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Today's episode of What Future with Joshua Topolski is a re release. It's a really interesting listen. We will be back next week with an all new episode.
Thanks for listening, hey, and welcome to What Future. I'm your host, Joshua Topolski, and We've got a great episode today because I have been wanting to talk to our guests for a long time, and in fact, the guest of today's show I had on my old podcast a long, long time ago, and it was one of the greatest conversations I've ever had in my entire life. And frankly, I've spent a lot of years in therapy dealing with the fact that not every conversation could be as good
as that one. Of course, talking about my conversation with Bartunde Thurston, who is a podcaster and a writer and a TV personality, I think he's done a Ted talk.
I believe he is maybe an astronaut. He's doing many things, and he has a fascinating guy he Currently he's writing for Puck News, which you may have heard of, is one of my favorite new websites, and he's been writing about social media and technology and one of the things that he talks about a lot, and I know thinks about a lot is sort of the way we get information and what's in our diet, how we get the news of the day, how we process it, how we
think about it, how generationally we're thinking about these things, And that to me is a fascinating topic because I feel like we have this information crisis in the world right now. I mean, I really believe the root of most of our problems in society. Okay, that's pretty broad, but I think the one of the main causes of the pain that we experience in modern life is the fact that it's become so impossible to get and understand information. There is so much noise, so much misinformation, so much
that is wrong that you have access to. Right when we thought of the Internet, you know, me and the think tank that created the Internet that I worked on, when we envisioned the Internet, or when we thought about it in its earliest days, this idea that it could give you access to all the world's knowledge, that you could have every book and every library, every encyclopedia, every piece of information available, felt like this superpower that we would all have, that this is like the beginning of
a new era. Of understanding and education and information and humanity coming together and people solving their problems, and we're all going to communicate and share and explore together in cyber space. And look at all this access that we now have to edify ourselves to become smarter, to become better citizens of the world.
And what nobody.
Seemed to think of, and myself included, is that the inverse of all of the world's information is true, is that all of the world's disinformation can also exist there.
And in fact, it turns out disinformation and misinformation is louder and faster and sexier and more interesting and more exciting than the real stuff, And it's easier to share, and it's easier to scan people with, and it's easier to convince people of For whatever reason, we are drawn as human beings to the more dramatic stories, and the
more dramatic stories are often the lies. And so the Internet has become as much as it is a tool for humanity to explore the world's knowledge and to explore all of the fascinating aspects of humanity itself, it's also become this massive and horrible tool for disrupting in the worst way possible with the most negative connotations, possible, disrupting how our brains work and disrupting what we know and what we believe is true and what we agree on
is scientific, and whether or not the Earth is flat, Like, these are now things that are up for debate in a lot of circles. And I say, in a lot of circles. On the internet, it feels like a lot of circles, but in reality, maybe it's only a few circles. But those circles are growing, and the pools inside the circles are deepening, and we're being sucked down to the bottom of the sea. And now I'm imagining like a cylinder filled with water and we're all in it.
At any rate. This is my roundabout way of saying.
I thought, who better to talk about the Internet and information and the future of humanity as we know it. Who better to have a conversation with about those topics than Baritunde Thurston. And he agreed to come on the show. He's here with us right now. Okay, I'm very happier here.
Yeah.
I had you on my show in twenty fifteen, Yeah, which is like kind of amazing. I went back and listened to a little bit of it. We were both drinking. First off, you were having a gigantic glass of whiskey and I was having vodka. We got into a long conversation about the iguanas whole foods. Which do you don't live in New York anymore?
Do you? You live in LA?
I live in LA. I left New York foty years ago.
Now that's smart, that's so smart. I'm jealous of you, all right, So let's talk about you for a second. Now, Yeah, I mean, obviously we now know where you're located. That's important. So I've been reading you a lot because you're writing for Puck Puck News.
Is that what we call it.
We call it puck. We called the website is puck dot news, but the name is just Puck.
I like Puck a lot. I gotta tell you, I'm a big fan. I'm a subscriber. I have been reading and following along. But your stuff is really interesting lately, especially because you're always interesting. But you've been talking a lot about social media. I mean, you just wrote a thing about TikTok that I thought was super interesting. You've been obviously talking about Elon Musk and the Twitter situation.
You made a passing comment.
Obviously that's been a topic of great interest to me because because it's your fault, because I personally am responsible for Elon Musk's behavior.
You laid the path I did.
Why did I do that?
Why did I Why did they make him act in that way? But you made this kind of pass you mentioned You're like, yeah, Twitter as we know it is basically dead or something like that.
I'm paraphrasing. Do you really believe that? Is it over?
I think so. What I added in that comment was that you know, I was referring to Twitter in the past tense because I think of Twitter, it is code, but it is also culture, and it is the unique combination of code and culture that created the environment that we knew as Twitter. Same goes for cities like New York is a different place than when I lived there four years ago, I think, especially if a place goes
through a major tragedy, it is substantively different. You know, after if you lived in New York before nine to eleven and never lived there after, you don't really know New York anymore. Like the character of the place has shifted, even though it's still in New York. It's kind of an existential question of a or metaphysical one too. If like all my cells have changed, am I still me?
But in this case, I think what Elon has done at Twitter is so violently abrupt in terms of driving out staff and also users of a certain kind, that he has shifted the nature and culture of the place. He has signaled really obviously and sort of boneheadedly what type of speech he wants to be free, just his right wing buddies, and what type he will police, which is anything critical of him or any jokes he doesn't understand.
Twitter's culture is now Elon's limitations. And he's just scaled himself, right, He's like implemented his predilections and personality into the code, right, And and he has the right to do that. That's what billions of dollars and debt and other people's money can help you do. But it is not the Twitter that we commonly refer to anymore because a lot of the people who made that place what it was aren't spending time there. Yeah, and I include myself in that.
And I'm late to the exodus by some measures, even though I've substantively like downgraded my time there years ago, before Elon even came on the scene. He just accelerated a path outward and made it easier for me to spend time elsewhere.
I mean that point is like I get it so well because I feel the same way like this. Yeah, you know, there definitely was a point, you know, I don't know when I was just like now I'm not can't do this anymore, but it has to end, right like he Can's not financially sustainable in its current state, don't you know?
It isn't. And I think there's cultural death, there's technological or kind of operational death, and there's financial death, and all of these are on the table, and I think they probably move in that order. Certainly, the cultural one, I think has already very much begun. When you start like banning journalists who criticize you as if you were Saudi Arabia itself. It's one thing to take their money.
It's another to adopt their stance on you know, freedom of expression and free press in your public square business with no sense of irony about it, like legit just doing that. So when people like me and you and others, a lot of the black Twitter folk, even some of the crypto kids, Like there's a whole community that's just like, I'm not here for this. It's exhausting. The town square shouldn't be the subject of discussion of the town square, right, But I don't.
Gather the town's creditly be like, Wow, I look at this. I love the what they've with the stones here or whatever.
Yeah, like they gather to talk about other stuff right about like the janitor, you know.
Yeah, it looks like one of those things like when the story is just about right and it's like it's like when you've made it about you or whatever.
Yeah, so you're a point about the money, you know. My colleague at Puck, William Cohen, has written much more incisively on this angle because he's a former banker and understand some of the Wall streetness of how Elon put this deal together and what's required and when payments are due, and he's gonna owe some significant amount of money on the debt he took out to pay for this thing. He can afford it, right, But with every drop in the share price at Tesla, it's going to sting a
little more. With every increase in the FED rate, it's gonna sting a little more. Yeah, and with every dollar of revenue that brands aren't spending in his toxic environment because they don't want to be adjacent to a white supremacy and Nazis and fake news, it's going to sting
a little more. And at some point he's gonna have to do something even more radical than what he's already done just to keep the lights on, which he had decided so far to handle by not paying his rent, right, which is so very trumpy of another brilliant, genius billionaire over it.
Like not paying your rent is one of those things where like if you're a regular human being, it's such a great demonstration of like the difference in class in like what the billionaire class or the very rich or capable of that we are not. And by the way, the rent on Twitter spaces is not like thirty eight hundred dollars a month or something. I mean, it's not like a one bedroom apartment in like Bushwick or something. It's like I don't even know what the rent would be.
It's probably way more than that right now.
It's ad zeros.
Yeah, but like he's just like I'm not going to pay the rent, and everybody's like, well, Okay, I guess, like what do we do. We can't do anything to Elon Musk or like to the company, but like if you don't pay your rent, or if I don't pay you know what I mean, like if a normal person, And maybe we're not perfectly normal, but no, I'm.
Definitely above normal at this point.
But in general, a person who does not pay their rent the air consequences gonna get fucking victed, Like we're gonna take you to court, and like none of that should happens. And it's like to me, like, what's more going than like him going, I'm not gonna pay it is that nobody does anything.
It's like everybody sits there.
Look, we're raised, Josh in this world where when someone like Elon, of his gender, of his race, of his inherited wealth decides to transgress, we tend to celebrate it right until it's too late, you know.
White.
Yeah, he I mean, he's like just like Heisenberg was way cooler than this guy.
His drugs aren't as good, but his blue math is like I don't know, fucking the blue teck mark.
Yeah, but he can afford to call our bluff as a society. He can afford to wade us out. And us I don't mean like me and you specifically, but just society at large. You know, people who need money to live, money that they get pay on a weekly, buy, weekly, or monthly basis. He can take the hit longer because he's got a big old cushion to fall back on, and so he can just like he knows he'll get sued for how he treated the employees when he first
came in. And he's just gonna see, like will they go through their trouble of hiring lawyers or will it burn so much of their time because they can't afford to spend it on that, and I can just weep them out. It's the Trump move, you know. It's like I'm gonna break this law. Let's see if the government bothers to prosecute I'm going to not pay these vendors. Let's see if they bother to send lawyers after me, or will I just settle for pennies on the dollar
and it's a deal. I'm won the deal of the century. But you're also just it's also criminality, that's another word for it, right, and dishonor you know, at best, the most charitable interpretation is he's a meanie and he's not honorable.
The thing that I find so and I've talked about this a bunch, but like you know, I don't want to belabor it, and I'm sure you're all talked out over Twitter, but like, what's so incredible to me is I never was like, Elon Musk is clearly the smartest man in the world or anything. But there was a
period where I was like, this guy's interesting. Yes, way before he was whatever his Twitter persona was, there was a period of years where Elon Musk was like you didn't hear that much about him on a personal level, but you heard a lot about the things he was doing, and the things he was doing were really fucking interesting and really seemed to be working right, Like once he was like involved in Tesla, the SpaceX stuff, some of his like big ideas that he would talk about, but
you never really eadn't go like way into detail on it. It's so strange to me to see the evolution or de evolution of his like character, of his personality like to whoever he plays in public. Yeah, it's like he's hearing these cheers from whoever wherever it is.
A different section of the stands. He's playing to that part of the room. Yes, so I share a big part of that, Josh. And I think I went from we're talking a decade ago, you know, not really knowing anything about this guy, heard about Tesla a little bit. Oh the roadster looks kind of cool. I'll never have one of those anyway, to twenty eighteen, maybe twenty seventeen, getting serious about wanting to get a car in New
York because my wife came from California. She's like, I can't do this subway thing all the time because the grocery stores is how do you live? Like this isn't a life we call this. I agree with her, and I was like, cool, cool, cool, but we're not getting a combustion engine car, Like that's my line. Her her line was I need car. Mine line was not gas car. And there was one option, yeah, you know, which was Tesla Model three. Okay, so I start paying more attention.
I'm building spreadsheets to analyze what the best car, and the Nero is coming out but it's not available yet from Kia and Hyundai. And I'm also keen on the Space thing, and I'm like starting to look into what's up with SpaceX, and the YouTube algorithm is great for me. I have never really been fed Nazis and sort of disinformation. I've been fed like how to make great cocktails, how to composts, you know, and like what electric cars should
you buy? Like my YouTube is dope? And YouTube got a whiff that I was interested in space again because I was a space kid, and so I watched his announcements around the Mars launcher and the reusable rockets, and I just admired his systematic thought. He has like thought through all these parts, and he was laying it out very logically, very engineering oriented, and over promising stuff that would eventually happen definitely wouldn't happen when he said it
would definitely. That's the one thing you know is true is that he's not telling the truth about the ready date. But beyond that, added up multiplanetary species climate change evis Yes, sign me up. So came to Cali, got the Tesla. At least the three real excited yeah, had friends that SpaceX almost visited. SpaceX never made it over to visit there, but just at admiration for these two pieces of the puzzle. Boring company I don't know, flamethrowers. That's kind of weird.
That's exactly when it started to go the moment. That's a moment.
Yeah, it was like he was getting high on his own supply, Like that's the fucking reality. People were like, you're so cool on He's like, yeah, I'll put a flamethrower out.
And that was it.
To explain part of the transition, You explain what happens to a lot of young men who get radicalized by the Internet. In this case young maybe a political but ultimately hyper conservative, largely white men who fall into the rabbit holes of you know the thing about feminism, right, they want to cut your balls off. Wait, is that's not going to be a man anymore?
God, is there a video?
You know the thing about black people, They want to take everything you ever worded hard for and rub it in your face. You know the thing about indigenous people, you know, to think about climate shait and it just becomes this like low appeal to people's deep insecurities. And that was modeled for him by the former president very well, very effectively, by Fox News and by people in an atmosphere online where he spent a lot of time you
know he loves memes. I mean, so much of this stuff was born out of meme culture with pet bat of Frog and gamer Gate, you know, that was all meme warfare early on. And he's he's a Reddit kind of guy. You know, he's a he's a hashtag kind of dude. And is he a four chain kind of guy. He's a four chang crely and he you know this if he plays with with Q. You know my pronouns
are was it prosecute fauci? I mean, that's that's some cute stuff, right, but it's actually very explicable if you've as you have spent time on the part of the Internet. That's not just about cloud services and profits going up into the right, but that's about emotion and culture and disaffected young men, which are usually the source of most societal collapses. Is like young men with too much time on their hands. I guess I agree, and and not
productively put to use. And Elon, who as CEO of four companies, should have had plenty to.
Do, well, that's my thing.
This is as you're saying this, all I can think is, and I've said this so many times, but like if I were the world's richest man. Do you know what I would not do is I would not fucking tweet. I would not go on Twitter. I would not need to go on.
Like he's that you and him are different.
I feel like there's so many things to do in the world that you could be doing that isn't tweeting. And I think you probably identify with this. We're very online people and we've probably spent like a pretty good amount of our career like building our whoever we are,
like our persona. Like it's like on Twitter, on Instagram or whatever, like we're communicating, but we're also and I'm not saying I did this consciously, but it becomes a thing where you're like that's your platform, Like that's where you talk to people. That's like where you need to kind of be doing what you're doing, Like you do it there, right, h But like to build an electric car, you don't do it on Twitter, Like you don't need to do it on Twitter. Like to go to space,
you don't do that on Twitter. It's not part of the like doesn't need to be part of his birth. Like Tim Cook doesn't fucking tweet, you know, Tim cooks like has he tells like his fourth assistant to get his social media person to tend to tweet about the new watch or whatever.
Tim Cook has something that Elon's missing. He's got a whole sense of himself. Yeah, he has self affirmation that doesn't require thousands of strangers every day to affirm him instead. Right, he's got self love in a way that is satisfied and quiet moments as opposed to having to make noise to prove that he still exists. Yeah, and so it's
not that mysterious. You know, we're not inside of Elon specifically, but no, I know what it feels like to like picture or it didn't happen right like I And I'm I think objectively more balanced, you know than Elon. Even though I have way less money, I have more of what I need.
Ye, what's right, You're not the world here. You are acting normal, so unusual.
We get to watch somebody, you know, with an unmet need act out in public. And we've seen it with Kanye, and we've seen it with Trump, and we've seen it with a lot of folks, with all kinds of people thrust into public life who don't have their own private lives sorted out, and so in that sense. There's no mystery, it's not intriguing, it's not novel. It's just so much more in our face because he forces us to watch. Because when he.
Literally bought the thing, yeah that we all were communicating, like he bought like the phone company, you know, he was like, no, I own the lines now, So you're gonna hear me a lot. I'm just gonna kind of like here, you guys, what's going on? Like you're like, dude, I didn't. You're not in this call. He's just popping up.
But okay, But it's interesting you mentioned Kanye, and obviously Trump like Kanye is very I mean, I assume he's still pretty rich, but has been at times very rich and very powerful, very much like in the public eye and very much in control of like the public sort of conversation, not where Elon is, like, he's not the world's richest man. And yet they both have access to presumably in Trump as well, to kind of any information
they want or need. And yet they all all from very different backgrounds, all from very different doing very different things, seem to gravitate towards him publicly, gravitate towards this weird conspiratorial thinking that I don't know. I don't want to give anybody too much credit. I think that all of them incline voting Trump, I hate to say it, are intelligent in some way.
Yeah, you know, it's not a stretch, that's yes, easy.
But like the shit they gravitate towards is kind of the lowest, like the bottom of the barrel, like conspiracy shit. Yeah right, Like it's not like, oh, I didn't hear this one before. It's not like, oh wow, like I hadn't considered that angle.
Oh the Jews. Really the Jews, that's your hot intelligent take the thousand year old conspiracy.
It's like the protocols of the Elders of Zion or whatever is the new conspiracy that you're you that you've now been been in clued into. But it's funny. It's like Ian Elon shares the same shit. It's like the Fauci conspiracy stuff. Yeah, and it's like the stuff that is really designed for for people who don't have better access to information.
Right, So a lot of what you've said applies to
many of us. You could take someone from the early nineteen hundreds and they could make that speech about anyone live after you know, nineteen ninety after two thousand and said, like, you have access to incredible information, right, I thought drinking mercury on a daily basis would improve my humors, you know, and like you know better, Wait it doesn't, right, And you have you know, Healthline and Wikipedia and doctors like you have, you have science, and yet you still engage
in superstition and conspiracy and unproven things. So it's so tempting and very easy. And I'll often be like, what's wrong with those people? Right? But it's like, Okay, we're all people. Something's wrong with all of us. They have a bigger stage on which that's That's what I'm.
Saying is so yeah, I feel like I can understand when you don't have access to.
So access doesn't mean anything. You know, people who enslaved other people had access to the idea of human rights right right, Like it wasn't like a secret, you know, it wasn't like that, oh my god, people could just own themselves what that's madness. They weren't waiting for you know, King to say it out loud right right, It was no, it was knowable, Yeah, And yet there were incentives set up and benefits set up to encourage millions of people to go along with something we now say is like
absolutely insane and dehumanizing and terrible. Right, that's a long way of getting to like what the incentive for people with presumably a lot of power and access to resources and better information than us to engage in the opposite transgression is a hell of a drug. And if you can be self perceived as like, yo, I'm so punk rock, you know, I find the real truth? Like it goes back to X Files. Man, we're old enough to remember, like the truth is out there, which planet a seed?
Not that show specifically, but it was of a moment where we can't trust anything. Yeah, like two plus two is for maybe prove it? Yeah, well okay, but what kind of numbers are you and what system of math are you basing that on? What assumption?
Right?
You can think yourself into not thinking, you're thinking when you're just viewing nonsense. And there's a lot of nonsense that passes for intelligence and thought these days. That's just counterintuitive bullshit. Right. But it's packaged up as Andrew Tate, you know, wow, it's packaged up as Ben Shapiro, And he sounds like a nerd, so he must be smart.
I love Ben right, not that everything he says is bullshit, but so much is so much, And so I think people like a Kanye or an Elon or parts of us, it's like, all right, I know you told me that COVID, you know we'd have to do these things. But I
know the government's been wrong about this stuff before. Look, the black person in me, not specifically me, but ancestrally, who was experimented on in Tuskegee by government health experiments, understand skepticism about government health mandates that might hurt people. So the anti vax thing is not even like, you're so dumb, why don't you believe science? Well, fucking science
is always changing, right, and sometimes science is abused. When you have no trust or very low trust in the environment, then you can take good faith nuance and weaponize it as faith in nothing, and it becomes nihilism, and it becomes ship posting, and it becomes pretend intelligence when you're just peddling noise and nonsense. And I think Elon crossed
that line so much. As a business owner, he was frustrated at California's mandates to keep people safe, right, and he took it to the extreme and is now pedling conspiracy theories about one guy who's spent most of his life literally trying to save millions and millions of people, right, Like, there's many people who could and should be vilified. Anthony Fauci ain't one of them. He's made mistakes. I would acknowledge that some of the messaging wasn't always clear, but
prosecution those are working out here trump a bit. Yeah, it's like metal, you know, not like firing lines. I don't know, man, Well I know some of the answer and it gets exhausting sometimes. But then this is also like, okay, what's the what's the lesson or the opportunity here besides spinning up media cycles? Talking about the guy who's powered by media cycles? Right? And I mean, I think the deeper thing that we're playing around with here, which is like, Okay,
what's the motivation, what's the incentive? How do we try to like protect against this because he's not alone, he's loud. But I just I think there's something about being perceived as brave and clever, and there is a value to victimhood which anyone in power loves to wrap themselves in. That flag. The greatest deflection against criticism of your own power is to claim to be the victim.
You know.
It's it's just so crazy too. You're like, I don't think you're the guy who's had the hard time.
Yeah. Yeah.
The thing you said about the X Files, which I think about all the time, is like, you know, when I was a kid, you know, or whatever, young adult, I guess when it was on. There's a lot of stuff on that show that circles of friends of mine we were like, yeah, what is up with not like
the things like there's aliens or whatever. Yeah, but there were books that now form the basis for like some of the craziest, most fringe conspiracy theories that were like these books like Behold a Pale Horse in like these like old school like the Robert Anton Wilson books like the Illuminatus trilogy and stuff that were like, oh, yeah, the Knights Templar and the Vatican and there's all this like cover up and whatever, and you're kind of like, yeah,
I kind of believe that because the Vatican seems sort of fucked up and who knows what's really.
Going on there?
All the people I knew it was all like the fascist state, the government man is like covering it up or whatever.
And now it's like weirdly flipped.
Yeah, the right wing now has like somehow adopted these things that I felt like were these really like almost like hippieish sort of conspiracies.
If you think of conspiracy theories as a virus capable of spreading morally neutral in terms of the hosts, it will attach itself to yeah, and it has variants, and it will mutate, and it will find new ways to increase the mortality rate, but not so much that it decreases the are not in the spread, Like all this stuff we should know, but we know now because of COVIDR. We're all a little epidemiologists. Now I just dropped. Are
not in a casual conversation. So because I read a white paper, you know, or five in the past three years.
You're staying in formed, you know what's going on.
And again overwhelming my brain with things that I like specialists to actually specialize. Right, So you know, being liberal is not an inoculation against conspiracy. Right, And the same doubt of systems, you know, is available to liberal and conservative and it's the basis for americanness. To begin with, like we don't trust the king. We started with distrust.
That's a good point. We should overthrow the government. Actually, yeah, So it's like whether you're like a black panther who doesn't trust the government, or like some libertarian pharm owner who doesn't trust the government. Like we share something. We like, what's up with this government? And even though one may vote for Democrats and the other.
For Republicans, with this government, I think that's a that's a great.
Question, is a super good question. But I also like I used to indulge in conspiracy theory. I'm gonna I can't believe I'm about to say before everybody else did.
Josh, Wow, Oh you're like the the indie rock guy.
Yeah, Like I'm that guy. I'm that guy that like I was there at the at the indie club, you know, like in the base.
Like losing my edge.
This is the LCD sounds lose to my edge, you Like, I was there when it happened.
And now that everybody's into them, they're not cool anymore.
You were the original infoce.
Theories are not cool when the richest guy in the world loudly embraces them, right, they lose their heads cutly not fun. It is no longer transgressive or countercultural when the ruling class rules by conspiracy theory.
Yeah.
Right, So when the President of the United States is like, you know what's true, lizard people like fuck, I guess I can't be engaged in that.
It actually says him, but lizard people didn't. I mean, he's got so.
It's not cool, and I think it's it's more but it's more dangerous. There's something about indulging, like with highly processed foods or dessert, right, a little bit has value. It can add balance, it can add an interesting, rich flavor. But if you just eat that, if you only eat Twizzlers, yeah, you're gonna die a horrible depth sooner.
Than it's actually a sponsor of this episode, so sort of disappointing to hear that you're not a fan, but.
It's too popular. They need to stay punk, you know, punk can ever be mainstream.
Twizzler is the most punk candy of all time as well. Know, it's funny that you mentioned that you were into conspiracy when it was cool or whatever, but.
Like ham Radio times, you know what I'm saying, Like, as a whole different level of commitment.
Well, I used to.
I used to love Coast to Coast, you know, the Art Bell Show, which is like people calling and they'd be like, you know, I was haunted by a spirit or whatever. Or he'd have people on who had had like UFO sightings. And actually Alex Jones comes from his show, like he became a regular or something on the show, which was like, you know, it was like a naturally syndicated like yeah, he was on at midnight and it would be like people talking about conspiracy or talking about
ghosts or talking about whatever. And it was fun because it was like, be crazy if that were real, you know, to your point, like when the president is like it's real, it's like okay, like you know what, Yeah, that loses a little bit of its novelty factor.
Yeah, And I think a little bit of like high sodium, high fructose corn cere like beef jerky whatever the thing is, like a beef jerky food cans, you know, like, oh, that's that's cool. If you're traveling to space, it shouldn't be your whole diet.
I don't know what tun to diversify outside the cave, and it's a little bit of conspiracy theory.
It probably does a body good, right, a whole system built on it. Then the whole system falls down because we actually do need to believe in something. Yeah, non belief isn't enough. And if you start doubting everything, you don't have anything left to stand on. You find yourself alone in the universe, which is pretty existentially terrifying, which is Elon Musk almost. It's where he's headed.
That's why he's like trying to like fly out to Mars, like be literally alone in the universe.
But the cost of his indulgence is a lot of the rest of us, you know.
No, I mean, we're all just the shrapnel flying at everybody from his like own weird like midlife crisis that he's experiencing that he has to like talk about on Twitter. Adjacent to Twitter, you just wrote this piece about TikTok, about America trying to shut down TikTok Get Out of TikTok.
Which people can read at puck dot News, Puck dot News, buy my page. TikTok on the Clock or something like that.
Is the title, hold on, I'm I tell you it is. The headline is TikTok on the Clock.
I have it up here what happens to the creator economy If the world's most important new social platform is banned in the United States, we may be amount to find out, says Caratonde. Uh okay, but like it's not gonna be banned, is it? They're gonna band You said that like gen Z would.
And Gen Alpha would unite form Voltron from gen.
I don't have any Whether they don't have any power.
We all have more power than we know. And I think if these kids stopped signing up from military duty, if they stopped paying for their parents and grandparents social Security checks, because we're in this page you go system, they could they could shut some shit down.
Do you think TikTok is that important? You don't think they'd just be like, well.
You know, I nodded to the idea that something so culturally enmeshed and with such deep daily habits, you know it's some high person. Is there some stats I left out of this piece as far as like the number of people under nineteen that represent the core usage of TikTok It it seems impossible. I don't think it is. It seems impossible that one day that would just disappear.
I think you say the average time daily is like.
Ninety minutes a day is the average TikTok craze and they have a billion monthly active user.
Well, I say that's crazy, But then I'm like, how much time did previous generations spend watching TV? And it's way more than ninety minutes a day.
Yeah, it was like four hours a day or more. I remember finding these stats in the early two thousands.
So we're like all blown away by that, but like, actually it's much close to do because in TikTok is in some way like you're kind of flipping through channels, so it is actually closer to a TV experience than maybe any other social.
App and the end, and it's higher for our high usage people, right, you know, it's like that's the average user, and then the ones who over index are going to be two hours a day, three hours a day and just living in the palmitter hand. So I think you'd be based on the combination of concerns about TikTok. You've got people concerned about data and privacy. You've got people concerned about youth mental health, and that's like a catchy
thing to suddenly give a shit about. You've got folks concerned about China, some for good reasons, some for racist reasons, but their reasons don't matter. They're on the same team when it comes to like skepticism toward anything that comes from that nation.
It's like that meme with the with the meme with the arms locked together. You know I'm talking about it looks like two guys like arm wrestling, but it's like, is it like a black arm and a white arm and they're like locked together?
Am I crazy?
I just like to make it feel crazy. You're not fun to watch. You try to paint a picture with one got a name? I don't know. Let's leave it to a listener. This will be the Easter egg. The first listener to find me on Mastadon and tell.
Me it's called epic handshake. Okay, you know what I'm talking about, right.
I probably know what you're talking about, but not by that.
Damn it.
Hold on, I'm just gonna say you this meme template right now. I'm going to put in the chat here. Oh you were saying that, like, yeah, the people who are like racists, Yeah, it's a coalition people who have good reasons to worry about China.
It's like this meme.
It's like, it's like mental health advocates, racists, national security people. Right, the Van diagram is very diverse here, that's the illustration we should have done.
I like that, Actually is could this be the thing that brings us all together?
Yes?
I mean I do think a common enemy.
I thought that before COVID. I was like, oh, COVID is the alien invasion. It's as close as we're going to get. And it ripped the country apart in the world too.
So No, it's funny because I thought the same thing about when Russia invaded Ukraine. I was like, Okay, now America, we're classically against us. You don't like Russia historically like we are, And and Matt gets is like, actually, no, it's crazy, right, it's fucking bizarre. These Republicans are like, actually, you know, Putin's got a good point. It's like, dude, does he like is that where we're at? Is that where you're part?
Aready? Anyhow?
Sorry, not not to fucking lose it, but let's take some deep breaths together. Josh is TikTok dangerous? Yeah, this sounds like the most bullshit sorry like CNN question of all time.
Bear Tunde. Is TikTok dangerous for the youth?
No?
I mean, like what is your take on it?
Like do you actually think there's real concern Like at the privacy thing I get, I get snooping shit, but like.
I think there's real concern in that is super addictive and it's become back to this world of low and no trust. TikTok the place people go to get real questions answered. It's like chat GPT, but like way larger scale, and sometimes the results you get back are as non factual as that bot. Oh yeah, but they present as like this is what you should do to heal this thing, this is what you should do in terms of how you vote.
No misinfo on TikTok is crazy.
Yeah, yeah, So it's it's a risky vector for misinformation. It's risky in terms of the black box of how it operates and semi public square media ecosystem without checks and balances, and that's always been that was the case with Facebook, that's the case with But it's just transfers to whatever the hot thing is, right, and TikTok for me is more fascinating and potentially more dangerous because it's a social network that like you don't have to bring
friends to experience it. You just trust, like the algorithm is the one friend you need. Whether you're a creator or I'm more of a passive consumer. In terms of your experience on there, you like a few things, you linger a half second longer on this thing versus that thing, And they just dialed you in quick and they put you in a little box and like you are this type of user for four to six dash B seven
and you get that stuff in your feed. And it's like if a pharmaceutical company could like build a highly addictive drug just for you within ten minutes of knowing you.
That sounds great, unless yet that's what I want. Okay, you got a little bit high from this, Like what if we kind of juice that.
Yeah, it's for the personalized drugs. Yeah, it's actually it's the promise of your actual.
Personal sound attractive and exciting to me? Is that a problem for me personally? As you've been describing TikTok just in this last thirty seconds or forty five seconds, I have been in the back of my head, I'm like, maybe I should be looking at TikTok more often, like almost very sick man. I'm doing dry January, so it could be I'm just looking for something like addictive, a new fix, you know, but.
Like I get it. I've been there, I do.
I'll open TikTok occasionally and I'm like, you know, you'll start looking at shit. It is like the pringles, you know, like once you pop, you can't stop or whatever.
It's also and what I didn't put in the puck piece because I can never put everything in one thing. So we copy and paste, like we are a meme driven society, even before we use that word the way Hollywood does a copy and paste on types of movies. You know, one thing hits and everybody's doing the thing right.
Everybody wants a Marvel cinematic universe, and everybody needs big ip and like leverage a book or a superstar or preferably both, so the risk is lower and we can just spend a fuck ton of money on this and make a fuck ton of money after that and not be original. Right. That also happens in business and tech and social media. Facebook just copies and paste. So the more successful TikTok is, the more everything else looks like TikTok. Right, our Instagram isn't Instagram anymore.
It's just TikTok. Yeah, but a failed TikTok, like a bad TikTok. So if I'm on a reel and I accidentally go to the next reel, I'm like, I'm immediately turned off and always like how do I get out of this? Which they don't make very easy. Of course they don't. It's entrap mean, but you can't get out of the reels once you're in there. I've quit the app on multiple occasions.
They're not your friendly neighborhood drug dealer. They're not cal or Doug or Jena, whoever you're a dealer with. They are big pharma of social media.
I have a medical marijuana lize, so I get it from the state.
When it jumped the shark a bit for me, I'm on Instagram. Like you had Twitter with text. You like reading, you know, you like writing, but not too much. That's Twitter for you. You want to write too much, that's medium for you. There's blog Spot or something to date myself if you want. If you want still photos and like cool photos with stories associated with them in captions, then you go to Instagram. You want short form video that kind of moves at the speed of freaking meth. Then
you go to TikTok. But now everything is everybody just has to be in everybody else's shit, and nobody can just be who they are. So there's no fixed identities in this world. So everybody just wants to be what the cool kid is at the time. So Facebook is TikTok,
Instagram is TikTok. Twitter is just whatever. It's dead. But I think when I'm on Instagram and I see I see a still photo, but it's actually a video because the algorithm and the incentive structure forced a normal human being to use a weird app to turn their photo into a looping, thirteen second video. Not a gift. Gifts are a whole thing. That's a whole different type of
media format. Totally had a place for that too. Nope, so we're just gonna We're gonna contort your natural abilities and sensibilities into this other thing because we don't know how to make our own shit work, so we're just going to copy theirs and make you TikTok. So even people who are on Instagram, I hate TikTok. No you don't, because you're in it, right now you're living in TikTok's great shadow.
But I think that people on Instagram do legitimately hate it, and I believe strongly that the only reason why reels, if it's successful at all, it's because it's being like forcibly pushed on the users in a way that it's like really uncomfortable and they don't like.
And here that was the great Facebook pivot to video that accelerated the overinvestment of so many newsrooms. And it was like years later, like, well, actually we were counting three second video starts. Well, okay, actually we added a zero to all the video plays across the network.
Now, if listeners may not know, there was a period where on the Internet when there was like a news company or whatever, they would just publish like texts. Sometimes they'd do like a long form video, there'd be some images, they would do a gallery. And then one day Facebook was like, video is going to be the next big
thing for our platform. Everybody should really make video. And then it literally many large news organizations that were well funded where like we're firing the people who write and we're gonna make video yep.
And then it was a huge failure. Nobody watching any of the video.
Nobody gave a shit, and then a bunch of those companies went out of business, like a crazy amount of companies now don't exist because of the pivot to video. And then Facebook was like, oh, we'd like completely miscounted the numbers. Also, like those views we said you were getting, like we're not real at all, Like we didn't have any real clue about what we were doing there, or we lied.
And on top of that, you cannot trust the outlet with an incentive to inflate its numbers to tell you what's going on. And part of what happened is Facebook shifted its algorithm to prioritize video, you know, right, to make sure it went more viral, got more views and ranked higher than stills or texts. And then they publicly said we're seeing a shift toward video amongst our users.
Right, They're like, they're like, it's weird.
We put video now on their feed and they seem to be watching it because there's nothing else.
I mean, it's true.
That's like you know, Shi Jinping saying, you know, we're just seeing a high degree of loyalty among other people of China. Right for me, people want me to rule forever, said the man holding a gun to his people.
We should be so, we should be so lucky to have such an opportunity to just completely railroad people like left, right and center and just just forcing this shit on them. It's a bleak picture, but I have a thought listening to you describe what's going on with the tiktokification of all the social networks, which is like, to me, it almost feels like the Netflix effect, which I think we've seen now kind of start to crumble a bit, which
is like Netflix is like, we're Netflix. We're doing our thing. Now,
we're making original stuff. Okay, now that's fucking killing. Now everybody is scrambling like to play catch up to the streaming Netflix to be Netflix, right, and you've got HBO doing it, and you've got fucking Paramount doing it whoever, And and it turns out there's like a limit to how much of that shit that we want and that will tolerate, and frankly, like there's a fatigue that will set in after a while, right where you're just like
this may be the best shit in the world. I may have one hundred of the best shows to watch, but like I don't really have the time or the attention span or the interest at this point, because like my doobamine has.
Left my brain. I'm fucking like tapped out.
Is it possible that this is the final breath or the near final breath of like social media as we know it, that it's collapsing in upon itself, like they've run out of ideas, they've run out of attention. I do think this is just me riffing now, but like I do think we are entering a phase, not post pandemic, because they're still like a pandemic happening, but post the worst, most intense part of it that we experienced where we were all alone inside online all day for a long time.
I feel like there's a little bit of like people going like I don't know if that's what I want to be now, Like I want to be like that. So is it possible there's these like all these forces coming together. This is just my weird wishful thinking that like people don't want TikTok everywhere, they don't even maybe want to be on social media that much anymore. Maybe TikTok is just this like super pronounced last gasp of social media as we know it any any Does that sound like possible?
I think, I think that's a beautiful sentiment. I want that world. I still believe that world as possible. I remember I loved clubhouse, and then I went outside clubhouse.
God, I forgot about clubhouse. Right.
It was very simple. I couldn't socialize, I couldn't host things, and that was a wonderful substitute. And then I left my house right, and I went and filmed my TV series America Outdoors on PBS. Check it out in the PBS apps, great very Smith Clugg. And I was like, all of a sudden, I'm not spending all my time talking to strangers on a party line. I'm just like at a restaurant. Again. Well, I love restaurants, you know what. I love strangers on the street. I love random people
at the coffee shop. Taken too long to order? Give me a DMV line. Yes, And it was all superior to that novel interesting but unsustainable blip in the in the grand sweep of all the social technologies. It was like a Poe blip. And so I was wrong about
the sustainability of that. And more to the point, so where the people who devoted so much more of their time to it with social media, I am excited for us to escape the phase that we've been in the centralization the feed based Like even the word feed just makes me feel like livestock, right, just like, oh, I'm going to go to the feed. I'm going to feed.
I'm freaking the memes and the data. And then some they're just fattening me up to shove ads into the feed to take stuff from me so I can buy things.
I don't need to monetize you.
Yeah, And so we will always tend toward that because of capitalism, which won't let a diverse ecosystem prevail. That will tend toward monoculture in food, in entertainment, in technology platforms, because people want more and more and more, and shareholders want more and more and more, and that means everybody's
got to taste the same. Damn rabbit. But the gen Z and the Alphas in particular, you know, they grew up in the ashes of the financial crisis, and they bear the brunt of the trillion dollars of college debt. You know, they're older siblings, especially, so like, I don't know so much about this, And then the planet's reminding us like, Hey, this whole feed based system, infinite feeding, you'll eat your home planet and won't have anywhere to live.
That's not sustainable either. So more of us, I don't know if the whole system will totally change, but more of us will seek this alternative universe you're talking about. It excites me, and so I joke about Mastodon. I think it's like a hint that we can create other environments. In my podcast How the Citizen, the most recent season is exploring how we use technology to help us show up as active citizens and members of society and not just be fed to an economic engine that we didn't
build and that we generally don't benefit from. And I just learned a lot talking to people who've done different things with tech, the folks that knew public who were designing digital public spaces differently, as for Alshafe over in the Middle East, who's created this social media network that operates very differently from all the noise we've been talking about and just doesn't give people infinite powers on day zero to fuck around and find out how much damage
they can cause the society. It respectfully onboards people into actual communities first. It doesn't have vcs, which makes it possible. I love that, and because the incentives, like if you start with venture capital money, and so it's rich people who need to get richer. So this is already just like disposable, but they drive everything you pursue downstream from that. All your user research, all your UX design, all your growth marketing tactics are so that a millionaire can get
to be a billionaire. Then whose need are you really meeting with that feed and so to really have TikTok be the last gasp, we need different funding mechanisms which are available but not wide scale, and we need people designing these spaces who are more than just bored engineers. Yeah, we need people who actually know how to design spaces, you know, like designers, interior designers, cultural programmers, artists. We need folks who understand people to build spaces for people.
And many of those folks have not been included. They've been subjected to the visions and imaginations of a very small group of folk who don't have the broadest human experience.
And who are incentivized to make money.
Yeah, above all, it might talk about like community and ship, but.
You don't have to take a vow of poverty but if your premise is returning ten x and getting valued at a billion dollars and being a unicorn, then you've already You've already I wouldn't even say corrupted. You have vastly limited the possibilities for what you create under those conditions, and so we need fewer limits.
First, of your vision. This vision you're just paying is very beautiful. I feel like that.
I think I think we you know, we did that a little bit together. I'll take it.
I will take some credit.
You can have fifteen percent of the vision at a pre money valuation, generous call it thirty million.
Thank you. That sounds good.
I'll fine, I'll take that. I like that, all right. So okay, I think that's a great place to leave it. But you have a ton of stuff going on. You mentioned a couple of things now before we end. I want you to tell me then, and by proxy tell everybody listening. Obviously you're writing for pop You've got a PBS show you just mentioned.
Yeah, it's called America Outdoors. When can I see that? Where can I see that? You can see it now? It's re airing on you know. Find your local PBS affiliate. You can go to PBS dot org slash America Outdoors. They have a great streaming app that doesn't strip your identity and sell it back to you. Just the PBS digital app PBS Passport. If you pay, Oh yeah, I subscribe to that.
It's great. It's it's money well spent. It's like I think it's cheap too. It's like a yearly thing, it's like forty bucks.
Yeah, it's great, and you're supporting your local PBS station, which in some communities is the only local news available and local media available. So I've become an even bigger fan of PBS working with them and not just watching some of their stuff. So check out America Outdoors. It's not a wildlife show. It's a human show about our relationship with nature's and it's people we don't typically see.
A couple of examples. I spent time with formally incarcerated folk who learned how to fight forest fires in prison and now do it as free people and understand some
of their journey. I spend time with multiple indigenous communities in what we call Idaho and Minnesota and California and learned many of their traditions with respect to the land that they're on I go crabbing with the most conservative person I've ever knowingly been around in my life in the chest today, and I go hiking with refugee kids in Idaho, like it's surfing and horseback riding and just
beautiful people. When it helped me remember how much we still have in common, which includes, at the basis level, our planet. So check out America outdoors, check out Puck, pay for it, It's worth it. And how the Citizen is my podcast where we take Citizen to be a verb.
And you're in season three.
We are at season four now, we're we're about to drop season four. We launched in twenty twenty, got some awards, had some really dope conversations, and the show is all about sharing new ways to show up in society and exercise our power. Sometimes that's voting, most of the time it's a total new bag. It's business stuff, it's tech stuff,
it's culture stuff. And I tend to interview one person at a time about their thing, and then we give listeners in each episode a way to make it your thing and actions you can take in your life to just practice these muscles that have aturo feed so much because the only thing we've been told to do is.
Shopkeehit, which is guy.
You gotta admit it's pretty fun though, like it's super fun.
Hot in fact, Yeah, they've gamified resource loss.
It's so true.
So Josh, it's a great reunion. Yeah, thank you for having me on here. Thank you so much for doing this. You got to come back do it some more, talk about some new things. I'm sure you'll have like ten new things next time. We talked to each other. Happy to come back.
Well, that conversation was amazing and also went kind of long, so I don't have a lot of time. They're telling me I have to wrap it up now, they're telling me. There's several people are motioning towards me. Look, they're doing that thing where they pointing to their watch and then like making their hand go in a circle like wrap it up. So I'm feeling a lot of pressure right now. So that is our show for this week, and we'll be back next week with more What Future And I
should say before I go that. What Future is an iHeartMedia podcast. It's executive produced by Lyras Smith, Adam Wand is our editor, and Jenna Caagel Am I saying that right Kegel, just like Bagel right, is our supervising producer.
She's mad at me.
Now, I hope you're all happy, and if you would like to, and you don't have to know, one's going to afford to you, but it would be great for me. I could finally hold my head up proudly at family dinners. If you would just go on iTunes or Apple podcasts or any place where you can add a star rating to this podcast and give it five or six stars, that would be great because my family doesn't respect me, and I think if you do that, they'll start to come around to the idea that I'm worth respecting.
So I really appreciate that