#56 Zardulu

Hey, PJ. Hey, Alex. Are you ready for this episode? Do you think?

Do I need to be ready in a different way than normal? I'm just trying to prepare you, man. This one's a weird one. Okay.

I like a weird one. Okay. So this is a story that I've been reporting for the last month, and it's honestly kind of taken over my life, but it starts small. It starts very small with this guy named Eric Yearwood.

About two and a half years ago, Eric embarked on this quintessential New York life change where he quit his job as a teacher in Florida and moved to the city to become an actor. But it didn't go so well. I haven't made the kind of career I wanted for myself, I guess, and I'm kind of falling back on some plan B's. That's a tough racket.

Really tough. And especially when I moved here and I had a fiancee and because I wasn't making a lot of money and didn't seem like I was headed towards a stable lifestyle, we split up. So I was pretty down and out mid year 2015. To make ends meet, Eric got jobs doing stuff like building stages for fancy transit events and some graphic design work, but Eric was not living his best life.

I think when I was in college, I wanted to be like a Renaissance man, you know. I wanted to experience all of life. But then you get a little older and you realize, hey, I've just got this little pocket of stuff I can do and got to be content with that. We're getting real heavy.

Sorry to be Debbie Downer here. I didn't know what to say, but I'm going to answer your questions. Eric was in the city following his dreams and he was going nowhere. And then magic entered his life in the form of an email.

It was basically something like, hello, I'm a performance artist. I go by the name of Zardulu. I have something that you might fit at this role and I was wondering if you might be willing for several hundred dollars to participate. Zardulu.

Eric still has no idea how or why this person found him. In fact, Eric barely knows anything about them beyond the fact that this person calls themselves Zardulu. But Zardulu took Eric and made him part of something that became bigger than he could have ever imagined. What do you mean calls themselves Zardulu?

That's their name. That's what they go by. It's like a mononym, pseudonym, a monosudonym. It just sounds like, I mean, maybe it's a common name somewhere.

It sounds like something from what was the movie where it was David Bowie and they're amazing and it's scary. It is very funny that you mentioned that. That movie is called Labyrinth. And after exchanging a few emails, Eric agreed to go to Zardulu Studio and this is what he said about meeting her.

She was wearing robes when we met. So that was very odd. She looked like she was like maybe a villager from the Labyrinth. Was she wearing a cloak?

It wasn't a cloak. It was more like kind of like a red like dashiiki or something with some sort of embroidered symbols or something down the front of it. She was a little bit kind of, I don't know, mystical is a weird word, but that's the way she seems somehow. Eric said that she was friendly but kind of inscrutable.

You know what I mean? And then she starts explaining what she wants from him. She just said, I want to create something viral. So this was fall of last year after Pizza Rat, the video of a rat carrying a sleigh speeds it down a flight of subway stairs, went viral.

And suddenly the internet couldn't get enough of videos of rats carrying things. And Zardulu apparently wanted to manufacture one of these videos. So she says to Eric, here's the plan. It's going to be a video starring you and a rat, but not just any subway rat, a rat that I trained.

You'll sit on the subway. The rat will crawl onto you, step on your phone, take a picture of itself, and then you will leap up in feigned surprise and run away. And I will be recording it. But then the rat would need to be able to unlock his phone.

Yes. So there is a level of artifice involved in this, right? He has to unlock his phone, pretend to be asleep, let the rat crawl on him, take the picture, and then jump up frightened and run away. But even if you're faking a little bit, that's still like an extremely well-trained rat.

BJ, you have no idea. Was the rat there? Yeah, the rat was there and there were other rats too. And so they would run this maze, they would leap over these little obstacles they would go through.

There was like a, like a, like a little pool that they would swim across to retrieve certain things. And she untrained in a way that was pretty amazing. That is amazing. It is amazing.

When I saw what she was doing with the rats, it went from being like, okay, this is just like, I'm helping somebody make a web series or something too. Wow, this person is doing something big. This isn't just some Mickey Mouse operation, no pun intended. In a couple of days later, they meet at about four in the morning in the subway.

Zardulu shows up dressed as a civilian with no robes, so as not to draw any attention to herself. And she brings another person to film the whole thing so that she is free to do the rat wrangling. And initially, we were going to actually take the video on a subway car. But when we went down into the subway, we couldn't find an empty car that was empty long enough.

So we, at some point, she kind of called an audible and said, let's do it just on the platform. Okay. So we found a platform that was empty enough. And we had peanut butter smeared on the phone and they put the rat on top of me and then took it from there.

Where was the peanut butter on the phone? It was at the spot where you press the button. Sorry, I need to know. No, no, no, no.

It appears that Ken Kardashian isn't the only one that loves selfies. Rats apparently like them too. Zardulu took the video and sent it to a Connecticut TV station posing as someone called Don Richards. And that's how selfie rat was born.

And it was everywhere. For a couple days, it became the weird news story on the 11 o'clock news all over the country. It was blurry and you couldn't tell that it was Eric, but the video was seen millions of times. In the process, he dropped his cell phone, which somehow snapped a photo of the imposing critter.

Richards caught the whole thing on video. And now the sleeping man has a forever memento of selfie rat. Christina Bair picks 11 news. What does the mouse look like in the photo?

I can show you a picture of it. He looks like it's like pretty blurry, but it makes him look like a rat from like a muffin. It makes him look really cute because it's just like you see like the pink of his nose and like, I don't know. I like it.

Yeah, I mean, it's adorable. So at this point, I'm asking myself, what kind of person puts this Herculean effort into this relatively inconsequential rat hoax? And Eric says to me that Zardulu told him that selfie rat is just the beginning. She has a big vision and she was describing the project as a piece, a puzzle piece in this grand tapestry of illusions that she wants to create in New York City.

Yeah, she would say, you know, like the world isn't prepared for what I have in store. You know, just things that are just like, okay, they're kind of enigmatic head scratchers. But after seeing Zardulu's studio, Eric was ready to believe her. A lot of the things I was looking at, I didn't really understand.

Like she had, there were these geometric shapes that she had cobbled together from iron and wood. And she had like a, I remember there was like a big suit made of hair. It looked like human hair. It didn't look like fur.

So that was bizarre. This bizarre. And then she had a lot of, there were a lot of like drills and industrial stuff that she uses to make bigger objects, I guess. Eric told me that all the stuff in Zardulu's studio, the suit made of human hair, the shapes made of iron and wood, all those things that he couldn't quite understand.

They're part of her master plan to unleash something huge on New York City. Wow. She sounds like an art villain. But is she an art villain?

Yeah. How was she villainous in this situation? Well, she's saying she's going to unleash a series of illusions. When was I something for the hero who was talking about, hey, unleashing anything, but particularly illusions?

Again, I am paraphrasing, but magician should work with consent. Magicians do illusions all the time. Magicians are like on the villainous gradient. Anyway, so part of doing this project was that Eric wasn't supposed to say anything about it to anyone.

And he wouldn't have were it not for the fact that some person anonymously contacted the witch a gothamist and said, listen, the selfie right video is a fake. And to this day, we have no idea who it was that contacted a gothamist. But whoever was they said, you know, this video's fake. I know the guy who is in it, his name's Eric.

Wow. And the author of the article contacted Eric and was like, hey, the jig is up. I know this was you. And so he was like, yeah, all right, I'll talk to you about it.

So God was put up the article, but the big headline wasn't even about selfie wrap. Instead, it was about pizza wrap. The headline was, is pizza rat a hoax? I talked to Matt Little, the guy who filmed pizza rat.

And unlike Eric, he says it wasn't staged. He insists that pizza rat is not a hoax. It's myself and my friend, Pat Bear. We were heading home from work late one night and we looked down and there's a rat dragging a slice of pizza twice his size, his or her size down the stairs.

And it was one of those moments where I was like, I have to take my phone out and videotape this because my friends will never believe this. If I just tell them I saw it. For Matt, pizza rat success was this strange and hilarious moment in his life. He did a ton of interviews.

He made a pizza rat t-shirt. It was just a serendipitous right place, right time kind of thing. And then he got an email from a reporter, a gothamist, the same reporter who had talked to Eric. And I said, okay, I just need more context of what you're what you want to know.

Right. And I checked out email about an hour later again. And he's emailed me twice. He said he's pretty sure it was faked.

And too, that he needs to hear from me by 3.30 if I want to quote in the in the article. And also congratulations on pulling off such a hoax, which like it's very flattering that he thought I was smart enough to fool the entire world this way. And I called him and I realized that he was serious. And the first thing I did was laugh.

I was like, well, one, like, why, why do you think this was staged? Like, who has the time? Who's the time to do something like that? So you answered your question.

Yeah, yeah. Who would do this? Apparently this person. When you hear the names are do, what do you think?

Well, when I first thought I thought terrible startup. When I hear the names are do, I think of the opening act for a Houdini escape exhibit at like a vaudeville theater in the 30s. So Matt Little says that he does not know as our do he says that he's never met Eric. Matt says that he was not collaborating with some robering ladders, whether he was just hanging out in the subway late at night and he saw a rat carrying a ridiculously huge piece of pizza.

But if you're a conspiracy theorist, there's one thing that ties these two guys together, which is that they both take classes at the Uprade Citizens Brigade Theater. And that's a detail that gothamist treats like a smoking gun. Okay, I feel like I can actually maybe dispatch with that specific conspiracy theory. I don't think that the fact that Matt and Eric both are affiliated with Uprade Citizens Brigade Theater means that they're collaborating just because like, UCB is like a comedy theater in New York that I really, really love.

I go to the shows all the time. I know a nerdy amount about like which performance do what and whatever. And anyway, all this to say that theater is huge. There's like thousands of people who've been associated with it.

Two people, both being quote unquote UCB people, is like two people having gone to the same like mid to large sized university. Right. And like I said, they say that they don't know each other. But when I was talking to Eric, the guy who conspired to Sardulu on selfie red, I asked him if he thought that's our do you could also be responsible for pizza?

Well, she's got an armada of highly trained rats to deploy to create viral content. So it doesn't take a mental leap to think that she could be. But is she or do I know that she is? I don't have any knowledge of such a thing.

I even asked Eric to go back and look at the pizza at video for clues. So does that rat look plausibly like one of the rats you might have seen? Well, I have to say, the main rat that Zardulu uses is named whiskers. And that did look somewhat like whiskers.

So they're doing those capable of doing things that you can't even imagine. And so the possibility that some people took a video that they didn't know was created by Zardulu, I mean, it's not beyond the realm of the imagination. Oh my God. Yeah.

I went from being like 80% sure that he was involved in an isolated performance art piece. And this other thing was completely separate to like starting to wonder what's real. Yeah. Well, I think that a selfie rat is inferior to a pizza rat as like a video.

It's a more complicated thing to stage. And so, you know, if this person is doing like a series of illusions designed to like terrify in the Twix New York City or whatever it was, like you'd start with pizza rat, you'd go to selfie rat, then maybe it's like rat writing a motorcycle, then maybe it's like rat president like there is a progression of like complexity that makes sense. Because the other thing that I think about it is like, why would a rat carry a whole slice of pizza like and the pizza was like perfect. Like it wasn't like a crumbled up thing that'd be on the floor.

Like the way I remember it looked like a slice that had been purchased by the rat. So you see, it's like making you question what what is real? Yeah. Now I do feel like a little bit of a rat truth or right.

I mean, my first impulse when I found out the pizza at my beahokes was just to be mad because I felt like this one incredible moment where the universe distilled everything New York City into this encounter with a rat on the subway was a lie. But then I started thinking like, who is the liar in this situation? And it seems like it's this person who is looking down over the city and basically leading us through mazes to get a reward. Just delivering a little joy to our rat like lives.

Right. A world where a rat carries a slice of pizza is more interesting than when it doesn't. But a world where a lady trains a lot rat to carry a slice of pizza is more interesting than either of those worlds. Yes, it is such an attractive idea.

So attractive, in fact, that I proposed it to Matt Little, the guy from the pizza at video, and even he was willing to entertain it. How do you know that you weren't an unwitting pawn in some kind of massive Zardulu illusion or microzardulu illusion? Well, that's an interesting question. I think that I think that one could never know.

You can really you can really go down like a pretty serious rabbit hole with this discussion. Are you Zardulu? If you're Zardulu, you have to tell me it's the law. Oh, it's like it's like if I'm a cop and you're trying to sell me cigarettes.

Yeah, I would love to be Zardulu because I would love to have like a vision like this. Right. I'm not. Yeah.

So after this Got From The Startable comes out, everyone in New York City is talking about viral rat videos again, including a woman named Laura Duch. It was in my head, I think like just because that morning I had read something online about how pizza rat was a hoax and it was such a big bummer. This rat is, just wants to freakin slice a pizza and it's going to do anything to get it. It was just kind of like embodied the New York spirit.

So Laura's coming home from dinner thinking about pizza rat and she goes into the 34th Street Herald Square subway stop. I was walking on the stairs and I noticed something moving by my feet as when she gets to the bottom of the stairs. She pulls her phone and this time instead of a rat pulling a piece of pizza down the stairs, it's two rats valiantly pulling a piece of pizza bread up the stairs. I'm not looking to have a viral video I never was, but I just thought that I could not not film that.

It's hard to deny that the timing of this video is pretty weird because I got from this article about pizza rat and selfie rat came out just the week before. But I talked a little bit about an hour and she was certain that Zardulu had nothing to do with what she'd seen, that there was no conspiracy. That rat's just like to eat pizza. Peter rats are not, these are just real rats.

I mean, I know I have no proof that I'm not lying, but I never thought that I would have to back up my story ever. Oh, I don't think that you're lying. I guess what I'm asking is considering how well coordinated those two rats were pulling that pizza up the stairs. Could you entertain the possibility even for a second that there might have been some rat trainer hiding somewhere in the subway?

I guess I could admit that there's a brigade of trained rats have been released upon New York City now that you've told me all of this background information. How do I know any rat is not one of Zardulu's rats? I guess they could have been planted there. At one point during my interview with Laura, my producer Tim stepped in and asked a couple questions.

How far is Harold Square from UCB? Very close. Really? I thought close.

It's 34th and 6th and UCB is 26th and 8th, but that doesn't mean anything. That's just coincidence. Well, I mean, there's a lot of incidences. I'm just trying to figure out if like Zardulu, if there was somebody unusual, I'm wondering if there's somebody unusual at the top of the stairs, but you didn't, you wouldn't, you wouldn't mention if you saw something odd like that.

Yeah, if you saw someone with a cage. Yeah, I didn't mention it. Well, there's an answer. There was a guy at the top of the stairs.

I assumed he was a homeless person. He was kind of shouting nonsensical things, you know, yelling about being hungry and are you hungry and it does look like he's tossing like some kind of item at the rat. I don't know if it's a crumb of something or a piece of something. And then it's I don't film anymore after that, but it is, I do have a couple seconds of that.

I don't know if he's involved. I just, I don't even, I really didn't think that I didn't give him much thought as someone who could have been like working in the background to facilitate this. Laura says that there was also a woman standing near her at the bottom of the stairs who was asking people not to get too close. So Laura could film.

Since the Gothamist article came out, Zardulu has declined numerous interviews, including a request from me. But once her name was public, she did two things. First, she started a Twitter account and a Facebook account. And second, she issued a statement, which is totally amazing.

She said, quote, I think there are better stories to tell. Why wake the world from a beautiful dream when the waking world is also drab? Why wake the world from a beautiful dream when the waking world is also drab? What was her avatar like?

Oh, I would, I would be delighted to show you. Yes. Oh my God. Oh my God.

Ah. Yeah, that's Zardulu. Okay, I'll try to describe it. Her seems like a woman.

She's wearing a purple robe as a sorcerer would. She's got some kind of like, it's not like a turban. It's like a turban and like a magician's hat like jam together. But her face is covered in this like, what looks like a death mask for like a man or billy goat.

And then she has pink hair behind that. And it's just a very like, it's a creepy like otherworldly like kind of menacing goofiness. And then she's holding a golden staff of a rat eating its own tail like a reverse. Right.

Alex. Very enjoyable. This whole creepy thing. So Zardulu's social media presence, if I could borrow a phrase from Eric Yearwood, is just basically a bunch of enigmatic head scratchers.

Okay. Her tweets are written in the voice of someone who is like, all powerful and all knowing. What is that type of person tweet like? Here are a couple of her tweets.

Follow me out of the sunlight of reason. And then the darkness will play. Okay. I have no memories of my actual life.

I can only recall what was captured and replayed in digital images. Wow. Same. What does she mean?

I think what she means, I think her whole sort of worldview is that the media create myths. Like you and I, we make a radio show where we have narratives. Our narratives are tightly controlled by us and our editing process. So we are myth makers.

And so she exists just to manipulate us and make her own myths. So she's really into Sasquatch and a lackness monster because those were the effort of a lot of people to try and fool a lot of other people into believing something that was kind of magical or supernatural. Right. And also those were myths that weren't created by the CIA or NBC.

They were created by people who will never know. And in fact, her Twitter handle is I am the myth maker. It feels like if you're going to be the myth maker, maybe you shouldn't tell everybody you're the myth maker. So since she has a social media presence, I tried getting in touch with her.

And normally when I ask for interviews, I say, hi, my name is Alex Goldman. I work on this podcast called Reply All and we have X listeners and I think your story would be good on our show for X reasons. But with Zardulu, I just went totally off script. I mean, here's something that I actually wrote in an email to her.

This is not, I'm quoting, right now. It says, you've successfully cracked my brain wide open. So congratulations to you on that. Your very existence has basically made me open to believing that anything is real and simultaneously that anything is an illusion.

I mean, I was offering to do an interview where she sat behind a screen so that I couldn't see her and I would just hold the microphone just beyond the screen. I was writing these messages that said knowing that she exists didn't make the way the world more drab, it actually made it more amazing because it made it like more unpredictable. And I was telling her that learning her existence totally changed the way that I saw the world. And she eventually declined to do an interview by not really responding to me anymore.

But she did say at one point, be assured that the breadth and magnitude of my work would astound you. Was it true what you said that it was making you see the world differently, see the city differently? Yes. I have put my phone down and I watch people now.

And I am suspect of everyone. I'm I'm I like that this has happened to you. I'm moderately skeptical. Like you think everybody could be part of as our Dulu hoax?

Have you noticed at the Carroll Street stop, there was a woman who is very well dressed in like a cloak who's constantly asking for spare change. No, she exists. She's tall and thin and very, very impeccably dressed and stands at the entrance of the subway asking for spare change every day in an impeccable cloak. Yes.

Huh. It's like there are tiny things that I've been noticing. Give me another one. I was on the subway the other day and there was a couple dancing with one another.

No music, just dancing. Like slow dancing, fast dancing, slow dancing. It felt like a slow dance at the prom. Old couple, young couple, middle aged, however, 40s or 50s.

Huh. It's like all of a sudden everything could be Zardulu. That's so funny. And Eric, who if you remember is the only person who admitted to me that he's met Zardulu, he makes it sound like there's almost nothing she can't do.

It's a good thing that Zardulu is using her powers for good because if she were to use her powers for evil, that would not be good. Can you give me a doomsday scenario? Imagine her using her powers for evil. What would she be doing?

Well, a doomsday scenario would be that Zardulu is using her abilities to create myths to completely disorient our federal government, all of our utilities in the city, all of our metropolitan infrastructure, mass hysteria, people's lives being upended, just panic in the streets. I think that Zardulu could cause just complete Armageddon. Just about that, because I can convince people to blog about something that seems fantastic to I can convince world leaders to do things is like, in my mind, actually a pretty large jump. He thinks that he saw things that were much larger in scope than Ratrix.

Like a robot of President Obama that was completely life-like? I don't know, man. Maybe that bodysuit of human hair. Who knows what's going to be that's going to be used for?

Maybe she's going to be a Sasquatch next. Oh, God. Okay. But so even then, you're like, Justin Trudeau, you're walking down the street in Montreal thinking about like what Canada's monetary policy should be.

And like a really lifelike Sasquatch jumps out of an alleyway and it's like, raise interest rates and disappears. I don't think you're going to listen to that advice. Okay. Here's what I'll say.

If I were Justin Trudeau, retaining all of my Alex Goldmini traits, yeah, you'd be a very handsome Alex Goldmini who could speak French. But if I were to retain sort of like my terrible personality, my weak-trivalled posture, all of the things that make me essentially Alex Goldmini and a Sasquatch ran up to me and told me to raise interest rates, you better believe that not only would I be raising interest rates, I would be putting all of my national defense money into Sasquatch elimination. Why are you as soon as Sasquatch is out to get you? Because the way that you described him was like a crowing terrifying monster.

Yeah, you know what? That's true. That's fair. I mean, I know that Zardulu probably can't actually cause Armageddon, but her very existence has definitely made my life way more unpredictable.

And I'm just kind of waiting for the moment that she strikes again. So Zardulu, if you're out there listening to this, I want you to know that I take the F train between 34th Street and Carroll Street every morning between 9 and 10 and most nights between 5 and 6. I'll be looking for you. After the break, I knew yes, yes, no with our boss Alex Bloomberg.

Welcome to Yes, Yes, No. The segment on the show where Alex Bloomberg gets a babysitter so he can come hang out with us and learn about what goes on on the internet. Alex comes to us with tweets that he doesn't understand. And hopefully we can decipher them for him.

And I'm really, I'm really excited. This is like one super mystifying tweet. Like I'm baffled. Like zero percent comprehension, zero percent comprehension.

Okay. All right. Are you guys ready? Yes.

I'm excited. I'm really hoping you can tell me out. All right. It actually comes from a listener, Alex Pretzlev, who tweeted at me and said, I deal Yes, yes, no material.

And Alex, I have to agree. I believe this is ideal Yes, No material. He included a link to the tweet in his tweet. All right.

So the tweet in question is from a Twitter user named Kate, Late Verde. And it's a photoshopped poster of like some sort of town hall. And it says Bernie or Hillary, be informed, compare them on issues that matter. And it's got their two pictures.

And then, and then it says issue. And then here's where the photoshopping begins, wherever whatever the issue that was there before, it's been boxed out. And now there's a new thing written in which is issue 0.5 x a presses. And then under Bernie's picture, where it had a quote that represented how he felt about that issue.

Now it says, quote, first off, I need to talk about parallel universes. And then under Hillary's picture, where the new quote has been photoshopped in, it says, quote, an a press is an a press. You can't say it's only half. So that's totally fucking confusing.

Yeah. I have no idea what that is. I don't know what 0.5 x a presses means. I don't know what they're talking about.

But here's the weird thing. In this tweet, it got 1,209 re tweets. And I got 1,602 likes. That's insane.

And then Kate Late Verde said, I ran out of the shower to make this because I was so proud of it. All right. So that's I'm beyond confused about this one. Yeah.

Do you understand the street? I'm like 50% comprehension. Let's go understand this tweet. I understand the joke format.

You don't understand the content that is contained there in. Alex Bloomberg, do you understand this? No, I think we can get you to like, I don't think we can get you all the way on this one. We can get you to like, hmm.

Okay. Okay. We're going to really have to detect this now. Aren't we?

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So the basic thing, the joke format thing that Alex and I both understand is like, there's this me.

I don't actually know where the meme, like I don't know what that basically there's this poster, as you can see, where it's comparing Bernie and Hillary on like any specific campaign issue. And there's like a quote box from him and a quote box from her. And the joke that kind of keeps cropping up over and over again, which like there's a lot of talk around whether the joke is okay or not. But the joke is that whatever the issue is Bernie's answer will always be very long kind of like a wankish, like perhaps like more detail than it's necessary.

And then Hillary's answer will always be like kind of vapid and straightforward and like wrong but enthusiastic. Got it. Okay. And so like people like the joke because it's versatile and you can apply it to like any weird specific subculture issue.

Like, imagine if the candidates had an opinion about whatever this is. Okay. But some people don't like the joke because they're like, it's just straightforwardly sexist because Hillary Clinton isn't somebody who like has super fast opinions about stuff, but I don't know. But it's about sexist and ageist.

I think it's sexist and ageist, honestly. All right. So wait, so can you give me some examples of the joke the way in a form that we would understand it? Okay.

So from this slide article about like why this was maybe problematic. Here's like the best example I've ever seen actually. So issue, Harry Potter, Bernie side, huge fan, read all the books, know what the trivia I bet Hillary doesn't even know what a muggle is. And then Hillary says, I'm a awful pump.

When really that house would be Hufflepuff. Huffle? Huffle? What is it?

Hufflepuff. Hufflepuff. So that's messed up that you knew to go to me with that is even more messed up than any of the other ones. I haven't read the books.

But I still read the IMDB trivia section for every movie I've ever seen. So I just know all the trivia. You are a good news in the movie. I'm a Hufflepuff.

Hufflepuff. Hufflepuff. A jippy Hufflepuff and it's a Hufflepuff. Pump.

Alex, you really like the stages. Here's one that I think is really good. Okay. Oh, actually, this one is going to make sense because it has like another embedded yes, yes, no problem in it.

I think we just find so issue white vans. Does that mean any of you? Yeah, I know the white fans thing. You just saw a war crime happen.

I hate that don't joke. Really? Yeah. Oh, you're broken.

Okay. So the issue white vans. Hillary, don't get in strangers cards kids. Bernie, damn Daniel.

What? How do you make that joke? It's just stupid. You're so broken.

Okay. Okay. Okay. So, oh, this is a two for this is a two for somebody posted this video.

I just kind of share the video. It's like, it's so wonderful. But in ways that are like actually kind of hard to put into words early, so I can tell you've seen it. Okay.

So, oh my God, it makes me so happy to show you this. There's like so few things that are any good. And this is so good. Okay.

So all it is is a Twitter video that one high school kid shot is like a montage of a bunch of different shots of his friend. And just like in case you are just hearing this and can't see the video, it's basically a bunch of like tight jump cuts of this one kid who is wearing a bunch of different really great outfits. And you can't see the person filming him, but you hear him reacting to all of them. Damn Daniel back at it again with the white band.

Damn Daniel. Damn Daniel. Damn Daniel. Damn Daniel.

Damn Daniel. Damn Daniel. Daniel. Daniel back at it again with the white band.

So then the burning or Hillary issue white vans Bernie damn Daniel. Like he gets it and then Hillary don't get as strange as cars kids. Like she thinks it's just like a white fan. Got it.

Yeah. Got it. Okay. Not so much a great joke as two internet jokes hitting each other and people being excited about it.

Right. Okay. So there's a bunch of these burning or Hillary Photoshop posters. Yeah.

Okay. Got it. So then back to the issue at hand. Actually, this should hand which what was it again?

0.5 A presses 0.5 X A presses. First off, I need to talk about parallel universes. All right. I've been looking it up while we've been talking and A presses and A press you can't say it's only half.

You look like you're processing information. This is so confusing. It has something to do with Super Mario 64. Really?

Yes. What? What? This guy made a long and complicated video about completing the stage in Super Mario 64 using only 0.5 A presses.

That's impossible. Yes. So the A button makes you jump. You can't do you can't press a half a button once you press the button.

It's pressed. Was it like a speed run? No. It's a long and complicated video about completing a stage using only 0.5 A presses.

It's ridiculous and amazing. But at one point, you respond to a comment by TJ Henry Yoshi who claims that 0.5 A presses aren't real because you can't half press a button. The poster of the video then took some time to explain how 0.5 A presses are real and exactly how they work. The overall ridiculous of the video has caused it to become an internet and Henry is of course part of it.

Wow. You can spend your life any way you want. This is what we've chosen. No.

This is what they've chosen. We make sense. Okay. So this is a person who found a way to beat Super Mario 64, a video game from 1996 maybe?

A level in Super Mario 64, a video game from, yeah, maybe 1996. So a person who beat a very old video game and they did it by putting an artificial encumbrance on themselves was that they would only press the jump button half the time. Which again means no sense. So how do you have to press a button?

Well, let's hear. But in a full game run, you'd round it down to two. So in conclusion, since that first A press counts in some context, but adds no additional A presses in other contexts, we refer to it as a half A press. I'm so going back to the video.

This one's totally right. You should not be a bit about it. Totally right. You're out of your fucking mind.

You get it? No. It's not that crazy. People are deliberately misunderstanding.

I get it. Yeah. I've never played. I don't know what Super Mario is.

I've never played it before. But like it just sounds like he's saying like when you're in one level, you press the button down and then you don't release the button until the next level. Until the next level. So until the next level is over where you're like got and then you move it to half and then you press.

Oh, so you spread it. You spread your A button press across multiple levels. Yeah. It's like, I'll never let it up.

This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Like the guy sounds like a putt. That's rude. I'm sorry.

The people that you have problems with on the internet. You're like mad at you. You're mad at the guy for doing speed run. You'd be one of the people who like had you known about this.

You would have been like, this is the half press douchebag. I believe I agree with Hillary on this one. Oh, there's no such thing as a half press. But like it just makes you want to picture in high school because like you're yelling at the nerds, you're mean to the kids who are just like goofy fashion kids.

Like you don't like anything. I was very lonely in high school. I didn't mean to take such a dark place, Coleman. I think we're not celebrating our victorious arrival at yes, yes, yes, properly.

Are we? Yes. Like we are. I think we are.

Yes. Yes. No. Yes.

All right. You ready? Yes. All right.

So Kate, Latte, Bernie sent out the following tweet. It's a picture of a Bernie or Hillary sign where it's like be informed to compare them on the issues that matter. And then there is issue colon and then it's clearly something has been superimposed over the original issue that was on the original poster. And the superimposed issue is 0.5 times a presses.

And then under Bernie, his real answer has been sort of swept out. And the fake answer is first off, I need to talk about parallel universes. And under Hillary, it says an a press is an a press. You can't say it's only half.

I now know everything about this. This thing that was like, I don't believe it's fine is now completely clear to me. All right. And there's a lot of memes.

This is the deep. This is the most complicated one I think we've done so far. There's like a trick that there's so much going on here. So all right.

So there's two memes that are sort of intersecting here. The first meme is one that I was not aware of, which was the Photoshop to Bernie or Hillary sign. So that's like something that's happening on the internet a lot. There's people who are taking this original Bernie or Hillary sign, which some well-meaning group put up to inform people on the issues of how different the two candidates were and has just simply just been sort of like ridiculed on the internet by people putting up fake issues and fake answers to Bernie and Hillary.

All right. So that's been out there. And then this particular iteration of that meme references another meme, which gets deep into nostalgia video game affinity groups. Sure.

Yeah. There's lots and lots of people who play an old video game called Super Mario 64, correct? Yes. And they talk about on the internet about how to beat different levels of Super Mario 64.

And this one guy talked about beating this one level by doing a half press of the a key. We're called a button. Yeah. That's close.

A half press of the a button, which erupted in controversy. And that is the thing that is referenced in this tweet from Kate Latte-Berti. It is as if Hillary and Bernie were weighing in on the issue of whether it's such a thing as a half a press in the Super Mario 64 video game. I feel like we're pretty much at yes, yes.

What's your asterisk? Bernie's saying first we have to talk about parally. Oh, yeah. Okay.

We're basically yes, yes. I don't know what that's about. I don't know what that's about. I just, yeah.

We can let that one go. In the interest of a disclosure, we did not watch the entire half hour video. So who knows? What are you mentioning?

What are you doing? Yeah. Yeah. But we can like we can retreat from this and call it yes.

Yes. Right? Yes. Yes.

Yes. Raphaal is PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Shrieky Panamanini and Fiavenan. Our editor is Peter Klammy.

Production assistance from Mervan DiGanyos. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Special thanks this week to Lydia Derosh of sit-stay dog training. She trains rats for the Broadway play, the curious incident of the dog of the nighttime.

And she was very gracious with her time. Our theme music is by the mysterious breakmaster, Cylinder, and our ad music is by build buildings. Matt Lieber is Zardulu. He could be you can find more episodes at iTunes.com slash reply all our website is replyall.ninja.

Shortly before I finish this episode, after many attempts to get her to come on the show, Zardulu reached out to me to reveal some of her secrets. But she asked that I not share them. All that I can say is that I believe big things are coming. We're taking next week off to work on some stories, but we'll see you in a couple weeks.

Thank you for listening. Can I tell you guys a weird story? Uh huh. One time I was in the grocery store.

I was checking out and the guy in front of me had tattooed on his arm. He was very muscular, had tattooed on his arm, the great gazoo who is a who's like an alien from the Jetsons and the Flintstones. Oh no, excuse me. Thank you.

Who's an alien from the Flintstones? And he was flirting with the woman who was checking him out. And he was like, what do you know about the great gazoo? This is a good old man.

She was like, what? And he was like, who's this? He pointed at his bicep and she said Marvin the Martian. And he was like, you don't know anything about the great gazoo.

And that man is now one of the lead blogs in the man's room. That man is also like, sort of similar to you. Where's like, I decided this piece of culture is really important. You've never heard of it.

You never cared about how you hadn't heard of it. And I'm going to berate you for the fact that you haven't heard of it. And then I'm going to leave. You don't know anything about the bone zone.

I would never ever get anything tattooed on my body than yell at people for not knowing what it is. That's true. You wouldn't get a tattooed you'd wear it on a hoodie. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.