Whatever you feel like. This is about you. My name is Chloe corcoran. Had I not been trans, I would have coached college football. Really? I'm Cy Clark Chan. I am one of those old dried up people who's already lived their best life. Is that okay? My name is Mariana marquin. Mommy, what do you think about this booty? How you feeling? Too much? Yeah. My name is Jeffrey J and so like I had to come out as transgender. But my mom had to come out as Republicans. About three months ago, a documentary crew followed us around recording our every move. They captured us navigating everything. And that's what you're about to hear. From being studios in lemonade media, an audio reality original. This is being trans. This is being trans. Out April 28th, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I see why my guys. If you love our podcast, then consider subscribing to slate plus. Number one means you will get no ads on any sleep podcast. Number two, it means you'll be supporting not only our show, but every slate show. And number three, I've lost count. I think we're at three. You'll get bonus segments, an extra episodes of shows like slow burn, amicus, political gab fest, culture gap fest, mom and dad are fighting. The list goes on and on, lots of good stuff. You'll also get unlimited reading on the slate website, which means access to every article, and every juicy juicy advice column without ever hitting the paywall. Just visit slate dot com slash IMI plus to sign up. That slate dot com slash IMI plus. All right, we are back with Dion Barry, the founder of the tumblr blog, the infamous tumblr blog, this is white privilege. And once again, Rachel's gonna take it away. I'm kind of sensing some ambivalence about the place that this is white privilege. And the legacy that the bog has. And so why did you stop moderating it? What was kind of the breaking point? So I think it burnt out in the sense that I became interested in other things. I heard someone describe tumblr once as the abandoned clown factory on the other side of the Internet. That's really good. But part of it is like, I had an urge to make a transactional. I had the urge to make it into a website or to publish it into a book or something along those lines. But I think the ambivalence really comes from, I don't like dumbing down the conversation. I think that when I was 20 or 22, I felt like I knew everything. And I felt like it was so simple, and it was so black and white. And so easy to understand. And that if you disagree with me, that means you hate black people. And if you don't like the way I run the blog, it means that you're just a racist period. And I was just so full of vinegar and anger and I just don't think that reflects the way I feel now at 31 I feel a lot different about how to express some of that stuff than at 21. If I ever had to go back through and read, it's probably some of the ways I spoke to people on that blog. I would probably be embarrassed. I'd probably want to go back and apologize to them. I'm curious, actually, did you see the times op-ed from the person who ran your favor problematic? Because it really touches on a lot of the things that you're saying. No, I would love to read that because your favorite problematic holds a fascinating place in the discourse too, I think. Definitely. But what do you think of it? Tell me about that place it holds. Yeah, so your favorite problematic was great because it great and horrible in the sense that the Internet. Yes. I think that it also did a similar thing that this is white privilege did, which was it was a format that was so digestible and easy to understand that it taught people a lot and also dumbed the conversation down so much that it was difficult to come back from. The same person who called tumblr the abandoned clown factory also said that Twitter sometimes threatened to reach the tumbler event horizon. And I think that this is why privilege and your favorite problematic were part of that event horizon where the conversation got so easy that you no longer had to think to participate in any of this stuff. We weren't teaching any critical thinking. We were discouraging critical thinking. There was a time where we said that it was problematic to ask a question. And that is wild to me. It's interesting to me that the nuance you're describing and what sounds like how to large part and you decide to step away from moderating this tumblr is the mantle that has been picked up and weaponized by this community online. We're talking about now. Yeah, I do think so. I think it's been I think there are people and I'll point the finger to myself. Number one, I was attracted to the amount of attention and quote unquote power and the voice that I had on 2013 to 2016 tumblr. I was learning for the first time what my ability was to mobilize a group of people on the Internet, which is now my job and what I do professionally. But there is something that will always rot what you bring to the table when part of your motivation involves the power you get from it, the serotonin shot in your brain when you can force Tyra Banks to apologize for a character she played on a fake reality show 15 years ago. Do you kind of see a lineage between, I guess, this is white privilege, but also kind of that tumblr discourse of like 2013. And the Internet today. The circle around this point. Yeah, I'm wondering if you guys do. I feel like I've been on the thing today. But I think that, no, I think there's an influence on what we were doing on tumblr at that time frame. I don't know if it's just looking at it from my narrative scope in the sense that I learned about a lot of the stuff for the first time on tumblr, and then I was able to take it to other places. Now when I see a phrase on Reddit or Twitter or TikTok that I first heard on tumblr, like, of course, I connected with tumblr. But did tumblr actually have a legacy on the whole Internet for that? I'm not sure. I know that other social media channels did not feel to me to be breeding grounds for those conversations, to me they happened on tumblr. Yeah. I mean, I hesitate to say this, even though semi true, I kind of grew up on tumblr and that I got on tumblr when I was in high school, which I think is when your brain is the softest and therefore the most susceptible to. A lot of this stuff and it's been interesting seeing the way, as you've said before, the kind of raw anger you have at that age change into something different. And so I don't know if it's tumblr specific or the fact that we all just retread the same things every 6 years on the Internet because they don't have the memory of a goldfish, but so much of what's happening right now. Is like so deeply familiar in a way and I don't know if it's just because there's a new generation of people who don't who weren't on tumblr and therefore aren't nearly as exhausted by it or if.