back to indexCal And Jamie Explain The Internet | Atomic Bombs, Bari Weiss, And Inscrutable TikToks
Chapters
0:0 Cal's intro
1:40 Atomic bombs
9:30 Twitter
20:41 Fusion
27:12 TikTok
38:34 Dave Chappelle
00:00:02.200 |
Hey guys, what if we made a web page, but designed it as a panic attack? 00:00:11.460 |
And as you look at it, a pneumatic arm comes out from your computer 00:00:20.880 |
I'm here with Jamie Kilstein for the very first installment in a new show. 00:00:26.560 |
We're trying that is called Cal and Jamie explain the internet. 00:00:35.140 |
And then Jamie, I'm going to ask you to try to explain to the audience 00:00:40.680 |
I'll be figuring it out while you talk right now. 00:00:44.800 |
So, so the, uh, the very well thought through premise that everyone thinks 00:00:48.080 |
is a good idea is that, uh, I'm someone who sort of famously has never 00:00:54.240 |
So I really often don't know what's going on in the world of the internet. 00:00:58.520 |
Jamie somewhat famously used to be a big user of social media, but as, uh, as 00:01:04.320 |
many of his fans know, has been really trying hard in recent months and years 00:01:09.120 |
to use that much less, which makes Jamie and I at this moment, two of the worst 00:01:13.960 |
people in the world to try to explain to you trends on the internet. 00:01:19.400 |
We had my intrepid podcast producer, Jesse pull a collection of five articles, 00:01:24.880 |
videos, or tweets that are big on the internet in the last week. 00:01:29.200 |
He told me he was using Twitter trends, tech talk trends, and a program called 00:01:34.120 |
tube buddy, which looks at what's trending on YouTube to try to figure out 00:01:38.720 |
what are five things that normal internet users have almost certainly heard about. 00:01:43.320 |
Jamie and I almost certainly know very little about it, but we will still try 00:01:46.600 |
nonetheless to explain to you what we think is going on or how we think people. 00:01:53.360 |
Uh, well, we are doing this for a couple of reasons. 00:01:56.480 |
Number one, it's very funny to maybe only us. 00:01:59.800 |
Number two, nothing in our friendship makes me laugh harder than when I would 00:02:04.600 |
try to explain to Cal, uh, like very online TM stuff where I'm like, Hey, did 00:02:12.960 |
And Cal's like, no, I have a family and I'm happy. 00:02:22.120 |
I also think for all of you listening, who have read cows work, listen to cows 00:02:27.120 |
podcast, or trying to get off social media less. 00:02:29.920 |
Um, I think hearing some of the dumb stuff that we're probably going to cover, um, 00:02:35.320 |
may be the nail in the coffin and may solidify it for you. 00:02:39.360 |
And, uh, if not, maybe also maybe Cal and I can give some non tribalized echo 00:02:49.600 |
And maybe we'll accidentally stumble upon some really good stuff, uh, that 00:02:54.280 |
you're not going to find on Twitter when everyone's just calling each other, 00:03:00.320 |
Uh, and then the final reason, uh, selfishly. 00:03:02.600 |
I still have to be on social media to promote my podcast a little bit. 00:03:08.760 |
I don't get into fights anymore, but I eventually would like to move out into 00:03:13.120 |
the woods, uh, with my girlfriend and never see a computer again. 00:03:16.560 |
So I'm hoping that whatever is trending on tick tock today or in future episodes, 00:03:21.720 |
uh, will drive me to become just, uh, just an armed, an armed father 00:03:31.080 |
Cuck, not a Nazi cock, not the worst kind of Nazis. 00:03:38.200 |
And you see, this is how, you know, I am a professor, not internet user. 00:03:55.320 |
Our first thing that was trending on the internet in the last week. 00:04:02.840 |
Christopher Nolan recreated a nuclear weapon explosion without CGI. 00:04:27.640 |
I like the fact, I mean, this is the same year. 00:04:35.160 |
Like one with like one gun, he shot a lady and Christopher Nolan saw that. 00:04:42.280 |
I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to blow something up. 00:04:46.160 |
You think Christopher Nolan is big timing Alec Baldwin by murdering 00:04:52.680 |
You know, this is probably the tamest story we're going to cover. 00:04:56.200 |
And I accidentally made our opening, probably the most 00:05:01.400 |
You didn't say you were, you thought it was a good idea. 00:05:06.280 |
Yeah, to be clear, but also I think anything post dark night, uh, of 00:05:12.160 |
Christopher Nolan has been kind of underwhelming anyway, I'm a moment. 00:05:17.560 |
Oh, you're talking to someone who saw Dunkirk in a 70 millimeter projection. 00:05:23.840 |
Before we reveal here though, let me just say two reasons why I like Chris Nolan. 00:05:29.400 |
Uh, number one, I had some articles somewhere that he doesn't use. 00:05:38.800 |
Like he's so focused on, I'm making these huge movies. 00:05:42.760 |
I wrote an article about him a couple of years ago. 00:05:46.200 |
Well, the more of a hermit, this guy, someone is the more you're like, I'm in baby. 00:05:53.880 |
I think he broke relations with Warner brothers when they started streaming. 00:05:58.600 |
All of their movie productions on HBO max while they're in the theaters. 00:06:10.360 |
I'll read this since this text might be small. 00:06:12.520 |
He recreated the first nuclear weapon detonation. 00:06:17.920 |
I'm a film geek about Robert Oppenheimer who ran the Manhattan 00:06:27.320 |
They're talking about all the actors in this. 00:06:31.120 |
No one has always favored practical effects over VFX. 00:06:34.960 |
He blew up a real Boeing seven 47 for tenant respect. 00:06:38.680 |
So it's no, uh, the bad news was it was, uh, an active Delta flight, but 00:06:48.240 |
Uh, it's that's why he doesn't have email or social media. 00:06:53.440 |
He doesn't want to hear the trolls who are going to prioritize. 00:07:10.920 |
I think what eventually we'll get to when we start getting these stories sent to us 00:07:23.120 |
This, so this is, this is a, this is an example I think of good internet, you 00:07:27.600 |
know, where it's, here's like a quirky, interesting thing that you probably 00:07:31.240 |
wouldn't have heard about, but if you're an internet user, you might've come across 00:07:34.360 |
this, this was trending on YouTube or something. 00:07:39.440 |
Uh, I'm, I'm giving this a sort of good internet thumbs up. 00:07:44.400 |
And this is going to be the difference between me and Cal as well is I am so 00:07:48.400 |
used to, um, I'm so used to bad internet that I think I jumped in and made my 00:07:55.240 |
little, made my little offensive joke just preparing. 00:07:58.600 |
So for example, I'm on a text thread right now. 00:08:01.320 |
That the beloved movie, the whale, Brendan Fraser's like, you know, resurgence, 00:08:07.840 |
staining ovation at all the film festivals, I guess Roxanne Gay wrote an 00:08:12.800 |
angry, uh, wrote a piece about it because something about fat people. 00:08:18.280 |
And, um, so I'm very used to, as I was part of back in the day, like 10 years 00:08:25.360 |
So when I see something that you might rate as good, oh, what a cool, what a 00:08:32.440 |
I'm just waiting for like my old friends to be like, this is offensive to bombs. 00:08:52.800 |
So I think here we're going to maybe leave good internet. 00:09:01.720 |
We need theme songs for leaving good internet. 00:09:04.840 |
Like just like a kind of cryptic, like rowing down the haunted 00:09:15.520 |
Thread the Twitter files, part two, Twitter's secret backlist. 00:09:21.880 |
Well, Jamie, you know, Barry, do you already know this story or 00:09:28.280 |
Old Jamie would have had so many takes on it. 00:09:33.080 |
It's something she's doing with journalist, Matt Taibbi, who 00:09:41.720 |
Um, I saw some people on both sides being outraged and I, I barely dude. 00:09:49.360 |
I mean, this is probably one of the biggest stories right now, period. 00:09:53.400 |
And I have just like, I've I'm rewatching Jack Ryan since season three is coming 00:10:00.120 |
So I, I I've heard about, like, I know this is happening. 00:10:05.480 |
I know that that Elon Musk is, uh, releasing internal Twitter 00:10:14.040 |
And I know that there's some stipulation that they have 00:10:21.520 |
Let's not read this whole thing, but here's number point. 00:10:24.680 |
By the way, can I just say, I wrote an article about Twitter for this one. 00:10:28.960 |
I think it was for Wired magazine early in the pandemic. 00:10:32.400 |
And I made this point, this is such a terrible platform for any 00:10:40.720 |
Like, look at this, let's put all content aside. 00:10:42.680 |
Look at the screen, this thread situation where you have like a couple of sentences 00:10:46.640 |
and you have to link to another thing with a couple of sentences and number it. 00:10:54.400 |
Uh, it's crazy that this is like the number one way over the last three years, 00:11:00.240 |
It's not like we haven't cracked the tech yet. 00:11:04.640 |
Hey guys, what if we made a webpage, but designed it as a panic attack? 00:11:13.880 |
And as you look at it, a pneumatic arm comes out from your computer 00:11:23.320 |
Uh, well, and then on top of that, it's like the algorithms make 00:11:29.840 |
And well, that's kind of what this is sort of about. 00:11:34.760 |
So here's number, I'll read the first couple tweets, which again, I have to 00:11:40.040 |
A new Twitter files investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees 00:11:44.320 |
build blacklist, prevent disfavored tweets from twin trending and actively 00:11:49.040 |
limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics, all in a secret, 00:11:59.600 |
I do know who that is because I was a COVID nerd early in COVID who argued that 00:12:04.800 |
Twitter secretly placed him on a trends, a blacklist, which 00:12:21.320 |
Second of all, how do you think people reacted to this? 00:12:31.720 |
You know, there, there are a bunch of different like memes that go around 00:12:35.880 |
about conspiracy theorists where it's like, Hey, we've been right, essentially 00:12:40.200 |
the last couple of years, and I hate to admit it, right. 00:12:43.560 |
But there were a lot of people who were talking about shadow banning and soft 00:12:54.840 |
And a lot of people on the left were calling them delusional, 00:13:01.080 |
I'm definitely shadow banned on Instagram and I haven't posted a 00:13:05.640 |
I'm just like mental health and dogs and comedy. 00:13:10.360 |
You know, that kind of get made fun of and what Barry and Ty Eby uncovered is 00:13:17.480 |
like, no, there are actually memos from the government being like, Hey, like 00:13:22.560 |
to Twitter to, you know, being like, Hey, check out this guy. 00:13:27.760 |
And a lot of the things they were posting at the time. 00:13:31.680 |
I think that people thought were dangerous because we didn't know as 00:13:39.640 |
It was people who were skeptical about the vaccine. 00:13:41.560 |
And, uh, and so they were just like, fucking shut it down. 00:13:49.880 |
I think that we should have access to all information and then we should be 00:13:55.520 |
But my, what I would throw back to you though, is in the way social media 00:14:01.200 |
works on our brains and the way tribalism works and these algorithm works. 00:14:08.520 |
And is it even possible to just, Hey, give us, give us information on 00:14:15.160 |
Like, where do you draw the line, I guess, um, for this kind of 00:14:30.560 |
I mean, small scale take, uh, if you're going to run one of these platforms, 00:14:35.560 |
you're going to have to make these types of decisions, right? 00:14:39.040 |
Like we've seen that, um, you look at 4chan, like 4chan had to start making 00:14:43.680 |
some of those decisions, which led to 8chan, right? 00:14:46.560 |
Like 8chan was people saying, uh, you cucks over at 4chan. 00:15:00.680 |
So, so 4chan was just cucking along with a bunch of cucks 00:15:04.760 |
Um, but anyway, so you have to, you're going to have to do this, right? 00:15:07.720 |
Like there's going to be, uh, there's going to be cases where like, we 00:15:13.880 |
Um, and then the, the dividing line is always going to be hazy. 00:15:17.400 |
So the fact that, so Twitter is based in San Francisco, that, I mean, the number 00:15:22.720 |
I saw is that 99% of their employees, according to public records, voted 00:15:27.760 |
Democrat in the last one percent is Elon Musk and the other one percent was Elon 00:15:33.000 |
Or I, I think they, they have, um, what's the name? 00:15:41.480 |
They, they put tweets in front of him and if he gets excited, they ban them. 00:15:47.320 |
Uh, so how do you avoid them in that situation? 00:15:50.520 |
If you're internally making decisions to have an Overton window, that's going to 00:15:53.200 |
be just farther towards the farther left, um, than rest of the country. 00:16:00.160 |
Uh, making moderation decisions are unavoidable. 00:16:02.640 |
I mean, I don't know any answer to that in the small scale beyond, and this is what 00:16:05.840 |
I thought Elon should have done, but you know, it seems like he might be going 00:16:09.960 |
Uh, what he should have done was just said, yes, we have to make this moderation 00:16:14.200 |
Um, we're just going to balance out who's on these committees so that like that 00:16:20.320 |
Like I, I said this in a podcast a couple of weeks ago. 00:16:22.960 |
Um, the standard should be, you know, if your mom would be kind of upset about 00:16:28.320 |
something, and I don't mean your mom in particular, but just like millennials, 00:16:32.280 |
moms, like people in their seventies, we have such like, okay, let's be, be worried 00:16:35.360 |
So like things where you would have to be like pretty up on sort of cutting edge 00:16:39.120 |
political ideology to understand something is offensive. 00:16:41.520 |
Like that probably wouldn't fall into like a standard, like what ups and downs. 00:16:45.600 |
I think that one, the, um, I love you pointing out that Elon Musk is going crazy 00:16:51.080 |
because that means his billions of dollars, all the businesses he runs, that's not 00:16:55.920 |
What made him crazy was a month on Twitter and he just fucking completely went like 00:17:00.960 |
That is by the way, that is exactly what, and this is. 00:17:04.000 |
I'm not talking out of school because this was during the episodes, what Sam 00:17:08.400 |
Sam knows Elon and in my recent appearance on Sam's podcast, he told me on air, 00:17:12.760 |
uh, Twitter broke Elon's brain, but, but he, he actually says it's not him buying 00:17:18.400 |
He bought Twitter because Twitter had broken his brain. 00:17:25.960 |
It's, it's, you know, it's like chasing that pure Coke in the eighties or 00:17:30.520 |
Uh, number two, I wanted to say that, I mean, the serious thing is, and I'm sure 00:17:36.440 |
what's going to be great about this show is just like when, you know, you're 00:17:40.240 |
listening to fucking two bears, one cave and they're like, what's that movie? 00:17:44.000 |
And the fans are like at home screaming the movie. 00:17:50.040 |
Um, you know, where this became even more problematic is look, man, companies, 00:17:54.520 |
private companies have the right to choose who uses their platform. 00:17:58.440 |
Um, where this got even crazier was the fact that there are memos from 00:18:05.960 |
political administrations pretty much being like, Hey, get this guy, go get 00:18:11.840 |
And now it's like, okay, well now the government is censoring voices and that's 00:18:17.520 |
And then the most important thing I was going to say is, uh, uh, Jesse, if you're 00:18:22.200 |
listening and we're looking for short clips to post, please cut a cow saying, 00:18:26.600 |
uh, cuckoody, cut, cuck, or whatever, uh, that was, I wish I had the timestamps.