EP.208 - NATALIE WYNN aka CONTRAPOINTS

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey,

how are you doing podcasts?

It's Adam Buxton here.

I am reporting to you

from

a grassy farm track in the east of England, Norfolk County.

It's a beautiful evening

in, what are we looking at, mid-October 2023.

The sun is beginning to go down

and

the fields are looking very lush.

We had some incredible rain

on Friday,

and so everything's still quite waterlogged.

But it's nice to be out here.

Rosie's in quite a good mood today.

She was pleased to come out for a walk,

and

she is here by my side.

Whippet poodle cross, for those of you not familiar with Rosie.

She's like a small, beautiful, hairy wolf, aren't you, Rosie?

Doug Patronized Maid.

Apologies.

Last night, myself and my wife

went out for, I think, maybe the fourth time in about a decade.

On a Saturday night, that is.

We've been out elsewhere.

But on the whole, when it comes to weekends, we'll generally be

at home.

Anyway, Bridget Christie

was coming through town

with her stand-up show, Who Am I?

And

I'm glad to say I'm friendly with Bridget.

In fact, I recorded a conversation with her a few weeks back, which you will be able to hear next weekend.

Anyway, we went along to see her show

at the Playhouse in Norwich.

It was good fun, especially...

you know, these days when the

news

from the Middle east is so sad and so bleak it was lovely to be in a room with other humans

laughing at bridget not laughing at bridget laughing with bridget

we were laughing at her as well she is a funny person recommend her show if she's coming through your town it's fun being out Good to get out of the domestic routine.

I mean, listen, I'm not complaining.

I love our domestic routine, But just being out and away from our normal patterns of conversation and behavior, oh, so nice.

We should do it more often.

It's a marriage update for you.

But right now, I'd like to tell you about podcast number 208 and my guest, who is the American YouTube essayist, Natalie Wynne, aka ContraPoints.

Natalie Fax!

Natalie was born in 1988 and grew up in Arlington, Virginia, USA.

Her mother is a doctor and her father a professor of psychology.

After studying piano at the prestigious Berkeley College of Music, Natalie got a degree in psychology from Illinois Northwest University, but broke off from her PhD studies and instead turned her attention to creative writing and making YouTube videos, which she started posting in 2008, initially on the subject of religion.

Meanwhile, she earned money with jobs that included being a legal assistant, an Uber driver, and an advertising copywriter.

In 2016, she started a YouTube channel under the name ContraPoints, where she posted video essays responding to the wave of online intolerance, misogyny, and right-wing commentary that intensified in the wake of the Gamergate saga, which had begun in 2014, when a blog post from the disgruntled boyfriend of a female games journalist led to the journalist and other women in the gaming industry being targeted in a campaign of harassment and abuse, largely by males unhappy with the gaming world's shift towards diversity and inclusion, where previously it had been considered more of a safe space for boys to be boys.

Gamergate was the first time that I became aware of internet subcultures that would come to be known as the alt-right and incels, darker, more numerous incarnations of what I'd previously imagined were just relatively harmless online trolls.

References to these subcultures and their flirtation or direct engagement with forms of fascism frequently pop up in Natalie's videos, which are artfully constructed essays that combine comedy and philosophy, often with Natalie playing exaggerated versions of herself via different characters to consider subjects like envy, cringe, incels, capitalism, violence, the West, Jordan Peterson and J.K.

Rowling to quote a few of the titles of her videos, with the themes of gender, sexuality and online behavior being frequent motifs.

Natalie also talks with great candor and humor in many of her videos about her own gender transition, which began around 2017.

Natalie is responsible for nearly every aspect of her videos, from script to lighting, sound design, costume, makeup, art direction, and editing.

And the results, especially in her more recent work, are videos that lie somewhere between performance art, comedy, and the kind of lectures that I wish there had been more of, or even some of, when I was at college.

My conversation with Natalie was recorded at the very beginning of this month, October 2023, and we were talking remotely via the Zoom with me in my Norfolk nutty room and her in the front room of her house in Baltimore, a city in the East Coast state of Maryland, America.

We talked about the practical challenges of being a YouTube creator, the weirdness of time spent on the internet, and the therapeutic value of liminal spaces.

We also talked about the darker side of the internet and the extent to which Gamergate represented the beginning of a more hostile age in which harassment and online threats are frequently a feature.

We talked about Natalie's experience of facing censure from her own tribe a few times towards the end of the 2010s for infractions that included tweets that landed badly, agreeing to debate a conservative YouTuber, and doing an interview with a journalist who was considered by some to have expressed transphobic points of view.

Natalie considered how much of the criticism she received was justified in a video she made in 2020 called Cancelling, that also takes a deep dive into the myriad intricacies and political complexities of trans identity.

As I told Natalie, my interest in her videos came about partly because of her being interviewed in the Witch Trials of JK Rowling podcast.

And we talked a little bit about why she ended up regretting her involvement with the series.

There was also advice for cultivating a Zen-like detachment when people feel they are being unfairly judged, and the dangers of becoming obsessed by managing how people see you online.

And we exchanged recommendations for music to soothe the soul.

But I began by asking Natalie what she'd like to drink.

Back at the end for a bit more waffle, but right now, with Natalie Wynne, here we go.

Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat.

We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat.

Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat.

If we were meeting in the real world of an evening, if we were out with friends, what would I be buying you if I was going to buy you a drink?

Oh, probably

a sparkling wine is my go-to.

That's my favorite.

I guess for most people, that's like a celebration drink.

I just decided that I like it so much that I made it a habit.

So when you say sparkling wine, it can be any sparkling wine.

It doesn't have to be champagne.

I maybe have a slight preference for champagne, but I will accept Kava or Prosecco.

There's some very nice Prosecco out there.

There are, yeah.

I try not to be prejudiced.

That's admirable.

Do you think you have a good palate?

A sophisticated palate?

No.

I mean, I've drunk enough of it that I have.

I can tell the difference between good and bad.

And I have some opinions.

I like more buttery ones as opposed to more citrusy ones, I think.

But that's about as fine as my taste gets.

I think I like the most sugary ones.

They got this wine over here called Thousand Stories.

I'm not sure exactly where it's from.

And me and my wife have got hooked on it this year, and we are just guzzling the thousand stories.

And I'm bracing myself for the day that I actually check how much sugar they've got in there, because I'm sure it absolutely loads.

Yeah, that stuff is dangerous.

It goes down easy.

Yeah, absolutely.

So you still drink.

Was there ever a a time when you abstained from drink, when drink was getting its talons into you?

Well, when I was in my 20s, there was definitely periods where like I was regularly asking myself, like, is this getting to be an issue that needs to be addressed?

I feel like I have a better relationship to it now than I did back then.

I think in part because

other kinds of anxieties have sort of inhibited my urge to like addiction runs in my family.

I definitely have like whatever genes those are because i've had problems with other substances um especially opiates which i talked about somewhat during the pandemic i like got into a real habit with that but um and they were recreational opiates rather than prescription oh yeah so i none i was like well i i don't i probably shouldn't go into the details i don't want to give people ideas but i i was doing a variety of of opiates yeah and these were not prescription right but now you've already given people ideas now there's just ideas swimming around.

Well, opiates is a vague sort of idea.

I feel like there's a difference between that and describing like the...

It's kind of like you can talk about like, I don't know, suicidal ideation, but if you start mentioning specific methods, like,

you're wandering into territory of like potentially putting a plan into someone's head.

Yes.

So you're binging on crack.

No, you weren't.

But you drink in your videos, right, sometimes?

I do, yeah.

Is that real booze that you're drinking?

Usually, yes.

What do I mean, usually?

Almost always, yes.

I think that I am a shy person, and I think one of the reasons that I do tend to gravitate towards alcohol is that I kind of like like myself a little bit more when I'm on it.

I mean, obviously, there's a kind of a sweet spot, right, where if you maintain just a little bit of buzz to kind of quell the anxiety about, oh God, like, what am I talking about?

Is anyone going to want to listen to this?

What am I doing filming myself alone in my house?

Like, it does help sort of overcome those sorts of hang-ups yeah i can believe it i'm interested to know what the process of filming the videos is are you generally on your own i mean a huge amount of work obviously goes into them from the writing of the scripts to filming, lighting, costume, set design, editing.

Every aspect is beautifully and thoughtfully rendered.

Like more and more, your most recent videos, I think, are some of your best.

Thank you.

So what's the team like who who is there in your house i assume you film them in your house yeah well when i'm i film them in my house occasionally i will have a friend or partner around to help out but i would say that the usual situation is that i'm basically alone in the house so this is not really a conventional way of doing this at the level of you know subscribers that i have i think most people at a certain point will hire some kind of team someone standing behind the camera someone helping out with this stuff i don't know why I do this.

I think I have this like very introverted process that I just kind of got used to.

And now I find it hard to bring other people in.

Part of it, I think, has to do with like what I feel to be the intimacy of talking to the camera alone.

And so I think for most situations, I kind of prefer solitude.

I feel like it helps with creating the kind of illusion that we all want to buy into when it comes to listening to a podcast or especially watching a YouTube video, I think the kind of illusion that someone is, this kind of friendly person is in the room with you talking to you, right?

I think that's what often what I'm enjoying when I'm watching YouTube videos.

And so I'm very aware that part of the craft, if you could call it that, of making YouTube videos is in kind of creating that illusion.

Yeah, I'm so glad to hear you say all that because that's sort of what I was hoping.

But then the practicalities of filming those things as i know because i used to do a tv show with my friend joe cornish that we made largely ourselves and there were many nights where it would just be us two but even the two of us sitting up through the night with cameras and lights and trying to get sound right

it would often be exhausting and frustrating and there was only so much you could do without getting quite ratty and also if you had a drink or something to smoke, then you were even more likely to make mistakes and you could piss away hours and then realize, like, I didn't tape it, or the sound was fucked, or it's overexposed, or whatever it might be.

So, I'm impressed that you don't have people helping you out with that stuff.

Yeah, I certainly wouldn't say that it's easy.

It's not an infrequent occurrence that I will have to refilm an entire section on the next night because something went wrong the first night.

And you probably see this in my videos: that I often will start filming around like 3 a.m.

And then by the time I'm done filming that the sun is coming up.

So the reason for that is that I mean obviously it's not ideal.

In some ways I think I would benefit from changing my method in some ways, but I

will often be kind of like setting up the camera and doing, you know, sample footage and sample audio during the day and then checking to make sure that works.

And you know, that takes a few hours.

I'll be rearranging like the quote set.

And then I will, you know, take a shower.

I will, you know, do my makeup.

And then, yeah, at a crisp 2 a.m., I will actually turn the camera on and sit in front of it.

Wow.

And then when it comes to the editing, who's doing that?

Is that you as well?

Yes, I also do, I mean, all of the editing, really.

So, yeah, that also takes time.

It's just habit, I think.

I think I'm sort of attached to the creative control of like editing the video and deciding like what footage goes in and doesn't go in.

I don't know.

I don't think that I'm a control freak in general in life, but for some reason when it comes to my

work,

every like control obsessive impulse comes out.

But I think that's why it's so good.

I mean, to me, it immediately feels different from so much that's online, because especially in the podcasting world now,

everything

aspires to the values of mainstream TV production, which is exactly what I thought YouTube was going to liberate people from.

And now everyone's filming their fucking podcasts and filming them on tracks with multi-camera setups with lighting and top-flight sound.

But I just

thought the whole point of a medium like YouTube or a podcast for me was

the intimacy that is available to you, the direct connection you can make.

And, you know, every part of that is important.

So for me, it's like

I want to make the adverts for the podcast.

I want to do the jingles.

I want, you know, it.

I'm across all of those things because A, they're fun and B, they're all an important part of how people end up engaging with the thing.

So of course you have to do the editing for your videos because that's all such a massive part of

how you end up feeling while you're watching them.

But how do you keep it sustainable?

Have you thought about like what's going to happen in the next few years?

Because someone at some point is going to come and wave a kind of Wayne's World check under your nose and say, okay, time to join the big leagues.

And what will you do then?

Well, to some extent, that's already happened.

I haven't had specific offers, but I've had people reach out and sort of say, Hey, like, I'm in media.

If you're interested in doing like a Netflix show or something, you know, we should talk.

And I'm not sure that I want to do that because, to me, I'm very attached to YouTube as a medium, or it doesn't have to be YouTube, but like independent video.

And I think that I totally agree with what you say about the whole point sort of being the homebrew aspect, which I feel like is essential to the appeal.

And I guess what I fear in doing that is that it will become generic because it will be done in the way that all other media is produced.

And it will lose the weird idiosyncrasies of my amateur editing and me having learned how to do all these things through trial and error.

I probably do all kinds of things that are technically wrong and unusual, but I don't know.

I feel like that sort of leaves a thumbprint on the work that people can tell that it's something kind of different.

Even if in some ways it's like not as competent in certain respects as a professional studio or a team would make it.

I don't know.

I just feel that when I'm watching YouTube, part of the charm is I want to see what some maniac is able to pull off in their apartment.

You're making feature-length videos at this point.

Like you've produced sort of several feature-length,

incredibly carefully and painstakingly constructed theses that every part of is beautifully done.

It just must take so much work.

Just the writing of them.

That's one thing you could do, I suppose, to capitalize a little bit is just release books of the transcripts and stuff.

Yeah, some people have definitely proposed that.

I definitely haven't offered book deals, and probably I'm financially sabotaging myself by not taking them.

But I feel so attached to video essays as a medium at this point that I don't know.

I guess I have lots of ideas, but not necessarily ideas for books.

Some of that is just force of habit.

I'm used to making video essays, but I'm sure I could write a book if I wanted to do that.

Any number of my video essays, I think this video essay could have been a book, right?

But I think also, like, because I, you know, my, I'm very lucky to have a very supportive fan base things, which includes financial support on Patreon.

So I sort of don't feel, feel I don't feel super pressed to like enrich myself more than necessary.

I watch YouTube videos a lot and I like them.

And I f so I feel like in a way it's like I'm making the kind of content that I myself would be most likely to consume.

What sort of stuff are you watching then?

I heard you mention Red Letter Media, which is

a couple of film nerd guys that used to well, they did a thing after the Phantom Menace,

which was, I think, the first long form YouTube video essay that I was aware of.

And they deconstructed, using characters, the Phantom Menace in a very funny way.

And I hadn't seen anyone do that before.

So you watched those, though, right?

I did, yeah.

I saw those when they came out.

And I consider those to be pretty foundational in the genre of video essays.

I think most of the creators I know, They don't often mention this in public, but I know that they've all watched those.

You know, my generation, I'm in my mid-30s so we watch these things in our late teens early 20s and you know that's the age where stuff really seeps into your your brain so I think that a lot of video essays do kind of owe some kind of ancestry to those red letter media Star Wars reviews YouTube is a great medium for film criticism in general because you can talk about the movie while showing clips of it.

And I think that a lot of the creators on the platform that I like now are sort of film tubers or film reviewers or people who have started that way and then kind of branched out into other topics.

How does it work technically?

You mentioned showing clips.

Isn't the YouTube algorithm very punitive when it comes to adding clips in videos?

Absolutely.

And that is definitely like one of the major career hazards of doing video essays where you're talking about movies.

Generally, it's safer to use just the visuals without the audio.

And I think the general rule of thumb is you're generally safe if you're using clips less than four seconds.

Now, four seconds is not long.

So you really are having to, like, it's not just that you're talking over an entire scene of a movie.

You're having to, in the editing program, basically recut whole parts of the movie that you're talking about so that they're not getting automatically flagged for copyright violation, which I think that this is fair use in American copyright law, anyway.

But the fact is that it's generally not a court, it's not a judge that is deciding what gets taken down, it's whether or not it's automatically flagged by YouTube's automated system, not what the law actually says or how a judge would interpret it.

Yes, that's right.

Yes, the algorithm is more the sidebar and all the stuff that it offers you, isn't it?

But yes, you're right.

The content violation thing is just a piece of image recognition software.

And that's the worst thing about YouTube, I think, or one of the worst things, is that it's now become

so hard to do anything like that.

Whereas, you know, when it came along, when I was posting videos in the first couple of years that YouTube was around,

as the good old days, you could do anything.

You could put anything on there whatsoever.

There's not going to be any flagging or violations.

But now, three strikes, you're out.

And that's for copyright violation and for people flagging your videos if they find them offensive or whatever it might be, right?

I mean, it's.

Absolutely.

Have you had any problems with that?

I've consistently had problems with age restriction, and YouTube is getting stricter about that too.

Almost any content that mentions like sexuality or depicts sexuality or violence is going to get age restricted, which really limits the algorithmic reach of the the video because it's not going to get recommended to as many people, and people need to be logged in, and their age needs to be set to above 18 to watch it.

And they've been getting more and more strict about this to the point that I actually am beginning to feel like I need to bleep out curse words and use like euphemisms basically to talk about a lot of the things that I want to talk about.

I also think that it kind of does have a disproportionate effect on LGBT creators because a lot of the stuff that we're going to want to talk about is related to sexuality and then that gets flagged by the system or gets reported by malicious users and you know moderators see well there's sexual content in this so I guess it should be age restricted.

It's definitely frustrating but I think that honestly the most frustrating thing about it is that you never quite know what the limit is.

Like it's almost easier when it's a government regulation, the FCC or whatever that says what you're what words you're not allowed to say on TV.

Okay, that would be great if we had that that for YouTube here's the words you're not allowed to say okay fine I'll just not say those words and I'll talk around them right but because you don't know it's like the panopticon prison right you you don't know what what is allowed and you don't know what you're going to be flagged for so you're constantly watching yourself and wondering like am i allowed to say this am i allowed to say this and you never quite know which makes you sort of more conservative with what you will say than you would be if there were explicit rules.

Well, that's a way of describing the internet as a whole, though, isn't it?

That whole panopticon

concept of everyone policing themselves and being aware that they are being looked at all the time and some people use that to their advantage and feel that they can make a career out of being viewed and manage the way that people see them.

But of course

it's incredibly

fraught as a process.

It can drive you mad and

frequently does drive people mad.

It makes me feel crazy, I I think, in a way that I don't remember feeling when I was younger, before the internet.

You know, I was sad and I was worried about things before the internet, but there's a peculiar tone to internet psychosis that isn't like anything else, a peculiar kind of anxiety.

And

like...

When I'm out looking at stuff online, I feel overwhelmed so often and come away from the experience with this strange knot in my stomach.

And it's not like reading a book because, you know, if you go and buy a book and bring it home, then you have made the decision to engage with the book.

I'm going to buy the book.

It's like inviting a friend home.

Yes.

And even if you don't end up getting on with the book, you don't feel violated by the book.

in the way that you sometimes do when you come across things online because wandering around the internet is just a bit like being in a busy city on New Year's Eve, and there's just all these unpredictable, dangerously uninhibited people around.

Some of them are very nice, some of them are good fun, but then also there's creeps and con men and liars and people who want to take advantage of you and judge you and all sorts of things.

So, just the whole atmosphere of the internet is unsettling and feels feels to me like I saw you live streaming yourself playing this video game Super Liminal, and I'd never seen that game before.

And I thought, wow, super liminal is an analogue for

this modern feeling of this knot in my stomach, this kind of internet psychosis, this space that we all inhabit more and more, that depending on how you're feeling, can sometimes just feel mad and nightmarish and sterile and dangerous and sort of banal.

And you have to figure it out in order to escape and not be trapped there.

So it was quite cool watching you play it.

Could you sort of describe for someone who hasn't played Super Liminal what it is?

Yes.

Super Liminal is a puzzle game that works based on a really innovative mechanic where you solve puzzles by using perspective.

So this is something that can never exist in any medium other than video games.

Yeah, it's hard to discover.

You know those

like cheesy Taurus pictures that people will take where it looks like they're like holding the Eiffel Tower in the palm of their hand or they're sort of like leaning against the leaning tower of Pisa?

It's like, what if you took that type of appearance and you built it into the physics of the video game?

That's what it is.

So if you see the Eiffel Tower in the distance, you can grab, you can just grab it in this game and it becomes the way it looks from the perspective of someone holding it in their palm.

And then you use this to solve puzzles.

So you could take a piece of cheese off a table and then hold it so that it looks like it's far away from you and drop it, in which case it becomes big enough that you can use the slice of cheese as a ramp to get up to a door.

So that's the way the game works.

And the game also just has a great aesthetic or a vibe.

A lot of it takes place in spaces that feel like empty museums, hotel hallways, indoor swimming pools, these kind of spaces.

Around the back of sets, like behind

sets.

Right, warehouses,

shadowy spaces, yeah.

Yeah, parking lots, like all these kinds of spaces that are not meant to be dwelled in.

That's, I guess, part of what the definition of liminal space is, right?

It's not home, it's not the destination, it's something in between.

Yeah.

How did you come across that game?

That game was recommended to me by one of my patrons who left a comment saying, oh, you should check out this game called Super Liminal.

And I looked it up and found out that I'd actually seen a trailer for this game, like a kind of like really early version for it, five or six years earlier.

And I'd loved it at the time and was looking forward to it.

And I had no idea that they had changed the name to Super Liminal and that the game had come out.

So I decided to stream it and found it to be like very much my kind of thing.

I'm not really a big gamer, but this, I loved it.

And

because it's a fairly small development team, i think one of the developers was sort of in the chat watching me play it and then i kind of called him at the end of the of the that's one of the quite fun things i think about being online is it gives you like this access to the people whose work you admire and so you know without the live streaming experience how often do you get to play a game and then immediately have a 30-minute phone call with the developer about the game and get to talk about it and i don't know it was a really fun experience what did you find out about the game in your conversation that you can tell me?

What did you ask the developer?

I'm trying to remember.

I admit that at that point I was also fairly drunk and that that also motivated some of the exuberance of I'm gonna call the developer.

Like

I mean we talked about like the pandemic.

This was 2021.

We talked about addiction and the way that the kind of concept of a liminal space and this aesthetic can be sort of healing or there's something sort of soothing about it as it it takes you out of habit, it takes you out of the sort of social structure that you usually engage with, and that provides a space for transformation.

It's kind of like a psychedelic experience in that way.

Sort of empty airport hallways,

tunnels, hotel lobbies, like these kinds of transitional spaces.

I found something sort of exciting about them because they represent this possibility for change, this possibility for doing something that's not your usual habit.

I remember sometimes when I was, you know, kind of struggling to stay clean.

I mean, they're trying to get off opiates and then they're trying to stay off of them.

They're sort of two different struggles.

Trying to stay off them, I often found, I would sometimes just leave the house and check into a hotel because being in a different space meant that I didn't have the environmental associations and triggers that were likely to sort of cause me to dwell on the craving.

And I,

you know, was in this hotel space where it's like oh who who am I well I'm here like I don't know right because it's there's something sort of so anonymous and so generic about a hotel that it makes you feel like there's these new possibilities open to you yes a liminal space often represents the kind of transition between two worlds you can think about like in the lion the witch and the wardrobe like there's this lamp post at the entrance to narnia i've always thought of that as a very liminal shot the entrance into this new world, or like the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland is that kind of experience of being in transition between two worlds.

I think that if you're unhappy with the world you're in, in some ways the liminal space will be comforting, right?

Because

it represents a promise of change or transformation.

But there's also something sort of sinister because it represents the unknown.

Yeah, that's right about the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

That was something that really got into my head when I was little and I first encountered those books.

Exactly.

Yeah, that's the most exciting aspect of it, I think, was that portal.

I guess people love portals.

People love portals.

Otherwise...

We do.

We love portals.

Yeah, that exploring weird spaces and then the idea that you might, if you push far enough into the back of some walk-in closet, find an entirely new world.

is incredibly intoxicating.

Yeah, there's an exhilarating aspect to it.

I think that the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland is like that too.

I think

the

red pill in the matrix almost, I mean, it's obviously this has been kind of misappropriated by conspiracy theorists now who use exactly these metaphors, going down the rabbit hole.

You're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.

Taking the red pill, right?

They'll use this

language, these analogies to describe this experience of

leaving reality and going into this exciting and terrifying new, you know, way of looking at the world where I don't know, Freemasons control the banks or whatever it is.

But you're angry now, very angry now,

and that's making me very angry too.

No, fuck you,

and your mother too.

So on your main ContraPoints YouTube channel you have your long form video essays but for your Patreon subscribers you do these things called tangents, which are

generally less long and less intensively produced essays or monologues on certain subjects.

And one of the ones I saw recently, as a Patreon subscriber, was your overview of the Gamergate phenomenon, controversy.

How would you describe Gamergate?

A campaign, it was a hashtag.

I would describe it as a harassment campaign.

Obviously, the people who participated generally do not conceptualize it that way.

They view it as a kind of grassroots uprising demanding ethics in game journalism.

I see it as a kind of expression of misogynistic backlash against women in nerd culture.

Yeah.

I mean, I think there's probably still quite a lot of people, certainly of my age, who might not have heard of Gamergate.

This was something that happened around 2014, it started.

And then it rolled on

being written about occasionally in think pieces in mainstream media.

Mainstream media every now and again.

But still, it was a niche phenomenon.

And most people, if they had heard of Gamergate, couldn't really tell you what it was or what it meant.

But looking back on it now and watching your recent tangent about it, It really does feel like it was the beginning of the end for the internet as this sort of utopian space where everyone was nice to each other and

you could solve all your problems and you could meet interesting people.

And

then it started changing and becoming this darker place, this more sinister place.

Is that the way it felt to you?

I think so, on some level.

I think that, I guess I do want to challenge a little bit the assumption that the internet, you know, in the early days was a total utopia.

I mean, I have known of cases and I've known through direct experience of people having pretty horrific experiences online, women being the victims of revenge porn, for example.

There was like a whole 10-year era where there was just nothing you could do.

There was no recourse for victims of this.

It would just kind of like ruin a few years of your life, and there was nothing you could do about it.

The law has kind of fortunately caught up on that, but there's a lot of other things that ought to be criminal that go on online that are not.

So, this stuff was going on before Gamergate, but I think that Gamergate really

organized it in a way

and sort of escalated it to a level that I don't think anyone had seen before.

And also it attracted a lot more awareness to the fact that this level of harassment was possible and that it was going on.

This movement began as backlash to a woman in the games industry after a vindictive ex-boyfriend published what basically was a call-out post, you know, accusing her of cheating on him.

And the internet kind of decided, you know, let's punish this woman.

And then from there, it kind of constantly was morphing, and the goals changed, and it became more socio-political.

And they later would insist, oh, it has nothing to do with punishing Zoe Quinn.

It's actually about ethics and games journalism.

And we're angry because we think that, like, there's a feminist plot to infiltrate the video game industry and take games away from men.

You know, these were the types of claims that people were making.

But one of the scary things about the internet is just the scale of it.

How many people can get involved in something, even if the thing in question is like evil or crackpot or just dangerous?

You know, there's a kind of mob mentality that...

It's interesting because I feel like now some of this stuff gets discussed under the heading of, quote, cancel culture.

No one said that Gamergate was cancel culture, though in a lot of ways, a lot of the dynamics that we associate with cancel culture were there in Gamergate.

Yeah, things got very, very ugly.

The harassment was very severe.

And I think that a lot of people before that sort of weren't aware of how ugly this could get.

Yeah, it was the first time that I was aware of these subcultures, people who came to be known as incels and those kinds of people who before you, well, I certainly I just dismissed as kind of disaffected teens, harmless trolls.

I mean, you know, in some ways harmless.

I ran foul of a few people on YouTube in the early days, and it was a horrible feeling when it happened.

And it happened so sort of quickly.

In no way was my life ruined by it, but there were a few days when, like the first time someone said, I'm pretty sure I know where you live, after I'd had a row with them.

They said, Oh, I've seen you in Stockwell High Street.

I know where your house is.

And it was a really horrible, horrible feeling that I'd never had before.

I mean, I got so upset just by that one comment from this fucking creep guy who was just throwing his weight around, you know.

But that's the thing.

In real life, if you're standing in front of someone, you can kind of assess whether the threat is real or not.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, one of the ways internet harassment works is that they're relying on you not to know how serious their threats are.

So I, in my earlier YouTube days, used to do content that I probably wouldn't do now, in part because it's quite dangerous, like content that sort of directly engages with communities of like far-right, you know, white nationalists online, for example, and attempts to kind of antagonize them.

This is dangerous.

You know, I mean, I've been sent like threats of like, you know, we know where you live.

I'm going to kidnap you and dismember you and leave your body in a ditch.

And like, probably,

almost definitely, right?

There's not going to be any actual follow-up on that, but they've put the image into your head and there's no way that that's not on some level gonna kind of get to you.

Of course.

I mean, even when you're not talking about those kinds of direct threats and intimidation,

just the tone of so much interaction that happens via the internet, especially when it comes to, you know, culture wars, has become so poisonous that I think it's got to the point where even if people are speaking in good faith about,

for example, trans issues, gender-critical issues, it's sort of a zero-sum exercise.

And the chance of any actual understanding and enlightenment happening seems pretty low.

Is that how it seems to you?

Yeah, I think, I mean, my most recent video on my main channel is still engaging with that conversation in response to the Witch Trials of J.K.

Rowling podcast that I was on, and which I

was very frustrated by.

But yeah, I have mostly avoided weighing in further on the kind of trans debate because it's gotten so toxic that it's like I don't know in the US I mean in the UK too like things have escalated to the point where transgender people are basically just being publicly accused of being child molesters for no reason and I don't really know what

you say about that I don't know how to argue with with some of these positions right a lot of people are really just kind of repulsed by the whole idea of trans people and it's like at a certain point it's like I don't know what you want me to say like trans people are not gonna stop being trans.

You're not going to be able to get rid of us.

So,

I don't know what else to say, right?

We have a right to live and

to exist as much as anyone else does.

And, you know, I think people just are going to have to learn to deal with that and stop.

A lot of this, of course, is like, you know, people have been deliberately misled by bait that comes from politicians, increasingly from right-wing politicians who are kind of using this as a wedge issue in the same way that gay marriage was used in the 2000s.

It's something that can be built into a moral panic and it has been built into a moral panic.

But it really, I will say, it really sucks to be on the receiving end of that kind of moral panic because you have to like wake up every day and look at people in the news just pretty blatantly dehumanizing you.

I can imagine.

The thing about the witch trials of J.K.

Rowling podcast, which you were interviewed for and then you made a video about afterwards, which I will post a link to in the description of the podcast.

And you regretted your involvement with it, and you explained very precisely and carefully why.

But it is what introduced me to your videos.

Do you entirely regret being involved with it?

Or do you think that it did serve a useful purpose in some ways, that it wasn't an entirely negative enterprise?

From my point of view, it doesn't seem like that, but I understand why you might think that.

Well, I mean, I'll put it this way.

There is a reason I agreed to do it in the first place, and that reason is that I knew this would be a big platform on which to kind of defend trans

people from

probably

one of the loudest voices in the world on this topic, J.K.

Rowling.

And that aspect I don't regret, but I sort of felt that my own inclusion in this podcast was sort of inadequate to really get the point across.

And that's why I felt I needed to make this follow-up video.

I think the frustration was about how the issue was handled and the way that the podcast primarily was about telling the story of JK Rowling and this kind of implication that she's been like sort of terribly oppressed by these trans people who have like overreacted to the things that she's said on Twitter.

And I just find that a really frustrating framing that sort of doesn't engage with like the real power dynamics in play when you have one of the most successful authors in the world basically

joining hands with a hate movement, the likes of Kelly J.

Kane Mitchell, for example, who are basically trying to, it's not an exaggeration to say that someone like Kelly J.

Kane Mitchell, their goal is to eliminate trans people.

And so for J.K.

Rowling, with all the prestige and sort of liberal humane clout that she represents, to kind of join hands with her and to endorse this movement,

I think it's just been a disaster for trans people.

So

yeah, I mean, I wasn't trying to get you to expand even as much as that, especially, as I said, because you've made this video.

It's on your ContraPoints channel where you very carefully and thoughtfully set out your feelings on the subject.

And it's brilliantly put together.

And I found it very enlightening.

And I would recommend people watch it.

Thank you.

I heard you talking on the Unladylike podcast in 2020 and you said you were careful about the kind of terms that you would use in your videos when you were talking about certain groups or certain types of behavior.

You would kind of try and avoid using terms like transphobic or sexist or racist too often.

And what was the thinking behind that?

I think that for me is more a matter of being persuasive.

I think that when you want to talk about these topics that for most people are quite delicate, you know, throwing around the words transphobia, homophobia, racism, bigotry, misogyny, I think people feel very threatened when they feel like you're calling them a bigot.

And so often it causes people to get very defensive and to immediately try to discredit you and discredit everything you're saying because they're afraid that you're calling them a bigot and they don't want that.

So they need to find a way to undermine you and discredit you and not listen to what you're saying.

I mean, that's not to say we should never use these words because obviously we do need to be able to talk about bigotry, right?

Like we can't just never talk about misogyny because sometimes it's threatening to men.

But I also think there's a place for talking about misogyny without saying the word misogyny right at the beginning, especially if you're talking about, I don't know, the way that someone is behaving online.

And if your goal is not just to shun them, but to sort of actually cause people to change their behavior, you know, you want them to listen to you.

And part of the one way that you can get them to listen to you is to not begin with

condemnation, right?

Because when people feel condemned, the immediate instinct is to defend themselves.

People, someone trying to defend themselves from accusations is not someone who's open-minded most of the time.

And so I think that there's kind of utility in making, especially something like a video essay where, you know, it's not an actual argument, it's kind of a simulated argument or a simulated one-sided conversation you want to make people feel like they're sort of invited in where they're willing to identify with you for a moment and and they will actually consider your perspective i think that you know you can decide if you even care about doing de-radicalization i don't think people are obligated to do that i especially don't think that marginalized people have an obligation to you know, prove that they deserve equal treatment or prove that they deserve to be treated with dignity.

But some people do feel a kind of calling calling to do that.

I certainly have at times.

And when you're doing that, I think that part of it is, you know,

presenting yourself in such a way where people won't be so threatened by entering the conversation.

Yeah, because

you've done videos about Nazis.

You've done videos about incels.

You've done...

You know, I'm not saying that all of these groups are equivalent, but you've done videos about Jordan Peterson, about J.K.

Rowling.

And in every case, you're thoughtful and careful with the people you're talking about.

Even if it's clear that you're opposed to what they may believe, you often try and understand where they might be coming from.

And it's something that I don't often see online.

And in fact, some of those people, some of the kind of more incelli, alt-righty people, have actually watched your videos and have maybe come to different conclusions about how they see things.

Is that right?

Yeah, that certainly was the hope, especially back in 2018.

A lot of the content that I was making was basically designed and to de-radicalize people who were sort of spiraling into these communities where they, I mean, it's one of the terrible things about the internet, right?

Is that people sort of are able to be attracted to other like-minded people.

And

then those people all kind of validate each other's like worst, most extreme ideas.

And there's this like snowballing effect.

So the goal with videos like Incels for me was to kind of try to interrupt someone in the early stages of that process.

Yeah, yeah.

Another video I was watching of yours the other day was you in 2018 at the XOXO festival.

Do you remember that appearance that you made?

I do, yeah.

I thought you were excellent at that.

And it was really quite affecting because you seemed quite vulnerable, like, not nervous exactly.

You were very confident in front of what looked like quite a massive audience.

But you were talking about some of the experiences that you'd been through in the past couple of years since your channel had started getting big.

You were talking about the unpleasant challenges that came along with that.

You had, in that period, come out as trans

and you were being kind of framed as a spokesperson for the trans community in some ways.

How different do you feel from the person on that stage in 2018 now?

Oh, I feel pretty different.

I think a lot of things have changed.

One, I think at the time, the level of attention that I was receiving at that time was new to me and it was shocking.

Like, I had never been someone who, I don't know, more than 20 people were interested in really engaging with the stuff that I made.

And then suddenly in 2017,

that swelled to like 100,000 and then to two hundred thousand and you know eventually to like a million but that happened in about two years and it's very sudden and at the same time I was going through you know this gender transition and figuring out how to navigate being a kind of figure of prominence in this community that's very marginalized and that doesn't generally have a lot of prominence.

So I made a lot of mistakes and I got

really angry and really upset a lot of the time about people who were angry and upset with me.

And it took me a few years, I think, to kind of learn to understand the dynamics of what was going on, why people were so mad at me.

And I think...

Why were they so mad at you?

Can you summarize for people that aren't familiar with it?

Yes, I think there's a lot of different reasons.

I think part of it has to do with when you belong to a small community, if someone from your community is getting a bunch of attention, that person sort of becomes what other people know of the community.

So I'm trying to think of a more universal example.

Well, this is an odd example, but everyone I know who is into BDSM hated 50 Shades of Gray because

50 Shades of Grey made them look bad.

And it was so big, right?

The audience for 50 Shades of Grey was so big that in a lot of people's minds, that novel became what BDSM is.

And this is exactly what they were afraid of, right?

And that's like threatening to them.

It's like they're being robbed of their identity.

Well, I think that's the case with a lot of marginalized groups.

You

are,

you know, relying on only a handful of people to kind of represent you to the world.

And so that magnifies how big a deal a disagreement or a difference of opinion is.

And so when I said some things that people in the community disagreed with, it wasn't just a disagreement.

It exploded into this like massive battle over what it means to be trans and like, you know, all kinds of questions that, like, I shouldn't have had to be the mascot for this, right?

But the fact is that to a lot of people, I was.

I mean, I think it's actually good for us.

Like, this is not an opinion I see a lot, but I think that those of us who are sort of public figures or semi-public figures, like, we,

a lot of us are terrified of like the mob, right?

Like Twitter and being canceled and being criticized and being called out, right?

It's scary because this can mess up your life.

At the same time, there's also like benefits, I think, that come from this caution.

Like, it sort of forces me to think about issues from lots of other different types of people's perspectives.

And how, like, if I say, like, you know, a certain statement, like, okay, how is this going to sound to disabled people?

How is this going to sound to black Americans?

How is this going to sound to, you know, trans people?

Like, you sort of pause and think about these different audiences before you speak.

And this

exercise in empathy, I think, actually does have some mind-expanding properties that I think are helpful.

Like, I think in a lot of ways, I'm like a less self-centered and a more conscientious and socially aware person than I was before I became a YouTuber.

In part because you get so much feedback that you sort of learn what's going on in other people's heads.

I think you're right.

And you have a character as well called Tiffany Tumbles, who is the kind of person who has been chastened by the criticism they've received, but rather than ending up as the kind of person you've just described, trying to see things from other people's point of view, ends up retreating to a more defensive place and being resentful and kind of getting in a huff about you can't say anything these days.

However, where I do have some sympathy with people who are worried about,

I'm trying to think of ways of expressing this without sort of resorting to talking about cancel culture and all that sort of stuff.

But you know, yes, it's good to consider the way that your words and your expressions are going to land and to consider the world from other people's points of view.

That's definitely valuable.

But of course, to do it completely isn't possible.

And to consider everybody's point of view, were you to do it totally, would be completely paralyzing.

So obviously, you know, you're trying to find a happy medium, which I guess you have.

I feel like you have from looking at your videos.

You're still funny and you're still saying

what you feel, and you have a unique point of view that you're still expressing, despite being more cautious in some ways.

But what was it?

Because basically you had the experience of being castigated harshly by your own tribe.

What was that experience like and why didn't it, do you think, force you into the Tiffany Tumbles camp of just thinking, fuck you, I'm done with you lot.

We're supposed to be on the same side.

I'm not a bad person.

You can piss off.

So how was it for you, the experience of being cast out?

I think there was definitely a couple years.

For me, it was 2019 and 2020 where I at times was kind of dangerously close to saying, you know, screw all of you.

Like,

I think that what helped me was just almost a kind of exposure therapy to public shaming.

Like, I kind of saw, I mean, a lot of it was directed at me, but it was helpful to watch it happen to other people too.

Because I was able to see that the way that they were reacting was counterproductive and self-destructive in its own way.

I've seen,

I'm quoting the beat poetry, like the I've seen the best minds of my generation, I feel like I have seen some of the best minds of my generation kind of destroyed by

a growing obsession with their online reputation and with defending it from attack and with the unfairness of the accusations against them.

And they just dwell on it almost to the point that it sort of overtakes the rest of their thinking.

So, you know, it's not easy, but there's a kind of Zen-like attitude that I feel like you kind of need to cultivate when it comes to reputation online.

You sort of have to remember that with fame comes infamy.

And at a certain point, you have to actually say, like, I am okay with that.

Like, I'm just not going to engage.

I'm not going to respond.

And for me, that shift in attitude actually caused less people.

to be engaged and constantly criticizing and shaming me because part of what people like is a fight.

If you don't fight back, the the fight kind of dies out.

Yeah, that's a very impressive way of looking at it.

I fear that if I found myself in a similar position, I wouldn't respond so well.

I mean,

you have talked though in your videos sometimes about self-loathing and moments of self-doubt and vulnerability that a lot of us have, but you talk about it in a way that suggests to me that you felt it fairly acutely before.

I certainly related to a lot of the things you've said in passing in videos and thought, oh yeah, I know what that feels like.

So with that in mind, I'm interested to know how you are able to achieve that level of Zen in those moments where you are being judged.

Because I think that my own occasional capacity for self-loathing would mean that I might end up agreeing with the people judging me.

I definitely have had moments of that and moments of self-loathing.

I think that it's definitely something that I'm prone to struggling with myself.

I guess one way of overcoming it is with self-deprecating humor for me is to kind of like, well, suppose they're all right.

Well, suppose, like, in a sense, like

the humor is like the overcoming of the criticism, right?

Because the fact that you're joking about it, like, takes the teeth out of it, in a sense.

Like, so people are calling me a degenerate, okay?

So, I'm a degenerate, right?

It helps if you don't have a very kind of grand, like, narcissistic narrative about yourself in the first place if you view yourself as like i don't know a great philosopher of our age or if you view yourself as a compassionate moral crusader fighting for justice like these kinds of like grandiose self-conceptions i think that leaves you especially vulnerable to criticism because you get very invested in protecting this narrative around yourself where you're this great person i think one defense against self-loathing is sort of paradoxically to have a more humble self-image and to not view yourself as a morally amazing person and you have no sexual deviancy at all and you're so beautiful, right?

Like if you don't include all these things in your self-conception, then it's not, you're not going to be so bothered when people attack you, right?

Yeah.

One of your videos is called Cringe and it's very good on some of these themes.

You mentioned a thing that David Foster Wallace said that there's a lot of narcissism in self-hatred, which is true, isn't it?

I mean, if you're spending too much time in your own head anyway,

then it often ends up tumbling into self-loathing.

Yeah, I think that thinking about yourself and your reputation and your image all the time,

whether positively or negatively, is kind of not a great habit and it is sort of a solipsism.

Even if it's self-loathing, you've still taken as your primary concern your image, your competency, your reputation.

So I think that the reason why cringe is such a big emotion in the digital age is that, yes, certainly people like us who have made a career out of our

content, we are in an especially intensified version of this situation.

But I think everyone, I mean, Kids growing up today are growing up with TikTok and you constantly are putting a camera in your own face and recording yourself.

Like, I think this is changing human self-consciousness in ways that have not even begun to be understood.

And I think that

one aspect of it is this kind of increased sense of self-awareness, this heightened perception of your own image, because you're constantly looking at yourself and you're constantly reading comment sections and you're getting feedback from other people.

And so, yourself, you know, it becomes becomes the topic of obsession, I I think, because of the nature of this technology.

I think this is something that should be resisted on some level.

Like, I think that it's not good for us to be so

self-obsessed.

And I don't mean that in a moral way.

Oh, this generation is so narcissistic.

I mean, you know, people say that about every generation, right?

People said about baby boomers.

Oh, this is a selfish generation.

And they said it about Gen X and they said it about millennials.

And now we're saying it about Gen Z, that, oh, the TikTok generation.

They're narcissistic.

They have no attention span.

The same stuff that everyone says about the youth.

Well, that's usually not true, but I do think that I don't mean this in a moral way, I mean it in a sympathetic way.

I think that the technology of the digital age and social media and the camera on the front of your phone, on the back of your phone, whichever side of the phone point faces your face,

you know, this, I think,

is a little bit of a psychological risk to people.

I think especially if you're sort of young and unsure of who you are, it's easy to get sucked into like a really dark spiral of self-hatred.

Yeah.

What are some of the apps that you use to entertain yourself that don't make you feel dirty?

Well, about a year ago, I decided that I wanted to learn chess.

I kind of decided this on a random whim after this like salacious news story about like cheating and the professional chess world circulated.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

The allegation that was like, was like someone was using like a vibrating sex toy in order to like telegraph like cheating.

And I was like, that sounds interesting.

I didn't realize that chess was that exciting.

I guess it was also the Queen's Gambit, that show that came out.

Oh, yeah.

And

that, you know, the Queen's Gambit kind of, that was kind of for chess, what Amadeus was for classical music, right?

It took this like old, like, stuffy thing and made it seem like rock and roll or whatever.

So I think I saw the Queen's Gambit and I was like, I think I should learn chess.

You know, I've always been someone who's like more oriented towards the humanities and towards people and towards emotions.

But I've discovered that there's this part of myself that I can get into the geometry of a game like chess, and it's a part of my brain that I don't usually use.

It's kind of a relief from like the kind of social psychological nightmare that is social media.

Yes, the chaos of social media.

There's a bit of order in a game like chess.

Yeah, it's order and it's introverted and it's, you know, I don't know.

It's a nice little escape.

There's rules.

Yes, there's rules.

It's like a certain predictability.

Yes.

Now, Natalie, we're coming towards the end of our conversation, but you sometimes end your videos with beautiful piano music.

You play yourself.

You're a talented piano player.

Thank you.

Yeah, I like, well, I like music a lot.

And so.

What are you listening to these days?

Oh, what am I listening to these days?

I mean, I listen to, honestly, I listen to a lot of classical piano music.

I think I that's what I play, and so I like listening to that music too.

I guess a few years ago, I really got into the hyper-pop, like

new dance music scene, like with artists like Sophie, but I kind of have, I don't know, I've like lost my edge or something.

I just, I feel like my tastes have gotten a little bit boring.

I just want to listen to Debussy all the time.

Where does someone start with Debussy?

I would say if you're getting started with Debussy, find a nice YouTube playlist of the piano music.

So that will include the kind of greatest hits, the reverie, the arabesques, the Claire Delune that everyone probably knows.

Okay, good.

I'll find a good playlist and post a link to that.

And then from there, yeah, you can.

WC, people think that he's only a composer of kind of like dreamy, ambient music, almost.

And that is definitely a lot of the appeal.

He wrote orchestral music that's very against the stereotype.

So if you like deep cuts, I guess you could explore that, but it's not really what I'm talking about here.

I do like dreamy ambient music as a genre.

I do too.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's kind of like the liminal space of music.

Yes.

Do you like Brian Eno?

He's the ambient godfather.

I think, I'm trying to think, what Brian Eno do I know?

I know the album of music for airports.

Oh, yeah, that's good.

Have you got The Pearl, Harold Budd, and Brian Eno?

No, I don't think I've heard that.

Oh, mate.

You gotta get that one.

It's an absolute peach.

Calm you right down.

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Continue.

Hey, welcome back, Podcats.

That was Natalie Wynne there talking to me and I'm very grateful to Natalie for giving up her time.

Whoa, we are in Pheasant Alley.

Aren't we doglegs?

Yes.

I've put a load of links to some of the things that we talked about in the description of today's podcast, including that video of Natalie playing Super Liminal for the first time.

back in 2021, which might serve as an introduction to the game for some of you, and maybe, like me, you'll end up playing it.

I played it with my daughter, we really enjoyed it.

Quite a good game, perhaps, to play with teens or young teens.

Yeah, it really stuck with me, that game, actually.

There's also several links to some of Natalie's YouTube videos, but if you just search for Contra points on YouTube, you'll find her archive.

Although, there's other bits bits and pieces that you have to be a Patreon member to access, like the

tangent videos, the tangent video on Gamergate, for example, that's behind the Patreon paywall.

But there's the video that Natalie did responding to the Witch Trials of JK Rowling podcast, in which she explains why she regretted her decision to take part in that series.

And as I said to Natalie, I mean, I did enjoy listening to the podcast.

I thought it was well made, and certainly it was an interesting overview of the situation from JK Rowling's point of view.

I think Natalie felt that it wasn't as balanced as it could have been.

See what you think.

Also, a link to the video about cringe that Natalie made in 2020.

I think maybe that's one of my favorite ones of hers.

There's also a link to that red letter media Phantom Menace review, which is quite a funny and forensic takedown of

the Phantom Menace, delivered in the character of quite a kind of

unpleasant sounding super nerd,

albeit one who has some

pretty fair comments to make about the Phantom Menace.

There's also a link to a Debussy playlist that seemed to be the kind of thing Natalie was talking about.

Lots of dreamy ambient piano music.

Nice introduction perhaps.

There is also a link to The Pearl, Harold Budd and Brian Eno.

You heard a couple of notes from the beginning of the title track when we came back from the adverts there at the end of the conversation.

I love that album.

Spent many

dreamy moments, especially when I was younger, drifting off to sleep listening to that.

I'm going to head back now

as the sun goes down

for a bit of supper at the castle

and maybe a bit more of the David Beckham dock.

Are you watching that?

I think that's been the big hit on Netflix the last few weeks

and my wife suggested we watch it.

She expected me to be more resistant, I think,

because of my extremely low

level of interest in football.

And also, it must be said in David and Victoria Beckham.

But it's a well-made dock, and even for someone like me who doesn't necessarily care about football, some pretty good football moments.

I can appreciate the greatness of his ball work.

It's weird as well to be reminded of things that I was only dimly aware of when they were happening in the 90s because I couldn't give a shit.

So when Beckham was being cancelled after

he

kind of kicked the guy at the thing

and everyone turned against him and blamed him for England losing the Sport Cup, yeah, it was interesting.

I felt as if I was finding out about it for the first time

and experiencing the whole scandal with him

and seeing it from his point of view and now especially with all the time that's passed

this may be sacrilegious to some of you who perhaps still have never forgiven him for what he'd done

but I just felt like the level of vicious hatred and meanness directed towards him was just so mad and a reminder that that kind of madness

is always there simmering away and back then I was kind of insulated from it because there was no social media.

It was in articles that I didn't read and sports programs that I didn't watch and football grounds that I didn't visit.

But looking at it in the documentary, it was like, oh well, that's just exactly like some of the madder things that go on in social media nowadays, innit?

What do you think of that, Rosie?

No opinion at all.

Okay, thanks very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his conversation editing, guest liaison, and general sportsmanship.

I appreciate you.

Thank you very much indeed to all at ACAST.

for continuing to support the podcast.

Thank you to Helen Green.

She does the artwork for the podcast.

But thanks most of all to you.

I'm so grateful to you for coming back and listening

and for being encouraging and supportive whenever I hear from one of you or bump into you, which is why I'm suggesting a close quarters hug.

What about it?

Hey,

come here.

Good to see you.

All right, until next time, hope hope things go okay for you.

And I just would like you to know that I love you.

Bye.

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