A Dubai Chocolate theory of the internet

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2:27uh check check check check check hi ryan hello hey nice shirt pj did you also buy this on amazon are we wearing the same shirt i think we're wearing the same shirt uh we got a discount because the sleeve monster ate our sleeves yeah well i just i'm done with sleeves you know i'm This is not the part of summer where sleeves are working for me. There's not, I don't have very good AC here. And it's not that I think that everyone's just like whistling at my biceps as I walk down the street. I'm just like, I've thrown in the towel on anything but comfort. Yeah, I think that's smart. Okay, so why don't you introduce yourself?

3:06Sure. My name is Ryan Broderick. I write a newsletter called Garbage Day, and I host a podcast called Panic World.

3:14And what you do in both of your projects and, like, your entire professional life is you survey, explore, and catalog the internet, but particularly you have an affinity for, like, like, if it were a Star Wars movie, it's, like, the outer rim far away from the empire. Like, you like the places where things are weirder, darker, stranger, the marginal edges of the internet. I do. But I also have like a grand fascination with where culture comes from, which typically is from the outer rim, you know, and it kind of makes its way in. But I feel like I never really understand what's going on. So I always like to just sit down and be like, okay, like, why is everyone talking about Sydney, Sweeney and jeans right now?

4:00Or why is everyone talking about these disgusting little dolls that look like little monster rats on TikTok? I feel like even when I was younger, I just never understood how everyone knew about something. And so the internet makes that easy. You can just spend some time figuring it out. And do you often, this is something that I've sometimes wanted to ask you, reading your work, is like, for me, the weird rat dolls, LaBubu. My first encounter with LaBubus was I was walking down the street in Manhattan, and I passed what any other month would have been one of those sidewalk kiosks where they sell newspapers.

4:34and because the LaBubu craze had hit such a fever pitch, the person who ran the kiosk had converted to just selling LaBubu. Sure. And so it was just an entire little side store of knockoff LaBubu. And I was like, oh, this is a thing that I don't know anything about and like kind of worked backwards. Do you, like when you're trying to understand how a trend has happened, is it like you work out and in? Do you often watch things bubble from outside to the center or is it more often something becomes popular and then you work backwards to figure out how it got that way? It's like a bit of both. I mean, every once in a while, I'll catch something four or five weeks later and I'm like, I don't know what this is.

5:15And I have to like fight the very millennial urge to like dismiss it. So I'm like, okay, like let's like engage with whatever this is and figure it out. But then I feel like because of the internet and doing this job for so long, I do see things fairly early and that causes like another problem where it's like you don't want to over-index. So there's like a sweet spot where like if you hit it, you're early, but it's still relevant. Yes. But it's a constant sort of talking to myself about like, okay, like I got to do something about this now or I got to look into this and fight the urge to just not care, which is hard.

5:53I often give in to the urge to not care these days, but that's why I'm glad that you exist because I can borrow your mind. Happy to help. Okay, so the reason that I wanted to talk to you today is I wanted to ask you about one of these things, like one of these waves that sort of seem to come from nowhere and then be everywhere. I feel like six months ago, I had never heard the words Dubai and chocolate next to each other. Now, I, like, in the world, online, I'm just, like, constantly seeing the phrase Dubai chocolate. I would just like to know, like, what even is the origin story of Dubai chocolate?

6:27Like, where does it come from? I have a safe guess. You can tell me I'm wrong and I would believe you. So it was created in 2021 by Sarah Hamuda, who was an engineer living in Dubai. And the story goes that she was pregnant and she had cravings for like specific kinds of food. And she kind of imagined this idea of like combining chocolate and pistachios and tahini and canafa, which is like a Middle Eastern dessert, basically. And so you put them all together and you get this chocolate that when you bite into it is full of green pistachios and it has quickly taken over the world, basically. I think I've seen the Patient's Hero video for this where it's like she's not the creator of it, but some influencer somewhere is just eating one of these candy bars.

7:19And can we actually, can we watch this sort of like original video together? Sure, I've got it right here as well. Let's see. Here we go.

7:35Okay, so tell me what we're looking at. So this is MariaVehera257 in 2023 on TikTok. She's like a woman. She looks like she's in her 20s. She looks like an influencer. And she's eating the candy bar and then just like green sort of like sludge is coming out of it in a way that I can't quite tell whether it makes me want to eat it or avoid it, but it's very visually striking.

8:03This video is gross. Watching her, this is gross. Well, it's really gross and it's looping. It's not looping. Oh, it's not? This video is a minute and a half long. Yeah, no, she's eating different chocolate bars, but she's letting it all drip and ooze out of her mouth like some kind of dog. It's awful. I don't like looking at this. It's funny because it's like, I can't tell if the effect is supposed to be like disgusting or like sexy or like she comes across as someone who's not very good at eating mainly. Yeah. It's like this is the first food I've ever had kind of thing. And she's doing, I mean, she's in her car.

8:35You know, it's like a woman in her car eating and like doing the like ASMR like pull apart thing that now everyone does with those mozzarella sticks from Chili's. Wait, I'm sorry. What is the ASMR pull apart thing? Oh, okay. So like if you watch a lot of food videos on TikTok. I don't. There's a lot of things they all do.

8:57So one is like there's the thing sometimes where like the women will tap stuff with their fingernails to make an ASMR noise into the compressor mic on their phone. Finally got the gooey gummies off of TikTok shop. So let's do a taste test. These literally look so good, you guys. And then if it's gooey, there'll be like a pull-apart shot, which is, like I said, how Chili's mozzarella sticks went viral recently. Let's eat some Chili's mozzarella sticks. Let's eat some Chili's mozzarella sticks. Hoy vamos a probar los fray mozzarella sticks de chilis. The idea is to just emphasize the sensory aspects of the food you're eating.

9:32I've been craving this for the longest time. 10 out of 10. which I think is the important thing here for trying to understand why Dubai chocolate is everywhere. If a thing doesn't look good now, it won't be as popular as something that does because of how popular video apps are.

9:55So the fact that you bite it in this chocolate bar and it oozes out effectively like delicious looking green slime is the marketing. like it's the marketing is literally baked in right it's like it's gooey and the goo itself is kind of like a surprise it's not the goo you expect the visual of it though like i can't help but thing just looks exactly like guacamole or like salsa verde and so like on camera it looks like you're just biting into chocolate a bunch of like guacamole is coming out i think that every time i see a chocolate thing it does look like a chocolate bar filled with guacamole it doesn't look like something, if I just saw this video, I wouldn't stop scrolling, and I also wouldn't necessarily want to eat the chocolate.

10:38I would think this person's deliberately eating something gross. And the thing that's green is pistachio cream. Yeah, it's like a spread made of pistachio. And who is this person in the original video? And what does she have to do with the person who actually invented the chocolate? So this video is posted by Maria Vejera. She's a beautiful woman on the internet and people send her food to eat because that's like a job you can have in the 21st century. I'm not even kidding. Unlike a normal and real job, which would be commenting on the significance of a beautiful person on the internet. Yeah. So like, here's her channel.

11:11So she's got 3 million followers. She basically just eats food in the United Arab Emirates. And so the Dubai angle to this, I think is what's important to kind of wrap her head around, which is like, there are like a couple of major cities now that seem to have an entire industry based around creating viral food for viral people to eat to go viral. I mean, there's a section of New York now that has, I had one of the worst burgers of my entire life at a chicken joint I went to that I had to wait two hours in line for. And it was like a donut chicken burger. And it was awful. But like, everyone in there was only eating it to film it to put it on Instagram.

11:48And so, you know, if you think of Dubai as like a giant shopping mall, sort of like the nexus of all late-stage capitalism. She's just trying viral stunt food in her car and then going viral on TikTok for it. If you want to go very high level with this, the fact that you're watching this beautiful, very skinny woman eat gigantic desserts, that is aspirational. It's this idea that all video on the internet as a form of pornography because algorithmic platforms have reduced it to that. And when you say a form of pornography, do you mean that it's all sexualized or that it's all fueled by desire?

12:27Yeah, it's sort of like you're watching someone else do something that you wish you could do and you're gratifying yourself that way. So you are watching this super, super skinny, fit, beautiful person eat junk food in their car because, like, that's not possible. Like, it's not possible to live that life and stay that way. I mean, the word for this is mukbang. Maria, she's effectively doing mukbangs, but... Give me just for, like, my mom listening, literally, what is mukbang? Mukbang started in Korea. It's a Korean word. It's a portmanteau of the word for eating and a broadcast. And so you basically watch typically beautiful women eat gigantic amounts of food.

13:11And it's like the reason this works as internet content is because, one, you're like, oh, I'm surprised that the thin person's eating the food that I try to avoid as a not thin person. But also, it's like, when you say pornographic, it's almost like aspirational. It's like we want to believe in a world where we could eat tasty food and be thin, young, and beautiful. Sure, yes. And it's like, okay, for most of the existence of video, we only understood what certain kinds of video made people feel. Pornography being one of the first ones. We You realize you can watch porn and you get horny. Cool.

13:47With the advent of user-generated video in the 21st century, we're now learning that there's more kinds of gratifying, stimulating video you can watch. You can watch people make slimes, or you could watch hours of temple-run footage, or you could watch a live stream of a woman eating nothing but french fries for eight hours. Or you could watch ASMR content. It's stimulating for reasons that it just is. so let me just make sure because I think you're I think this is an insightful theory and I just want to make sure I fully understand it which is like when you say that everything on the internet is pornographic you don't mean that all the video people watch they watch to be sexually aroused what you mean is that like before the internet when people watched videos usually more often than not they were watching stories and like we thought we'd watch stories because they had a beginning middle and end and like they had morals and feelings and whatever because with the internet people make things purely to an intentional algorithm, not like to a production studio that has ideas and notes.

14:48We've learned that the same way porn is not really a story. Porn is like people will watch images of naked people because it arouses them. There's lots of images people watch that they're drawn to because it activates some feeling they like to have. And those images don't need to be stories. They're just like stimulating in different and surprising ways. And what the internet has discovered is lots of things that work like porn, even though, you know, if somebody walked into the room when you were watching it, you would not slam your laptop. Yeah, we've reduced video content on the internet to raw stimuli.

15:20Yes. And so if you're watching like a beautiful woman eat a really expensive chocolate bar in a really fancy car, there's like a bunch of different parts of your brain that light up. and you just want to watch more and more of it, which is how this woman, Maria Veyera, has tens of millions of views on this video and it's her just eating fancy desserts that ooze all over her as she eats them. And that's her whole job.

15:50So this is part of Ryan's theory of the internet right now. In the old world, we watched TV shows, which showed us stories interrupted periodically by commercials for products like candy. Today, we don't really watch TV, and a lot of the online video we watch isn't quite story. It's sometimes closer to raw stimulation. A beautiful woman in Dubai eating a gloppy, visually arresting candy bar. That content itself, a kind of infinite commercial. After the break, Ryan expands on this Dubai chocolate theory of the internet a little bit more. How does an idea for a viral chocolate bar go from the mind of an engineer in Dubai to a food influencer to seemingly everywhere at the same time?

16:34How is the virality we get from Chinese social media different from the viralities that came before? That's after these ads.

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19:37Welcome back to the show. I wanted Ryan Broderick to just trace for me this chocolate's path through the internet to see what we could learn as we watched it gloop through the pipes. I asked him to start at the first step. How does Dubai chocolate go from the person who invents it to the influencer eating it in her car? So companies send influencers these products for free. So in this case, the influencer, Maria Vejera, she was sent those bars by Sarah Hamouda, who was the original engineer that created Dubai Chocolate. Oh, got it. Okay, so it's the inventor of the chocolate is like, I should send out free samples.

20:16To this viral woman, exactly. And hopefully she'll want to make a video. But the chocolate had been around for a couple years, but they're like, here, have a promotional chocolate bar. Yeah, exactly. God, she must be so happy she sent that chocolate bar. You should send her search engine to listen to in her car. I bet there's a fee. I bet there's a fee, and I bet I can't afford it. But I bet it's worth it. Yeah. Could have a bunch of Dubai teenagers listening to search engine. Honestly, nothing would make me happier. But if you're trying to understand how TikTok is involved here, you have to understand that TikTok is not primarily a video platform.

20:55TikTok is based off Duyuan, its Chinese sister app. And it's part of what would be called like social shopping or like social e-commerce platforms in China, which are very popular. And the way they function is like they let people post stuff on there, but they also want to sell you stuff. And so TikTok doesn't want to create culture with trends, which is like the American misunderstanding. It's the misunderstanding that fuels like all of the moral panics about TikTok, like at the highest levels of our government right now. TikTok doesn't give a crap about whether or not it's like influencing culture.

21:30It wants to influence you to buy the same product and talk about it. Wait, and help me understand, because I really, TikTok, I've said this before in public on this podcast, but this generation of internet, I have just mostly sat out. I don't go to the bathroom and get on TikTok. I don't get on TikTok on the subway. I'm not on TikTok when I should be paying attention to the dinner table. I've skipped it. How is, when you say it's not, this is a social media platform that doesn't want to drive culture. It just wants to get people to buy stuff. How is that different than Instagram, Twitter when it was Twitter, even Facebook?

22:05What's the meaningful step change here? It's the reverse. So let's do YouTube or Instagram. I think it's the closest. So YouTube and Instagram, the idea was we could destabilize Hollywood by allowing anyone to make video content, visual content. And that would mean we have an infinite television that can produce things that could have never been produced with the studio system. And then we can get a lot of people hooked on that and watch it all day long. And then we can put ads on it. TikTok's the reverse. So it's like, if we can get everyone to make ads, then those ads can become culture. So instead of making culture to sell ads, it's what if we got people to make ads that happen to create culture?

22:50It's the total inverse of it. It's funny. it's like the way TikTok consumerism works is you see a commercial for something and then you're offered the opportunity to film your own commercial in which you are the star. Exactly. And then you wonder if that commercial might also go viral. And what does that look like functionally? Dubai chocolate, LeBouBous, matcha, Stanley cups. It has become more and more pronounced actually since the pandemic. Although recently TikTok has kind of fallen off in a really weird way. Like there aren't as many memes happening on there. There's not as much sort of like high level cultural discourse.

23:23And there's a theory that my researcher Adam and I have been kicking around that actually TikTok is throttling itself in the U.S. to fly under the radar of the possible band that still hovers over them. But we're not really sure yet. But for the last, let's say, four or five years, once a quarter, there'll be some product that emerges out of TikTok that just takes over the whole country. But how is that a good business model for TikTok as a company? Like, my assumption is that the woman who invents Dubai chocolate, her business does well. The influencer who gets more attention going viral on Dubai chocolate, like, that's good for her business.