Episode Transcript
Lula's WhatsApp Army in Brazil with Joao Biondi
Guest: Joao Biondi
Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, this is Matthew Remski with Antifascist Dad. Episode 56, Lula's WhatsApp Army in Brazil with Joao Biondi.
Joao Biondi: We had elderly people that don't vote for like 20 years getting out of their beds and saying, I'm gonna vote. We had people with oxygen tanks on their noses voting. We had people that couldn't walk being carried to vote. Like we did everything we could and it paid. You know, we have four years of democracy, which can be your last four years, we don't know. But we're gonna get very attached to those four years and we're gonna work very hard to make this democracy go even further. So I just wanna say to the people that are listening all around the world, it is worth your time and your work.
Matthew Remski: You can find me on bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. And the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to a second weekly episode. And this week it's an episode called what Students Accomplished in Serbia with writer Lav Mrenovic, in which we explore a very different social movement than the one we're talking about today. Former soccer hooligan turned neoliberal nerd and autocrat Aleksandar Vučić was not punched in the throat by a digital general leading 10 million digital warriors, but by a slow burning two-year anarcho-syndicalist model of student organization organizing that wiped out Serbia's old guard political class. It's a really fantastic, very interesting story. Very different story than the one I'm telling today, or that we're telling today. And I hope you can catch it on Patreon. And if not, it'll be up here on the main feed soon enough.
Also, I would direct you to all of the links in the show notes that support the data that's in this particular episode. But also you'll find a link to my book which is called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times.
And you can click on that, you can buy the book. If you've bought the book and read it, you can review it. And of course that helps a lot. I'm really grateful.
Okay, everybody, if you've been following my Instagram, you know that I've been engaging with a little bit of agitprop inspo from the win by Lula's Workers' Party over the fascist Bolsonaro criminal family.
And this is not because I'm under any illusion that Lula's reelected social democracy will cut out the root of capitalism, but because the strategists for his digital army have cracked a code that has baffled me for the past like seven years, I got into the podcasting world through the Conspirituality Project, in which my colleagues and I reported on and analyzed the rise of the chaotic, mostly online meme-fed conspiracy theory mongering MAGA movement and its ties to New Age and Christian charismatic leaders and content. We did really good work, and the approach I went in with was dictated by my liberal class habits that there is a marketplace of ideas that if I make the most persuasive argument to the anti-vax person about why for-profit medicine isn't really trying to poison them, or to the QAnon person about why their notion of the cabal is actually a little bit off, I'll just win. Sanity will be restored.
And even though I have always been a Marxist, this argument, it became clear, was structurally similar to the liberal plea for a more sane capitalism. As in if only we can be more precise in our communications and more ethical in our institutions, things will return to normal. But that's not true. And I knew it wasn't true when I was reminded of Sartre's words in Anti-Semite and Jew: Never believe that antisemites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly since he believes in words.
The antisemites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for having given ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument, but to intimidate and disconcert. Now if you listen to my interview with Max Haiven on The Player and the Played, his excellent book on 21st century fascism, you'll know that. Or I want you to know that he basically opens his book with that quote.
So like a central concept in the leftist tradition in reckoning with, well, how are we actually going to reason our way out of absolute irrationality? It doesn't really work.
And as the MAGA crowd battered at the Capitol and then rallied to drag Kamala Harris into humiliation in 2024, it was painfully clear that they were not playing on the level of debate and persuasion that fascists have gone all in on digital manipulation and that the fascist-aligned tech overlords have given them A playground, because, as Sartre says, they're not beholden to fair play. In fact, they hold fair play in contempt.
And I watched fellow liberal persuaders get their asses beat over and over again with no consolation but to say, well, at least I stuck to my values. At least. As Michelle Obama said, when they went low, I went high.
But something additional broke inside me when I picked up Sarah Stein Lubrano's book Don't Talk About Politics, and then interviewed her on this show way back on episode 10. So this is more than a year ago.
Gathering piles of empirical evidence, Sarah basically says that argumentation rarely changes political beliefs, and this is because beliefs are bound up with identity, so challenges register as threats, not as information.
Debates, persuasive media, even protests have little measurable effect on what people believe or how they vote.
Cognitive dissonance makes everything worse, because when evidence or behavior conflicts with a belief, people tend to explain the conflict away and hold the belief more firmly.
And her answer to all of this is that you have to build experiences and relationships, because these aspects of human life precede belief. They are the materials beneath belief. She's trying to move people away from the idealism of the persuasion paradigm.
We make some changes in our lives and then our political beliefs change as a result.
This is like a key mantra within her book.
Lived experience, relationships and community shift views more than persuasion does.
Social isolation, this is the next book that she's working on, erodes trust and tolerance, while shared structures such as neighborhood co-ops build political awareness. Now, if you hear the phrase neighborhood co-op and you go, oh my God, that's a lot of work. That's going to take a lot of time. That's right, because she's describing a very long game.
And so the question remains, what are we to do in the online space in the meantime?
Well, imagine my surprise to come across not only the news stories of Lula's digital army of 10 million on WhatsApp, breaking the algorithm away from the fascists favor, but to read the operating manual put together by two writers about this movement, writers who I only know by their Twitter handles. So one is Yacobvs and the other one is Dengxiaopix. So I'll put them in the show notes as well.
I've been in touch with them and they've agreed to an interview here soon. But, you know, never mind that. Let me just read the basics section of their mini manual of Informational Insurgency, or Janonism, named for André Janones, the digital strategy guy at the center of Lula's win.
Politics is a permanent interplay of forces operating at different levels, converging and or colliding in the struggle for hegemony over how the realities we inhabit are shaped.
Social media are fundamental components in shaping the realities people inhabit today, constantly connected through their devices.
Networks are therefore a fundamental terrain in the struggle over reality.
The networks we inhabit are dominated by digital platforms owned by a small group of large North American corporations with their own interests and supranational prerogatives.
Our ways of constructing realities are subject to these platforms.
Our while we cannot escape their capture, we can use their own operating logic to advance other interests. This is the path we will set out.
Each platform has its own logic, which is algorithmic, commercial, and relational at the same time.
Platforms are machines in which algorithms capture people in a particular kind of trance from which value is extracted.
Understanding a platform's logic means understanding how it produces and modulates realities.
On the one hand, this means understanding the kinds of behavior it spontaneously favors. On the other, understanding how to intervene and change the course of this process.
Over the past decade, certain political forces acquired this understanding and used it to storm liberal democracies around the planet in collusion with international financial power.
What is now called the far right feeds on the spontaneous workings of platforms, on a permanent trance that excites the basest impulses of moral horror, tribalism, the desire to destroy differences, and so on. The result is the accelerated entropization of institutions and the most basic conventions of coexistence. The spontaneity of networks favors the decline of whatever little civilizational order remains.
The old republican institutions lack the resources to contain this wave. They become hostages and accomplices of the new regime of power, while being progressively undermined in favor of regimes with fascist characteristics.
Janonism proposes that other forces appropriate these same platform mechanisms, instead of what networks spontaneously favor, train a mass of users to intervene in a coordinated way and hijack the algorithmic dynamic.
Space and time on social media are limited. Not everything posted circulates, and the algorithm selects content according to its capacity to generate spontaneous engagement. How much people will react to it positively or negatively? A mass offensive by committed users can hijack the algorithm on its own terms.
With the right content and above all, an enormous amount of directed informational power, it is possible to overflow and blow apart the dynamic of bubbles and occupy ever larger portions of the infosphere. The activity spontaneously favored by networks is replaced by the coordinated avalanche. The dream of a digital public sphere for deliberation through rational arguments is over only a force sufficient to produce hegemony in the infosphere can confront the political processes preying on what little civilization we have.
We must mobilize informational brute force.
So that is heavy. And I'll be analyzing bits and pieces of this theory over time. I'll be interviewing the writers, but I'm going to leave it there for now to talk with Joao Biondi about how this felt on the ground in the last two weeks before Lula sent Flávio Bolsonaro packing off to Florida.
Joao Biondi is a writer and content creator from Brasilia, Brazil. He has an international relations degree and is also a storytelling specialist. He analyzes fashion, film art, and the semiotics that build the symbiotic relation between pop culture and politics. Here's our conversation.
Joao Biondi, welcome to Antifascist Dad. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Joao Biondi: Thank you for inviting me.
Matthew Remski: First of all, congratulations on a powerful win over the Bolsonaro fascist gangsters. We'll get into how WhatsApp was central to this win, but before that, I'm just wondering whether Brazil's Gen Z especially has been frustrated for a while about how campaigns, especially on the progressive left, can be ineffective or academic or too polite.
I mean, Lula himself spits fire, but not online, or at least not before he's 80 years old. So has this been a theme that your generation has been working on for a while?
Joao Biondi: Totally. I mean, the first thing that I think is an image that will stick to our minds on the second round. When Lula was in second place in the first round is Ana Elisa. She's a Brazilian congresswoman that was elected and she's 21, and she gave an interview saying, we're going to lose. If we're not paying attention to the Internet, we are going to lose. And I think that shook us all up, because she was right.
Lula's campaign was already using the Internet, but not the way Gen Z uses it. Or not only Gen Z. Not the way we use the Internet nowadays. All of us.
They used to make the ads for the tv, and then they used to cut out and put it vertically on cell phones. But that's not the language of the Internet. No. So I think it actually became a meme. The first video Lula posted in his life in a selfie camera saying, let's go to the streets, let's talk to people. And it became a meme. Like if you go out with your friends on a Friday night, you post a picture with that audio. Like, let's go to the streets because people really engaged with that. But it was the first time in 80 years of Lula's life that he recorded himself on a cell phone talking directly to the camera and to the people. And he was like, I'm not gonna say he was proud of it, but he was constantly saying that, I don't have a cell phone.
Matthew Remski: Yeah,
Joao Biondi: I don't use a cell phone. And people were like, you have to change that to win the election. And he actually got a cell phone. He actually posted the video of him getting a cell phone as a present. And, well, he started using the Internet.
Matthew Remski: There's a real breakthrough there, because I know a lot of boomers up here in the Global north who almost take it as a mark of pride that they don't engage with this particular technology, that, you know, somehow it's. You know, it's beneath them or it's unserious or something like that. And I'm wondering, like, did he.
Is he just flexible that way?
Joao Biondi: I mean, Lula, he's known for listening to the people. Like, he is a.
He comes from the people. He's the first president in the history of Brazil that was not, like, from a very wealthy family or an entrepreneur, a big, big financial guy. So he learns very fast how to talk to people. The thing about cell phone is Jair Bolsonaro, the father of Flávio, when he was the president, he used to be very different. He had a cell phone. He used to make lives. I don't know if every day. I'm sorry, I didn't watch them, but he was making. They're probably
Matthew Remski: very bad.
Joao Biondi: They're very bad.
One of those lives he made, live streams he made is the infamous live, where he mocked people with COVID dying without air. So this is the kind of thing that happened in Brazil. And I think because Bolsonaro was very connected to using the cell phone, making lives, it kind of became something that the far right does.
And then the left was like, let's not do that, because that's not how we grow. But they realized we need to do that if you want to win. We need to talk to the people the way the far right is talking to the people, or else they're gonna be talking alone with the people, and we're gonna lose the people for them.
Matthew Remski: So along comes André Janones, who is like, he's a politician before. He's a political career before, but then he becomes a kind of communications guru for Lula. And I'm really intrigued by his willingness to play as dirty as the fascists do in this very charism.
I think a lot of us whiter leftists up here in the global north think of ourselves as being above all of that. But tell me how he strikes you and how he came onto the scene and what people's impressions have been of him as this campaign has developed.
Joao Biondi: Not only you guys up north, lots of people here also think the same, that we shouldn't go that low.
But Janones is.
He likes, if they play dirty, we're gonna play filthy. Cause we're gonna win.
And that's his motto. And he does that. I'm from Brasilia, so I'm very close to politics because it's the capital.
I think it was August or something. There was this event where they called lots of influencers and people from the Internet to gather around and hear kind of lectures from very important people in the campaign. And Janones was already there. It's very important to remember that Janones was a member of the campaign since the beginning. He was just not allowed, let's put it this way, to do the things he did in the second round. Because people got really, really scared and desperate on the second round.
Because here in Brazil. Just a quick update.
The first president that ever won an election coming second on the first round was Lula last Sunday. So when we were in second, we were like, we lost. That never happened before. We need to do something that history have never seen before. And I think because of that, Janones said, well, let me do things you've never seen before then, because this is what we're gonna need,
Matthew Remski: you know, put me in coach. And everybody says, okay, I guess there's no choice.
Joao Biondi: I guess we have to try everything, you know. But Janones was, like you said, a politician before he was first elected in 2018, the same year Bolsonaro was elected. He became a big deal in Brazil because of the truck drivers strike, which literally stopped the country. I remember I was like, I was listening, reading the news, listening to the TV and saying, okay, there is no gas. And I called my mother and said, I'm going to take the car and I'm going to put as many gas as I can because I don't know when we're going to have it again.
And I was riding the city around and. But again, I'm in Brazil, I'm in the capital. So it was very hard, that strike. And I was looking for a gas station with no line, because it was like 10, 20 meters of line, sometimes a kilometer.
And that's when he rose to the Internet. He was elected in 2018, and then in 2022, he was a presidential candidate. He was a candidate for 2022 election at the beginning, because we don't have primaries here, so. So if your party is allowed legally to run for president, because there is some legal issues you have to face, you can put a candidate. And he was a candidate for Avante, one of the small parties in Brazil.
But Avante this year, Augusto Cury was the candidate and they were third place. So I don't remember if they were. I think they were third place.
And so he became the candidate and then he dropped out of his campaign to help Lula. So he's been helping Lula since 2018, 2022. We have been around Janonism since 2022. But like I told you, this time around we needed to deliver a miracle to make Lula win. And so they gave the controls to Janones and said, do what you think you have to do, just get us some votes. And that's. I think this is an answer for the question you made before that shows how Lula is available to listening to people. Because he was listening to the Gen Z congresspeople that were elected, like Ana Elisa, like I said, but also Guilherme Cortez from São Paulo, who had lots of votes.
Janones, which is, I guess, part of the youth. He's not Gen Z, but he's part of the youth on politics.
So Lula listened to those people and decided to make things different. And he did, and we won. But what Janones did was like I told you, he said, I'm gonna play as dirty as they do. He knew what they were going to do and he had lots of very smart ideas. For example, I'm gonna give you an example.
Matthew Remski: Okay.
Joao Biondi: There was this Saturday, there was this idea that Flávio Bolsonaro was going to receive the key of the city in Salvador. He was being considered a citizen. And there was this ongoing rumor that he was going to try to fake an attempt of murder because that's how his father.
Matthew Remski: An assassination attempt?
Joao Biondi: Yes, that's how his father won the election. I don't know if you're aware, but Jair Bolsonaro had this assassination attempt with a knife in 2018. So there was this rumor going on that he was trying to fake this.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Joao Biondi: And so the idea was like to dress up people in red, which is the color of the party of Lula. And that people would be like making a lot of noise and a lot of problems on the event, because the event's supposed to be inside the House of Representatives, but they changed it to a public place out of a sudden. So we were all like, oh, something is happening. So what Janones did is on the same day, at the same time, he made all of us Lula supporters post to post a picture wearing the colors of Brazil.
Matthew Remski: Yes. Oh, the jerseys. The soccer jerseys. The
Joao Biondi: jerseys. Not only the jerseys, but the colors.
Use something yellow or green. If you don't have some clothes, you know, do some makeup. Because on that moment, if they tried to connect Lula supporters to red, on that moment, everyone was wearing Brazilian colors. So he kind of made the narrative been about us, not them. And this is how we win the election. Since 2018, when Jair Bolsonaro won his first election, the narrative is always about them, and we always have to defend ourselves. What Janones did in 2026 is let's make the narrative about us. Let's make them defend themselves. Because we don't have to run after an answer. They have to run after the answers about the questions we are going to ask. And I think this is genius, honestly.
Matthew Remski: Do you know, I'm going to come back to the football jerseys at the end, because there's something interesting about that with regard to where they emerge in 2013. But before I.
The Janones crowd has put out a whole manual where they articulate their strategy and they talk about some very heavy things. They say that politics at this point is a struggle for dominance over our inhabited realities and spaces. They say the deliberative digital public sphere is dead.
They say like this. Oh, this was amazing to read. The old Marxist value of changing consciousness has to be, like, sidelined at times, because that's not going to work when what. What you really have to do is dominate online space and create new realities. So was that all very impactful on how you began to think of your own participation in this campaign?
Did people have to get over some of their intellectual ideas that they had about how politics goes in order to participate?
Joao Biondi: Oh, definitely, because I'm a leftist, I'm a Marxist. But I am very aware that this was not the win of a Marxist group. It was the win of democracy. Because many people there are, like, right wing. They voted for Lula because they didn't want a mob man to be the president of Brazil. A mob man that already flee the country, because, of course, he fled the country.
He's been persecuted by the police because he's a criminal. But you know, what about that?
Matthew Remski: We're wondering if ICE is gonna show up to pick him up down Florida.
Joao Biondi: Well, they should. I mean, he's an illegal alien. Not my words, but the word they're using. But the thing is, we made this movement and it happened almost the same way in 2022, but this was the year it blew up. In which we said, a vote for Lula is a vote for democracy. If you vote for Lula, even if you don't like him, you are giving us the guarantee that you can criticize him. That if he does something wrong, we can take him out of power. And he's not going to run again because it's. Because it's illegal. Lula was the President of Brazil from 2020, from 2002 to 2010, two terms. And around 2008, he had over 60% of approval, if I'm not mistaken. And people were already saying, if he tries to change the constitution to run a third term, he will probably do it. And he said, I'm not gonna do it,
Matthew Remski: of course.
Joao Biondi: I'm not gonna disrespect the constitution. He. He appointed the successor Dilma, the first woman president of Brazil. But he showed us that he respected the constitution. So that was very important for us to build the argument around why you should vote for Lula. Even if you don't like him. You are sure that four years from now he's out and he's like 80. He's 81 right now. He's not gonna run again like in four years, cuz he'll be almost 90. So vote for Lula, not because you're a Marxist or because you're a leftist, or because you had a change of consciousness towards the left, but just because that's the way you guarantee democracy, that's the way you guarantee you can vote him out if you want to. Four years on the future. And also that we're gonna have people allowed to go on streets and protest against something that he does or anyone does. Because if Bolsonaro wins with the majority in Senate and on the House, it is going to be a dictatorship.
Matthew Remski: Right?
Joao Biondi: And he was already saying, I don't want to run again, but I want to extend my term for five.
He was already trying to give us some idea that he was not going to respect the way the Constitution rules the election. Something was going to change. And I think that was what we did. We got around the idea of democracy, not the idea of the left or Marxism.
Matthew Remski: It's very interesting because it really focuses a number of human instincts down into the notion of do you want to have any say at all? Do you want to have autonomy? And I think arguably this is a root Marxist value, right? Is that you're able to say, first and foremost, oh, I'm actually going to do something, I'm going to be heard.
And I haven't really thought about how that argument could be in play here, but that really makes sense.
Now with regard to Janones and the WhatsApp engineering feats, did he figure this out on his own? Is there a team? Did he draw on other technical experts?
Is he a polymath that way?
Joao Biondi: I'm not very sure. But if I'm guessing, I think he came up with it all by himself. He has a team, it's known. But I don't think the team is a strategic team. I think he's an operational team. He gives the order that people do.
I think it all came from his mind. I am not sure I'm not close to him enough. I know people that know him and I know that people say the guy is like, he's the kind of crazy genius. Like he's crazy. He's everything you've seen on videos. If you've seen videos of him, he's like spitting and screaming. And he's like that always. Of course, not always, but he takes a microphone. That's his personality. He talks to people like that. I think he did it all by himself.
I remind you he was elected a congressman the first time because he started this movement during the strikes on the Internet. So it's been eight years of doing this.
And he's known in Brazil before the election, he's known for being this loud mouth politician. So I do think that it was all his idea. The group was an ingenious idea. The way he brought guerrilla strategies to the group and it started to multiply. I remember when I was, when I first became a member of the group, it was before he had 1 million subscribers,
Matthew Remski: right?
Joao Biondi: And he was already saying, you know, if everyone here brings one more person, we're gonna more than double because blah, blah, blah. And he was like saying that. And I remember like in a week from like 900,000, 800,000, we were like 5 million,
Matthew Remski: right?
Joao Biondi: And it was so crazy. Cause like people were really engaged in this. People were really, really interested in making this a thing, you know?
Matthew Remski: Do you. Okay. I don't know much about, let's say, Brazilian masculinity and how it functions. I don't know much about charismatic personalities. Is there a segment of his following that had to get over or had to sort of, you know, just sort of trust that, oh, this GU guy isn't just an authoritarian mastermind who is power hungry because he is shouty. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I don't know how that reads culturally in Brazil,
Joao Biondi: that's hard because I'm afraid I'm gonna answer for myself and not for the whole country.
Matthew Remski: Well, now you've said that. So you're fine.
Joao Biondi: Yes, now I'm fine. I can say whatever I want.
So I think there is this cut we need to see. For example, in my humble opinion, Dilma Rousseff, the first female president of Brazil, she was impeached because she was a woman. That is another conversation. It's a whole nother episode. But I think masculinity plays a very, very long game here in Brazil. And I do think that because Janones is a man, people trusted him more. I cannot see a woman on that place. Like I told you, I gave the example of Ana Elisa, a 21 year old black woman that was, I believe it was the most well voted congresswoman in Minas Gerais, her state. I'm not sure, but I think it is. She is. So she already had this immense power. She's very popular online. She's part of the minds that built this second round, Lula's campaign.
And she's receiving kinds of attacks Janones is not receiving online. So it is. It will be naive of myself to exclude the fact that he's a man when you talk about his own interest. He was constantly saying, I am a congressperson elect. I should be gathering around my cabinet, going around my things. But I am going to give up everything to work for electing this man, because I believe this man is historical and blah, blah, blah. Maybe you're aware, but he was actually brought to the hospital, to the ICU during the elections because his heart was beating wrong.
It was crazy. Like the guy almost died trying to do what he did.
So I think people was like,
Matthew Remski: I think I've seen a couple of videos in which I can see him needing a defibrillator. Actually,
Joao Biondi: yes. I mean, it was actually the night of the first debate of the second round. It was a Sunday night. After the debate, the candidates were giving out interviews and you could see Janones in the back, heavily breathing, having trouble. And then he went home. And when he was home, he was feeling unwell. And then he was taken to the hospital and strictly to the ICU. And he spent like 48 hours there. But even coming Out. He said, I'm gonna be out of the hospital on Tuesday at 13 hours, 13 minutes, which is the number of the president, Lula. 13 is the number of Lula. So he was like, I almost died, but I didn't. So the campaign keeps 13, 13. Everyone online. I'm gonna give a speech. And people were like, doing this. They were together doing this, you know.
Matthew Remski: You know, you said that Brazilian masculinity is its own episode, and maybe we should do that sometime. Because the other thing that I wanted to ask about is that during those debates, Bolsonaro and Lula are sort of like prowling around each other on the stage.
There's no lectern or podium or anything like that. It was very, very theatrical. So there's all kinds of things that are of very difficult to understand from where I am, but they're all fascinating. Now, as I Understand it, the WhatsApp social media technology used some really unique tactics that bent the algorithm in your favor. And I just want to list them and maybe you can tell me what they do. So, first of all, the groups on WhatsApp are one way. So you can subscribe and you can view posts and instructions you can like, but you're not going to comment. Right. So everything is sort of being delivered in this downstream. And this feels like this is a very powerful democratic centralism. Is that how it worked?
Joao Biondi: Yes. I mean, it's more a broadcast group than a group chat, because you cannot answer what is. There is some ways you can comment on the messages, but that was not available for this specific group. Exército do Lula, the group Janones made, he only sent the messages, and we could could react to them, we could like them, we could share them. But the thing is, even though it's a broadcast group, not a group chat, it is inside your app, the app you use to chat.
So I would say that it's the app, I'm guessing here, but over 95% of Brazilians use as the main message app. And I would say is the app they use the most during the day because they use this to talk with their families, with their friends, with the coworkers. Some people work with WhatsApp, like some people have. My mother is one of them.
She makes puddings, Brazilian puddings, which are very delicious. And she sells it basically on WhatsApp. Her clients send her a message and she said, I have this flavors today. It's that price. I'm gonna be their place. And the people go and buy. So WhatsApp is very big in Brazil. What he did is he created this thing, this broadcast system inside the app Brazilians use the most. And most Brazilians use. Wow. So it was very easy for Brazilians to read message and then just share it with the groups they're already in.
Matthew Remski: So it's seamless. It's really seamless.
Joao Biondi: It's seamless. It's completely seamless.
Matthew Remski: Not like Facebook or Twitter or anything like that. So you can have. You can click the share button on the WhatsApp group post and then immediately your other groups show up. And that's just. Is a normal thing. That's a natural thing.
Joao Biondi: Yeah. And you are in a group chat with friends saying, oh, have you seen Last Mission from Janones? And the ones that are not in the group? Like, I didn't. I'm not in the group. Then you just send the link and now they're in, you know, so it becomes like the theme, the topic of discussion on the groups. It kind of became this wave of people just wanting to be a part of this because everybody wanted to know what was happening inside there.
Matthew Remski: You had a strict ignore the fascists rule, except for. I mean, and this is not engaging with fascist posts. But there's also this principle of mirroring their campaigns with opposite posts. So how do those things work?
Joao Biondi: This is us getting dirty and responding them. Like, here in Brazil, we say we're giving them a taste of their own poison.
Because the WhatsApp group we just talked about, this was a strategy that was born in 2018 with Jair Bolsonaro. It's very important to tell people from outside the country. Jair Bolsonaro was nothing in 2018. He was a congressperson. He was a congressman. He has been a congressman for like 20 years. But he had like no national projection.
People knew him because he was like a buffoon, which he is until today.
But he was not like presidential at any way. So there is this marketing people that wanted to try in 2018, this strategy, new strategy for an election like 100% based on the Internet. Because until 2018, campaigning in Brazil was like TV and radio.
The parties used to make coalitions to extend their TV and radio time because they said, this is going to elect the president. If we have more TV time, we can talk about more things, we can show more proposals, we can attack more our enemies and adversaries, but we need to extend that. So this marketing team that was trying to make something out of the Internet, they. They chose a person that would have nothing to lose. Bolsonaro decided to be A president. And he had 10 seconds of TV time, 10 seconds against like eight minutes from Lula, and I think six minutes from Alckmin, which is the vice president now, but run again. Lula. I'm sorry. Haddad was representing Lula. Fernando Haddad, our Minister of Economics. Right now, he was representing Lula in 2018. We had like eight minutes of TV time, if I'm not mistaken. Alckmin, which is the vice president today, was running against the party of Lula, and he had like six minutes, and Bolsonaro had 10 seconds. So they come to Bolsonaro and said, you have nothing to lose. Let us make your campaign online, an online thing, because maybe you have a chance. You're not going to have a chance on tv. And he said, sure. And that. That became the election that elected Jair Bolsonaro. During the 10 seconds he had, it was only a big QR code on tv. And you had to scan the QR code and go straight to the atmosphere. Like the ecosystem they have built with lies, fake news, lots of very, very poorly produced videos. And the WhatsApp group.
Matthew Remski: Wow.
Joao Biondi: And the thing is, we have something here in Brazil called the Dark Saturday. Cause it's like on Sunday is devoted to. You go vote on a Sunday. And the campaign goes officially to Friday.
So Saturday, it's forbidden to campaign.
The candidates cannot put ads on tv. If they had paid for ads, it has just to stop on Friday before midnight. So Saturday is like this.
No man's land.
And so Bolsonaro's strategy was like. The far right strategy was like, let's just. Just put bots to interact online and let's send lots of billions of billions of messages to WhatsApps all over the country telling lies about them. Because around 20% of voters decide their vote on Saturday or Sunday morning before going out to vote.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Joao Biondi: So this Saturday was like completely taken by the far right, you know,
Matthew Remski: Was that technically legal? Because the laws applied to television and radio, but they hadn't really caught up with online ecosystems yet.
Joao Biondi: 2018 was. I don't know if it was illegal.
I'm not gonna tell you with 100% certainty, but I believe in 2018, we were already very far behind on Internet legislation. What I can say is, today it is illegal, but they do it anyway.
Okay, go after me. But I just won the election.
That's what they do. It's all in or nothing. So the Dark Saturday thing happened twice in 2018 and then 2022. And even though it happened in 2022, we won. But A very small margin like less than 1%.
But this year, Janones again had this incredible idea of going out live on a livestream that lasted 24 hours from Friday midnight ish to Saturday.
Not Friday midnight ish, the midnight between Friday and Saturday to the midnight between Saturday and Sunday.
So what he did was he started sending out ideas for hashtags and it became trending. So the machine of fake news that actually happens usually happens on the dark Saturday. It was not working because everybody was talking about something else. And if I received some kind of fake news online and I wanted to check, There was Janones's 24 hours saying, this is a lie, don't believe them. So what he did is like you said, we mirrored what they were doing, we looked at what were the biggest strategy and then we said, let's do it the same way. Let's fight them with their own weapons because we're gonna win. But we did.
Matthew Remski: The other side of that is that as you're mirroring the strategy, you're also not engaging with it. And that happens on the micro level too, of you're not responding to the critical posts or to the trolling, you're not engaging with the opponent at all.
But in this separate room, you're actually mirroring what they do.
So there's a double edged sword there.
Joao Biondi: Yeah, I mean, I like to say that to my friends.
We were walking to a war with swords and they were walking with machine guns.
So of course you have to use machine guns. It's not my kind of choice. I don't like machine guns, but I don't want to die in this war. So I have to adapt. And that's what we did. We finally like eight years after we adapted and thank God because if we didn't, we don't even know when we would have the chance to be in an election again, you know,
Matthew Remski: well, speaking of weapons, AI usage was very much encouraged and it was very current.
And this is going to be an area especially, and I found this as I started doing a little bit of reporting on these techniques for my own Instagram feed, that there was a lot of negative response from northern leftists about, you know, are we really going to use this fascist technology in order to make our points made, you know, what about the environmental cost? What about, you know, the data centers that are taking over our land masses? What about the power usage? And so there's a very sort of almost allergy to the notion that this could be used as a strategic weapon.
And I'm Wondering how your demographic, how your comrades negotiated those same issues, or if it was as much of an issue as it would be here.
Joao Biondi: I think it was an issue, but as far as I'm concerned, it was not something that was like the campaign decided to use AI.
It just happened because they were using. It just
Matthew Remski: happened,
Joao Biondi: right. And most of the AI we used, fandoms were using AI. If you search for AI during our election, you're gonna see that the most usage of AI was actually this mem.
The kind of memes. But the fandoms used to take the very famous video clips of their pop divas, and they used to insert Lula in the place of the diva. So you have videos of lula singing to 2 million people in Copacabana like he's Lady Gaga. You have videos of Rihanna, super bowl, but it's not Rihanna is Lula. This is how we used AI.
We were afraid of AI usage during the elections because we knew the far right was going to do deep fakes with AI. We didn't.
Our interest was not to create a virtual reality, an alternative reality of lies. We used AI to make fun of our opponent, and it became an ongoing meme. Of course, it's something that needs to be talked about. Of course, there's the environmental price we have to pay for that. And not only that, the political price, which for me, it's even more important. But the thing is, we were trying to elect a president that will take this serious seriously.
If we didn't use AI, for example, and we knew they were going to use AI, we were going to be behind. And once they elected their president, there's nothing we can do about this. AI is going to. He's going to probably put data centers inside my own room because that's what he's trying to do with Brazil. So I think there was this idea of we're not doing something right, but we have to do it in order to do something right in the future, like Machiavelli.
The ends justify the means. And. And, well, I hope it does, because right now I am really interested in that topic of regulating AI and especially social media. And in his first speech after the election, Lula said something like that. Like, we have to regulate media, we have to regulate AI because the way things are in Brazil, Lula, right now, he's trying to create a Brazilian LLM in Portuguese, because he's very intelligent in this way. Like, we are using LLMs every day. We stopped using Google, and even if we use Google, it's Gemini.
We are giving out our data to foreign companies. We need something to put people inside the country and store our datas inside the country. And so this is the way I think Lula is seeing this. You have to remember, like, Lula is a left leftist, but he has never made a left leaning government. It's always more centered.
Some of this politics, especially when it comes to economics, it's very neoliberal. So he's very criticized by the leftists in Brazil for that. But again, he's a democrat. He's a person who understands how the game is played and he respects the game and the people. And also he uses his power as the president to give the poor people in Brazil more opportunities. Like the guy literally destroyed hunger in Brazil twice. We were a country with people that had nothing to eat in 2021, and he had to become the president again.
So we are sure that everybody in this country eats every day. So he's not as left as I would like him to be, but he's helping, helping the country do things that we would never do without him or a president of his sort.
Matthew Remski: You know, I think this pivot to concentrating on AI regulation or Internet or social media regulation after the election happens, do you think it indicates, you know, a kind of awareness, maybe on his part, maybe even Janones recognizing this, that, oh, you know, these are very powerful tools. We've let a particular cat out of the bag and we want to be careful with them at the same time, because of course, too much of this material can actually destroy the fabric of our brains and epistemology and who we think we are.
Joao Biondi: Yes, I think they had this conversation. Unfortunately, I was not in the room. I would like to be, but before the second round, in the first round and before even the election, Lula was already giving out interviews where he was saying, we need to regulate this. This is hard, this is harmful, this is problematic. So I don't think this is something that came to his mind after the election. I think the election just showed him how urgent this is. Like, this is a top priority for your next government. We need to talk about social media. We need to talk about AI. We need to talk about WhatsApp. Because we need, like in Brazil, I don't know if you know that, but we had our Supreme Court, had a very big beef with lots of big tech companies.
I'm not sure right now, because I was here in Brazil. We said we were under political psychosis during this last election. And I agree, I couldn't care less about anything. But the election I'm slowly coming out of that shell now. But I believe the Discord app is not allowed in Brazil anymore. You cannot access that because we had problems with pedophilia and things like that happening. And then the government said, shut it down.
If you're not willing to engage with our laws, you're not gonna work here. And it happen.
Twitter fell in Brazil in 2024, I believe, and we spent like a month without Twitter. We are usually going after those big tech companies because they are literally committing crimes, disrespecting our Constitution. And they are very sad and mad that we are taking them down. And every time we take one of those down, they come back saying, okay, we're gonna cooperate. And then it happens again and again. So I think what Lula understood is like, we cannot let the Supreme Court put them down. We need to have a stronger, more robust legislation around this on the Constitution that cannot be changed. So every new big tech that surges, when they come to Brazil, they already know the law and they're gonna play by the law. And I think this is the way Lula is talking about this, I think is the way he's looking at this situation. I hope it is, but we'll see. Because like I told you, the Congress is not, not very much leaning to what he believes is the right thing to do.
Flávio Bolsonaro lost, but his party elected the most senators and the most congress people. So it is still very blurry how the future of politics in Brazil will be. But I do think if Lula wants to, and I think he wants to, that will be his priority.
Matthew Remski: Coming to the end with some longer term, bigger picture questions, it seems to me that Lula's army was a very elegant and quick to deploy strategy for the this really short term drive at a binary choice, right? Like are you going to re elect this gangster fascist family who's likely to cruise towards dictatorship, or are you going to elect the Social Democrat who's actually going to respect the Constitution and give people breathing space to actually form maybe even more progressive politics.
Do you think that the strategy of Janones has a broader and more long-lasting application?
Joao Biondi: Yes and no. I mean, I think what Janones did is he taught us how to use the gear because we didn't know that the left didn't know how to use.
Myself, I am a content creator for I'm on my second year of content creation and my main theme is culture, especially fashion and movies. But I have been studying marketing for 10 years and I've been working with marketing for 10 years, I'm actually a storytelling specialist.
I knew how to use the Internet, but I knew people didn't know.
So what we did during this second round is let's tell the people what they need to do, how long they have to spend online, what they need to do, what buttons they have to press, what kind of engagement is better. So I think that is something that is going to last because people are learning how to use the Internet right now. And we are not going to be dominated by. By the far right Internet, because it was the far right Internet in Brazil. They dominated it before Janones and before the second round, and it was completely the opposite. I saw this graph on Friday before the election, two days before the election, Lula's account on Instagram had 195.8 million interactions. And Flávio Bolsonaro's account had 85 million interactions. So we had over 110 million interactions more. And I think this is very much why we won, because we were around everyone. Even people that didn't like Lula were seeing Lula content.
But I think the way we did it, it's not going to last.
I can be an example. I have an iPhone, 17 Pro. This is a huge battery. Usually I charge my phone up to 80. I put the block on 80 once a day and I can roll with it. During the election, I was charging my phone up to 100 three times a day.
That's how much we were engaged on doing that. I had a follower that sent me a print screen of her, you know, screen time, it used to be six hours.
During the second term, it was 17 hours. And I don't even know how she did, like 17 hours online. You have seven hours to eat, sleep, work.
It's not going to happen. It's unsustainable. People are not going to be on that level of psychology forever. But I think people learn from it.
Matthew Remski: There was a comment on one of my threads from this guy who said, you know, my girlfriend was in Lula's army. And it was very, very difficult because, you know, we would be trying to have sex and she would have to stop. Look at what was happening.
Joao Biondi: You only gonna have this if Lula is elected?
It's probably that anyway.
Matthew Remski: So the last question I think is probably might be the hardest because, you know, my familiarity, small familiarity with Brazilian politics, it doesn't begin with, but it includes this book by an American journalist named Vincent Bevins. And the book is called if We Burn. And it's really about Protest. Movements between 2010 and 2020 throughout the world, which rallied huge numbers of people through social media, but were also very fragmentary and very vulnerable to right wing capture. And he talks about how in 2013, there are huge bus fare prot. Like public transit protests in Brazil, in Rio, I think.
And there's an anarchist group who is organizing them, and they're organizing mass fare evasion, and they're getting a lot of support and they're getting some legislative wins. And it sparks this online wave of rolling protests. But because it wasn't clearly directed before long, nationalists, right wingers, white supremacists, Bolsonaristas, are showing up at the protests, claiming ownership over the populist energy. And when they're doing that, they're bringing the Brazilian flag and they're bringing the soccer jerseys. And from that point on, the soccer jersey, the green and the yellow, become associated with Brazilian nationalism around the world. And so. So that is part of what Janones flips over into a re. Sort of adoption, a recapture of those national symbols. And I'm wondering whether or not you feel that is stable, because nationalism is a very powerful but somewhat abstract force. And I think that you had a very, very broad coalition here.
And obviously 10 million people on that app agreed on the need to get rid of Bolsonaro, but what else will they agree on going forward? And how do you see the stability of this movement as it progresses?
Joao Biondi: Wow, that is a good question. And for someone that knows just a little bit about Brazilian politics, you know a lot. But it's basically that, like, I was actually in college.
I have a master's in international relations, so I was talking about politics in college all the time when the 2013 movement started. And I think the thing that made me clear that Lula was going to win this election, because many of my followers, like, how are you so confident?
I remember in 2013, when it all began, we actually have a saying that that was when the Bolsonarista movement was born. Like the far right was born in Brazil during those movements. Because, like you said, it was this bus fare thing. I think it started in São Paulo, then it went to Rio,
Matthew Remski: I guess, had we.
Joao Biondi: It blew up around Brazil and like a month after that, people were still on the streets. But, like, the bus fare was already the bus fare they wanted. Like, it was completely forgotten.
The main reason, like the bus fare thing, it was completely forgotten and it became something else. And it was kidnapped by far right. And there was this group, MBL, Movimento Brasil Livre, which would mean, like Free Brazilian Move Movement. And it now has become a party called Missão. And Renan Santos ran for president.
Matthew Remski: Part of the story was that the initial naming of the right wing group was actually a play on words that confused itself with the left wing group itself. Right,
Joao Biondi: exactly. Because, I mean, I tend to believe that most of the people that was on the streets protesting against the increase of a bus share is some bus fare is people from the left. And all of a sudden there was this far right movement taking those people and telling it's all because the president was Dilma Rousseff, the president of Brazil. And it's all the fault of that woman. That woman is a demon. We need to take her out. And she was actually impeached in 2016, but there was an election in 2014 that she almost lost, but she managed to win reelection in 2014. But in 2014 in Brazil, there was a World Cup. And this is very important for us Brazilians for obvious reasons. And there's this very like, I remember it vividly. Dilma on the World Cup opening, about to make her speech, and the whole crowd was booing her. And she was just like, the election happened months after that and she was reelected. So this is how hard it is to understand Brazil. They hated her because of the movements of 2013, but they reelected her.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Joao Biondi: And then it just grew during this period in 2016 when she was impeached. This movement, like you said, of people wearing the Brazilian jersey to go to the streets. It was something. So like every weekend we had something like that. The Paulista Avenue, which is the most important avenue of the country, basically was filled with people on those clothes. We have FIESP, which is the industry federation of Brazil. Bunch of very rich dudes giving a lot of money to movements that was trying to take people to the streets. To impeach Lula. We had this very amazing image that I think every Brazilian knows, which is this giant duck, this giant rubber duck.
Matthew Remski: I remember. Yeah.
Joao Biondi: And it was like, because here in Brazil we have quem vai pagar o pato? Which is gonna.
Who are we going to blame about it? So the duck, which is who is going to pay the duck was already everywhere. And so it became very clear they were co-opting not only the people, but the national, national symbols. And they convinced everyone that being a patriot meant hating the left.
Because if you don't hate the left, if you don't wear the jersey. We have those also. They have the same as nossa bandeira jamais será vermelha, which Means our flag is never going to be red because of the colors of the party of Dilma and the colors of the left. They were trying to tell us that everybody that is not right wing, everybody that does not wear those colors, they hate Brazil. They're not patriots. And like that, they elected two presidents that love the United States. Talk about the United States all the time.
One of them fled to the United States. And I don't know if you have the opportunity to read the letter Flávio Bolsonaro put out. If you have, don't.
And the letter is like 20 paragraphs, I don't know.
But on the first paragraph, he thanks President Trump and the beautiful people of America.
On the 12th paragraph, he thanks the 60 million people who voted for him in Brazil. So this is how these patriots work. They are all about the United States for some reason, and they hate their own country. But somehow they built this narrative that we, the ones that hate them, hate the country. Like, Lula is a president that is very interested in supporting our country. Like I told you, he takes the people from hunger to buying houses and TVs and cars in four years.
He. Because what is a country like? Let's get a little philosophical. A country is not the barriers around. A country is not a flag or the constitution. A country is its people. And what it's very clear to me is that Bolsonaro and his family, they hate the Brazilian people. They don't like us.
While Lula, he has like this commitment to us. And I think that's what actually became clear in this election. This man, he's thinking about Brazil. This other man is thinking about himself and his family. He's not becoming the president because he loves the country and he wants to make the country grow. He's becoming the president because he has a lot of crazy crimes on his back and he wants to get rid of them. And because he needs to become president, not to go to jail.
Therefore, like a week from now.
A week ago, they were debating the last presidential debate.
Matthew Remski: I saw this. This was incredible.
Joao Biondi: Today he's in Florida and he's like declaring himself the righteous president of Brazil by no one. Like, the president of his party just gave an interpretation. Just saying, ignore him. Like, forget him. We don't care about him.
Matthew Remski: It seems like the sentiment within the country to reclaim the Brazilian flag and the jersey for actually somebody who's interested in supporting the country that this was already building. And then Janones came in and said, okay, now is the time to actually snatch it. And that's the Saturday morning.
Joao Biondi: Yeah, I mean, me, myself, talking about myself, I had really a really hard time wearing the Brazilian jersey after that, because I was like, what is the people on the streets gonna think about me? And during the World Cup, and let's be honest, the Brazilian team is not giving us much proud to stay. So, like, we're not proud of our team. We're not proud of the colors. We're not proud of the movement. Why would I wear this? But from some years from now, actually since Lula's first election, we were trying to reclaim those things. And, I mean, I'm a bisexual man, so I'm very inside the LGBTQ.
And when Madonna went to Copacabana and danced with Pabllo Vittar, which is our biggest star, one of the biggest star in Brazil, a drag queen, the most followed drag queen internationally, she was wearing the Brazilian jersey. And so the LGBTQ community said, okay. The queen said, we can use it, we can use it. And I think we started using it back. I have a jersey, a T shirt, which is yellow and green, the colors of Brazil, and has Lula written down. So we're bringing it back.
And I think, for example, we always go vote.
When the Bolsonaristas went to vote, they used to wear the Brazilian jersey. So you spot a Bolsonarista on the voting line by the color of the shirt, by the jersey they were wearing. And I was always wearing red to show everyone, I'm not voting for this.
This year, I saw many, many, like many people wearing the Brazilian jersey with Lula stickers.
Matthew Remski: Amazing.
Joao Biondi: They're saying, this is my shirt. And me, myself, I went to vote with a Brazilian jersey on the second term, which I never thought I was going to do that, but I went to vote with a Brazilian jersey. Not the red one, the yellow one, the blue one, because we have a blue one too, which I think looks better. And I have the blue one, and I stick a Lula sticker here. I put one on the back because I said, if people look me from the back, they're gonna think I'm voting Bolsonaro. And I don't want to be mistaken for a second with those people.
And I felt so powerful, like, I am really voting for Brazil. This is my T shirt. It took me some time to understand that, but now it's mine. You know,
Matthew Remski: it's so incredible because the colors then become an anti imperialist statement, right?
Joao Biondi: Yeah. I mean, us from the left left, the actual left in Brazil, we know that the colors of our flag, it relates to. To Our colonizers.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Joao Biondi: It's the colors of the royal family of Portugal, the yellow and the green. And we have this debate of our flag should be red, not because of the communist color, but because Brazil, the word means, like it in flames.
Matthew Remski: Oh.
Joao Biondi: Because it comes from this tree, pau-brasil. And when you cut the tree in the middle, you can Google it. It looks like the.
The wood is in flames.
Matthew Remski: Wow.
Joao Biondi: Because it's red and it has this very specific tones, and the name of our country means as if it is flaming. So for me, it's obvious that our flag. We're gonna have fire or colors related to fire, but we don't have this. We have the colors from the royal family of Portugal. And, well, it would be my dream to take this serious and change the flag. But right now, I don't think it's even important anymore because people were already connected to it. We give it a new symbol, new meanings to the colors. And I actually like the Brazilian flag. I don't dislike it. I'm just saying that they say our flags are never gonna be red. Our name is red, man. You cannot change that.
It's something that we need to be talking about. But I think we really did get back to our roots. We are proud again of wearing the colors of Brazil. We are proud of our flag. We are proud of our anthem and our symbols. We're just not very proud of our football team yet, but we're working there.
Matthew Remski: Joao Biondi, thank you so much for taking the time and for walking me and my listeners through these complex.
It's really a fantastic story, and I wish you all the best.
Joao Biondi: Yeah, me too. Thank you very much for this opportunity. I hope I helped and inspired you all over the world to do the same.
It's not easy. Like I told you, we had people with 17 hours of screen time. I don't want you guys to spend 17 hours on screen, but I want you guys to understand one thing. If it's done together, if it's a group, a teamwork, even if it's hard, it's going to be easier because it was very hard. But lula went from 54 million votes to 64 million votes in three weeks.
We convinced 10 million people to vote for Lula. We had elderly people that don't vote for, like, 20 years getting out of their beds and saying, I'm going to vote. We had people with oxygen tanks on their noses voting. We had people that couldn't walk being carried to vote. Like, we did everything we could, and it paid, you know, we have four years of democracy, which can be our last four years. We don't know. But we're going to get very attached to those four years and we're going to work very hard to make this democracy go even further. So I just want to say to the people that are listening all around the world, it is worth your time and your work. I know we have many other problems. We have families, we have job jobs. But when it comes to the point of defending democracy, I do believe there's nothing more important for you to do, you know, and take the example of Brazil. And please, if you have any questions, just ask us. We are very friendly, as they said. We are going to answer you. We can help. Thank you. Bye bye.
Matthew Remski: Bye bye.
Such an amazing story. So much theory to go into.
I can't wait to see how my own thought develops around Janonism. There's a lot of very difficult, interesting questions that are coming up, especially in my Instagram reels and the comment threads. And I'm here and I really want to thank Joao for coming on the show to walk us through what it was like at ground level. And I want to remind you that up now on Patreon is the bonus episode for this week called what Students Accomplished in Serbia. That's with Lav Mrenovic, where we'll look at something very, very different, but also perhaps equally positive.
A more anarcho-syndicalist movement to unseat the forces of autocracy.
And so that's very interest.
And you know, this is an educational project, so it is paywalled. This second episode for this week is paywalled for a little while, but I also want to push it out to the public as quickly as possible because I don't want to conceal anything or let things just sort of fester behind capitalism.
However, that said, if you are able to support this podcast, this is what I just love to do. It's an amazing season in the lifespan of this antifascist. And so if you can support the show, please consider doing so. And if not, then I'll see you back here. And until then, take care of each other.
