, we're in this highly politicized world. And yes, we do like to look down on other people or feel
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superior about ourselves or at least feel like we're reinforcing our own identities and political
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identities especially. However, there's also this extreme craving online and in the world in general
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for authenticity. And so these people that you can watch to hate, they are typically very authentic.
00:11:23.680
They're very vehement in their beliefs. And often you watch them because they're vehement in their
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beliefs, which are in political opposition to your own, right? So they're like the based Mormons and
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you're the progressive. Historically, we're not about political beliefs. Yeah. They were more just
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embarrassing people online. And now people are watching, they're hate watching people who are
00:11:42.580
politically very different from them. But this one went to my political theory. So this would argue
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that it's something different is going on here, which is, and it was this topic, we don't have an
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answer. Like I'm very open to ideas. Yeah, this is conjecture. Most of what we do is conjecture.
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We just sometimes feel very confident about it. Yeah. I feel uniquely unconfident about this conjecture,
00:12:01.700
but it was something I wanted to think about and pontificate on with you because this podcast
00:12:04.920
helps me think through things, which was, I think it is political lolcows are seen as okay
00:12:10.400
because they are, you can hate on them within the other political sphere. And we believe that they
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are not like mentally ill people often. They are just people doing active harm to the world out of
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arrogance and not being, and a lack of open-mindedness. And both parties now just think the other party
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isn't open-minded. The left is, oh, the right isn't open-minded about these topics.
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And the right's like, no, you're not open-minded about ideological diversity
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and diversity of cultural spectrums. And so both groups believe the other groups is small-minded
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and could, if they tried to look outside their bubbles, see the world as it truly is.
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So not being open-minded. That, and then the other thing is I think that punching up is seen as very
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okay. So lolcows that are famous in some way are seen as okay to laugh at still and okay to focus on.
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So a great example of this would be the Shia LaBeouf flag thing when 4chan was chasing around it,
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the great internet has to worry in on it. Because Shia LaBeouf is technically a famous actor. So we
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can lolcow him all we want. Or the Johnny Depp divorce thing, right? Like I think people really
00:13:19.500
focus on that because that woman, whatever her name was, was just so hateable.
00:13:22.860
Yeah. And not only was she hateable, but the form of hate you had for her fell into one of the
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political niches that was in the online, i.e. was in like red pill communities and stuff like that.
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And so this then goes to reinforce the reason why cringe stopped is you needed to be cringing
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specifically at an otherwise mentally competent person now, because it's just not funny to cringe
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at the mentally disabled anymore, which like, yeah, sure. Like online culture has grown up.
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And they need to be in opposition to something one of your community stands for. What do you think?
00:13:58.640
Yeah, that sounds about right. I think now there's also this need to add to what you're saying
00:14:07.460
to virtue signal, in addition to be smug and cringe at someone. Whereas in the past,
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it was just fun to cringe and laugh at someone who was just incredibly mentally ill.
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Or just really stupid, which seemed to be the most common themes. Now it's more appropriate to
00:14:28.060
cringe or laugh at someone who's just very, we'll say morally inferior per your cultural group, right?
00:14:38.160
Yeah. Yeah. And I also think it's that we have moved away from a society where the lull cows were seen as
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violating societal norms that everyone agreed to. And that's what made them cringe. It was like this cringe
00:14:54.980
that everyone could agree on. But in the modern context, that's not what we're looking at. We're not looking
00:15:01.980
at it because people no longer believe in like a default set of social values. The social values in
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the online left and the online right, because they've drifted apart so much are unique and
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differentiated, which prevents generic violations of social norms as othering somebody from specifically
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one of those two communities. Where do you think the future is going to go with this stuff?
00:15:22.740
Oh boy, that's a good question. Yeah. Who will we demonize and make fun of in the future? I could see
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apostates being the next top targets. So both, because what we predict, right, demographically,
00:15:41.420
is that there's going to be this increasing xenophobia in high fertility groups, plus increasing levels of
00:15:50.480
extreme predation from the urban monoculture as it needs to get more converts, which means that
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there is on both sides, we're going to see more xenophobia. And then on both sides, the ultimate enemy,
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the people that are the worst are those who detract, those who leave the home culture,
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or those who leave progressive culture. So like detransitioners and stuff like that.
00:16:14.340
Detransitioners, religious people who convert to atheism, that those people will be seen. So right
00:16:19.440
now, for example, there's a lot of people we follow online on YouTube who are like ex-Mormons,
00:16:25.740
for example, who do a lot of commentary on Mormon culture. I could see there being this sort of movement
00:16:30.820
of now a bunch of Mormons just really enjoy following those ex-Mormons and seeing how miserable their
00:16:36.080
lives are and how childless they are and how fat and ugly they've become as soon as they leave the
00:16:40.480
religion, whatever, right? Like that, I could see them going for those sorts of things. On the other
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side, I could see people, and we're already, I think, starting to see the forefront of this,
00:16:51.300
the bellwether of this. I'm starting to see religious people doing things like that. And I'm
00:16:56.880
also starting to see progressives doing things like that with trad wives, for example. Oh, now she says
00:17:01.020
she's a trad cat. Now she says she's this. And look, she's going to lose all her money, and she's going
00:17:05.420
to be so miserable, and she acts as though she's so perfect, but she's really not. And I think that
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we're going to see more of that, and specifically from people who deconvert, and not just from people
00:17:18.120
who happen to be on the other team. We're going to increasingly ignore those people.
00:17:22.860
So I hear you. That might be what I have a different take of what might happen.
00:17:27.100
Tell me. Which is to say, and we've done a tweet to this extent, you cannot be based without being
00:17:35.400
cringe. Yeah. And by that, what I mean, people will be like, what do you mean by that? You cannot
00:17:39.600
be based. Like you cannot, where base is defined as, without fear of societal expectations, do what
00:17:46.280
you think is right, say what you think is true, and interpret reality in a way that is logically
00:17:51.680
consistent within whatever value set you have determined for yourself. So just uninfluenced by
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society, or a desire to status signal, or what's going on around you, just take a straight narrow
00:18:03.760
path there, that will lead you to make decisions that, it will axiomatically lead you to make
00:18:09.880
decisions that go against mainstream societal values. And where cringe is an individual, quote
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unquote, not recognizing mainstream societal values, or going against mainstream societal values,
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you are intrinsically, you must pass through the valley of cringe to get too based. And
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as such, and I'm going to get, and people might be like, come on, you're not really, you can't be
00:18:33.200
saying that lolcows are the new base. And I'd say, actually, I think so. I think that we live in a
00:18:40.200
society right now that is so starved for vitalism in people that it might admire, or model itself on,
00:18:48.600
that it is looking for these post-cringe individuals who demonstrate having something
00:18:55.980
together in their lives. It's this pall of nihilism that flows over the generations, who are
00:19:00.120
comfortable with who they are, and who they are is not about fitting some social trope around them.
00:19:07.020
And somebody can be like, who are you talking about here? Who would fit this? I'd say the Tiger King is a
00:19:11.980
great example of this. In any previous generation, the Tiger King would have been a lolcow. He is
00:19:19.480
almost the perfect representation of a lolcow. Look at this cringy, he's a bad person. He's cringy as
00:19:27.100
hell at everything he does. And yet you watch him, and he is the hero. Very obviously. You can look,
00:19:35.820
and he seems like a genuinely pretty bad person. And yet you find yourself, and I think society found
00:19:41.140
itself, loving him, and then hating the alternative, Carole Baskin, which was somebody who tried to play
00:19:47.340
by all of society's rules. Somebody who tried to fit this default social, like, idea of, I am a good
00:19:56.600
person, please like me. Subset of the Tiger King watchers, though, that was pro-Carole Baskin. I was under
00:20:03.440
that impression. There is a subset. They were like the far progressive ones, because what do
00:20:07.300
she represent? What do progressives represent, but just going along with the dominant cultural
00:20:11.780
group, right? And I think that what they miss is the average person, the average American who isn't
00:20:17.100
one of these progressive intellectual circles, doesn't like people like that. I actually think
00:20:21.860
that we saw this reflected in the Trump-Hillary election. Trump was cringe in many ways. It is almost
00:20:29.800
impossible to say, Trump isn't cringe, but he passed through the Valley of Cringe to base,
00:20:34.280
where he combined cringe and a self-satisfaction with who he has a self-satisfaction, but self-comfort.
00:20:39.960
The comfort was the ways that his value system was different from society's value system.
00:20:45.080
Yeah. And then on the progressive side- You had Clinton, who was just Carole Baskin.
00:20:48.600
No, yeah. Clinton did not pass through the Valley. She was still in the uncanny Valley of not,
00:20:54.940
What's his name? Mitten's guy. The guy who sat in the cold and is old.
00:21:02.600
No, Bernie Sanders passes through the Valley of Cringe to base with a complete ownership of
00:21:11.960
Mainstream culture. And here's where I think you have the new lolcow. The new true lolcow,
00:21:17.280
the person who everybody agrees that they hate, is somebody who both comes from privilege and
00:21:24.780
structures their entire life around fitting the mainstream societal exception of the idea of
00:21:31.760
this is a good person. And is clearly unhappy at the other end of that. And so I think the ideal,
00:21:39.360
who do you think I'm going to say is the ideal new lolcow? It's a couple.
00:21:43.260
Okay. So performative virtue signaler, a couple?
00:21:45.540
Comes from a position of power. Everything they do is about just showing the world. You know who
00:21:57.760
I think it's the new perfect lolcow. They are like the Carole Baskin or the Hillary Clinton on
00:22:04.140
crack, where every little thing about their lives is structured to try to earn mainstream societal
00:22:12.680
They don't realize that the normies don't exist anymore. They are yelling into a cloud that
00:22:19.060
does it to a void. And everybody thinks everything they do is truly detestable because it is so
00:22:31.720
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I think it's so interesting and I think intuitively confusing
00:22:37.680
to people. And I can't really understand it myself because they do represent some fairly average and
00:22:44.720
mainstream views. And they're always trying to jump on things that the mainstream has already jumped on.
00:22:49.140
So that's where it's weird. Why would we find that so cringe? And yet we do. I wonder what's going on
00:22:55.520
there. Why it would be so rejected because intuitively it seems like it shouldn't be that if they just glom on
00:23:00.920
whatever the current thing is that they should be celebrated for that. And yet they are not. Why do you think that only people
00:23:07.520
because I think that the dominant cultural group in our society has been so aggressive and so abusive to its
00:23:17.700
neighboring groups that the only people who really follow it anymore are the ultra elite, i.e. people who own media
00:23:25.720
companies, people who control our school systems, professors, stuff like that. And everyone else basically sees it as
00:23:32.260
this stupid culty religion. And so if you're like Harry and Meghan, all of your friends are in this cult. So you don't
00:23:37.680
understand that the general public basically sees it as a joke now. Even at the age of Trump, when he was first running,
00:23:45.280
we had already, I think, begun to enter that where everyone was just like, yeah, at least he's not doing what everyone
00:23:50.680
else is doing. And I think with Bernie, you catch on to the same thing here. People want something different.
00:23:57.520
Yeah, it could be. Yeah. The biggest thing is a dissatisfaction with everything
00:24:03.820
and an understanding that our current stances don't equal a solution. And maybe, yeah, it's part
00:24:09.100
of a flailing for hope. That's interesting. I guess we'll see how it plays out, who the future targets
00:24:15.060
of ridicule will be. Yeah, I'm very interested to watch this play out. And I think it's a positive
00:24:20.300
societal shift. And I think that there is a hole within the current memetic landscape
00:24:26.680
for individuals who are happy with who they are, who show a sense of vitalism and optimism for the
00:24:35.920
future, and who are cringe in that they differentiate from mainstream social expectations,
00:24:43.840
but take complete ownership of that. And I think that this is best represented in the traditional
00:24:48.020
Addams family, like the 90s Addams family, where I always say that the monsters were monstrous
00:24:52.740
because they were monsters trying to live within the dominant social culture, where the Addams
00:25:01.080
family were monstrous because they were normal humans who differentiated from the mainstream
00:25:04.860
societal culture so much that it made them more culturally similar to monsters than the society
00:25:10.740
around them, with the joke constant throughout the old Addams family being that despite that,
00:25:17.200
they were happy and satisfied and had healthy relationships that no one else was able to
00:25:22.820
capture in their society by following the rules. And in a society that is so nihilistic today,
00:25:30.280
in a society that is so clearly failed people and with social expectations that so clearly do not work
00:25:35.580
within this new economic and social context that we're in, people want a real Addams family.
00:25:41.880
They want a real family who your average boomer is like, oh, they're weird and cringe, but then why are
00:25:49.460
they happy? And that reflects on the real boomer that maybe they're right and you're wrong and everything
00:25:58.620
that you are teaching as a society right now is a necrotic rot of the human soul. And that when you look at
00:26:06.380
something and you react, ew, that's so silly, you are merely showing that you don't understand how to
00:26:14.700
achieve happiness and you genuinely, or satisfaction or a healthy relationship, and you have no future
00:26:21.380
plan for where we are going as a species that breeds optimism anymore while these weirdos do. And that
00:26:28.420
humor, I think, and that contrast, I think, is what we hope to drive with the community that we build and
00:26:34.700
why I think that it isn't just random cringe alternative. And I love you for creating this
00:26:42.260
with me, Simone. Thank you for not caring what others think. Oh, gosh. I'm very happy with what
00:26:47.920
we've done. And I really don't care what other people think, but that's probably the autism.
00:26:53.880
But I care what you think. Yeah. All right. Have a good one, Simone. You too, gorgeous.