Reply All - #171 Account Suspended

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

The President is no longer allowed to Tweet. PJ and Alex sit down with their boss to explain what that means, how it happened, and what might happen next. Plus -- an upset listener berates our climate reporter. Click here to listen to How to Save a Planet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Repai-all. And I'm Alex Goldman. Hello, Alex Goldman. Hi, PJ. You okay? No. I mean, things are really fucked up, dude. I just feel like the state of the world externally is permeating my every thought.

And like, I try to retreat into things that make me feel comfortable and safe. And nothing's working. Oh, you mean to hang out on the internet? it's not helping. Yeah, strangely, reading Twitter is not giving me the sense of calm that it usually does. Alex Bloomberg, you are also here. I'm also curious how you're doing. I'm all right.

Yeah. So basically, we'd had this moment where we were sort of, we were, Alex and I were talking and it felt like with everything that had happened with the riots at the Capitol, it might be nice to do an explainer to you. about sort of how the internet was responding to everything that happened at the Capitol. So we brought you Alex in on Friday we recorded the thing. That was Friday afternoon. By even like Friday evening, it felt like just so much had happened that the thing we

recorded instead of feeling five days old, it felt 10 years old. And so we actually wanted to come back, scrap what we had. And now that it's Monday, just sort of like talk about what has happened since. Friday because it feels like there's enough there to just talk about. That sounds great. My question is like your listeners never would have known about the Friday thing if you just hadn't just told them about it right now. Like why don't we just like pretend like we're just doing it?

You know that Wooten Klan album that Martin Schreli owns? It's like $2 million. There's only one of them. Uh-huh. This is our $2 million U-TN Klan album. We're going to send the last yes-yes yes. person. The loss, yes, yes, no. It'll be a collector's item. Nobody will ever hear it. Yeah, no one will ever hear. Okay, we're going to press it to vinyl. We're running it on eBay.

We could make tens of dollars off of this. Are you sure you want to deprive people of the, like, that might have been the best episode you guys ever did. You know, our continued success is in your best interest professionally, and I feel like you're trying to sabotage us here. No, no, I'm trying to, like, I'm trying to boost the price. Anyway, okay, guys, we're doing a new one. Yep, okay, good. Okay, so today's Monday. Let's just talk about literally what has happened since the weekend.

So, I would say half an hour after we finished recording. Okay. Donald Trump was banned from Twitter. Right. Oh, there was that. Right. Basically, it launched a series of domino effects that were both, I think a lot of things that happened because of that were very funny. And also, like, very interesting.

Like, it sort of felt like if the internet in general and Twitter in particular has felt like a really bad TV show that I don't know why I still watch it, this was sort of one of those episodes where we're like, oh, this is why I watch it. Because sometimes stuff like this happens. All right. So what's happened? I don't know anything about this. You didn't pay any attention? No, I mean, I know that You know that he was banned.

Here's what I, the basic outlines of it. I knew he got banned and then he got banned from everything including Shopify. I saw Shopify trending on Twitter. So does that mean he can't sell challenge coins? Because every time I see like a Donald Trump,

anything that is Donald Trump merchandise related, it's like the Donald Trump coin minted with silver and gold. And it's like, he's very into memorabilia of himself. And then I know that everybody was going to go to parlor, and then parlor also got in trouble, although I don't exactly know the nature of the trouble. You didn't watch the show, but you heard what happened on

it. He has a baby's understanding. That's what I would say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. That's a very unkind way to talk to an adult man. I would never insult someone on this podcast, but anyway, yes. Okay, so let me just fill in the details because this is a story where I think the details are very interesting. Yeah. Okay. So Friday, Twitter announces that they suspended Donald Trump permanently. They did it. They had a post about the rationale for it. And it was interesting because they cited his most recent tweet, which was he sort of vaguely intimated that the movement wasn't done and more stuff was going to happen, which you could definitely interpret as a call for violence. But it was sort of interesting because relative to the many things he's done, it was kind of table stakes.

But actually his last tweet was that he wasn't going to be attending the inauguration. which Twitter said, we take you saying you're not going to be at the inauguration to be like, it's open season, go ahead and attack. Oh, I didn't even, I didn't read that tweet that way. I read that as just like typical sore loser stuff. That's what I read it as too. Yeah, they saw that as an implicit call for people to go fuck shit up again. Wow.

So the tweets they cited were the 750 million great American patriots who voted for me, America First and Make America Great Again. He's got to get all this trademarks in there. will have a giant voice long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape, or form. And then shortly thereafter said he wasn't going at the inauguration. Which just relative to every other thing he's done, it's like... Yeah, that's real small potatoes.

If you were going to ban Trump from Twitter over one of his tweets, which tweet would you personally choose as evidence number one? He taunted North Korea with nuclear war. He was like, I've got a... What did he say? Trump, North Korea. nuclear war tweet. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un just said that the nuclear button is on his desk at all times. Will someone from his depleted and flood-starved regime, please inform him that I too have a

nuclear button and it is much bigger and more powerful one than his and my button works? Wow. That was fine. This isn't. But the thing that they said that I think was real was that there were already, there was already on Twitter calls circulating for another riot around the inauguration. And so they were like, this plus this equals, you're dead. So I think what everybody assumed was that because the president's addicted to social media and doesn't have great self-control and doesn't love rules, he would immediately just start trying

to tweet from somebody else's account. Right. Which is exactly what happened. Right. First thing he does is there's like an at POTUS account, which belongs to whoever's the current president. He starts tweeting from that. He's like, as I've been saying for a long time, Twitter's coordinated with the Democrats and the radical left to silence me. We will not be silenced. Tours about free speech, blah, blah, blah. They immediately delete those tweets. Okay. And then he tried to tweet the exact same message from the at Team Trump account, which was like the campaign account. Same thing. They delete the tweets. They submitted the account. And then his digital director, this guy named Gary Kobe, tweeted at Dan Scavino, who's Trump's Twitter guy,

hey, you guys can use my login if you want and had like a picture of the president. I don't know if he was joking or incompetent, but they banned his account as well. My favorite tweet about it was there's this Ariana Grande fan whose mom had taken away her internet, and she was tweeting from like a variety of, I think her mom had taken her cell phone, and she found out how to put Twitter on an old Nintendo DS, basically like a newer generation Game Boy. She tweeted from that. She got the DS taken away. She then figured out how to tweet from their family smart fridge somehow. And so she's like tweeting through the whole thing. And somebody had a tweet that was just like Donald Trump in five minutes.

And it was a retweet of her tweet, which is, I don't know if this is going to tweet. I am talking to my fridge. What the heck? My mom confiscated all my electronics again sent for my LG smart refrigerator. Is that true? Can you tweet from a refrigerator? It could have been a hoax. It's internet true.

And it's in the realm of things I'm not going to learn more about because I would have less enjoyment in my life. You like to leave me in a world where a teenager figured out how to tweet from a fridge. Yes. So, okay, so then it was just like the feeling, which is what you missed out on was like, it felt it was just one of the most like, first of all, it was just like relief. Like there are so many people, even people who support Trump or like, like one of the things a lot of his supporters say is like, I wish you wouldn't tweet. People who have worked in the White House have been like, I wish they would turn out his

Twitter account. Like everybody felt a jubilation of like the tweets aren't going to come anymore. One of my favorite tweets honestly is from an account that I really honestly dislike is this guy Jeff Teedrick, who responds to every Trump tweet being like, you, sir, are going to be canceled. Oh, the users are terrible. So he's one of those. He's like one of those guys. And then Donald Trump got banned and his tweet was, I guess I'll go read a book.

There are people whose lives online have been permanently warped around him who have like careers out of responding to his tweets. I would argue the two worst of all the users were the craters. Cresenstein brothers. They were these beef cakey identical twin brothers who just said the dumbest stuff in response to every Trump tweet. Twitter banned them after saying that they'd bought followers and account interactions, but then a new account popped up that was Mrs. Crasenstein. And that account posted a video of the twins celebrating Trump losing Twitter. What happened? Trump. Synchronized high five. Champagne. I got the special Twitter Trump ban champagne. Oh my God. They go in. Yeah.

To their refrigerator, they pull out a glass of two glasses and a champagne bottle. Over which they've crudely taped a piece of printer paper that says Twitter Trump ban champagne. Don't pop your eyeball out. And then they're pouring their champagne into champagne flutes. There's a real vibe like somehow they did this. We knew this was going to happen. It just took some time. They are so buff, too.

They're like total like... They're ripped bros. it's from all the retweets. Wow. Okay. That was the vibe. But it also felt the other thing that felt weird about it is like in a way that I think people knew, but I hadn't understood the extent of. It felt eerie because we've been so conditioned to be like, we know everything he's feeling

all the time. It's like this bully who runs right in the house screaming. And everyone knows how Donald Trump feels about not being able to tweet. And like the feeling of not hearing him yell about it, but knowing he was mad about it felt kind of ominous and dreadful. Right. So then the next thing that happens, which I think you saw, is like every single platform sort of decides like, okay, fuck it.

We're kicking off too. So it was Facebook, Twitter, Google, Snapchat, Instagram, Shopify, Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, which I don't think he used, and Pinterest, which I'm sure he didn't use. There's a very niche, like, hipster film review website called Letterbox. And they were like, Donald Trump can't post his filling opinions here. I think the thing that probably wounded him the most is that the PGA said they weren't going to use one of his golf courses for like a PGA contest. Wow. There was going to be like a big champion.

I don't know anything about golf. So I'm going to call it a championship. Please don't correct me. The big championship golf game was going to be at one of his one of his courses in 2022. And they were like rescinded that. It's not going to be at his golf course anymore. You sound like a grandparent talking about a high school mixer that you got a touchdown in the hockey goal. Matt Lieber is going to come on here and yes, yes, no, you guys.

Is Matt Lieber a golf man? Matt Leaver's a golfer. Of course, yeah. That's what business guys do. They go golfing. It's just, it's like, it's a, it's like I don't like sports and then you add walking, like just walking. My dad had a midlife crisis during which he got a motorcycle and started golfing and then like 10 years old. And started listening.

At the same time? And started listening to world music, like almost exclusively. Oh, God. Wow. He fully was like a Paul Simon album. That's a, like a slightly unusual midlife crisis. It just feels like he picked a bunch of different midlife crisis from different shelves that don't necessarily match each other.

I know, exactly. But many years later, I think he still, his love for motorcycles, even though he does not have one. I don't think that ever died. But he's like, I don't know what I was doing with golf. That shit. fuck. Okay, anyway, so Domino, kind of like Domino one is like because of the riots and because Trump did like one I'm so sorry video and then immediately started tweeting like angrily, every tech company was finally like, okay, enough's enough. We're not going to do this.

Also probably an awareness that Democrats are coming to power. So then what happens is that all these other conservatives start piping up and they're not like, no one's saying, at the time that's bad that Donald Trump's been kicked off of anything. But what they are saying is that while they're not getting kicked off platforms, their follower accounts are being attacked. So like Mike Pompeo had this tweet where he was like, this is how you create an echo chamber. And he had a list of a bunch of different Republican Twitter accounts that had lost a lot of followers. So he lost 36,000. Kevin McCarthy lost 41,000. Tom Cotton lost 15. But what was going on? and what people quickly pointed out was that Twitter had also banned pretty much as many Q&N accounts as they could find.

Oh. And so the reason these guys were losing followers is because they have big QAnon followings. And the thing they were accidentally advertising by complaining about this was that a lot of their following is lunatics. Oh, wow. Right. So they banned the entire, they're trying to basically ban the Q&on conspirators. Right. Yeah. On Friday, when we were talking, they just banned some of the big accounts, like the big hubs. But now if you search QAnon or if you search the Q&H hashtags, very little comes up. It's mostly people making fun of the idea of it. And the very few accounts are accounts with like 120 followers or whatever. Like it's really, they have just scrubbed it. Wow. It's crazy because it's like all the stuff that they said they just couldn't do. Like all these tech companies for four years, in like two days.

It's just different. Yeah, it's very different. I mean, obviously, I know what happened, which was the insurrection led by the president at the Capitol. But like what, but do you, do people know, like, what was the moment? Like, how, how did this happen? How did it happen? Yeah.

I've spoken to people at Facebook and Twitter, and they don't really know more than we do about why these decisions were made now. I do know that internally there has been a lot of criticism about the way this stuff has been handled. And in spite of many calls to change things, not much has changed. Because honestly, I think these companies are loath to ban people and hate being seen as censors. Right. But last week, a lot of these places finally felt emboldened to do something because there's really never been a straighter line between like violent rhetoric online and violent action in the world. Yeah, exactly.

So the next thing that happens is how much do you know about parlor? Here's what I know. There was always conservative talk about like how Twitter was actually sort of like throttling conservatives and sort of like shadow banning. Yeah. So then somebody started parlor, which was sort of, which was like the true platform for free speech where nothing would be banned and there would be no basically rules essentially. Yeah.

So there's two websites that are trying to do this. One is called Gab, which is just like the Nazi one. It's just fully, fully, it's that far. And then there's Parlor, which is sort of, it's a mix of alt-right, racist, hardcore QAnon, but then it's also the people who are like, you know, cancel culture has gone too far. I don't like big tech. Right. Gotcha.

Okay. But even though conservatives have made noise about using it, nobody does because Twitter's so big and they want the biggest audience and they want the biggest platform. Right. After this, yeah, there's this mass exit. where people go to both parlor and gab, mainly parlor. Both websites immediately crash because they're not actually built for traffic. The stuff that was happening in Parlor over the weekend was its own kind of hilarious.

There's like, what's her name, Marjorie Taylor Green, who's the Q&ON Congresswoman, like, she just fully believes. She was like, big tech is silencing me. Things aren't going to be safe for long. I don't know what the verb is on Parlor. It's not tweet at me. But like, post your phone number and email address so I can contact you if stuff goes bad. which meant all of her followers were just doxing themselves across the thread. Oh my God.

Basically, it was like highly paranoid but confused people trying to organize very quickly. And then, yeah, so what happens with Parlor is first Apple said, you guys, you can't have a social network without any moderation. You have a day to get a moderation force in effect. Because, again, like people were using Parlor to organize violence. So a day later, Apple and Google both boot Parlor out of their store. And then I don't know of an example of this happening before. So like every internet service you use, and you know, you sort of picture that they have a basement with all these servers that are making the thing work.

What actually is usually happening is a lot of these sites just rent those servers from Amazon. It's called Amazon Web Services. And Amazon Web Services was like, we're not going to host Parlor. You guys are done. Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah. So like the two places where Q and on people move, like sort of the flank that is sticking with Trump, basically, that wants its own place to post, they want it to be parlor. But in this moment, at least, parlor's so dysfunctional. They actually have, as far as I can tell, no home on the internet.

Right. So as you probably would expect, conservatives not taking this super well. This was like the common reasonable reaction on Fox News to, the fact that this non-moderated social network, Parlor has been taken out of Apple's App Store until it has moderation. Let's bring in Judge Janine, Piro, host of Justice with Judge Janine. Good morning, Judge. Good morning. Good morning. What's your reaction to that?

Parlor, shut down. Ah. Well, look, they give us a taste of this pre-election when they suppress the Hunter Biden story. And now that they've won, what we're seeing is a kind of censorship that is akin to, a crystal knock where they decide what we can communicate about. She said crystal knock and Brian Kilmead looked down in a way like... A sign of shame? Yes.

I mean, the thing that you have to... Like, wow. The real subtle thing there is that Janine Piro says this is akin to a kind of crystal knock. Like, if you're going to fucking invoke one of the most horrific nights of ethnic violence in history, try to get the fucking name right. Like, it's really, I'm levitating with rage watching it. It's interesting that, like, you're focusing on the mispronunciation as a thing to be angry about. Yeah, for me, it's the fact that it's totally inappropriate metaphor. It's just to me, it's like icing on a shit cake.

Yes. It's turd icing on a shit cake. But that's been, the general vibe has been like, I think people on the right are like a couple ticks away from where Genevira is. But the reaction is like the great censoring has begun. Right. Wow. Yeah. And on top of parlor, like losing its server and being kicked off the app store,

it has this entirely different self-inflicted problem that it's dealing with. Which is? Basically, it got hacked in like a major way. So when you post a picture or a video to Twitter or Instagram, two things happen. One is that it scrubs it of all the metadata about when it was taken, where it was taken, what kind of device took it,

and when it uploads it, it gives it a random file name. So that you can't just make, you can't just look sequentially and see like, okay, well, this file's name 160. I wonder what file 161 is and 162. You can't just make those replacements to look at every file that's ever been posted

to Twitter or Instagram. Right. Parlor did neither of those things. So an enterprising hacker whose name is Donk NB was like, hey guys, I just figured out they sequentially, you can just look at their stuff sequentially.

I'm downloading everything now. So it was like the equivalent if you just wanted to do like Harler.com slash images and just downloaded all the images. But it's not just that. Like when you delete a tweet, it no longer shows up

the website, but it's still in their database sequentially. So every deleted tweet was still there, too. So she downloaded every tweet, every image, every video, including all the videos and images that people desperately deleted after they realized the gravity of the thing they were doing at the Capitol. Oh, like all the planning stuff, all the like I was inside the Capitol, look how cool I am stuff. Right.

So now there's more than 50 terabytes of every tweet, both deleted and not deleted, every image and every video, just waiting for the government, first of all. And just like, you know, average schmose to pour over. Also, I should say, I was calling them tweets. I guess they're called. What do they call them? Parles. Parleys, I think.

Really? Yeah, I think they're called parles. And I think you're supposed to pronounce the name of it parlay. But come on. I'm not doing that. I'm not doing it. Interesting. Anyway.

Okay. So, I mean, I think part of the lesson is just, you know, you think of, I mean, I often think of Twitter as like a dumb website anybody could make. But it's like they've spent a long time building a big platform that works and protects people's privacy and doesn't crash most of the time. And like, I think it's hard to build that stuff for real overnight. It's easy to say you're building it and raise some money and get some clout. But I think really doing it is a much longer project. I have to say I'm of two minds about this particular moment. me too uh how do you feel i guess i just have to say that the idea of jack dorsey and mark zuckerberg being the people who decide who stays up and who goes down doesn't sit very well with me makes me feel pretty uncomfortable right it just gives them such a massive amount of power to like strip people of the ability to communicate yeah there's been people like um allexi nivani the the russian opposition leader who Putin's always trying to kill um he said he didn't like this uncle um Merkel said she didn't like it. Yeah. And I totally get why people are coming out and saying that.

But on the other hand, I'm really glad that they finally took the step. I think that it's long overdue, that they should have banned a lot of these accounts because it's been obvious to pretty much everybody watching that like radicalization through like social media is a real thing. Yeah. And, you know, removing all these Q&O accounts from places like Twitter, it's not just like, symbolism or ceremony. Like, you can actually have an effect. You know, like, there have been examples of people who behaved badly enough that they got kicked off the platform. And then they perished.

Like, without having attention and oxygen, they went away. Like, Miloianapolis. He says that he's like millions of dollars in debt. Yeah. He's been reduced to, he's having people pay him to fly to meet him for dinner. He auctioned off his giant, gaudy throne chair on eBay. Like, when people like him lose the ability to access an audience, they starve for action, they do actually go away. Right.

So I don't miss Milo. I'm not going to miss QAnon accounts. But it doesn't fit with the rest of my beliefs to be like, it's good that the tech companies are banning speech. Like, it feels like this is, this is a thing that will have effects that are bigger than this moment. Yeah. I guess the way I feel is. It's easy to make fun of conservatives who are saying that, like, getting kicked off Twitter is censorship because obviously Twitter is not the government. They're a private company. They can do what they want. But I get why getting kicked off Twitter is a huge deal. Like Twitter hasn't moderated anyone meaningfully for years because they wanted to be the biggest website in the world. They want to be a monopoly. And they're pretty close to being a monopoly for what they do. And so now if you're not on there, it is being silenced in a way that's real. And so Parlor has not followed any rules. They're getting kicked off the internet doesn't bother me. but what I want to happen out of this is people to build more websites that can have their own rules,

they can have the viewpoints they want or don't want on them, so that losing your account on one website isn't such a big deal. Like, that's what I'm hoping will happen. So in this moment, like, do you feel hopeful? Because it seems like there are some reasons to feel hopeful. I don't know. To me, what's interesting is like, I felt good. It was really nice to wake up and Q and on be off of Twitter.

and not to be able to find it. That felt really good. It would be different if they'd done it earlier. Those people and their beliefs still exist. But I don't know. This sounds dire. I feel hopeful that something is changing. Like I feel hopeful that I'm not saying these are the right decisions.

I don't know. But I'm just like, oh, you know, the thing that all these companies were saying was impossible. They did overnight. Now we're going to find out what the world is like after that. And I want to find out what that world's like. Because this one sucks. I'm laughing, but not because I thought, not because I'm happy.

In the meantime, we have a power that the president of the United States doesn't have. Like, we're allowed to post online. That is crazy. Yeah. That's crazy. He's not responsible enough to do that. He can only be president. After the break, Alex Bloomberg's potent rage.

Alex Goldman. Yeah. You're not in trouble yet. All right. So we, our last episode, we published a song of impotent rage, which was about your, the emotional experience of being Alex Coleman, how you struggle with the feeling of climate apocalypse and how your solution for that was to write a punk rock anthem. The song whipped. The song whipped, according to you. It was good.

Everybody should stream it. Oh, yeah, it's available on Spotify. It's available on Spotify. Should go get into it. But we did hear from one listener who was upset with the segment. And because that listener's our boss, we thought we should invite him on to air his grievances. Alex Klipper, what would you like to say? You can't deny it whipped.

I mean, whatever. The song was fine. You can't deny the music whipped. It is a. exactly the stance that I find most enraging. There's this like climate nihilism that's just wrong. I think it just makes people feel like there is no hope and there's no future. And I guess I guess that I feel that. I feel like there's no hope. I know. I know you feel that. That's fine. But it's not true. And so you shouldn't be telling people that. Trump feels that the election was

stolen from him. It's not true. And so you should. shouldn't be telling people that because you do have a platform and lots of people listen to you. There is this like all is lost so fuck it mentality, which I think is, that I think is incredibly damaging. And especially from people who actually, people, I hate to say this, but respect. Oh no. And admire and follow. Part of the reason that Alex Bloomberg might have a problem with it While you listeners may know him as an old man who's confused about the internet, he's also the host of a new Gimlet show called How to Save a Planet. The premise of the show is that rather than climate change feeling like homework,

the world's collectively decided not to do, but there's a story going on right now about the things people are doing to make things better and things that people can do to make things better. And so perhaps felt like you were ignoring that work. I'm just trying to moderate here. Am I? Yes. Can you guys tell my parents are divorced?

I'm just saying this is part of the problem. Like, I've been working for a year and a half on a climate show. This co-host named Dr. Ianna Elizabeth Johnson, and she's a marine biologist who studied coral reefs. That was her sort of area of study. And coral reefs are like basically, you know, going to disappear because of climate change. That's one of the things that's, like, real. and is probably baked in, and there might not be much we can do about that.

And so of all the people who would be like, oh, I'm going to throw up my hands, you know, here it is, this thing that, like, she loves and that she does on a day-to-day basis and that she has, like, devoted her life to doing, is going to disappear because of climate change. And she did not go to her basement and write, like, a post-punk anthem. My addict. She instead was, like, I'm going to try to, like, actually sort of do some things. things about it and learn about it and try to become a person who talks to people about this stuff and, like, actually focus on what we can do. And so, and so I was, and so she does this,

she does a whole bunch of things. And then, and then I met her and we started this podcast together. We've hired this team of, like, the incredible environmental reporters, like we have this woman, Kendra Pierre-Louis, who was an amazing climate report at the New York Times, Rachel Waldoltz, who's, like, a climate reporter from public radio. We have this, like, incredibly knowledgeable team of people. And like, and we're, and we're like, instead of just, like, diving into the, like, doomsday of it, we're just talking about, like, what should we do? It's here. It's happening. What do we do? And, like, the minute you start talking about what you should do, it's actually sort of exciting. Do you want to tell Alex about someone's stories he may not

have heard on how to save a planet that, you know, you didn't hear a person? It's to be cheerful. The single most exciting thing is that renewable energy is now as cheap or cheaper than fossil fuel energy. And solar in particular is now being called the cheapest electricity in history. So, like, there's all these, like, market forces now that are, like, speeding the transition. So this gigantic, huge blocker that was the oil industry that had, that was, that was, was incredibly powerful and had the super cheap, super efficient energy source, they're rapidly losing their power.

How rapidly are you talking? Pretty rapidly. Like, Exxon was one of the most powerful, most profitable companies in history, you know, just like a little over 10 years ago. And it was just recently kicked off of the exchange that it was on. It's still a publicly traded company, but it got kicked off. the Dow Jones, which is like just a list of the 30 biggest companies because it wasn't big enough anymore.

There's just so many other good things that come out of that. Like all the thing, you know how that, you know how you're not supposed to eat fish because of mercury? Yeah. You know where the mercury comes from? Fossil fuels. Coal plants. Yeah.

It comes from coal plants. It's all from coal plants. So like once you start getting rid of coal plants, like you can eat fish again. And people won't die of asthma. Yeah, I know. Jeremy Piven could stay in his next, his forthcoming play. You know, and the biggest car company in the world right now,

the most valuable car company in the world. Electric car company. Yeah. Run by a guy who's just like a crazy schmuck all the time for no reason. Like, seriously, a very flawed individual. It's one of my favorite things about the future that we live in where this guy perfected the electric car. And then he just spends all of his time on Twitter picking fights for no reason.

For no reason. Whatever. All that stuff is very exciting. But like every fucking paper that comes out says we're going to miss the mark on like the two degrees Celsius that we have eight years or less to fix. And shit's going to get real bad in the next hundred years. No, shit is going to get bad. There's no question about it. Like we have changed the climate that's actually happening for sure.

And a lot of people are worried about that. But, like, there's a huge, wide range of, like, how bad it gets. Water Wars Mad Max is not baked in. Like, alarm is fine. I believe there's a crisis. But there's this whole, you know, there was this, like, essay by Jonathan Franzen that this reminded me of where it was just sort of like, everything is so bleak, we should just give up. He literally, it was sort of basically the argument was just sort of like, let's not do anything. I don't like that guy.

And I think that attitude of just sort of like, it's too depressing. There's nothing to do but write good songs, good songs. Adolescent punk ballads about it is like, I think it's the big part of the problem. Okay. So are you saying that the way that I express myself is not valid? I'm not saying if you're not valid. Oh, my God. You baby.

He goes to therapy one time. I'm just saying, I don't know. I'm just saying like when you do things like that, you're actually hurting the thing that you actually want to help. Like, to me, one of the biggest threats to like actually getting to where we need to go as a world is the way we feel about it. Like, honestly. And if we feel like there's nothing to be done and it's hopeless and the fossil fuel companies always win anyway, like, it's something about that as self-fulfilling. It's scary, but it's not like hopeless.

All right. I tell you what, you'll listen to the entire series. And if I become a climate optimist, I'll write a song about how I was wrong. the wolf set the door but he's actually cute dog and he just wants some scraps it'll be called the puppies in your lap I mean the wolf set the door you're not wrong about that the wolf set the door but I've got my musket here's all the wolf mitigation strategies that we have it at disposal wolf mitigation strategies is actually I think a much better song title it writes itself it really does it sounds like a man I mean I kind of a song called Wolf Mitigation Strategies, regardless now.

Okay, so Alex is going to write an apology song to the climate. To Guy. If it works. Now I feel like there's a lot writing on us. He's going to tell the team, how to save a plan, which people can listen to on Spotify. Do you think Alex Palmer, next time Alex Goldman does a story, could you come back and criticize about it? Because I really enjoyed this.

No, but you know, if you ever feel this way about anything that I'd, do. Oh, we'll be on. Reply All is hosted by PJ Vote, Emmanuel Jochi, and me, Alex Goldman. Our show's produced by Shreuthi Pinaminen, Damiano Marquetti, Anna Foley, Jessica Young, and Lisa Wang. Our executive producer is Tim Howard. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Our intern is

Navani Otero. Our show is fact-checked by Michelle Harris. This is her last week with us after fact-checking our show for many years. Michelle, thank you so much for saving our butts so many times. We are going to miss you terribly. Congratulations on your new gig. Our theme song is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Special thanks this week to Rusty Foster. Matt Lieber is the stillness of the woods in winter. You can listen to our show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you in a couple weeks.