Should You Leave Twitter?

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1:25Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osman. Hello Marina, how are you this week? I'm very well Anna, how are you? I'm really well, can we start with the big news of the week? Is it to do with how your kitten's settling in? Yeah, she came home in the middle of last week There's still her Lottie, she's called She's not stopped purring since the second we got her home I promise we'll get on to entertainment everyone She's been kept apart from these The two of them are circling each other like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat And by which I'm in the film Heat, rather than the cat thing more news next week as they meet they've had a brief introductory hiss they're aware of each other's existence they are very aware of each other's existence Lisa essentially sits like down stairs looking upstairs the entire time with just an air of slight quizzicality I think she's playing it pretty cool I would say Lottie just wants to play you know Lottie's not going to be the problem here scrappy do yeah she really is going to be she's going to ruin the franchise do you know what how dare you I know she's not going to ruin the franchise she's not going to ruin the franchise poor Lottie what if she ruins the front oh the whole brand comes down because of Lottie I don't think so she's cute and also I'm meeting Spielberg this week are you?

2:39yeah right well we're definitely going to have to talk about that I mean we'll lead with Lottie but then we'll get on to Big Steve I mean that's massive I can't really believe that we're going to now also talk this week about Twitter now called X that's something we're going to talk about we're going to say should you leave Twitter essentially is the or should one leave X which sounds more of an algebra equation. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about Katy Perry. Has she become a sort of designated train wreck? Her first single off her new album flopped and she seems to have been shoehorned into one of those narratives of now a failure.

3:15Is this true? Why did it happen? What can be done about it? Should anything be done about it? And we're also going to talk, you've heard us talk before about Mr. Beast and this huge deal he signed with Amazon Studios. as well. The first bits of filming have been done and rest assured a lot has gone wrong and we're going to talk about that. Now he owns a media company. Yeah, it turns out that's harder than it looks. So the first thing we want to talk about is Twitter. Musk is essentially taking loads of advertisers to court, all sorts of trouble over disinformation. He's having a go at Keir Starmer.

3:47Are we in the dying days of Twitter and should we leave? A huge amount of me feels like I can't even rationally talk about this. One of the things that social media has done has made everyone this sort of pooterish character. Don't forget there was a long time on Twitter where people would say things like, I won't be posting here for a week because I'm going on holiday. It's fine, just don't post. We can all do it. We can all become deranged because of social media. I mean, there was one person I saw this week, he's got quite a big following saying, you know, that Twitter's now like Paris under the Nazi occupation.

4:16So some are collaborating, some are refusing to give up the city, some are fighting for liberation. It's just like, oh my God, have a day off from taking yourself this seriously. So I'll tell you what I'm doing. What? I'm being René from Hello, Hello. Yeah. Friendly on the surface, but helping a British airman in the attic. I mean, do people have any idea how mad they sound? I mean, I've read one of the Times columnists sort of saying, you know, I'm going to leave after I've filed this column. I see she's still on it on Monday morning after we've... But, you know, you work for Murdoch. Yeah. And that's fine.

4:45But if you want to talk about engines of disinformation and engines of polarisation, have a look at your stablemate, Fox News, over the past decades now and what that's done. They've had to pay out billions anyway on this false election thing and the voting machines or whatever. I mean, have a day off your high horse, I would say to a lot of these people. It's just a social media platform to have as much of people's identity as it seems to be tied up with how it fares, whether it stays, in which case you've sort of ceded control of part of your identity to one of a number of weirdo billionaires who own these platforms who are just generally quite bad people, I think.

5:20certainly it's easier to not buy a paper than not be on twitter i think lots of people have left and saying it's become very difficult to navigate with with the amount of hate i personally don't see it because i don't and i've never used twitter for my political discourse call me weird i just right from the start i thought i'm not sure if this is the place for me so it's useful for links and what have you so if there's newspaper things there's always interesting articles but i'm not going to start engaging about the state of the world on twitter and by the way the whole of the world is not engaging with the world on Twitter.

5:51There's nothing political ever gets changed in this country on Twitter. Around the world it does, which is why Twitter is banned in Iran and China and has just been banned in Venezuela and things like that. Look at the places it's banned and then think whether you want it banned in the UK. Why don't we try and get banned in Venezuela for 10 days? The rest is entertainment. I dispute Maduro's election win. I think it was stolen from the people of Venezuela and I challenge him to allow people in Venezuela to listen to this podcast. I'm watching our listener top line just drain in real time it's going like this you don't think people want to hear Venezuela and Maduro talk from us anyway so I don't use it for political discourse and what the far right does and has always done what they're very clever at doing is using something like Twitter to leverage the amount of noise that they make and they know they're doing that's the game they've always been playing and Twitter has always been like that which is why I've never gone anywhere near political Twitter because you can see you can see in real time it's being used so the political side of it is less interesting to me what i think is interesting is twitter for quite a long time is an incredibly useful place for new creative voices to be heard i agree with that and for you know illustrators joke writers all sorts of things people to be able to put this stuff out there to be amplified to make a living you know we used to look for writers on twitter you get people who would never dream of being a joke writer or sending stuff into a tv company and you just go but you're really funny why don't you come in for a day and sit in a writer's room and that's a great thing it used to be a great marketplace now the algorithm i think definitely has changed in that regard it's much harder to share your stuff it's much harder to sell your stuff it's much harder to share a patreon or any of these ways that created people make money and they are now not able to do that and what you do after 10 years if your business plan gets some you know torpedoed like that the political side of things it was always a cesspit can i add one thing on that i agree that many people have come up far that way and they've managed to get themselves commissioned to do all sorts of different things whether it's joke writing whether it's writing journalism whether it's all sorts of things as well yeah yeah it is a lesson to all of us it's good not to have all your eggs in one basket it is good to have real relationships with people that you can feel you can contact outside the platform wait wait all your x in one basket sorry i just had to do you know what if i didn't say it i was gonna literally explode well we would have had to edit it in yeah we would have had to done that good um so yes all your eggs in one basket It's good not to have all your eggs in one basket It's good to be diversified in terms of how you are able to get work and it's always good to be able to have personal relationships with people that are not social media personal relationships.

8:24100 % but it's been useful in terms of if you're somebody who's not going to travel to London or where the media is, that you can get yourself known. That was an incredibly useful thing and of course all those people's relationships are now in the real world which is very helpful But also you can go to TikTok and you can do it that way in lots of other ways and that's what people are doing that's the point is this whole thing about twitter twitter is for old people yeah it just my favorite thing is like don't forget to register to vote like by the way if they follow you on this platform believe me they're registered today or people talking about their sort of gcse results i didn't do well on my gcse's and i'm fine nobody nobody doing their gcse's follows you let me tell you this right now yeah extraordinary the only message you should ever give on twitter is don't forget you have to retake your driving test at 80 but I see why it is there's there's a certain bit of left-leaning media for whom Twitter's been just a lovely warm bath for a really really long time you know it's always been fun to do.

9:17But they liked they liked to fight on there too and they did they enjoyed fighting they changed nobody's minds I don't really think and actually I've mentioned him before Geron Lernier who's a really sort of interesting kind of internet prophet and a bit of a Cassandra on lots of these things and there's a good book he wrote which is very slim called 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now and it really clearly explains that these platforms all of them by the way are about keeping people angry because then they stay on the platform longer and they know this and there's been tons of research done that so what they really always want to do is make you cross that's always been my attitude towards it is knowing that i've always tried to not do that i've always tried to be i've always tried to just do jokes do nice things um You know, I, for example, posted a picture of Lottie the other day, which went down very, very well.

10:04She's not the brand breaker some people seem to think she's going to be. So I've always done that, and I've always had that in return. And I'm very like this, and I'm a white man, so there's a lot of abuse I don't get on Twitter just by the very nature of who I am. But I also don't attract anything negative, really, because I don't really post anything negative. And that's not me sitting on a fence. That's me going, no, I choose to use this thing for fun. I choose to use this thing to hear the latest rumors about Fulham, to be shown interesting articles from America and to tweet along with the Olympic closing ceremony.

10:35That's what I choose to use it for. And I do and I can. And I've been very, very lucky in that regard. But I do think if you've ever tried to use Twitter for politics, then it's not having an impact because in Britain, politics is all on Facebook. I don't think it has a huge influence on things like the riots because that's all on Telegram and that's on Facebook. I certainly think that's the case. And I think that people thinking this has happened because of social media. If we turn this into a social media story, I'm afraid it'll keep on happening. That isn't the story. And we've seen this in lots of different ways since, I suppose, the big political shocks of 2016.

11:12I do think that foreign states meddle in our politics. And I do think that obviously social media is one way to do it. But I don't think that that's why Brexit happened. There's a huge cope in all of this where people are just thinking, oh, something awful has happened and I need to either litigate it away or explain it away via Russian interference. And if Trump's coming back this time, again, it's not because of social media. And it makes it might help people to think that this is why and it's a useful bogeyman. But I actually think that the causes of it are something much deeper. And as I say, it's a bit of a cope saying it's all to do with social media because it's not.

11:46Well, I'll say two things. Firstly, Marina has rubles sticking out of her pocket. Someone's a shill. All right, comrade. And secondly, I think that all of us tend to think the world looks a bit more like us than it actually does. And we think that the world looks like the people around us a bit more than it does. And even those people who say, yes, I understand I'm in a bubble, but I get a rough idea of what Britain is and who lives in Britain. So what do you think the alternative is for people who either A, want to find a way to monetize their creativity, or B, just enjoy the fellow feeling and the friendship groups that they've made on Twitter?

12:20Do you think there's an alternative? Just get a WhatsApp group for your friends. Honestly, this is incredible. Most people do this. No one is going to cancel you in your WhatsApp group. You can make much more amusing jokes. Just do all that. And if you want to get noticed as a creative, obviously TikTok. It's like we're talking about there's a big row on the steam trains. Yeah. And talking of internet profits, that's the other thing people say, but you're making money for Elon Musk. I tell you one thing that Twitter's not doing, and that's making money for Elon Musk. It's at least half the value of the company.

12:49Scott Galloway, who's a brilliant sort of entrepreneur and professor, and maybe some of you listen to one of his many and brilliant podcasts, like Pivot or something like that. But there's never been a case of a company that's losing like this. Yeah, I think he's literally the worst performing company in history. Yeah, don't worry. You can leave, but people are leaving. And the main thing is that people don't want to advertise on it. Now, Elon Musk, who said not so long ago to companies who didn't want to advertise, go fuck yourselves, now is literally trying to take them to court in Texas for not advertising on his platform.

13:26Good luck with that. Yeah, he's suggesting that advertisers have joined together in some sort of consortium to wrong him. and he's he's suing them in a i'm going to say a very friendly court in wichita falls in uh in texas and the judge is a is a is a major tesla shareholder but to answer the original question i mean i still use it i don't use it anything like as often as i used to i've certainly anytime something comes along my timeline that i'm like this is grifting pure and simple uh i mute it instantly you know i'll try and tweet nice things and you know there's still plenty i've never blocked or muted anyone on Twitter.

14:03Not one single person. Wow. I like to see it all. Do you see? I don't. I can't handle it. I'm very bad with conflict. I don't need for it to be algorithmically sent to me by Russian bots. I can find it in the real world. I feel, you know, Aristophanes' first mention on the podcast maybe. I can't remember. To be insulted by you is to be garlanded with lilies. Wow. I feel I should have that as my bio. That's a nice one. That's good, yeah. First time on the podcast. First time on the podcast. We should interview Aristophanes He's a very, very funny guy In Roman times, of course, X was called 10, right?

14:40Yes He was Greek, but other than that, yes Was he? And they say you don't learn anything on podcasts Well, he could be the first for our breakout series, The Creators The Greek Squad But if you do wish to leave Twitter I, by all means, don't feel the need to make a huge announcement about it You can just sign off without saying anything at all And I hear Threads is perfectly nice So here, blue sky is perfectly nice. But also, you could just not be on it at all and see what happens, I would say. And listen, I give that advice to someone who's not leaving it. But if you do choose to leave it, if it is too upsetting for you, if you do find it too difficult, there's a way in which you could just not be on it.

15:15Yeah, just log off. Here's me being kind and gentle. And there's you going, just log off. Yeah. That's good. Is it such bad advice? It's like two completely different types of therapists. And you know within the first session which one works for you. They keep coming back to you because you're telling them what they want to hear. whereas I'm curing them wow I mean listen that's pretty good I like to think of myself as a Plato to your Aristophanes now Plato was Roman right? no Greek again what about Plato to my Socrates? ok Socrates I know that Plato and Socrates were linked so therefore Socrates is Greek plus Brazilian because of the football this is really taking people behind the scenes of Athenian philosophy isn't it?

15:57so who was Roman? Like no one. Who was Roman? Yeah. Marcus Aurelius. Yes, he was Roman. Julius Caesar. Yeah. Paolo Maldini. Of course, from Milan. Oh, no. And so Milan is not Roman? Let's have some ads. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from EBCLIS. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

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18:07Welcome back, everybody. That Twitter handle is at Richard Osman. We are now talking about Katy Perry. We're now going to talk about Katy Perry. Now, Katy Perry was, I want to say, once the biggest pop star in the world, but it's a little bit like being the world number one in tennis that you can possibly have never won a Grand Slam. But she had five number one singles in a row, which I think is still the record. Well, five number one singles from the same album. She's the only woman ever to do that. Michael Jackson did it as well, but she's the only woman ever to do it. From the same album, right.

18:38Now, she recently, taken a break, she's become a mother. She's been one of the judges on American Idol for about seven seasons, roughly. Don't quote me on that. But she's now decided to leave that and return to supposedly her first love, music. She's got a new album coming next month, 143, or 143, I don't even know how you say it yet, and that might be part of its difficulties. 14-3, I'm hearing. 14-3. It's named after the France versus New Zealand rugby league score in 1979. She had a comeback single called Woman's World, which failed to chart but got a huge amount of negative attention for reasons we will come to.

19:16and she's sort of been wedged into that failure narrative now where almost everything she does feeds into the idea that it isn't working. She's got another single that has just come out called Lifetimes which is a sort of off-the-peg club music. That's the music I like. Now, it's interesting to talk about what has gone wrong and what can be put right. Because, as I say, this is a woman who's absolutely at the top of her game, seemed to be in control of absolutely everything, was, as I said, took a break, did lots of interesting things, came back at a time where female-led music is absolutely dominating the charts.

19:52So there's an opportunity to her to come back and be Lady Gaga, but she's come back and it seems to have all gone away from her. Lady Gaga, I think, is one of those stars that is a sort of genre of one, almost, in some ways. And I know it's always dangerous to say that, but she does have such a sort of defined image and way of doing things. The first single, Woman's World, was this kind of, I mean, really kind of calamitous girl boss feminism word salad that when you think of the summer that we've been talking about, people like Charlie XCX, all these kind of young stars coming through, it just seemed so old fashioned and almost like it was a sort of parody, which we'll come to what she said about it.

20:31And the reaction was really swift and horrible. Also, lots of her albums, her early albums, her really big success was produced by Dr. Luke. Now, Dr. Luke, he worked on the first three albums. Now, Kesha, a former Dr. Luke artist, eventually went public and said that Dr. Luke had sexually assaulted her and physically and verbally abused her for a decade. And so he's a sort of persona non grata in lots of ways. Whilst he is responsible for loads of Katy Perry's most successful albums, to go back with him And then especially in some sort of faux feminist message or real feminist message. Anyway, it went so badly wrong.

21:07I don't know who her publicist is, but can I just say they are terrible because it went so badly wrong. She had all this opprobrium sort of tipped all over on the Internet. Then she issued a statement retrospectively claiming that it was satire. I'm going to read the statement because it's very special. With this set, it's like we all were not about the male gaze, but we really are about the male gaze. and we're really overplaying it, which is like a reset for me and a reset of my idea of the feminine divine. Well, you just made it worse. Wow. Sometimes it's not the disaster, it is the attempt to cover up the disaster.

21:38And saying that it was satire, which was new, and saying it in that way, you just didn't get that it was about her reset of the feminine divine. Yeah, the feminine divine. Yes, interesting. She seems stuck on post-feminism where the world has not only gone on to post-post-feminism, I think we're now on post-post-post-feminism. And so she's two posts behind. First of all, and I know you mentioned Lady Gaga earlier, and there's people like Cher who can go off and do it and go act, but then very few. I think we want still to believe that musicians have to be musicians. They are artists and they have to sing and they have to make music.

22:11Now, if you take a long period out and go and be a television judge on a show that I don't think anyone would really claim is particularly about the music, and then you sort of say, right, I'm coming back to music, I think there's a world where maybe if you don't take your fans with you with an amazing song, people just think, oh, I see. You've come to look at this quadrant of your media empire, have you? Yeah, I mean, authenticity is everything, whether you're genuinely authentic or your PR are very good at faking your authenticity. And the acts that are huge today that we talked about many of them before, we could have some like Billie Eilish.

22:44There is an authenticity that feels real. and I was thinking exactly that to come off eight seasons of American Idol and to come back and say no I'm here to save pop music you know you have to come back with a banger and she hasn't come back with a firework or a roar she's come back with women's work I'll say this for her you know that time out that she had and you think oh I don't know has that ruined your career having that time out in the last eight years she sold her music rights she sold her music rights for$225 million she had a residency in Vegas earned her$148 million and for being a judge on American Idol she got paid about$200 million so there's half a billion dollars she's made in the last eight years which might hopefully just soften her landing from height I don't think we believe these people someone like Taylor Swift has somehow managed to make herself extremely relatable but I saw this morning she was photographed getting off or getting on to friend of the podcast Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos And I just thought, yeah, you're in your stage of your life where you're going on the boat with Jeff Bezos.

23:50I mean, can you imagine Charlie XCX doing that? No, of course we can't. No, Charlie, no. You're sort of in the persona era of your career if you're a musician of questionable commitment to the art of music, as I would say, as Katy Perry is. It reminds me a little bit of JLo, who had something similar this year. Again, she self-financed a documentary called This Is Me Now, which people sort of laughed about. and that cost her 20 million but you know you can't self-finance something for 20 million if you don't have 20 million lying around so she's not doing too badly then they she released the album which didn't do well she then announced a tour nobody bought tickets so they then said it's going to be more of a greatest hits arena tour and everyone was still like remind me the J-Lo hits she's always to some extent felt overvalued as a music star even though she's done very well and I'm sure she does loads of really lucrative private gigs etc etc but she's not going to set out an arena tour and in the end they had to pull the arena tour.

24:43But like we think, you know, she is a movie star, big movie star, particularly on Netflix where her movies might get panned. J-Lo this is. Yeah, this is J-Lo. Her movies might get panned but something like that. Atlas was number one for how many weeks? She's done very well as a sort of, as an actress and as a, she's got, you know, she's got an alcohol brand of some type or another. Has she? That's a good idea. More celebrities should do that. Yeah, you're in your persona years now. You're diversified into a number of different revenue streams and you do talk about the money, like revenue streams, and you don't talk about the art anymore.

25:16That's what you do. And unless you are so committed to one particular avenue, someone like Madonna who continues to make music, who continues to tour, nobody ever says, I don't think she's interested in it. People might say, well, she likes the attention. So what? I mean, she remains the person that she always was. But that's not to say that going into five or six different things isn't good business. And I'm sure Katy Perry's business manager is a lot better than her publicist. I can see they are. but I think it's most important if you're going to have a good business manager or a good publicist always choose a good business manager yeah well the business manager can tell you to file the publicist at some point and surely must have at this point in the summer I don't know if she really cares that much about music and being anything she obviously doesn't need to work again but people miss the attention I personally would not have if I had been her publicist or her agent had her leave American Idol until the album had been a real hit because at the moment it seems like She's shut the door on a very successful television judge career, and this has tanked.

26:15Now, she's been asked to perform at the VMAs, the MTV Video Music Awards, so there's a lot riding on that performance. But you know what? She performed at Joe Biden's inauguration. She performed at the King's coronation. I mean, you know... Yeah, exactly. She performs... She does private gigs for really old guys now. Yeah. But, you know, and there's a lot of money in it. Yeah, and it's a question of, can you have your cake and eat it? And it looks like you can't. All the people at the top of the pop charts at the moment, as you say, are either younger and just fully on it, or they're the older generation who've always committed to what it is that they do.