Baratunde Thurston Explains Our Pain

On the show this week Josh is joined by the illuminating and hilarious Baratunde Thurston (host of the PBS show America Outdoors, Puck News writer, and all-around genius) to discuss... the total breakdown of information in the world. Baratunde and Josh take the listener on a sprawling conversational ride, revealing unexpected truths about the future of all life on Earth. Discussed: Original conspiracy theories, the diversity of TikTok haters, Tim Cook's sense of well-being, deep breathing, being who you are.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Hey, and welcome to What Future. I'm your host, Joshua Tapulski,
and We've got a great episode today because I have
been wanting to talk to our guest 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

(00:39):
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. Um
of course, talking about my conversation with barrettund Thurston, who
is a podcaster and a writer and a TV personality.
I think he's done a Ted talk. I believe he

(01:01):
is uh, he may be an astronaut. He's doing many things,
and he has a fascinating guy. He currently is writing
for puck News you may have heard of is one
of my favorite new websites, and he's been writing about
social media and technology and 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

(01:23):
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
of most of our problems in society. Okay, that's pretty broad,

(01:46):
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's so much noise, so much misinformation, so much that

(02:06):
is wrong that you have access to. Right when we
thought of the Internet, we 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 the superpower that we

(02:30):
would all have, that this is like the beginning of
a new era of understanding and education and information and
and humanity coming together and people solving their problems, and
we're all gonna you know, communicate and share and explore
together in cyberspace, and you know, look at all this

(02:51):
access that we now have to edify ourselves to become smarter,
to become better citizens of the world. And what nobody
seem to think of, and myself included, is that the
the inverse of all 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

(03:15):
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 too, the more dramatic stories, and the
more dramatic stories are often the lies. And so the

(03:37):
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

(03:59):
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 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 are growing, and there the pools inside

(04:24):
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

(04:44):
than Barrettunde Thurston. And uh, he agreed to come on
the show. He's here with us right now. Okay, I'm

(05:08):
very happy you're here. Yeah, I had you on my
show in 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
you do you you don't live in New York anymore?
Do you? You live in l A. I live in

(05:31):
l A. I left New York four 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, let's
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, Yes, puck News. Is that what we call it.
We call it puck we call it. The website is
puck dot news. But my name is just I like

(05:54):
Puck a lot. I gotta tell you, I'm a big fan.
I'm a subscriber. I have been reading and fall going 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.

(06:16):
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, 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 past you mentioned You're like, yeah, Twitter as
we know it is basically dead or something like that.

(06:36):
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. The same goes for cities like

(06:59):
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 and on
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 or metaphysical one too. If

(07:21):
like all my cells have changed, am I still me?
But in this case, I think what Ellen has done
at Twitter 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

(07:44):
of speech he wants to be free, which is 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 and he's implemented his predilections and personality into the code.

(08:05):
And if he 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. And I include myself in that,
And I'm late to the exodus by some measures, even

(08:27):
though I substantively like downgraded my time there years ago
before Ellen 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. You know, there definitely was a point, you know,
I don't know when I was just like no, I'm
not going to do this anymore. But but it has

(08:49):
to end, right, like he can't sto financially sustainable in
its current state, don't you don't know? It isn't. And
I think there's cultural death, there's technological or kind of
operational death, um, and there's financial death, and 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

(09:11):
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

(09:31):
lot of the black Twitter folk, even some of like
the crypto kids, like there's a whole community, it'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 if you don't gather the town screat to be like, wow,
look at this, I love that what they've done with
the stones here or whatever. Yeah, like they gather to
talk about other stuff about like the janitor, you know. Yeah,

(09:52):
it's like it's 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, so
you're part 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 Street nous of how Ellen put this deal together
and what's required and when payments are due, and he's

(10:14):
gonna owe some significant amount of money on the debt
he took out to pay for this thing. He can
afford it. But with every drop in the share price
of Tesla, it's gonna sting a little more, With every
increase in the FED rate, it's going to sting a
little more. And with every dollar of revenue that brands
aren't spending in his toxic environment because they don't want

(10:35):
to be adjacent to a white supremacy and Nazis and
fake news. It's gonna 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 has decided so far to handle
by not paying his rent, which is so very trumpy
of another brilliant genius billionaire over it. Like not paying

(10:58):
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 in class in in like
what the billionaire class are the very rich or cape
below that we are not. And by the way, the
rent on Twitter spaces is not like a month or something,
you know. I mean, it's not like a one bedroom
apartment in in in like Bushwick or something. It's like,

(11:19):
I don't even know what the rent would be. It's
probably way more than that right now. 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 I'm definitely above normal at this point.

(11:41):
But in general, a person who does not pay their
rent our consequences. You're gonna get fucking evicted. 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
and we're raised, Josh in this world where where someone
like Elon, of his gender, of his race, of his

(12:04):
inherited wealth decides to transgress, we tend to celebrate it
right until it's too late, you know. Yeah. He I mean,
he's like he's less cool. Heisenberg was way cooler than this.
His drugs aren't as good, but his blue math is

(12:26):
like I don't know, fucking the blue check mark. Yeah,
but he can afford to call our bluff. As a society,
he can afford to wait 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 paid on a weekly, bi weekly

(12:49):
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 employee 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

(13:09):
to spend it on that and I can just rent
them out. It's it's the Trump move, you know. It's
like I'm gonna break this law. Let's see at the
government bothers to process. I'm gonna 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 won the deal of the century.
But you're also just it's also criminality, it's another word

(13:32):
for it, and dishonor you know, at at best, the
most charitable interpretation is he's a meanie and he's not honorable.
He sucks the thing that I find so and I've
talked about this a bunch, but like you know, I
don't want to belabor and I'm sure you're all talked
out over Twitter, but like, what's so incredible to means?
I never was like Elon Musk is clearly the smartest

(13:52):
man in the world or anything. But there was a
period where I was like, this guy is interesting, 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, We're really fucking interesting
and really seemed to be working right, like once he

(14:14):
was involved in Tesla, the SpaceX stuff, some of his
like bigger ideas that he would talk about, but you
never really he didn't go like way into detail on it.
It's so strange to me to see the evolution or
de evolution of his character, of his personality, like whoever
he plays in public, it's like he's hearing these cheers

(14:35):
from whoever wherever it is a different section of the
stands and it's like that part of the room. Yes,
so I I share a big part of that, Josh,
And I think I went from we're talking to a
decade ago, you know, not really knowing anything about this
guy heard about Tesla a little bit. Ah, the roadster
looks kind of cool. I'll never have one of those anyway.

(14:58):
Ten maybe 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, grocer,
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

(15:19):
line was not gas car. And there was one option,
you know, which was Tesla Model three. Okay, So I
start paying more attention. I'm building spreadsheets to analyze with
the best car, and the Nero is coming out but
it's not available yet from Kia, Hyundai and all. And
I'm also keen on the space thing and I'm like
starting to look into what's up with SpaceX and the

(15:40):
YouTube algorithm is great for me. I have never really
been fed Nazis. I've sort of disinformation. I've been fed
like how to make great cocktails, how to compost, 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 space kid

(16:00):
and I saw I watched his announcements around the Mars
launcher and the reusable rockets, and I just admired his
systematic thought. Yeah, 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

(16:22):
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 evies. Yes, sign me up.
So camm Callie got the Tesla. At least the three
real excited had friends that SpaceX almost visited. SpaceX never
made it over to visit there, but just at admiration

(16:44):
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 to 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

(17:04):
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 vol
into the rabbit holes of you know the thing about feminism, right,

(17:26):
they want to cut your balls off anymore god video,
you know the thing about black people. They want to
take everything you ever worked hard for and rub it
in your face. You know the thing about indigenous people,
you know, to think about climate 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,

(17:50):
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 me culture with Pepetter Frog and
gamer Gate. You know, that was all mean 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 if

(18:10):
a Ford Chain kind of guy. He's a fortune early
and he you know this, if he plays with with Q.
You know my pronouns are um, was it prosecute fauci?
I mean, that's that's some que stuff, right, But it's
it's actually very explicable if you've as you have spent
time on the part of the internet. That's not just

(18:31):
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, like
young men with too much time on their hands did
agree and and not productively put to use and and Ellen,
who as CEO of four companies should have had plenty

(18:51):
to do, Well, that's my thing. This is what 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

(19:12):
not do is I would not fucking tweet. I would
not go on Twitter. I would not need to go
on Twitter. 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

(19:32):
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, they're right,
but but like to build an electric car, you don't
do it on on Twitter, Like you don't need to
do it on Twitter. Like to go to space, you

(19:54):
don't do that on Twitter. It's not part of the
it doesn't need to be part of his 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 a tweet about the new watch
or whatever. Tim Cook has something that Ellen's missing. He's

(20:15):
got a whole sense of himself. Yeah, he has self
affirmation that doesn't require thousands of strangers every day to
affirm him. Instead, he's got self love in a way
that is satisfied and quiet moments as opposed to happen
to make noise, to prove that he still exists. Yeah,

(20:36):
and so it's not that mysterious. You know, we're not
inside of Elan specifically, but I know what it feels
like to like picture or didn't happen, right, like I
and and I'm I think objectively more balanced, you know
than even though I have way less money, I have

(20:58):
more of what I need. Yeah, what's up with right?
You're not You're not the world's richest man, and yet
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

(21:19):
public life who don't have their own private lives sorted out.
And so in that sense, he 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 cat that we all were communicating, like,
he bought like the phone company, you know, he was like, no,

(21:42):
I own the lines now, So you're gonna hear me
a lot. I'm just gonna kind of hell 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 a public eye and very much
in control of like the public sort of conversation, not

(22:05):
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 and publicly gravitate towards this weird conspiratorial thinking that

(22:29):
I don't know, I don't want to give anybody too
much credit. I think that all of them, including Trump,
I hate to say it, are intelligent in some way. Yeah,
you know, not a stretch, that's yes, easy, But like
the should they gravitate towards is kind of the lowest,
like the bottom of the barrel. Like conspiracy ship. Right,
Like it's not like, oh I didn't hear this one before.

(22:52):
It's not like oh wow, like I hadn't considered that
angle the Jews. The Jews, that's your hot, intelligent take
the thousands 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 included into. But
it's funny, it's like I and Ellen shares the same ship.
It's like the Fauci's conspiracy stuff, and it's like the

(23:14):
stuff that it's really designed 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 alive after after two thousand. It's

(23:38):
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 don't, right?
And you have you know, hell Shine and Wikipedia and
doctors like you have you have science, and yet right,

(23:58):
you still in age in superstition and conspiracy and unproven things.
So it's so tempting and very easy, and I'll be like,
what's wrong with those people? But it's like, okay, we're
all people. Something wrong with all of us. They have
as bigger stage on which but that's That's what I'm saying,
is so yeah, I feel like I can understand when

(24:19):
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, oh my god, people could
just own themselves what that's madness. They weren't waiting for

(24:39):
you know, king to say it out loud, right it was.
It was no, it was noable. Yeah, and yet there
were incentives set up and benefits set up to encourage
millions of people to go along with something we now
says like absolutely insane and the humanizing and terrible. That's
a long way of getting to like, what's the incentive
for people with presumable a lot of power and access

(25:01):
to resources and better information than us to engage in
the opposite transgression is a hell of a drug. And
if 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

(25:22):
planted to see. Not that shows specifically, but it was
of a moment where we can't trust anything like two
plus two is four maybe proven? Well what okay? But
what kind of numbers are you and what system of
math are you basing that on? What assumption you can
think yourself into not thinking? You're thinking when you're just

(25:43):
spewing nonsense. And there's a lot of nonsense that passes
for intelligence and thought these days. That's just counterintuitive bullshit.
But it's packaged up as Andrew tape. It's packaged up
as being a piro, and he he sounds like a nerd,
and he must be smart, not that everything he says

(26:07):
is bullshit. And and so I think people like a
Kanye or an Elon or parts of us or it's like,
all right, I know you told me that COVID you
know we'd have to do these things, but I don't
know the government has been wrong about this stuff before. Look,
the black person and me, not specifically me, but ancestrally,

(26:28):
who was experimented on in Tuskegee by government health experiments.
Understand skepticism about government health man dates that might hurt people.
So the anti vax thing, it's not even like you're
so dumb. Why don't you believe science? Well, science is
always changing, and sometimes science is abused. When you have
no trust or very low trust in environment, then you
can take good faith nuance and weaponize it as faith

(26:52):
in nothing, and it becomes nihilism, and it becomes ship posting,
and it becomes pretend intelligence when you're just pedal noise
and nonsense. And I think Ellen crossed that line so much.
As a business owner. He was frustrated at California's mandates
to keep people safe, and he took it to the
extreme and is now peddling conspiracy theories about one guy

(27:14):
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 Faucier one of them.
He's made mistakes. I would acknowledge that some of the
messaging wasn't always clear, but prosecution trumpe medals, you know,

(27:36):
not like firing lines. I don't know, man, I 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. I mean,

(27:57):
I know, I agree the deeper thing that we're playing
around with here, which is like, Okay, what's the motivation,
what's the insensive? 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

(28:22):
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 also
so crazy too. You're like, I don't think you're the
guy who's had the hard time, but like, you know,
it works. It's super effective. I mean I think. I mean,

(28:43):
there's like ten things you just said that I'm like, fuck, yes,
like I completely agree, and I'm like yes, one thing,
just to go back to you really quickly, 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 and we
were like, yeah, what is up with Not like the

(29:04):
things like there's aliens or whatever, but there were books
that now formed the basis for like some of the craziest,
most fringe conspiracy theories that were like these books like
Behold a Pale Horse and like these like old school
like the Robert Anton Wilson books like the Illuminatus trilogy
and stuff that we're like, oh, yeah, the Nights Templar
and the Vatican and there's all this like cover up
and whatever, and you're kind of like, yeah, I kind

(29:26):
of believe that because the Vatican seems sort of sucked
up and who knows it'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. The right wing now
has like somehow adopted these things that I felt like
were these really like almost like hippie ish sort of conspiracies.

(29:48):
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 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

(30:09):
we shouldn't know, but we know now because of COVID.
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 informed, you know what's going on, and again
overwhelming my brain with things that I like specialists to
actually specialize. So you know, being liberal is not an

(30:30):
inoculation against conspiracy. 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

(30:50):
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 democ rats and
the other for putting yourself. I think that's that's a
great question. I'd love to get the answered to. Is
a super good question. But I also like, I used
to indulge in conspiracy theory. I'm gonna I can't believe

(31:12):
this before everybody else did. Josh, Wow, you're like the
indie rock guy. Yeah, like I was that guy. I'm
that guy that like I was there at the at
the indie club, you know, like in the basis literally
like losing my edge. This is the LCD sound edge.
You're like, I was there when it happened, and now
that everybody's into them, they're not cool anymore. You were

(31:33):
the original info force. Theories are not cool When the
richest guy in the world loudly embraces them, they lose
their edge. Certainly not fun. It is no longer transgressive
or countercultural when the ruling class rules by conspiracy theory. Right,
So when the president of the United States is like,
you know, what's true, lizard people, they're like, fuck, I

(31:54):
guess I can't be engaging that he did. Actually, lizard
people didn't mean he's he's got So it's not cool
and I think it's it's 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

(32:17):
eat that, if you only eat Twizzlers, you're gonna die
a horrible death sooner. Twizzler is 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, and every mainstream Twizzler is
the most punk candy of all times. Really, though, it's

(32:47):
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 like UFO sightings. And actually

(33:08):
Alex Jones comes from his show, like he became a
regular or something on this show, which was like, you know,
it's like a naturally syndicated, like 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, it's your point, Like when the
president is like it's real, it's like okay, like you

(33:29):
know what, Yeah, that loses a little bit of its
novelty factor. Yeah, and I think a little bit of
like high sodium, high fruc dose corn syra like beef
jerky whatever the thing is like a beef jerky food
and can'ts you know, like, oh, that's that's cool. If
you're traveling into space, it shouldn't be your whole diet.

(33:50):
I don't know, like tuna fish that's can diversifileside and
a little bit of conspiracy theory. It probably does a
body good a whole the system built on it. Then
the whole system falls down because we actually do need
to believe in something. Yeah, nonbelief isn't enough. And if
you start doubting everything, you don't have anything left to

(34:10):
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 like shrapnel flying at everybody from his own
weird like midlife crisis that he's experiencing that he has

(34:32):
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 and read
at puck dot news, puck dot News on my page.
TikTok on the Clock or something like that is the title. Hold,
I'm gonna tell you it is. The headline is TikTok
on the Clock. I have it up here. What happens

(34:52):
to the creator economy if the world's most important new
social platforms banned in the United States? We maybe amount
to find out, says our Turn of Day. Uh okay,
but like it's not gonna be banned, is it. They're
gonna You said that, like gen Z would jin Alpha, um,
you would would unite form Voltron from Jenne. They don't

(35:15):
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 ship down. Do you think TikTok
is that important? You don't think they'd just be like, well,

(35:35):
you know, I nodded to the idea that something so
culturally ameshed and with such deep daily habits, you know
it's some high person. Is there are 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.

(35:57):
Do you think you say, the average time daily is
like minutes a day is the average TikTok and they
have 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. It was like four hours a day or more.
I remember finding stats in that early two thousand's so

(36:18):
we're like all blown away by that, but like, actually
it's much closer 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 it's and it's
higher for our high usage people, you know, it's like
that's the average user, and then the ones who over
index are going to be a two hours a day,

(36:38):
three hours a day and just living in the palm
of their 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. Right. You've got folks concerned about China,

(36:59):
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 theme 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

(37:21):
like locked together? Am I crazy? And I just like
to make me feel crazy, not to watch you try
to paint a picture with it. What the call? It's
got a it's got a name. I don't know. Let's
leave it to a listener. This will be the easter
the first listener to find me on Mastodon and tell
me it's called epic handshake. Okay, you know what I'm
talking about, right, you probably know what you're talking about,

(37:42):
but not by that. Damn it. Hold on, I'm just
gonna send you this meme template right now. I'm gonna
put in the chat here. Oh you were saying that, like, yeah,
the people who are like racist, Yeah, it's a coalition
to people who have good reasons to worry about China.
It's like this me, It's like it's like mental health advocates, racists,
national security people banning TikTok, and the diagram very diverse here,

(38:08):
that's the illustration we should have done. I like that,
actually is could this be the thing that brings us
all together? I mean, I do think a common enemy.
I thought that before COVID. I was like, oh, COVID
the alien invasion. It's the closest 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 Russian invaded Ukraine. I was like, Okay, now
America we're classically against historically like we are, And Matt

(38:33):
Gates is like, actually, no, it's crazy, right, it's fucking bizarre.
These Republicans are like, actually, you know, Putin's got a
good points, Like, dude, does he like is that where
we're at? Is that where the your party? Anyhow? Sorry,
not think good, not to fucking lose it, but um
let's take some deep breath together, Josh, Is TikTok dangerous?
That sounds like the most bullshit sorry, like CNN question

(38:55):
of all time? Is TikTok dangerous for the youth? Now?
I mean, like what should take on it? Like, do
you actually think there's real concern like the privacy thing
I get, I get the snooping ship, 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.

(39:16):
TikTok to 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 body, 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.
You know, miss info on TikTok is crazy. Yeah, so

(39:37):
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 all that's always been. That was the case
with Facebook, that's the case with It's just transfers to
whatever the hot thing is. And and TikTok for me

(39:57):
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

(40:18):
experience on there, you like a few things, you 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're this type
of user four four six dash B seven and you
get that stuff in your feet and it's it's like, um,
if a pharmaceutical company could like build a highly addictive

(40:39):
drug just for you. Within ten minutes of knowing that
sounds great, I'm listening. That's what I want. Okay, you
got a little bit high from this, Like what if
we kind of juice that it's persia. It's actually it's
the promise of you're actually making it sound attractive and
exciting to me. Is that a problem for me personally?

(41:00):
As you've been describing TikTok just in this last thirty
seconds or seconds, I have been in the back of
my head. I'm like, maybe I should be looking at
TikTok more often. Like I'm a very sick man. I'm
doing dry January, so it could be I'm just looking
for something like addictive, you know, but like I get it.
I've been there, I do. I'll open TikTok occasionally and

(41:21):
I'm like, you know, you'll start looking at ship. 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

(41:42):
and everybody's doing the thing. Everybody wants a Marvel cinematic universe,
and everybody needs big I p and like leverage a
book or superstar perfectly both, so the risk is lower
and we can just spend a town of money on
this and make a fun town of money after that
and not be original. Right. That also happens in business
and in social media. Facebook just copies and paste. So

(42:03):
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. 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. Course they don't. It's entrapped, but you can't

(42:25):
get out of the reels once you're in there. I've
quit the app on multipleccasions. They're not your friendly neighborhood
drug dealer. They're not Cal or Doug or Jenn or
whoever your dealer was. They are big pharma of social media.
I have a medical marijuana life, so I get it
straight from the from the state. I think, you know

(42:48):
when when it jumped the shark a bit. For me,
I'm on Instagram like you had. Twitter was text. You
like reading, you know, you like writing, but not too much.
That's Twitter for you. You want to write too much
as medium for you, there's blogspot or something to date
myself if you want. If you want still photos and
like cool photos with stories associated with them in captions,

(43:10):
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 and everybody else's ship, and nobody
can just be who they are, so there 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.

(43:32):
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 second video. Not a gift,

(43:54):
gifts the whole thing. That's a whole different type of
media format at 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 ship work. So we're just gonna
copy theirs and make you TikTok. So even people who
are on Instagram like I hate TikTok, No, you don't,
because you're in it right now. You're living in TikTok's

(44:17):
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 forced, forcibly pushed on the users in
a way that it's like really uncomfortable and they don't like. No.
That was that was the great Facebook pivot to video
that accelerated the over investment of so many newsrooms, and

(44:40):
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 sometimes they do,

(45:01):
like a long form video. There'd be some images that
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 were
like we're firing the people who write and we're gonna
make video. And then it was a huge failure. Nobody

(45:21):
watching any of the video, Nobody gave a ship, 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 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,

(45:43):
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 right, to make sure it went more viral, got
more views, and ranked higher than stills or texts. And

(46:05):
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 feet and they seem
to be watching it because there's nothing else now. It's true.
That's like, you know, Shijin Ping saying, you know, we're
just seeing a high degree of loyalty among people of

(46:26):
China for me, people want me to rule forever, said
the man holding a gun to 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 ship on them. It's a
bleak picture, but I have a I have a thought.
Listening you describe what's going on with the TikTok ification

(46:48):
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 would do
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 to be Netflix, right, and you've
got HBO doing it, and you've got fucking paramount doing

(47:11):
it whoever, And and it turns out there's like a
limit to how much of that ship 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 ship in the world.
I may have a 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 adobamine has left my brain. I'm fucking like tapped out.

(47:33):
Is it possible that this is the final breath or
the near final breath of like social media as we
know it, that 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're entering a phase post not
post pandemic, because there's still like a pandemic happening, but

(47:53):
post the worst, most intense part of it that we
experienced where we were all alone inside online all a
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

(48:14):
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 any does that sound like possible? I think

(48:37):
I think that's a beautiful sentiment. I want that world.
I still believe that world is 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 and I went and

(48:59):
filmed my TV series America Outdoors on PBS. Check it
out and the PBS, 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, of 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 d MV line. Yes,

(49:21):
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 potent 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.

(49:42):
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 gonna go to the feed. I'm
gonna feed im freaking the memes and the data. And
then some there is fattening me up to shove ads
into the feed to take stuff from me so I

(50:05):
can buy things. I don't need to monetize you. Yeah,
and so we will always tend towards that because of capitalism,
which won't let a diverse ecosystem prevail. It will tend
towards mono culture in food and entertainment, in technology platforms
because people want more and more and more, and shareholders

(50:26):
want more and more and more, and that means everybody's
got to chaste the same damn rabbit. But the gen
Z and the Alpha is in particular, you know, they
grew up in the ashes of the financial crisis and
they bear the brunt of the trillion dollars in college debt.
You know, they're they're older siblings especially, so it's like,
I don't know so much about this, And then the
planet's reminding us like, hey, this whole feed based system,

(50:48):
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. 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

(51:10):
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
have done different things with tech, the folks a new

(51:31):
public who are designing digital public spaces differently, as for
all Chafe over in the Middle East, who has 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 funk around and
find out how much damage they can cause the society.
It respectfully on boards people into actual communities. First, it

(51:54):
doesn't have vcs, which makes it possible. I love that,
And because the insensives, like if you start with venture
capital money and so it's rich people who need to
get richer. This is already just like disposable, but they
drive everything you pursued downstream from that. All your user research,

(52:15):
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? Feat uh?
And so to really have TikTok be the last gasp.
We need different funding mechanisms which are available but not
white scale, and we need people designing these spaces who

(52:36):
are more than just board 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 and many of
those folks have not been included. They've been subjected to

(52:58):
the visions and imagination is of a very small group
of folks 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 if
your premise is returning ten x and getting valued at

(53:18):
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 which you create under those conditions,
and so we need few were limits. First off, your vision,
this vision you're just paint is very beautiful. I feel
like that. I think I think we you know, we
did that a little bit together. You well, all right,
I'll take I will take some credit. You can have

(53:41):
the vision at a pre money valuations. Call it thirty million.
Thank you. That sounds good, I'll find 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,

(54:04):
it's called America Outdoors. When can I see that? Where
can I see that? You can see it now? Um,
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.

(54:27):
It's like I think it's cheap too. It's like a
yearly thing. It's like forty bucks. It's 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 a even bigger fan of PBS working with them
and not just watching some of their stuff. So check
out America Outdoors. It's it's not a wildlife show. It's
a human show about our relationship with nature. It's and

(54:49):
and it's people we don't typically see. A couple of examples.
I had 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 spent time with multiple indigenous communities in what we
call Idaho and Minnesota and California UH and learned many

(55:11):
of you know their traditions with respect to the land
that they were on. I go crabbing with the most
conservative person I've ever knowingly been around in my life
and the child 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

(55:33):
still have in common, which includes UH at the basis
level our planet. So check out America Outdoors, check out
Puck pay for it It's worth it, and 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 about to about to drop
season four. We launched in got some awards, had some

(55:55):
really dope conversations, and the show was all about sharing
new ways to show up in society and like 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

(56:16):
listeners in each episode a way to make it your
thing and and actions you can take in your life
to just practice these muscles that have at your feeds
so much because the only thing we've been told to
do is shop for it, which is guy, you got
a man. It's pretty fun though, like it's super fun.
In fact, they've gamified resource loss. So, Josh, it's a

(56:38):
great reunion. Thank you for having me on here. Thank
you so much for doing this. You've 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.
Happy to come back. Well, that conversation was amazing and
also went kind of long, so don't have a lot

(57:00):
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 into 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 I Heart Media podcast. It's executive produced by

(57:23):
Lyrah Smith, Adam Wand is our editor, and Jenna Cagel
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, no one's gonna force 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

(57:45):
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