Agartha explained, and hot girls revolt on BookTok

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. What do Beatles member Sir Paul McCartney, YouTube megastar Mr Beast and former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg all have in common? They're all being discussed in the new season of Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast which explores the lives and fortunes of the world's super rich. That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now, search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Hi, Top Commenters. If you're loving the podcast and listening to us unpick what's popping up on your social media feeds, then we would love to see you in person.

0:36We are going to be recording the podcast live at Crossed Wires Festival in Sheffield. It's going to be on Friday, the 3rd of July, and you can sign up for free tickets at crosswires.live slash fringe. So, Marianna, today on Top Comment, we're going to talk about, first of all, this viral photograph that appears to depict Donald Trump on the lawn of the White House, standing next to three sort of vampiric, freakishly tall figures with long blonde hair, pale skin and red coats. And whether this photograph is evidence of the existence of a mythical realm known as Agartha. If you don't know what that is, you will by the end of the podcast.

1:14You will. It's the kind of image that pops up and poses the age old question of, is it AI, isn't it? And what the hell is any of this about? The age old question that only existed as of two years ago. We solved the mystery of Trump posing with aliens at the White House that went viral. So who are these people in these uniforms? He put it up during the opening ceremonies and immediately took it down. This is just Trump trying to prepare us for more disclosure and to possibly meet aliens in our future. We've been doing some digging into these images and where they've come from and why people are sharing them.

1:47And they have spawned a whole range of conspiracy theories, one of which is that Donald Trump had somehow met with the Norwegian Kingsguard, which if you Google them, they do not look like these people. Well, they don't wear red. They wear black. Yeah. And they also don't look like sort of extraterrestrial beings. Yeah, exactly. So that one's out. We're not just going to be doing Agatha and the conspiracy content and some of the toxicity around that. Matt, we're also going to be talking about some toxicity on BookTok. Matt loves BookTok. I've made a foray into BookTok for this podcast and I didn't like what I saw.

2:22Some people love it, though. And that is in part why it inspired such a strong reaction to one creator deciding to trademark this term, Hot Girls Read. And we're going to get into that.

2:39Do you frequent BookTok then? No, not really. No, I made a foray into it for this episode and I kind of hated it. Like it was just like I saw this one guy, he was recommending a book and he was like, this book is going to make you want to go straight to Paris, have oysters, drink wine, like sit at a cafe, scribble in your notebook and like drink a black coffee. And so there was no talk of like the book itself. It was all the aesthetic around the book. So BookTok is what we would consider like one side of TikTok, right? I feel like when TikTok came into existence during the pandemic or became really popular during the pandemic here in the UK, people would often talk about what side of TikTok are you on?

3:15And BookTok has so often been cited as one of the positive things about TikTok. But easy because if you want to find something to read and there is a particular creator or influencer who likes similar books to you, it's quite useful when someone's like, if you enjoyed this book, you might like this book, this book, this book and this book. And I guess because it's coming from an influencer, it can feel authentic, like they've actually read the books. It's a bit more personal, right? I even saw someone recommending having a cute outfit to read in on BookTok. I mean, I think... Well, it's a whole aesthetic as well.

3:44People do massively lean into it. It seems like an aesthetic culture. It seems like what these people are displaying as a love of books could more accurately be described as a kind of like an American fetishization of like Parisian cafe culture. Yeah, I think that there's like a performative section of BookTok. I would also say there's like an uber nerdy version of BookTok as well, which is like people who are obsessed with reading with a capital O who are like properly into it and have kind of like found their niche and area because they're like, great, I love reading and I want to tell everyone about it.

4:15And that's good, by the way. Yeah, that's good. If it's making more young people read things, that's good. Yeah, exactly. Particularly because young people are worried they might have to just stare at walls from now on. At least they can read, but they can't get their recommendations on TikTok. It's also a hugely valuable corner of the site, right? Because if you are like selling books, you're an author, you're a publisher, what have you, if you can get on book talk like the the reach and influence you can have like we're talking millions and millions of views here and there are some books that appear to have kind of very specifically blown up on tiktok take for example um it ends with us i mean that's obviously got some quite difficult topics in it as a book but these kind of like romance novels and books as well that have been romanticized and it's not just new debut novels that it's helping blow up but it's also like old stuff.

5:02Classics. It's bringing back classics as well. And also, I guess, because people are giving strong opinions, often they'll be critiquing books. They'll be talking about what they love or what they hate. Or crying as a result of finishing a book is a big genre. Yeah, yeah. Or like this changed my life, this book, basically. It was transformative because it inspires a strong emotional reaction, which to some extent explains why it's such a popular corner of TikTok. It means that it also inspires a bit of a ding dong between creators sometimes. Yeah, and now it has become a necessary and integral part of the literary marketing world, right, is getting your book on BookTok.

5:36Yeah, yeah. And actually, it's a good example of where all publicity is not necessarily good publicity. Because these creators build these kind of like mini empires of followers around them who really trust what they say, if they tell you a book is rubbish and you've agreed with everything else that they've recommended to you and you think, oh, I really like their stuff, you'll probably follow their lead. So it can be sort of like quite detrimental in that sense. And I think it's worth noting that kind of micro-influencer culture that exists around BookTok because that helps us to understand the controversy we're talking about today, which involves this creator called Ali Rose Co.

6:08And she is someone who's been incredibly popular on BookTok, but with a very niche audience, if that's the right word, like a very committed but small audience. A lot of people listening probably haven't heard of her. And she's not been having a good week. A cult following, exactly. Because she's tried to trademark this phrase, hot girls read. And when I talk about a small following here, we're talking about, you know, we're not talking tiny. We're talking hundreds of thousands of followers, which in influencer land is still sort of in the micro influencer territory. But obviously to the average person is still a lot of people.

6:39So this book talk influencer trademarked the phrase hot girls read for its use on what, like T-shirts and notebooks. Yeah. So the issue is, is that it's actually a phrase that has become pretty sort of prevalent on book talk. People use it a lot. I mean, it's like a fairly common phrase in general. and we can get a bit more into where it came from in a minute. Quite a few users have said that they've received these sort of, what they classed as threatening messages, e.g. like you need to stop selling this merch. And then she herself had also posted basically telling everyone like I've trademarked this so you need to stop selling this stuff that has Hot Girls Read on it.

7:12And you know, these are like small creators who might have like an Etsy shop or they're selling their own merch. Obviously that didn't go down well. Trademarking Hot Girls Read like you fucking created it is not only diabolical, it's absolutely fucking insane. And I've seen so many think pieces on here. I literally just watched a video where somebody's like, maybe it's a good thing. No, the fuck, it's not a good thing. Let's not try to make this into something it's fucking not. Hot Girls Read, before that bitch started, her business was already popping. What do you actually mean that you are selling unlicensed merch and you have the fucking audacity to trademark something?

7:46You have got to be kidding me. By now, we've all heard about the girl who has somehow managed to trademark the phrase hot girls read, right? How batshit bonkers that is aside. I was so curious. What did you trademark the phrase for? So I go to her website. The stuff she's selling is genuinely so offensively boring that I have to wonder why she even bothered with the trademark in the first place. A lot of people were really upset because they were like, hold on a second. Like the whole thing about book talk is we're all in it together. That's not the vibe that this gave. Right. Because legally she's allowed to trademarked you don't have to be the first person to have said something to trademark it if she's selling merchandise with hot girls reading around it she just needs to be the first one to trademark it yeah and that's the issue because people were like you didn't come up with this it's not like you know there are some people thing for them yeah well it's really interesting like i feel like this happens quite a lot doesn't it on on social media in general look for example at patrick tar you might have heard of him he's a massive makeup influencer he often does like other influencers makeup or celebrity makeup etc and you know launches products on social media is very sort of social media first and savvy.

8:49And he's actually had to come out and apologise after he tried to copyright this phrase transition blush, which was a product line, which is inspired by this widely used technique that other makeup influencers have posted about. And one in particular, and people were upset because they were like, hang on a second, this other influencer coined this term. That's not fair to kind of take it away from her. Like there are some phrases that become hugely associated with particular influencers. I can think, for example, of one influencer who does these like really interesting debriefs about Love Island on TikTok, the reality TV show.

9:22She'll be like, let's get into it. And that phrase has become sort of synonymous with her. Like it's like her phrase. The controversy here is that this phrase is so prevalent. It's a phrase that lots of different people have used and spoken about, even though she's used it a lot. So their criticism and their fury of over her trademarking Hot Girls read comes from the notion that actually their community owns the their community and she's not being a good member of the supposed community by trademarking this but also lots of book talk influencers are selling merchandise lots of them are essentially small business owners so there's some tension between the idea of this book talk being a kind of community of creators who are all in it together for their love of books or a network of small businesses who are competing for sales on merchandise.

10:10Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And ultimately also BookTok thrives because Big Book. Big Book relies on it for marketing. Yeah, exactly. So that also is in part sort of funding the influencers and you can see how influencers want to kind of take a bit of ownership of that because otherwise their content is effectively being monetized by the publishers, but they might not be being paid to be involved with that. Right. To get more answers about what has been going on with the scandal on BookTok, we did speak to a booktok creator called chloe palmieri she sent us some voice notes and this was her explanation of why the whole trademark thing has caused such aggro on booktok this trademark caused so much outrage among booktok users because ali didn't come up with the phrase at all her decision impacted hundreds if not thousands of small businesses and so many shops were gonna just lose out on money and lose out on stock.

11:05She trademarked a phrase that everyone uses, which just ultimately felt really unfair. And I think the way she went about it, she was telling everyone like, hey, if you're a small business, take this down because I own it now. But she gained a lot of her popularity selling unlicensed book merch. So it just felt very ironic and surprising that she did this at all. As I mentioned, BookTok is kind of known for people getting in quite heated debates with one another. I think, like, ostensibly, if you've never heard of it, you think it might be quite, like, wholesome and cutesy and let's have a cup of tea and talk about a book.

11:42Whereas a lot of it is people very strongly expressing their opinions. And on this issue, Chloe actually says that BookTok have been pretty united in saying, hold up, this flies in the face of what we're comfortable with as a community, inverted commas. Book Talk really united on this issue in a way that I haven't seen before. People were immediately signing petitions, raising money, trying to figure out how to get this trademark overturned and canceled. And within a few days, the official paperwork to challenge the trademark had been sent in. and Ali had also posted for any Hot Girls Read merch listings to be taken down by a certain date.

12:20So in turn, people were creating videos, sharing posts about where to go buy it so that everyone could go support these small businesses before they just turned into dead stock and lost money. Everyone really banded together, but BookTok usually is not unified. I mean, people have very toxic and controversial opinions people have been very severely bullied and personally attacked for saying they read over a hundred books in a year i mean just like very outlandish things right because this is the other thing about book talk because it's there's a performative element which is a competitive element of how many books have i read this year yeah yeah and like reading quickly and being like and showing off your book competing on yeah yeah yeah showing off your bookshelves The aesthetic of the books.

13:06Yeah. Okay, let's get a little bit into the origins of Hot Girl and Hot Girls Read. We were joking about Hot Girls that osen. Who osen? Open Source Intelligence. Open Source Intelligence, yeah. We could maybe trademark that on Top Comment. It has a community of like one or two people of which you are one of the 50 % of that, basically. In fact, it's a very small pool of people. Anyways, it all kind of comes back to Hot Girls Summer. You may remember 2019, Megan Thee Stallion. Megan Thee Stallion, yeah. And that single Hot Girl Summer kind of inspired the whole like hot girl everything. There's all sorts of hot girls do whatever.

13:41But Hot Girl Reading Club was one Instagram account that was launched in February of 2020. So just after that. So, you know, this phrase predates Ali Rose Co. talking about it. And she only seemed to start selling this merchandise in 2023. I mean, if we're saying that Hot Girl Summer is a Megan Thee Stallion thing, then another argument that's been made by some people on BookTok is, oh, hang on a second, is this a white woman who's essentially trademarking a phrase that actually belonged to black women before that? And is that problematic in some way? So there's many layers to this hot girl analysis.

14:13Yeah, which may seem ridiculous as an isolated allegation, but a lot of internet slang that has been adopted by white people did just start as basically black internet slang, like clock it, period. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it can be actually quite hard to, even in this case, trace back the original origin. Often it can kind of have like different influences who use it at a time, popularize it, which is why the trademark thing feels very... Vulture-like. Yeah, yeah. And it just feels like there's a really serious tension between a trademark and then like the way that social media works and the way language on social media works.

14:47Obviously, all of this has been pointed out to Ali Rose Co, who then decided to post an apology video where she promised to withdraw the trademark and redirect the profits from the Hot Girls Read merchandise to charity. Hi, I want to talk about my trademark. First and foremost, the trademark is being surrendered. It is in the process of being filed right now to be abandoned. But more importantly, I want to say I'm so sorry to every small business that I harmed in doing this. The decision was made more as a business strategy decision than a human being decision. And I take full accountability for that.

15:20That was entirely wrong on my end. I hear you and I take that on the chin 100%. I want to clear up the last within the last week I've seen a lot of screenshots and messages from people saying that I sent them a cease and desist or I sent them a message on Etsy to remove any hot girls read items. I want to say none of those came for me. I mean some apology videos go down quite well if people feel like they're genuine and authentic. This one has had quite a mixed response. There are a lot of people that are really annoyed and feel like it's a cynical move and that she didn't have a choice and that ultimately a lot of her audience who she relies on to create the kind of content she makes had turned on her and she basically had to come out and say I'm going to reverse the trademark and I'm going to give the money to charity and so on and so forth.

16:00Someone who reacted quite positively to the video was the BookTok influencer who we were chatting about before, Chloe Palmieri and this is what she had to say about the apology and feeling like some of the trolling has gone a bit far. The personal attacks that Ali's received over all of this are definitely way too far. People are so quick to jump on someone and rip apart anything and everything about them without any consideration that there's a real person reading all of this. It's totally fine for people to be upset about all of this, but threatening her, going after her looks, trying to leak her address, it's just way too over the top.

16:36And then regarding her apology video, I definitely respect her for putting it out. She took accountability. She said it was a bad business decision, but I do think she took way too long to address any of it? I think this is where we're getting to this like post-authenticity era of social media which is what made BookTok good originally was it was people a bit like the average person just sitting in their bedroom being like by the way I really liked reading this as it becomes something that publishers and authors themselves and agents look to capitalize on its authenticity has started to wane to some extent and that authenticity problem is the issue that I think so many of the booktokers who were upset about this, this to them represented booktop becoming more capitalist.

17:19Ultimately, the lesson this teaches everyone, but I guess particularly the influencer in its centre, Ali Rose Co., is that when you build a platform on authenticity, when you build a platform that's about being genuine and part of a community and whatever, your personality and who you are is the brand. And so any decision you make will reflect on how your following perceive you And they care about how they perceive you as a person, not just as someone selling them books. They care about you as someone whose opinion they trust, whose expertise they respect. And the minute that you undermine that in any way, it's kind of a bit irreversible.

17:53If people stop liking them, they stop being able to have the level of influence that they had. Any cultural brand that exists in the cultural sphere and has an audience that they must monetise in order to turn any kind of profit is constantly struggling with where the line is on how much bullshit they can market to their audience and get away with it while still retaining authenticity. That is literally what people are paid six figure salaries to figure out. What do Beatles member Sir Paul McCartney, YouTube megastar Mr Beast and former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg all have in common? They're all being discussed in the new season of Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast which explores the lives and fortunes of the world's super rich.

18:36That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now, search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

18:52Now we're going to talk about Agartha. I feel like this is like the side of the internet that you are much more interested in. That you and the producers are finally letting me talk about it, Gartha. It's exactly the kind of weird rabbit hole that I love on the internet. And the reason we're talking about it is because of this image we mentioned at the beginning, right? This Donald Trump with these long blonde haired characters. Yeah. So in this image. Which appears to be AI generated, at least definitely the one that's on the lawn of the white. It's almost certainly AI generated. And it's gone hugely viral.

19:22It's been viewed 60 million times at the time of recording. and lots of right-wing influencers have said that these three beings are Agarthans. I've even heard people say like this image has set the left back. By showing Trump with delegates from Agartha, it sort of proves all sorts of right-wing ethno-nationalist conspiracy theories. So what is Agartha? Come with me, child, and I shall tell you. So - Down the Shayin rabbit hole. Yeah. First of all, what you need to know is there are, for a while, and this was bigger a few years ago, but it's coming back, hundreds of thousands of videos on TikTok that all display this mythical realm of Agartha.

20:03They're hugely popular amongst young people. In the classic Agartha video, it always has the drum and bass remix of Down Under by Men at Work.

20:22And it takes you underneath usually the Antarctic, where there's this underground hidden utopia realm ruled over by a blonde haired, blue eyed, reincarnated Charlie Kirk. And to get in, you have to drink a white monster energy drink, at which time a figure with a oversized head called Jakob lets you into Agartha. Sometimes Trump's there. Sometimes Epstein's there. Sometimes Jakob is depicted as Peter. Do they like Epstein being there? There's so many things. I have so many questions. There's lots of questions. The main thing, though, is like you can imagine, given all that, like what all these parents and teachers are thinking.

21:01They're like, what the hell is going on? Why is my son sharing these videos? But with like very extreme political. Yes. So there are political. There are political undertones. And there's a reason that there are like oftentimes there will be subliminal Nazi occult messages like the Sonnengrad, the Nazi black son will flash for a second. And look, most people sharing this, they're sharing because it's funny and weird. Right. but they don't realize that they may also be sharing Nazi occult ideology, which we can get into. But a lot of the tone of these videos, it's a discussion over who gets into Agartha and who doesn't.

21:32Is this something that has become more popular with the advent of TikTok? Like when did this post Charlie Kirk being assassinated? Like when did it sort of blow up? Charlie Kirk didn't appear in the early Agartha videos. He kind of came later. But it all comes back to the Nazis, really the OG conspiracy theorists in many ways some Nazis especially Heinrich Himmler believed that the Aryans were actually like a kind of divine race that may have come from some kind of mythical realm and there's lots of different theories around this but a lot of these theories center around this idea that the earth is hollow okay and that like if you travel down the right kind of secret door in in like Tokyo subway or in some random temple in Asia you'll uncover the hollow earth and you will see you will eventually land upon the mythical realm of agartha which is also known as hyperborea there's also a variation of this myth that hitler never died he actually just traveled to antarctica and like lives in this underground civilization and is building a spaceship so some neo-nazis actually believe this uh a lot of people just find it funny and interesting um it's almost like a sort of fucked up fairy tale for one of the best yeah no it's It's like a kind of racist fairy tale.

22:44Yeah, yeah. But it's a racist fairy tale that the head of the SS kind of helped to spread. In some ways, I see parallels between this and when we see, you know, when we've spoken about it before, like when people see AI generated content and it's kind of like it doesn't matter whether they believe it's real or not. It's just that it further cements a view that they hold. it feels like myths like this do the same thing or serve the same purpose which is ultimately although a lot of people won't actually believe that there are people in these kind of weird underground empires or what have you it cements in their head the racist idea that white people are a superior race in some way yeah exactly and again most people sharing this just think it's funny and weird and they like the white monster energy drink that you have to drink to get in and they probably may not even notice the the monster the monster realized that this is what's happened on top of the white monster joke.

23:33It's a bit like Ikea and the Punch the Monkey. Yeah, I don't know if you'd... It's like accidental advertising for them. I'm not sure if you'd... More problematic. More problematic than Punch the Monkey, yeah. Yeah, so they probably think it's a joke. Most people are sharing it. But there is a lot of Nazi symbolism in them. So, for example, I mentioned the Black Sun, the Sonnengrad, and that demonstrates that at least the originators of these videos would have had significant knowledge of esoteric Nazism. There's something quite telling about that because it's this idea that in order to participate in either the creation or consumption of this content, you've basically got to kind of know this secret code that you've learned in some way, which is also the very nature of the Agarthen community, right?

24:14That they are somehow like superior. It's almost like makes you a part of it to be able to understand their code. Yeah, there's an aspirational, like hidden society element of it. And there's a sense in which is what people might call aesthetic camouflage. So it takes a dangerous neo-Nazi myth and dresses it up in a more palatable kind of sci-fi funny mythology. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, this is arguably dog whistle as well because in a lot of these videos, the number 271 appears in the background, which is a code for Holocaust denial because it represents this false theory that only 271 ,000 Jews died in the Holocaust.