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That's the Zendesk AI effect. Find out more at Zendesst.com. Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I-C-Y-M-I, or in case you missed it, Slate's podcast about internet culture.

And we're joined Stay on the pod by Slate's

senior writer Ben Mathis Lilley. Ben, welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be a part

of this cultural phenomenon. Yes, on your last week at Slate, no less. I know, I know. Bittersweet.

It's kind of like senior week. Like, anything goes. Exactly.

Yeah, I'm going to write a couple articles about politics on the internet.

I mean, maybe I should do something more fun than that.

That was the only thing I had planned.

I mean, yeah, you could literally kind of get away with whatever you want. Like, what are they going to do, ask you to leave?

Mm-hmm. I did get fired from a job on the last day once in high school. Oh, my God. Okay. So you could maybe break that record now here. Well, no, I want to stick it out this time.

Oh, yeah, fair enough, fair enough. So we are actually here to honor your past 11 years at Slate, where you wrote such pieces as,

wouldn't it be nice to get knocked out cold with a shovel for exactly six weeks and five days?

And that honestly needs no context, but in the context of it is awaiting the 2020 election where I felt very similar. And it actually led

to the creation of something called the shovel meter. Could you explain the shovel meter really

briefly? I think it was just like, I mean, how badly you wanted to get knocked out with a shovel

at any given time, right, given what was happening in the in the political discourse at, in the political discourse at the moment. Uh, you know, yeah, pretty self-explan. Like you said, I think people really just like immediately grasped for that concept. Um, you know, it's like one of those when you're writing stuff sometimes, it's like, okay, we've got a joke in Slack or whatever. And it's like, is that going to translate to people who are not already

talking to us about this exact subject yeah but that one like it just it just spoke to the moment

what would you say your personal shovel meter is right now in in this moment oh man it's pretty high

I mean I don't even know if we have to explain it to people but like it's a pretty dismal time

to be on the internet right now and in the American political sphere. So, I mean, people are asking me like this, you know, this weekend, I was with some, my extended family and they're like, are you excited to be not have to deal with this anymore? Because my new job is is not it's like not political focused and I was

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