the time the denny’s tumblr became an edgy teen

In part one of our ‘Sentient Brands on Social Media’ series, Jamie speaks with Serenity Discko, the original media writer behind the teenage edgelord Denny’s Tumblr account. But worry not, we go DEEP — Jamie sets the stage by tracing back our history of parasocial relationships with brands all the way back to World War I. Buckle in, the brands are getting angry, the brands are getting horny, and the brands want to be your best friend.

Follow Serenity’s work here: Serenity Discko

Watch The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis: https://youtu.be/eJ3RzGoQC4s?si=_eHsM0hadnUQA3Cr

Read The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu:  https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-attention-merchants-the-epic-scramble-to-get-inside-our-heads-tim-wu/8632123

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alsone media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
In the late nineteen fifties, the image of the docile,
white American housewife was everywhere. The Donna Reed show made
plain the expectations of the ideal womanhood of the day,
one that strayed significantly from women joining the workforce during
World War iiO just a decade earlier.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
Children never raises her voice and never screams at them.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Any mother who can get through a day with children
without exploding is a saint.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Well, of course, I don't believe in screaming.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
A rubber hose is just as effective and it doesn't
leave any marks. Of course, Donna Reed produced this show,
but that wasn't a part of the narrative. And with
Jim Crow laws still in effect for another decade in
the seventy year Chinese Exclusion Act just being rolled back
earlier in the fifties, you'd be hard pressed to see
anyone but a white woman in American media. The fifties

(00:58):
were a time of hyper consumption, of the widespread adoption
of television, of telling company your husband just has a
little headache when he retreats with a bottle of scotch,
having flashbacks to Korea. It was a very different time
from now. Well, actually you couldn't get abortions then either.
But one thing holds true in America. When faced with discomfort, uncertainty,

(01:21):
and oppression, there will always be someone telling you the
solution is to simply buy stuff. And it certainly doesn't
hurt if the person telling you to buy stuff is
a sexy cartoon man.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
Enter Mister Klean gets red of dirt and gum and
greet and just a man.

Speaker 4 (01:43):
Mister Clean will clean your whole hol Is.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
It everything that dinner mister Hotty himself, the brawnie paper
towel guy wishes the mister Clean advertising has been strikingly
consistent since his debut back in the nineteen fifties. If
you live under a he's a bald guy with white eyebrows,
huge arms, a white shirt.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
And a single earring. Hello, sorry to it. No one
wants to hear it. But he is daddy and he
always has been.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
And from his very inception, mister Clean has been turning
on the housewives he's been consistently marketed to. In fact,
in that first jingle, a cartoon fifties housewife with a
fuck ass little bob is overwhelmed by the tall hunky
mister Clean as he makes everything in her home Sparkle.
Shout out to the YouTube channel brand Management for aggregating

(02:36):
all of this. As the years continued, mister Clean would
appear as either a sexy cartoon or a sexy human
man who would tower over cuck husbands and show him
what a real man was.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
I am serious.

Speaker 5 (02:51):
This happens in the ads, but never bragged or.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
Made fun of people for not cleaning as well as
he could, and customers seemed to love the guy in
their own unique, horny little ways. For the record, do
I think that mister Clean is kind of like an idealized,
slightly queer coded fantasy of a man who simply cleans.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
Up after himself.

Speaker 5 (03:14):
Sort of?

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
One of mister Clean's weirder moments came pretty early in
his story in nineteen sixty two, when a magazine contest
was held to give mister Clean a first name. The
ad came with suggestive images for mister Clean's new persona,
including at least one racist option if you're being generous.
Others included mister Clean's take on pirates, weightlifters nights, and

(03:40):
even just a mister Clean with a big lipsticky kiss
on his cheek. Check out the copy they write to
pitch these first names with the personas Waldo means powerful
and mighty, and mister Clean has the might that makes
right of the toughest clean jobs, the power to overpower

(04:03):
any kind of dirt. Alvin, Alvin is beloved by all
men and ladies, brides and babies, recluses, shuntooses, the.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Complete who hooses.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Everybody loves mister Clean, the world's best cleaning man. Bryce
means speedy. You can say that twice, because no one
ever cleans so much so fast as mister Clean, the
original minute man. Guys, I think mister Clean comes fast.

(04:42):
I think that's what they're saying. So he's always sexy,
but he is sometimes different kinds of sexy. Later in
this decade, he was rebranded as sexy mean.

Speaker 5 (04:55):
Mean mister Clean.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
What made mister Clean on mean lean?

Speaker 2 (05:01):
He hates dirt. Eventually the character was translated to Cgi
and he got a backstory this whole weird thing.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
He was found by farmers.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
As a CGI baby who was washing the steps with
a magic eraser whatever. By twenty sixteen, parent company Procter
and Gamble hired former Twilight Honk kellen Lutz to promote
a mister Clean lookalike contest where buff weirdos from all
over competed for their chance to appear in ads. But baby,

(05:32):
there's no beating the real thing, and so the next
year they went for it. By twenty seventeen, mister Clean
had made the next logical jump, entering himself into the
annals of horny history. He had a full time social
media manager who was working with advertising agencies in Harmony
to take away the wink wink and go full fuck.

(05:55):
During the twenty seventeen Super Bowl in lieu of booking
Elvis Presto as musical act again like they should have,
the brand aired an ad that featured CGI mister Clean
doing a seductive cleaning dance with a woman in her home,
culminating with and its moments like these where I simply
can't stand working in an audio medium. It culminates in

(06:17):
this unbelievably detailed shot of mister Clean's toned ass in
those white little pants. It's wild, and the clickbait media
responded in kind, saying the next day, mister Clean's erotic
Super Bowl ad makes us uncomfortable.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
The mister Clean super Bowl commercial was too damn sexy
and people loved it.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
Moms everywhere are losing their minds over the Mister Clean
super Bowl commercial, and mister Clean's social media team was
fast to react to this attention. The next day, they
posted an old school meme of a shy Mister Clean
bashfully covering his.

Speaker 3 (06:57):
Face with the writing that look when you realize your
mom will see your sexy super Bowl ad.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
But while mister Clean was making hay of this big moment,
the brand was far from alone. By the time this
twenty seventeen burst of web activity happened, the Mister Clean
brand or the Mister Clean man the lines were getting Hazier.
Was following a carefully developed playbook in which beloved twentieth

(07:27):
century American brands, ones that had been developed to become
friends with their consumers, took things one step further and
they started trying to slide into their customers dms more
like mister Cream Right, sorry, sentient sometimes horny brands on
social media. Your sixteenth minute starts now going Welcome back

(08:42):
to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we take a look
back at the internet's main characters, talk to them about
how their big moments affected them and what it says
about us and the Internet. My name is Jamie Loftus,
and I was genuinely, perhaps embarrassingly starstruck to talk to
some of the social media managers who are at the
heart of this series, because yes, this is going to

(09:04):
be a multi part investigation. It was really cool and
surreal to talk to the people behind the pretty controversial
practice of how we have come to interact with brands
on social media from the twenty tens into now. And
while you may be sitting over there saying, Jamie, no
need to explain this to me, it makes total sense

(09:24):
to me that the American experiment would lead to the
Twitter account for fake orangeroduce beverage, Sunny Delight, threatening suicide.
There is actually quite a bit of history that got
us there, and even more history since that makes me
suspect that if Sonny D made that same threat today,
probably no one would care. In this three possibly four

(09:45):
part series, let's see what happens.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
We're going to go deep, mister clean deep.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Oh my god, on how if you dare look close enough.
The duo Lingo Owl begging pop star Dua Liba to
fill a pool with her piss so he can swim
in it. A thing that truly happened may in fact
be the logical endpoint of American marketing. And while it
takes until the early twenty tens to become a part
of the web to social media history, there are traces

(10:15):
of parasocial violence and sex that go back far before then.
And each week we'll be talking to someone who's work
got people horny or clench fisted with rage at products,
while taking a look at a different facet of why
we're here today. This week, we are talking to the
creator of the account that started it all, the Denny's

(10:36):
Tumblr account run in the early to mid twenty tens
by Serenity Disco, who and we'll get into it, still
works in tech and advertising now, but now runs an
app that encourages self care and avoidance of capitalism driven
online burnout.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
Could these two things be connected?

Speaker 3 (10:58):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (10:59):
In futures of this mini series, I'll be speaking with
other heavy hitters in this space as it continues to
grow and contract with time. I'll be talking to the
person who ran the cyberbully Wendy's Twitter account. I'll be
talking to the person who ran the lockdown era nihilistic
dread of the stakem's account. And yes, listener, I even

(11:22):
have a conversation with the person currently running the Horny
and possibly canonically dead at the time of this recording,
fictional mascot.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
Of the Duo Lingo app.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
But to get there, you're going to need a little
setup on how American marketing has worked and changed over time.
How this industry went from a government project turned mad
men suited Scotch soaked nightmare all the way to outsourcing
the best work in the advertising industry today to underpaid

(11:54):
twenty sothter internet natives working check to check. So come
with me if you dare to World War One, I
am so sorry. You know World War one Archduke Franz
Ferdinandez shot trench foot. Remember that my public schooling was

(12:15):
such that it took me a second to remember who
fought in World War One, But I vividly remember the
pictures that my teacher showed us of trench foot. Good stuff,
Thank you, mister Kates. And in the West, advertising took
a turn for the insidious as mass advertising began its
slow encroachment into our daily lives and then into our homes,

(12:38):
and finally directly into our minds. So I'm going to
start with a quick and necessary shout out. The two
main sources I use for this installment are Adam Curtis's
two thousand and two BBC docuseries The Century of the Self,
which traces how Sigmund Freud's ideas went on to deeply
impact American marketing, and the twenty seventeen book Via Ten

(12:59):
Ti Merchants by Tim Wu, which is a look at
how the last century of American marketing tactics have led
to many of us becoming our own product to sell.
And of course there are plenty of other vital sources
on this topic, but I can't stress enough. I only
have a week or so to put these shows together,
and it's giving me a skin condition. Okay, World War

(13:21):
One a big inflection point in how American marketing works.
And that's certainly not to say that attention grabbing, frequently
inaccurate news reporting fueled by a need for advertising dollars
wasn't already deeply entrenched in Western media by this time.
After all, the term yellow journalism was coined all the

(13:41):
way back in the eighteen nineties, modeled after the battle
for attention of New Yorkers between rival newspaper publishers William
Randolph Hurst and Joseph Pulitzer. The moment that news became
readily accessible and monetized, the integrity of that news came intoes,
and in the event of that particular flame war, it's

(14:04):
commonly thought to have pushed the US into the Spanish
American War of eighteen ninety eight. And today, as the
country's remaining influential news outlets and the social media channels
they're disseminated on are largely owned by ugly men with
a vested interest in having certain news just not appear
or be fully misrepresented, it's much the same, but the

(14:27):
venues where this happens have changed significantly. But what makes
the World War One era different, according to Tim Wu,
is that this is when the American government decided that
it was okay to use these same yellow journalism tactics
to get people to enlist in the military, because at
the time there wasn't really much of a reason to

(14:49):
volunteer in a war on the side of England. It
was politically advantageous for the American administration of the time,
but not necessarily for a normal citizen and so to
convince people to enlist, they had to bring in admin
who could convince a bunch of teenage boys to go
get themselves skilled in order to make President Wilson look awesome, and.

Speaker 5 (15:11):
They did very effectively.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
In the form of the relentless George Creole, a longtime
supporter of President Wilson, who churned out ads of young,
buff patriotic men fighting against the German army alongside illustrations
of the idealized, frail white American woman. And working alongside
Creole was a man who would go on to declare

(15:37):
himself the father of public relations. Edward So the Century
of the self SIPs the Burneze kool aid a little
too hard for my liking, because, after all, leave it
to an ad man to say that it was just

(15:57):
him who invented PR, which does not appear to be true.
According to Tim Wu's research. However, Edward Burnees was scarily
good at selling Americans on things they didn't really need,
whether that be a war, a box of cigarettes, or
a household product. And his secret weapon was, as it

(16:17):
is for many, he was a nepo baby, the American
nephew of one Sigmund Freud, whose theories end up having
a lot of influence on American marketing as the century
wore on. Now I know you know who this guy is,
but quick crash course on Freud, Austrian inventor of psychoanalysis.

(16:38):
His teachings basically boil down to talk therapy and explaining
your current behaviors through repressed memories and feelings.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
From the past.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
He's the guy that makes it possible for you to
blame your being a piece of shit on your mom,
whether that's true or not. And his nephew, Eddie Burnez,
was a big reason that Freud's work really took off
in the US, and Uncle Siggy as he was called,
would come to regret this, but by the time he
was remorseful about handing his works over to his little

(17:09):
nephew in exchange for a nice cigar, it was too late.
I'm well aware that there's plenty of dispute on Freud's
actual theories. It's a whole cottage industry basically, but I'm
not here to debate whether what he said was true.
I'm here to tell you that much of the advertising
in the front half of the twentieth century proceeded as if.

Speaker 1 (17:29):
It were true.

Speaker 2 (17:31):
This meant that advertising, especially headed by a little nephew
Eddie Burnez, was designed to appeal to the latent violence
and horniness within every prospective consumer. Freudian psychology is centered
around repression, and Burnees took this idea and offered up
a product to solve a problem that very often consumers

(17:53):
were just told they had. Burne has blended Freud's theories
of unconscious desires with herd theory and crowd psychology, equally
disputable works that allowed Burns to argue that propaganda was ethical.
After all, people left to their own devices are just
animals and agents of self destruction. Being told what they

(18:15):
wanted could be a gift. Quoth Eddie, this was enlightened manipulation.
The public could very easily vote for the wrong man,
and after a lot of success running government propaganda, Hitler
and Company would later cite the work of Creole and
Brenees on their vision Board of Propagandistic Destruction. If you

(18:36):
can believe that Brenees decided to pivot to selling products,
he famously said.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
I decided that if you could use propaganda for war,
you could certainly use it for peace.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
So Brene's pivots to doing damage in the private sector,
publishing quite a bit in the next few decades, titles
that pulled no punches, like Crystallizing Public Opinion or Ganda
Public Relations, and, most famously nineteen fifty five's The Engineering
of Consent, one of the scariest and most prescient phrases

(19:10):
of the last hundred years. Among his marketing victories featured
time honored classics such as taking advantage of progressive social
movements to sell members of that movement things that would
slow their movement down. The best example of this is
Brene's selling feminist Suffragettes on cigarettes, famously rebranding lucky strikes

(19:32):
as torches of freedom and having feminist march in the
New York Easter Day Parade, ripping SIGs as an expression
of their liberation, not the source of the cancer that
would one day kill them, and while controversial, this was
generally supported by prominent feminists of the time.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
Brenes later ran a campaign.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
For disposable Dixie cups in the nineteen thirties that was
predicated on the idea that reusable glasses would give you
neural disease. He's part of the reason that we associate
eggs and bacon with breakfast. He has an award from
the NAACP question mark. The list goes on, and by
the nineteen forties, purveyors of brands had mastered the art

(20:14):
of print and billboards and had gotten very good at
convincing you that buying X product would mean that you
would finally fit in, whether that was smoking cigarettes to
show you're a feminist II or gargle with listerine to
make sure that you're married before thirty an actual campaign.
But this Bernesian Freud influenced marketing scheme would eventually fall

(20:39):
out of favor as the century wore on and gave
way to the hippie influenced, highly individualistic marketing of the
sixties and seventies. By this time, radio marketing had proved
it effective to associate certain brands with popular programs. Unfortunately,
the earliest successful example of this was a toothpaste brand

(21:01):
subsequent success after being the sole advertiser on the very
racist and extremely popular Amos and Andy Show. Promotions like
these and the increased popularity of specific broadcasts was what
created primetime, a concept that effortlessly crossed over to TV
and directly began to influence the content that was selling products,

(21:25):
because in the aim As and Andy days, you couldn't
really explain why a toothpaste brand was the right advertiser
for this show.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
But on TV that changed.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
Early soap operas built out theatrics surrounding their characters in
the young white upper class, or a model of exactly
who their advertisers were hoping to sell products to. And
while that sounds kind of hokey and obvious now, it
pretty cleanly reflects what social media marketing would become by

(22:00):
the twenty tens. The product is mimicking the audience in
order to gain their trust. So in the sixties and onward,
product marketing shifted to not selling you something in order
to fit in, but to this philosophy of consumption as
an act of self expression, buying shit as a radical act.

(22:22):
We still do this all the time, and to me
it is almost more dangerous than the work of Edward Brenees.
Don't worry about the labor issues or why this product
is made by children overseas for pennies. Your iPhone case
tells the world that you are a girl boss in
the century of the self. Adam Curtis credits this freelove

(22:43):
approach to consumption to former Freud friend eventual Freud enemy
William Reich, who claimed that any neurosis could easily be
attributed to quote a lack of good orgasm unquote, and
when his main ideological adversary was Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna,
a lifelong virgin whose two main case studies killed themselves,

(23:06):
people didn't have a hard time choosing which way they
wanted the wind to blow. They went with the marketing
that the coming guy was pushing, although Reich would eventually
take this too far for the public and the government's
liking when he'd go on to claim that harnessing this
organ energy could locate UFOs and cure cancer, and most

(23:27):
of his work was ordered destroyed, but his legacy lived
on via marketing trying to meet the liberated self, leading
to this quote from the Century of the Self.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
That made me laugh so much.

Speaker 6 (23:40):
Was the idea that people could be happy simply within
themselves and that changing society was irrelevant.

Speaker 7 (23:47):
Socialism in one person, although that, of course is capitalism.
That's the whole joke.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
I think it's funny.

Speaker 7 (23:57):
I think it's.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
Funny because people spend so much of their life life
being bedeviled by their past and being locked into their
past and being limited by their past, and there's an
enormous freedom from that. And while it came with its
share of hiccups, advertising benefited from promoting this individualistic, myopic worldview.

(24:19):
Buying things was the act of radicalism that showed the
world who you were not something like organizing giving a
shit about other people wasn't.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
Cool, man.

Speaker 2 (24:30):
And by participating in capitalism, maybe you were actually fighting
it too. Buying products expressed your values. And with that,
let's take an ad break. Best of luck, welcome back

(24:58):
to sixteenth minute. Thank you for attending my ted talk
on advertising. So we're going to jump ahead a little
bit in the timeline through the Reagan and Thatcher era
nineteen eighties marketing that only built on and solidified the
idea that aging hippies were continuing the work of their
youth by blasting a hole in the ozone layer with

(25:19):
hair products. Go boomers from the century of the self.

Speaker 6 (25:24):
And the generation who had once rebelled against the conformity
imposed by consumers, now I embraced it because it helped
them to be themselves.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
And this on a longer timeline, brings us to the Internet,
a technology originally invented for government use that early users
were horrified at the idea of advertising on. Of course,
this would change the second that people realized you could
make a single dollar off of it, and this translated
to a series of trial and error moments in early

(25:53):
Internet history. If you were there, you might remember America Online,
aol became so flaw with advertising that it accidentally killed
itself off, and the same could be said for early
social networking site MySpace. But one phenomenon that really stuck
was the idea of operant conditioning. Tim Wu describes this

(26:15):
as the reason that humans are obsessed with refreshing their emails,
their notifications, whatever it may be. We are hard wired
to seek out the serotonin and positive reinforcement of acknowledgment
and a feeling of belonging. And as it turned out,
the best way to sell you something was not in

(26:35):
fact an invasive banner ad or a too loud podcast
to add, with due respect to iHeartRadio, it was to
make you trust in the product and have yourself image
become attached to that product. The two people worth singling
out in this department would go on to either build
or mistakenly sell off their respective attention economy empires for

(26:57):
parts our Jonah Peretti of feed fame and mister Zuki himself.
So we've talked about the legacy of BuzzFeed many times
on this show and how its model of curating the
clickiest parts of the Internet led to massive business for
its founder and a brief clickbait renaissance before collapsing into

(27:17):
a series of labor disputes surrounding their top personalities, the
shuddering of their Pulitzer winning journalism branch, and essentially nuked
the site with AI before then hard pivoting last month
to say he thinks AI might be bad. Really quick
sidebar here, I promised, but I am serious that Jonah
Peretti recently did this less than two years after facing

(27:41):
severe and warranted criticism for shutting down news and laying
off sixteen percent of his workforce. He published a somewhat
regretful post on BuzzFeed in February twenty twenty five about how,
you guys, he's realizing this AI slop is a bunch
of bullshit. He writes about this as if he has

(28:02):
discovered it himself, even going so far as to make
a cringey millennial shorthand for what he's talking about.

Speaker 3 (28:09):
Social media has become overrun with snarf. S is for stakes,
exaggerate stakes to make content urgent and existential. N is
for novelty, manufacture novelty, and spin content as unprecedented and unique.
A is for anger. Manipulate people's anger to drive engagement

(28:31):
via outrage. R is for retention. Retention hacks by withholding
info and promising a payoff at the end of a video.
F is for fear. Take advantage of fear to make
people focus with urgency on their content.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, why did you do that with your Pulitzer Prize
winning website? You dork handened over Back in Peretti's On
New Days, he had a pretty solid handle on the
attention economy as it existed in the two thousands and
twenty tens, and even wrote a full manifesto on how

(29:10):
to hold a user's attention. This included experiments like asking
contest entrants to see which unhinged clickbait ideas would get
the most engagement, and later setting strict content rules during
peak BuzzFeed to avoid having anything on the main page
that was by his description, a bummer. And this sounds

(29:31):
ridiculously simple, but it was very successful until one of
Peretti's big mistakes appeared to be a pretty familiar one
in the Internet space, that being capitulating to the temptation
of obvious, annoying ads and losing user trust at BuzzFeed.
This came in the form of sponsored posts, something I

(29:54):
still find shockingly unethical a decade later. Basically, these were
posts that looked and were formatted exactly like unsponsored BuzzFeed
pieces that related to how cool it would be to
have a certain product, or how having something would make
you feel a certain way. And these pieces would be

(30:16):
tagged paid for by Audi or whichever brand, in tiny,
easy to miss lettering somewhere on the piece, and people
understandably hated this as the only way to engage with
these pieces were to be tricked into looking at them,
and Peretti continued to fumble the back from there.

Speaker 1 (30:35):
All the way up to snarf dah yo, I cannot
believe snarf.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
And then of course there's Mark Zuckerberg, who famously I
am a colleague. You can be unethical and still be legal.
That's the way I live my life haha. In two
thousand and seven, and I know that there is no
shortage of things to say about this fucking guy, but
I'm going to put the five years too late hype
beast rebrand and the pivot to fascism aside.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
For the moment.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
It's important, but it's for another day. Early Zuckerberg also
benefited from a commitment to prioritizing user attention over advertising dollars.
And just as Jonah Peretti did eventually nuked his own website,
Facebook with aislop, but in the beginning, back when he

(31:28):
was just a bad man and not a robot playing
the part of a bad.

Speaker 1 (31:31):
Man, Mark Zuckerberg was extremely.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Resistant to advertising on Facebook in a way that made
the site more popular because instead of overwhelming users with
Brene's style consent engineering by controlling their site experience or
slamming users with ugly banner ads like AOL or MySpace,
Zuckerberg was adamant that the bland, white and blue Facebook

(31:54):
layout remain consistent and clean.

Speaker 1 (31:57):
So how did he make money?

Speaker 2 (31:59):
As you probably know, he just sold all of our
data to those same advertisers through the back door. Another
long step in the lurch toward us becoming our own
products to sell and our inner lives being the final
items on offer before we were subsumed by late capitalism entirely.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
How are we feeling? Do we need a mister clean sting? No,
you're right, we don't need one.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
Early Twitter was similar to Facebook in this respect. The
particulars were different, but layout consistency and an initial lack
of sponsor posts was one of the elements of early
Twitter that made old school journalists more inclined to adapt
to it in order to spread their work. I will
never forget miss pivot. In the two thousands, my dad

(32:47):
like squeezed his brick cell phone between his hands like
he was trying to pop it after the newspaper he
worked at said he had to learn how to use Twitter.
But with social media's most enduring platform displaying this initial
resistance to ads, people native to these platforms grew to
trust the ads that did eke through these algorithms a

(33:09):
little bit more, even if this trust, as subsequent data
brokering deals would lay bare, was extremely naive. But for
the advertisers themselves, they had to either figure out how
to turn their brands into a friend to be added,
followed and interacted with or be left in the past.

(33:29):
Enter the age of personified social media brands, ones where
you didn't just have in your horny fantasies, but you
could DM mister clean your horny fantasies, and someone on
the other side of that account would be tasked with
the psychic torture of reading it. So we've made it
up to the point of Web two. In marketing, the

(33:52):
early twenty tens, just shy of the Cambridge analytical scandal
that would lose Zuckerberg the last few fanboys he had.
After this social network the era where Tumbler and Pinterests
were considered fem fan paradises and ignited some of the
most bizarrely specific feuds of all time. The Internet was
still fun, but its days were numbered, just as in

(34:14):
previous eras of advertising. The next generation of advertisers, this
time young millennials, adapted to their audience and learned from
the banner ad catastrophes of time gone by. While a
lot of early social media marketing was happy to tweet out,
hey guys, here's the special this week.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
Here's a link to more info, a.

Speaker 5 (34:33):
Handful of creative twenty somethings.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
Were already well aware that these were mediums that needed
actual personality and direct engagement to stand out on an
increasingly crowded timeline.

Speaker 5 (34:45):
And so they became.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
The mascots, not appearing in front of the camera like
in TV ads, but now behind the keyboard, developing a
personality that effectively modernized a decade's old brand. And I'll
be honest, so far, we have mainly talked about the
heads of these marketing empires, the highest titles, not the
folks who are tasked with actually executing the usually bizarrely

(35:12):
specific task of winning your loyalty as a customer. That's
because employees at this level of marketing are rarely appreciated
in wider media. The expected powerful male figureheads still dominating
the history of the industry that changes during this era,
though in no small part, I think because of its

(35:32):
overlap with the huge popularity of innocuous clickbait led by
sites like BuzzFeed that overlapped with this time, and so
as early brand accounts begin to refine their voice, usually
into absurdist humor. I think Taco Bell was the earliest
to do this, but they were quickly followed by Denny's
and Wendy's. The grotesquely curious Internet would want to know

(35:57):
just who was doing this, and when they found out
it was generally someone just like them, people really liked it,
turning lower level and certainly lower paid copywriters and customer
service reps who had always been generally anonymous in years
prior into Internet micro celebrities the main character behind the

(36:19):
main character, if you will, and that is why I
was so excited to talk with you one and only
Serenity Disco. Serenity's work on the Dennis Tumbler and Twitter
is somewhat legend in social media marketing. It won their
team a Shorty Award and really clarified the brand voice
of Denny's until this day. As I explained in our interview,

(36:42):
there was some precedent for the world that they dropped
into when it came to social media brand voice at Denny's,
including a gorgeous, inexplicable partnership with the Emo band Brand New,
but Serenity essentially turned Denny's the Diner in to an
extremely online Emo teenager, the same kind of customer that

(37:04):
might roll up to the Diners stoned at three in
the morning and debate the virtues of MCR with their friends.
I think that's what they did. They wouldn't let me
hang out with them. Unlike a lot of effective advertisers,
Serenity really throws themselves into this job whole hog.

Speaker 5 (37:20):
Although on the Denny's.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
Accounts they were technically acting as a character, the Tumblr
community and its absurdist, edgy but not offensive joke style
and hyperbonded mostly queer and fem communities were something that
Serenity was already familiar with. The assignment was to make
the account another weird friend to bond with and sell

(37:43):
witching our pancakes doing it, and Serenity was damn good
at it.

Speaker 5 (37:48):
And like they and every.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
Other social media manager singled up for a brand account's
success has told me in the research for this series,
this was not something that they did alone. Serenity credits
their graph designer and account manager just as much for
bringing her gently demented visions to the page. So what
do I mean when I say the Denny's Tumblr account

(38:11):
that Serenity curated? Okay, so buckle in because it is
very hard to describe.

Speaker 5 (38:18):
Some examples an image of a contact lens full of
coffee with the caption if you're up really late, studying
for finals. Try swapping your contact solution.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
With coffee for a quick pick me up.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Next, user Hella Spooky King asks are you single? The
Denny's Tumblr account answered, we are a restaurant and finally
a classic, a photoshopped stock image of a woman in
a candlelight bath, but now she's covered in Denny's waffles.

(38:52):
The caption reads, after a hard day, nothing is more
relaxing than the syrupy SuDS of a waffle bath. And
tumblers generally adored the Denny's account and responded in kind,
and that is a critical component.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
Of this working.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
When users would interact with or expand on the joke
that Serenity made on the Denny's account, Denny's would reply back,
often at random or in the middle of the night,
and this was obviously something that earlier generations of marketers
could never have done.

Speaker 5 (39:28):
The commercials and billboards.

Speaker 2 (39:30):
Obviously can't talk back, but the social media accounts can,
and posting challenges like tag yourself at Denny's and will
repost did seem to draw a lot of younger people
to the restaurant, predicated on a combination of wanting their
image scene on a widely followed account and kind of
the parasocial relationship they had formed with the account for

(39:53):
a diner.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
And is it weird when you say it all like that?

Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yes, but you'll have to trust me when I say
there was very much a time where hearing back from
Denny's on Tumblr would be like hearing back from a
celebrity on Twitter, and that celebrities and brands not for nothing.
We're using the exact same playbook to expand their name,
recognition and relevance. I mean, there is a strong argument

(40:19):
to be made that Ashton Kutcher would never have had
much of a career if he hadn't become a pathological
reply guy and smug Twitter joke writer, which is actually
a bad example because we would be better off without him.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Here's a clip from his Steve Jobs.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
Movie I Already Fired You saw that drunk on my
twenty first birthday. Back to Pancakes, Serenity's work was routinely
written up on clickbait websites with headlines like twenty eight
weirdly wonderful images from the Denny's tumbler page. And I
really do find their professional trajectory super, super interesting and specific.

(40:56):
You'll hear a lot in their experience that's reflected in
the experience of other people I speak with later in
this series. Serenity was in their early twenties and starting
a life in a big city when they started at Denny's,
and they later branch out to make their own startup,
and then they pivot again and end up working in
celebrity and political social media management at a crucial point

(41:19):
in American history. And there is a lot to talk
about when it comes to this era of advertising. And
we're going to take a closer look and what the
ins and outs of early social media management was like
next week. But today I'm going to let our first
interviewee lay out what a brand management job was like
on the ground floor of it having massive advertising influence

(41:43):
in the twenty tens, as in generations past, advertising two
young people was.

Speaker 1 (41:49):
A job best suited to other.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Young people who could make the argument that marketing something
as innocuous as Denny's diner food was an act of
self expression, regardless of how underpaid or burnout inducing the
job may one day become. When we come back, Serenity
Disco of the Denny's Tumblr account, Welcome back to sixteenth

(42:27):
minute I'm so sleepy. Here's my interview with Serenity Disco and.

Speaker 8 (42:32):
My name is Serenity Disco. I'm the founder of Alobud,
which is a self care app, but I also do
freelance consulting on the side.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
I mean, you've had truly a storied and like wide
variety of work online over the years.

Speaker 1 (42:47):
I'm really excited to talk about it.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
But what brings us together today is the Denny's Tumblr account.
I would love to know just a little bit more
about you. Where did you grow up? How did you
grow up?

Speaker 8 (42:57):
I love the question of like where did you grow up?
Because is I can't like pinpoint one place that because
I moved so many times. I've probably moved like twenty
times in total. I guess I could say I lived
in between Wisconsin and Connecticut. You know, parents, divorce, school,
work relationships. That's kind of what caused me to move

(43:21):
all over the place. I definitely was a child of
the Internet, raised by machines. I started out on aim
and you know, AOL chat rooms as a minor, like
in the adult chat rooms I discovered as a teen,
MySpace and neopets. Yeah, jeffree Star posted on my MySpace

(43:43):
page once and that was like an iconic moment for me.

Speaker 5 (43:49):
What a sentence.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
Yeah, if you've learned about jeffree Star in the last
five years, that may seem actually quite terrifying. Yes, ever,
yes there was a time where it was a sign
that you've made it on MySpace, specifically.

Speaker 8 (44:02):
Exactly being someone who moved so many times, Like I
didn't really have much of a community in real life,
so the Internet had become my community consistent for my
childhood and my teen years. I learned how to code
on neopaths, took that to creating my own forums for people.

(44:23):
One was called Rebel mb message Boards.

Speaker 5 (44:27):
What was the theme?

Speaker 8 (44:29):
It was like, you know, if you're a rebel, if
you're an outsider, a misfit, you can join. It was
good times. I wanted to be a developer growing up,
you know, coding my attention span. I had ADHD and
struggle with like activities of daily life made it really
hard for me to focus. And we couldn't really afford

(44:51):
college in my family. So even though I self taught
myself a lot of it. I did get a job
doing QA engineering for a game company, but I just
wasn't passionate about it. And until the doors opened for
my work at Denny's.

Speaker 5 (45:07):
When did you start working for Denny's.

Speaker 8 (45:10):
I'm pretty sure it was back in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen.
I kind of like fell into this job because a
friend referred me. I can't tell you which parody account,
but I had a very successful parody account on Twitter.

(45:30):
A lot of people, like you know, knew about it
and loved it, and a friend of mine who followed
the account was like, whatever you're doing on this account,
I think we could use it at Denny's. Because she
was the current her name is Ariel, called her on,
and she was the current social media manager at Denny's.

(45:50):
I came into my interview and I showed them my tweets.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
I would love to hear more about the interview. Well,
here's here's my little joke.

Speaker 8 (45:59):
Yeah, literally printed out some of my favorite tweets into
a portfolio and I was like, you know, this sounds
like something that your brand might like. The brand strategy
for Denny's was I'm not sure if it still is
is Denny's is always open, it's twenty four to seven.
It's a community meeting space, it's a family gathering. It's

(46:23):
a place, you know, to go with your partner, and
being that it's twenty four to seven, it's very it
can get very silly there. It can get very silly
in the booths because you know, maybe you just went
out drinking with your friends and now you need an
evening stack of pancakes. And so we wanted to create

(46:44):
a personality was in their late teens, goes to Denny's
with their friends, likes punk pop. They had an initiative
with brand New the band for a long time. Really yeah,
I knew that that was before I started, so I
think that they wanted to carry that over. They thought
that I would be a good fit for the role,

(47:05):
and I was like, great, I don't have a job
right now, and it sounds, you know, like being myself
on social media for a brand. It didn't feel as
larger than life then, you know, like look back now.
I was like, oh my gosh, like look what you did. So, yeah,
they hired me and they didn't have a tumbler at

(47:27):
the time, so I was tasked with making a tumblr,
which I already had my own tumblr, so it was
really easy for me to set them up. We started
following people who posted, you know, at Denny's, like their
Denny's selfie, we called them. So anyone who's like at
Denny's in the booth posting photos selfies, we would share them.

(47:51):
It kind of spiraled into like a meme where they
people would actually take photos of themselves in front of
the Denny's sign and be like, hey Dad, I'm here
like my my friend Denny's.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
And you are like a lot of power for a
twenty three year old, Yeah, like shaping the image of this.

Speaker 8 (48:11):
And I got a lot of like confusion from people
in my immediate family and like you know, close friend circle.
They're like, so, what exactly do you do? Like you
sure you tweet? And I just was like, yeah, that's
my job. And now if they were to ask me,
they would immediately know. Because brands having personalities online is

(48:36):
just so common and everyone's using social media.

Speaker 2 (48:40):
Denny's already had sort of an idea of what the
persona of this company is when you come in, and
I feel.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
Like it seems like they were pretty early too.

Speaker 8 (48:49):
Yes, Monday's and Denny's were like very early on in
the brand persona. You know, they let me have free
rain I could post virtual like there was a process
of content as an art being approved. But I could
just fire off tweets whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted.

(49:12):
Case in point. Some might see this as like bad
business practice, but I would wake up at like two
in the morning and I would tweet on the Denny's
account at two in the morning because Denny's is always
open and seeing that time stamp. This was before like
buffer exist to where you could schedule posts. Seeing Denny's
up at two am and replying to a post and

(49:35):
having Denny's reply back to you. Like for some people,
it was so surreal because brands, you're a brand, Like,
what are you doing because Denny's is your friend?

Speaker 5 (49:47):
Were you running all of the social media?

Speaker 8 (49:49):
Yeah? I was running all of the social media accounts.
Oh and I just want to mention that the fact
that I was given this free reign is because I
had an amazing that I worked with. My direct report
and our graphic designer were incredible and so smart and

(50:10):
really like we were like the dream team together. So
it just it fit together so perfectly.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
Was there a moment where you're like, oh, this is
like really working.

Speaker 8 (50:21):
I think I kind of had the wow moment when
I saw this meme going around on Tumblr this text
post saying like relationship status and then whatever, and we
took that and did relationship Status breakfast. It got like
three hundred thousand notes on it. I just loved the
community on Tumblr so much. They were so fun and

(50:45):
supportive and made every post into a meme and the
comments section was incredible, and that's just really rare, I think.
And then I don't know if you know, but I
actually got tired at Tumblr directly after Denny's. They they
poached me because they liked the work I did on

(51:07):
the Denny's tumbler, and they wanted me to help other brands,
you know, have that, you know, experience the same experience.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
I don't know, I want to like explore this idea
that feels so bizarre and I would have killed for
a job like yours.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
I'm sure so many people would say that.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
But you're being yourself essentially, but you're also being Denny's,
the restaurant.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
Chains, right, right?

Speaker 5 (51:30):
How do you navigate that?

Speaker 1 (51:32):
Were there?

Speaker 7 (51:33):
Ever?

Speaker 5 (51:33):
Like moments of this feels weird?

Speaker 1 (51:36):
Like what is this?

Speaker 8 (51:38):
Like you said, you know, we were being we were
we were being on the internet as the Internet's meant
to be, but at the same time, we're running a
brand account for a corporation and like we would have
to take care of customer service questions like or like
people would this is disgusting, but people would send us

(51:59):
like pos of themselves in the bathroom after going like
after eating. You totally don't have to include this, but.

Speaker 1 (52:06):
Like, no, that's the people need to know.

Speaker 8 (52:09):
Like that's that was the life of a community manager
for a quick service restaurant, you know, or just like
people complaining, which is normal. The job was fun, but
it was also work.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
And let me know if you experienced any version of this,
how emotionally draining a job like that can be where
you know, you don't necessarily always have to be on,
but there's a part of you that like, like you're
saying posting it too in the morning, like I should
always be on.

Speaker 8 (52:35):
Yeah, that's exactly it. Though at the time it did
not feel like I was draining, but I was definitely
pushing myself to an extent that I didn't necessarily have to.
It was so much a part of my life at
the time. Like I had just moved to New York City.
I didn't know that many people the only people I

(52:55):
knew were people who I met through Twitter, on social
media or other social media platforms. So I was so
used to being always on, you know, now looking back
at it, I created an entire company around self care
because I did not take care of myself back in
the day, and it all led up to, like a couple,

(53:17):
you know, massive burnout periods. And I feel like we're
so used to talking about burnout these days, but back then,
we didn't have the word doom scrolling. We didn't have
anything that would allow people to just remember that they
need to take you know, breaks, and that jobs, our
jobs are not our entire lives.

Speaker 5 (53:39):
Right, which is so American of us to do.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
First, like, are there any like standout positive memories or
like moments of recognition that you look back on fondly.

Speaker 8 (53:54):
Also, we would we would do giveaways where we would
give away, you know, Denny's gift car cards for doing
fan art, for drawing fan art for Denny's. So those
were really really cool. I can't remember any of the posts,
but I remember at the time I was just like
I would collect all the posts and bring them to

(54:17):
my superior and be.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
Like, look what they made us. Look at our fans
made us like.

Speaker 8 (54:21):
Oh my gosh, and it was just so sweet. At
the time. I'm like getting teary eyed thinking about the
community there. I was the voice of Denny's at the time,
but I felt like the community had large voices within
it that I could talk to and be friendly with.

(54:44):
I'll never forget.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Did anyone at the time sort of figure out who
you as an individual were?

Speaker 8 (54:52):
Yeah, some people. Some people did, and most of them
were people who are also living in New York City
as well and were part of like New York City
Twitter Attie. I guess you could call it okay, Like
I don't know if it still exists, but like, you know,
people who worked in media or worked on social media

(55:12):
brand accounts, we all kind of knew each other. And
I was known as the Denny's Girl. It's really common
for social media managers who are you know, public facing,
to like have haters, and they don't just don't deserve it.

Speaker 2 (55:29):
Just the idea that, oh, if you're receiving some sort
of hate or harassment online, that's actually a sign that
you're doing a good job. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (55:37):
Always, I would get told that too, But I'm very like,
I'm very like Emo and so I get it, like
it really affects me. So I would like, you know,
be sad and people be like, don't don't worry, They're
just Internet trolls. I'm like, I know, but why is
my mental health like failing me? Right now?

Speaker 4 (55:58):
We will be back with more Serenity.

Speaker 1 (56:15):
Welcome back to sixteenth minute.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
I always want Jack in the Box to be good,
but it simply.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
Never is good.

Speaker 2 (56:21):
I had an argument with both of my producers, Sophie
and Ian, and they're from southern California, so they think
that Jack in the Box is good.

Speaker 1 (56:30):
It's not good.

Speaker 4 (56:31):
Here's the rest of my interview with Serenity Disco.

Speaker 2 (56:34):
What led you to decide to move on? Were you
cognizant of any degree of burnout at this time?

Speaker 8 (56:41):
I think it was just the opportunity. You know, they
definitely offered me more money there, and I was just
getting started. Like you said, I was a twenty three,
twenty four year old in New York City and runt's
not cheap, so you know, you got to go where
the money gotta go where the money is. And like,
I love Tumblr as a platform, and the people I

(57:05):
worked with at Tumblr were really awesome as well. And
I just wanted a different experience, and they hired me
as a creative strategist. I would get to like travel
around the country and do these things called Tumblr road shows,
where I think, yeah, it's basically like a Tumblr one
oh one, like you know how to use Tumblr and

(57:28):
got I got to talk about all different awesome communities
on Tumblr, like back in the day. I don't know
if it still exists, but like there's a sink fandom,
like washing your hands sinc. Fandom, Like people were obsessed
with sinks, I know, And I just thought that was
so kooky and like fun. But just to show that

(57:49):
there's a community for everything on Tumblr.

Speaker 2 (57:52):
You've worked in so many areas of the internet, because
is it from Tumblr? At what point do you switch
over to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign?

Speaker 8 (58:02):
So Hillary Clinton. That was a couple years after Tumblr.
I actually launched a small median article organization called fums
plain that was for short and long form content personal
essays for women and fem identifying individuals. And I did

(58:23):
that for a few years before we shut it down
because of not being able to fund it. It was fun.
I knew a lot of people who worked in the
media field at the time, and I wanted to be
a part of it because it sounded so interesting and impactful,
and I wanted to do something impactful. I was like, Okay,

(58:44):
brands being weird on social media, check time to do
something and you know that. I know that was impactful too,
but you know, I wanted to do something in the
media space as well.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
It seems like you're sort of chasing more of your powers.

Speaker 8 (59:00):
And yes, like fmsplain was definitely a passion. And then
I was like, Okay, I need I need a real
I need a not a real job because that was
a real job. I needed a job that's going to
pay me money to keep living in the great state
of New York. I got hired actually at Rock Nation,

(59:21):
the record label, where I worked on celebrity accounts doing
their social media. I'm not under nda with them, but
I just don't like to say because I don't know
if it's appropriate. While I was working there, they were
kind enough to let me go work on the Hillary
Clinton campaign back in twenty.

Speaker 1 (59:41):
Sixteen when you were there.

Speaker 8 (59:42):
Yeah, I got recruited to work for her doing voter
registration and influencer management. Work with influencers to create like
help them create content that they could share in their
social media channels to get people to register to vote
using the I Will Vote website.

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
I think it is fascinating, and because I wasn't sure
what like a social media job at rock Nation would
even entail, But it is fascinating that, like celebrities are
brands of their own.

Speaker 8 (01:00:12):
Basically, and they have their they have their own campaigns.
You know, like when an album comes out, there's so
many there's so many pieces to promotion of the album.
Not only are they promoting the album, they're promoting themselves
as a person.

Speaker 2 (01:00:30):
Was it meaningfully different managing a celebrities account versus a
restaurant's account?

Speaker 8 (01:00:37):
I will. You know, Denny's has such a special spot
in my heart. You know, it was my first job.
It was my first time interacting with a community that
was so large. I met so many wonderful people through it. Today,
like I have, we're on this podcast talking about what
I did when I was twenty three years old and

(01:00:58):
I'm now thirty five.

Speaker 2 (01:01:02):
My last question about sort of this period of your work.
It was twenty sixteen election, Yes, quite contentious. Oh, by
the way people interact with the celebrities that they think
around the other side of the account. Quite contentious for
you working in those spaces, especially simultaneously. What kind of

(01:01:23):
like energy are you having to absorb from people who
are who think they're talking to whomever but actually aren't well.

Speaker 8 (01:01:30):
I will say when I was doing social media for
the Hillary campaign, I had to be quite public facing,
and so I got a ton of hate and trolls
from the opposing side. I don't even know how to
describe it, like it's like these people don't believe that

(01:01:51):
someone exists on the other side of the screen. Shout.
They're just shouting, and I don't know what they think
they're shouting at because someone there and I'm doing a
job and I'm doing a job that I actually believe in.
I believed in her. It was really upsetting. I remember
the day of the election. It was heartbreaking, like people

(01:02:15):
were messaging me in my direct messages saying like, hey,
I'm looking at the results and they're not they're not
doing well, Like we're not doing well. What are we
going to do? And I just I couldn't say anything.
And it was so it was so many people reaching
out to me privately and publicly because I had to

(01:02:37):
be so public facing during the three months that I
worked there, there were some people who were very sympathetic
and supportive, who were like, you know, we're rooting for you.
You did your best. As the clock got closer to
the announcements who won, and even the day after it

(01:02:58):
was like a funeral. So I had so many messages,
you know, of support, and it really shows that even
though there are trolls on the internet, you know, the
community that you have is much louder, can be louder
than that, you know, focusing on that positivity and utilizing

(01:03:21):
the mute and black button.

Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
Working on the Hillary campaign, was that the first time
that you were in a big social media position as yourself. Yes.

Speaker 8 (01:03:31):
Because I never publicly shared who I was on Denny's,
people just kind of found out. I don't know how,
and I didn't really expect going into the Hillary Clinton
campaign that I would be so public facing, but it
just sort of happened that way, and you know, I
don't regret any of it. It was a really great experience,

(01:03:54):
and I again worked with some really amazing people.

Speaker 2 (01:03:57):
So you experienced signific I can't burn out. Oh yes,
can you tell me more about that?

Speaker 8 (01:04:04):
Oh yes, it hit me like a thousand bricks. The
day after the election, I couldn't get out of bed.
I was supposed to go to the concession speech and
I just could not get myself unable to move. And
during the campaign I wasn't taking care of myself. I

(01:04:25):
wasn't eating very well. I was eating Chipotle almost every
night because it was there, and I wasn't drinking enough water.
The inspiration for my current company, Alabud, came from working
on the campaign. A coworker would post on post it
notes like really nice reminders and then post it into

(01:04:45):
her cubicle, and I was like, that's really sweet. I should,
you know, do more reminders for myself. Yeah, so I
went back to Rock Nation. I worked there for a
couple of months before deciding to quit because I couldn't
keep up with the work. I was so burnt out
and I didn't feel like I was putting my best
self out there. And then a few months later I

(01:05:07):
started working on Alabud, and yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:10):
I'm just like, I'm happy for you that you were
able to be like, no, we're calling it. Your next
project was about addressing that. Yeah, when you were putting
Alobud together, how you build something like that out.

Speaker 1 (01:05:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:05:23):
So initially it was a worksheet that I had someone
designed where you know, we listed out hydrate, fuel, refresh,
things like that, and then you know, you check off
that you did it Monday through Monday through Sunday. We
created a digital version of the worksheet on type form.

(01:05:48):
It got thousands of people using it, and I was like, Wow,
there's definitely a need for a self care checklist slash reminders. Luckily,
I had a friend who owns their own design studio
for app development that I used to work with at Tumblr.

(01:06:08):
They were like, if you can fundraise X amount of dollars,
you know we can make this for you. And so
we went to Kickstarter and fundraise fifty thousand dollars. Yeah,
we have one point four million users now and we've
been around for I think eight years.

Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
On the whole, since you were tweeting at two am
from the Denny's account to now. How has your relationship
with the Internet changed.

Speaker 8 (01:06:40):
I definitely use social media a lot less than I
did previously. Like I was someone who is always on,
but now I have a very healthy relationship with my
phone and social media. I basically only check it like
once or twice a day, and I use scheduling software

(01:07:01):
to schedule all my content for Alobud. I hate to
say it, but I'm I use LinkedIn now more than
I do Twitter. I definitely have been connecting with folks
like face to face. I've been getting virtual coffee with
friends and just catching up because I really miss seeing

(01:07:22):
people's faces. I feel very content with my career and
I'm I'm happy to be focusing on something that really
helps folks with their mental health and their well being.
I guess I would say to my younger self, put

(01:07:42):
the phone down and not touch grasps. I hate I
hate that uh saying.

Speaker 1 (01:07:50):
It's so patronizing.

Speaker 8 (01:07:51):
Yeah, and you don't know what it's like to be
to have like all of your communities and everything be all,
but put the phone down for a little bit and
know that it's always going to be there for you
when you're ready for it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
Thank you so much to Serenity, and you can follow
their work and learn more about their app at the
links in the description. Okay, I hope you're locked in
because we've got a lot to cover in this series.
Because we've made it a whole episode without circling back
to the pool full of dua Lipa's piss. We will

(01:08:29):
get there next week, but for your moment of fun
seems like a stretch. In this case, here is the
concluding thought of the century of the self. And next
week we will talk to the person who translated online
shit posting out of raw human rage to selling cheeseburgers,

(01:08:50):
Amy Brown of the Wendy's Twitter account next Tuesday.

Speaker 7 (01:08:54):
It's not that the people are in charge, but that
the people's desires are in charge. The people are not
in charge. The people exercise no decision making power within
this environment. So democracy is reduced from something which assumes
an active citizenry to something which now increasingly is predicated

(01:09:14):
on the idea of the public as passive consumers, the
public as people who essentially what you're delivering them are
doggy truths.

Speaker 2 (01:09:27):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of fol Zone Media and Iheartradim.

Speaker 1 (01:09:31):
It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamielostis.

Speaker 2 (01:09:34):
Our executive producers are Sophie Lickterman and Robert Evans. The
Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.

Speaker 1 (01:09:42):
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen.

Speaker 2 (01:09:45):
Voice acting is from Brant Crater and pet shout outs
to our dog producer Anderson, my katz Flee and Casper,
and my pet Rockbert, who will outlive us all.

Speaker 1 (01:09:54):
Bye.