Good afternoon, Michael Malis here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. We have with us a guest who has been a long time coming. Colin Moriarty. Colin, we've been trying to do this for

a few years now, I think you run last 10 media, you host Secret Symbols, which is a PlayStation podcast. I got to tell you I was an Nintendo kid and I'm old enough and annoyed and annoying enough that I was also like a DC Comics kid, so like if anyone likes Marvel, it's a complete non starter. For me, and like Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, so for me, and I'm obviously team Debbie Gibson, because she wrote her own songs, there has to be some little animus between me and you on that front.

Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I grew up an Nintendo kid too before PlayStation even existed. Nintendo didn't lose me totally until the week, and then I was I was out, but I love Nintendo. The NES is my favorite console of all time, so yeah, and if you're bored, I recommend to people, those stupid games you watch as a kid that you couldn't get through, sit and watch a walk through on YouTube. It's a lot of fun, particularly Athena, a game which made absolutely no sense at the time.

I hate that game. That's a game. That game's notorious with my brother and I SNK. Yeah, off one of the worst games ever. Yeah, but you have no idea what you're trying to do, but there's people who have figured it out who have more autism than me, so if you go to YouTube and watch the playthrough, it's like, oh, this is how the game actually ends. Now Colin, one of the things I want to talk to you about, and I have this whole long speech ready, because when you work in social media, you know what the responses are going to be with the actually guys going to say, and you're anticipatory.

So let me give my speech, then I'll ask you your question. Okay, you are one of the few people or one of several people, excuse me, who was canceled.

Life's over. It's a rap career's done, and now you're thriving. And that's a story. People don't get to hear, because there's all this talk about cancel culture. And in my opinion, cancel culture is not as bad as it has been a few years ago. And this is where the screaming starts. Let me get ahead of it.

All I'm saying is, I'm not saying cancel a country's gone. I'm not saying cancel culture's good. I'm not saying it's not a big deal to get canceled. All I'm saying is it's better to have AIDS in 2023 than in 1987.

Things have improved. It doesn't mean they're acceptable. I'm just saying, and one big example of this is Elon Musk taking over Twitter, because it used to be, you got what four websites, if you're knocked all four platforms, if you knocked up all those four, you're done.

And now, even if there's one, it's not great. It's not good. This is not where we want to be. That's what I'm saying, Kathy Newman. I'm just saying, this is progress in the right direction. Now you had a tweet that in retrospect. And this also speaks to my point, it's almost shocking that this is something that would get anyone in trouble.

Can you tell that whole story? Sure. Yeah, it's very anodine when you go back and look at it. I don't even understand what happened really. But in the storm, it was different. So I was senior editor a long time ago of IGN, which is a huge video game website. And I was there for a long time since 2002 to 2014.

And in 2014, I left to co-found a company called Kind of Funny, which still exists today. And I did that until early 2017 in March of 2017. I tweeted during the hashtag day without a woman or day without, yeah, day without a woman or women. I don't even remember what it is anymore. And I tweeted out a piece and quiet. And then just the hashtag and just something really added. And I actually remember, it's funny because I remember so clearly sending the tweet because I was sitting with my ex-girlfriend at the time.

So it was like, this is funny, right? And then I literally went to an Uber and went to work. So it was like, I didn't even think of anything.

This is the kind of tweet someone writes when they're on the toilet, right? It's completely like a brain fart. It's a silly joke. It's irreverent. You're just real back, you're bandwagoning and what the trending tweet of the day is, it's neither here nor there.

And it's the kind of joke that you would see unlike any dopey sitcom. It's just so innocuous that anyone would take Umbridge at this.

If anything, the offensiveness is the laziness of it. It's like, oh, women don't shut up. This is like 1950s humor.

Yeah, it's horrible. I mean, I referred to it as, you know, Archie Bunker and 70 years were, you know, something like from married with children and some totally calling peg that or something like that.

I got into the car and I was just going to work. And then it really all blew up that day. But there is context, which is, I was in an open Republican and open conservative in the games industry.

So I feel like with many cancellations, at least in my opinion, there's always something and then they'll try to figure out something to destroy you with. And I think that that that was just the nexus of those two things.

They find the target. And then, and by the way, this is one of the big reasons I'm an anarchist, right? Like they Al Capone is obviously not a good guy. Al Capone should have been in jail.

They didn't put him in jail for tax evasion. They just got him for tax evasion. Cause like, this is what we get him for. Right. And this works the same exact way. This guy's a target. He's got to be destroyed. Oh, good. We got it.

Ladies, gentlemen, we got him. Now we got this dopey tweet that if anyone else who wasn't it. And by the way, the other context is, this is right after the Trump inauguration.

And there was that whole, the whole narrative that now that Trump is president, like people will be able to date rape it will. And it'll be if anything mandatory.

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