A (2:55)

This is not the part of the summer where sleeves are working for me there'. 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.

B (3:09)

Yeah, I think that's smart.

A (3:11)

Okay, so why don't you introduce yourself?

B (3:14)

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

A (3:22)

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.

B (3:48)

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. 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.

A (4:25)

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.

B (4:51)

Sure.

A (4:51)

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.

B (5:16)

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

A (6:01)

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.

B (6:07)

Happy to help.

A (6:08)

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 seem to come from nowhere and then be everywhere. I feel like 6 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 constantly seeing the phrase Dubai chocolate. I would just like to know what even is the origin story of Dubai chocolate. Where does it come from? I have a safe guess. You could tell me I'm wrong and I would believe you.

B (6:40)

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

A (7:18)

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 this sort of, like, original video together?

B (7:31)

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

A (7:44)

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

B (7:45)

So this is MariaVajera257 in 2023 on TikTok.

A (7:51)

She's like a woman. She looks like she's in her 20s. 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.

B (8:11)

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

A (8:14)

It's really gross. And it's looping.

B (8:16)

It's not looping.

A (8:17)

Oh, it's not.

B (8:17)

This video is a minute and a half long. Yeah, I know 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.

A (8:27)

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.

B (8:38)

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.

A (8:53)

Wait, sorry, what is the ASMR Pull apart thing?

B (8:55)

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

A (9:00)

I don't.

B (9:01)

There's a lot of things they all do. 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.

A (9:13)

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

B (9:19)

Okay. 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. Let's eat some chili's mozzarella sticks.

A (9:29)

Let's eat some chili's mozzarella sticks.

B (9:31)

Oy, palmos. Fried mozzarella stick de chilies. The idea is to just emphasize the sensory aspects of the food you're eating.

A (9:40)

I've been craving this for the longest time.

B (9:42)

10 out of 10, 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. So the fact that you bite it in this chocolate bar and it oozes out effectively, like, delicious looking green slime is the marketing. Like, it's. The marketing is literally baked in.

A (10:16)

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

B (10:22)

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's coming out. I think that every time I see.

A (10:33)

A Dubai chocolate thing, 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.

B (10:53)

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

A (10:55)

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

B (11:00)

So this video is posted by Maria Verhera. 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.

A (11:11)

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

B (11:17)

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 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 a giant shopping mall, sort of like the nexus of all late stage capitalism, 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.

A (12:28)

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?

B (12:35)

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.

A (13:00)

But give me just for like my mom listening, literally. What is mukbang?

B (13:05)

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

A (13:19)

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 non 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.

B (13:42)

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 get horny. Cool. With the advent of user generated video 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 hours of temple run footage, or you could watch a live stream of a woman eating nothing but french fries for eight hours. Or you could watch ASMR content. It's stimulating for reasons that it just is.

A (14:21)

So let me just make sure. Cause 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 notes. 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. There's lots of images people watch that they're drawn to because it activates some 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.

B (15:24)

Yeah. We've reduced video content on the Internet to raw stimuli.

A (15:28)

Yes.

B (15:28)

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 Vieira, 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.

A (15:58)

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. 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. This episode is brought to you in part by Ollie. If your dog could talk. They beg for Ollie. The full body tail wag, the excited little hops, the big goofy grin. That's the Ollie effect. Ollie delivers clean, fresh nutrition in five drool worthy flavors even for the pickiest eaters. Made in US Kitchens with the highest quality human grade ingredients, Ollie's food offers no fillers, no preservatives, just real food. And here's the thing. Healthier food means a happier pup, more energy, shinier coats, better poops, and more excitement at mealtime. I offered Ollie to my dog. He was a huge fan. While he does not communicate using words, he ate the food very quickly and seemed to want more. Dogs deserve the best, and that means fresh, healthy food. Head to ollie.com search tell them all about your dog and use Code search to get 60% off your welcome kit when you subscribe today. Plus, they offer a happiness guarantee on the first spot, so if you're not completely satisfied, you'll get your money back. That's o l l I e.com search and enter code search to get 60% off your first box this episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Chilipad. Will my kid sleep tonight? Will I wake up at 3am again? Am I going to wake up hot and sweaty because my partner leaves the heat on? Those are thoughts that bounce around my head when I can't sleep too. And let's face it, sleep slips away when you're too hot, uncomfortable, or caught in a loop of racing thoughts. But cool sleep helps reset the body and calm the mind. That's where Chilipad by Sleep Me comes in. It's a bed cooling system that personalizes your sleep environment so you'll fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and actually wake up refreshed. I struggle with sleep constantly, and I have found that having a bed that is cool and temperature controlled actually really does make a huge difference. Chilipad works with your current mattress and uses water to regulate the temperature. Visit www.sleepmesearch to get your chilipad and save 20% with code search. This limited offer is available for search engine listeners and only for a limited time. Order it today with free shipping and try it out for 30 days. You return it for free. If you don't like it with their sleep trial, visit www.sleep s l e e p.me search and see why cold sleep is your ultimate ally in performance and recovery. From comedians like Mike Birbiglia, Tig Notaro and Bill Burr to astronauts, teachers and Nobel Prize winners every week on the Moth Podcast, real people tell their stories live on the stage. Is there anything in your diet that might be spiking your blood sugar? I said. Sometimes I eat pizza until I'm unconscious, he said. I think that might be it to hear stories of humor, heart, and connection. Follow and listen to the moth on the Free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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?

B (20:24)

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

A (20:39)

Oh, got it. Okay. So it's the inventor of the chocolate is like, I should send out free samples to this viral woman.

B (20:45)

Exactly.

A (20:46)

And hopefully she'll want to make a video.

B (20:48)

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

A (20:52)

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

B (20:56)

You should send her search engine to listen to in her corner. I bet there's a fee.

A (21:03)

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

B (21:05)

But I bet it's worth it.

A (21:07)

Yeah.

B (21:07)

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

A (21:11)

Honestly, nothing would make me happier.

B (21:13)

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. 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.

A (22:03)

Wait, and help me understand because, like, I really ticked. 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 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's that different than Instagram? Like Twitter, when it was Twitter, even Facebook, like, what's the meaningful step change here?

B (22:36)

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 can 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. Okay, so instead of making culture to sell ads, it's what if we got people to make ads that happen to create culture? It's the total inverse of it. It's funny.

A (23:23)

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.

B (23:30)

Exactly.

A (23:31)

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

B (23:35)

Do you buy chocolate? Labubus 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.

A (24:12)

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?

B (24:35)

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.

A (24:55)

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.

B (25:13)

Right.

A (25:13)

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.

B (25:24)

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. Huh. 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 show Panic World, we did an interview a couple 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 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 going to do? And obviously they have workarounds and, like, code words and all that. But, like, Chinese Internet is a shopping mall, and ours, even though we like to think it is, is not even close to how consumerist Chinese social media is.

A (26:18)

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 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 at TikTok just sells Americans more stuff, which feels like the most American thing a final switch could do.

B (27:19)

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.

A (27:34)

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 commercial in it.

B (27:50)

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.

A (28:10)

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

B (28:13)

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

A (28:20)

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

B (28:29)

Yeah, sure. I think it works on desktop. Yeah. Okay, so this is TikTok shop. It launched a couple years ago and it looks exactly like Amazon. And it's selling stuff that you would buy on Amazon. Yeah. But if you click on. Let's see, do you need.

A (28:44)

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

B (28:49)

You want to buy the supplement, so you go to the supplement. Yeah, look in here, it's got reviews. Now here, what we can do is go down and here's all the videos.

A (28:59)

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

B (29:00)

And these videos are making commission, by the way.

A (29:02)

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

B (29:07)

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?

A (29:18)

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

B (29:23)

Let's find out. Okay, so yeah, you got. Here's a diaper bomb. You go to the TikTok shop, but.

A (29:29)

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

B (29:33)

Well, let's, you know, let's. Oh, and it's even suggesting K Pop demon hunters 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 and why.

A (29:47)

Why have American social media companies resisted that so strongly?

B (29:50)

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? Right?

A (29:58)

Okay.

B (29:58)

And then you also see the flip side of this was so like 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.

A (30:41)

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 times a year. Like Dubai Chocolate is one. Labubu right now is another. The Stanley Thermos thing. Like, I don't even remember how long ago that was. A year, two years now. 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 a 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.

B (31:36)

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 Labubus or Dubai Chocolate or Stanley Cups or whatever it is. There's one of those happening as often as there is like a meme or a hit song or whatever.

A (32:03)

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, the exact same.

B (32:13)

Shirt we bought off Amazon together. Yes, yes, exactly. Right. So this is happening. Like, this is clearly happening.

A (32:21)

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.

B (32:28)

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

A (32:49)

Oh, wow.

B (32:51)

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.

A (33:22)

Right.

B (33:22)

Like there's no way. Right.

A (33:24)

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

B (34:14)

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

A (34:22)

Not really.

B (34:23)

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

A (34:30)

Hey, Ryan, thanks for having me.

B (34:31)

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 am 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.

A (35:13)

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

B (35:17)

Yes, we're a terrible advertisement.

A (35:19)

Yeah. We're a hyper polarized society that has not figured out how to handle truth and misinformation or like extreme viewpoints. Like, huh?

B (35:27)

Yeah.

A (35:28)

So they're like, what if the Internet was just shopping and sort of.

B (35:31)

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 shouldn't or, you know, any sort of police political thing you'd want to talk about on our Internet, they're like, we're going to focus on other stuff.

A (35:49)

Just to say, I support democracy and free speech. I'd 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.

B (36:01)

Exactly.

A (36:03)

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 in world culture right now. Just like there's a viral video, it's posted by an influencer named Maria Ferreira. 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?

B (36:32)

It blows up. There's a pistachio shortage. It's so popular. There's A bunch of copycats that hit the market if 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 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.

A (37:02)

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

B (37:05)

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

A (37:10)

Oh, my God.

B (37:11)

Yeah, 2023.

A (37:11)

And the candy bar itself is invented 2021.

B (37:15)

And, like, Dubai Chocolate's having a huge moment in the last, let's say, four or five months because it snowballed together with a bunch of other trends that people are realizing are algorithmic. So, like, you're going to see if you type into your search bar of you use the aol, you go to your AOL homepage and you type in. You could type in Dubai Chocolate, Labubu, Matcha, if you want. And according to Know youw 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 Le Boo hanging off your carabiner attached to your Japanese selvage. Denim is so tough. And then another post a couple months later said, I got my Matcha, Dubai Chocolate, my Labubu and my Murakami book. What should I get next, Mr. Algorithm? Please tell me, please. And then people started making Dubai Chocolate Labubu Matcha, which is like a Labubu made of Dubai Chocolate that's dipped in the matcha.

A (38:21)

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 the last joke about them always ends up just being, what if all the popular things were in the same place?

B (38:36)

Yeah.

A (38:37)

Or.

B (38:37)

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 right.

A (38:50)

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.

B (38:56)

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.

A (39:31)

Yeah.

B (39:31)

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.

A (40:05)

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.

B (40:15)

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

A (40:21)

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.

B (40:38)

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. Hmm.

A (40:57)

It's funny. I feel bad for them.

B (40:59)

I always feel bad for them.

A (41:00)

Yeah, 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.

B (41:09)

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.

A (41:28)

And is the candy any good?

B (41:29)

I've never had it. Never had it.

A (41:34)

You've never been curious enough to try to eat the digital thing in real life after. 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.

B (41:45)

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

A (41:59)

Ryan, thank you for mapping this insanity.

B (42:03)

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.

A (42:17)

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 episodes back. It was very fun. Ryan made me pretty uncomfortable. You should check it out. This episode is brought to you in part by Robert Half. Need contract help for those workload peaks and backlogged projects? You're not alone. Robert half found that 67% of companies surveyed so they will increase their use of contract talent. That's why their recruiters leverage their experience and use award winning AI to quickly find the skilled candidates they want learn about their specialized talent in finance, accounting, technology, marketing, legal and administrative support at Robert Half. They know talent. Visit roberthalf.com talent today. This episode is brought to you in part by Groons. Summer just got tastier with Gruen's limited edition Raspberry Limited Flavor. But hurry, it's only available through August. This limited time flavor is a fun, refreshing way to upgrade your wellness routine. Whether you're packing your beach bag, carry on or just heading out for the day, these gummies are snackable, packable and perfect for wherever your summer takes you. Being healthy this summer has never been more convenient or tasted better. Here's what makes Groons different. They're not just a multivitamin. They pack greens, prebiotics, 20 plus vitamins and minerals and over 16 whole food ingredients into eight gummies a day. Because one gummy just can't do it all Groons are vegan, gluten free, dairy free, nut free and free from artificial colors and flavors. And the best part? The ingredients are backed by over 35,000 research publications. So it's a formula you can trust Grab your limited edition Raspberry Lemonade Grooms and get up to 52% off by using the code search. You can find them@gruns co g r u n s c o go. This episode is brought to you in part by Jerry. All right, let's play a quick game of Would you rather Would you rather be stuck on a group chat with your ex and your in laws or shop for car insurance? Exactly. Shopping for car insurance used to be that painful. Endless forums hopping from site to site, dodging sales calls like it's dodgeball in high school. But with Jerry, everything has changed. Jerry makes the whole whole process ridiculously easy. You answer a few simple questions once, and Jerry compares quotes from over 50 top rated insurers all in one place. No spam, no sketchy calls. No need to sacrifice your weekend to paperwork. Stop needlessly overpaying for car insurance. Drivers who save with Jerry save on average $110 a month. That's more than $1,300 a year. So before you renew your policy, do yourself a favor. Download the Jerry app or head to Jerry Jerry AI Search Engine. In just a few minutes, you can compare quotes and coverages side by side from up to 50 top insurers. Jerry Car Insurance Made simple and finally, on your side, based on drivers who switched and saved with Jerry over the past 12 months, over 20% of drivers who switched with Jerry found a monthly premium of $87 or less. Not all drivers find savings. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by Me, PJ Vogt and Shruti Pinamaneny. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. This episode was Fact Checked by Claire Hyman. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Special thanks this week to Matt Lieber. Our executive producer is Leah Rees Dennis. And thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk, Courtney and Hilary Schaff. Our agent is Oren 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. You can learn more at Search Engine 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. See you in two weeks.