Reply All - #176 Twicarus

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

Today, the return of Super Tech Support: Alex discovers a Twitter account that breaks his brain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, quick announcement before we start the show, we are hiring. We are searching for a producer and a supervising editor to join our team. If you would like to read more about the jobs or apply, go to replyoshow.com slash jobs. Here's the show. From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman. And this week, I wanted to invite my colleague Fia Benin on a journey with me. Hello, Fia Benin.

Hello, Alex Coleman. Fia, I actually asked you on the show today because, one, you are cool and smart. Thank you. You are too. And two, I don't think that you would disagree with me when I say that you are not like the most experienced Twitter user. No, I'm one of the worst. And I thought it would be fun to have you on because today I have a story that is like very much about Twitter. Cool. Yeah, I'm like, I have no right to be on Twitter even though I am.

I mean, everyone has a right to be on it. I haven't earned it. I don't know how to, I mean like by, if I mean like by, if you. You have to tweet to earn it? Yeah, you haven't really earned it. It's like I have a house that I have the keys to, but I never go inside of. So I think you know that for the, that I am like a very regular Twitter user. I am a very, I'm a power user, I would say.

I use it a lot. Yes, there are times during the workday that we're like, is Alex tweeting right now? Alex, pay attention. Stop tweeting. Come on. I sound like I'm talking to a puppy. When I, when that's happening, I have like an idea that's like, that's like shoe horns. I thought they were called trumpets or something.

And I have to tweet, like I suddenly have to tweet it, you know? Yeah. So, Fia, today I have a story for you about a Twitter account that I've gotten extremely interested in because it's somehow able to defy the rules of Twitter. Like, it shouldn't be able to exist. And this story is a super tech support. A bunch. I'm very excited. I'm going to be honest, you sound a little morose.

Oh, no, no. What is better than, like, just listening to you tell a story and not having to do any other work? Is that what you think this is? Yes. You don't have to do any of the lifting here? I've shown up. Tell me a story. I will enjoy it.

Okay. Well, we got an email from a listener named Ian. Mm-hmm. And the email started, this one will knock your socks off. So I was immediately intrigued. And it was about this strange Twitter account that he discovered. So I gave him a call. Hi, Ian.

Hello. How are you? Ian is a student at Louisiana State University. What are you majoring in? Physics and astronomy. Oh, man, that's... That gives me heart palpitations. It reminds me of like...

It gives me heart palpitations. If I can be honest with you, the one time I cheated on a test in college was in astronomy, because I knew I was going to fail if I didn't look at the paper of the person next to me. I was like, I was like, I went into astronomy and I was like, this is going to be awesome. We're going to learn about the atmosphere of other planets, space travel. And all it is is like the math of pinpointing objects in like a universe that's perpetually moving. Yeah. Well, here's the question, though. Did he pass the test?

I passed. I did great on the test because it wasn't my answer. Okay. Great. So you wrote into us, and I'm wondering if you can just tell me a little bit about, like, that your experience of finding the account that you contacted us about. Sure. Okay. So this account is a Twitter account with absolutely no Twitter handle.

It shows the at, like, it's in front of every other Twitter handle, but there's nothing after that and there's no name. So, you know, like my username on Twitter is A. Goldman. So the handle, not the, not the name that shows up like... Not the display name, because my display name is Alex Goldman. My username is A. Goldman. At A goldmund. And this person's username is just at. There's just an at there. Just an ad. It's like the rest of it had vanished.

Right. Can you explain the way you found it? Yeah. So the at account had promoted one of his tweets. and there was... They paid money for people to find it? Yeah, yeah. And another Twitter account that is the sole purpose of taking screenshots

of really weird promoted tweets and then posting that on Twitter had found that tweet and then in the thread under that somebody had linked one of the at account's tweets and then from there I found the account. I mean, what's crazy about this account

with no username is that when Ian first emailed me about it, I tried to find it and I couldn't even access it on my computer. Like, Ian included a link in his email, and I kept trying to go to it, but you can't go to it.

It doesn't, like, go to the next screen. It'll just say, like, something went wrong, and you can't get to the tweet. Is this true? Like, could does somebody have the email at gmail.com? I don't think so. How do you email that person? That's the thing. It's like, how do you go to

at's Twitter account? Because for starters, you can't search for them. And, like, If I were to go to the URL for my Twitter account, it's Twitter.com slash A-G-O-L-D-M-D, A-G-O-D-M-D. If you have no username, what do you just go to? Twitter.com slash nothing? Oh, I see. That takes you straight to the main page. Like, it just...

Yes. This Twitter account, like, breaks Twitter. But exists on Twitter. But it still exists. It's sort of like an exclusive club. So if you know somebody that has access to the account, you can have access, but otherwise you will not find this account. So the only way that's... could conceivably find this account is if someone else links to it.

Exactly. Yeah. Basically, there is no way to see this account, just like operating in the wild on Twitter. You can't search it. You can't retweet it. Like, the only way you could stumble upon the account is if someone you follow replies to the account for some reason. Then it will show up in your timeline. I mean, this account to me has the feeling of, like, one of those special, beautiful places that isn't on a map. and you only find out about it because, like, someone heard about it from someone who heard about it from someone.

Like, in my case, I was only actually able to see this account when I took a link that Ian sent me in an email and opened it up on my phone because, for some reason, it did not work on my computer. That's so weird. Yes, for whatever reason, it will not load on a laptop or desktop computer. So it's like a weird little portal glitch. Totally. Wow. And to me, this is like my dream Twitter account. Why?

I mean, as you know, I use Twitter a lot. Mm-hmm. And I do know that. And for whatever reason, quite a few people follow me and read all of the dumb things. Like tens of thousands of people follow you. Pour out of my head, yeah. Is it more than that? Is that it does 100,000 people follow you?

Yeah, it's 100 something. Wow. I mean, but the thing is, like, I'm always tweeting on the pretense that, like, I'm connecting with the world and like, and people are very nice, but it just feels really empty. Yeah. And so sometimes I'm just like really embarrassed of my need for that connection and like my insistence on trying to get it. So I'll just like delete all of my tweets and take Twitter off my phone. But I also have this constant compulsion to be on Twitter for like the tiny

drip of validation that it gives me. So that's why this account would be perfect for me. It's like simultaneously on Twitter and not on Twitter. It's like hard to find and hard to retweet. Like the idea of being this hard to find on Twitter feels really nice to me. That makes sense to me. So it's perfect. So is your theory that like this account belongs to like one of the original employees of Twitter or like Jack Dorsey or like? I had no idea because the thing is that if you finally make it to the account, if you are determined enough to actually make it to the account.

this person, part of the reason that Ian was so interested in it is because whoever is tweeting or whatever is tweeting from this account, the tweets are very weird. Like, they're just random things without context like aerodynamic milk or just tweeting the word live stream. Oh. Like they almost feel like they could be written by a computer. Like a bot? Because they're so weird. Like one thing that this account did for a while was just tweet. Twitter polls. Do you know what a Twitter poll is?

Alex, the way you talk to me, it's like I don't know anything about Twitter, which is fair, but I do, I do know Instagram and everything you're saying, I just go like Instagram. Got it. I'm not so do-do stupid. To be perfectly fair, I know nothing about Instagram. So I don't know if they have polls. I'm surprised you haven't done a poll on Instagram. Because the things you do on Instagram just feel like invading my Instagram with your Twitter. I don't think I've ever liked anything you've posted to Instagram because I just feel like I'm not on Twitter because I'm opting out of like internet Alex. Like I find your internet personality very confusing. Well, I'm sorry. Okay. I like I find your day to day personality very enjoyable. But but some other some other things that I'm just not going to.

I mean, what do you want me to say? I think they're both awesome. No. Okay, keep going. Anyway, the account tweets a bunch of polls. But instead of the options being actual choices, like, what's better? Pony's or horses or whatever. The options will be like 68% and 32%.

And then people can vote on those two percentages. Oh. It's a really bizarre account. Sometimes it feels like it's just taking text from somewhere and like reconfiguring it into non sequiters and tweeting it. But then there are things that feel like, oh, this is totally written by a real person. Like why? Like, well,

I mean, the account posts a lot about soccer, specifically a soccer team in Scotland called Kilmarnock FC. It also retweets an account called The Real LaRoy quite a bit. And I found the account. It belongs to a guy named Martin Leroy. And I am guessing that that is the owner

of the ad account, of the no-name account. Have you tried contacting him and saying, like, hey, what's up with your account? Yeah. So I tried doing that through just tweeting at him, but a lot of people do that. But then the account started following Ian, which was really confusing to Ian because besides him, this account only follows Elon Musk and a YouTuber. At one point, he followed me. And he only follows Vsauce and Elon Musk. So I thought it was really weird that I would be the third. I'm not even verified. So I reached out to him and said, hey, I'm very honored. Thank you. Why are you following me? He had absolutely no idea. And then

he said, sorry to break it to you. Yeah, I'll unfollow you now because I don't really want to follow you. And I tried to ask some more clarifying questions and I never really got an answer. He's a very mysterious guy, really hard to get a hold of. He is mysterious. He doesn't seem interested at all in explaining what's going on. I had sent him a DM and I said like, oh, there's this podcast. I've been listening to it for years, Alex Goldman. I'm sure he's going to want to talk to you. Do you want to talk to him? And I started that message with Hear Me Out. And then about an hour later, he tweeted, Hear Me Out, and he never responded to my message. So I don't know what that means. And then the account blocked him. God. So Ian just wants to know, like, what is this account?

Thank you for meeting with me. I'm really curious to know what you can find. And so I told him, I do my best to figure it out. All right. Take care. Bye, guys. So, of course, the first thing I did was try tweeting at the nameless account. Like, hey, will you please do an interview with me? Which didn't work at all. Like, the account never responded.

So I looked up that guy, Martin Leroy, who I think owns the account. And I found an account of his on another website, a website where he, like, sells T-shirts that he designs. Okay. And so I sent him a message there, and he did not reply. And, you know, I was getting very frustrated. Yeah. Because I just wanted to know, like, how do you get this account? Can I get one of my own?

And they were stonewalling me. But there was a person who saw me tweeting at the no-name account asking for an interview. This guy named Austin Burke. Test, test. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Wow. I've never had someone give such an amazing sound test before. He lives in Lansing, Michigan.

He works for like a web hosting company. What I do is I work on our internal systems to find ways to make them break in testing so that they don't break in the real world. That sounds kind of fun. I mean, I'd like to have a job where I try and. and break stuff all the time. Austin said that coming across this account, he was immediately intrigued. This is the kind of thing that I lived for you.

You put a mystery in front of me, and like, I will dive into it. I will drop everything else that I'm doing and just dive into it. He came to me with like a level of comprehensive knowledge of the way Twitter works because of this account that was like genuinely surprising to me.

Here's the thing about that account with no username. Okay. It isn't, it isn't the only one. When you say it isn't the only one, tell me a little more. How many are we talking? Well, at first I found five or six. And then I started looking a little harder.

And that five or six went up to almost 2000. And while I haven't been able to get all the IDs for them, it's looking like that might be even closer to 20,000. Wait, so you were focused on one, but there are many? Yes. which was exciting to me because Martin's account wasn't getting back to me. And I was like, well, if there's thousands of these, then maybe I could talk to someone else with one of these magic accounts. But if none of them have usernames, like, how do you know, how do you differentiate? Like, how do you know which one you're reaching out to or like if you're just like writing the same one over and over again?

So when I go to the Twitter website, I'm going to look up an account by like the username, like A. Goldman or Fia Bannon or whatever. But in addition to the username, Twitter tracks each account by giving it a unique number. That's how you can change your username and still have all your old tweets. Or in this case, how it's possible to have no username and still have a Twitter account. Right, because it's a computer that's following things, it just thinks about things as numbers. It doesn't care that you're Alex Goldman. Right. And so Austin was like very helpful because he knew how to look up Twitter accounts by their unique.

numbers. All right, let's take a look here. So we were looking at this massive Excel spreadsheet of accounts with no username, and I'm like reading off the unique number for each account to Austin. Let's do the next one. Five, eight, three, five. And Austin has this account called a Twitter developer account. You can apply with Twitter so that you can do sort of like special searches on their data. And he would look up the number that I read to him and then tell me, it's almost certainly a bot account. Okay, so yeah, it's auto-tweeting newsworthy stuff. And we were able to figure out that, like, out of the thousands of accounts that exist with no usernames, only six of them had tweeted in 2021. But they were all bots, just like tweeting random links to articles

or some other inane crap, with the exception of one account, which seemed to be active, and actually being used by a human being. And that was the one that Ian found. I think it's pretty amazing that the one real one is the one that you've been looking for. Yeah, I know. I mean, but also no one would ever notice the ones that aren't real, right? Don't diminish the magic. And, you know, like, I'm getting super frustrated. I'm like, you know, we still have no, there's still no real information on how to contact this guy.

Like, he's not getting back to me. So at the end of May, we have this team meeting of everyone working on the story. It's me, Lisa, Jessica, Jessica, Han. and Tim. And we're all like, okay, what do we do? How do we get this guy? And I mean, we're getting desperate. So we start entertaining our editor, Tim Howard's total bong hit ideas.

The best guy. Yeah, absolutely. Or the other possibility is Alex figures out some sort of way to do a non-creepy Valentine thing related to the Kilmarnock football club and then sends that in like an email. And you like tweet the VATTS. Valentine at him? I could. I could.

I'm sure. And while we're throwing these ideas around, like, ways to get this account's owner to reply to me, producer Jessica Young, she has this sudden realization why this person is not replying. She was like, Alex, didn't you deactivate your Twitter? And I was like, yeah, I did because I had actually deactivated my account at the beginning of April. And so Jessica, who knew that I had de-activated my account. activated my Twitter account was like, are you tweeting at them from? What account are you tweeting at them from? And I was like, well, and I was like, uh, and she was like, are you tweeting at them from the reply all account? And I was like, no. She was like, are you tweeting at them from your band's account?

So I have an account for my band, which has like 500 followers. Doesn't have a picture of my face on it. Wow. Okay. So you weren't tweeting. Oh, what's your band's name? Your band? You don't know that we're called Slow Fonds. We? Who's the we? Me and me, it's me. I mean, I'm called slow font. Slow fawns is plural. Well, it shouldn't be plural. You're a slow fawn.

What's on that Twitter account? How many tweets do you have? Is it all just like, listen to this synth sound? It sounds like a fart. I mean, a Twitter account is kind of like a combination of jokes that I tell, um, uh, music and just like totally. non sequiters. Here, let me send you the Twitter. Okay,

I got it. I wish she'd don't Alipa. Androids delight floating further from the future I day by day. You're reading my tweets just right now because I think people probably are thinking you're just

having a stroke. And you only first started tweeting here in April. So you only made this account a couple months ago. Right. And Jessica, I think, understandably, was like, what are you doing?

Why are you tweeting from that account? Oh. And you were like, why isn't this working? I'm so frustrated. You sound really disappointed to me. You sound so disappointed. It feels like, yes, this is the kind of thing that, like,

is frustrating. That, like, nobody knew to ask. They all thought you were tweeting from an account with, like, lots of people. and instead you were doing it from such a weird place. You're so weird, Alex. So, you know, right then and there, I made the decision that, like, the only way to solve this problem would be that I, to tweet at the mystery account from my personal account.

So I reactivated, and it still had all my followers. But my timeline was totally blank because I deleted everything. And I was like, how am I going to get this guy's attention? Because it still seems weird that I don't. have anything on my account. Right. And then I was like, well, this Martin Leroy person who I feel like must run this account, he's definitely a shit poster because he posts, you know, dumb, goofy stuff all the time.

Okay. So I immediately started tweeting. Your normal stuff. My normal stuff. My first tweet was, Enya, I've hardly even begun you. That's pretty good. As your stuff goes, I like it. And then Chewbacca, more like spin.

front you. No. Well, okay. And then immediately, like within the hour, I was back into my worst attention-seeking Twitter behavior. Like, at one point, I quote tweeted an article from this website called BGR, and the article said, the tweet said, your future sex robot could be hacked and programmed to murder you. And I tweeted, I don't even have a current sex robot.

No, nothing? I had no reaction. But, you know, I mean, I spent the next several hours after that tweet, just like checking my notifications to see how that tweet was doing. Did it get a good reaction? It did. People loved it. Really? Yeah. But, I mean, it just felt like a total relapse into my old habits.

Yeah. Like, refreshing all day long, during work, after work, after the kids went to bed. Like, it was just, what I want. Like, my dream is to stop having the experience of having members of my family talking to me while I'm checking Twitter and having to look up and go, huh? Can you say that again? That feels pretty bad. Yeah. I would like to be a little more present.

It's like you'd quit smoking and then you had a cigarette and then you were like, I'm back to having a pack a day. Right. And I was very mad about it. I mean, like, mostly mad at myself about it for, like, falling right back into my old tweeting habits. But, I mean, at the same time, I felt like if I ever need to contact anyone else, I'm going to need to have this account up again. Yeah. So you just, you felt the, like, you felt cornered.

You were, yeah. That's sad. I know. But I got in touch with Martin. The next day after I reactivated my account, I tweeted at the no-name account. And within a couple hours, it replied and said, I'll send you an email. After the break, the man with no-name. So the day after I reactivated my personal Twitter account, the owner of the no-name account got back to me.

And it was definitely not the master hacker I'd been expecting. So my name's Martin, and I am nobody of note, really. Well, I live in the Northeast Finkland. I'm obviously originally from Scotland. And I just happened across a Twitter account, which had no username for a very long period of time. So when this account with no username fell into the hands of this self-described nobody of note, he was in a very different part of his Twitter life journey than me. Like, well, I had spent the past couple of years trying to wean myself off the need for Twitter validation. Martin has been trying to figure out how to become Twitter famous.

Okay. And it seems like the account just like fell into his hands almost as if like by divine providence. It was like one of many accounts that he has, like his fifth or sixth or seventh or something. He's not really sure. And he was going through the process of signing up. And I was typing into the section where you pick your username. I was typing in random just names of what I could select and see. if they were available or not.

I don't know if it still does, but a tick was coming up next to it or a cross was coming up to say whether it was available or not. And to the best of my knowledge, what happened was that I had deleted the field. The field was empty, but the tick was there to say

that it was an acceptable username. So I pressed next. And that was it. That's all it took. And that was it. That's all it took. So I got in touch with Twitter and I was like, hey, how was Martin able to create this account?

And they were like, there was a temporary bug in the code. And a lot of people made accounts like this. But what they also told me was like, these accounts don't work as like normal accounts are intended to work. Like, they're very buggy. And so pretty much everybody who got one was like, well, this doesn't have a username and it's impossible to use. I'm not going to use it. Right. Except for Martin.

Yeah, except for Martin. because Martin got this idea in his head like anytime he like replied to someone or someone posted a screenshot of his weird account and other people noticed it they were like oh this thing is awesome this is such a weird cool account I want to make sure I'm following it so he was collecting followers

he was collecting followers and it didn't matter how bad his tweets were the account just like had its own pull it just felt to Martin like it could be huge specifically I was trying to hit over 30,000 followers because according to in the UK according to the advertising standards agency, if you have over 30,000 followers in a social media platform, you are legally a celebrity.

So that was my aim. I just wanted to be over 30,000 followers, and then I wasn't bothered. Why did you want your Twitter account to be legally a celebrity? I just wanted to be able to say I am, technically, a celebrity, even though no one's ever heard of me and actually knows who I am. Martin basically found the narrowest and most unglamorous path to celebrity I've ever heard of. I had to look this up, but this board in the UK that's actually called the Advertising Standards Authority made a ruling that said any account with over 30,000 followers counted as a celebrity for their purposes.

And so that's what Martin was aiming for. Right. But the first hurdle to Martin's plan was the account itself because it's not only hard to find. it's like impossible to use and is always breaking in sort of new and different ways. For a very long period of time, I couldn't see my own tweets. So I would tweet, then I wouldn't be able to see it again. So I would have to then log into my main account to see the replies to my tweets. And then if I wanted to reply to one of those, I would have to copy the link that I got from my main account,

sign into my other, sign into the nameless account. So complex. to get to the reply to reply to it. So there was a big period of time where I wasn't replying to people very much because it was a bit of a lengthy process. Martin started developing other strategies to up his exposure, like replying to tweets by Elon Musk, which would usually get him some followers. But the most successful thing he tried, which was originally how he got the attention of Ian, who is our listener, is a sponsored tweet. And the tweet that Martin promoted said, quote, I seem to have lost my username. Can anyone help, please?

That's pretty cute. And it worked. In April, he ended up hitting 30,000 followers. He's a celebrity. He's a celebrity. He's made it. He has, you know, 30,000 people listening to every sort of Dada-esque joke he wants to make. But, like, Martin's moment in the sun was sadly very, very brief.

because like just a couple months ago this weird thing started to happen where any time he changed a setting on his account like if he changed his Twitter bio or opened or closed his DMs anything like that for the next couple minutes he'd have a username what would it be

just complete gibberish numbers and letters then he disappeared very very quickly and I was like right what happened there that was very strange and then on the afternoon of May 22nd he made a change to one of the settings on his account. And another one of these gibberish usernames appeared.

But this time it's stuck. And it hasn't gone away. And so Martin now, instead of having a Twitter account with no username, has a Twitter account with the username, OJ-A-K-S-S-S-F-V-3-7-S-M-V-I. So I've since learned why Twitter had to, in that moment, take the no-name account away. Okay.

I talked to a former Twitter engineer whose name is Lisa Phillips. And her job at Twitter was to make sure as Twitter scaled, as it got bigger, it wouldn't break from all the people on it, basically. And while she never encountered this particular account when she worked there, when I told her about it, she was like, oh, I could see why that was a nightmare for engineers to deal with. Because what Martin doesn't know is that because this account is so fundamentally broken, even the smallest interactions with it can generally. generate errors that Twitter's engineers have to fix. Let's say you're gaining 10,000 followers every minute or whatever, you know, a celebrity or something. You have to update each one of those followers to show that they follow that person and the counts for each of them. There's a lot of tasks that have to happen when you start thinking about how to interact between Twitter accounts.

So yeah, I think once he started getting followers, it probably triggered errors. Wow. So every time he does anything, they are like notified. They know about it. They get error messages that may or may not directly point to his account. Like it's the Twitter implied that it took some time to figure out how, what was going on. But these errors would pile up until they had to be dealt with by Twitter engineers. And Lisa said that as the account started to grow, there would be more and more errors.

And so the engineers would eventually have to find out what was causing them. And I told her, like, well, he did do a promoted tweet, and that promoted tweet got him a bunch of new followers. He paid for a sponsored post. No. And he was able to? He was as surprised as you are. So that was the...

So he was. Yeah, he was. He got that attention. Probably those errors flew through the roof. and yeah, he got triggered. That's really interesting. He probably could have just kept with that username for a really long time. It was like his very quest for fame that undid the thing that made him special.

He flew too close to the sun. That's exactly what I said. He's Twitter's Icarus. Yeah. What does it feel like to be the part of the rest of us rabble these days? Sad. This seems to tweet anything now. It's like, dude, you've got it.

username. It's like, yeah, no. Like, I've got the 38-something thousand followers, like, what do I do now? Because they're there, because I was weird. Now I'm not weird. So, what do I do with it now?

I'm at a loss, really. You're still tweeting. I'm still tweeting, but it's... Has your heart gone out of a bit? A little bit. Like, it's just, it's not special anymore. Twitter's really just lost it

shine for Martin. which I can relate to. What about you, Alex? Do you still have your Twitter account? Did you get rid of it? Nope. It's still up. I'm still tweeting.

Still feeling bad. It sounds so ridiculous when I say it. It's like, I'm sure there are a million people listening to this being like, just stop tweeting. Yes. But it's very hard for me. I'm sorry. Am I allowed to get rid of it again? Yes, absolutely.

You don't need to ask me. Just do whatever you want. Your job does not require you to have a Twitter account. You need to be creative enough that you can book people, you can use the white pages and book people without it. And you can't try to book people from a creepy account that only posts like weird synth music. But like, I don't think it's a creepy account. I think you're a very smart person that I don't think Slophan is your answer. But I think that like you can figure out other ways to connect with the world, right?

Yeah. Yes. So you're rolling just to be clear. The record button is red. Okay. It's the best I can say. So, Fia, we last talked on Thursday of last week. Yes, and now it is Tuesday.

And I just wanted to let you know that Saturday morning, I did deactivate my Twitter account. I was about to go, I was like on my way to a weekend trip to Sarah's family to see a nephew get christened. And I wanted to like, I was like, I was like, I bet that if I have this thing on, I'll probably compulsively check it during downtime and just be like Sarah's weird, rude husband who doesn't talk to anybody. So I'd rather be Sarah's not rude husband who doesn't talk to anybody. So I deactivated my Twitter account and immediately went outside. Yes. Can you show me how you go across the monkey bars? You never catch me.

You never catch me. And played with Polly on a little jungle gym we have in the backyard. Whoa, look at you. You're hanging. And I had this moment where I was just like, oh, I'm fine. I'm not missing out on anything by not using Twitter. You seem really happy. Yeah. And Twitterless.

Oh, it feels so good. This episode of Reply All was produced by Jessica Young, Lisa Wang, and Hannah Chin with production assistance from Nor Gill. It was edited by Tim Howard. additional help from the rest of the reply-all crew, Anna Foley, Damiano Marquetti, Emmanuel Jochi, and Fia Bena. We are hosted by Emmanuel Jochi and me, Alex Goldman. The episode was mixed by Rick Kwan with fact-checking by Isabel Cristo. Music in this episode by Breakmaster Cylinder, Mariana Romano, Luke Williams, and Tim Howard.

Special thanks this week to Brian Haggerty, Mark Mims, Matt Dobbin, and Andrew Signor. Also, we are always on the lookout for more super tech supports. If there is a problem that is so big that you have no way to solve it, and it is having a real effect on your life, please email us at reply all at gillardmedia.com. Thank you for listening, and we will see you in two weeks.