0:00

It began, for me anyway,

0:02

on a sultry Wednesday. I logged

0:04

onto Twitter against my better judgment,

0:07

and everyone was talking about Mark.

0:09

Mark Zuckerberg just posted on Twitter for

0:11

the first

0:12

time in 11 years

0:15

the Spider-Man meme. Of

0:17

all things, the Spider-Man meme. Who

0:20

are you? Who are you? Who are you? I'm

0:22

me. Who are you? What did

0:24

it mean?

0:25

The Twitterati said it was a clever reference,

0:28

a message to Musk. A threat?

0:30

Maybe. Something new? Certainly.

0:33

Threads. An app to rival

0:35

Twitter from Facebook creator Zuckerberg's

0:38

meta accessible via your Instagram.

0:41

Millions of people signed up within days, so

0:43

quickly that records were broken.

0:46

So, some say, is social media

0:48

broken? Maybe dying? Coming

0:51

up on Today Explained, laughter

0:53

at a funeral.

0:59

You've probably heard about the job

1:01

of an intimacy coordinator. But

1:04

do you know what they actually do? In

1:06

every intimacy coordinator's kit is going to be some

1:08

form of mint. Really? I think most of the time. Wait.

1:11

Oh, 100%. Then we

1:13

add in the full retro Listerine

1:15

breath strip, which is

1:16

crucial. Several years into

1:18

the era of the intimacy coordinator,

1:21

we ask what they've changed for

1:23

the better in Hollywood. And

1:26

what still needs work? This week

1:28

on Intuit, Vulture's pop

1:30

culture podcast.

1:42

Perfect. OK, David, before we begin,

1:44

there is a very funny note here that says to me, remind

1:47

David that our audience is not tech heads.

1:50

So, what I gather Amanda

1:52

is trying to tell both of us is just remember normal

1:55

people, normal people. At the end of the day, my mom

1:57

has to understand this too, OK?

1:59

So, start. by saying, what's up nerds

2:01

is probably a bad call. Yeah, exactly. Okay, cool.

2:03

Just a minute. Let's get nuts. What's up nerds

2:05

and grannies? Okay,

2:09

my friend, go ahead. Give me your full name and tell me

2:11

what you

2:11

do. Sure. My name is David Pierce

2:13

and I'm the editor at large at the Verge. Can we

2:16

talk about threads? I would love to talk about threads.

2:18

What is threads? Threads is

2:21

a new social app from Meta and

2:24

I've come to find two ways

2:26

to explain threads. One is just that it's Twitter.

2:28

Like if you just picture Twitter, that's

2:31

it. You've pretty much got it. The other thing

2:33

is like, it's as if you took Instagram comments

2:35

and made a whole app out of them. So you

2:38

can talk to each other, you can reply, you can like

2:40

stuff, but the whole app is designed

2:42

to be based on sort of individual

2:44

posts rather than, you know, big feeds of images.

2:47

It's much more like tweets and

2:49

messages than it was. Are you on it? I

2:52

am, begrudgingly, I would say. Not

2:54

so much that I have to professionally, but because

2:56

I'm sort of drawn to it like a moth to

2:59

a flame to any new social

3:00

platform, I just feel obligated to

3:03

be there and spend all of my life pouring

3:05

all of my attention into these apps.

3:07

It's

3:07

just what happens. Why was threads created

3:10

and launched? What's its purpose? So

3:12

threads has

3:13

an interesting and sort of complicated

3:16

history.

3:17

What is Threads? What

3:19

is Threads? Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta,

3:22

has spent a long time some

3:25

combination of envious of and

3:27

indirect competition with Twitter. For a long

3:30

time, Facebook and Twitter were kind of the two

3:32

major social platforms. Facebook, obviously

3:34

much bigger, much more successful, but Twitter was

3:36

always kind of zeitgeisty and

3:38

culturally relevant in a way that Facebook

3:41

never really was. It just always struck me. I

3:44

always thought that Twitter should have a billion

3:46

people using it. So Mark Zuckerberg

3:49

and Facebook have always admired that and

3:51

looked for ways to make Facebook

3:53

products more like that. But the more recent

3:55

answer, and the one that I actually think really leads

3:57

to Threads, is that Elon Musk bought Twitter

3:59

in the...

3:59

fall of 2022, and

4:02

by all accounts basically started immediately

4:04

running it into the ground. Reports say thousands

4:07

of Twitter users were not able to

4:09

access its site or struggle with delays

4:11

and difficulties. Twitter's advertising

4:13

revenue has declined about 50%,

4:15

maybe more since Musk took over.

4:18

He's really alienated a lot of advertisers

4:20

with some of his erratic decision

4:22

making. The overwhelming

4:25

feeling came to be that there is opportunity for a

4:27

new kind of social media

4:29

place, a new social network, a new place

4:32

for people to post and hang out that felt

4:35

better, that was better moderated, that was

4:37

more sanely run. And I

4:39

think for whatever reason, I think Twitter

4:41

has this great idea and sort of magic

4:44

in the service. But

4:46

I they just

4:48

haven't kind of cracked that piece yet. And I think

4:51

that that's made it so that you're seeing all these

4:53

other things, whether it's mastodon or, or blue

4:56

sky, that that I think are,

4:59

you know, maybe

4:59

just different different cuts at the same thing. And

5:02

threads really is a 2023 phenomenon. This

5:04

app happened really,

5:06

really quickly. It's still very basic. And

5:09

even the launch timing meta

5:11

launched threads sooner than it meant to,

5:14

in part because Elon Musk

5:16

made a big change over the July 4th weekend to

5:18

essentially limit the number of tweets

5:20

that people can see unless they pay. So

5:23

Twitter is becoming more and more private, more and more closed

5:25

off. And meta saw

5:28

that as an opportunity to say we are going

5:29

to launch right now, we're going to push up the launch date.

5:32

It's just abundantly obvious that this is about

5:35

sticking it to Twitter in a very real way.

5:41

You know, there have been so

5:44

many Twitter alternatives that have popped

5:46

up ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter,

5:49

blue ski, the mastodon

5:52

one, the one that Adam Davidson is running, Jurno

5:54

host, none of them seem very

5:57

good. I say with a laugh is threads

5:59

actually

5:59

different from the other nonsense

6:02

we've been exposed to in the last

6:04

couple months? Nonsense

6:07

is a good word for it. I think yes

6:09

purely because of where it comes from. To some

6:12

extent it's really not a very good app. It's

6:14

very basic, it's missing lots of features, it crashed

6:16

a lot when it first launched. There's a lot wrong

6:19

and missing in Threads, but Threads has two

6:21

real things going for it. One is that

6:24

because it's attached to Instagram it's incredibly

6:27

easy to sign up for. You download

6:29

the app, you press sign in with Instagram, and

6:31

just like that you have a profile, you have a username

6:34

with another couple of clicks you can bring in your

6:36

bio, you can bring in your followers. So the

6:38

speed of getting set up is faster

6:41

than basically any social network

6:43

ever as long as you're an existing Instagram user.

6:46

And the other thing is just that it's owned by Meta. Meta

6:48

is very good at this. It's very good at scaling social

6:51

networks. Facebook has 2 billion plus

6:53

users. Meta knows how to have

6:55

social networks with lots of people in them, so it

6:57

was able to get past a lot of the early,

7:01

screwy, you know, can't keep the service

7:03

live stuff much, much faster

7:05

than most. In a matter of like hours it started

7:08

to feel like a stable service, whereas some of these

7:11

still don't feel stable,

7:11

you know, months and years after they launched.

7:14

So I think it was just able to get up to speed and get

7:16

a lot of people interested so much more quickly

7:18

than some of these other ones. Whether

7:20

or not it's a better app,

7:22

almost notwithstanding. Okay, David,

7:24

it's been about a week since Threads

7:26

launched. Are people signing up for it? And

7:28

are they actually staying on it? People are definitely

7:30

signing up for it. So Threads

7:32

has more than a hundred million users

7:35

already, which is an

7:36

astounding number. It is by

7:39

that measure, at least just by number

7:41

of people who signed up for it, it's the fastest growing

7:43

app ever. Last fall, that was ChatGPT,

7:46

which got a hundred million people in about a month.

7:49

Threads did it in five days. And it's

7:51

not quite apples to apples because since

7:54

it's so based on Instagram, you're

7:56

not totally starting from scratch.

7:58

Instagram also has... Lots of people it

8:00

can send lots of push notifications to, to

8:03

say, hey, did you know threads exists? Would you like

8:05

to download threads? Please download threads, come to threads.

8:07

Your friends are on threads, which they have been doing

8:09

aggressively. But still, there's no

8:11

question that 100 million is a gigantic number.

8:13

Everyone at Meta is saying it is way

8:16

past all of their expectations for how this app

8:18

was gonna do. Whether people are gonna

8:20

stick around

8:21

is very much the question.

8:23

Even Adam Messeri, the head of Instagram

8:25

at Meta has been saying, it's not

8:28

nearly as hard to get a bunch of people to try something as

8:30

it is to build something that a bunch of people wanna keep using over

8:32

time. And that's a question

8:34

of a week. It's a question of months.

8:37

It's a question of years. But anecdotally, the

8:39

vibes have shifted a little. When you open

8:41

threads, it's just a gigantic feed of

8:43

people, many of whom you don't follow. That's

8:45

turning some people off. Lots of people

8:48

are posting. Lots of people are very excited. But there was that

8:50

kind of 72 hour period right at the beginning

8:52

where there was just so much enthusiasm. And

8:55

that definitely seems like it has waned a bit,

8:57

but we'll

8:58

see. I am

9:00

not on it because I'm now over 40

9:03

and I've decided I don't wanna be part of the discourse

9:05

anymore, but I am curious. What does

9:07

it look like?

9:08

Well, I'd like to know what's it like to have like a

9:10

healthy approach to social media. Like that's,

9:13

can we talk about you for a little bit? I DM me. That

9:15

sounds great. It's

9:18

an interesting place. So it's kind of a mix

9:20

between

9:21

Twitter right now, which is mostly

9:23

based on the people you follow, right?

9:26

You say, here's the people I wanna follow and

9:28

who I think is interesting. And most of

9:30

what you see is gonna be their stuff. That has changed a little

9:32

bit over time, but that's still mostly the vibe. And

9:34

then there's kind of a dash of TikTok where there's

9:36

just an algorithm that says, here's what we think you're

9:39

gonna like. Here's just an endless feed of

9:41

stuff. And that algorithm

9:44

is not great so far, at least

9:46

has been my experience. Like there's this one account, I

9:49

don't know anything about it. I had never seen it before, but it's

9:51

just called

9:51

Nugget. And it just makes dumb jokes.

9:54

And it's probably

9:56

one out of six posts in my threads

9:58

feed is just that. that others

10:00

are experiencing the same thing. So there's

10:03

definitely a big push

10:05

to show you interesting content

10:08

over, show you the stuff that you've

10:10

professed Instagram that you care about by virtue

10:12

of who you follow. And I think that's gonna

10:15

start to annoy some people because it's just

10:17

meme city right now. It's a lot of people talking

10:20

about threads, which is what everybody does in the first week. And

10:22

then just a lot of stupid memes, which

10:24

to be fair is what Twitter was for

10:26

a lot of people too. So maybe in that sense, it's already

10:29

working.

10:29

Are there any downsides to it? I mean,

10:32

this is an app that was built in less than

10:34

six months. Is it glitchy at all?

10:36

Is it making demands of the user? It

10:39

was

10:39

glitchy at first. I haven't

10:41

seen many

10:43

outages or issues in the last couple

10:45

of days. It was a pretty big mess the

10:47

first day or so, but it's missing

10:49

a ton of stuff. There's no feed

10:52

to just see the people that you follow. There's

10:54

no hashtags. There's no trending

10:56

topics. That one, I think you could argue is a good thing, but

10:59

it doesn't exist. There's no way

11:02

to sort people into lists. Some

11:04

of these are very basic things. There's no

11:06

good search. You can search for accounts, but you can't search

11:08

for content. It's very much a

11:11

prototype of a social media network. And

11:13

if this were any company other than Instagram,

11:15

and if this were any moment other than the moment

11:18

everybody is desperate to find something that feels like

11:20

Twitter but isn't Twitter, I don't think this

11:22

would have gotten this kind of excitement.

11:25

That's also, by the way, the reason

11:28

it's not available in the EU was

11:30

just because they launched it so quickly. There's this thing

11:32

called the Digital Markets Act in the EU that

11:34

puts a lot of work onto

11:37

what are called gatekeepers, which are in this case,

11:39

mostly the social platforms, to make

11:42

sure that they're doing right by

11:44

users both with the data that they collect and how they

11:46

use that data. And not only do you have to do the

11:49

right thing, you have to document it, you have to do all this

11:51

legal work and paperwork, and it's the kind of thing

11:53

lots of companies are gonna have to do. And ordinarily

11:55

you would do it before you launch, but Meta

11:57

was racing to get this thing out the door. It

12:00

basically seems to have decided launching

12:03

some places quickly was better than

12:05

launching everywhere well. And

12:07

I think that is very much like the vibe of all of threads

12:09

right now.

12:10

How is Elon Musk responding to all

12:12

of this? He's so mad. He's

12:14

so, so, so mad. It's

12:17

delightful. So the obvious

12:20

backstory of this is when threads

12:23

started to leak out, reporting from my

12:25

colleague Alex Heath and others, talked about how this was

12:27

a thing that was coming, that I was coming for Twitter

12:30

in a big way. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk

12:32

are beefing, I suppose you'd say. There

12:35

was a moment where it looked like they might

12:37

fight in a cage match. I still don't know if that's

12:39

real. I hope and pray every single day that

12:41

it's not real, but there's a chance it might

12:43

be because this is the world we live in. But

12:46

Musk's response so far has basically

12:48

been to kind of stick his fingers

12:50

in his ears and say, I'm not mad, I'm not mad, I'm

12:52

not mad, which is always a good signal that you're very

12:55

mad. He's been tweeting a lot about how

12:58

much Twitter is being used right now. He's

13:00

tweeted a couple of what I would say are unsavory

13:03

things about Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter

13:05

actually sent a legal notice to Meta

13:07

threatening to sue because of the

13:10

way that Meta supposedly

13:12

took intellectual property from Twitter

13:14

to make threads. Most of this is nonsense.

13:17

None of it is likely to go anywhere. Meta's very

13:19

good at copying other people's apps without getting into legal

13:21

trouble, so I don't see that turning into anything.

13:24

But the CEO fight is still

13:26

very much going on, whether or not that ends in a cage match

13:28

or not. It's still happening.

13:32

But we can hope for the match. I kind of

13:34

do hope for it. I both feel like it's the worst

13:36

timeline and the best timeline if it comes

13:38

to be. It's going to be very interesting.

13:41

David Pierce, editor at large, The

13:43

Verge, will

13:44

you stick around with us until we get back from the break

13:46

to talk about your big idea that social

13:49

media might be dying? I would love to.

13:51

Let's get ready to rumble!

14:06

Hello, I'm Esther Perel. I'm

14:08

a psychotherapist and host of the podcast

14:11

Where Should We Begin? Relationships

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morning for a new episode. Listen

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and follow Where Should We Begin on your

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favorite podcast app.

15:05

Unexplainables got a new

15:07

two-part series we're calling The Black Box.

15:10

It's all about the mysterious hole at the center of

15:12

modern artificial intelligence. I've

15:14

built these models. I've studied these models. We

15:16

just don't understand what's going on here. Even

15:19

the experts don't really know how these systems

15:21

work or what they can do. If

15:23

we open up Tachopogee or a system

15:25

like it, you just see millions

15:27

of numbers flipping around and

15:30

we just have no idea what any of it means.

15:31

We are rushing at breakneck

15:34

speed towards more and more advanced

15:37

forms of AI.

15:37

You know, when I see something that is well

15:40

beyond my understanding, I'm

15:42

scared. And that was something well beyond

15:44

my understanding. I'm

15:46

no am hasn't felt, but this isn't my voice.

15:49

And it hasn't been the whole time. It's

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just an AI I made that sounds sort of like me. Unexplainables

15:54

new series starts July 12th, wherever

15:56

you get your podcast.

16:10

We're back with David Pierce, he's editor

16:12

at large of The Verge. David, is

16:15

threads indicative of

16:17

something bigger that is happening on

16:20

the internet right now?

16:21

Very much so. I think we're

16:23

in a weird transitional

16:25

moment in how we interact with

16:28

each other on the internet and I'm

16:30

about to accidentally do a pun that I just want to apologize

16:32

for in advance. There are a bunch of threads

16:35

here to pull on, I think. One

16:37

is just Twitter specific,

16:39

right? Twitter was this really important information

16:42

sharing platform and in

16:45

the sense that it feels like it's falling apart, there are a lot

16:47

of uses of it that have been looking

16:49

for another place to go.

16:51

But the bigger picture thing here is we're

16:54

just kind of coming out of an era of

16:56

the internet, I think. We spent really

16:59

from about 2006 or 7 on, in just a handful of places.

17:04

We were on Facebook, we were on Twitter, we

17:06

were on Instagram, there were a lot of people on Reddit, but

17:09

our experience of the internet was mediated

17:11

by a small handful of companies

17:14

and it kind of feels like all at once

17:16

that's going away. Some are pivoting to be

17:18

these entertainment platforms like Instagram with

17:20

Reels

17:21

and TikTok is very much an entertainment platform,

17:24

but there's no place that

17:26

it feels like people can just have

17:28

social networks anymore. That was the phase

17:31

we were in for so long and increasingly

17:33

this question of like, where do I go to be with my

17:36

friends on the internet feels

17:38

like an open question and it hasn't for a long time. And

17:40

I think that's a really big,

17:41

weird change that people are going through right now.

17:44

It would make sense if this happened on

17:46

one platform. Twitter is falling apart, okay,

17:48

we get it. But what you're saying is interesting.

17:51

You're saying it's actually happening across all the platforms.

17:54

Why is this happening

17:56

everywhere all at once? Yeah,

17:58

so I think the Reddit.

17:59

Reddit story is actually kind of the perfect

18:02

microcosm of all of this. Reddit

18:06

has been around for a very long time. It's an 18-year-old company,

18:09

and Reddit has kind of

18:11

been this big, successful company

18:13

without ever being any kind of good business. It's

18:15

actually a terrible business. But so Reddit

18:18

has discovered, okay, we have to make money. We

18:20

are now in a time after a long

18:23

period of low interest rates and

18:25

huge investments where a lot of that

18:27

has gone away. So if you're a company like Reddit,

18:29

you have to figure

18:29

out how to actually make money. And

18:32

so Reddit has said, okay, there are two ways

18:34

we think we can make money. One is

18:36

to sell the data on

18:38

our platform, this incredibly valuable

18:41

community and all the stuff they talk about to

18:43

AI companies to use to train their

18:46

future chatbots and all that stuff. That's

18:49

where those AI companies get data is from places like Reddit.

18:52

And until now, that's been freely available and Reddit would

18:54

like to make it not freely available. There's

18:56

aspects of Reddit where it's like, look, we have

18:59

this massive

18:59

corpus that gets updated every

19:02

day of people's

19:04

opinions about pretty much everything.

19:08

And I think there's a lot of value in that.

19:11

And the other way is to just figure out

19:13

how to make more money off of the platform. And

19:15

so Reddit sparked this whole revolt

19:18

from users and moderators

19:21

by taking away a lot of

19:23

the privileges from third party apps. So if you

19:25

wanted to build an app that used Reddit

19:27

in data and information, you had to pay a whole bunch

19:29

of money

19:29

and most couldn't. So most closed and

19:32

just basically infuriated

19:35

everyone who has cared about Reddit. The

19:37

narwhal is not baconing today,

19:39

my friends. This is not

19:41

a wholesome, chungus moment. Reddit

19:44

is offline and there is good reason

19:46

for it. And Reddit's not the only company going

19:48

through this. Twitter has historically been a very bad

19:51

business. Snapchat has historically

19:53

been a very bad business. These companies just

19:55

have not figured out how to make a lot

19:58

of money out of social.

19:59

We're now in a time where you

20:02

can't just grow, grow, grow, and convince

20:04

your investors that eventually you'll make money. You have

20:06

to make money now.

20:10

And that has really turned the

20:12

whole vibe of the kind of social

20:14

web on its head.

20:16

How are users going to feel that?

20:19

I mean, we're already feeling it in some ways. We're already seeing

20:21

it in some ways. But how do you imagine

20:23

this evolving over the next six months to a year?

20:25

Yeah, I think the thing that's

20:27

really going to happen is that

20:30

the trade-off that we as users make

20:32

with social platforms is going to become

20:34

really, really obvious. And so

20:37

what used to happen is like, I

20:40

don't know, Facebook's a good example. We all use Facebook

20:42

for a long time because we got to

20:44

hang out with our friends. And you sort of understood the

20:46

trade-off that I'm posting for

20:48

free. I'm not getting paid to do that. And Facebook

20:51

is selling ads that appear next to those posts.

20:53

But I sort of got enough value

20:56

out of it that it felt like that was worth it. I didn't

20:58

need to make money. I was happy to post because I got to be where my

21:00

friends are. I think that trade

21:02

is becoming much more obvious to people

21:05

where now, instead of just putting

21:07

ads next to my posts, you're actually going to take my

21:10

posts and sell them to open

21:12

AI to use to build

21:14

a chatbot. Or you're going

21:16

to charge me money. In Twitter's

21:18

case, it's trying to get everyone to pay $8 a month

21:20

for Twitter Blue to actually

21:23

just use your platform. And now we're

21:26

in a position where I think a lot

21:28

of social media users are going to start

21:30

to feel more like, I

21:32

don't know, Uber drivers or DoorDash

21:34

delivery people, where instead of participating

21:37

in a platform,

21:37

users are going to start to feel

21:39

like the ones who are

21:41

kind of being dumped on as this company

21:43

tries to make money off of you. And I think that's

21:45

just going to feel bad. Yeah,

21:48

it also might mean if

21:50

we look to the future and we think, well, who's going to

21:52

replace Twitter? That's where I am in my life, right?

21:54

I've been on Twitter for, I think, 10 years. I

21:56

covered the Arab Spring. Twitter was such a big part of it. I

21:59

have really remained

21:59

loyal. So I've been thinking, well,

22:02

who's going to replace Twitter? But I think

22:04

what you're saying is there might never be

22:06

another Twitter. Twitter might not go back to

22:08

what it was that I remember and

22:11

nothing ever might get that big again. I'm not doing

22:14

threads.

22:14

Yeah, I

22:16

think the really interesting

22:18

kind of big philosophical question to ask

22:20

right now is, was Twitter a good idea?

22:23

Like fundamentally, morally

22:25

for us as people existing in the

22:27

world, was Twitter a good idea? And I think

22:29

you can make super, super compelling

22:32

cases in both directions, which

22:34

is why this moment is so interesting,

22:36

right? Because I think if what we

22:39

want as a society is basically

22:41

Twitter only better and not run

22:43

by Elon Musk, that's doable.

22:46

Like threads is on its way to becoming

22:48

that. I think whether we want that company

22:50

to be owned by Meta is an equally good question.

22:52

But I think we're also going to come to this problem

22:55

of trying to figure out if it's a good idea

22:58

for all of us to be connected to each other. And

23:01

I don't know, I'm so torn. And I think we're going to

23:03

spend the next couple of years figuring that out. Like is the

23:05

best version of social networks, just the

23:07

group chats that we're in with our friends and family, maybe

23:10

that solves the amount

23:12

of connectedness and sharing

23:14

and posting that we want to do without

23:17

this relentless dopamine hit of

23:19

looking for likes and looking for retweets and trying

23:21

to get followers and maybe let the entertainment

23:24

platforms be entertainment platforms and

23:26

let TikTok compete with Netflix. And that's all

23:28

fine and good. And when we want to spend

23:30

time with the people that we care about, we do it in

23:33

relative private. Maybe that's the answer.

23:35

And I think the first question a lot

23:38

of people are going to ask is, is

23:40

better Twitter actually a thing that

23:43

I want?

23:44

I am going to ask you something

23:46

now, David grandiose. Ready.

23:49

Could you eulogize the

23:50

golden era of social media 2011, 12, 13, 14? What

23:53

would you say at

23:56

social media's funeral? Oh man. I

24:01

would say that for a brief, beautiful

24:04

moment, we thought that

24:06

putting the whole world in a room would

24:10

make everything better. That if we just

24:12

connected everybody, we'd all come to some

24:15

kind of mutual understanding. We'd

24:17

globalize the world. We would see each other's problems.

24:19

We would see each other's goods and bads

24:22

and struggles and triumphs. And

24:24

that that would add up to something beautiful.

24:28

And for a while it felt like it might.

24:31

I think there was a long time on

24:33

Facebook even where it felt like you could just

24:36

post candid, kind

24:38

of nothing pictures of your life and

24:40

people would care. And it was a way to keep up with the

24:42

people that you cared about. And it felt

24:45

like it was genuinely

24:47

social and genuinely human. And

24:51

we were wrong and that all fell apart. And I think

24:53

that was kind of a beautiful lie we told

24:55

ourselves for a while, but like wasn't that a nice

24:57

moment when it felt like we had found a way to be

24:59

ourselves online and connect

25:02

to everybody? What a cool world that was for

25:04

a minute there.

25:05

I teared up.

25:08

I'm holding a lighter in the air as I say all of this.

25:10

It's good stuff.

25:14

David Pierce, editor at large of The Verge.

25:16

Thank you David for taking the time today. This was really

25:18

fun. My pleasure, thank you for having me. Congratulations

25:22

to David on his new washing machine. Today's

25:25

episode was produced by Amanda Llewellyn

25:27

who leaves very good notes and edited by

25:29

Amina El-Sadi. Laura Bullard

25:31

is senior fact checker. Michael Raphael

25:33

is engineer. I'm Noelle King. I've been on Twitter

25:36

for 12 years, not 10. It's

25:38

Today Explained.

26:00

Thank you.