Transcript

Paul Ford Alright, so, Richard.

Rich Ziade Mhm?

PF This episode, something we recorded a couple weeks ago.

RZ Mhm?

PF And it’s about how conspiracy theories have a kind of user interface to them. And then when we recorded it, we didn’t expect what was going to happen in the world, to happen quite so quickly. So, I just want to give people a little warning and a little context that you’re about to hear a conversation from four weeks, as opposed to forty thousand weeks—is how it feels.

RZ Yeah, and the thesis was that conspiracy theories have great UX.

PF Yeah they really do and they really work well with platforms and we just saw the evidence of that and we’re continuing to see it as we get towards the Biden inauguration. So, still an interesting conversation, which is why we’re going to release it. But, wanted to give people a little context, we’re not just kind of milling around—

RZ It’s very nice of you. It’s very kind of you, Paul. 

PFJust help the listener out. Let’s let the voices of Paul and Rich from several weeks ago fill your ears. [music fades in, plays alone for 15 seconds, ramps down]

PF Alright, Rich.

RZ Hmm?

PF You and I talk all the time, something we do. It’s like six hours a day. You said something the other day that stuck with me. I want to talk about a little more now that we’re recording this podcast. You said, “You know what’s interesting about conspiracy theories?” which, for worse, dominate our current moment. And you’re like, “Look, the way the thing about conspiracy theories is they’re just, they’re better UX to reality, right? Like they simplified.” Reality is so confusing. And conspiracy theories are just like, they make it so simple. It’s like one drop down.

RZ And I think that’s a huge component of why they take and why they not only are believed, but are defended in such an emphatic way. Because there is something very satisfying when when you’re in the flow around how to use something like a tool, when you’re really good at a tool when your hands don’t come off the keyboard or whatever. There’s a really positive feedback loop. And so when someone tells you that it’s pedophiles out of a pizzeria that are behind a lot of the bad things in the world, right? A, that’s polarized, right? It’s an extreme narrative, right, which is, movie trailers rarely are boring. They’re usually very action packed and you know, really optimized for my senses.

PF Oh and cool taglines, it’ll be like, “Shut it down!” 

RZ That’s right/ So check that box, right, the world’s I mean, this pandemic is terrible. This virus even though it really doesn’t have a moral actor behind it is really terrible. And right, it’s way easier to A) simplify it and B) vilify it, such that it feels like, “Okay, I see what’s happening. These bastards in a basement in DC, spun this thing up, called their friends, and put this out in the world. And you know, obviously, 5Gs in the mix. You’re gonna tell me it’s a coincidence that 5G showed up at the same time as the pandemic, Paul? You’re gonna tell me that’s a coincidence?”

PF And look, there are charts out there of what QAnon believes yhat are like five encyclopedias worth of content with arrows pointing from everything to everything else. You got the Pentagon, the military industrial complex, the Vatican. How’s this simpler?

RZ The thing is this, Dodge trucks are RAM tough.

PF Oh, boy, are they? 

RZ Now look, if the Dodge truck owner’s manual, if you buy in, is thick, there’s all kinds. It’s a very complicated machine. But to get you to get you to buy in, I’m not going to slip through an owner’s manual and a 30 second ad during a football game. What I’m going to do is I’m going to show this truck climbing this Rocky Mountain. And then sort of there’s that balance at the very end, where it just sort of like its grill kind of faces you almost in a menacing way. And they just say “Dodge trucks are RAM tough.”

PF Oh, my God.

RZ Now, okay, once I buy that Dodge truck, my neighbor who has the GMC or whatever else is out there, the Ford F 150. can go straight to hell. I bought the right truck. Okay? 

PF It is true, you’re in the club.

RZ So what I guess what I’m saying is the gateway drug is dead simple. It has to be dead simple. It is a page out of marketing.

PF Yeah. Then you get into it. And the Internet has made it so easy. They’re really into this idea of research in QAnon, like I’m going to do, I got my clues and I’m gonna do my research.

RZ I think you’re making—you’re challenging me in exactly the right way in that you’re saying “But look, it’s really complicated.” And I think what happens is this once I’m in, once I was a Jets fan for like 20 years, the New York Jets are the shittiest football team in the history of sports.

PF There’s not a lot—that’s not a conspiracy. That’s just the truth, yeah.

RZ 

Yeah, many of my years were in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Okay. And you’ve got angry angry man wearing Jets jerseys through seasons where they were like 2 and 14. I kid you not. But they’ve, you know, they’ve committed and they look out for the drafts and they look out for the big plays and they hang on to the occasional win because they’re in. So once you wear the jersey, it becomes part of your identity.

PF Well, yes.

RZ If I’m a Jets fan, I’m gonna say you can’t be a bandwagon fan, right? So once you latch on and this happens in politics, this happens in positions around things—and here’s the other thing. I know people who were pro-Trump on the 16th side because he told it like it was whatnot. Here’s the thing. Now when you start gotcha, it’s a bunch of gotchas right over four years, to the point where it went to like a banana cakes place. But the thing is, you can’t bail on the Jets and become a Giants fan. You’re in. It’s part of who you are. And in fact what you do you start defending the team.

PF And you double down on the Jets, you’re like, “If things if this was if this league was run well, Jets would have a chance” you know, “it’s all a scam, just a scam.”

RZ Spin the whole world in your direction. 

PF This is what happens when Mets fans—Mets fans do this.

RZ Oh, same thing. Same. It’s a tragedy. I mean, Knicks fans, the Knicks haven’t won since like 1863.

PF That’s it, yeah. Literally, somebody put up a peach basket on a wall and said—[Paul & Rich chuckle]

RZ And that’s last time! And I’m also Lebanese, I follow Lebanese politics. And you know, there are some utterly, this is same thing. You think, “Oh, my God, what has Trump done to our brains?” This pattern plays out amongst the Lebanese population, amongst Jets fans in Bay Ridge, amongst Knicks fans, amongst Trump supporters, amongst anti vaxxers. Right?

PF Now, this is good. Let me give this back to you and how I see it, because I think it’s, I think it’ll be interesting. And I think we can actually, oddly enough, bring it back to software. What a surprise! So I’m looking at a chart here that probably has about 500 different nouns on it. Right, Monsanto, and NASA and Nikola Tesla, and they’re all pointing and there’s hundreds of them, hundreds of them. So here’s what I see, I see an individual has put this together. And they’ve put together many of them. And what they’re doing is they’re trying to unlock where the power is in the world, because power is deeply, deeply mysterious. Now, I’ll tell you, I was pushing back at you and saying like, you know, you’re saying it’s simple. But look at how complicated this is. Yhis is an order of magnitude less complicated then—I’m going to throw out a very specific artifact—the course catalog for the 2021 to 2022 Academic Year at Harvard University. Right? People go to Harvard, and then they check in on each other for 20, 30 years, until one of them becomes president. Right? Like that’s how Harvard works. It really does.

RZ A journal, a journal article on the efficacy of a vaccine is impenetrable. Ever tried to read like a medical journal or journal article?

PF No, I do. I mean, it took me 20 years to really get fluent in technology, like does a huge amount of work. And you go, if you look at these places of power, how the White House actually works, not how people believe it should work. But how like policymaking happens and the processes of, or how a giant educational institution functions, including, you know, how they are criticised for how they consolidate power, you will find something that actually is much much, much, much more complicated than QAnon. Like it actually, QAnon with all of its its arrows and lines is actually a simplification of how power works in the world. And it’s, you know, it’s one poster that shows you how it all works, as opposed to a incredibly huge set of overlapping ambiguous power structures that are both mutually interdependent, and in competition with each other. And I think that, you know, what really gets caught up in this kind of thinking, this is why QAnon is a perfect internet conspiracy. The tech industry, the tech industry likes to believe that the answer to all problems in the world is more technology. And it’s the it sees itself as the great simplifying force. And what’s happened is, now the government is regulating it. And now other power structures are saying, “Okay, we actually let this go on about 10 years too long” like, every major tech company seems to be getting sued by the FTC, or some other major part of the government right now today, and I’m sure they’re just like, “Here comes regulation”. But really, what’s happening is that, like, there is an almost conspiratorial thinking in our industry, where it’s just like, it will magically the forces of decentralization and open networks and marketplaces will all come together and create a bold, wonderful future. And people really believe in it in the same way that I think other people believe that more government is always the answer or that you know, just, we all want that solution so bad. 

RZ What we want is a clear narrative, a clear antagonist, right? I mean, what makes a good action movie?

PF What do we what do we really want? We want to feel safe, that’s a good start, and then more, we want to feel powerful.

RZ Yes, I want to latch on to powerful for a second. Once you wear the jersey, you have committed to something very basic in our nature around latching on to a particular set of beliefs or positions and what not, right? Once you’re in that state, you are effectively compromised, right? That’s why science is so boring. Once you’re in that state, if you are bought into QAnon and I come to you at your barbecue and say, “Hey, have you heard the latest?” Right? You are already inside, you’re not going to question and scrutinize. Science, on the other hand is a “Great idea. Let’s validate it with a placebo for 12 months.” That is not interesting or fun, and boring and slow, right? Like what has happened in nine months, 10 months around the vaccine is utterly magical. It was science like slamming on the gas, but ultimately was still science right?

PF Now this is completely, I mean, I’ve been trying to learn more and more about climate because I actually, both it’s interesting and also I think it’s a big part of what’s going to happen to our industry is is dealing with climate. And I wrote about this a little bit. And I’m, I’m not a slouch. I’m a pretty bright person. I’m a good reader, I have enough understanding of math and science to, to get through a lot of stuff. It is the most boring damn thing I’ve ever tried. [Rich laughs] It’s just it’s like, it’s like Fortran code. It’s like I actually read through models of climate models.

RZ This stuff, it’s hard, man! It’s hard and simple narratives, validating narratives—

PF Well, you actually have to have, you know, you know, it works really well Newtonian physics. It’s like, so, you know, we’re like, the one ball spins around another ball, and then they show up in the 30s, 40s, 50s and they’re like actually, it’s kind of, but you know, what they still teach in high school? Because it works just fine. It’s Newtonian physics.

RZ Yeah. How do you convince a Jets fan of 15 years? How do you convince a Jets fan? He’s like, “You know what, Paul? Let it go, man. Have you seen the Eagles play? They look really good this year. Have you seen?” Do you understand how insane and irrational that is for a fan who has not just committed themselves, but also made it part of their identity? 

PF And think about what it takes to actually get power in America? So first of all, you have to leave your hometown, you have to go to a big city. That’s where the power is, right? [Rich chuckles]

RZ Sure. Sometimes you can be like the boss of like—

PF But I’m talking about the kind of the kind of power that QAnon is interested in. Gotta go to a good college, you probably got to have a really good network, you got to be in a global city, you got to find money, you have to affiliate yourself with very powerful institutions. And you have to kind of just like you’re talking about with the Jets, you got to start like, there are a lot of people inside of the Vatican who have a lot of problems on a day to day basis with how the Vatican is working. But if, if a journalist calls them up, they’re like, “Yeah, no, man, it’s good Vatican these days, just things are going real well, yeah.” Or Microsoft, Google, Facebook. Like, if we call someone on Facebook, they’re gonna be like, “Oh, man, the FTC, they, they told us, we could buy Instagram. And now they’re like, he can’t have Instagram anymore. Come on, guys!” Right. And so people who are obsessed with this stuff, right? They don’t have access to power, they don’t have access to how the world works. 

RZ They see a lot of injustice. They see a lot of unfairness and they want to rationalize it in a lot of ways. Yeah. 

PF Well, this makes as much sense as hearing about how the Council on Foreign Relations, hosted a seminar with Donald Rumsfeld. Like that doesn’t make any sense.

RZ Yeah, we shouldn’t gloss over the recruitment practices here. Like, once you’re in, you’re in but how do they get recruited? You know, it’s worth saying, here, let me tell you an old slogan from a burger franchise. “The beef in our burgers has approximately 18 to 24% more volume than our leading competitor.”

PF That is a lot of volume.

RZ Versus “Where’s the beef?” [Paul laughs] Okay? Look, call Trump what you want, right. But his appropriation of classic old school marketing tagline psychology, changed the game and abused the game in a lot of ways, right? We know, you say it’s a rigged election. It’s like, well, wait, it’s not a rigged election. And what you don’t realize is he just needs to get those two words out. “Rigged election” is just “Where’s the beef?” again and again.

PF Oh he’s so good at it, I mean—until he wasn’t.

RZ It’s the same phrases. Until he wasn’t and I think we’re honing in on like the core diagnosis of like the symptom, like what are what is the cause of a lot of this? And this is not about 2020 or 2015 to 2020. This is about I think humanity, which is how do you counter it? Because and I want to end it with this question. Because where we are today is, “Well, we’re going to file a lawsuit because clearly the the election workers in Georgia, were stealing and changing names on the bottom balance.” And, and you’re left exasperated.

PF Exactly. You can never win in that because you’re asking people to actually hewed to logical constructs and rules of argumentation, and they don’t want to. People want to believe things right? And I’ve got—look at me, I was raised religious, but I’m not religious anymore. And then I go to church to see, you know, for all the reasons you go to church when people invite you. And there’s a part of me in my head that’s like, I get this. I totally I used to, I used to be here too. And other part of me that’s like, you’re talking about magical sky animals? And I don’t think they’re real. Right? And it’s, yeah, yeah. And I actually can hold both of those in my head. And I’m not, that might sound disrespectful. It’s actually not, it’s just like, I’m in a different place. And yet at the same time, I, you know, I have a religious family, and I respect that they’re very religious. And so it’s like, okay, we got to get along, we’re going to get along. We’re gonna figure it out.

RZ Probe this a little further, though. Because what these people are doing, they’re not saying believe in magic flying animals they’re making essentially, they’re stating something as fact. And it’s spun up, right. It’s spun up to create doubt and friction and whatnot. And and how do you counter that? Nobody needs you to—you can’t run into the church and say, “Wait a minute, guys, what are you doing here?”

PF You can only meet it with what it is, right? So you know, and this is the problem, is that who’s gonna go out there and run billboards that just say the words “Science is good” all around America, right? Who’s gonna be like “Science, it brings you food” right? Like that. That’s where we’re, that’s where we got to get to, right? Because and essentially, right, like, we don’t really teach civics in the same way we used to, and people fight about evolution in the classroom. So like, we used to just kind of count on education and kind of shared sense that people would come up with some kind of consensus reality, you know, it’s purple instead of red and blue. And now you get to choose your own facts. And what what has turned out is that choosing your own facts is actually not a mortal risk. We always assumed it was, for years it wasn’t. And now suddenly, like, if you choose your own facts, and you say, I don’t want a vaccine, you actually are threatening to kill other people you don’t know you are. But you are. 

RZ People have been choosing their own facts for 200 years.

PF Forever. 

RZ But now we have new mechanisms, don’t we? To amplify a lot of these narratives, right? 

PF To codify the facts so they keep going, you know, that’s the thing with QAnon, because it keeps going and you keep getting proof of that worldview.

RZ Google Docs, is Google Docs is free, bro.

PF Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. And the web is free and real science and you know, all those things take money. So there’s this huge bias for this huge blast of information to go right into—I mean, it’s cheap. And it’s fun. And it’s way more interesting than consensus reality, which requires you to read, you know, 1800 pages about Middle East Policy, in order to understand why things are the way they are. 

RZ That’s, that’s the crux of it, right? I mean, it is the kind of junk food that people know, I mean, a snazzy headline and a mobile phone that can download the internet for 80 bucks. Well, it’s got a formula here that I think is backing us into the responsibilities that are in the hands of these platforms, like

PF It’ll never be as fun right? So this is the thing, the world is controlled by, you know, “insert anti semitic conspiracy theory here” is far more sort of fascinating to your brain than 

“science is good and here to help you.” Right? This is where it’s brutal, because the answer is not counterprogramming. Because counterprogramming will always be more boring than sort of violent, power driven narrative of like, if you learn this, you’ll be able to—you know, prepping is always going to be more interesting than paying your taxes. “Well, if it all goes off, I’m gonna have my bag and I go out to the woods” as opposed to “Clean water, I like to pay for it by paying my taxes every year.” Imagine that YouTube video, are you gonna watch a guy who can survive and negative 20 degrees in the woods using only a trash bag? Are you gonna watch a city council meeting where they talk about the reservoir?

RZ And that’s YouTube. This is what we’re up against. Right? 

PF Let me just say something awkward, which is, like, smart people get in their own way so bad with this, because they just assume they just assume that everybody is out there. And we’re just waiting for a little more enlightenment to come from somebody with a liberal arts degree to tell them you know, just how exciting city council meetings can be. [Rich laughs] And they are not, that’s just not how it is and I don’t, I go bananas because I see people in media and so people in mass in aggregate and the internet teaches you this. It’s rough out there. They want to buy nice things. They want big TVs, sexual intercourse and food. [Rich laughs] And like no, and they’re gonna, they’re gonna read things that validate them. People assume that people want to participate in content that will punish them. They never will. 

RZ They never will. I mean, if there’s anything to take away, right, it’s that, right? 

PF Well, this is the great paradox of the online platform. For me, this is the hard part, which is that you build that box. And you say, humans are creative. We’ve made a box that you can fill out, go do something wonderful. And 20% of the time, they do something wonderful. 60% of the time, they just do nonsense, and it’s fine. It’s like, you know, here’s, we went to the picnic, or here’s my, here’s my cat. And then 20% of the time on the other side—

RZ It’s manipulation. 

PF Disgusting, right? Yeah. And that, and that gets the that is the most horrible, and yes, the most attention. And so. So that is like, and this is the great puzzle, right? And so we talked about this in lots of different ways. We talked about accessibility, we talked about, let’s make the box accessible to everyone so that all the voices can contribute. I think that’s critical. It gets important. Yeah. And I just look at it. I’m like, how the hell do you get people to be better?

RZ You know, who kind of gets this and I know I’m gonna like, either piss people off or and get people to nod, is Andrew Cuomo. He’s a bit of an egomaniac. I’ll just say it out loud. Right?

PF It’s so good. He’s archetypal, right? He actually negotiates with it. He knows it about himself.

RZ But every so often, he realizes that he needs to educate people in a very basic way. And what he does is with good intention, and actually founded on good science, he’s like, okay, I could show people a chart about how effective masks are most of the time for different age groups. Or I can show up with a mask that makes your face look like a thanksgiving turkey. Yeah. And I’m going to make it available for free. And what he’s doing there is he’s actually hijacking the methods that are used to spread disinformation, for good information.

PF He’s really good at it.

RZ And what he does is it’s not just like, “Look, the science is right here, guys. We got to gotta fess up.” He’s saying “Check out my American flag mask. This is the most American thing you can do.” And what he’s doing there, he’s saying, Okay, I get it. Where’s the beef is the message. Dodge RAM tough is the message, but I got to get you to wear the mask.

PF This is what’s really tricky, right is that you could run billboards that say science is good, and people will be like, well, that’s the communists running the Billboard. You gotta beat him with your own game. Cuomo did not play anybody else’s game. I don’t know if he possibly could.

RZ Yeah, that’s right. And he understands marketing, right? He understands simple messaging to get a point across, right. And you see this in other campaigns like anti smoking campaigns and you know, don’t do drugs with like your brain on drugs and eggs in a frying pan and all the wood these are essentially you’re you’re leaning on simple narrative, simple, visual, simple taglines to get something across.

PF Well, and if you look at it, but but he showed he slowly unveiled all the power structures that were going to keep New Yorkers safe. And so they had a pretty complete story over time. Like, “this is the hospital, you have to keep socially distant, the mask will save your life. Here is a doctor here. Here is this. Here is that.” And then he would go to New York. He went to the Javits Center where they unpacked personal protective equipment. And he actually created the counterprogramming to the conspiracies.

RZ That’s like one of the positives, right?

PF Well, that’s you can beat them at this game. But you can’t beat them, you can’t beat them with an intellectualism. You can, you have to actually kind of communicate, this is where it look, that guy is many things, but he is clearly a master communicator, those PowerPoint slides became a national phenomenon.

RZ They became a national phenomenon. And my mom was tuning in. I want to I want to end this on two positive notes. Even though this is this stuff can be used in frankly, evil ways. He lost the election. And I don’t care where you stand on the political sector where your positions are. It didn’t work. It didn’t work. It didn’t work. 

PF His shit broke. 

RZ And not only did it not work, it broke! And that’s a beautiful thing.

PF And Look, I know why people don’t get excited about Joe Biden, sometimes, like I fully understand, I’ve felt that way myself. But boy, did they double down. They said, we’re gonna run a campaign based on—and it’s the same thing as Cuomo. I’m going to tell the same story. I’m going to show I’m going to hug your kids. You’re going to make fun of me for how I communicate? I’m going to talk about my stuttering problem. And it just, oh, yeah, it’s just the warm bath over and over until finally you’re like, I guess I could just fall asleep. [Rich laughs]

RZ And this is good for my skin.

PF Oh, boy. Well, my shoulders are so sore. And then suddenly you wake up one day and he’s president you’re like, “I guess so” [Rich laughs] Like this just shrieking, louder, louder. And It was it was a true Judo move. But here was the thing. It was definitely counterprogramming. But the focus was always like, tell the same story. No, tell it again. When you read about their digital strategy and how they did it, they didn’t double down on Twitter. And they didn’t actually go toe to toe. They’re just like, tell the same boring story over and over and over again, until America goes “Yeah, sounds good”

RZ Well, I think also people were just, it’s been so toxic, and people are just exhausted. And I want to say one other sort of positive I’ve seen and that’s after the election, which is, you know, as a student of the law, I have to say, people are like, “Court shut it down! Court shut it down! Court shut it down!” You know, we talked about science a good amount here. The law is, is a form of science that demands a certain level of truth to move forward. Right? Otherwise, you end up with a third world dictatorship, essentially, where everything can be like it seeps into—the media right now, like Facebook is just a—

PF It ain’t good. It ain’t good.

RZ Some countries, countries where it’s just gotten brought to the court, the courts are exploited just as much, right. And what was good to see here is that the sea wall was not breached, and that the law was still defending truth, just as science tries to seek truth, the law defends truth. And that was, as a student of the law I was good to see. I will also say this, I wish there were mechanisms where you can’t just go do that. It’s a massive waste of resources and time, millions and millions of public money was wasted listening to this nonsense again, and again.

PF We waste so much money on litigation in this country. The problem is if you try to unlock that you’re in a world—

RZ And you should be held accountable. The Bar Association, the Bar Association, at some point should have stepped forward here and said, “Okay, you are soiling a profession that kind of keeps it together.”

PF You’re disbarred. They should disbarred, bar should be disbarred. Like, it’s just like, it’s enough.

RZ Yeah. And none of that happened. It’s like, Okay, you know what, you’re doing something damaging here to the profession, forget the politics.

PF But you’re not you’re not really breaking the real rules, etc. It’s like, this is the problem. There is always what no one will ever acknowledge the true informal system, right? Like, and there is a true informal system that, yeah, maybe they’re not actually breaking the law by suing, but at a certain level, you’re damaging the whole deal. And everybody can see it.

RZ And I’m paying for it! You’re paying as taxpayers. You’re paying for these judges and these systems to be in place. I mean, 10s of millions of dollars, I think have been spent, easily, on this non-sense.

PF Oh it’s such a waste. Such a waste. So look, we figured it out. It all applies to technology, you just have to think about it. [Rich laughs] And we’ll leave that as an exercise to listeners.

RZ I mean, we’ve talked in the past about how technology needs to be reined in, frankly, because it amplifies a lot of this nonsense. That’s real.

PF It’s also how do you provide information and resources so that people can build the counter programming themselves? Right. So that, you know, for me, I give 50 bucks a month to Wikipedia because I think it’s just the best bet.

RZ Yeah, yes. But I think on top of that, the big, big players who are dominating, frankly, the bandwidth.

PF Yeah, they also give 50 bucks a month to Wikipedia. That’s the problem.

RZ They just need to be held, I mean you’re gonna have to hold them accountable eventually. Like, it’s just, the whole thing is, you know, okay, there’s—

PF That’s the reckoning baby, we’re going for you it, you and I are gonna have infinite podcast material. All we have to do is read FTC filing for the next year.

RZ Paul, remind everyone what Postlight is.

PF Postlight is your partner, you come to us and say “I gotta build some stuff. I need to create a platform, I need to think really hard about how we are going to function with not just building an app, but actually, like get our strategy, right, when it comes to all things digital” And Postlight will help you. We will help you organize your thoughts, figure out the strategy, we’ll get the deck done with you, we’ll help you tell the story. And then we will build the thing, that thing might be an app on the new platform, might be a marketplace, we can build all of it. We’ve built commodities trading platforms, and we’ve built systems for communications for the MTA. So we’re here, we’re here to help. And we like big, complicated discussions like this one, and bringing them home so that they actually turn into a software that people can use. Did I get it? Did I explain the company?

RZ Check us out at Postlight.com. Have a lovely week, everyone.

PF Bye! [music ramps up, plays alone for 3 seconds, ends]