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You need Indeed. Hey there, cyber

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listeners, Matthew here. This episode

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was brought to you by Delete Me. A

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I know

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package is being delivered.

4:00

Hello out there on the internet. I'm Emily

4:02

Lipstein.

4:03

And I'm Matthew Golt.

4:05

And this is Cyber. It's

4:07

time for a new history of the internet, one

4:10

that focuses on the recent revolutions

4:12

that define the world that we all live in. Social

4:15

media has changed the way that many of us live and work. It's

4:17

a world defined by a new economy of creators and influencers.

4:20

The new media is here, and it's

4:22

extremely online. And that's the title

4:24

of the new book from Taylor the Runce, which is the untold

4:27

story of fame, influence, and power

4:29

on the internet. Lorenz is a columnist

4:32

for the Washington Post, and she's here today

4:34

to answer all of our questions about why Vine

4:36

failed, why Logan Paul is dancing

4:38

with presidential candidates, and what the future

4:40

holds for everyone who lives and works

4:42

online. Taylor, welcome. Thanks

4:46

for having me. I think it's Jake.

4:47

If you're talking about Vivek, it was Jake

4:49

Paul. That's my bad. I

4:52

got the Pauls mixed up when I wrote the intro.

4:55

It's funny that you say that, because as

4:57

I was writing it, I was like,

4:59

wait a minute, which Paul was it that he danced

5:01

with?

5:02

I'm sure it's fine. I'm sure I got it right. One

5:05

of the Pauls. They're

5:07

very easy to confuse, honestly.

5:09

We really are. I

5:12

will say Logan has slightly different politics

5:14

than his brother. He

5:16

did defend Black Lives

5:17

Matter and has been sort of outspoken about

5:20

social justice stuff. There we go.

5:25

For people

5:30

that are maybe a little bit more offline

5:33

who are listening to this podcast, can

5:35

you define what it means to be extremely online?

5:38

What do you mean by that? Yeah.

5:43

I would say it's sort of this term

5:45

that arose

5:46

in the 2010s that

5:49

I think we're all increasingly, extremely

5:51

online, which is why I used it for

5:53

my buzzword.

5:59

title because I think my

6:02

book is basically about the first 20 years of the

6:04

social web and kind of how it evolved

6:07

and I

6:08

feel like it's sort of we've all progressively become

6:11

extremely online. Yeah, I mean

6:14

the specific timeline of this book for

6:16

me has felt like a personal

6:18

attack, so thank you. Because

6:21

it really spans my

6:24

experience of the internet. I've

6:27

worked in social my entire career. I've

6:30

been online since honestly

6:32

like I probably before I probably should

6:35

have been. But you know

6:37

it really feels like as I read this book it was

6:39

just like a this is your life reminded of all of these

6:41

characters of the past like emerging

6:44

like you know this is this is some sort

6:46

of ghost of Christmas past situation.

6:49

It's

6:50

wild how much has happened in

6:53

I know it's 20 years but what

6:55

feels like an incredibly fast

6:58

paced time. Yeah, it's

7:00

there's just so much that's happened and I'm

7:02

so glad that it felt that way to you because

7:04

that's kind of how I wanted people to read it because

7:06

I think we all like lived through these moments

7:09

especially those of us that use the internet a lot

7:11

but we don't you know it's such recent history

7:14

and we haven't had time to kind of go back and

7:16

analyze it and contextualize

7:18

it and really think about it. A lot of stuff that's

7:20

like happened when maybe like

7:23

we

7:23

were still in school or like we weren't like 100 percent

7:25

kind of like paying attention to things.

7:27

So yeah and also hindsight

7:30

is 2020 and and also you

7:32

know just re-examining I've had an excerpt

7:34

come out this week about one part

7:36

this woman Julia Allison and kind of what she was

7:39

put through

7:39

and it's just crazy

7:41

like there was a lot that would happen that I don't think

7:44

would even happen today. Exactly yeah

7:46

and we're gonna return to her a little bit later but

7:49

I really did want to ask you why

7:51

you chose to start the timeline of your

7:53

book where you did because I read a lot of

7:55

like internet history books that tend

7:58

to start you know maybe 10 15 years

8:01

earlier than the history that you're

8:03

giving, talking about Usenet, talking

8:05

about MUDs, really going into like those

8:07

early, I would say, startup

8:10

if that didn't have other connotations,

8:12

but almost like Stone Age of the internet.

8:15

So I'm curious, why did you just choose

8:18

to start your book in the early age

8:20

of blogging, but

8:22

not like the beginning of blogging? Yeah,

8:25

well, I mean, it is an

8:29

internet history book, but it's really

8:31

about the rise of the social internet and

8:33

the social web. So yes, I

8:35

mentioned sites like Six Degrees and The Globe

8:38

and these like sort of very early like

8:40

aim, chat rooms, like these sort

8:42

of early social things that were happening in the 90s. But

8:45

the social web didn't meaningfully

8:47

start until the blog ecosystem in

8:49

the early 20s

8:50

or in the early aughts. And

8:52

especially when you're talking about people building

8:55

audiences online, again,

8:57

it just didn't start until like

8:59

the bloggers and even so

9:01

it didn't even really

9:02

start until kind of like, I would

9:04

argue the mommy bloggers really pioneered

9:07

this personality

9:10

driven model of media and kind of building

9:12

an audience around yourself, commodifying your life,

9:15

monetizing it. So that's kind

9:17

of where the story begins

9:19

for the story that I'm trying to tell. And

9:22

I'm with you. I mean, I love those books

9:24

about the 90s and tech and

9:27

all of that, but it just wasn't it wasn't like relevant

9:30

to this story. So I start

9:32

with sort of like, I would say the dawn of

9:34

blogging right at the turn of the millennium

9:37

and kind of that

9:39

first, you know, yeah, that

9:41

first era. Totally. And

9:43

like, I think that something that really

9:45

is

9:47

interesting to me is how much your book focuses

9:50

on, you know, the individual

9:52

and like actually, you know, you talk a little bit about

9:55

being a student on

9:57

a mess online, you know, various accounts.

10:00

stuff, you know, the various

10:03

like NYC socialite stuff, the at New

10:05

York City that you talk about in the early

10:07

Instagram chapters. But it

10:09

really this era of

10:12

social media really is like a line

10:15

of demarcation between the student anonymous

10:17

internet being the main way

10:19

that people communicated and were, you

10:21

know, social on the

10:23

internet to you as, you know, a person,

10:26

you know, whether

10:29

you're whoever

10:31

you are, you are the brand. Exactly.

10:34

Yeah. And also just like, I

10:37

think you're the

10:39

brand and then also just like you start to see things

10:41

in the early bots as well.

10:43

I mean, I also get into like early myspace

10:46

and the myspace stars and kind of and

10:48

I talk about reality TV like

10:50

so much was happening in culture, alongside

10:53

the internet that was changed also changing our notions

10:55

of fame and media, you had reality

10:58

TV boom, which I think changed

11:00

people's understandings of fame and what it meant to be

11:02

a TV star and all of that. And

11:05

then you had, what was the other thing

11:07

I was just thinking of you had, I mean, you had so many

11:09

sort of like economic things happening. And

11:13

then yeah, you then you had the Oh, yeah, then you had things

11:15

like myspace and Facebook and all these things that

11:17

were sort of like more consumer friendly ways

11:19

of, you know,

11:21

encouraging people to like kind of put themselves online

11:24

and have an identity online.

11:26

Yeah, Matt, there was someone that you remembered

11:28

that you had totally forgotten

11:29

about when you were reading this book. Oh,

11:32

Lonely Girl 115. Is it 115? Another one. Oh, what was

11:34

the

11:37

what you're gonna have

11:39

to remind you? Tequila Tequila. Oh, no. Tequila

11:41

Tequila. Like, what

11:43

a character that defines like the

11:46

2000s era. Like

11:49

celebrity. I'm just I'm sitting here thinking about

11:51

all of those bad reality shows that were turned

11:53

out on VH1 and

11:55

MTV that I would that

11:57

I would sit and watch.

11:59

I don't know, it would be something that would be

12:02

nice to have on in the background while I was doing other things

12:04

or doing laundry, it was just kind of roll over

12:06

your brain, but I would

12:08

absorb all this stuff. And it's funny, reading

12:10

your book, I was like, I don't, there's

12:13

this whole 10 years of my life that

12:15

I only remember when it's prompted

12:18

to me, like all of these characters.

12:20

It's kind of, it was fascinating to see Tila

12:23

Tequila's name and

12:27

then go back and

12:29

have a half memory of, like, did she

12:31

get involved with Nazism in some way? And

12:33

then she's got a very long

12:36

chunk about it on her Wikipedia page, which is

12:38

always a good sign,

12:39

always a good sign.

12:41

Yeah, another thing I remembered,

12:43

I was gonna say too, another thing,

12:45

and I don't know if that you remember the Zara too,

12:47

but the odds were also the first

12:49

time party photos were being put online

12:52

at scale. And so you also had

12:54

a lot of like cults of personalities, like

12:56

Corey Kennedy or these other people that, and

12:59

a lot of socialites, they talk about this too, with Patrick

13:01

McMullen, like basically people developing

13:03

cult followings because of their

13:05

role in party, like they were featured

13:08

very heavily in certain party photography websites.

13:10

Yeah, it was kind of the, it was strange

13:13

to me, like living in North

13:15

Texas at the time, to watch

13:19

portions of like New York City

13:21

media and scene

13:24

culture kind of spread

13:26

throughout the rest of the country.

13:28

Like did anyone outside of

13:30

Manhattan need to know who Paris Hilton was?

13:33

Well,

13:33

we did, we did.

13:36

And it's funny because at the

13:38

time I was like coming out, like coming

13:40

out, it was a very 90s kid,

13:43

having like early fight club

13:46

brain, which is just like a terrible thing for a young

13:48

man in Texas to have, going

13:50

into a world where the idea that

13:55

all of that stuff was deeply uncool was going

13:57

to be kind of just upended.

13:59

and the culture was going to completely change.

14:02

Something that you were, as the changing

14:05

nature of the celebrity,

14:06

something I think is really interesting that I hadn't

14:08

thought about until I read your book and had like started having

14:10

this conversation, is that there was

14:13

this idea that to sell out, which

14:15

is like completely ancient now, to

14:17

sell out and pursue celebrity was like this empty

14:20

thing and also that it

14:22

was impossible, that you had been sold

14:25

alive, that you could grind it out

14:27

and become famous.

14:29

A lot of people had started to be disillusioned

14:31

right at the time that the tools to

14:34

actually make that impossible came

14:37

around. Like it is hard work and there is quite

14:39

a bit of luck involved but a

14:42

person that is good at

14:44

it and is good at using these tools can in fact

14:47

turn themselves into a celebrity, right? Yeah.

14:52

I know this is more of a comment than a question. Something

14:55

that occurred to me.

14:56

I agree with everything you said. Yeah,

15:00

it was really fun to kind of like revisit that

15:02

era. And also there was these, I

15:04

mean, just as you're talking about sort of these notions

15:06

of celebrity, like, you

15:09

know,

15:09

there was this idea that you couldn't

15:12

pursue it and people that did pursue

15:14

it through the internet were like just

15:17

lambasted for

15:18

it. You know, like it was like, oh no, fame

15:20

is something that's bestowed on you. If

15:23

you seek it, you know, you're bad

15:26

and like, you know, like it should be from Hollywood

15:28

and it should, you know, some executives should spot you

15:30

at the mall and, you know,

15:32

you're plucked out of nowhere. It's like, you can't grind

15:35

online and try to get famous. Which

15:37

is interesting and a lot of, I mean, a

15:39

lot of

15:41

early internet starts, their goal was actually not

15:43

fame at all. A lot of it happened very

15:45

serendipitously, especially like early YouTubers,

15:48

like it was a lot of sort of viral videos

15:50

of people that were like, oh, I guess I'll put, you

15:52

know, I talk about the chocolate rain video

15:55

and like, tase on day. It's like, I guess I'll put my

15:57

music online and like suddenly, you know,

15:59

like four.

15:59

has made me a hero and it's

16:02

blowing me up, and now I'm hugely popular

16:04

and have a big song. So it

16:06

was a lot of kind of serendipitous fame.

16:09

And

16:09

then you did have people that really thought it out and

16:11

really worked hard to try to build their brand. And

16:14

the traditional media just vilified

16:17

them for it. I mean, a lot of the

16:18

mommy bloggers,

16:21

when Heather Armstrong ran,

16:22

she was sort of the most famous of

16:25

that

16:25

group. And she put blogs on her ad, she

16:28

put ads

16:28

on her blog in 2004, which is so standard. And

16:32

her post about it reads, you're like, why

16:34

are you explaining? Why do you have to put ads on here? Like,

16:36

of course you do, this is your full-time job.

16:39

And she was just

16:42

brutalized for that decision, saying that

16:44

motherhood is sacred and how could

16:46

you monetize a blog about

16:48

motherhood? You're so horrible. And

16:51

the media, especially traditional media, it's

16:53

just so cruel to her.

16:56

And it's really set

16:58

into the Heather Armstrong story too. Yeah,

17:01

she passed away this year. She

17:04

took her own life. She had struggled. I mean,

17:07

so many of those women really

17:10

struggled with mental health issues. And I think

17:12

part of the reason a lot of them were online actually

17:15

was for community and to

17:17

kind of express

17:20

themselves and talk about

17:22

addiction and things like that. And so it was very

17:24

sad to end. But Rebecca Wolf, who's also

17:26

in my book, is still around and thriving.

17:28

And there's other mommy

17:30

bloggers that made it out alive

17:33

somehow.

17:35

I wanna, we've talked

17:38

a little bit about the focus of the book and how it's

17:40

different from a lot of other histories of the internet

17:43

and technology that have

17:44

come out. And I wanna pull this one quote

17:47

and get you to kind of talk about it a little bit.

17:49

Well, the mythology around Silicon Valley featured young

17:51

men who could see the future better than everyone

17:53

else. What the rise of social

17:56

media thus far had proven was

17:58

that nearly all of those young men had... been

18:00

wrong. In what ways

18:02

were those young men wrong? And what is the traditional

18:05

story that you're kind of blowing up here?

18:08

Yes. Can you say that one more time?

18:10

Sorry, what was the first part?

18:16

What?

18:18

Yeah. Social media thus far

18:20

had been proven that nearly all of those young men had been

18:23

wrong. What

18:25

were they wrong about, I guess? What was the first

18:27

part of that? What is the first? Sorry.

18:30

All right. So, while the mythology around Silicon

18:33

Valley featured young men who could see the future

18:35

better than everyone else, what the rise of

18:37

social media thus far had proven was that nearly

18:39

all of those young men had been wrong.

18:42

Yes.

18:43

Can you tell me a little bit more about the myth that you're exposing

18:46

and the ways in which that myth is wrong?

18:49

Yes, definitely. I'm so sorry. No, it's

18:51

all right. There's

18:54

all these random, and I'm like, I talk about men

18:56

a lot. Which one? Yeah. Well,

18:59

a huge theme of my book is just like, is

19:01

that Silicon Valley doesn't know

19:03

what they're doing and they take credit

19:05

for everything

19:06

after the fact. And especially,

19:08

I think when we consume

19:10

stories about the rise of these social

19:13

platforms, often they're through things like the

19:15

social network or these books

19:17

that glorify

19:20

the founders. I was thinking

19:22

of the other two big tech books that I'm up against

19:25

this fall, which is Walter Isaacson's Biography

19:27

of Musk and then the SBS Michael

19:29

Lewis book. There's all these books

19:32

that just focus on these powerful

19:33

men. Did they know what they

19:35

were doing? I think

19:38

in those two cases, it really is obvious

19:40

that they didn't

19:40

know what they were doing or don't know what they're doing. But yeah,

19:44

with Silicon Valley, there's all these narratives

19:46

that are really pervasive. And so I

19:48

just wanted to

19:50

talk about the fact that actually Silicon

19:54

Valley, first of all, was extremely

19:57

hostile to the influencer, content

19:59

creator, and the story.

19:59

industry for literally 20 years, only

20:02

in 2021, which is partially what

20:04

triggered me to write this

20:05

book. Like, did they start to even talk

20:07

about it? And then they wanted to invest in

20:09

it. They just invested in the dumbest stuff alive,

20:11

because they had literally not been paying attention

20:13

to the

20:14

entire industry for decades.

20:17

And yeah, they never know, they never know

20:19

how their, you know, products will be used. And

20:21

I think that I talk about that so much in my

20:23

book, like, you know, these platforms

20:27

don't start out the way they intended. They just

20:30

usually have no, they don't anticipate

20:33

kind of how they'll evolve. They

20:36

often reject, you know, the user

20:38

base that they've cultivated on their own apps,

20:40

like with Vine, you know, it's like the founders

20:43

had this idea of what they wanted the app

20:45

to be. And when people started using it in

20:47

other ways, they were really sort of hostile to

20:49

that. So yeah, I

20:51

hate the whole Silicon Valley,

20:53

like boy genius myth. And I think it's

20:55

a lie. And

20:58

I wanted to talk about that, I guess.

21:01

Yeah,

21:04

well, definitely get back into the into the death

21:06

of vine, towards the end of our conversation,

21:09

because, you know, we

21:11

all lived through that. But I feel like I

21:14

learned some things about it, that I didn't quite

21:16

realize what led to it in

21:19

the book. So that was really helpful. And we'll talk

21:21

about that more. I want

21:23

to talk a little bit more about something

21:26

that you talked about at

21:29

the beginning of our conversation. What was

21:32

sex on the hilltop?

21:34

Yes, sex on

21:36

the hilltop was Julia Allison's

21:40

blog that she started actually

21:42

in college, that was kind of like, I

21:44

mean, at the time, Sex and the City

21:48

was like, offended, you know. And

21:52

so I think it was sort of like her tongue in cheek kind

21:54

of referenced that. And it was just, yeah, it was like a blog

21:57

about, you know, being a young girl on a college

21:59

campus. this and kind of her life.

22:04

She didn't have happening. Oh,

22:06

sorry, what is happening with her? With

22:09

that blog and the way that she blew up and

22:11

the reaction to it? Yeah,

22:14

well, so it blew up.

22:16

And there was a lot of hostility

22:18

to it. I mean, people were pretty

22:20

intense about it. But it also

22:23

made her really popular, you know, she, she

22:26

sort of started to develop an audience

22:29

in college, it was very small, wasn't, you know, she didn't

22:31

really develop, it was a sort of a thing.

22:33

But it wasn't really till after college

22:35

that she like really developed her

22:38

actual blog that made her famous. But

22:40

she did have this blog in college that was

22:42

kind of had gotten

22:44

her some attention initially.

22:48

I think there was fascination with her dating

22:51

life. And what is what

22:53

was the price that she paid for it? Like,

22:56

what's the arc of her story? I know that this

22:58

was all just segmented in Rolling Stone, right?

23:01

Yeah, it was. Yeah, if you want to read more,

23:03

definitely check out my Rolling Stone excerpt.

23:06

So yeah, so that was this college blog that she had that

23:08

was kind of like,

23:09

you know,

23:10

popular for like a minute at school,

23:13

but like ultimately was not really anything.

23:15

And then she graduates. And

23:17

she can't get a job in New York media, because it's

23:19

impossible to get a job in New York media, even

23:21

back then. And

23:24

so she starts blogging, she starts blogging

23:26

on Tumblr, and she

23:28

starts creating video content,

23:30

which she was putting on Vimeo, and then she signed to do with

23:33

YouTube, next new

23:35

networks. And so she starts blogging

23:37

a lot. And like she starts like a lifestyle

23:40

blog, which she called life casting, where

23:42

basically she would talk about everything

23:45

about her life as like a young woman in

23:47

New York City. So party recaps

23:50

outfits, he did these things called head to toes,

23:52

where she, you

23:54

know, like, basically

23:56

essentially tag but not tag

23:58

if you couldn't tag but like sort of

23:59

describe everything that she was wearing, so

24:02

people could shop her posts. She

24:04

had a blog with her, you know, a guy that she was

24:06

dating for a while, like they had this couples blog,

24:08

like things that today actually

24:11

would be very totally commonplace, like a couples

24:13

account on TikTok is like completely, there's

24:15

zillions of them, but like at the time where

24:18

people were like livid that she was doing

24:20

this and putting herself out there, I think also because she was

24:22

like very feminine. And

24:24

yeah, she was just, she

24:27

was, she was destroyed by it. Like her

24:29

sort of original sin and

24:31

why the media went so viciously

24:33

against her in the beginning was because

24:36

she had gone into the comments of Gawker

24:39

posts and she would promote links to her blog

24:41

in the comments because people were spending a lot of time in

24:43

the comment sections back then. And she thought,

24:46

oh, well, I will just

24:47

link to my, you know, responses or things

24:49

that I'm writing about related to these Gawker

24:52

posts,

24:53

like to get promotion, right? Again,

24:56

something that is, seems so commonplace

24:58

today, but at the time she

25:00

was called, you know, like a fame whore, you

25:03

know, just relentless self promoter and did it.

25:05

And it was this notion of

25:06

like, you can't seek fame. Like who

25:08

do you think you are?

25:10

You know, that you, you know, that you

25:12

have an audience and that you've developed an audience. Like who

25:14

do you think you are? Basically like you silly

25:16

little girl. And so she was, she

25:19

became the target of, I

25:21

think one of the worst misogynistic smear

25:23

campaigns of thought.

25:26

In what,

25:28

I mean, I don't want to ruin the

25:31

arc of the story, but like what becomes of her in

25:33

the end? Like how is she doing now?

25:36

Well, when she quit the internet,

25:38

I mean what becomes of her is unfortunately, like

25:41

what happens to a lot of women that have

25:43

to deal with these sorts

25:45

of, you know, vicious campaigns

25:48

against them, which is she

25:50

sort of had to quit the internet. And she

25:52

did about 10 years ago. She just quit

25:54

the internet and sort of stepped away and stopped using

25:56

it. And now

25:58

she was living in LA. a really long time and then

26:01

now she's actually at Harvard Kennedy

26:03

School. And she lives

26:05

in Boston and has

26:07

a very, very different life.

26:09

And it's a real shame, honestly, because when you

26:11

go back and read what she was writing about tech and media,

26:14

every single thing came true. She was

26:16

so ahead of her time. It's actually

26:19

insane. Like every single thing

26:22

that she described

26:23

has happened. Like she basically predicted

26:25

tiktok. I can't even explain

26:28

to you how it and this

26:30

woman was so

26:32

and I have to say, I was so angry

26:35

the day that it went out and rolling. There

26:38

were people online,

26:41

men that were still, you

26:45

know, like bashing her. Like, you know,

26:47

there were all these people and other people that were like,

26:49

well, I've never heard of her. And I'm like, you've never heard

26:51

of her. That's the point. That's the point. Yeah. Written

26:54

out of history. If this woman was a man,

26:57

she would have gotten millions in venture funding and

26:59

probably, you know, been the

27:01

first to fund a lot

27:04

of major companies, you know, like she's me.

27:07

But but of course

27:08

she wasn't. She was literally driven off the internet

27:10

by misogyny and hate. And I

27:13

think it's just the story of so many women on

27:15

the internet and just

27:17

like, you know, what we could have had because we have these bumbling

27:20

idiots in Silicon Valley that can barely

27:23

refuse to recognize like what's right in front

27:25

of them. And then you have people like Julia

27:28

and other women that saw the future decades

27:31

ahead, you know, and

27:34

tried to take advantage of that and were just

27:36

vilified. I

27:38

can tell for hours makes me so angry.

27:40

I mean, I understand

27:42

that like there are the there are people that,

27:44

you know, were ahead

27:47

of their time and really being the vanguard

27:50

with purpose, you know, trying to break in

27:52

and testing these new mediums out and being

27:54

very excited about it to see what it all did. And

27:56

then there were also people that kind of stumbled

27:59

into it. we were talking about earlier. I'm remembering,

28:03

you know, that stumbled into it, I guess, on

28:06

one side, you have the people that are accidental viral

28:08

videos. I'm thinking

28:10

very much of why I was reading

28:12

your book, Remembering Lazy

28:14

Sunday, which, for

28:17

those of you who might not remember, the

28:20

Lonely Island, they were did stuff with

28:22

SNL, do stuff with SNL. One

28:26

of the first viral YouTube videos

28:28

was someone

28:28

recording their TV with the clip

28:31

on it and just posting

28:33

it on YouTube. I

28:36

don't think that they were doing that necessarily to go viral

28:38

as much as it was just to, you know, have

28:40

a repository for this for this

28:42

clip. But mixing

28:45

that with a little bit of, you know, reality

28:47

TV stuff, where you had things like

28:49

the Bad Girls Club, what we're talking about, Teal

28:52

of Teal of the Simple Life,

28:54

etc. I'm

28:56

remembering watching the soup

28:59

a lot

29:00

in, you know, middle school,

29:03

which I don't know why

29:05

I was watching that in middle school, but that's a story

29:07

for another time. How

29:11

did early virality work? Yeah,

29:16

it's so funny, I also used to watch the soup

29:18

and the soup was just like kind of like, it

29:20

was this like weird show that was really,

29:23

yeah, kind of like aggregated everything, I think,

29:25

at the time.

29:28

Did you say how did early virality work? Yeah,

29:31

how did like, how did, you know, people go viral?

29:33

How were people? How were you

29:35

know, now we think about memes spreading like

29:38

wildfire on the internet or viral videos,

29:40

it feels very natural, because we're all kind of plugged

29:42

into this ecosystem. But,

29:44

you know, that I feel

29:47

very silly. It's almost like, you know, the Pony Express

29:50

of early memes, you

29:52

know, how did these things get out there? How did

29:54

people know about, you know, keyboard cat?

29:57

Yeah, well, it was through early

29:59

sharing. I I mean, very early it was

30:01

like link sharing, especially with YouTube videos.

30:03

You would share the link

30:05

with somebody else to watch, like look at this funny

30:07

video. There weren't algorithms that

30:09

could surface content back then, so it was, you

30:12

had a lot of things like Dig and Delicious

30:14

and these sort of like web discovery tools

30:17

that would help you discover content

30:19

and kind of share content. And then also blogs played

30:22

a really key role in that discovery, whether

30:25

it was like Tumblr blog or like a blog spot

30:27

or whatever, people would sort of curate things

30:29

around the internet and sort of that's

30:32

how things would go viral. I do

30:34

sort of talk about this actually with Tays on Day

30:36

and like 4chan at that time, like 4chan,

30:39

it was not really the 4chan that we think of today,

30:41

but early 4chan was like

30:43

sort of manufacturer

30:44

virality, often

30:46

around people that they felt were sort of like

30:48

outcasts or like they

30:50

would sort of ironically want to like boost

30:52

somebody that like wouldn't, like someone like

30:55

Adam Boehner that did Tays on Day, he's

30:57

sort of somebody that's like outside the realm

31:00

of Nord's mainstream and so they

31:02

were like, oh, like this would be funny kind of

31:04

to like make him a star and that's sort of like

31:06

an FU to this entertainment

31:09

ecosystem

31:09

that would never make these people stars.

31:12

And so yeah, it was a lot of like

31:14

kind of,

31:16

it was just a lot slower too. I

31:18

mean, like a viral, like

31:21

something that was viral would last for like months,

31:23

you know, because it took that long to like make its way

31:25

through the internet.

31:27

It was really interesting just going

31:29

back and reading things like how slowly

31:32

that evolution, like how slowly

31:34

it took for some of these things to take up that

31:36

were like, oh, you have that viral video. It's like that

31:38

viral video was like

31:40

viral for six months, you know,

31:42

like something that would never happen today.

31:47

You mentioned 4chan and I want to drill

31:49

down on this just briefly because I think it's important.

31:53

Can you talk a little bit about

31:56

the what 4chan kind of used to be and

31:58

how it was an engine?

31:59

for the spread of a lot of this viral stuff.

32:02

So I think it being very different

32:04

than what 4chan is now, I

32:07

think is really important.

32:08

Yeah.

32:10

Sorry, go ahead.

32:12

Yeah, as 4chan, I mean, so

32:14

it emerged, obviously, as a sort of like message

32:16

board thing for people that don't know what

32:18

4chan is, basically message board system. And

32:22

in us, it was a place for kind

32:24

of like weirdo, like internet people,

32:26

and it was very like pro-internet,

32:29

the sort of mentality on it was very like

32:31

sort of anti,

32:33

like the system, like

32:35

especially Hollywood and entertainment system

32:38

and kind of the media in a sense, but not like

32:40

the way that we think of anti-media today. It was more

32:42

just like, we're the little guys

32:44

on internet, sort of in the trenches every

32:47

day, and like we're gonna stick to the man

32:49

by like making this song about systemic

32:51

racism viral, which they definitely did

32:53

not realize

32:53

that's what it was about at the time, but like it

32:55

was about sort of like

32:58

insurgent power,

33:00

but it wasn't politicized in the same

33:02

way. Yes, there was like political content on

33:04

there, but like it just as a community

33:07

was

33:08

very different than

33:11

it hadn't been sort of like as radicalized.

33:14

I'm sure there were radicalized, you know, sort of the

33:16

streaks

33:17

of it, but the overwhelming

33:19

vibe of it was not that

33:21

way. And

33:24

it played a really important role, I think, in

33:26

early virality because they would scrape the

33:28

internet and they would sort of go around

33:30

and like find these little like gems

33:32

and then blow them up. And I

33:34

mean, again, like things like Digg and Delicious

33:37

also like did sort of played a

33:40

similar role, but it wasn't

33:42

like a community or forum. It was more like these

33:45

sort of like bookmarking and discovery tools.

33:48

But yeah, it was very different for Chan.

33:51

And

33:53

it's sad because I think also that was

33:55

this era of the internet where there was so much optimism and

33:57

it was sort of funny. And I mean, even

33:59

you mentioned.

33:59

in Lonely Girl 15 earlier, like,

34:03

you know, back then when they were casting,

34:05

it was this it was a story about this girl

34:07

and her best friend, this guy who was like maybe,

34:10

you know, love interest. And they

34:12

were both supposed to be teenagers. And when they were casting

34:14

the young boy, the casting

34:16

description said no one attractive

34:18

because it was it was totally

34:20

unbelievable or they figured

34:23

it would be totally unbelievable for an attractive

34:25

young boy to be spending time on

34:27

YouTube because YouTube was like, for

34:29

nerds and weirdos and like, so it's

34:32

just very funny, you know, because now of

34:34

course, we have this internet that's dominated

34:36

by like, you know, teens

34:38

that are like, it looks like Backstreet

34:40

Boys or something, you know.

34:43

But at the time, it was still it was still

34:45

like internet culture was secondary to

34:47

mainstream culture. I'm just

34:49

thinking of like every like, you know,

34:52

early off teen movie where the girl takes off

34:54

her glasses and suddenly she's hot. And

34:56

I'm just like, damn. And that's the story

34:58

of when the internet turned from like nerds

35:01

in their little corner to Oh, yeah, we're also

35:03

real people. Justin

35:06

Bieber exists, etc, etc. Yeah.

35:10

But yeah, I actually, you know, wanted

35:12

to talk a little bit about Tumblr.

35:14

And this is, you know, forgive me, this is

35:16

very self indulgent. You know,

35:19

I was in Tumblr for a very

35:21

long time. And like, very like,

35:24

it was interesting to just see the

35:27

transition from, you know, less curated kinds

35:32

of social media presences or ones that are less

35:34

curatorial in nature, to that

35:37

curated sense that we see on Tumblr

35:39

and then later on, on, you know, to make

35:42

an extent on Twitter where you're retweeting things,

35:45

to an extent on Instagram when you're doing meme pages

35:48

and that kind of a thing. But let's,

35:50

can we talk about that a little bit?

35:52

Tumblr? Yeah.

35:55

I mean, Tumblr was my favorite era

35:58

of the internet and I was so thrilled

35:59

to write about it because I mean I personally

36:02

owe like everything in my life

36:04

to Tumblr. It's like what got me into

36:06

everything. So I think Tumblr was like

36:08

the perfect actual thought about this so

36:11

much but it was just such a perfect like training

36:13

ground for what the internet

36:15

became I think like just

36:17

the way that it was sort of um I mean overrun

36:20

with fandom and kind of like the real-time

36:22

news aspect of it and like the way

36:24

that sort of like different narratives around celebrities

36:26

would emerge or whatever it

36:27

was just this sort of like

36:29

early version of just

36:32

yeah like the early reflection of kind

36:34

of the broader internet and um especially

36:37

in the late aughts and the early

36:39

2010s it had a lot of

36:41

power and people today don't really remember

36:43

that or realize that but like every major

36:45

media company was on Tumblr. Like Tumblr

36:48

was these single serving tumblers like

36:50

Veronica DeSouza's um you know binders

36:52

full of women right in 2012 like that ended

36:55

up like being this massive

36:57

thing that became this meme because she

37:00

seized on this comment um you

37:02

know that I think it was Mitt Romney made um yeah

37:05

it was and yeah and like but

37:07

made a tumbler out of it because you could spin up these

37:09

single serving tumblers very easily around different

37:11

themes and so it was just like it was just

37:14

this like transformative

37:15

platform that never could

37:17

really

37:18

seize

37:20

seize on its power like it was sort

37:22

of like mismanaged unfortunately because

37:24

it got bought by Yahoo and I know

37:26

and then they got rid of all the porn on there which

37:29

you know honestly tanks the platform oh yeah

37:31

I mean yeah that was the dumbest thing they've

37:34

ever done I yeah it's

37:35

very sad um

37:36

but yeah someone in the chat

37:39

on Twitch is talking about the

37:41

fuckea tumblers which I think is like a perfect

37:43

microcosm of what you're talking about which really just

37:47

like hooking on to one thing in particular

37:49

I think you you have the example of sharks

37:52

as one of the things in your book um

37:54

but also there's you know

37:57

started to change from you know going very

37:59

broad like like sharks to

38:02

menswear as one example. And

38:04

really it's like, okay, now you're

38:07

getting not just fans and

38:09

not just people

38:11

that like sharks, how

38:13

do you monetize a shark, who's

38:16

to say? To, you could get brands,

38:19

well then coming in and

38:21

being like, oh, we have a space

38:23

on this nascent social network. That's what

38:25

shark, I mean, Shark Week,

38:26

I think Shark Week

38:28

partnered with Fuck Yeah, Shark Week.

38:30

I think, I feel like they did. That

38:34

is how you monetize sharks and.

38:36

I

38:38

have a whole like chart about

38:41

sort of like from, showing the rise of

38:43

the Tumblr, Fuck

38:45

Yeah, Tumblr era

38:47

that they printed, actually

38:50

it was, it's in a Washington Post article

38:51

about, I think Abby Olheiser wrote about

38:54

the whole Fuck Yeah, Tumblr

38:55

thing back in like 2015, right? I

38:57

sort of at the end of that era. And

39:00

it's just a great, yeah, it's so

39:02

fun to see that ride. But I think what the Fuck Yeah

39:05

era of Tumblr showed

39:07

was like these, these rise of exactly

39:09

what you said of like these interest based communities,

39:11

where

39:11

you have like increasingly obscure

39:14

interests. My friend

39:16

and I had one on transhumanism. I

39:21

think it was called like all the

39:23

singular ladies or something, but

39:25

we like, you know, you would just

39:28

make these things like

39:29

overnight. Like I can't even, I mean, we probably

39:31

post it like, you would like make them and sometimes

39:33

you just post them there like four times and then sometimes

39:35

you'd post on there forever, like, I mean, I have

39:38

like thousands of them because you could make them

39:40

so easily.

39:41

Yeah, I think I had like a couple

39:43

of like specific ship ones that

39:46

I co ran with a couple of friends of mine

39:48

from like fandom Tumblr. And like,

39:50

I think we maybe posted on it five times before

39:52

forgetting that it existed and just reblogging the

39:54

stuff that was relevant to that topic

39:57

to our own personal blogs, but

39:59

yeah.

39:59

I get reminders. I've spent

40:02

so much time trying to like scrub

40:05

my old internet history off. Just not,

40:07

I'm not like embarrassed about anything. It's just, well, I am

40:10

embarrassed. Basically, there was really embarrassing

40:12

and a lot of times I was revealing personal information.

40:15

So like, I tried to kind of get rid of

40:17

all those, but

40:18

sometimes I get a email that's

40:21

like, your Tumblr,

40:23

just turned like 13 years old today

40:25

or whatever. And you're like, oh, my God, I can't believe I made that. I need

40:27

to delete that.

40:27

I mean, I spent fuck yeah,

40:30

history crushes.

40:33

This is up my alley.

40:36

It's just

40:37

wonderful pictures of early

40:40

men from history. I

40:42

love that. This is like, I

40:45

miss this era of the internet so much.

40:47

It was so good. If

40:49

things feel scary and

40:51

aggressive now, in a

40:54

way, and like so high stakes, everything

40:58

feels so high stakes in a way that it didn't

41:00

back then. When it was just

41:02

this, I mean, obviously, there's a lot of things going on in the

41:04

background, right? But this

41:06

this era of experimentation and play

41:09

that feels like is dead now,

41:12

in most places, right?

41:15

Yeah, it's totally dead.

41:17

And I think you couldn't make a lot of these things

41:19

now. Like, there's just, we're in such

41:21

I mean, I think we're in a very hypercritical

41:23

internet, which is so good in so

41:25

many senses, because like, a lot does

41:27

deserve critique, you know, like, if somebody made

41:29

a history, Tumblr, and it's all men or something, right, like, we should

41:32

critique that I'm just making

41:34

things up. But like, you know, like, things like that, I think

41:36

people are like, Oh, you know, like, let people enjoy things.

41:38

And it's like, no, we need criticism. And like, actually,

41:40

I think actually, a lot of that came from Tumblr, Tumblr

41:43

was very like, sort of self critical

41:45

and progressive and had ideas. I

41:47

mean, I remember learning what

41:49

a non binary

41:50

person was the first time on Tumblr,

41:52

like, literally over a decade ago,

41:54

you

41:54

know, like, they were so ahead of the time on so many such

41:56

things,

41:56

but, but I think it was there wasn't that

41:58

same level of toxicity.

41:59

that there is now, especially driven

42:02

by Twitter. And I think that shift from

42:04

Tumblr to Twitter ushered

42:06

in a lot of stuff. Because Twitter, in the

42:08

mid 2010s, also embraced this

42:11

algorithmic feed, which Tumblr never had at

42:14

the time, that

42:16

rewarded, yeah, extremism and horrible

42:18

stuff.

42:21

I think. Sorry, go ahead. Oh,

42:23

sorry. You go ahead, Matt. No, no, no. I

42:26

was about to pontificate in a way that we probably

42:28

didn't need to do. Go

42:30

ahead. I was just

42:31

going to segue into talking about some

42:33

other sad things. Or I guess maybe

42:36

not sad as much as it is just a sign

42:38

of the changing times that we talked a little

42:40

bit about earlier, which was about

42:43

the

42:43

money and the capitalism underlying

42:46

it all.

42:46

Because

42:49

we were talking a little bit earlier about how the

42:51

punk sensibilities of the 90s colliding

42:56

with the girl bossification in the

42:58

2010s. It

43:02

became like you

43:04

went from, no, it's awful

43:06

to try to make money off of this creative

43:08

stuff that you're doing to, hell yeah, get

43:11

your bag. How

43:13

does that start to happen to the

43:15

social platforms themselves? Were

43:19

the early social platforms trying to

43:21

make money? Were they trying to be viable

43:24

businesses themselves? Yeah,

43:27

well, they had a lot of venture capitalist funding.

43:29

So yes, they were eventually

43:31

going to have to make money. But

43:34

it was really early. I mean,

43:37

Facebook

43:37

obviously started launching ads

43:39

and had a whole ad network and was

43:42

a big company by even 2010. It's

43:44

not like these companies weren't trying to make money. MySpace

43:47

as well. They tried to make money. But I

43:50

think what was different, it's not so much about the companies

43:52

trying to make money. It's more about the

43:54

users. And users were not

43:56

trying to make money. I

43:58

think they probably would have liked.

43:59

too, but there was no viable time. I

44:02

think about this all the time, actually, with Tumblr,

44:03

because I think about the audience that

44:05

I cultivated on Tumblr. And

44:08

if I had been able to monetize that, I

44:10

would have never gotten in traditional media, like the

44:12

sort of springboard

44:12

from virality was like,

44:15

Oh, you go viral online, and then you try to use

44:17

that to like,

44:19

get something in the mainstream

44:21

traditional world, because you really can't make

44:23

the money online. And maybe these platforms have

44:26

some revenue models, but like,

44:27

creators aren't being cut in.

44:29

Only YouTube was sort of even

44:31

thinking about this, and their partner program was so

44:34

small, it was so small, like, and the

44:36

creators were so small, like, you

44:38

know, maybe you got $9,000 for

44:40

a campaign, which seemed like millions, but nowadays

44:43

would be nothing, you know, because it wasn't enough

44:45

to really sustain

44:46

yourself. So

44:47

yeah, it wasn't until the mid 2010s, when all

44:51

the marketing dollars really poured

44:53

in, and that's where and that's where you saw the

44:55

rise of the word influencer, which comes

44:58

from the marketing industry sort of applied to

45:00

before that everyone use very platform specific

45:02

terms, you were a Tumblr creator, or like a Tumblr

45:05

blogger, or a Viner or

45:07

YouTuber, you know, like there wasn't that was

45:09

terminology. And yeah, the

45:11

mid 2010s were horrible and girl boss. And that's when

45:14

I think like, you really started to see the

45:16

effects on capitalism, sort of capitalism's

45:18

effects on the internet, where

45:20

people started to see

45:22

it as a path to entrepreneurship.

45:24

I was on a podcast recently, and

45:27

we were talking about this guy, and I totally forgot his

45:29

name, but he wrote this piece about

45:31

how the internet like revived

45:33

the American dream. And I just thought it was so

45:36

true, where like he talked about kind of like

45:38

in the 90s, and like the early, the early

45:40

odds, like, it was clear that like, there

45:43

wasn't a lot of class mobility, we have wealth

45:45

disparity, it was really hard, like, people

45:47

were losing faith in this notion of like, everyone

45:50

can make it, you know, come to America, never going to make

45:52

it. And how the internet and social

45:54

media revived that. And we sell people

45:56

on this thing of like,

45:57

anyone can make it online, like you just have to post

45:59

you just have to grind it up, you just have to like,

46:02

you know, use

46:03

YouTube every day and you

46:06

might be a Mr. Beast, you know. And

46:09

I think a lot of that had been internalized by the mid

46:11

2010s and you had tons of brand money coming

46:13

in suddenly. I feel like

46:15

I'm staring down the barrel of a gun

46:18

right now given my line of work. But yeah,

46:20

that's exactly it. It really

46:22

is exactly that.

46:24

And

46:26

I don't, you know, my book,

46:29

I don't know if this is what you're interested in at all, but

46:31

like, you know, a lot of people, my book, like,

46:33

I don't, I like to tell,

46:35

just in my reporting generally, and I think this is

46:37

from being like having it drilled out of me, but

46:39

like, I like to kind of like tell the

46:41

stories and not get too into like,

46:44

I think hopefully people read the book and

46:47

see how

46:50

messed up everything got and kind of like recognize

46:52

like the problems. And I talk a little bit about it, but

46:54

like, obviously, I think that

46:57

this hyper capitalist social influencer

46:59

driven ecosystem where everyone has to commodify

47:01

themselves is like, incredibly toxic

47:03

and corrosive and bad. It's liberatory in

47:05

some ways. I'm glad that the legacy

47:08

media is dying in a lot of ways they

47:10

deserve to in many instances.

47:12

But but it's

47:15

but it's this really bad news system. And

47:17

anyway, I don't get like too political in the book.

47:19

But I

47:21

think

47:22

if you read it,

47:23

you can understand the sort

47:25

of arc hopefully.

47:28

What do you think then? If

47:31

like legacy media is dying, right?

47:33

I think I think we can all agree on that. People

47:36

that are from the companies, they're still deluded about

47:39

it. Well,

47:41

don't get us started.

47:43

So what then

47:45

can you tell us like what the

47:48

what does the world look like in five years? What

47:50

does it look like in 10 years? Where are these

47:52

trends taking us? What's what

47:54

horrible new future have we built for ourselves?

47:57

Well, we could build a better future. But

48:01

we'll probably have the worst

48:02

option available. I keep learning that's

48:04

really, that's

48:07

always what happens, it's the worst option

48:09

available. But

48:11

I think we're moving towards this personality-driven

48:14

media ecosystem. It's been that way for a really long

48:17

time, but you have basically

48:19

a very distributed media environment where

48:22

we have so many people that have their own little media

48:25

companies. I was thinking

48:27

of this girl, actually I was catching

48:29

up with a colleague, I worked at Refinery29 and our

48:32

old colleague, this girl Serena is now

48:34

a full-time influencer. Her

48:38

name is Serena Kerrigan, she's so talented, but apparently

48:40

she worked at Refinery29. I didn't overlap with her, but

48:43

I was just thinking like, wow, that's

48:45

incredible because she's been able to build this whole

48:48

dating. She has a lot of like a

48:50

dating podcast and show

48:52

and content, and she's huge on TikTok

48:54

and she's built an entire media brand

48:56

basically around dating. Previously someone

48:58

like that would have to work for even a digital

49:01

media company like Refinery. I

49:03

think we're seeing more individualized media.

49:06

The scary

49:08

thing is, and I've written about this too,

49:11

is that media ecosystem,

49:14

there's a lot less oversight. It's great because it's not

49:16

dominated by some

49:18

old man at the New York Times, but

49:20

it's really bad because you do still have

49:22

special interests exerting power. For

49:24

instance, somebody like Barry Weiss, she

49:27

has a very specific political agenda. She

49:30

pretends to be this independent journalist,

49:32

but she's backed by

49:34

rich billionaires that just want to, that also

49:38

want to prop up corporate

49:40

power or push anti-trans

49:42

nonsense. It's a little

49:45

bit hard with this new creator

49:47

driven ecosystem because I think there's a lot less

49:49

understanding of like, okay,

49:52

who has got a bunch of billionaire backers and

49:54

who is a true

49:56

independent media. I don't think we have

49:58

a very

49:59

true independent media.

49:59

media in this country. We have right-wing

50:02

media, corporate media, and

50:04

then maybe some people on the internet

50:05

that have sort of started to build the following, but

50:08

nothing too robust. I'm

50:11

just thinking about like every small organization,

50:13

it's like, or like the PBS, and

50:16

viewers like you, thank you kind

50:18

of kind of situation. I'm into that.

50:22

Well, there's a lot of that now though, right? There

50:25

is a lot of that now, I think. Yeah,

50:28

there's

50:28

so much small media companies. I think

50:30

of actually bikes. I was getting a

50:33

new bike a little while

50:35

ago, and I think in the past, I probably would have turned

50:37

to a magazine, like Outdoors

50:39

magazine to look for a bike and look

50:41

for their bike recommendations. And now I'm like, okay,

50:43

let me go. There's so many YouTube channels and

50:47

social media sort of creators and people

50:50

that just truly specialize in all these niches

50:52

that have built media companies around. And they do

50:54

add deals with bike companies, and they talk about the

50:56

different locks. And you can extrapolate

50:59

that into everything, food, fashion, you

51:02

know, like beauty, like there is content

51:04

around everything, breaking

51:06

news, right? You have breaking news now.

51:08

The way that people learn about

51:11

breaking news is increasingly through content creators,

51:13

not through

51:15

legacy media. And I think

51:17

all those trends are accelerating. Yeah,

51:21

I think watching Hassan, Piker

51:23

watch

51:25

debates, you

51:27

know, and then kind of breaking all that

51:29

traditional stuff apart for you in like internet,

51:31

like people want to feel like they're hanging out on the

51:33

couch with somebody. And

51:35

they want analysis too. They

51:37

want like, I think the reason that news

51:39

analysis is so popular on TikTok,

51:41

it's

51:42

like 90% of TikTok sometimes like when there's a

51:44

big news event, I feel like it's like everyone like the analysis

51:47

videos or like the Burning Man like analysis or

51:49

everything else. I think people want the

51:51

world contextualized and they want, you

51:53

know, people who they ideologically agree with

51:55

or who,

51:58

you know, like they,

51:59

about them resonates with them in some way. They

52:02

want to understand information through

52:04

that person because there's no trust. And

52:06

by the way, the mainstream media has lost

52:08

that trust. It's on them. They squandered

52:10

that trust with the audience. And I think

52:13

they still... Executives

52:16

at these companies, I was just reading some response

52:18

to this piece Wes

52:19

Lowry wrote that was phenomenal about just how

52:21

there's no such thing as an objective point

52:23

of view. And

52:26

it's so funny, they're just

52:29

so delusional. They really think like, oh no,

52:31

we'll get back to this world where

52:33

the grizzled old man sort of tells

52:36

you what the news is of the day. And it's

52:38

like, no, I'm sorry. That's

52:42

not happening anymore.

52:44

I'm just thinking about the

52:46

movie broadcast news and just being

52:48

like, ah, yes, we must return to

52:50

that time where it's Jack

52:52

Nicholson behind the desk. The most objective

52:55

kind of newscaster in the world, just

52:58

serious, serious ass. There are

53:01

benefits and drawbacks

53:05

to this new era. And yeah,

53:08

the drawbacks are rampant misinformation

53:10

and all the other bad stuff

53:13

that comes along with it. But I

53:17

will say again, I truly think that an independent

53:19

media ecosystem is better. I've always been a huge

53:21

supporter of that. I came from the blogger world, so

53:23

I think I still have that mentality. But

53:26

I don't want to

53:28

ever live in a world. I think about

53:30

the 90s and

53:32

I don't want to go back to that media landscape ever.

53:35

I may have to call the cat. I

53:37

apologize.

53:39

I'm going to go down a diversion route

53:41

before we talk about Vine before we close

53:43

it out. Because Taylor, just to quickly,

53:47

just you know, fourth wall break for a second. When

53:49

is your heart out?

53:51

Oh, yeah.

53:53

Like nine thirty, but I can be a human in

53:55

sleep. Okay. Then

53:58

I will not talk about VidCon. But

54:00

I think it was on VidCon for a minute.

54:03

So I was an early

54:05

vlogbrothers, I was a nerdfighter back

54:08

in the day, was like an admin

54:10

on like one of the nerdfighters of New York Facebook

54:12

pages, was not allowed to go to VidCon 2011 because

54:16

my mom said no, which is very

54:18

sad for me personally, but she was

54:20

not wrong. But just like seeing

54:23

what happened and just like the passage of time

54:25

going from, John and Hank Green

54:27

just like sending, basically

54:30

using YouTube as a way to send videos back and forth

54:32

to each other, which is how the channel started, to

54:34

early collab channels, to then watching

54:37

that community turn into a company,

54:40

turn into a media empire, now

54:42

to things like SciShow and

54:44

Crash Course. And it's

54:47

just, your

54:50

book has really made me realize,

54:54

it's not just looking back at these things with nostalgia,

54:57

it really just feels like we're

55:00

speed

55:01

running, just all

55:03

of these changes in society

55:06

as technology,

55:09

changes in the communities around them change

55:11

too. A hundred percent, yeah,

55:14

a hundred percent. And it's so recent,

55:16

again, it's like this recent history that I

55:18

think we don't talk enough about

55:21

because we feel like, oh yeah, I remember

55:24

that, or oh, that was just like, that wasn't that long ago,

55:26

10 years seems like nothing sometimes. Yeah,

55:30

I just think it's worth contextualizing

55:32

it and reexamining it. And talking about the user

55:35

side, I think that's what a lot of these

55:38

corporate stories don't tell, it's like, I

55:41

love the inside story I've read, I loved Mark

55:43

Bergen's YouTube book, which everyone should read, like

55:45

comment, subscribe. He's

55:47

just done such a great job of telling the story of YouTube

55:49

and obviously he talks about viral videos and

55:51

stuff, but I

55:54

wanted to zoom out and talk about how

55:56

all of these platforms emerged together and

55:59

things like VidCon. and all this whole industry

56:01

that emerged around it. Because I

56:03

think that's what's missing about the story of social media.

56:05

When we think about the story of the ride of social media,

56:07

only through the lens of like the social network

56:10

and like these singular company narratives, we

56:12

miss like this

56:13

whole ecosystem around

56:16

it.

56:16

Yeah, and to wrap up our conversation, I

56:18

wanna ask a question about the

56:20

death of Vine. Because

56:23

I think that that feeds into it perfectly,

56:26

because the death of Vine was basically

56:29

like a union power struggle in a way.

56:32

Yeah, I know. And it's

56:34

like the last time like creators, I think had

56:36

enough power over a platform to like

56:38

truly exert that power. Now

56:40

I think the platforms are very intent on

56:42

never allowing creators to have

56:45

like a group of creators to have that much power over a platform.

56:48

But yeah, I mean, so much of the death of Vine, it

56:50

was a self-inflicted wound. I mean, the

56:52

Vine, like I talk about this, but like I

56:55

think that, I mean, Elon is

56:57

learning this lesson now. You cannot

57:00

have a hostile relationship to your user base.

57:02

You cannot dictate

57:05

who is popular on your platform. You can try, but

57:07

you're gonna drive everyone away. Like look at Clubhouse,

57:09

right? Like they tried to make all of Andreessen

57:11

Horowitz like influencers on their platform and no

57:13

one wanted to use the platform anymore. Like you

57:16

cannot, you

57:18

need to listen to your users and you need to be

57:20

respectful of the communities that you've cultivated.

57:22

Of course you can like incentivize different forms

57:24

of content, but

57:26

yeah, they were like horrible to like their biggest creators.

57:29

And then all the biggest creators were like, okay,

57:31

why are we even on here? You're not even paying us. You're

57:33

not servicing us in any way. And

57:37

so like, yeah, pay us

57:39

or we're gonna get out. And they ultimately Vine

57:41

did not have the money to even pay them. I felt bad

57:43

for Karen Spencer who was sort of brought

57:46

in too late in the game to like

57:48

really change the courses. Cause she

57:50

really did try to like get the money. Like

57:52

she really wanted to help, you know,

57:54

to work with them. But she ultimately,

57:57

you know, the company was too far gone and it

57:59

shut down.

58:01

What a huge loss. Once again, Twitter mismanaged

58:03

something.

58:04

I mean, Twitter... So shocked.

58:08

They really can never get it together. I loved

58:10

also Nick Bilton's Hashing Twitter I read it years

58:12

ago, but it was a great book on early Twitter.

58:15

There

58:17

was definitely an energy when they

58:19

sold to Musk that

58:21

was like, this is

58:23

the best thing that could happen.

58:25

We don't have to be in charge of this thing anymore. He's

58:28

going to give us way too much money and

58:30

take all of our problems away.

58:32

Here. Sure, buddy. Take it. Great.

58:35

I also say like I was optimistic

58:37

about Elon's takeover. I'm not

58:41

inherently or I wasn't inherently sort of

58:43

like anti Elon running Twitter. I

58:45

think I didn't realize how that he was

58:47

like full on sort of like supporting fascists

58:49

at that time. But I was like, you know,

58:52

Elon has three successful

58:54

companies. Twitter. Everyone's correct

58:56

that Twitter was on life support. And I think people

58:58

don't realize that like Twitter was was not

59:01

going to be around for much longer in its previous

59:04

form. It just wouldn't have

59:06

it would have sort of petered along and it died out

59:09

and it

59:09

never was able to sort of ascend to what you

59:12

know, one of the giants.

59:14

But obviously what he wants done to it is horrifying

59:17

and terrible and

59:19

RIP.

59:20

Yeah, I

59:22

know we need to let you go.

59:24

But I hate on such a negative note. I

59:27

think people like to like a book. It is

59:29

a very fun read. I hope. Yeah,

59:31

there

59:32

it is. Where can people find it? What is it out?

59:34

It was out on preorder now. So

59:37

preorder it right now. Preorders are so

59:39

important for books like the only thing that counts

59:41

as I realized. And also that

59:43

we'll have it on your doorstep, October 3, which

59:45

is when it formally drops, which is really only

59:47

a couple weeks away. So preorder it now.

59:50

Love it.

59:52

Taylor Lorenz, thank you so much for coming on to cyber

59:55

and talking to us about all this.

59:57

Thank you so much for having me.

59:59

Take care. Bye guys. This

1:00:02

was fun. Bye. Bye. All

1:00:05

right, cyber listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be

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You need Indeed. Hey

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there, cyber listeners. Matthew here.

1:02:12

This episode was brought to you by Delete Me. A

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1:04:17

All right, cyber listeners. Welcome back. We are

1:04:20

switching gears. I

1:04:24

had to do Gus management

1:04:26

at the end of that. Yeah. How's, how's, how's our guy

1:04:28

doing? He's fine. The thing is like he has

1:04:31

a, he's like a dog. He's

1:04:33

got a very set schedule

1:04:35

and now it's about 12 31. It

1:04:37

was like now's the time where you make me chase the

1:04:39

mouse and then I get a treat.

1:04:42

That's not happening.

1:04:44

And then he starts, he's like,

1:04:46

he, so he sat down and he was in my lab for a while.

1:04:48

It was nice. Then he got down and he looked

1:04:50

at me and just stared at me for 10 minutes.

1:04:53

Then he got up and he just started prowling and

1:04:55

it was like a trouble prowl. I was like, Oh, this isn't

1:04:58

going to be good. Uh, he started, he

1:05:00

like looks at me and he looks at a wire and

1:05:02

he's like, are we doing this? So we don't have

1:05:04

to do this. We can, you can just go make me chase the mouse. Like

1:05:07

buddy, I'm doing, I'm talking to the people. Uh,

1:05:11

the other day was being

1:05:13

a right terror. Like all he,

1:05:15

I mean, I feel so bad even describing it like

1:05:17

that. It's just like I was working and I couldn't pay

1:05:19

attention to him because I was like trying to, I was

1:05:22

trying to record voiceover for something. Yeah. He

1:05:26

kept going like, man, wow. And I'm like, dude, you

1:05:28

can't be in the background of this tick tock. Where's

1:05:32

the catnip? My roommate moved

1:05:35

it and I don't know where it went. I can't distract.

1:05:36

That's

1:05:39

unfortunate.

1:05:40

Uh, so do you

1:05:43

have any,

1:05:45

do you have any final thoughts on being extremely

1:05:47

online?

1:05:49

Uh, my thoughts about extremely

1:05:52

online is that I love logging off. Um,

1:05:55

and something we kind of talked to Taylor

1:05:57

about a little bit and I wouldn't, you know, we can do it.

1:05:59

talk about a little bit more is just like how much

1:06:02

is looking back on the early of the past 20 years

1:06:05

of internet nostalgia versus

1:06:07

actually this was a better time. I think

1:06:10

like you know that's always looking at history

1:06:12

like through a different lens than you

1:06:14

know it's just something

1:06:16

that I've been thinking about a lot recently.

1:06:21

Sorry I was getting our next guest link

1:06:23

to to get them in. I think

1:06:26

that that's a really good point. Maybe

1:06:30

it was because of the place that I was in in my life at

1:06:32

the time but it's very easy

1:06:35

for me to look at the early

1:06:37

2000s which is when a decent

1:06:39

portion of this book

1:06:41

or those thoughts and

1:06:43

realize like this is a really shitty

1:06:45

time for our culture

1:06:47

and

1:06:48

like this

1:06:51

weird time of transition and like global

1:06:53

war on terror spins up and

1:06:56

we've got like

1:06:59

this big boom on the internet and in reality

1:07:01

television and a lot of that stuff I look

1:07:03

back on now and it's just

1:07:05

this was all slop so much of this

1:07:07

was so bad

1:07:09

so much of this was terrible

1:07:11

and you know what the 90s also terrible

1:07:13

was all bad it

1:07:15

was all bad don't have nostalgia for any of

1:07:17

it move forward

1:07:22

the other thing I wish I had a chance

1:07:24

to ask her but I'll

1:07:27

ask you is do you have extremely

1:07:31

offline friends like

1:07:34

do you have friends that don't have like any social

1:07:37

media or know what anything is like what any

1:07:39

of this stuff is?

1:07:43

I'm silent because I'm thinking okay

1:07:48

what I'm gonna answer that with an anecdote excellent

1:07:51

which is part of what I

1:07:53

was doing in California

1:07:56

when I was there was visiting a front he had a baby during

1:07:58

the pandemic and

1:07:59

And I've been

1:08:02

very proactive in making

1:08:04

sure I'm asking questions. I'm like, okay, can I post

1:08:06

a picture of the baby on my

1:08:09

Instagram? Like, how do

1:08:11

you want me to handle this? Because I think

1:08:15

that, you know, the way that

1:08:17

social media has kind of evolved over

1:08:19

the past 20 years is

1:08:21

very much being like, this is your life. And

1:08:24

it is online versus that really, you know,

1:08:26

the demarcation that we were talking about at the beginning

1:08:28

of our conversation

1:08:30

with Taylor from the Student Anonymous internet and to

1:08:32

more, you know, this is you and your

1:08:35

online. And where

1:08:37

the separation between your

1:08:40

actual personhood and

1:08:42

your online persona and how

1:08:44

that goes. And just like, I think that

1:08:46

we're at a point where we're kind of facing a reckoning

1:08:48

over that. And, you know, we've been talking about

1:08:51

that as it relates to child

1:08:53

influencers. And that'll be the topic of another episode

1:08:56

once we get all of our ducks in a row about that.

1:08:58

But just kind of like it

1:09:01

for a while, it didn't feel like there was a choice

1:09:03

if you wanted to keep up with modern

1:09:06

culture in the zeitgeist. Like, how do you,

1:09:08

how do you, how

1:09:10

are you online without being online? And

1:09:12

I guess the equivalent of that is

1:09:15

lurking.

1:09:16

Yeah.

1:09:17

I'm a big lurker, actually. Most

1:09:20

of the spaces I'm in, I lurk.

1:09:22

Which social platform

1:09:25

in particular do

1:09:26

you lurk the most?

1:09:29

Because I am a video gamer,

1:09:32

Discord and Reddit.

1:09:35

So it's like

1:09:38

Reddit just watching the conversations

1:09:42

and watching people ask

1:09:44

questions and talk about like Starfield,

1:09:46

for example, Discord

1:09:49

for the same thing, but it's also about

1:09:52

Discord is a great place to

1:09:55

harvest memes. So

1:09:59

you like go to... the the discord

1:10:01

server that is run

1:10:03

by a game company that

1:10:06

is like the place where people gather to talk about the video

1:10:08

game you're playing say Warhammer 40k

1:10:10

dark tide

1:10:13

then those companies usually have

1:10:15

a separate channel in the discord server that

1:10:17

is just the memes then you

1:10:19

go into that and like I'm harvesting those

1:10:22

to sprinkle across my various group chats

1:10:25

throughout the day and make them think that

1:10:27

I'm very clever and

1:10:29

you never share where you got them

1:10:31

no of course not you can't reveal your sources there

1:10:33

you have to do source protection there you

1:10:35

know can

1:10:37

we

1:10:41

ask why Matt is not part of the boycott

1:10:43

reddit crew what is his take on

1:10:45

this we've done an episode about this actually we did

1:10:48

we did do there there is a past

1:10:50

cyber episode which I will pull up here in a second

1:10:53

and try to link where we talked quite a bit about

1:10:56

the boycott and reddit stuff

1:11:01

some of it like yeah

1:11:04

I boycotted it for a while but

1:11:07

also I didn't use the apps in

1:11:09

like it's the same thing that happens that always happens is

1:11:11

like eventually you break down and you

1:11:14

have a question that you need an answer to and

1:11:16

where you're gonna go gonna type that into Google you're

1:11:19

not gonna get the answer

1:11:20

gotta go to reddit you gotta go to reddit and find out

1:11:22

who asked the question before and like get

1:11:24

it from there so

1:11:26

yeah also

1:11:27

it would

1:11:28

be interesting maybe you

1:11:31

know sometime in the next month or two for us

1:11:33

to go back and do some more reporting on what the

1:11:35

state of the anti-spazz slash

1:11:37

like what's going on with the

1:11:40

mod cord guys

1:11:44

now there was thank you for asking that question

1:11:46

yeah there was a really good a

1:11:49

lot of them lasted much

1:11:51

longer than I expected there is one of them that I was

1:11:54

one of the subreddits I was in they did a

1:11:56

really great job of just

1:11:58

posting pictures of don't one, she'd all for

1:12:01

like a month solid. Uh,

1:12:03

they kept it a long

1:12:05

time. Uh, and I was very proud to

1:12:07

have be a lurker in that community. Um, but

1:12:12

then it, you know, eventually, eventually

1:12:14

people forget that things move, move

1:12:18

on and like, where it pushes through. And we're seeing this again

1:12:20

with, I think it's going to be different. Uh,

1:12:23

this is something I want to talk to Corey

1:12:25

doctoral on about when we

1:12:27

have him on, uh, not next week, but the week after,

1:12:30

are you following this unity thing at all? Do you

1:12:32

know anything about this?

1:12:34

So I keep seeing

1:12:36

people tweeting about it, but like my,

1:12:39

my feelings about like the video game

1:12:41

world is that I'm happy to know like 30 per no,

1:12:44

okay. 50% of what's going on in games news at

1:12:46

any given time, just to like protect

1:12:49

my heart. Um, it's

1:12:51

like when I was in Seattle, I was walking down the

1:12:53

street and I was like, Oh my God, I have walked

1:12:55

into packs West. That

1:12:59

was truly the most horrifying thing that

1:13:01

ever had to explain to my friend that I was with

1:13:03

what cuphead was. And I'm like, I, can

1:13:06

someone please just put me out of my misery?

1:13:08

I don't need to, I hate that I know these things.

1:13:10

Yeah. So this is

1:13:12

actually, actually I wanted to hear this story and

1:13:14

Becky, I know I see you waiting in the wings. We'll

1:13:17

bring you one to talk about UFOs in a minute. Um,

1:13:20

just give us one second and then we'll be back. Okay.

1:13:22

So hit me with your packs West story.

1:13:26

Oh, so I was, um, visiting

1:13:29

my college roommate who lives in Seattle and she lives

1:13:31

in like the Capitol Hill area.

1:13:33

And we were just walking towards like place

1:13:35

market. Um, cause I'm not

1:13:37

much of a touristy person, but I just

1:13:39

wanted to see a guy throw a fish and then be

1:13:42

done with it. Um, so

1:13:44

we're walking down the street and suddenly I

1:13:46

start seeing people like a larger than normal, um,

1:13:51

percentage of people.

1:13:52

I was around having shirts

1:13:55

that were either about like Dungeons and Dragons or like my

1:13:57

brother, my brother and me. And I was like something. is

1:14:00

happening right now. A lot of people in like

1:14:02

various anime vibes cosplay

1:14:05

and I'm like, Oh, no, oh,

1:14:07

no. And I see a sign for PAX

1:14:09

West. And I'm just like, God, I can't believe

1:14:11

I'm here. I thought I would be able to

1:14:13

avoid this. This is like work for

1:14:15

me. I don't want to be here.

1:14:17

You are you are

1:14:19

a gamer though. Why do you hate our culture, Emily?

1:14:22

Why do I not want to be a part of the

1:14:24

PAX West gamer community?

1:14:27

Yeah. Is that your question? Because

1:14:31

I'm not

1:14:33

like the other girls. But

1:14:39

it's more just like I really

1:14:43

enjoy doing these things in my own time and in

1:14:46

my own ways. And if I was approaching these

1:14:48

communities in a slightly different from

1:14:50

a slightly different angle, maybe I would be really

1:14:52

into it. I think it was talked earlier

1:14:55

in our conversation with Taylor, like, I've

1:14:58

been in like into the idea

1:15:00

of fan conventions and wanting to go to fan conventions.

1:15:04

Oh, God, for like, 20

1:15:06

some 20 years, something like that, haven't

1:15:09

gone to a lot of them, which it

1:15:11

could have been fun to go to some of them. But

1:15:14

I think, you

1:15:16

know, my a lot of my intersection

1:15:19

with a lot of these fan communities has been very on

1:15:22

the internet and through my

1:15:24

own, you

1:15:25

know,

1:15:28

dipping my toe in as deep as I

1:15:30

wanted to. Whereas I think going

1:15:32

to a convention, you're really soaked in it. And

1:15:34

also, you know, if we're gonna pull the curtain back a little bit,

1:15:36

like we're journalists, and going to

1:15:39

a big convention like that feels like

1:15:41

work. And I was on a two week vacation. And I

1:15:43

was like, I don't want to think about work. When

1:15:46

I am on my last day of my vacation.

1:15:48

Yeah, you're starting to construct TikToks and

1:15:50

blogs as you're walking around looking at everything.

1:15:52

And like, that's no good. You

1:15:53

don't want to be thinking about

1:15:56

and I was just like, we're not doing this, I need to go.

1:15:59

Fair

1:15:59

enough.

1:15:59

Yeah, I don't think I could. I mean,

1:16:02

I don't like,

1:16:04

I've been to several in my time. I've

1:16:06

actually been to a Star Trek

1:16:08

convention, if you can believe it.

1:16:10

How was that? Was it a lot of fun?

1:16:12

It was all right. It was funny. I went with

1:16:15

a girl I was dating at the time wanted to go. And

1:16:18

I went and I got to see the guy

1:16:20

that played Sisko, whose name escapes me on DS9. He

1:16:23

was my favorite captain. And I

1:16:25

got to see him speak and that was really fun and

1:16:27

good. And then the rest of the thing, like so

1:16:29

much of this stuff, it really depends on which one you go to,

1:16:31

but it just feels like a giant shopping

1:16:34

mall.

1:16:35

Yes. Like you're

1:16:37

just, it's just vendors and people selling

1:16:40

comic books. They couldn't move at their store, you know,

1:16:43

for the past 20 years that they're selling on discount

1:16:46

and like t-shirts. Avery Brooks, thank you. Avery

1:16:49

Brooks was incredible.

1:16:51

There's just so much of this stuff

1:16:53

is just commerce and it's not actually

1:16:55

like

1:16:56

panels and stuff like that. Like that kind of turns me

1:16:59

off. It's like I can go to a comic book store anyway. Anyway,

1:17:02

let's talk about, do you want to talk about? No, I want to

1:17:04

speak some aliens. Yes. Let's talk about aliens.

1:17:07

Let's do that. Before I go

1:17:10

down the rabbit hole with like saddle dirt

1:17:13

completely. Let me shut down all these

1:17:15

fuck yeah, Tom Blurs I had while

1:17:18

we're talking to you.

1:17:19

Let's close the tabs from the last

1:17:22

guest.

1:17:23

Right. I

1:17:25

guess right before we jump in, did we think did we we

1:17:27

don't have sound if we pull up a thing? I don't

1:17:29

think so. Okay. I do want

1:17:31

to say that motherboard has a documentary coming out.

1:17:35

Yeah, I'm going to drop the link to it

1:17:37

in the chat for people to watch as their

1:17:39

you know, little Amoose Boosh

1:17:41

for this conversation. If you so desire,

1:17:44

it could be or maybe like an

1:17:46

after stream little you know, a party.

1:17:48

So if we're going to go some some fancy, you

1:17:50

know, content snack, as we

1:17:52

say here at Vice. But

1:17:55

yeah, so Vice or motherboard has a

1:17:57

documentary that's coming out on Netflix.

1:18:00

about aliens and you should absolutely watch

1:18:02

it. We're all really excited for that

1:18:05

to premiere.

1:18:05

Because as much as

1:18:08

it hurts me inside and

1:18:10

I hate talking about it, we're gonna keep talking

1:18:12

about Amazon and we're gonna keep talking

1:18:14

about UFOs because it's

1:18:16

in the news. So it's time to leave

1:18:19

our terrestrial world behind and look instead to

1:18:21

the stars. Can we get Becky on here please?

1:18:26

Hello. Hello,

1:18:28

how are you? I'm doing all right. So

1:18:31

it was a banner week for Weird UFO News

1:18:33

and with us today to talk about all of motherboard.

1:18:36

I've got, I'm not

1:18:38

having,

1:18:39

this is why you don't go off the air for two weeks. All

1:18:42

right, I'm gonna take this as a re- I'm gonna reread this again.

1:18:45

All

1:18:45

right. I believe in you. We got this guys. Encourage

1:18:47

me in

1:18:49

the chat please. Unique

1:18:52

New York. All right. Stop.

1:18:54

Are we gonna

1:18:57

do zip zaps off? Are we going theater kid

1:18:59

mode now? Of course. Got

1:19:01

to do, yeah. Anyway, all right.

1:19:04

It was a banner week for Weird UFO

1:19:07

News and with us today to talk about all

1:19:09

of it as motherboard science writer. I

1:19:13

can't, I don't know why I can't do your lesson. No, it's

1:19:15

because you, okay. You know what's funny is I

1:19:17

listened to my, I listed the past episode too.

1:19:20

I was like, all right, I do this every time

1:19:22

and I'm gonna listen to it before. I'm gonna

1:19:24

pronounce it correctly because I know what I'm doing. It's

1:19:27

fine.

1:19:29

Say it for me one more time. Ferrera?

1:19:32

Yeah. Why, why did I, okay.

1:19:35

It's good. It's good. All right.

1:19:38

It's always a 50-50 chance.

1:19:41

It was a banner week for Weird UFO

1:19:43

News and with us today to talk about all of it

1:19:45

is motherboard science writer, Becky Ferrera.

1:19:49

Yay. Hi. Hello. So

1:19:52

I'm sorry that we're having you on once again to talk about

1:19:54

UAPs, but thank you for coming.

1:19:56

What can you do? Stop there. But thank you for coming.

1:20:02

So top level before we get into specifics,

1:20:06

did we actually learn anything this week?

1:20:08

Well, I'm going to let you cover the whole

1:20:11

Mexican alien thing. Because

1:20:13

I like, as I said, I actively avoided that. I was like,

1:20:15

I can't, that's water. I can't take

1:20:17

it to my boat, I'm going

1:20:19

to take it. But in terms of like the

1:20:22

NASA UAP report that came out this

1:20:24

week, I think the biggest thing we learned is just that

1:20:26

they appointed a director of UAP

1:20:28

studies, which was really interesting to

1:20:30

me, just means that they're going to continue clearly

1:20:33

having an office devoted to

1:20:35

it. And it's also just like very exiles

1:20:37

in that way too, because they didn't reveal the name until

1:20:39

like a little bit after the press

1:20:42

conference too. So yeah, I think that's the

1:20:44

biggest news.

1:20:46

We can get into that. We've got a FOIA

1:20:48

that we got back that we'll talk about as well, that

1:20:51

I think is pretty interesting and we'll show some of the stuff from

1:20:53

that. But yeah, let's start with

1:20:56

what happened in Mexico. So

1:21:00

on Tuesday, so you

1:21:01

just completely tuned out of this? Did

1:21:04

you completely avoided it? Emily, did you see any

1:21:06

of it?

1:21:07

I just completely. I'm still happy

1:21:10

for you. It

1:21:13

was a logging off choice, right? That was

1:21:15

the Emily at PAX West of UFOs.

1:21:18

Like you just don't want to even engage.

1:21:21

Yeah, I've

1:21:23

been writing only about aliens for months now

1:21:25

too. So I was just like, I just, there's

1:21:28

some things that can't get, that need time

1:21:30

to dissolve into my brain. It's like a mitosis process.

1:21:33

I can't just like take it as a cop.

1:21:36

It was helpful

1:21:38

for me because I think as I was going over

1:21:40

it and reading it, I didn't have to write anything

1:21:42

about it, even though I'm talking about it now.

1:21:45

But B, I think it helped me like zero

1:21:48

in on why so much of this stuff makes me so

1:21:50

upset. So let's let

1:21:52

me let me talk about it a little bit if

1:21:54

I can.

1:21:55

If my brain isn't too completely

1:21:58

fried. You got this.

1:22:00

So on Tuesday there was a large

1:22:02

presentation before the lower house of Mexican

1:22:04

Congress And the

1:22:06

presentation was led by a well-known crank

1:22:09

who has a YouTube channel JB

1:22:13

Masson, I think that's how you say his last name.

1:22:15

Well, obviously I'm really great with last

1:22:17

names There was a

1:22:19

lot of other people in the audience kind of from all over the

1:22:21

world In the centerpiece of

1:22:23

it if we can bring up the picture Yeah

1:22:27

Um

1:22:30

Were these coffins a

1:22:33

coffin is maybe an overdramatization

1:22:35

but these photographs like these These

1:22:38

coffins that were opened to reveal

1:22:41

these shriveled

1:22:43

little mummies They

1:22:46

are mummies

1:22:47

as far as we know that

1:22:48

were purported to be

1:22:51

Alien bodies and then the rest of the

1:22:53

presentation was basically One

1:22:56

of this guy's YouTube videos but done

1:22:58

for the lower house of Mexican Congress so

1:23:02

I Realized

1:23:05

like reading this reading about this stuff

1:23:07

and watching this footage

1:23:09

like why?

1:23:11

One of the reasons why all this UFO stuff

1:23:13

makes me so mad is that we've

1:23:15

done all this before and we've been doing all

1:23:17

Of this for like 30 even

1:23:20

longer than I've been alive actually It's

1:23:22

just kind of the same shit over and over again And

1:23:25

like once you see it once and kind of

1:23:27

get it debunked for you

1:23:29

And get yourself inoculated to

1:23:31

it like it would it recurs

1:23:34

like 10 years later? Just

1:23:36

like we already did this. Why do we have to do it again? So

1:23:39

these mummies are famous Like

1:23:42

they're this is not some grand reveal of alien

1:23:44

bodies. Obviously, these are literal mummies

1:23:48

Probably from Peru

1:23:53

There have you heard you Becky have you

1:23:55

heard of the the Nazca

1:23:58

lines in Peru you've seen these

1:23:59

Yeah, yeah, and this whole entanglement

1:24:03

thing that they have unfortunately

1:24:05

got themselves into for sure. Yes. So

1:24:08

basically what's happening is in 1968, a

1:24:12

guy wrote

1:24:14

a book called Chariot of the Gods, which

1:24:17

is the kind of the origin story in

1:24:19

the modern mythos of all this ancient

1:24:22

alien stuff.

1:24:23

So this is like why you've

1:24:25

got like

1:24:28

the guy on the History Channel doing 10 seasons

1:24:30

of saying we're not sure that it's aliens. I'm

1:24:33

not saying it's aliens, but it's probably aliens,

1:24:35

right? And the basic

1:24:37

pitch is that ancient

1:24:40

civilizations interacted with aliens, and the aliens

1:24:42

helped them build stuff. One

1:24:45

of the little pieces of evidence

1:24:48

that is thrown around are these Nazca lines

1:24:50

in Peru, and I think I've got a link to it if you can pull them

1:24:52

up just so that people can know what I'm talking

1:24:54

about, which are these Eric

1:24:57

Von Duncan, thank you.

1:24:59

Thank

1:25:04

you, Beat Master. The

1:25:05

aliens, let me explain one.

1:25:09

I'm sorry, what?

1:25:10

I mean, is it this? Let

1:25:14

me,

1:25:15

I mean, that's another link to, I thought I had a

1:25:17

link for the Nazca line specifically, but I may

1:25:19

have screwed up.

1:25:21

No,

1:25:24

it's below the Wikipedia link. We're doing it live, guys.

1:25:26

Oh no, we are. There it is. There it is,

1:25:30

right. Perfect. So outside

1:25:32

of,

1:25:34

these are in Peru outside of like

1:25:36

some archeological sites, and it's one of these things

1:25:38

that people look at and they're like, why was this built?

1:25:42

Obviously can only be seen from the sky. This is obvious

1:25:44

communication with aliens. And then part of this

1:25:47

is that

1:25:48

they find

1:25:51

the mummified remains of people

1:25:53

near these ruins

1:25:55

in Peru

1:25:58

and some of the mummy have

1:26:00

elongated skulls. So

1:26:03

what happens is like all

1:26:05

of these mummies get trotted out as

1:26:07

evidence by cranks who have YouTube

1:26:10

channels and are now apparently

1:26:12

fit to testify before Congress in

1:26:14

Mexico that these mummies

1:26:17

with elongated skulls are evidence of aliens.

1:26:21

And in like in this guy's presentation they even

1:26:23

like showed an x-ray, said like oh he's got, you know, this

1:26:26

body has eggs in it, et cetera, et cetera. Lots

1:26:28

of really wild stuff. The

1:26:30

thing that drives me, this one specifically

1:26:34

is really irritating to me because most

1:26:36

of these bodies are like looted

1:26:39

remains. They are mummies that were literally

1:26:41

like taken out of these tombs.

1:26:45

Sometimes there's evidence that they have been

1:26:47

like chopped up and like

1:26:50

put, like there's several different mummies that have been

1:26:52

put together and like stuff that's

1:26:54

been stolen by grave robbers and like sold

1:26:56

to cranks. And this

1:26:58

is something that like

1:27:02

archa, Peruvian archeologists and scientists

1:27:04

have been talking about for a long time and have

1:27:06

actually accused these people of committing crimes.

1:27:11

And like we know that there's

1:27:13

a history in the area of

1:27:16

specific groups doing like skull

1:27:18

elongation on their children.

1:27:20

And this is something that like still happens today

1:27:23

where

1:27:24

some babies get, you

1:27:27

get like a helmet because it's got a, the

1:27:29

skull has to be kind of shaped. Well, they

1:27:31

used to do this in Peru

1:27:34

a long time ago to like make the skull elongate.

1:27:36

And so people find them the mummies, they think it looks strange.

1:27:39

And then it gets tried out as evidence that

1:27:41

there's aliens.

1:27:43

And

1:27:46

it's the idea that this stuff

1:27:48

has been debunked like six years ago in 2017. In 2015,

1:27:52

the same guy he tried to peddle a photo he said

1:27:55

was of an alien corpse. And it was the mummy

1:27:57

of a two year old boy been

1:28:00

found in like Pueblo cliff

1:28:02

dwellings in the 19th century. Like we know

1:28:05

where a lot of these bodies come from. There's like providence

1:28:07

behind them. We know what or

1:28:09

providence behind them. Like we know where

1:28:12

it

1:28:13

comes from and yet we keep falling

1:28:15

for the same stories over and over again. And it irritates

1:28:18

me that we can't seem to learn anything or

1:28:20

that we have to be taught this over and over and

1:28:22

over again. And that is my

1:28:25

angry rant about the Nausicaa

1:28:28

Hawaiian alien stuff this week.

1:28:30

So thank you for letting me get that out. I

1:28:32

apologize. Thank you everyone

1:28:34

watching.

1:28:35

I mean, that that

1:28:37

makes a lot of sense to me. Why? Why? You

1:28:40

know, literally,

1:28:43

like, I have no comment, not because

1:28:45

I'm trying to figure out how

1:28:48

to put this. Yeah.

1:28:52

Exactly.

1:28:54

It's just like we

1:28:57

I don't know. Like there's it's

1:28:59

something.

1:29:01

There's something

1:29:03

like there's one thing about a guy like going on to the history

1:29:05

channel and talking about ancient aliens. It's

1:29:08

a whole other level of fucked up when

1:29:11

people in these movements are purchasing

1:29:14

like mummies, the

1:29:17

remains of human bodies that

1:29:19

have been stolen from tombs and

1:29:21

then like peddling them as aliens. It's like another

1:29:24

level of like,

1:29:26

like you refuse to believe like you

1:29:28

desecrated a tomb because

1:29:31

you want the world to believe

1:29:33

your vision of what extraterrestrial

1:29:36

life is. And like that just

1:29:38

snow god, it's bad.

1:29:42

But that's sorry. Let's

1:29:44

let's get into the more serious UFO news. Shall

1:29:46

we Becky? No,

1:29:48

totally. Is that chariots of the gods book?

1:29:50

It's really interesting to me that it kind of sparked

1:29:52

such a huge, you

1:29:55

know, readership and everything.

1:29:55

There's like a lot of people kind of speculating

1:29:58

about that stuff at the time. That's whatever.

1:29:59

reason that was

1:30:01

the one that became mainstream and isn't

1:30:03

it like also like responsible for a lot of the theories like

1:30:06

yeah you know African

1:30:08

and South American people couldn't have made

1:30:10

all of their monuments and kind of like that's

1:30:13

true

1:30:13

here to it as well that's an under

1:30:15

a beat master brings this up in chat right as you were saying

1:30:18

it and it's

1:30:19

that's something else that that dovetails

1:30:21

with this stuff is like a lot

1:30:24

of the cherry to the god stuff and like these Peruvian

1:30:26

mummy stuff is it's it's all really

1:30:29

racist

1:30:30

and it's tied up in like race science

1:30:32

ideas from the 19th century

1:30:34

that have been like routinely debunked but also

1:30:37

much like the way we talk about these aliens like

1:30:39

it's the stuff keeps recurring and we keep having

1:30:41

to fight it

1:30:43

you know it I do really think

1:30:45

that the history of like alien hoaxes is very

1:30:48

interesting but kind of much more interesting when you get

1:30:50

like further back and it's more rudimentary and

1:30:52

not so organized because now like there is such

1:30:54

a community that is centered

1:30:57

around charity the gods and those those ideas

1:31:00

but yeah I

1:31:02

just I just like those little hopes is where someone

1:31:06

put a seed in a meteorite

1:31:07

and I hate it up

1:31:09

and there's seeds in space

1:31:11

or whatever you know yeah there's some some a

1:31:14

farmer under something in their backyard

1:31:16

and yeah those are a little bit

1:31:19

more fun that any day

1:31:21

yeah over to him to

1:31:23

robbing anyway yeah generally

1:31:25

I would say one one is definitely better

1:31:28

than the other think

1:31:29

we can genuinely conclude

1:31:31

this

1:31:33

but let's move on to the serious UFO news because

1:31:35

we did have some this week the

1:31:38

first one that caught my eye that you wrote was

1:31:40

motherboard recently got back a Freedom

1:31:42

of Information Act request what

1:31:45

was what was in there what did we ask them for

1:31:48

yeah it was a bunch of internal communications

1:31:51

about this independent

1:31:53

UAP study group that NASA

1:31:55

launched last year there's like

1:31:58

emails organizing that group,

1:32:01

people emailing NASA, both experts

1:32:03

in the public alike, with their thoughts about what

1:32:06

how the group should approach. And even

1:32:08

a couple, there's a couple emails in there from people who ended up

1:32:10

being on the group, who are just

1:32:12

like kind of basically auditioning in it, and

1:32:15

telling them telling NASA what they could do for

1:32:17

the group. So it was really interesting as kind

1:32:19

of a process read of just

1:32:22

how they saw

1:32:24

some of the initial issues that came into making the group.

1:32:26

And then there's also emails from the public that

1:32:29

are amazing, because they're just

1:32:31

like, instead

1:32:33

of, you know, we saw a little

1:32:35

bit of phosphine in Venus's atmosphere,

1:32:37

that could be like, it's like flat out like, I've

1:32:40

been talking to aliens all the time. And I find that really refreshing

1:32:42

that some people are just like, this is a subtle question.

1:32:44

You know, here's my theory.

1:32:47

And like a reminder for people like

1:32:50

how

1:32:51

diverse, let's say opinions on

1:32:54

these phenomena are. So that was really cool

1:32:56

to read as well. Yeah, I really enjoy congratulations

1:32:59

to your recent appointments to head up the NASA effort

1:33:02

on UFO UAP, or what I have

1:33:04

termed the five dimensional atmospheric

1:33:06

entities, or AE

1:33:08

for short.

1:33:09

And then just

1:33:12

just really pitching

1:33:14

their kind of variant of

1:33:18

what they think all of this stuff is, right?

1:33:21

Please reply to this historic email your earliest

1:33:23

opportunity, you can reply to me at my cell

1:33:25

phone, cell phone redacted, or

1:33:27

else use the reply button at the bottom of this email,

1:33:30

which is a forward for my recent email

1:33:32

to other employees at NOAA, NASA, etc.

1:33:35

None of which have reply.

1:33:37

Cry

1:33:40

laugh reading this is so good.

1:33:44

Well,

1:33:44

it's also just like, I think

1:33:47

there's another one in there that has a similar that

1:33:50

was my favorite that was like, an

1:33:52

email saying I emailed you guys

1:33:54

already about how I know about

1:33:56

the sun prophecies and how they're related to aliens.

1:33:59

I did this in

1:33:59

2012 and here's a picture of the sent

1:34:02

email like that's

1:34:04

a ball of like that's such a that's to

1:34:06

be like I've already you should have been talking

1:34:08

to me like over a decade ago this is the email

1:34:11

here's the proof and it's just this whole

1:34:13

this big very elaborate theory about I

1:34:16

think like fountain of youth stuff

1:34:18

and

1:34:20

but I just thought it was really

1:34:22

cool that they were like I've got the documents

1:34:24

and it's like a picture of their computer one

1:34:27

commenter email NASA to say that they had discovered

1:34:30

the elixir of eternal youth and that supernatural

1:34:32

beings had given them prophecies of the sun activity

1:34:34

for 100 years

1:34:36

and then right below that yeah is the

1:34:39

it's something so perfect that it's

1:34:41

there it is it's

1:34:43

an AOL

1:34:45

it's an AOL

1:34:48

it's

1:34:49

a beautiful

1:34:50

yeah because it's someone taking a

1:34:52

photograph of their desktop

1:34:55

AOL mail which

1:34:57

like who still has that good lord and

1:35:01

then some sort of

1:35:03

weird politeness

1:35:05

this person has a lot of unread emails

1:35:08

I think it's like six thousand seven

1:35:10

hundred eighty one if my if my close-up

1:35:12

vision is good enough come on yeah I

1:35:14

can't do that that's your email you

1:35:16

got to go I mean you got a I'm deleting

1:35:18

all day but I'm still going through them yeah

1:35:22

that gives me anxiety but I also love the

1:35:24

big redaction block

1:35:26

on top of it as if

1:35:28

this this information about NASA

1:35:31

and the elixir of immortality cannot

1:35:34

be cannot be discussed cannot

1:35:36

be disclosed it's not for the hoi poi

1:35:39

like us

1:35:40

well I agree and I want to make clear

1:35:42

like I thought these emails were great like I just

1:35:45

there it was just a reminder again like

1:35:47

that there is just there's

1:35:50

a lot of people who have already developed their

1:35:52

own ideas and they're and they're very

1:35:54

like developed like that one the five-dimensional

1:35:57

entities person that's like a

1:35:59

fifth of the FOIA documents

1:36:01

we received is just his theory.

1:36:03

Oh, that's beautiful. It is great.

1:36:05

It's wonderful.

1:36:07

Yeah, I think that that's another important part

1:36:09

of all of this and like why it resonates

1:36:12

so much with people is that it is this mystery

1:36:14

that you kind of get to build out

1:36:16

your own mythology for. Yeah. Right.

1:36:20

It's participatory.

1:36:21

Yeah.

1:36:23

So, but the, we

1:36:25

did have more NASA news this week

1:36:28

and

1:36:29

everybody thinks about these things a little bit differently.

1:36:32

So

1:36:33

what is NASA's definition of what

1:36:35

a UAP or UFO is and is it different

1:36:37

from like how the Pentagon is thinking about it and what we traditionally

1:36:40

think of?

1:36:41

I'm not sure if their definition is different from

1:36:43

the Pentagon. I would assume they may

1:36:46

have coordinated, but I

1:36:47

kind of think there's interesting because I'm just going to get

1:36:49

it

1:36:50

the exact phrasing here. It

1:36:52

was, sorry,

1:36:56

observations of events in the sky that

1:36:58

cannot be exhibited or identified

1:37:00

as balloons, aircraft, or known natural phenomena. I

1:37:02

thought it was kind of interesting that they even specified

1:37:05

in the sky because they had to change it

1:37:07

from unidentified aerial phenomenon

1:37:09

to unidentified anomalous phenomenon

1:37:12

just in case people were seeing things that were on the ground or

1:37:14

like in the sea or things like that. I

1:37:16

kind of expect them to change that eventually to

1:37:19

just like

1:37:20

things that can't be explained by

1:37:22

technological or natural phenomenon. Well

1:37:26

that's the distinction between the Pentagon definition

1:37:29

and the NASA definition then. It's because they're

1:37:32

only doing aerial. Yes, because the

1:37:34

Pentagon is very specifically looking at things

1:37:36

that are, I can't

1:37:38

remember what the exact terminology

1:37:41

is, but it's stuff that they are seeing like maybe

1:37:43

phasing in and out of the ground and out of the sea

1:37:45

as well. Gotcha. Okay,

1:37:47

that answers. We brought it up then. Yeah,

1:37:50

so NASA. Yeah, I guess that's a good area. Yeah,

1:37:53

narrowly looking at the stars is

1:37:55

what NASA is doing. Yeah,

1:37:58

totally that.

1:37:59

What

1:38:02

can you tell me a little bit more about NASA's

1:38:05

group and what they had announced

1:38:08

this week?

1:38:09

Yeah, so their

1:38:11

group commissioned the study last June,

1:38:14

I think, and then convened

1:38:17

it formally in October. It's

1:38:20

a group led by David Spergill, who's

1:38:23

an astrophysicist and has a bunch of other specialists

1:38:25

like specialists on AI, public

1:38:28

relations, astrobiology. The

1:38:34

big line at their briefing was that it

1:38:37

was supposed to make the sensationalism

1:38:39

of this topic more scientific, like

1:38:41

how do you approach this and how can

1:38:43

you use

1:38:44

NASA's assets

1:38:45

to support this in a scientific way? They

1:38:50

released some initial findings in

1:38:52

the spring and then this is their final report that they

1:38:54

released

1:38:56

just this week.

1:38:57

This report is 36

1:38:59

pages.

1:39:01

What's in there? Yeah,

1:39:04

it's actually a really interesting read and I kind

1:39:06

of thought it was a really good start

1:39:08

in terms of how they're going to define their role

1:39:10

in it, which clearly they are going to keep

1:39:13

contributing to if they have a director in an office now. A

1:39:17

lot of it is, okay, here's the limitations

1:39:20

of what NASA can do. What they were saying, we basically

1:39:22

learned that NASA's got really great missions,

1:39:24

but they don't have the resolution for a lot of aerial

1:39:27

lifts. Almost none of them have that kind of resolution for

1:39:29

following up on aerial observations through

1:39:31

satellites and things like that. We

1:39:37

can give you environmental context for

1:39:40

sightings that are really strange that we can't identify. We

1:39:42

can see if that could be a weather phenomenon

1:39:45

that the right weather patterns would be there. Then

1:39:48

they were kind of like the commercial satellite

1:39:51

industry is better for actually trying to get

1:39:53

independent images of sightings

1:39:55

that people bring in. They also

1:39:58