A Dubai Chocolate theory of the internet

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To stream the best of cinema, you can try MUBI free for 30 days at MUBI.com/searchengine. That's MUBI.com/searchengine for a whole month of great cinema free. a check, check, check, check, check, hi, Ryan. Hello. Hey, nice shirt. PJ, did you also buy this on Amazon? I did. Are we wearing the same shirt? I think we're wearing the same shirt. We got a discount because the sleep monster ate our sleeves. Yeah. I'm done with sleeves. I'm done. This is not the part is over where sleeves are working for me. I don't have a very good AC here, and it's not that I think that everyone's just whistling at my biceps as I walk down the street. I'm just like, I've thrown in the towel on anything but comfort. Yeah. I think that's smart. Okay. So why don't you introduce yourself? Sure. My name is Ryan Broderick. I write a newsletter called Garbage Day, and I host a podcast called Panic World. And what you do in both of your projects and your entire professional life is you survey, explore, and catalog the internet, but particularly of an affinity for, like, if it were a Star Wars movie, it's like the outer rim far away from the empire. You like the places where things are weirder, darker, stranger, the marginal edges of the internet. I do. And 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 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 Sidney 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. And do you often, this is something that I've always wanted to ask you, Rudy, your work, is, like, for me, the weird rat dolls, LaBooBoo, my first encounter with LaBooBoo's 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 LaBooBoo craze had hit such a fever pitch, the person who ran the kiosk had converted to just selling LaBooBoo. Sure. And so it was just an entire little side store to knock off LaBooBoo. And I was like, oh, this is a thing that I don't know anything about and, like, kind of work 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? 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 overindex. 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. 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. Happy to help. 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 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. 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 canapha, 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. 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? Sure. I've got it right here, as well. Let's see. Here we go. Okay, so tell me what we're looking at. So this is Maria Vajara 257 in 2023 on TikTok. 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 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. This video's gross. Watching her, this is gross. It's really gross, and it's looping. It's not looping. Oh, it's not? This video's 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. It's funny because I can't tell if the effect is supposed to be disgusting or sexy, or she comes across as someone who's not very good at eating, mainly. 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. It's like a woman in her car eating and doing the ASMR pull apart thing that now everyone does with those mozzarella sticks from Chili's. Wait, I'm sorry. What is the ASMR pull apart thing? Oh, okay. So, like if you watch a lot of food videos on TikTok, I don't, but 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 phone. I finally got the gooey gummies off of TikTok shop, so let's do a taste test. These literally look so good, you guys. 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. Let's eat some Chili's mozzarella sticks. Hoy vamos a probar los fry mozzarella sticks de Chili's. The idea is to just emphasize the sensory aspects of the food you're eating. I've been craving this for the longest time, 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. Right. It's gooey and the goo itself is kind of like a surprise. It's not the goo you expect. The visual of it, though, I can't help but think just looks exactly like guacamole or like salsa verde. And so on camera, it looks like you're just biting in a chocolate and a bunch of guacamole is coming out. I think that every time I see it, it's my 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. Yeah. It's like a spread made of pistachio. And who is this person in the original video and what does she have to do with the person who actually invented the chocolate? So this video is supposed to by Maria Vajera. 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. I'm like a normal and real job, which would be commenting on the significance of a beautiful person on the internet. Yeah. 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 like 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. 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? 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- Give me just for like my mom listening, literally what is mukbang? It's 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. 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. 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 that you could watch porn and you could 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. So let me just make sure, because 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 before the internet, when people watched videos, usually more often than not, they were watching stories. We thought we'd watch stories because they had a beginning, middle, and end, and they had morals and feelings and whatever. Because with the internet, people make things purely to an intentional algorithm, not 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 if somebody walked into the room when you were watching it, you would not slam your laptop. Yeah. We've reduced video content on the internet to raw stimuli. Yes. 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 Vaera, 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. 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 that for these ads. 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? Companies send influencers these products for free. In this case, the influencer, Maria Vahera, she was sent those bars by Sarah Hamouda, who was the original engineer that created Dubai chocolate. The inventor of the chocolate is like, "I should send out free samples to this viral woman." Exactly. Hopefully, she'll want to make a video. The chocolate had been around for a couple years, but they're like, "Here, have a promotional chocolate bar." Yeah, exactly. She must be so happy she sent the chocolate bar. You should just send her search engine to listen to in her car. I bet there's a fee. I bet there's a fee, and I bet I can't afford it. But I bet it's worth it. Yeah. Could have a bunch of Dubai teenagers listening to search engine. Honestly, nothing would make me happier. But if you're trying to understand how TikTok is involved here, you have to understand that TikTok is not primarily a video platform. TikTok is based off Duyan. It's Chinese sister app, and it's part of what would be called social shopping or social e-commerce platforms in China, which are very popular. The way they function is they let people post stuff on there, but they also want to sell you stuff. So, TikTok doesn't want to create culture with trends, which is the American misunderstanding. It's the misunderstanding that fuels all of the moral panics about TikTok at the highest levels of our government right now. TikTok doesn't give a crap about whether or not it's influencing culture. It wants to influence you to buy the same product and talk about it. Wait, and help me understand it, because I've said this before in public on this podcast, but this generation of internet, I have just mostly set out. 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. I've skipped it. When you say 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, Twitter when it was Twitter, even Facebook? What's the meaningful step change here? 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 things that 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. 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. 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. Exactly. And then you wonder if that commercial might also go viral. And what does that look like functionally? Dubai chocolate, laboubous, matcha, Stanley cups, it has 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. 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? So like in most social shopping apps in China, the first wave is getting users to create their own ads for trends. The second wave is you build Amazon. 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. 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. Right. 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. 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, I 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. 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 underworrying 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 a TikTok just sells Americans more stuff, which feels like the most American thing a final switch could do. 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. 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. 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 is in this picture, it's sold through either the app itself or a third party that they're partnered with. It's funny. I've often wished Instagram would do that. Like, yeah. I can imagine if Instagram ads were then taking you to an Instagram store that you could just buy them from. 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? 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. Yeah. But if you click on, let's see, do you need, let's say I want to buy an Acetel Elcarnitine, which I think it's like an exercise supplement. You want to buy this 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. Oh, and then there's videos for the product. And these videos are making commission, by the way. So if I watch a video of someone telling me to take the supplement and click through, they get a percentage. 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 f- what? Best diaper cream for face mask. Why are you putting diaper cream on your face mask? Let's find out. Um, okay. So yeah, you got, here's a diaper bomb, you go to the Tik Tok shop. But there should be a video of someone explaining why you want diaper cream for your face mask, I imagine. 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. 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, why have American social media companies resisted that so strongly? 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. Okay. And then you also see the flip side of this was 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. 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, LaBoubou right now is another. The Stanley thermos thing, like I don't even remember how long ago that was a year or two years ago. Yeah. 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. 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 LaBoubou's 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. I will say like the theory of this interview is that this doesn't often happen in America or as often. I believe this theory and we were having this conversation while wearing the exact same shirt we bought off Amazon together. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Right. So this is happening. Like this is clearly happening. 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. 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. Oh, wow. 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. Right. Like there's no way. 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 conserve 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. 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. No, I'm not kidding. 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 they're Chicago. So yes, I was... Hey Ryan, thanks for everything. 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. Oh, that's so funny that we're a bad advertisement for free speech right now. Yes, we're a terrible advertisement. Yeah. It's a super polarized society that has not figured out how to handle truths and misinformation or extreme viewpoints. Yeah. So what if the internet was just shopping and sort of... Yeah, what if the internet 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 any sort of political thing you'd want to talk about on our internet, we're going to focus on other stuff. Just to say, I support democracy in free speech. I prefer to live in America. I also see how for them right now, we're like the friend who's trying to convince you to try psychedelics, who is a drug addict and doing really poorly. Exactly. Okay, so to go back to the story that brought us to 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 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? 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 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. Wait, Dubai chocolate has been going on for two years? The video we watched of that beautiful woman eating it in her car, I think was filmed in 2023. Oh my God. Yeah, 2023. And the candy bar itself is invented 2021. And like Dubai chocolate is 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 can type in Dubai chocolate, LaBoubou, matcha, if you want. And 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 up. It reads, dude, the way you use that DigiCam while drinking matcha with the LaBoubou hanging off your carabiner attached to your Japanese salvage denim is so tough twin. And then another post a couple months later said, I got my matcha, Dubai chocolate, my LaBoubou and my Murakami book. What should I get next, Mr. Algorithm, please tell me please. And then people started making Dubai chocolate LaBoubou matcha, which is like a LaBoubou made of Dubai chocolate that's dipped in the matcha. 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? Yeah, or to think of it like the pornography idea, it's like at the end of the algorithm is just all this cultural detritus, because it's all these people just jamming keywords together to get your eyeballs. Right, right. It's like the thing that you see at the end of super spammy quotes where it's just like 50 hashtags. 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. Yeah. So about 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 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. 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. Right. In an attention economy, which we now live in, if you don't tell anyone, it's worthless. 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. 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. It's funny, I feel bad for them. I always feel bad for them. 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. 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. And is the candy any good? Never had it. 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. No, I've had the Middle Eastern dessert it's based on, you know, canapha, I like it. I like Middle Eastern pistachio candy, but I don't, I'm not a big chocolate guy, to be very honest. Ryan, thank you for mapping this insanity. 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. 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. I actually appeared on the show a couple episodes back. It was very fun. Ryan made me pretty uncomfortable. You should check it out. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruti Pinamaneni. 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 Reese-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 Shuff. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. 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