Read the full transcript (2,759 words, machine made)
This is the Chris Abraham Show. It's The Chris Abraham Show season five, episode 54. So here's a cultural rift that I feel like, quote UN quote white people can't really deal with is the fact that, like, it's a cultural thing, that people just play their phones on speaker or publicly run their music. Through their Bluetooth speakers and public places such as the beach and the park, in courtyards and bus stops and stuff like that. And in kind of a traditional community all the way going back to boom boxes and and anytime you had portable radios including transistor radios, playing those things out loud and not quietly and not.
Through in earbud is considered extremely antisocial. It's considered to be hostile and in general people will call cops based on that, right? They will call cops. And you could plot it all over YouTube, like if you play your boom box in the bus, someone's going to yell at you. And it's generally a Karen and I personally say gets aggressive and it's antisocial and it's. It's rude.
Extremely rude. Like, actively rude. Like it feels like you're intentionally messing with my world. But I know it's not that at all. So I always make sure that I have in the head earphones and so none of that bothers me. And now that I have, if you will know that I have Adobe sound cancelling, it doesn't bother my podcasts at all either. Not anymore.
Good morning. As I was walking down my own hallway, a broad shouldered and some young Latino man was playing Latin music from his cell phone just like out loud in the speaker. And so that's just brought that to my mind. Doesn't bother me per se, but I do realize that it it it really like perks up my autonomics autonomic system. Which is to say, I feel I feel defensively aggressive, like based on the hostile nature of Public Music playing via Bluetooth or the speaker on a phone. I feel like I am.
My autonomic response is that I'm going to get in a in a fist fight soon, so it sets my, you know, autonomic system on edge, ready for a fight because. Any kind of antisocial aggressive choice is dealing with kind of an autonomic response. And 0% of the time is the music that the people choose to play on the beach or in the park or whatever. 0% of the time, is it music that I want to listen to? Unless it's NPR. If it's if they're playing WAMU on the speaker, that's fine. So anyway, I was not going to be talking about this today, but. That's what happens.
I did ooh, I have my hats in my bag. Yay, thought I forgot my hats or my hat and my glasses, but I had packed them in my bag yesterday. So I'm good. I'm good to go. No turning back.
All right. So aside from that comment that I'm going to make, which is also related to 1000 articles over the last five years where where people of color with spicier cultures. Move into, I mean, I guess they either become, hey, how's it going? They either become upwardly mobile and move into a traditionally kind of Protestant Waspy neighborhood or a bunch of Waspy neighbors gentrify that particular neighborhood and before nice truck. It's what it's beautiful, Yeah.
Looks like it wants to be in Baja though.
Have a good day. So, So yeah, so there's always these interactions and in in transitioning neighborhoods where, oh, recently there was a lot of articles about this happening at universities where you know in this case it was, it was either code switch or it was. Those awesome like Asta la Proxima that that talk show that radio show about Latin Americans in Hawaii, I mean in America called Latino USAI think. And it's really. I love that show. It's always on the off hours I never get to hear it. But it's so awesome and this was a report put by a girl who moved into whatever Princeton dorm or whatever. And.
She and all of her Latina friends were like having get togethers. They were laughing, they were goofing around, they were playing music, they were dancing, they were filling all the other awesome Latina stereotypes. And like, they were like the white kids were freaking the fuck out. The white kids were freaking the fuck out. And they were like, you can't behave like this in the dorms.
Dorms are study areas, Dorms are. Not party areas, you know, you have roommates and your roommates expect to be able to study and so forth. And like, I didn't have a culture of going to the gym, I'm going to the library. When I was a a kid, either in high school or in college, I wish I had. I wish someone had. Sat me down is like, don't expect your room to be a monastic cell.
If you need to study, go to the library. But there's a real cultural conflict. Between like like traditionally like studious nerd nerdotypes who, you know really want the dorm to be a an academic, respectful place, and this belief that you know or whatever awful type of terrible stereotype you want to, you know, it's sort of a an environment of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Archetypes, you know, where there's the nerdy only child, Waspy, New England husband whose parents are the only people at the wedding from his side because the parents really don't have that much, don't really have that much of a relationship with their. You know, it's very much an insular mom, dad, son type of experience like mine was. Although, yeah, I'm a.
I totally don't think about it this way, but I'm totally from a broken marriage, right? Like my parents separated when I was 13. So like, I don't even think about it that way. Like my dad didn't move to a different state and a while he didn't participate a lot. Like, I saw enough of him. But yeah, divorce, child of divorce. I don't identify with being that that's really weird. But anyway, versus the the Greek woman bride fiance. Who's everybody's and everybody else's business. Everybody's getting together.
Loudness is a way of showing, like, love languages. Loudness, Love languages is fetching love languages. There's a diesel truck going. Room, room, room, room, room, room. Here's an evil truck going all day long. All right, so there's that thing, right? Like so.
I mean it's. It's a commonplace thing. Like, even at my Penrose Square Park, there's always these like, dudes who have these electric mobility vehicles and they're like two or three, three or four wheels. The wheels on the truck go round and round and they always have like like big big what are they called? Big portable radios or or Bluetooth speakers?
Big ones like. Ghetto blasters, as they used to be called, there and they're playing their music down the street. Or there's like the kind of guy on his bicycle and he's got like a Bluetooth speaker blaring on his on his bicycle hanging from a carabiner. Or there's like this isn't only a a people of color thing either like they totally build. It's a it's a Harley-Davidson owner. Like it's an aggressive antisocial. Loud pipes like loud speakers on a Harley-Davidson blasting away like you know, classic rock loud enough that it overwhelms the loud pipes on the Harley-Davidson. And all these things kind of go together into a really world blowing experience of of what seems. Capital a antisocial and antisocial behavior tends to result in in in escalation and there's never been a speaker. Well, I think they're probably are speakers on on the big touring bikes, on the big BMW touring bikes. But once you realize that helmets can have a little Bluetooth speakers in them, and even before that, all the way back to Walkman days like they've got in ear buds. That people like used to both block out motorcycle and wind noise, but also play tapes and CD's at those times and radio and now Bluetooth and streaming and stuff. Like, once you have access to that, it seems extremely aggressive and countercultural in a hostile way to be blasting. And and this is, you know, in a similar way, people perceive this kind of thing in the world of me, you know, recording these podcasts in public, screaming at the top of my lungs over a street, street construction, or, you know, when people take loud calls or loud conferences or whatever and like the DMV or in the cafe or in a line at a theater or whatever and talk not in quiet, hushed tones.
But talk loud as fuck. And and so, like, it's not an inconsistent thing. The topic of today, while the topic of today is now about how aggressive and antisocial playing your music on a Bluetooth speaker at the beach, at a park, in the apartment, in the elevator. It's the same kind of thing, you know, when you there's a lot of people, a lot of migrants and immigrants, who really miss their families. And so they've got a constant stream all the way from home. It's like a portal to to to to Kabul, and it's always on speaker.
And like they're basically having the conversations that my family could only afford to have 10 minutes once a week back in the 70s into this constant running live stream. Sort of like a live Twitch kind of stream where, you know, they just. Live with their extended family who are abroad. And most people I think, kind of put it in their ear. Most people are in love with their iPods or whatever, not iPods, I ear Pods or whatever they're called. But you know, it's still a thing like and I I don't think I would notice that if I didn't live in such a immigrant, migrant, refugee building.
So the topic is going to be the next. The next episode is going to be the fact that I had this conversation with my best friend Mark and I asked to be read in since he's super, like intellectual, cultural, entrepreneurial, Silicon Valley tech elite. I told him to read me in on this whole climate change thing and he said it's all true. But then he also said that that in order to make people, you know, aggressively. Comply. You got to, like, spook them and lie to them and nudge them and and and manipulate them and scare them and put them into a place where they're convinced the only people don't care about a threat that happens a month from now or a year from now. And they certainly don't care about a threat that's five or 10 years from now, certainly not 30 years from now and. Nothing's really going to happen for another 30 years. So we need to make, we need to nudge people in a a way that makes them feel like there's an existential crisis that supersedes their next paycheck, right. So they need to feel that if they don't make decisions based on elections, based on polls, based on, you know, general discussions like if we meaning.
The powers that be, if we can scare them into compliance and they don't comply themselves, then we're eventually going to have to force them into compliance, which is even harder and more expensive. And you know, now I'm riffing here. Mark did not say any of these things, but basically the whole nudge culture that Britain is admitted to says that we tell you what you need to hear in order to comply with our larger purpose. We manipulate you for your own good. We nudge you for your own good. We push you in the right direction, using a certain level of deceit, so that in the long run you will have done something on behalf of not only your goodness, your health, but the health of everybody around you.
We are willing to tell you bald face lies so as to motivate you. To decide on your own in an opt in way to make drastic cultural, financial, fiscal, educational, environmental, political, cultural changes that are drastic and in many ways antithetical to your enjoyment, to your normal, to the way you spend your money, to the way you feed yourself. To your daily life experience, to your relationship with your parents, your children, your greater family. Different relationship with your community, different relationship with the things you own and the things you wear and the things you eat and the things you drink. And so this Cultural Revolution is trying the nudge technique.
But unfortunately, we live in a world where there's so much viable counter messaging that people can do really simple checks and balances and then completely counter message against the bald face lies that they can find all kinds of receipts in the wallets of the person who's trying to nudge you. That doesn't that. That is hypocritical or antithetical to the stories being told, you know? Every leader has a house on the beach. Everybody can get a mortgage.
People haven't been abandoning shorefront places like people still fly their private planes. People still own their Lamborghinis. Nobody sold their 30,000 square foot house. Nobody sold their second 30,000 square foot house, or their third 30,000 square foot house, or their 10,000 square foot cabin. Nobody's got rid of their helicopter.
Nobody has divested themselves from their investments. Nobody has given up their steak dinners. Very few people eat bugs anyway. So when you when you, when you have counter messaging, there's always been counter messaging. But we've called those crack pots, right?
But now the crack pots have an extreme amount of influence and everything. Every time there's a nudge, which is done for allegedly the good of all humanity around the world. Every Neolib proactive war. Every blowing up of a of a of a gas pipeline. Every change of uranium mining area into national parks, Every this and every that, Every aggressive move against.
Traditional government structures the everything is an attempt to try to manipulate a mob who needs to steer and run themselves because it's impossible to have a one to one physical like control methodology, even with a I or whatever at the end of the day like. It's not working And there's what is it called? What is the term? The term for it is there's a lower return. There's like diminishing returns, the law of diminishing return site.
Obviously the more people catch that what they read in the Bible and what they're told about the Bible, what they read in a in a science paper and what you tell them is in a science paper, what they see reported from local news. Anchors and the local telegram reports and and local tick tockers and what the news reports is, is happening. Eventually these get so out of whack that people start completely distrusting and rejecting the official narrative in which the the nudging, the manipulation, and the telling you little lies for your own good. Starts breaking down and people like, do not trust you anymore and they start to aggressively not trust you. And it becomes an antitrust kind of thing, not the legal, but it becomes the opposite of trust. People never believe anything you say, and you've completely been discredited and nothing you say has any effect. And in fact, anything you try to say results in extreme blowback. So.
Who knows what happens then, right? So anyway, tomorrow. Oh, well, then I we talked about it. I'll talk about it more if you're interested in, but this is going to be a controversial episode that nobody is going to listen to and nobody will give a shit about it. So this was episode 54, season five of The Chris Abraham Show. My name is Chris Abraham.
Please, like, subscribe and click the notification bell and share with your friends. I'll talk to you soon. Love you. Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to The Chris Abraham Show. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. Until next time.
Now.
