Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Georgia Hampton: Nice save.
Mike Rugnetta: But we but we ask the hard questions here on
Neverpost. Jason Oberholzer, Neverpost executive producer,
has a dog.
Jason Oberholtzer: I do.
Mike Rugnetta: An Australian Shepherd named Hank.
Jason Oberholtzer: This is true.
Mike Rugnetta: But regardless, I am gonna say retriever. Oh.
Georgia Hampton: You
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Oh, that's I knew that I should've Yeah. Did. This
is my band.
Georgia Hampton: That's amazing.
Mike Rugnetta: And Jason has told great stories about how
they are tiny little jerks. Well,
Georgia Hampton: yeah. Oh my god.
Jason Oberholtzer: I love wild little bullies. And once you get
into that, it's hard to like other things.
Georgia Hampton: You with just like a fleet of ducks. Oh my
god.
Jason Oberholtzer: My minions.
Mike Rugnetta: Okay. Georgia Hampton, never post producer. A
cat person. Yes. Confirmed.
Respect to his majesty, King Beef.
Hans Buetow: Yes.
Mike Rugnetta: Georgia. I do not know. Have you ever had a dog?
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. I actually did grow up with dogs.
Mike Rugnetta: Okay. So don't tell me what they were. Okay.
I'm gonna guess. Spaniel.
Georgia Hampton: Oh. Very regal.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
Georgia Hampton: That's not correct.
Jason Oberholtzer: Over two.
Georgia Hampton: But I would be shocked if you just out of the
gate got mine, which is shipper key.
Mike Rugnetta: Oh, sure. Yeah. The screeching dog.
Georgia Hampton: I like them because they look like little
bats.
Jason Oberholtzer: They do look like bats.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Hans Buetow: Yes. Alright. He's a he's a Shih Tzu Poodle mix.
Shih Tzu. A Shih Okay.
Mike Rugnetta: So he's smart. Sure. Okay. I'm gonna say
favorite breed, Weimaraner.
Hans Buetow: You're not far off. Nice breed.
Mike Rugnetta: See, I've known Hans the longest out of all of
you. So Fair enough. Weimaraner.
Hans Buetow: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. I see.
Hans Buetow: Both both Germans. The guy named Hans loves the
German.
Mike Rugnetta: And you've you've met Jules. Right?
Hans Buetow: Oh, yes.
Jason Oberholtzer: Mike, as the parent of Jules, who is a
muttish sort of German or
Mike Rugnetta: German German What is a Jules? American bully.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Woah.
Georgia Hampton: Okay. American bully. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: A very strange mix. Yeah. That is a very weird
dog.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Georgia Hampton: Woah. I
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Jason Oberholtzer: That's I I
Mike Rugnetta: 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
Georgia Hampton: I love that.
Mike Rugnetta: Who can run like 75 miles an hour. Yes. Which is
occasionally harrowing, but always impressive.
Jason Oberholtzer: Jack was the best.
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Georgia Hampton: That's just a dog built to wear a turtleneck.
Hans Buetow: Right? It's true. Yeah.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Love it. Okay. Well, that's
Mike Rugnetta: 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
Jason Oberholtzer: The end. The end. See you next week.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Hans Buetow: Lot of nods. Lot of nods.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Hans Buetow: The skills is, I mean, I appreciate the
generosity of thinking that that's what I've done.
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Georgia Hampton: When is the right time to start crying?
Mike Rugnetta: I mean, honestly, you might wanna just get it out
of
Georgia Hampton: the way. Yeah. Pause the recording.
Hans Buetow: Or not. Just keep going. Or not. Just record
through it. That's how I get through.
I record through it.
Georgia Hampton: Oh, god.
Mike Rugnetta: 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
Georgia Hampton: this is going Oh, no. Mike, no.
Jason Oberholtzer: Delete phone.
Mike Rugnetta: Scroll down until you see notifications.
Jason Oberholtzer: Mhmm.
Mike Rugnetta: Sounds and haptics. Mhmm. Focus. Mhmm.
Screen time.
Jason Oberholtzer: No. Yes.
Mike Rugnetta: What's your daily average? I will go first. Minus
two hours and fifty six minutes.
Georgia Hampton: I don't feel like that's that bad.
Hans Buetow: Five hours eighteen minutes. I can explain why, but
I wanna hear yours.
Jason Oberholtzer: I am right there with you. I am at between
five and six hours a day on this device.
Georgia Hampton: I really expected mine to be a lot higher
than this. Minus three hours and twenty eight minutes.
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Hans Buetow: 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.
Georgia Hampton: The truth comes out.
Hans Buetow: 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.
Georgia Hampton: Wow.
Hans Buetow: So, like, using it, yes. Using it, no.
Georgia Hampton: No. I imagine that out of all of us then,
Hans, you might be at the lowest in terms of tactics.
Hans Buetow: Actually probably am of the most time that I spend
interacting with my phone.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Georgia, how are feeling?
Georgia Hampton: 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
Mike Rugnetta: be low? Back in the weeks, is it roughly that
amount every week?
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: I think I spend almost the entirety of the three
hours on my phone reading the news.
Georgia Hampton: Interesting.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Hans Buetow: And when you say that, Mike, read the news,
you're going to individual publications and reading the
paper?
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Jason Oberholtzer: 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
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: This is another segment for another time. I
think we have to reckon with how everyone on TikTok is an idiot.
Oh, well,
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: I only wanna see clips of the blacklist, and
that's it.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Hans Buetow: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Georgia Hampton: Oh my god. Constantly, I'm having this,
like, fight with TikTok specifically.
Mike Rugnetta: Because you're also fighting with yourself.
Right? I know. And same thing.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. That is around the time
Mike Rugnetta: Segment again.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: It rules. It's great.
Jason Oberholtzer: So, Georgia, why do you think that you have
this reticence to embrace something you're interested in?
Georgia Hampton: I don't know. I feel like maybe it's because I
want to force myself to do that myself.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Interesting. Interesting. Okay. Okay.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: K.
Jason Oberholtzer: I go there to have fun and I'd never do.
Georgia Hampton: 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
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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
Mike Rugnetta: No Anderson Cooper.
Georgia Hampton: No. I'm Anderson, it's Betty Bye time.
Mike Rugnetta: Stay out of my house.
Georgia Hampton: Get out of here.
Jason Oberholtzer: Boop him on the nose.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Bop.
Hans Buetow: 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
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah.
Hans Buetow: Generally how I stay abreast of, like, oh, these
are the three things that are happening in the conversation
today.
Mike Rugnetta: Pause. Everybody pick up your phone again. K.
Open the same page.
Jason Oberholtzer: This always goes well. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: How many daily notifications?
Hans Buetow: Holy sharks. Well, it's fewer than I remember.
Jason Oberholtzer: Around 250 a day.
Hans Buetow: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Hans, that's very reasonable. Yeah.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. Mine's I'm looking at yesterday's since
today wouldn't really be enough. 93?
Mike Rugnetta: Mine's an average of a 70. So it seems like we've
maintained our rough order here. Yeah.
Hans Buetow: Mike, how many pickups do you have
Jason Oberholtzer: per day?
Mike Rugnetta: That's actually a good question. Let me look.
Hans Buetow: I'm pretty consistent hovering between
seventy and eighty.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. I'm at 84.
Mike Rugnetta: 80 eight.
Hans Buetow: Okay. That's interesting. So that means that
you're spending more time on each of the individual pickups.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Hans Buetow: Oh, this makes a
Georgia Hampton: ton of sense.
Mike Rugnetta: To check on
Hans Buetow: 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?
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Jason Oberholtzer: And the first thing you do every time you pick
up your phone is hop on signal and chat with Marc Andreessen?
Course.
Hans Buetow: Oh, man.
Georgia Hampton: No. It's always Instagram. Always Instagram or
messages, but usually Instagram.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Hans Buetow: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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 Buetow: Hans, you
Georgia Hampton: wanna take the floor? Hans. Please. You
Mike Rugnetta: call Mike real quick? Can you get my moral Get
Georgia Hampton: Mike on this one.
Hans Buetow: Okay. So
Mike Rugnetta: first, just tell him to post his location. I only
wanna talk. So
Hans Buetow: 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
Mike Rugnetta: since you've a changed.
Hans Buetow: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Georgia Hampton: Well, the Internet is a series of tubes.
Mike Rugnetta: Oh, there it is. We did. Yeah. Just shaving off
the edges of every story that goes through.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: So I think, like, that's maybe the heart of my
question is, like, is that imagined person informed? Mhmm.
Jason Oberholtzer: So I think, like, in some ways, we are the
Michael Barbaros of our own lives.
Georgia Hampton: Wow. Each of us has a Michael Barbaro within us.
Jason?
Mike Rugnetta: That hurts.
Georgia Hampton: He's in there, and he's trying to get out.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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,
Mike Rugnetta: Literally. We
Jason Oberholtzer: just do our best to rise to the occasion and
say, I'm informed. Here's what I know.
Mike Rugnetta: I open my mouth and like the mother xenomorph
from alien Oh my god. A Michael Barbaro head comes at us.
Georgia Hampton: Tiny little mouth.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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,
Mike Rugnetta: ah. Hearing hearing you say that that way is
both just completely exhausting and, like, staring into a
mirror.
Georgia Hampton: 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?
Mike Rugnetta: Well, or the opposite. And TikTok is just
like, hey. Don't you want another chainsaw?
Georgia Hampton: Yes. It's like both of those that get this damn
time.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Georgia Hampton: Hans.
Hans Buetow: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Jason and I are both very excited to hear what
comes next. Talk about us.
Hans Buetow: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: And everything was fine.
Hans Buetow: Mean, I
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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
Mike Rugnetta: house, we believe in science.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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
Mike Rugnetta: I can't help but notice
Georgia Hampton: that you're
Mike Rugnetta: being hypocritical.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Hans Buetow: Yeah. It's Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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
Georgia Hampton: wrong. Guys. But
Jason Oberholtzer: I'm just gonna stick it here in the
timeline for fun.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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?
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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?
Hans Buetow: 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
Mike Rugnetta: hurt you.
Hans Buetow: 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
Mike Rugnetta: the thing that Ryan talked about, not knowing
what's going on around you.
Hans Buetow: Ryan Roderick.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Jason Oberholtzer: So
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Hans Buetow: 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?
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Hans Buetow: Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: You when you connect local people via Yeah.
These, like, global media technologies, they turn into
monsters.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Georgia Hampton: Well, I mean, the Internet is not a
meritocracy, and I think we are seeing that in so many very
miserable ways.
Jason Oberholtzer: Who misses me in an astronaut suit behind you
with a gun?
Mike Rugnetta: Well, yeah. Exactly. Like You're telling me
thing with biggest number is most popular Yeah. Is maybe
rigged? Well,
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Talk to your Talk
Georgia Hampton: 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
Hans Buetow: Go to a city council meeting.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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
Georgia Hampton: Oh, jeez.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Hans Buetow: 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,
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Hans Buetow: When my head hits the keyboard. There
Mike Rugnetta: 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
Georgia Hampton: bed. Yes.
Mike Rugnetta: Like, he always finds me at the right time.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Time to hit the old dusty trail.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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
Mike Rugnetta: end of the rope, you know? No. Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer: 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.
Hans Buetow: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.