What's going on with Elon Musk?

23:13Later, desperate to escape South Africa, he moves to Canada for college. He doesn't have much money, but tuition's cheap because his mom's a Canadian citizen. He moves to the U.S. after. He and his brother start an early internet company, Google Maps before Google Maps. It gets acquired, makes him his first fortune. He plows almost all of that money into another big idea, an internet bank. That company eventually becomes PayPal. Still a dreamer, he plows much of that money into something stranger. He wants to get a rocket to Mars. He thinks that America has lost the ability to dream, to explore, and he wants to revive that dream.

23:49Many newly minted multimillionaires before him have tried to do this. Most have lost a lot of money. Elon stays the course. actually managed to build a privately made rocket ship that takes a payload to the International Space Station and returns.

24:06Oh, also, at the same time he's doing all this, he's leading a completely revolutionary electric car company. Not only do they make electric cars seem cool, they reimagine the car industry itself. No dealerships, these are cars you buy on the internet. Futuristic-seeming machines, almost like driving an iPhone. In this alternate version of Earth, in 2018, a Thai soccer team still gets stuck in an underwater cave. And cable news exists. That moment holds the world's attention for about the same amount of time. Elon Musk, industrialist, inventor, and attention seeker, probably does give an interview where he suggests he'd love to help.

24:45But when he's rebuffed, even if it stings the part of him that desires to be at the center of every story, he has no outlet in which he can impulsively call a heroic diver pedo guy. And because he can't do that, he can't get the applause the cheap shot will summon. And because he can't do that, maybe he sits in his office, and instead of picking a series of increasingly absurd, debasing fights, he just does his job. He dreams up impossible ideas, some of them actually impossible, but many of them quite useful. In this world, Elon Musk makes electric cars and rocket ships. He does not sink a significant amount of his fortune and seemingly a lot of his attention into the purchase of Twitter, a website that, on our Earth, reporter Casey Newton once really liked using and writing about.

25:38So Twitter has been the company that I have loved covering the most ever since I started writing about social networks because it has always been both so broken and also the most fun website. And covering the story of this thing that's only ever succeeded in spite of itself, and yet was still at risk of dying at any moment, was just the greatest thrill ride I've been on in this business. Wait, and can you, because I feel like when you say Twitter is broken, everybody nods their heads immediately. But when you are talking about it specifically in this context, do you mean that relative to its influence, it never was very financially viable?

26:15How was it broken in your mind? Well, there's this great Mark Zuckerberg line that Twitter was a clown car that crashed into a gold mine. And truer words have never been spoken. At no point during the building of early Twitter did any of the founders have any idea what they were building. They just thought, what if you could put status messages on text messages like we used to on our AOL instant messenger. And it somehow became the beating heart of the global conversation. And most of the features that we use now were just invented by the users of the site. The users invented hashtags, the users invented retweets, the users invented threads.

26:58At any point, someone at Twitter could have had an idea. They never did. They never shipped an idea. It was just like, what are the users doing? Can we turn that into a product? So there's just something very beautiful about that to me. And then, you know, trying to turn it into a business because they had no real ideas. The business was always bad. The leadership was always bad. This company just did nothing but trip over its shoelaces for 10 plus years. And yet every day I opened the website and I was like, this is the best website. So there was just, there was something magical about that. There was something magical about it.

27:34A website that like an awkward silence or the city of Montreal was somehow actually better because it was broken. But in spring of 2022, things begin to change. By now, Elon Musk has become one of Twitter's most popular accounts. He has tens of millions of followers on the same leaderboard as Obama and Taylor Swift. He's also now the richest man in the world with a net worth around$200 billion. And on April 14th of that year, Elon makes an offer to buy Twitter. So take me to the moment where he fully walks into your neck of the woods. What was that like for you? I was not thrilled about it. Jack Dorsey, one of the co-founders and former CEO of the company, had been beating this drum for a while saying Twitter cannot be a public company.

28:30Twitter is a precious and essentially holy idea. and to corrupt it by making it a for-profit capitalist enterprise is unthinkable. And Jack said he regretted that he'd ever done it. And it was like the great tragedy of his life was that he had turned Twitter into a company. Now, of course, it wasn't a very good company. And activist investors had spent the past year trying to chase him off the board and out of his job. The problem was not that Twitter could not be salvaged as a public company. The problem was that Jack Dorsey was a terrible CEO. This was the one idea that Jack Dorsey never entertained was that he was that, you know, Taylor Swift style.

29:05It's like, hi, I'm the problem. It's me. That was Jack Dorsey. Okay. So he's like, I got it. Who can I get? And Jack Dorsey has always had the biggest crush on Elon Musk, you know, in the way that. Oh, because for all of the reasons that we talked about at the start of this conversation, Elon was this tinkerer who'd been inspired by sci-fi as a kid and who grew up. and was making it real. And what did Elon do with all of his free time during the day? He tweeted. And for Jack Dorsey, it was just like the greatest validation because here you have the greatest inventor of the age and he's obsessed with the product that Jack Dorsey co-created.

29:47I see, I see. So when they would have like an all hands meeting at Twitter, sometimes Elon Musk would beam in over video chat and answer questions and talk about his use of the product. Give us some direct feedback, critique. What are we doing poorly? We found a video of this online posted in early 2020, a couple of years before Elon's takeover. Jack Dorsey on stage with his back turned to his employees is asking questions of a giant video screen with Elon's face on it. What could we be doing better? And what's your hope for our potential as a service? If you're running Twitter, by the way, do you want to run Twitter?

30:29What would you do? I think it would be helpful to differentiate between real and, you know, like, is this a real, to verify, like a real, not just like verify, but like, is this a real person or is it a bot man or a sort of troll army or something like that? I should say we reached out to Jack Dorsey's company block for comment. We did not hear back. so jack and elon were friendly and later jack reached out to him and said why don't you take this thing over and he got more and more interested in it and you know the actual story of how the acquisition played out was quite crazy at first elon just acquired a stake in twitter without disclosing it the way that he was supposed to then as soon as that was announced he joined the board then basically as soon as he joined the board he said actually i'm just going to buy the whole company.

31:23And then we were off to the races with just absolutely wild ride. And what did you think? What was your theory for what he wanted out of the website then? Why did you think it was happening? Well, at that time, he had started talking more about Twitter's role in society as a bastion of free speech. And Elon had adopted this right wing position that social networks were censoring too much speech and that free speech was essential to a functioning democracy. And he was going to rescue Twitter from what he saw as the encroachment of woke ideology or whatever. You know, the context for this is that after the 2016 election, Twitter and other social networks got a lot of flack for the way that Russians use them to interfere in our election for their failure to police, hate speech, misinformation, and other harms.

32:23And so Twitter had invested a lot in hiring content moderators, developing new policies. When President Trump said something insane and wrong about COVID-19, they would put a label on it. When he said something wrong about the election or mail-in ballots, they would put a label on it. And Elon Musk said, we got to get rid of all of this stuff. And he was pretty explicit about that. And just, you know, given my own position on those subjects, when he started talking about that in the context of taking over Twitter, I thought this is not going to be good. You could tell that what he wanted was to basically, he's like a guy, he's like a guy watching like football on Sunday who's like, I'm going to buy the league so I can be the ref.

32:59And you knew what he wanted out of that. And so you're like, this is, this is not going to be fun for, for me, Casey, a person who doesn't want my Twitter to just be like people screaming about like wokeism and how the vaccines are giving them like 5G or whatever. Right, because you talk to the media and Twitter user, and that's not what their complaint was. I mean, obviously, we do have endless debates over what's the appropriate amount of content moderation to bring to any website, but Twitter users had a long list of, I think, other things they would have rather seen addressed first. Elon just wasn't interested in any of that.

33:30For him, it was a culture war fight from day one.

33:37Elon Musk formally took over the site in October of 2022 and immediately started to dismantle it. Under Elon, celebrities and journalists and brands lost the verification badges that made it hard to impersonate them. Many fled the site. Under Elon, users could pay$8 to get their tweets seen by more people. Predictably, the people you least want to hear from were now the most heard from. And as the site's moderation policies bent to favor more inflammatory speech, advertisers fled. Twitter became an abandoned playground, where it seemed like the only people left were the bullies. An outcome pretty much everyone said they foresaw.

34:15Except, well, I knew of one chronically open-minded tech journalist foolish enough to have entertained the idea that maybe Elon did have some kind of secret plan here. Me. The way my brain works is that if everyone's saying something, I cannot help but be like, well, maybe not. And like, sometimes that's an incredibly valuable skill. And sometimes it makes me look very dumb. Because I was like, I don't know, Elon Musk, I don't agree with him politically. But he has successfully run a bunch of companies. Twitter is not a very well run company. The idea that he could make the site have moderation policies I don't like, but run better.

34:54I was like, maybe, maybe, I mean, maybe. And then watching him just like pile drive it into the ground. Like there's so many times where people are like, I could do a better job than that person. You're like, no, you couldn't. I could have done a better job than that. Like I could have been a McKinsey consultant at Twitter and save them like a lot of money. And I didn't expect it to go that badly that fast. I really didn't. No, look, to some degree, I was with you. In all of these cases, I try to maintain some degree of humility. I've been wrong on a million things covering tech. I was open to the idea that Elon Musk would come in.

35:29I did think that he would have to both keep a good number of Twitter employees who were already there who knew what they were doing and bring in people who had some expertise in running social networks. I thought, essentially, if he brings in the right generals and lieutenants, something could happen. I was open to that possibility. And then from the first week, it just became clear he had no intention of doing any of that. And that's when I gave up on the project. When he fired everybody who worked there who knew what they were doing? Yeah. And then the verification mess that you described was like, oh, he truly has no idea what he is doing.

36:04Because I mean, no one at Twitter at the time thought it was a good idea. I mean, it was a true sort of dictatorship situation where the military warlord just takes over and announces the worst idea, and everyone in the entire community is like, don't. And he's like, we're gonna. And then it blows up massively in the exact ways that everyone told him it was gonna blow up. And he was like, ah, waka waka, you know. It's also hard because there are mistakes that you can't really undo. Like, you can't... You make the website a place people don't want to be. it's weird. It's like it's spoiled in a way that feels I would never have imagined.

36:43I just never would have imagined. Yeah. Irene, so as we're recording this week, here's a thing that happened on Twitter. So Twitter has had a really rough month. Every month has been a rough month since he took over. But some highlights from this month, limiting everyone to viewing 600 tweets a day as an alleged effort to fight bots, preventing people who are logged out from even seeing tweets. And this has created a lot of problems for his new CEO who comes from the advertising world and whose job it is, is to boost advertising on this site that is falling apart. And Elon Musk decides to tweet, hey, here's a really cool interview that Tucker Carlson just did of Andrew Tate.

37:22I'm sorry, I have to play you a clip from this interview that Elon Musk was tweeting about. What do you think of women? I think women are some of the most powerful people on the planet, firstly. A lot of the conversations we're having, most people don't understand that women are the gatekeepers. And women are the ultimate judges. Women are the ultimate judges, especially of sexual access, right? That's Andrew Tate, the manosphere influencer who's currently facing charges of sex trafficking in Romania. If that could be true, then you also understand that women are more susceptible to programming to a degree.

37:53I got called misogynistic by saying that if you sit 100 men and 100 women down in front of propaganda, I believe that women are more likely to believe a lot of that. I think a lot of liberals are female. They're more emotional. And it's easier to convince them of something if you use an emotionally led argument. This goes on for a brisk two and a half hours. And you just look at that and you're like, who is this for? I'm not sure that it's actually for any advertisers. No. And I'm pretty sure it's not for, you know, normal people who want to have a good time on a website.

38:29When we come back, we go to our actual question. What are the top three theories for how Elon Musk went from a guy who might get us to Mars to a person who seems to be spending an extraordinary amount of time on the internet's worst message board?

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40:25Welcome back to the show. So the whole reason I wanted to talk to Casey is because he spends a lot of time talking both with other tech journalists and with people who work at Twitter or used to work at Twitter. And I wanted to know for people with more proximity to Musk, what are the stories they were telling themselves that explained all of this? one thing to say before we get into those theories one explanation some people will float if you start this conversation with them is just that elon musk has asperger's syndrome he has said as much in a saturday night live monologue but i don't know how to respectfully determine how much of a stranger's behavior is due to a complicated form of neurodivergence that expresses itself very differently in different people i just know that saying oh it's asperger's syndrome doesn't really answer any of my questions.

41:13A lot of people are diagnosed with Asperger's, but we really only have one Elon Musk. And his behavior, both his antisocial behavior and his pro-social behavior, feels extraordinary to me in a way that a label that short just doesn't capture. Okay, so delicate paragraph aside, let's get into some theories. Theory number one is just money. Money can make people behave strangely.

42:07like Elon Musk's effectiveness as a leader and that that goes down into the right, you know, it just sort of seems self-evident to me. Yeah. It's also it's sort of interesting to consider Elon Musk. Like we don't have a lot of people who have become that wealthy that fast to be able to say, like, this is what it does to a person. And those people like those people are hard to understand by virtue of the position they're in. Yeah. If you are the CEO of a public company, as Elon Musk is, you are typically extremely careful in what you say because, yeah, being a little bit edgy, like on the margins of some relatively safe questions can have a benefit to you.

42:47But the risk is higher than the reward in a lot of cases, right? Like if you're a true edgelord online and you're the CEO of a public company, you risk alienating your employee base and driving away talent. You risk alienating your customers. You risk pissing off your investors and your shareholders. So there's this whole dimension of things which explains why most CEOs are not edgelords, which is what leads me to believe that it's actually money that is the bigger factor in this equation because the more money you have, the less consequences there are for anything. And so it sort of removes this natural limit on how much of an edgelord you would be.

43:26Because look, I have all sorts of fucking edgy thoughts I never say. I wouldn't even say them to you privately at a party because I'm like, I don't want that out there. Okay. But what if I had a hundred billion dollars? All of a sudden you think I give a fuck what PJ knows about what I said to him at a party? Come at me, bro. And that's the story of Elon Musk. As you're explaining why most CEOs choose to be boring, I'm like, right. Like I forgot, I forgot that CEOs before Elon Musk were supposed to be boring because after him, a lot of them started like Jeff Bezos is trying to be more interesting.

43:57Mark Zuckerberg, feels more comfortable being more interesting like ceos used to be boring and there were social and economic reasons for that it's true that bezos and zuckerberg both have gotten a little more interesting in recent years let's think about how they got more interesting jeff bezos got a girlfriend mark zuckerberg got a hobby those are actually normal things for ceos to do right like elon musk was like i'm going to war with the guy that's trying to save the children in the cave yeah you're right you're right on the scale of ceos becoming quote unquote more interesting it's like he he totally breaks the graph like it's it's a totally totally different thing yeah i think you're right so that's theory number one basically too much money made too fast made elon musk tilt that theory is less interesting to me than theory number two but theory number two is also a bit more nerve-wracking to talk about on a podcast.

44:53Because theory number two is ketamine. Ketamine is a drug that was developed as an anesthetic in the 1960s. It was used on people in surgery. Later, it was used on animals in surgery. And after that, in the 1980s, it started to become popular as a recreational street drug. It's a very strange drug. It has some hallucinogenic properties. It can make users feel like they're in an absurd dream. It can also be addictive. Anyway, June 27th, 2023, the Wall Street Journal publishes this article. It's a large story about CEOs in Silicon Valley taking all kinds of drugs. And the article starts with four words.

45:34Elon Musk takes ketamine. It goes on to say later in the piece, quote, the CEO has told people he microdoses ketamine for depression, and he also takes full doses of ketamine at parties, according to the people who have witnessed his drug use and others who have direct knowledge of it. End quote. Musk, after the article is published, of course tweets that, quote, zombifying people with SSRIs for sure happens way too much. From what I've seen with friends, ketamine taken occasionally is a better option. End quote. Casey Newton was wary of talking about Elon Musk's drug use because he has not personally reported on it.

46:11But we did talk about the journalist reporting. I think adults who want to take recreational drugs can. People should do what they want to do. But what I noticed is that the journal said that he was taking ketamine, micro doses of ketamine to treat his depression and regular doses of ketamine at parties. Like if you're taking a drug therapeutically and recreationally, it's worth asking yourself if that's a good idea. And like ketamine is an interesting drug because it's a drug that like it's a disassociative, which makes the world feel absurd and not real. And I just like, I'll never know. But I really wonder, I really wonder about the effect of that on that person.

46:58Totally. So, you know, maybe let me say a couple of things and say that these are not about Elon Musk. These are just the general observations I would make about people. I think people who talk openly about ketamine use and particularly heavy ketamine use have probably used other drugs. And I would say they probably use other drugs consistently. And I think if I were talking to somebody like that, and they were in some sort of leadership position and their quality of their leadership had deteriorated over time, I would be asking questions about what the long-term effects of drug use had been on that person.

47:32And if I were a shareholder in a company run by such a person, I might have some serious questions. So again, I'm not saying that that's specifically about Elon Musk, but I'm saying that if somebody were in the Wall Street Journal talking about their heavy ketamine usage, those are some of the additional questions that I would be asking. it's also interesting about the weird moment we've gotten to where we accept much weirder behaviors from much more interesting ceos that that kind of like came and went we just like all proceeded because we've all gotten used to a world that's absurdity levels are so high we can't feel anything yeah i mean also it's just like the public conversation around drugs is changing so fast like i am a child of the 80s like i'm a child of dare like when i was nine i was told the worst thing you could do in your life was to smoke marijuana.

48:17And like now we live in a world where you can get ketamine on Instagram. So I'm actually struggling to catch up to this new reality. So that's theory number two, ketamine. Just to say, I did get to talk to one source who speaks to Elon and sees him in person. They don't believe drugs are affecting his leadership. And they said that from their perspective, Elon's as focused and as high performing as he's ever been. That while Twitter is a mess, his other companies do seem to be doing fine. Is there a third theory for what might be going on with Elon Musk? Yeah, the third theory would be that he believes that we're living in a simulation, and so that truly nothing matters.

48:58Obviously, this is my favorite theory, the simulation theory. Please tell me more about the third theory. So in 2016, Musk attends the Code Conference and is being interviewed by Karis Wisher and Walt Mossberg. And at the end, Josh Topolsky, my old boss at The Verge, stands up and asks a question, which is, did he think that our existence was simulated? there's a um sort of a philosophic concept that a sufficiently advanced civilization will be able to create uh a simulation yeah maybe you've answered this before a simulation i've had so many simulation discussions it's crazy okay and musk says quote i've had so many simulation discussions it's crazy and josh says you've thought about this and musk says a lot it got to the point where every conversation was the ai simulation conversation and my brother and i agreed that we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub and i think that's because they spent a lot of time i think i think they spent a lot of time together in hot tubs and so and so then musk says if you assume any rate of improvement at all then games will become indistinguishable from reality even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is Now, let's just imagine it's 10 ,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

50:27And in that case, Musk says that the odds that we are living our lives in what simulation theory people call base reality, you know, which is like the real real. Musk says that the odds there are one in billions. There's a one in billions chance that this is base reality. Oh, OK. What do you think? Well, I think it's one in billions. so musk in 2016 basically says that there is only a one in a billion chance that we are not living in a simulation right now that's more alarming than anything else to me yeah well now peter here's what i have to tell you i've spent a lot of time thinking about the simulation theory this year

51:09and i have to say i find it scarily persuasive but i don't know how much we want to go there no No. Really? No. Here's the thing. No. So one of the things that the AI researchers started doing this year, now that we have these generative AI systems came out, is that they started to try to simulate societies. So there was like a really fun paper. We talked about it on my podcast, Hard Fork, where they kind of set up a town and they just have these characters interact with each other and they gave them kind of a few starting characteristics. And then they just observed what would happen. You know, they sort of wrote some code and saw the characters would talk to each other.

51:42And then one of them decided to run for mayor. And pretty soon, you were like, we're creating a text-based SimCity just based on these large language models, okay? And so why is that interesting? Well, we assume, I think, that those simulations are only going to get better over time. And that if 100, 1 ,000 years go by and we see, as Elon Musk says, some rate of improvement in these simulations, then we should have simulations, potentially, that are just as persuasive as how real life feels to us, okay? So the first question is just, do you accept that, one, we're already running simulations here in what we think is base reality, and two, that those simulations are going to get better?

52:23I believe both those things. So then it's just actually a very short jump from there to, well, what makes you so sure that the base reality that you think you live in, where we're already simulating societies, is just the only one? And I think that's just a hard way to think your way out of. So it doesn't bother me that you're finding the simulation theory more persuasive. Like, that's fine. How should I feel about the idea that someone who wields an enormous amount of power and influence might think that nothing's really happening and he's in a computer program? Totally. And I would just say, I'm simulation theory curious.

53:01I'm not saying I've gone all in. I'm just saying that some of the assumptions that Musk makes in the quotes that I read, I think are okay assumptions to make. But why is it scary? Well, I have been told by someone who speaks to CEOs about these matters that there are a number of CEOs in Silicon Valley who believe fully in the simulation theory hypothesis, and they believe that one reason why you might simulate the world is to understand the interactions between these great historical figures, right? You sort of want to see what would happen if some of the main characters of history went toe to toe in, I don't know, a cage match or a contest to build social networks, you know.

53:46Oh my God. And if you already are suffering from megalomania, you might actually assume that you are the reason that reality is being simulated. That you're the reason why somebody booted up a computer to load Earth-46 and see what would happen if these variables collided. Oh my god. Oh god. So it's like a mix of nothing matters, but also you're very important. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So those are three theories floating around among people whose job it is to try to understand Elon Musk. Again, we outlined these theories in an email to Twitter's press office and got their auto-response, a poop emoji.

54:29This podcast search engine asks questions. And you have to be honest about the questions you have, but might never be able to answer with total certainty. We try to be careful here in speculating about someone else, by being clear about what we do know and what we don't or can't know for sure. ultimately, other people are a mystery. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is a mystery I find more interesting than some other mysteries. We'll probably have more questions about him this year. This week, though, I did have one more question for Casey while I had him on the line. Right now, as we're speaking, Meta, which was once Facebook, has launched Threads, which is working better than I think most people expected.

55:11They've had over 100 million signups. It looks like we might be heading into a world where we have a bunch of different Twitter clones that all kind of coexist forever. It looks like we might be entering into a world where Twitter is no longer the dominant public square of the Jack Dorsey wanted it to be. What do you think happens next? What do you see down the road? I think Twitter is legitimately dying. I think the company will be in bankruptcy proceedings within 12 months. I think the news media will essentially complete its divorce from the website, and I think it will be left to the Tucker Carlson's and Andrew Tate's and Elon Musk's of the world.

55:53So I truly believe that that app has entered a death spiral. I also think that the need that Twitter served for so long to have these public conversations between average people and high-profile people in various capacities still exists. There is still a need to be served. And so we're entering this kind of Cambrian explosion of these apps like we haven't seen since the early days of Twitter. You know, in the early days of Twitter, there were also Twitter clones. Some people might remember plurk. Some people might remember pounce. Almost nobody does, but they existed. And they were just Twitter, okay?

56:34It was just Twitter. And they flopped because Twitter won.

56:41I think something else is going to take its place. Something else is going to become the default. And the fact that a social app from one of the most unpopular companies in Silicon Valley history was able to siphon 100 million people to check out something new within a few days, I think tells you that it's got a pretty good chance. And do you want something to replace Twitter? Absolutely. Look, and not for any high-minded reasons, PJ. It's part of my business. Like, what I do is I write things, and then I need a place where I can go and tell people that I wrote things. And specifically, I need to talk to people who do not pay me money that I wrote something, okay?

57:21And then some of those people will see that and they will think, I'm going to give that man$10. That is a huge part of my life. So I don't care if Mark Zuckerberg makes it. I don't care if Jack Dorsey starts something. Whoever starts something and it works, that's where you can find me, my little lemonade stand, asking you for$10.

57:43Casey Newton. You can support his wonderful, wonderful lemonade stand, which this year was definitely the place to understand Twitter's meltdown at platformer.news. And you should subscribe to his fantastic podcast, Hard Fork. It's a funny, insightful look at our changing internet. I really enjoy it. Also, look for him on Plurk. I don't even know if he has an account there, but I'm just curious. After the break, a recommendation from Search Engine.

58:21Quickly before we go, I got a lot of great emails after our episode last week about finding new music once you're old and irrelevant. Surprisingly concrete suggestions from listeners. Just to share them with you, a lot of people recommended WFMU, the radio station, and specifically the show Wake and Bake with Clay Pigeon, Weekday Mornings. A lot of people emailed about this show. I haven't listened yet. I'm going to check it out. If you listen and you like it, let me know. Other recommendations that I thought were interesting, Soma FM apparently is very good. There's a website called everynoise.com that like maps the music you like generically on a scatterplot and shows other things like it.

59:01And then finally, our editor, Shruti Pinamineni, apropos of last week's episode and this week, wanted to recommend a grime song, Venus Fly, features Janelle Monae. It's really good.

59:35Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me and Shruti Pinnamanani and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. They also fact-checked this week's episode. Theme and sound design by Armin Bazarian. Show art by Ali Moss. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Richard Pirello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey. J.D. Crowley, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Clouser, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

1:00:12If you've listened this far into the credits, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can follow and listen to Search Engine with me, PJVote, now for free on the Odyssey app, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have a question for this show, you can leave a comment on our newsletter at PJVote.com or email me directly at PJVote85 at gmail.com. Those questions are my favorite thing to see on my phone. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.