Is the Internet Just AI Slop Now?

Cory Corrine:
If you've ever seen a giant orange cat in your feed --maybe it's cradling a smaller cat, surviving a plane crash, or holding a sign that says, 'I miss my son' -- if you have, then you might've thought: What is this? Why is this? It has a name: it's slop. And you've most likely already met it. This week I speak to Aidan Walker -- a writer, internet culture researcher, and the creator of the Substack How To Do Things With Memes. He studied where viral content comes from, how it spreads, what it reveals about our world. Because here's the truth about the internet right now: it's being created by all of us. Not just the creators, the influencers or the journalists, but the commenters, the reposters, the community. Culture isn't just made for us -- it's made by us.
But when our feeds are flooded with AI-generated content, something real gets displaced. The thoughtful stuff. The connective stuff. The weird human stuff that makes the internet worth being on at all -- the culture itself. If you've ever scrolled for an hour and looked up thinking, what did I just look at? What did I just do? This episode is for you. Let's talk to Aidan. So I came across your work as I was exploring suggested Substack writers, which is a very interesting thing in and of itself, and you were recommended by some writers I admire. So I was like, okay, it's a match. And I found your work instantly resonant because at first I was like, this guy's thinking about some of the things that I'm thinking about. And then I kept reading and I was like, oh, this guy's, no, he's on another level. He's really thinking about this stuff. You're a writer, internet culture researcher, which is, those are my words. You can correct me. You write a Substack called How to Do Things With Memes. Can you describe for us what it is you do for a living?

Aidan Walker:
Well, thank you so much for your kind words about my work and my Substack, and I'm grateful to Substack's new algorithmic feed features of having brought us together. I was an English major in college. I loved literature, I loved art, and I sort of realized that the memes and the internet culture I was consuming sort of recreationally in my spare time, I was like, this is just as complex. And I was in classes being told, "Let's read a poem and think about what it might say about gender," or about the way people were using language at this time. And then I'd leave class and I'd open my phone and I'd be on an Instagram meme page and I'd say, "So why not think about this stuff that same way?" And so out of school I started pitching around, I'm a freelance writer and I worked for Know Your Meme for three years, which is the Internet's only and oldest meme encyclopedia type archive.
So what my job was and what people who still work there do is we find where viral memes come from, document their origin, research the whole sort of story of their rise and gather a lot of different examples to archive and save them. And that's often a challenge with internet culture because people say stuff lasts forever online, but it really doesn't. I'd be in 2022 researching a meme from 2017 and it's very hard to find a trail. And so I was really interested in those questions of how to archive because if I did want to take a meme more seriously and study it like it was a poem, then you need to have the meme, you need the record, you need to know its context, where it came from. And so I did a master's degree in France and also with an American university kind of focusing on how do you make a cultural archive?

Cory Corrine:
You coined the phrase Slop Capitalism, or at least to my knowledge you did, you'll tell me. Slop Capitalism, it describes a proliferation of low quality, high volume content driven by platform economies. In your Substack you wrote, "Slop Capitalism is an economic and cultural system in which the primary product is slop and the primary activity is the destruction of value rather than its creation." Sounds pretty bad, it sounds not great. So for the non-business person, non-media ecology, can you explain this to us and maybe even what is slop? I think that's a new word.

Aidan Walker:
And so my approach is always trying to read something in the memes that goes a bit deeper and tell us about history. And over the last two, three years, one of the biggest trends has been all of this AI slop, which is sort of content that, high volume, low quality, made through these free or low cost AI generators. And often it'll be just random shocking stuff or it'll be kind of things that you're like, why is this even here? There's a big account on TikTok I was looking at that's just old people holding massive animals that are AI generated, a parrot the size of a woman.

Cory Corrine:
Why do I want to see it? Is that the problem? Now I'm just like, what does that look like? Anyway, okay, that's bananas.

Aidan Walker:
Okay. It's just sort of endless stuff like this that maybe on the surface seems just sort of not interesting or just why do people want to see it? But I was digging more into it and looking at not just the slop, but there's a lot of memes that make fun of the slop.

Cory Corrine:
Tell us about what the slop is. Yeah, what is slop?

Aidan Walker:
Slop is this sort of content that using an AI-generator, you can make 40 videos a day. It is sort of like a algorithm hacking, money oriented type of thing. I've like interviewed slop creators who will use Chat GPT to generate the prompt they put into Midjourney to make the video or make the picture.

Cory Corrine:
But there's a human who says, "I want to make this. I'm going to use Chat GPT to create a prompt to go into the other machine."

Aidan Walker:
So there's a human at the root of the process, it is sort of like a algorithm hacking, money oriented type of thing. And often they will have a link in bio selling courses in how can you make slop as well as a viewer if you want to monetize. And a lot of the slop stuff, I loved these reels of, it's a big orange cat and it's either, the first ones that had a little kid and it was always something bad would happen. They'd be in a plane crash.

Cory Corrine:
Oh.

Aidan Walker:
And you'd have five a day of different tragedy, different disaster to these cats, and they would have hundreds of thousands of views and comments and likes and shares. And I saw some value in that, they were maybe amusing. The weird thing was people in comments were like, "Oh, my daughter passed away six years ago," and it's a heartwarming thing, but it's also on an AI generated reel of a large cat with his little cat son. I just sort of wondered why, why is this the biggest thing happening on the internet?

Cory Corrine:
When did you come to this is Slop Capitalism?

Aidan Walker:
I'd seen these accounts of the slop, a lot of journalistic people talking about it, other content creators. And the thing implicit in that seemed to be this AI slop is a consequence of we may be embraced AI too quickly. We didn't put on the right guardrails, the algorithms are misaligned and suddenly this is being served to everyone. And the conclusion seemed to be it's because the platforms aren't trying hard enough to stop it, but they would want to stop it or be neutral about it. And I was sort of thinking there's that old expression, the purpose of a system is what it does. And so I was like, what if slop was kind of, what if we thought about it being at the center? And in terms of coining the term, I think I just sort of thoughtlessly threw it out there. And I half think it's one of those things where a musician will write a song and then they realize that it's just a Beatles' song they heard as a kid that they didn't remember hearing and they've subconsciously done it.

Cory Corrine:
Do you have an example, and maybe you've this orange cat as one of them, but that encapsulates the Slop Capitalism at work? To the untrained eye, the less critical observer that doesn't have this kind of background and is looking into the etymology of memes, how would one know? And what is an example that, yeah, I'm just curious.

Aidan Walker:
A year or so, maybe two years ago, Google introduced that AI overview feature, which you search something up and it just gives you a little window and there are a lot of memes about it because it was, you'd search up spaghetti sauce recipe and it would say, "pour two cups of Elmer's glue into your pot along with some tomatoes." Or there's one where it was like you Googled what to do if I get bitten by a snake, and it told you exactly what not to do.

Cory Corrine:
Is this hallucination?

Aidan Walker:
It's hallucination. People were saying some of it is maybe it had Reddit shitposts in the training data, so it just scooped that up.

Cory Corrine:
I see. Okay.

Aidan Walker:
But what I sort of saw in it was Know Your Meme, like a lot of other sites, and I'm sure you know, it's like an SEO driven business, and so if people aren't going to click the link to the website to get the answer and in Know Your Meme's case, it would be where did this meme come from? If they just read the AI overview, nobody gets paid. And it isn't that people are greedy, it's that in order to have websites, you need money. And so if there's no money, there's no websites. And so what is Google doing? And they've spent years, I was sitting there, they spent years developing this SEO thing, which people criticize, but undoubtedly it's a whole industry.

Cory Corrine:
An entire publishing industry was born out of it. It was the answer to the newspapers and the TV stage. Oh, the erosion of journalism, the monetization of it. But oh, we have all this digital opportunity now. But as it turns out, then that business completely eroded. I mean the percentage of clicks to sites at this point with AI Google, quite diminished, quite diminished.

Aidan Walker:
And I was like, why would they do that? Why would they destroy their own business? And I see it kind of the same thing with these slop reels. It's like if the purpose of Instagram reels is to connect people to creators and that's how they make their money, in the same way Google's business was connect users asking questions to websites to get answers, why would you allow that to be just kind of destroyed?

Cory Corrine:
I mean, is it not because they're now building an entirely different business and it's like we care not about the sort of archives of the past?

Aidan Walker:
So some of it might be kind of shifting, going on to invest in the AI, but I think another part of it is purpose of a system is what it does. If you're going to sort of starve the organic web of human generated business run websites, then what you're doing is you're, in the same way that the person who sees 16 AI slop reels out of their 20 they're scrolling, you're missing those chances to spread true information, to connect people to communities, to connect creators to audiences. And so I was like, this just feels like in so many areas, it's like this targeted diminishment. And my thought with the Slop Capitalism, and I feel like I've taken way too long to get to it, is that decreasing the overall value in the system that helps them. That's the idea. It's not a side effect. Google is more powerful if the people using Google are less powerful.

Cory Corrine:
I keep thinking of that feeling of when you scroll for an hour or so and then you put your phone down and you're like, but what did I just extract? Did something valuable happen in that exchange? Is that slop? Is that sort of what's happening?

Aidan Walker:
I think it's a bit more than just, oh, nothing of value happened. It's like I scrolled for an hour and I feel more hopeless about the world, I feel more alone. Those sorts of things. Or I've digested some information that is a lie. It is sort of diminishing the quality of communication and conversation. And for me, I see it kind of clearest to me and nearest to me is the content, slop on Instagram or the AI overview thing on Google. But I also see it in being Gen Z, if you want a job, you have to go to LinkedIn or Indeed. And half of those jobs aren't even real.

Cory Corrine:
They're not real?

Aidan Walker:
That they've already filled the role internally-

Cory Corrine:
They've already filled the role, okay.

Aidan Walker:
... or they're just advertising it, or it gets a mark on a box.

Cory Corrine:
That's interesting that you say that from a Gen Z, in that you're just expecting this stuff to be slop across the board. You can't find value in these places. Am I understanding that?

Aidan Walker:
I think that's it, yeah. And what really crystallized it for me, I was on a walk here in DC and I ended up sitting at a bar getting a beer, and it was Monday or Tuesday night, so very slow. And I was sitting there talking to the bartender and every few minutes an Uber Eats delivery driver would come up and ask for a name because they haven't ordered it. And half the time the bartender would say, "Oh, it's already been taken." And so these people just kept coming on their scooters or in their cars and sometimes they'd pick up an order, sometimes they'd already be taken. And I remember I did delivery driving at one point in my life a few years back, and that would happen occasionally, but not chronically. And so I sort of asked the bartender, how's it gotten worse?
How's it affected your business just to have everything be people on the internet order something on their phone, the driver comes, the platform doesn't really care about the driver's time or the restaurant's time, and they just kind of get it all delivered? And he said, "Yeah, it sucks." And I think a lot of people in hospitality or food service would say the same stuff, even though it is a good revenue stream for these companies, in that it's that sort of hassle, they feel disrespected. I think a lot of us do by these platforms. And then overall, it's like every person who's ordering in is a person who's not sitting at a table on the street creating that communal vibe. And on that same street where that bar was, there was a lot of shuttered businesses, and it's not solely Uber's fault, I don't want to suggest. But it's sort of this social pattern where it feels like just basically the more things we do through the phone, the worse the phone seems to be at doing them. And then the worst things feel.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah, I'm glad you're putting these pieces together. I mean, I did do Uber Eats this morning, by the way. I did do that, okay, from the hotel.

Aidan Walker:
It has its place.

Cory Corrine:
It has its place.

Aidan Walker:
I'm not categorically against it.

Cory Corrine:
It has its place, but I had an experience that I felt like I was lost in the machine because my driver came and we had a ships in the night connection. He'd already, but he delivered it and then the hotel couldn't find it, and then the parking attendant guy is searching for it. I'm trying to call him. He's not answering. I then got in touch with Uber Eats, I'm talking to a robot. And the TLDR is that it was there. It was there in the hotel, and I did get it, but it's just like I felt like I had no agency in that experience, and if I didn't get it just didn't matter. And the money was already gone and just everyone moved on. There's no accountability. No one cares.

Aidan Walker:
No one cares at all.

Cory Corrine:
No one cares. No one cares. Yeah.

Aidan Walker:
And you think too, your time, the driver's time, the hotel, people's time, all the other things everyone could have been doing instead of dealing with what should be a fairly simple food is here, you come, you paid for it.

Cory Corrine:
This is slop manifesting in our lives in all of these different ways. You've described how we're living in this inter-social world, which we're kind of talking about, where our social reality is just intertwined with these slop soaked platforms. Psychologically, what do you think this is doing to us? What do you think it's doing to people? How does this affect our attention spans, our tolerance for or patience for depth.

Aidan Walker:
I always think of it like the brain is a muscle and you have to use a muscle to train it and make it big, make it robust. And so if a bunch of your reels are slop and they're not training you to look at another person whose face is in your phone and say, oh, what's going on with her? What's her story? Or they're not training you to listen to someone and say, oh, that's such an interesting fact about history. If you're not getting that exercise, I think that kind of atrophies a lot of these muscles.
And I think the first muscle that sort of goes is kind of that social muscle, that tolerance for maybe ambiguity or a little bit of discomfort or, oh, I don't know this person. What are they all about? If everything is AI slop, and it's like that immediately recognizable reptile brain sort of, oh, this is shocking, this is flashing lights, bright colors and it never sort of asks you to pause for a second and consider or never asks you to think critically or think in a way that might be unfamiliar, then people just won't, I think, expect themselves to do that.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah. You wrote about slop narrowing the Overton window for being in the world. I mean, do you feel our range of life experiences or expressions are shrinking to fit what platforms can easily just scan and monetize? Yeah.

Aidan Walker:
Yeah. I think that's exactly the threat. Yeah. The Overton window is a concept in political science that at any sort of given time, there's a spectrum of acceptable opinion, but maybe more accurately put, normal or possible opinion. Maybe 10 years ago in the US the Overton window was, oh, this person I meet could be a Republican or a Democrat. Maybe they're a Libertarian, maybe they're further left. But someone being a monarchist or something was out of the Overton window. It wasn't really in the conversation. And I don't know if political scientists or Heidegger scholars would have any truck with what I'm saying, but I feel like that same thing of what you can be towards who you can be with, that can be artificially kind of limited by slop.

Cory Corrine:
For your average person on the ground level, what is that experience for them then in their everyday life? They're not even aware that this is trunk for them. People don't know.

Aidan Walker:
I mean, I think in a way, the part of it that people talk about the most is something like representation. So if you only see certain kinds of stories or certain kinds of people in movies or something, people feel like that will sort of limit what feels possible or what feels normal or natural and kind of set that tone. But I think another way that we often see it in our lives is just the kinds of things that are normal to talk about or where the taboos are. I lived in and studied in France, and so even just seeing, I think when you live in another culture for any amount of time, you see that the vibes of people are different. A bro in France is very different than a bro in the US.

Cory Corrine:
A French bro. I'm trying to imagine that. Okay.

Aidan Walker:
Yeah, he drinks red wine and has a developed opinion on, which you can't imagine an American frat bro doing that.

Cory Corrine:
No, I'm, no. Cool.

Aidan Walker:
And those cultural forces, I mean, people get the French love wine. It's a historical thing. So of course you have a developed opinion about wine. And that's a certain type of, I guess, Overton window for being in the world.

Cory Corrine:
I see.

Aidan Walker:
It's possible, normal, natural. So then if as Kamala Harris said, and it got memed, you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before, you didn't fall out of a coconut tree-

Cory Corrine:
Fall out of a coconut tree, yep.

Aidan Walker:
What sets that context? And right now, for a lot of us, I think it is these platforms set that context or a big piece of it.

Cory Corrine:
They do. I mean the entire, I am making this podcast because I cannot stop... Technology creates media. Media creates culture. It is all connected.

Aidan Walker:
You could say it all intersects.

Cory Corrine:
It all intersects. And you can't talk about one thing without talking about the other. Yeah. Do you have any hope or is there anything on the horizon that tells you, well, maybe...

Aidan Walker:
Yeah, that's a great question.

Cory Corrine:
Or does it get worse?

Aidan Walker:
I think there's a chance of it getting worse, but nothing is ever for sure on the internet. Like you were saying there was this 10, 15 years of the SEO game or whatever, and then that changed in a heartbeat. And you've seen it over and over, the only constant on the internet is crazy change. One of my favorite projects I did at Know Your Meme was I went through all our data and recorded the site of origin. What percentage of memes in 2014 originated on Tumblr, and I made pie charts of every year with the percentage for each platform they recorded a meme starting on. And through that data, it's crazy. And it kind of tracks with Tumblr, of course, like peak 2014, that's when we have the biggest share of memes from there, TikTok comes around and starts dominating late 2010s, early 2020s.
And so I just was like, every three years, the game changes fundamentally. And so that's one cause of optimism for me is that I think they're holding with a much looser grip than they would like. But I think if you look at acts under Elon Musk is the most obvious example. That's a political ideological project. I think Zuckerberg wants to be a Roman emperor. I think that Bezos wants to get to the moon, and he bought the Post for a reason. And I think Google is so big that it's this bureaucracy that has its own whatever. And so I think their motives are often as much about power and control or money as a means to that. And so I feel like the reason they might want slop is that it does do that thing of decreasing the power of people who have to use the platforms, and that means proportionately increases their power.
So one thing I thought was often you'll think of a company like growing the pie, making a product that helps people, that customers want, that is good. Or you'll think of a company in a way exploiting people, which may be SEO model is a little like, publishers are the reason people are here, we take a cut, we connect them, it's exploitative. It can be good exploitative, bad exploitative, whatever. But I sort of feel like with the slop era, there's maybe a third thing, which is we will cut off pieces of the pie so that we own a larger percentage of what's left. And that to me feels like the model.

Cory Corrine:
I remember, and I was at the Washington Post when Facebook hit 2 billion users, and I had this very existential sort of moment thinking, just is anybody else, I'm like, this seems like a whole sovereign nation that is the globe now. And I'm sitting in DC and we're, at the Post, we're covering politics and policy and all this, Washington is gridlocked. And I'm just thinking, but isn't someone else in charge now? Do you know what I mean?

Aidan Walker:
I feel the same way. Yeah.

Cory Corrine:
I think someone else is in charge, guys, and this is it is because someone else is in charge. Someone else is absolutely in charge.

Aidan Walker:
And it became undeniable at the inauguration.

Cory Corrine:
That's right.

Aidan Walker:
Where they're all sitting there.

Cory Corrine:
That's right.

Aidan Walker:
Watching it happen.

Cory Corrine:
That's right. Yeah, absolutely. You write this amazing Substack, which we've talked about. Who do you hope is reading and listening? What do you want them to take away or do differently?

Aidan Walker:
I'd say mostly I think about just the average user, and I think a lot of people who might self-describe as doomers, who sort of think everything's getting worse, we're all powerless. And I guess my one big message would be reframe what you do online as being a producer rather than a consumer. Because I think it's most obvious for creators and people who make media that it's a job, we're producing. But I think nobody would be there if it weren't for communities that support them, people who view, people who comment.
I think of everyone talks about big streamers or podcasters, and there's a whole bunch of people supporting that. There's mods making sure the chat works, there's admins. And I think really appreciating those mid-level people or the meme pages that repost other meme pages. Online you're doing work. You're producing some of the most important culture and value, and you should A: honor yourself for doing that, respect what we're doing together and then, B: defend it and try to get better at it and try to do it purposefully and take the reins, realize that you have more power than you might think, or us collectively have more power.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah, I love that. That makes me feel very positive.

Aidan Walker:
I try to be a positive.

Cory Corrine:
It was a good. As a producer, I just organically have always, I'm like, look at these green fields for me to do stuff with and create. I've come at it from a very different perspective, but that's really interesting. Just Jane Doe using the internet is also a producer, a consumer is also a producer, because we're moving cultural artifacts around, we're making culture and then we're trying to understand it and collect it. This is what humans do, and we think this is new because of the internet, but it's just we have more stuff to dissect.

Aidan Walker:
And it's like a classic sort of, people talk about this in studying English literature, it's like we remember the big poets, but they would be nothing if it weren't for their readers. If it weren't for readers who were more involved than just reading it in a magazine, who advocated for the poets or who helped publish them, or all the spouses of writers, or the editors, the agents, the friends. People are producers, and I think partly out of just convenience, we tend to be like, oh, so-and-so is a great writer. Or we sort of recognize, oh, his wife did more than just the laundry. They were talking about it. She's kind of a co-author. But yeah, I think we really need to recognize that in memes and internet culture, we all do it together and we need each other.

Cory Corrine:
We all do it together. That is so, this is very powerful. Do you have thoughts on education or media literacy in the age of slop? I mean, that's why I'm like, you should go teach this class right now, Gen Z man because how, in the halls of the ivory tower, I'm not sure what we're actually talking about in there that's maybe salient to that. And I'm sure we are talking about things that are salient, but yeah, do you have movements or alternatives that give you hope?

Aidan Walker:
Based on my limited experience, the important thing is giving people ideas that are fun to think. The reason I got into this stuff from the beginning was that it was fun to be someone who was curious about these things and learning about them and presenting these ideas in a way that feels accessible, in a way that isn't gatekeepy. And in a way that is trying to grow and trying to get more people involved and trying to recognize that often online discussions about stuff, people will be like, "Oh, if we have this slight disagreement or whatever, you're totally, totally wrong," but we should be grateful the conversation is happening.
And I think two that I'm very optimistic about a lot of things happening outside of the spaces we usually think of as places where we enshrine critical thinking. I've been so happy, like I said, I can do a TikTok talking about Walter Benjamin that'll do 150,000 views and people will comment and talk about their own lives. And it's like, yeah, sure, it would be better if we all were really grappling with the critical theory text or whatever, but it's like I phrased the idea in a way that's fun to think. Maybe I said a few things wrong, but we can have this culture where people want to experiment, want to be okay making a wrong point, feel interested in speaking out.

Cory Corrine:
The institutions, and I think you said it that, you didn't say elitist, but very pretentious or there was an idea that to be a thinking, scholarly type person and intellectual, you have to go to a certain institution, you have to have these kinds of bona fides. You have to have read the books that you've read. I went to state schools many times over, and I sort of came up with an imposter... I've worked at very, I would say, what are seen as important institutions that would say, "Oh, okay, she's a legitimate person. She works at this institution." But I always felt like maybe I didn't have all of the right words or I hadn't read all of the...
And I mean, I've since gotten over that and I just say it and if I'm wrong, I'm wrong and I love to learn things. But how we can infuse that kind of confidence for just trying to engage and understand people, that is critical. I think that will get us out of this, but I think we're going to have to change the institutions a bit for that to be enabled. And I mean maybe they're all learning from your TikTok. I mean, honestly, something will have to change for what you're saying to be true because the current system is not modeling that. It's continuing to advantage itself over this, I mean, just, I don't know, slop and engagement bait type or that kind of thing, that's still incentivized. So we're not incentivized to do what you're talking about doing.

Aidan Walker:
I would totally agree with that. And I'd be curious to hear more about your experience at these big places like the Post or wherever, because I sometimes have the sense that they're living through this era where we're seeing a lot of these institutions start to sink and kind of go down. And I feel sometimes the response of people within them or people who've come up with them, which is maybe understandable, is to just sort of retreat and be like, okay, if the kids aren't reading big books, if people would rather listen to Joe Rogan than read our articles, we're just going to double down on being us. Which, there's nobility in that, and you can't sell yourself out to whatever is popular. But I think there needs to be maybe along with that retreat an invitation to people who are maybe dissatisfied with the stuff that's out there just in the general culture. And I think there's sort of a shift maybe in the Overton window of being in the world, not to, I guess people like to coin, I'm a coiner, I don't know.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah, it's working. This conceit is, I understand it, yes.

Aidan Walker:
Okay. But that it should be fun to coin phrases.

Cory Corrine:
Yes.

Aidan Walker:
It should be just something everyday people want to do. And that feels empowering and that is normal. And it doesn't need to be, we don't need to have an elite necessarily.

Cory Corrine:
We don't need to have an elite. That's right.

Aidan Walker:
What does it do?

Cory Corrine:
We all have brains.

Aidan Walker:
Yeah.

Cory Corrine:
We should use those brains.

Aidan Walker:
We should have experts. There's people who've learned stuff, people who know things, but it's like you just know a thing. Other people can know it. And I trust people who have studied things I've never studied to tell the truth, but I think ultimately knowledge is most powerful and most robust, and those institutions have the most reach when more people are in the tent. And I often feel like when you say something online, if you're doing it right and with a good ethic of discussion, you're making more space than you're taking. And so I felt really encouraged watching other people who I sort of look up to in my own content, or I think people like you who have been in the industry for a while and sort of innovating it, I think there is an appetite for that that is untapped into, and maybe that's the force that can kind of fight the slop.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah, I think that's right. I think that is the force that can fight the slop. It's the slop isn't going to fight itself. We will have to do this. I have one final question for you. Tell me about a piece of content you've consumed in the last week, Mr. Gen Z, that really stuck with you and why has it stuck with you?

Aidan Walker:
So I would say Mike Duncan and the Revolutions podcast.

Cory Corrine:
Okay, I'm not familiar.

Aidan Walker:
Are you familiar with his...

Cory Corrine:
No.

Aidan Walker:
Okay. He started this podcast called The History of Rome, and he was one of the first people to make podcasting a thing and long form history podcasting. And then over the past 20 years, he did all the history of Rome, a lot of episodes, and then he did Revolutions and he did different seasons studying world revolution, so like English Revolution, American Revolution, French Revolution, Haitian Revolution. And me being a history nerd, I loved it because I would use it to fall asleep. And he does like a hundred half hour episodes describing in detail everything that happens. And by doing this, he's just like a dude, he studied history, but he's not teaching at some institution or something. He's a podcaster. He sort of developed, he saw different patterns in how revolutions work across history. Certain things tend to happen, certain people tend to be involved.
And he was kind of in retirement for a few years and he just came back with this new series called The Martian Revolution, where it's fictional now and it is set in a Mars colony, 150 years, like 2248, there's a revolution. And they're rebelling against the corporate overlord of the Mars colony. And Mike Duncan is telling it from the perspective of a historian 200 years after the revolution in the future. And he's incorporating all these patterns he saw studying real life revolutions and playing with them and messing with them. And then the whole thing, because it's a Mars colony, is kind of a commentary on what's happening right now. And he kind of famously feuded with Elon Musk on Twitter, because Elon was a History of Rome listener and was saying stuff like, "Low birth rates and gayness made the Roman Empire fall." And Mike Duncan was there being like, "No, not at all. And also, colonizing Mars is stupid." And now he's made this epic story about martians on the colony rebelling against their corporate tech, oligarch overlord. So I really enjoy the series.

Cory Corrine:
I'm so there, that's fascinating. He's using his own language model of his 20 years of studying history and those patterns to bring to, okay. Powerful, powerful. Aidan, thank you. This has been fantastic and please keep doing what you're doing and I'd love to have you back when you develop a new, you coin a new term.

Aidan Walker:
Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. And thanks.

Cory Corrine:
The Intersect is distributed exclusively by our partner, Dear Media. Today's episode was produced by Sarah Singer, our showrunner and myself, along with technical production by Chad Parizman, and coordination by Haley Duffy and Dana Binfet. Caitlyn Durcan, an executive producer on the show, oversaw communications with original show music by Tom Peele. Thank you to Music For A While, and the Alameda Hotel for the use of their beautiful studio space. And if you liked our show today, please subscribe right here, wherever you are watching or listening. And we'll be back next week right here at The Intersect.