🆕 Never Post! Roundtable: Is The Internet Driving You To The Brink?

Friends! A Very Special Never Post for you!

In this one, Georgia, Hans, Jason, and Mike discuss their screen time stats and habits and what it even means to be informed.

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Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show's host is Mike Rugnetta. 

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure.

Friends, hello, and welcome to a Neverpost team chat roundtable where the staff of Neverpost gather round the metaphorical table to discuss something that has been on our minds. And this team chat is about how to not go insane. More on that later. First, joining me today, paired with what I assume are their favorite dog breeds, which I would like to contextualize by saying each dog breed is god's favorite.

Nice save.

But we but we ask the hard questions here on Neverpost. Jason Oberholzer, Neverpost executive producer, has a dog.

I do.

An Australian Shepherd named Hank.

This is true.

But regardless, I am gonna say retriever. Oh.

You

you you are going to be incorrect. I will say Australian shepherds are rising up the list very quickly. Hank rules. But I grew up rule. Yeah.

With dachshunds.

Oh, that's I knew that I should've Yeah. Did. This is my band.

That's amazing.

And Jason has told great stories about how they are tiny little jerks. Well,

yeah. Oh my god.

I love wild little bullies. And once you get into that, it's hard to like other things.

You with just like a fleet of ducks. Oh my god.

My minions.

Okay. Georgia Hampton, never post producer. A cat person. Yes. Confirmed.

Respect to his majesty, King Beef.

Yes.

Georgia. I do not know. Have you ever had a dog?

Yeah. I actually did grow up with dogs.

Okay. So don't tell me what they were. Okay. I'm gonna guess. Spaniel.

Oh. Very regal.

Yeah.

That's not correct.

Over two.

But I would be shocked if you just out of the gate got mine, which is shipper key.

Oh, sure. Yeah. The screeching dog.

I like them because they look like little bats.

They do look like bats.

Hans Vito, never post senior producer. Has a dog. Yep. A small gray I do not know what Niven is other than he sorta looks like the end of a mop.

Yes. Alright. He's a he's a Shih Tzu Poodle mix. Shih Tzu. A Shih Okay.

So he's smart. Sure. Okay. I'm gonna say favorite breed, Weimaraner.

You're not far off. Nice breed.

See, I've known Hans the longest out of all of you. So Fair enough. Weimaraner.

No. That's interesting. No. Interestingly, I was just thinking about it because I had a lot of more time to think than everybody else. Probably my two favorite breeds are German shorthaired pointer, a GSP Mhmm.

Or a German shepherd.

Yeah. I see.

Both both Germans. The guy named Hans loves the German.

And you've you've met Jules. Right?

Oh, yes.

Mike, as the parent of Jules, who is a muttish sort of German or

German German What is a Jules? American bully.

Yeah. Woah.

Okay. American bully. Yeah.

A very strange mix. Yeah. That is a very weird dog.

I'm going to guess that your favorite breed actually is one that you would not have been able to have because you live in a small apartment or you live in a normal sized Brooklyn apartment. Yeah. But you like metal shows. I'm gonna guess Kane Corso.

Woah. I

have only met one is it Kane Corso? Kane Corso? I've only ever met one and she was the sweetest, hugest, floppiest dog in the world. Just like would wanna sit on you and weighed like a hundred and seventy five pounds.

That's I I

think that my favorite breed is the breed of our last dog, Jack. He was a a whippet. Yeah. And I did not know anything about whippets until we got Jack. But ever sit now now I can pick them out.

Like, know that it's like, you know, a greyhound, but not. And they are little weirdos

I love that.

Who can run like 75 miles an hour. Yes. Which is occasionally harrowing, but always impressive.

Jack was the best.

Yeah. He was good. Yeah. And like, even though they run just at the speed of light outside, when they're in the house Just flop. Us.

Yeah. And the classic, you know, they fall asleep with all four legs in the air. Yeah. Yeah. Which is always a good time, you know?

That's just a dog built to wear a turtleneck.

Right? It's true. Yeah.

Yeah. Love it. Okay. Well, that's

the end of the fun. Let's get on to those next. Let's go. Okay. So we are here to discuss one thing, both broadly and specifically as it relates to our phones our computers, our devices, the internet, our lives.

And that is how to not go insane. Or maybe just like how to maintain some baseline level of sanity in the media and information environment in which we all live and work, which is no small task. So what do I mean by all of this? I think this could mean a bunch of things. Like, the world is really lousy with evidence that constantly tethering yourself to the world wide web is bad for you.

It's not good. Yet we all do it. We make a show about it. You know, it's bad for self image. It's bad for time management.

It causes FOMO. It's the drainer of bank accounts. And, you know

The end. The end. See you next week.

See you next week. Bye, guys. The source of a lot of overwhelm, so much so that I didn't know how to finish that sentence. Today, specifically, I wanna focus on one of those things, which is current events. So that can mean news, but I think it could also mean, like, things that don't even necessarily rise to the relatively low bar that is news.

So it's like things happening in town, in your neighborhood, but then also, yeah, like global and national political events. And related to that, and the use of the Internet and the feed and social media and devices, my sense is that the following things are true. That the first election of Donald Trump, the chaos that ensued after that, followed then by COVID, had a kind of, like, two level effect on a lot of people. And I think that that group includes the members of this team. The first is it baked our brains a little bit.

Got a little fried. Little brain fried.

Lot of nods. Lot of nods.

Lot of nods. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I I think that that can have a bunch of different effects that are different on different days.

Kinda like generalized anxiety, a little bit of emotional detachment from what goes on in the world, hyperintellectualization of the problems that we face in the world. And then second, it forced us to develop skills to deal with this current onslaught of just pieces of news that by themselves would be too much to deal with. It's like, you know, the economy, the climate, public health, law enforcement, genocide, and now, of course, secret police disappearing your neighbors and your friends and your family members. It's like, any one of those things is bad enough, and now every day, it's all of them. I just wanna flag also that I said we had to develop skills, and Hans made a face like Hans made a face like someone shined a bright flashlight in his eyes.

The skills is, I mean, I appreciate the generosity of thinking that that's what I've done.

I'm assuming because of your continued presence in the world and the fact that we can have normal focused conversations that must indicate some level of coping mechanism. So I did I wanted to talk about what happens at the intersection of these two things, sort of like baked or fried, depending upon your snack preparation of choice brain that has nonetheless, you know, had to figure out how to cope with the world, and perhaps some of those approaches are better than others. And I just wanna talk about how it is we do those things, what our day to day processes are like, if we're finding them effective, and what it's just like to be on the Internet at the moment being constantly confronted with this onslaught of stuff. You guys ready? How does that sound?

When is the right time to start crying?

I mean, honestly, you might wanna just get it out of

the way. Yeah. Pause the recording.

Or not. Just keep going. Or not. Just record through it. That's how I get through.

I record through it.

Oh, god.

I have a first question, which is a personal one, but this is a safe space. It's a safe space. Open your phone. Please go to the settings. Yeah.

I know what

this is going Oh, no. Mike, no.

Delete phone.

Scroll down until you see notifications.

Mhmm.

Sounds and haptics. Mhmm. Focus. Mhmm. Screen time.

No. Yes.

What's your daily average? I will go first. Minus two hours and fifty six minutes.

I don't feel like that's that bad.

Five hours eighteen minutes. I can explain why, but I wanna hear yours.

I am right there with you. I am at between five and six hours a day on this device.

I really expected mine to be a lot higher than this. Minus three hours and twenty eight minutes.

How does that number feel to all of you? I feel I have a sense from Georgia. You're Georgia. You're surprised. I I am.

Hans, what's your caveat?

My caveat is that I have a game that I let run with my phone on most of my workday. Woah. Apparently not because I work more than five hours a day.

The truth comes out.

But I think, like, weekends, I probably I have very little. But, like, a lot of my actual phone open time is that game just running in the background. It's four hours also than me watching Golden Girls when I can't sleep, and just I put it on so that I can hear it, but I can't see it, and then that's what gets me to go back to sleep. And so that'll run for four or five hours straight.

Wow.

So, like, using it, yes. Using it, no.

No. I imagine that out of all of us then, Hans, you might be at the lowest in terms of tactics.

Actually probably am of the most time that I spend interacting with my phone.

I find myself really needing to, like, find excuses for this, which is, like, doesn't seem like a healthy reaction to this news. I also find myself thinking that, like, six hours a day is, like, kind of reasonable and that I have expected more. I expected someone to come in with like an eight hours or something like that. My caveats are that I read my Kindle books on my phone at night and so that adds an hour plus every day of staring at the phone in bed. I do wonder also how much of that is like second screening because most of my work day, it's like on a little stand sitting next to my keyboard and I'm just, like, responding to things or looking a thing up or tapping away at it.

So it kind of is a second screen companion for the majority of my day as well.

Georgia, how are feeling?

Like like I said, I'm kind of pleasantly surprised at what mine is, because I was expecting to be the one who had, you know, eight hours or something. And I I'm trying to parse why that is. Why it would

be low? Back in the weeks, is it roughly that amount every week?

A couple weeks ago, we're at more like six and a half hours. So there's there's a range. But I think this is probably because I use my phone really just for social media. Like, social media, maybe responding to stuff in Slack if I'm not at my computer. But as I've said before, usually, I even, like, text from my computer.

So I'd be very I mean, if we added the computer time to this, I'm sure it would be truly horrific. But, like, I don't read on a screen. I like that has been, like, a huge rule for myself is I I don't like reading books that aren't tangible books.

I think I spend almost the entirety of the three hours on my phone reading the news.

Interesting.

I don't open my phone right when I wake up. I've learned to not do that. But like, I wake up, have my morning, you know, like get climb out of bed, we eat breakfast like she goes to school. Then I sit down and I drink a coffee and read the news. And that's usually, like, half an hour, maybe.

And when you say that, Mike, read the news, you're going to individual publications and reading the paper?

It's a combination of I'll probably spend five minutes scrolling through Blue Sky just to see what's up because that's the best place to get an immediate idea of, like, what's going on. Yeah. It's like I woke up this morning and read about the power outage in Spain and Portugal. Mhmm. Then I go I use Feedly.

It's like a RSS aggregator. And just go literally, often, I will just look at headlines. Mhmm. On a Monday, it's bad because it means I probably haven't looked at it maybe since Thursday, so there's gonna be like a thousand things in the list. But I'll just scroll through and see if there's anything interesting to see.

I'll go to work. I'll probably spend some portion of the day looking at my phone while I'm away from my desk. So it's like while I'm going to get lunch, I'll, like, keep up on Slack and stuff. And then at night, it's probably an additional half an hour of seeing what has happened during the day, and then another hour of probably just looking at social media in the cracks in other things. I'm curious.

So I'm curious. Do any of you take proactive measures to limit the amount of time that you look at any screen, whether it's, you know, the one that's in your pocket or the one that's on your desk that you, you know, use for work, I assume. Is there any sort of strategy that you have or even a desire to limit your interaction with those things?

So I don't currently have any stop points in place. And if I look at my phone also has my old devices. It connects to all of my Apple things. So that includes an iPad I use for, you know, like putting up a recipe while I'm cooking and various other, like, watching a video of something, and this laptop that I do my work on. And that tends to clock in between all devices at, like, ten hours a day, it looks like across the various weeks.

So that's, like, the full workday plus some time around the edges

Yeah.

Of staring at one screen or another. So this both seems to me like too much time to be staring at screens and less time than I would expect considering that almost everything I do interacts with a screen in some way.

I had basically the exact same reaction. I was like, this is like Yeah. That's too much, but also, I'm doing pretty good. Yeah. Because there's really

not an activity that it doesn't work its way into. Like, I Yeah. Go out and I will garden, and I'll bring out picture of this and try to, like, figure out what a plant is or if this plant looks healthy, or I'll look up how I'm supposed to prune this thing, or I'm, like, changing the song that's playing, you know, like, working on a shed. I'm looking up, like, how do you use this tool? Like, whatever the thing is that I'm doing, like, I'm always referencing this thing.

I'm always using it. When I'm driving, I'm using it for navigation. Like, there is no activity that I have really set aside to be like, the phone does not touch this. Even like reading. When I'm reading a book, I like to like look up definitions or, like, look up people or, like, things like that.

It's always, like, possibly there to do some further research while I'm reading something. So I really have no checkpoints built in. Absolutely nothing between me and using this whenever I want to, however I want to. And that feels bad.

Yeah. I mean, in preparation for this conversation, I was kind of paying attention to the way I interact, especially with my social feeds. Because like I said, I I use my phone largely just for that, for, like, Instagram, TikTok. When I was going through the breakdown of where I'm looking most, it is overwhelmingly Instagram and TikTok. And I'm kind of like Jason in that I feel like I am desperate to have more of a structure around the way and the degree to which I'm engaging with my phone.

Because so much, especially of news that I receive, apart from if I intentionally go and read articles, go to the New York Times app, what have you, is, like, on TikTok being just catapulted at me at random. And half of it isn't even really news per se. It's someone seeing a headline and assuming that, you know, a law being proposed means that it is into effect right now and, like, scaring everybody off. This is a time.

This is another segment for another time. I think we have to reckon with how everyone on TikTok is an idiot. Oh, well,

it's everyone on TikTok wants to be like a breaking news journalist, but without, you know, all the pesky Standards. Principles. Yeah. Breaks. Codes of conduct.

Like, you know, fact checking. Yeah. And and it is something that is just so mentally destructive to me. Because TikTok, I obviously use just for fun. I use it for work sometimes.

Like, it's a thing that I can share stuff with friends. You know, it's a social platform. But I've had to, like, grab my algorithm by the nape of the neck and be like, no. Yeah. Absolutely not.

And, like, flick it on its nose and be like, stop it. We're going to watch these ten minute long videos about art history, and you will know that is what I want.

I only wanna see clips of the blacklist, and that's it.

Yeah. Like, I've had to very intentionally wrangle my algorithm to be like, stop it, unless it's, you know, CNN, PBS have TikTok accounts. So, like, okay. Sure. Yes.

I will I will consume that. But, like, otherwise, I'm like, no. Show me this, you know, experimental animation. Like, we're going to use this app as, like, the fun art and funny app. Like, stop it.

This whole experience is, to me, revealing this interesting tension between how we use our screens and that not all screen time is equal screen time. Because, Jason, when you're saying, like, oh, oh, I use it to look something up, or I use it to, like, fact check something to myself, or, like, wait. What is this plan? Or how do I do this thing? That to me feels like one corner of the Internet or usage of a screen.

Then there's the entertainment corner of this of the usage. Then there's the algorithmic usage, which could kinda swerve into any of those, but you're just like, the point of that is just to sit in the stream and be like tubing on a river. Mhmm. It just takes you where you're going. Mhmm.

And so, like, I don't know that all of those are are equal, or me spending all this time with this, like, my my phone is on, and I technically have three screens up all the time, but I'm not using them in that way.

It strikes me that there is a difference between something like going out into the garden with your iPad to problem solve and having to train the algorithm to show you the things that you want. Or in my case, like, I have a lot of systems where it's like, my phone reminds me every fifteen minutes that I've been looking for fifteen minutes. And so I actively choose every fifteen minutes to continue, like, opting in. And, you know, sometimes that works better than others, but I found it to be a really effective way to measure my usage of the phone. But it feels like there's this difference between going into the world with the Internet and the Internet bringing the world to you.

Mhmm. And the problem with the second one is that it's very hard to tell technology what to bring you, especially now because it is not designed to listen. Mhmm. It just sort of brings you whatever you interact with the most, and that might be the things that you also hate the most.

Oh my god. Constantly, I'm having this, like, fight with TikTok specifically.

Because you're also fighting with yourself. Right? I know. And same thing.

Yeah. That is around the time

Segment again.

That is also around the time where I'm like, maybe we're done right now. Maybe we maybe we're done. Maybe we're gonna walk. Maybe we do something else. But I wanna I wanna come back, Mike, to this the the widgets and things that you can add to your phone that tell you, like you said, hey, you've been looking at your screen for fifteen minutes.

I have never used those, and I have a weird gun shyness around them. Like, I feel like I don't want to have to use it, but I feel like it would be helpful.

It rules. It's great.

So, Georgia, why do you think that you have this reticence to embrace something you're interested in?

I don't know. I feel like maybe it's because I want to force myself to do that myself.

As in, like, part of the way that you imagine Georgia is as somebody who can say no to this, or that you think that being able to make yourself do it will actually give you the skill to resist it in a way that depending on a timer won't.

I feel like a little bit of both. I also sometimes I can this is maybe a personal problem. I feel like sometimes I I get a little weird with mandated boundaries like that, where I'm like, I wanna do it, but I I wanna do it, like, in my own way at at my own interval.

Georgia, I think an important thing to remember is that you are doing it. Right? Like Mhmm. If you are using the screen time rules to remind you every fifteen minutes that it's been fifteen minutes, that's past Georgia talking to present Georgia. And like all rules, they are made by man.

Wow. You know? They're made by man. So I wanna ask, with the world the way that it is, which is to say varying degrees of, like, absurd, scary, dangerous, chaotic, What do you all go and I think we've answered this to certain degrees, but I wanna talk about it really explicitly. What do you all go to the feed for?

I very specifically go to the feed, broadly speaking, and the only thing that is called the feed that I take out of the equation here is blue sky. To me, the feed is everything else.

Interesting. Interesting. Okay. Okay.

Everything else is the feed. The internet math problem working out what it wants to give me when I walk into its sites. That to me is the feed.

K.

I go there to have fun and I'd never do.

Yes. Jason, you and I are the same. Relatable. Yeah. Yeah.

I I think of it kind of as I go to put my brain on autopilot for a little bit, like, to just kind of float around. But that also kind of isn't what happens because, as I said, I am fighting with TikTok constantly. So it's like, I will have fun by the grace of God. Like

But, Georgia, you also did say that it's like, you know, if the algorithm wants to show you CNN or PBS, like, that's fine.

Yes. It it I will say sometimes it depends on what time of day it is. Interesting. If I'm trying to go to sleep and I'm just on TikTok

No Anderson Cooper.

No. I'm Anderson, it's Betty Bye time.

Stay out of my house.

Get out of here.

Boop him on the nose.

Yeah. Bop.

Jason, it's so interesting to hear you say that blue sky is not the feed, because to me, sky is the only feed. No. That's not true. That's not true. It's one of the only feeds that I regularly look at and use, and I very much consider that a feed and use it for that feediness.

Kinda like what Mike is saying, where it's like it's a bellwether, albeit I'm realizing very incomplete, very partial of what is happening, so that I can quickly because the only other way that I can really get a sense of things is push notifications from various newspapers that come to my phone when something happens, and that's

Yeah.

Generally how I stay abreast of, like, oh, these are the three things that are happening in the conversation today.

Pause. Everybody pick up your phone again. K. Open the same page.

This always goes well. Yeah.

How many daily notifications?

Holy sharks. Well, it's fewer than I remember.

Around 250 a day.

It looks like weekdays, I tend to get it looks like from the few days that I can get data on, 50 to 60 a day.

Hans, that's very reasonable. Yeah.

Yeah. Mine's I'm looking at yesterday's since today wouldn't really be enough. 93?

Mine's an average of a 70. So it seems like we've maintained our rough order here. Yeah.

Mike, how many pickups do you have

per day?

That's actually a good question. Let me look.

I'm pretty consistent hovering between seventy and eighty.

Yeah. I'm at 84.

80 eight.

Okay. That's interesting. So that means that you're spending more time on each of the individual pickups.

I also my most the thing that I pick up my phone to use the most often because it says it's like you picked up your phone and here's the app that you opened. The most used is Clem's baby camera.

Oh, this makes a

ton of sense.

To check on

her during sleep. It's a utility thing, though. It's just like Jason's gardening. You know? It's like using a tool.

Right?

I feel like I'm I'm the problem. So I'm going through days, and it's it's more than 84, actually. It's like a 41 or a hundred five.

And the first thing you do every time you pick up your phone is hop on signal and chat with Marc Andreessen? Course.

Oh, man.

No. It's always Instagram. Always Instagram or messages, but usually Instagram.

Okay. Unpause. I just wanted to know that in the context of Hans's point about the phone being the thing that alerts you to things happening. Yeah. And I don't get any of those alerts.

Molly works her job is such that she has to stay abreast of, like, current events. It's very important for what she does that, like, when there's breaking news, she knows what it is. Yep. And her phone is just like, constant. I learn more about the news from being near Molly's phone than anything else.

Yeah. So, anyways, I just wanted to I wanted to contextualize that. So, Hans, keep making your point that you were making about blue sky being the place that you go to learn about what happens in the world, but it's incomplete.

It's very incomplete. You know, Ryan Broderick probably in in April had a reaction to the hands off, the big first hands off protest that was happening. He came back on Monday for garbage day and had this whole thing being like, did you all know that a protest was happening over the weekend? Mhmm. He's like, I am wildly online both professionally and personally, and I didn't know it was happening.

And he got a lot of people writing in to him. He's like, tell me if you knew. And people were like, it was mixed bag. It was a total mixed bag.

This exact phenomenon is why I wanted to have this conversation. Yeah. This exact thing. It's real. Right?

It's real. It's real. And I don't think we need to talk about it directly because Ryan did a really good job with it, but I think the disconnect is significant. Because the the next thing I wanna ask is, ever since I'm gonna say 2014, there has been a broad societal anxiety in in our shared society about using the Internet and social media and whatever whatever, you know, using current information technologies, contemporary information technologies to stay informed. I don't wanna ask, because I feel like it's we've spilled an ocean of ink on it, how you stay informed.

But I wanna know from each of you, what even is staying informed? What the fuck does that mean? Yeah. Hans, you used to work at The Daily. Yeah.

Hans, you

wanna take the floor? Hans. Please. You

call Mike real quick? Can you get my moral Get

Mike on this one.

Okay. So

first, just tell him to post his location. I only wanna talk. So

I think this is a very interesting like, you can take that as an analogy. Right? Like, there's this fire hose of things that are happening. But if we so if we look at the daily. Right?

And anyone who actually is currently working on the daily and listening to this, I love you. I'm sorry if I get this wrong, and you have a totally different impression of how this works. But some of the lessons I think we can

since you've a changed.

Things have absolutely changed since I've been a part of it. But one of the things that I think are notable about The Daily is The Daily is 45 people working on it. Cool. And they have a daily meeting where everybody comes in and pitches. So no one has the responsibility of understanding what the news is.

Everybody has limited understanding of their corner of the news, and then there has a system of triaging up what news is most important. They go to the 09:00 meeting in the morning, and all of the editors of all of the desks all sit together, and your your news editor, your top top person, calls around. Alright. National desk. What's the most important stuff?

And then the national editor says, alright. Today, we're following this, and this, and this. Okay. Next. And that happens every day at 09:00 and every day at 04:15.

It happens every single day. Every single day. Every single day. And you go to that to find out what's the coverage. And that meeting, because it's New York Times, actually sets the coverage for a lot of other publications around the world.

So you already have somebody who's making these decisions, these editorial decisions. And then you have people who are assigned to different desks who are working on The Daily, and they're grabbing, you know, they're I'm I work with the international desk. That's mostly so they're going to the international desk meeting, and you have different people who are going to the culture desk meeting, you have different people who are going to the metro meeting. And everybody's specializing down so that when you aggregate the knowledge of 45 people and then present it through one person or two people, suddenly it looks like that person knows everything, but that's actually not accurate. And I think that sort of specialization that no one can know any one thing is a really powerful thing that gets masked.

And it's all it's also like it feels like it should be a funnel, but it's not. It's actually like decreasingly, like tubes of decreasing size. Yeah. So that as things are pushed through, the edges get shaved off. Like, at every successive step, you just lose a little bit off the side.

Well, the Internet is a series of tubes.

Oh, there it is. We did. Yeah. Just shaving off the edges of every story that goes through.

But, I mean, this is such a perfect example of something that, again, has been written about endlessly from so many different perspectives, which is the hyper isolation, the hyper individualization of your experience online, which, of course, involves the perceived responsibility of understanding the news, of consuming the news, of interacting with the news, which I think can easily lead to a paralysis and a lack of engagement with news in a meaningful way to the point where you are a lot of people are just kind of on TikTok and having things, like, lobbed at them, which some of which might be reputable and some of which might not, but you're not doing anything.

So I think, like, that's maybe the heart of my question is, like, is that imagined person informed? Mhmm.

So I think, like, in some ways, we are the Michael Barbaros of our own lives.

Wow. Each of us has a Michael Barbaro within us. Jason?

That hurts.

He's in there, and he's trying to get out.

We all have 45 people, more or less, trying to tell us what the most important thing from their part of the world is. And at some point, we are asked by somebody what's going on, and we open our mouth and just say, tariffs are wild,

Literally. We

just do our best to rise to the occasion and say, I'm informed. Here's what I know.

I open my mouth and like the mother xenomorph from alien Oh my god. A Michael Barbaro head comes at us.

Tiny little mouth.

I think the more we've been asked to care about the veracity of information, the more obvious it is that there is no veracity of information. We are all just a part of a moving set of conduits doing our best to push forward the things that we think are most true at any given moment and constructing the worldviews of others by being some of their producers for their personal Michael Barbaros.

Well, this is also a part of the problem, at least from my experience, which is that if you don't have the preexisting understanding that you cannot engage with every single kind of news at the same level of intensity all the time forever. If you don't have that understanding, like, of course, you're going to get online and be like,

ah. Hearing hearing you say that that way is both just completely exhausting and, like, staring into a mirror.

Yes. Yes. Because and I think what can be so treacherous about existing on the social Internet is that you are constantly having to reset that awareness and being like, right. Right. Right.

Right. Cannot juggle 300 chainsaws at the same time. I can't. And also, have to, while I'm engaging with all of this, kind of do some extra work if I wanna really understand what's going on to be, like, cool. So is that actually happening?

Where is this information from? Like, you have to do some background research, journalism y stuff. And the social Internet is constantly telling you, like, don't you just wanna just not do that and just think this is what's happening?

Well, or the opposite. And TikTok is just like, hey. Don't you want another chainsaw?

Yes. It's like both of those that get this damn time.

Or the other option is to sort of, like, give over to idolatry and, like, pick your favorite talking icon and just be like, I'm gonna let them handle it. I'm gonna throw on Hassan, and everything Hassan says is true. I'm just gonna accept it. Or I'm gonna throw on Tucker. Or, like, whatever your deal is, you're just you're just gonna you're going to outsource that responsibility to someone else and then just decide that's the reality because they look a little more put together when they're doing the exact same shit you're doing.

Hans.

Even though they have 45 people working making them sound smart, in direct answer to your question, Mike, I think are they informed is maybe not the right question. Because there's a difference between having the info and using the info, understanding the info, assimilating the info, making making meaning out of that info. I think a lot about the example of working with a bunch of different musicians. Guitarists are really quintessential for this, I think.

Jason and I are both very excited to hear what comes next. Talk about us.

This is a it's a classic distinction amongst guitarists, that there are the technical guitarists and the field guitarists. Right? So you have the technical guitarists who can play literally anything under the sun, and it's stunning. And the adeptness that they have over the fingerboard and the the the level of finger picking or whatever their specialty is, or maybe they can do all specialties, it's just astonishing. And they tend to make the most boring records, but my god, they can they do whatever you ask them to do and do it really, really, like, competently.

And then there's the people who don't know how to read, are super self conscious, only know how to do a couple of things, but the things that they know how to do are like speaking directly into their soul. And there's, like, there's a communication that happens that is not necessarily happening happening in a technical way. And I think the same thing applies to information. So you have you can have access to all of the facts. But if you don't know why those facts are important, not just important, but important to your life, or you haven't made this distinction of how you can use them, what they do for you, how to employ them, how to share them, how to make meaning out of them.

And I think this is a big change from the first Trump administration to this Trump administration is that the first one, we all stared wide eyed and agog and thought that just by knowing and bearing witness Mhmm. Mhmm. Somehow that would make a difference. And I don't know. It did, because then Biden got elected and we, you know, solved it and wandered off into the sunset.

And everything was fine.

Mean, I

think it's I think you have hit the nail on the head as far as both the successes and the shortcomings of that approach. Right? Like, bearing witness does something, but it certainly doesn't do everything. Yeah.

And and I think the other thing that it did is it kept off this decade of existing online where it seemed like the project was to see more things, get more perspectives, and therefore, know more things. And then what would logically, obviously, follow is that we would act on more information to make better choices. And that in some sense, if we were able to be more correct about something, if you knew more and you could be more right, then that would have an outcome that would affect a positive change. That would do something. And I think In this

house, we believe in science.

Exactly. And I think that that moment of Trump won put the lie to that, where you are able to say objectively even, like, this is true. This is false. This is good. This is bad, and that should be worth something.

And the concept of power does not care about that. Now it was never more plainly true. And so I think in Trump won, we spent a lot of time still kind of clinging to that hope. Like, well, if I learn enough about the things that are happening in there and I can, like, articulate them and I get more knowledge, surely I will be rewarded for being more right with a just universe. And it does not matter.

No. And I think there is a very tantalizing sense of comfort that can come from information gathering. The sort of, you know, pointing at what this administration is doing going, that's illegal. Like

I can't help but notice

that you're

being hypocritical.

That's actually in violation of the constitution. Like, which like, the yes. There is there is a very shallow sense of control and ownership and agency that you can gather from something like that. But I think what's happening a lot, at least right now, in the second iteration of this administration, is this, like, rending of the comfort that that kind of information gathering and sharing of information can offer, and it's very obvious limitation.

Mhmm. I no longer see or I less frequently see that behavior on display now. I see a lot less of the, well, I looked at this thing that they proposed, and I got to the bottom of it, and here's the hypocritical points of it. Here's where it's illegal, and here's where it's wrong. And I'm gonna put this here, and surely, it will find its way to the right hands who can do something about this.

I see a lot less of that.

Yeah. It's Yeah.

I will say it's all over blue sky, but it's definitely not the level of it doesn't attain the level of cultural cache that it did on Twitter, you know Sure. Five or six years ago.

Yeah. Or it's even presented in sort of this wilting way of, like, hey, someone had to do it. So here's why this is

wrong. Guys. But

I'm just gonna stick it here in the timeline for fun.

Or it's presented earnestly by, like, you know, a blue wave bot account. So probably some a Russian somewhere. Yeah. Okay. Let's take a quick break.

Alright. So there's two things I wanna say. The first is it feels like there is this kind of, like, parallel set of skills or this parallel relationship between the time we spend on our devices and the time that we spend on those devices building and reinforcing skills that are only useful on those devices. Interesting. It is a it is like a compounding problem.

It's hard to do the first thing, so it's extra hard to do the second thing. And it feels like a level of both critical technological engagement and critical self engagement that every piece of techno almost every piece of technology and of and as we're discussing right now, a fair amount of the user base of those technologies disincentivize you from engaging in.

Yeah. Oh my god. Yes. Oh my god. Because, I mean, truly, there there are times when I am just scrolling on Instagram or TikTok or whatever.

It's usually just those two. And it's like I sort of emerge from the ether, and I'm like, what am I looking for right now?

Like I was just talking to I make a show with some friends where we play a game, but we have a chat show related to it. And one of the players in the game, my friend Taylor Moore, was like, I hate waking up an hour later learning I've been pwned by Instagram. Yeah. Just how it feels.

Right? Yeah. Where it's like, it's so abundantly easy to waste an hour Yeah. On TikTok or Instagram or wherever. And it is exponentially harder the longer you do that to kind of pull yourself out of the drift and be like, wait a second.

Hello? Where am I?

I think we're seeing a real disconnect. I wrote down Mike, this is part like, I wrote down the thing I wanna say is the fire hose versus the tools. Like, those two things don't match each other anymore, and I think we really don't. We are we have, like, the beginning of an awareness that they don't match, but we're not sure what else to do because these are the tools that we have, which seem insufficient for the moment, they seem insufficient for the content, they seem information for insufficient for the format. Like, I want to

hurt you.

They're built to hurt you. And and I say I mean, I did a story last March with doctor Steven Lewandowski talking about critical ignoring, this idea that you can't absorb everything, and it's actually harmful to try to absorb everything. Since that time, then I did this and went deep with him on it and really lived this stuff. Have I been able to incorporate that? I have not.

I say things like, oh, I want to do to do that, but I don't. And in some ways, I'm like, oh, I want to do that, but I can't? Maybe that's more of what it is? Like, I want to be able to be more specific. I want to be able to be more localized.

But if I can't find the things that are happening around me, the the information that actually has value or that I can actually make meaning out of, if those are getting more and more difficult for me to find because the tools don't allow them to surface This is exactly

the thing that Ryan talked about, not knowing what's going on around you.

Ryan Roderick.

Yeah. Yeah. And also the thing, Jason, that you just mentioned. I wanna, like, tie this all together. Jason, you were talking about a few minutes ago this idea that, like, we're using the Internet in a way that was its original promise and that we think that it's for, or at least a certain portion of us.

Like, I think millennials especially maybe cling to this more than than other groups, which is like, the Internet is a global network. It is made for you to be able to communicate with people and acquire media and familiarize yourself with perspectives that are fundamentally different from the ones that are available to you in a necessarily bounded geographical location with your local community. And I think that, like, all of these things add up to, like, kinda what Hans is saying, like, the big struggle right now is, I think, in in part, the impulse to use the Internet as it's always been used by at least our cohort, a thing to socialize and connect globally, which, you know, that's powerful and that's important, but we can't act globally. And that's becoming increasingly clear, and I think increasingly true. It may have been less true twenty or thirty years ago, but it's more true now that, like, it's even hard to act locally given the state of especially American politics.

Mhmm. And, you know, I feel like even my ability to even know how to act locally has perhaps atrophied a bit because of my focus on the importance of familiarizing myself with national and global events.

So

I think this isn't really a question so much as like, I don't know, a hypothesis or like a charge, but it's like, I think that we have to figure out how to have a healthy time and information based relationship with our devices that leads to more local action, and I just don't know where to start.

I just wanna enter that, like, I actually find this time really exciting. I mean, amongst all of the, like, awfulness that it represents because we're untethered, we're unmoored, we don't have the right tools for the situation, we know it, that feels terrible. But boy does it feel exciting. There are tools out there that you like, I'm I'm going back to RSS feeds in a really big way, and I'm changing the way that I regard them, which is, like, I read through them, rather than just, like, the scrolling of of that kind of the opposite of what you're saying, which is, like, headline, headline, headline, Mike. I'm like, no.

Pause. Read the thing. Read the thing. And I'm following things like Investigate Midwest, who does, like, investigative reporting on, like, who owns land in Nebraska, and, like, what's the stuff in my part of the world that actually makes some degree of sense, and then talking to the people. I mean, I think this is the other thing from the from the daily that is a good example.

It's, like, it's about asking questions to the people who do know. It's not about pretending like you know. And I find it really helpful. I just feel like there there are new tools five years from now. Could we have new tools and new ways that we interact?

Could we retrain ourselves?

I really wanna believe the answer to that is yes. But like, if you look at if you look at, like, the Neighbors app or, like, Nextdoor or Patch, it's it's all just poison.

Yeah.

You when you connect local people via Yeah. These, like, global media technologies, they turn into monsters.

Well, this is, like, the ironic thing that then you notice is I'm trying to do a lot more intentional interaction with my content. The the reason I say Blue Sky is not a feed, it's because it's something that I go to to intentionally click through to articles and read them, to get out of the feed and into the source material. I'm only listening to music on Bandcamp this year, where I can select something, listen to it until I don't want to, and then do the little bit of work to find something else for some reason to listen to. And in doing these things more, I am noticing more how terrible most content is, the more I'm allowing myself to choose my way around it, that it is awful, and it is getting worse, and it is roundly celebrated. The things that are put up for awards, the things that have the most eyeballs, the things that are most embraced by all of these content industries are worse.

This is not just the bias of age. This is not just, like, my genre of something is better. These are just empirically bad things, And they're getting rewarded constantly. And there is something that feels inevitable about it in a very, very deeply dispiriting way.

Well, I mean, the Internet is not a meritocracy, and I think we are seeing that in so many very miserable ways.

Who misses me in an astronaut suit behind you with a gun?

Well, yeah. Exactly. Like You're telling me thing with biggest number is most popular Yeah. Is maybe rigged? Well,

I'm gonna blow your mind. But but, no, I mean, I wanna I wanna really drill down on this overarching issue of the hyper individualization of our online experience. Because I think it's something where the Internet is both too much and not enough in many ways, and that I think is exacerbated by the fact that we are reliably and stubbornly siloed into these individual experiences. We're sure there are a lot of people online, and you can engage with them. And in some ways, that's beautiful and incredible.

But it also is a space that heavily incentivizes you to exist as one agent that is not encouraged to kind of reach out your hand. It's the whole idea of everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager. And I think in addition to us engaging with news content online in a way that is hopefully more intentional, that is sort of removing yourself from the lazy river of the feed to be, like, I don't wanna look at this, and I wanna look at this other thing. I can turn this off. I can put my phone away.

I can change the app. I can text my friend. I think in addition to all of that, this is such a simple thing. But, like, talk to your friends. Talk to your friends.

Talk to your friends.

Talk to your Talk

to your neighbors. Go to the park with your friends. Like, go to a bar with your friends. Call them on the phone. Like, honestly

Go to a city council meeting.

Yes. Oh my god. Absolutely. Like, it it's that is the thing that is going to save us always, is having this real community of hands reaching out for each other and holding each other.

I think that that's right. And I think that so I've in the last couple years, I moved and I moved into a studio, which is in a different neighborhood from where my studio from where my house is. So it's like I've kind of joined two new neighborhoods or two new communities in the last couple years. And I noticed something in both of them that I have been wondering idly if it's just generally true and not true in just these specific locations, which is in both of those places, I showed up and one person was like, hey, we have a group chat. We have a place that we all hang out in, and here it is, you join it.

And I've since left both of them because they're both toxic and horrible. Just the worst, like, unhinged, like, people being mean, people hiding behind a screen even though they're your neighbors. And it's like, people who, like, when I see them on the street, I'm like, you are perfectly nice. Like, why are you

Oh, jeez.

Such a shit, like, in the WhatsApp group. Mhmm. And I wonder whether or not it is just the, like, the direction of flow of participation, where it's like shoving people into the hopper that is the feeding mechanism to a technologically mediated community as opposed to gathering a community and then saying, let's also communicate via distributed media.

Yeah. It it does feel like people, I don't think consciously, fall into archetypes of talking through mediated devices. Like, there are scores fewer types of guys you can be online than there were, I don't know, a decade ago or something. People are like, I'm I'm typing in my phone, there's one of four lanes that I type in, and unfortunately, one of them is to be a dick.

Yeah. I think one to many has proven itself to be a dangerous thing for our psychology, and I think a lot of the Internet is set up to make us one to many. And I think, Mike, what you're saying, what we're kind of all coming to is one to one or one to few. One to few. Or I think, like,

I said this on Matt Silverman's podcast a few weeks ago, just like, I think that a lot of these spaces, because of just the cultural moment that we're in, people get in them and they have an audience. And I think they think of the people that they're typing to even in the neighborhood group chat as their audience. I think that's a % right. That's poisonous.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think it's another way to have to untie knots, you know, is that it's it's abundantly easy to just behave like, oh, cool. So I actually just have a captive audience, and this isn't actually community. This isn't actually a village.

And it it just forces you back into that silo again and again and again. And there are going to be groups like that. And I think what sucks, but is true, is that we will have to see that and be like, cool. That's not my village. I'm going to go somewhere else.

And I think to your point, Georgia, it's exactly like what we started this conversation talking about. It's really easy for those people to pick up their phone and know that that audience is always there. There's always a feed of things to do. There's, like, there's just you know, and it's hard to say no to I think for some people, it's hard to say no to. Alright.

I wanna wrap us up, but I wanna leave us with one question. Answer this however you see fit. How do you know when it is time to log off?

When my head hits the keyboard. There

is one guy on TikTok, and his name is Hugh, and he is a Scottish man who lives in India. And his whole channel, which is great, is just him going to, street side food vendors throughout all of India, all over the place. And he has the very opposite approach from so many other people, especially westerners on TikTok who sample Indian street food, which is that he is nonjudgmental, he's nice, he has pleasant interactions with the people, he pays them, he eats the food, and then he reviews it, and most things he enjoys. He seems genuinely nice. And at the start of every video, he goes, it's something like, oh, look at this.

What's being sold here? Oh. And when I hear that, I think, I'm gonna watch this video and then I'm gonna go to

bed. Yes.

Like, he always finds me at the right time.

He knows. I will genuinely set timers, like, internally for myself be like, cool. It's 11:30PM. I'm going to be on TikTok until 11:45, and then I'm done. But it I I will usually have that kind of question of what am I looking for right now?

Why do I feel like I'm, like, rummaging frantically looking for something and I'm like, I gotta go. It's time to go.

Time to hit the old dusty trail.

Yep. I think I only really know through fatigue markers. I will get tired of the channel that I'm on and I will go to a different channel and then realize I've already been there and then decide that I'm in aggregate fatigued enough to stop. And that does not seem good like Yeah. You're not supposed to reach

end of the rope, you know? No. Yeah.

No. It is that. And I think, you know, I there is I think there is I have some difficulty discerning sort of the sources of my pain. And so when you are just constantly online and in pain, who knows if it is getting worse or better or if you could continue or stop. And so all you have left is fatigue and sometimes that makes me stop.

And I'm gonna work on that.

I I don't have a good answer. I don't have a good answer. I'm not as self aware as I need to be in this realm and I appreciate the conversation because it's helping me realize I should be. I'm gonna should all over myself which is something my grandmother would be mad at.

That's right. That's right. Alright, friends. Thank you for joining. Thanks for the conversation.

Thanks everybody for listening. We'll have an episode in the main feed for you next week. See you soon. Bye. Bye.