Ryan Broderick

They were pretending to be teenage girls who were self-harming because Justin Bieber was photographed smoking weed.

That's pretty funny.

Nowadays, I feel like if you become the main character of the internet, it probably stays more on the internet than it used to also, I would say.

Yeah.

I remember in 2019, someone tried to like call in a bomb threat to my apartment.

I guess they were going to like call the police and say that there was like a bomb there or something.

But they got the wrong address and they did it to like a French restaurant down the street.

I've always felt very bad about that.

Did you tell them?

the french restaurant yeah no like give them extra business no the pandemic had started and i think so this was in 2020 and i think i figured like no one was there because like because of lockdown so i was like yeah that's fine uh like sure the thing is people also understand the concept of prank phone calls yes

Right.

Yeah, I think the fact that these sort of tactics have bubbled their way all the way up to like the highest levels of government and this behavior means that like everyone kind of writes it off as being silly and wacky.

Like, I mean, and I don't want to like, you know, diminish this sort of thing when it happens to the average person, which is sort of what we're talking about today, the main character effect, which I want to get to this in just a second.

But like...

Yeah, the whole world has sort of gotten used to it to a degree.

But to start properly, can you define what you sort of think of it meaning when you say, like, someone has become today's main character?

That's right.

I have to credit Maple Cocaine, the Twitter user in 2019 who coined the phrase in a post that reads, each day on Twitter, there's one main character.

The goal is to never be it.

But I want to start in reverse chronological order today, actually.