It probably won't surprise you that Twitter’s a bit of a mess right now. Last week, billionaire Elon Musk made a play to buy the whole company, stating that his goal was to turn it into a bastion for free speech absolutists. Regardless, Twitter is also in the process of undergoing some changes that are posed to shake up the platform, with or without Musk’s involvement.
This week on Gadget Lab, we’re joined by Casey Newton, the journalist and writer of the Substack newsletter Platformer. Casey comes on the show to talk all about Twitter, Elon, and the always controversial edit button.
Read and subscribe to Casey’s newsletter, Platformer. Here’s how Twitter’s edit button might actually work. Read more about what exactly Elon’s vision of truth means.
Casey recommends the show Yellowjackets on Showtime. Lauren recommends Goodreads. Mike recommends simplifying your burgers (i.e., stop putting marshmallow Peeps on them).
Casey Newton can be found on Twitter @CaseyNewton. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: Lauren, how "gadly" do you want to edit your tweets?
Lauren Goode: So by that, I think you mean how badly do I want to edit my tweets?
Michael Calore: Oh yeah. OK. Let me ask you that question again. How badly do you want to edit your tweets?
Lauren Goode: OK. Is there a timestamp where I can go back and call up your former mistake if I need to when you said “godly?”
Michael Calore: That would be a good feature.
Lauren Goode: That would be a good feature. I have to be totally honest. I don't have super strong opinions on editing tweets, because I don't think we should be able to edit tweets.
Michael Calore: I'm with you on that one.
Lauren Goode: Really?
Michael Calore: Yes, I am. And we'll talk about that and much more on this week's show.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: And I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: We're also joined this week by journalist Casey Newton, who writes the Platformer Substack and covers all things related to social media, technology, and democracy. Casey, welcome to the show.
Casey Newton: Thanks so much for having me, you all.
Michael Calore: Of course.
Lauren Goode: Hey neighbor.
Michael Calore: We could not think of a better person to bring on this week, because today we are talking about Twitter. In the second half of the show, the three of us are going to talk about how we use Twitter, and we'll share some of our thoughts about the future of the social platform, but first, we have to grill Casey, because we want to talk about some of the disruption that's been happening at Twitter lately. And yes, that means we need to talk about Elon Musk. Last week, after acquiring 9 percent of Twitter's stock and stepping back from a company board seat, Elon suddenly announced that he wanted to buy the whole darn thing. Musk, who is the richest person in the world, by the way, put in a bid to buy Twitter for $43 billion with the intention of taking the company private.
Now, Casey, you've written both about Twitter and Elon Musk quite a bit in your excellent newsletter that everybody should subscribe to. So I need to ask you, is this for real? On a scale of 1 to 10—10 being absolutely yes—how likely is it that Elon will actually end up buying Twitter?
Casey Newton: Well, my joke about this is that all evidence points to the fact that he's not serious about it, which, by what I call the trickster god theory of Elon Musk, suggests that he is likely to buy it. Basically everything that I've thought about Elon Musk and Twitter has been wrong up until this point. And so while I continue to believe that it's unlikely he will acquire it, there's a voice in the back of my head saying, Oh, well, this may mean that he actually is going to acquire it.
Lauren Goode: And what would it take financially for this to happen?
Casey Newton: So he needs $40 billion, and he's the world's richest man. But as The Wall Street Journal wrote in a good piece, Elon Musk is cash-poor. Most of his money is tied up in Tesla stock, SpaceX stock, and if he wants to get access to it, he's going to have to sell a lot of it, which he may be unwilling to do. He could also go out and find partners to help him put up the money, but during a recent TED talk, he said that he had no economic interest in Twitter at all, which I suspect may be a hindrance in lining up people to give him $40 billion. So it is as chaotic as you would expect from Elon Musk.
Lauren Goode: He is such a Chaos Muppet. It's unbelievable. OK. So what is the appeal? Why does he want to buy Twitter?
Casey Newton: Well, there is what he has said, which is a series of fairly skeletal pronouncements that boil down to there's not enough free speech on Twitter, and free speech is important for the survival of civilization. And so under his control, it would be more free-speech oriented. He has not really weighed in on many specific scenarios in content moderation that he thinks have gone awry. Of course, Twitter's most famous content moderation decision in the past couple of years is deplatforming Donald Trump. But Musk has been no particular friend to Trump over the years, or vice versa, so it's not clear that's his sole mission, but because he has been such a blank canvas, conservatives in particular have really rallied around him. And they seem to believe that Elon Musk will give them the version of Twitter they want.
Lauren Goode: Right. There are some on the conservative side of the political aisle who believe that Twitter would basically become some kind of free-for-all where anyone could say anything. But I think this, once again, shows that there is and continues to be serious confusion about what constitutes free speech in this country, here in the United States, and what constitutes free speech for a publicly traded social media company that happens to operate in the private sector and also has its own terms of service, so actually does still have rules around what people can and cannot say. So please illuminate us, would Elon buying Twitter make a difference in terms of the speech that's allowed on the platform?
Casey Newton: I mean, it's so hard to say, because it's not clear to me that Elon Musk has given thought to what will happen five minutes after the deal closes. There is not a plan. He's said he doesn't have any confidence in management. So presumably, he would go out and hire a bunch of new managers. Who would those people be? I don't know. My sources at Twitter tell me that if Musk became CEO, you would see chaos and mass attrition. I think a lot of current top executives would leave the company, and they would have to figure out how to do a lot of things.
So I don't know, but OK, let's say he comes in and he brings in his team of pro-free-speech people, and they want to sort of do Twitter policy from scratch. What would you do? Well, maybe you take a look at policies that currently require tweets to be labeled. If they contain misinformation of one sort or another, maybe you stop labeling state media, maybe you stop hiding certain things from search results. There are certainly things that you could do to elevate speech that is currently down-ranked or banned in particular, but I think the idea that this is going to bring in tens of millions or hundreds of millions of Twitter users is pretty laughable on its face.
Michael Calore: I'm one of those people who is of the opinion that the down-ranking and the deplatforming you've been talking about are good things. If anybody who's listening to the show has read your work or has read Lauren's work or just follows social media platforms, they know that content moderation is very, very difficult and very tricky to get right. Nobody gets it right. So one of the things that Elon has said he wants to do is, he wants to allow all legal speech on Twitter. This means that spam will not be moderated on Twitter, that bots can do whatever they want on Twitter without moderation, false information and false claims of a political nature or of a cultural nature can be retweeted and amplified as much as the bots want. Also, hate speech will have a forum on Twitter. So it does not sound like those things would be a positive for the platform.
Casey Newton: Well, I mean, and maybe you were teeing me up for this, but two of the specific things that Elon Musk said immediately after saying all legal speech should be allowed on Twitter is that he wants to get rid of all of the spam and the bots. So it's like, to the extent that he has concrete proposals for Twitter, they are somewhat contradictory. I mean, like, even just to talk a little bit about bots, there are clearly some bad bots. Like if the Kremlin is purchasing tens of thousands of Twitter accounts to run disinformation campaigns on Americans, I would think most of us would agree that's a bad use of bots. But there's also bots that just tell you the weather or the time of day in another part of the world, or let you know when The New York Times corrects something online. And I don't think all of those bots should be banned. In fact, a lot of things, it would probably benefit from just some labeling, which I actually think Twitter has recently started to implement.
So there are some clear things that they could do on that front, but again, just to highlight, in my experience, when someone introduces a plan with this many internal contradictions, it's a sign they haven't thought about it all that much.
Lauren Goode: We probably sound pretty down on the idea of Elon Musk buying Twitter. And I think that's partly because it's just hard to know how serious he is about it, or how much of this is just a whim gone too far. But what might be some of the upsides if this actually happened?
Casey Newton: So it is true that, basically forever, Twitter has been disappointing as a business. There was kind of a fork in the road moment that the company faced a little over a decade ago when they were trying to figure out what kind of business they were going to be. They could have decided to become a protocol and essentially sell the API that let other people build thir-party clients and other kinds of experiences. But because they had hired a bunch of ex-Googlers, the ex-Googlers came in and said, Why don't we just build an ad business? And they just have not been nearly as good of an ads business as Google or Facebook or now Amazon are at that. And so, as a result, Twitter has lost more money than it has earned. And up until very recently, they have also not shipped a lot of new product experiences. And so Twitter really has been one of the great underperforming tech stocks in the past 10 years.
So even setting Musk aside, there has long been this assumption that if you brought in other managers, other leaders, you could probably have a company that was better for shareholders. So to the extent that you think Elon Musk can realize that vision, you might think there's something to be done here.
Michael Calore: Before we move on, I want to talk a little bit about how Twitter has responded to this. There are many strategies to stop some sort of hostile takeover or a shareholder trying to buy up all the shares to take a company private. What has Twitter done? There's been a lot of talk about the poison pill defense, and we'd like to ask you to explain this and tell us a little bit about how frequently it is implemented in these kind of corporate battles.
Casey Newton: Yeah. So when the board of directors at a company does not want someone to make a hostile takeover bid, they adopt a shareholder rights plan, more commonly called a poison pill. And the idea is, you make it extremely unpalatable for the potential acquirer to buy more stock. So Elon Musk has like 9.2 percent-ish of Twitter right now. Twitter's poison pill said, you cannot get above 15 percent. And if you do go above 15 percent, we're going to enable every other Twitter shareholder to purchase more shares at a steep discount. And so in practice, the would-be acquirer then stops buying stock because the stock becomes less and less valuable. It's essentially a mechanism for making any additional stock purchases worthless, not worth the trouble. And so that's what Twitter has adopted, and in practice, this is a strategy for getting the would-be acquirer to the negotiating table so they can come to terms that are more mutually agreeable.
Michael Calore: All right. Well, let's take a quick break right now, and when we come back, we are going to have a spirited debate about the edit button.
[Break]
Michael Calore: So all things Elon Musk aside, Twitter has evolved a lot over the last 15 years. For some, it is still a delight. It's where people find their community. For others, it's a cesspool of abuse and manufactured outrage. On top of that, most people on the internet don't understand how it works, and they don't even hang out there. So it's a complicated place that is always evolving. We want to talk about what's next in that evolution. We should note that before and during the whole Elon saga, Twitter has been talking about making some other potential changes, including adding the ability for users to edit their tweets. Casey, what do you think? Is an edit button a good idea?
Casey Newton: An edit button is a great idea on Twitter, for the same reason it's a great idea on every other text box on the internet where you're allowed to fix a mistake. Human beings are frail, and a world in which we are expected to live up to the expectations of robots and software is a nightmare dystopia. We're fallible creatures. We make typos. When we attempt to fix those typos on Twitter by deleting our posts, we break threads, we leave orphan comments, and of course, we give up all that sweet, precious engagement. So to me, all of the people who say that editing tweets is a terrible idea are just revealing a failure of their own imagination as product thinkers.
Lauren Goode: So that's interesting. I don't think it's a terrible idea. And I see what you're saying. I can edit a comment on Facebook right now, or my Instagram caption or something I posted on Reddit, because everyone knows I'm such a shit poster on Reddit. OK I don't spend that much time on Reddit, but I guess ... And this is me coming from a relatively privileged place on the internet, but also someone who has experienced harassment on the internet, which is like, I feel like the changes I would want to make personally would be relatively inconsequential. I do have typos and I do sometimes post something where someone might come in with some kind of correction or insight. Not necessarily like a “Well, actually,” but like a legitimate kind of “No, but have you considered this?” And I'm like, “Oh yeah. OK. That's a good point. I can see how my first tweet doesn't really encapsulate that.” But I personally am not writing hateful things or saying, Storm the capital! So I guess it feels to me a little bit low-stakes to necessarily have to edit my tweets.
Michael Calore: I agree with you. And I'm going to go on the record here saying that I'm firmly against an edit button. I do not think that people should be able to edit their tweets after they post them. But I agree with you. It does feel pretty low-stakes. If somebody makes a typo, we are all used to seeing typos on Twitter. It's been 15 damn years at this point. We all make mistakes when we're typing text messages or Slacks, and yes, you can edit Slacks. I know. Bad example. But you understand what I mean. We've come up with a mechanism for signaling to each other that we made a mistake and that we want to correct it. Or if we see a mistake, we understand that it's a simple typo, and we don't come down on the person or judge them or make fun of them too much, because we all do it.
So it's just sort of like a collective understanding that there are going to be mistakes happening here, small mistakes. Larger mistakes are more difficult. Like if the link that you tweeted all of a sudden goes dark, you follow up and you say, here's a better link, or that link is broken, somebody cashed it, here it is. And I think that's useful to have, to have that record of how things progressed in a conversation. That's just the way I feel.
Casey Newton: Well, I mean, think about the scenario in which you've tweeted something and it goes viral, and then you find out that you made a big factual mistake or maybe the thing that you tweeted is no longer true. Maybe you tweeted, “Oh my God! My house is on fire. Somebody please save me.” And you get 10,000 likes, and then the firemen come and put out your house, but then three days later, people are still like trying to come help you with your fire situation. Of course, you could just do another tweet, but we all know that's not going to get nearly the reach that the first one did. Most people won't bother going to your timeline to checkout what you tweet. What if you could just update the tweet? What if you could say, “Hey everybody. Great news. The fire is out at my house.” We found the missing person. We found the missing dog. I thought this was true, but actually it was false.
Everybody talks about editing tweets from the standpoint of how it could be used to undermine trust, but think about what a rotten system of trust we have on Twitter right now. Think about the chaos we're living in right now. If you would just let people update their stuff, I think you would be surprised by how many people were doing it in good faith rather than as trolls.
Lauren Goode: That's a really good point, because it's a famous saying, but it's also shown through lots of studies on misinformation, that falsehoods travel much more quickly than truth. And so, if there is a tweet that is amplified, and there is not an ability to update that. Someone just posts a secondary tweet, to your point, Casey, it might not get nearly as much attention or as many eyeballs as the initial one that was erroneous in some way. I also think Mike and I are thinking about this very much from the perspective of well-meaning journalists. Like, here's our experience. But Twitter is much broader and bigger than that.
What do you think it looks like if you're someone like a really high-profile politician and they tweet a falsehood? Or they tweet something and then they go to correct it after the fact. It's not obvious what the original statement was that was made. What happens then? What does that look like?
Casey Newton: So, I mean, thanks to Jane Manchun Wong, the researcher who takes apart new APKs to figure out what companies have in store for us, we know that Twitter is planning on building an edit history. Like, there'll be an audit trail, so that if you see an edited tweet, you'll be able to go back in time to see what it said before. This is actually an improvement on the current system where people can just delete what they said before. And unless it was screenshotted, you'll never have any idea. So again, I just encourage people to think about the ways that such a system could be used to build trust and improve on our current system.
Michael Calore: That's a good point. It does come down to trust, and I'm just not a trusting person. I've been on the internet long enough to know that's just a mistake.
Casey Newton: Well, people use this other example, which is like, you go viral tweeting a picture of your puppy, and everybody's like, “Oh, look at the puppy!” And 100,000 people retweet the cute puppy picture. And then you go in behind the scenes and you change it to Hitler just to upset everyone. And my point is just, who practically has the incentive to do this? Most people don't want to be associated with these horrible things that everyone is convinced that they're going to all update their edited tweets to. That said, I do think Twitter might want to consider some mitigations here. Maybe, at least for a testing period, it only rolls out these editing capabilities to some subset of accounts. Maybe it's like only politicians. Maybe it's only verified users, or maybe it rolls it out to everybody but says “We will revoke this privilege.” Maybe it won't roll out for accounts that are new or don't have a phone number associated. Maybe there should be some sort of extra accountability on you.
I would just remind everybody, though, that this is not true of any other platform. These resharing features, they're enabled on Facebook, they're enabled on Tumblr, and yet we still let people edit those posts, and, I mean … well, I was going to say democracy isn't collapsing all around us. It is. I'm just not sure it's because of the editing features on Tumblr and Facebook.
Lauren Goode: But also some of what you're describing captures the essence of Twitter, like people will watch a debate or a live sporting event or the Oscars and tweet in real time. Or sometimes we as journalists will cover events, both in person and virtually and live tweet them for our audiences. And the idea is that you're sort of capturing this moment in time. There feels to me to be like a little bit less permanence inherently in Twitter versus other things you're posting on social media where you're like you're posting an Instagram photo because you anticipate it's going to be there until you decide to archive the photo or just get off the platform entirely.
Casey Newton: I would tell that to somebody who's been canceled for something they tweeted 10 years ago. Ask them how ephemeral Twitter is.
Lauren Goode: That's an excellent point. I guess that just changes the whole notion of like ... It underscores, I guess that it's a more permanent platform than maybe it was intended to be as a micro blogging site in 2006.
Casey Newton: I mean, I'm pro ephemeral thing. I think Twitter should build ephemeral tweets. There are plenty of things that I would probably say on Twitter if I knew that they were just going to disappear automatically in 24 hours. I'm all for that.
Lauren Goode: Like Fleets, but it didn't work out.
Casey Newton: Yeah. Well, my argument with Fleets was always they should just be in the main timeline. Why is there a separate feed for disappearing tweets? I thought that was just a total misreading of the room there. But again, with so many of the anti edit brigade as I call them, I just really think that if you take their arguments to their logical conclusion, you would not be allowed to delete tweets. Like people really think that if you say something, you have to stand by it forever. And I just don't want to live in that world. I think it's really authoritarian and gross.
Michael Calore: All I'm saying is that I think that the situation to stay as it is now, I think that what we have now is working and it's fine.
Casey Newton: That is the hottest take on this entire podcast.
Michael Calore: It is not. But speaking of live events and ephemerality, I do want to ask the crew here, how we feel about Spaces, because Spaces, the audio chat rooms that popped up on Twitter were a response to this boom in audio chat rooms around the internet at the start of the pandemic. And they're still there and I don't know if they are still sticking with people or if it was a flash in the pan, how do we feel about spaces?
Casey Newton: I'm a fan. The way I think of that whole world is like a Twitter Spaces or a Clubhouse room is like a pickup game of podcasting. There are pickup games of basketball where you just go down to the local hoop and see whoever is around and you play a quick game. That's to me like what a Twitter spaces is for a podcast. There have been time when I think when we found out that Facebook was changing its name and I just opened up spaces and I was like, who's around? Let's talk. And within, I don't know, three minutes, there were like five or six reporters who I know and they hopped on with me and we kicked it around and a few hundred people listened and it just felt like a meaningful thing to do. And at the same time, if I had emailed all the same five reporters and said, what's a good time for you to do a podcast? The podcast never would've happened.
So there is something about the spontaneity that spaces enables that I think is really cool. And unlike fleets, I just think it's obvious that it has a home within Twitter for good. I think wanting to discuss the news is basically the thing that Twitter is and people are going to want to do that via audio as well as via text.
Michael Calore: I think we need more chaotic energy in spaces. I would like to hear some more DJ sets, some more live music, because those are the kind of things that you'll find on Clubhouse, but haven't necessarily made it over to Twitter spaces. At least not in my sphere, not in my dabblings.
Casey Newton: Yeah. I mean, who knows what's happening over on Clubhouse anymore? That act is pretty dead to me, I have to say.
Michael Calore: I mean, you're not at NFTs?
Casey Newton: I do love to pump my bags and have other bags pumped for me. So maybe I could find more of that on space or on a Clubhouse. Although I do see plenty of that on spaces now too.
Lauren Goode: OK. Casey, wild card feature for Twitter. Something we haven't discussed yet today. What is something that you would like to see happen on Twitter?
Casey Newton: Well, I would like to see ephemeral tweets but maybe that doesn't count because they've sort of already tried it. But again, I want you to be able to tweet to your main timeline and have it disappear. I like to be able to do local tweets. I would love to only talk to my followers who live in San Francisco about San Francisco things. It feels a little weird to broadcast that to people who may be living around the world and don't care. So I think geographically constrained to tweets are an interesting idea.
Michael Calore: That's a great idea.
Casey Newton: We know that they're working on close friend tweets. So pretty soon, you're going to be able to tweet to maybe the limit at like 150, which is where I think Instagram places that cap but I'm interested to see how that works too. And then finally, I would love to be able to people sign up for my newsletter which is hosted on Substack directly from my profile. You can actually do that if you run your newsletter on review which is owned by Twitter. But I think the right thing to do is to enable interoperability, which is becoming a big watch word in tech regulation
Michael Calore: As it should be, because that's how we got here, is interoperability.
Casey Newton: That's right.
Michael Calore: All right. Well, thanks, Casey, for all your insight and the hottest of takes. We really appreciate it.
Casey Newton: Yes. And again, the hottest take, everything is fine. Let's leave at this.
Michael Calore: Everything is fine. You heard it here. Put my name on it. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll have our recommendations.
[Break]
Michael Calore: All right, here is the part of our show where we have everybody recommend a thing that they love to our listeners. So Casey, you go first. What is your recommendation?
Casey Newton: Well, the thing that I find myself recommending to everyone now when I meet them on the street is the show Yellowjackets.
Michael Calore: You just walk down the street telling people like, Yellowjackets.
Casey Newton: If you meet me, the odds I ask you if you've seen Yellowjackets are higher than 50 percent. If you're not familiar, it is a show about a girl's soccer team which gets lost in the wilderness in the '90s. And then 30 years later, there's a second timeline where you see some of the girls going on with their lives but it's not clear who made it back and what happened while they were there. It starts two incredible actresses who were best known for their work in the '90s, Juliet Lewis and Christina Ricci. And the show does such an amazing job at a lot of things. It's very suspenseful. If you like Lost, you'll love the show but also the actresses, like as kids and the actresses as adult, they did such a great job finding people who can plausibly play the same person 30 years apart. So anyway, I inhaled it in like three days. I'm desperate to find out what happens in season two. It's on Showtime, which sucks because then you have to subscribe your Showtime, but do a free trial, watch Yellowjackets, cancel. It's amazing.
Michael Calore: There's great stuff on Showtime. Come on. Got Super Pumped, you got Billions.
Casey Newton: Never heard of any of them but I'm sure they're great, but I'm very excited about Yellowjackets.
Michael Calore: Yes, I'll second that. It's a great show. Lauren, what is your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: Well, once you're done watching Yellowjackets and you're waiting for season two and I haven't seen it yet, so now I'm going to watch it … I recommend an old app called Goodreads. This was the result of Mike and I going for a jog last weekend. Sometimes folks, Mike and I go for runs together and we essentially tape a podcast but we don't tape it and you just never get to hear it. We just talk a lot of shit for like an hour like we do now, but you never get to hear it.
So anyway, we did this last weekend and I was saying to Mike how I hadn't ... I think I was just saying how I hadn't really yet achieved my goal of reading as many books this year as I would like to. And I have Apple Notes that I just keep filled with book recommendations. Oh, and you were talking about Denis Johnson. Anyway, and then Mike's said, do you use Goodreads? And I said, no, I don't. And he said, you should use Goodreads. It's really great for just keeping tabs and what you want to read, what you're currently reading, what you've already read. It's a little bit of a social network. And then Mike said, it makes really great recommendations based on what you've been reading. And I said, wow, it sounds like the Amazon of book apps, huh? And Mike was like, well, got some news for you. It's owned by Amazon, which I was not aware of.
I'm really, really late to Goodreads but over the past week, I've signed up. Mike and I are now following each other as friends on Goodreads. I've started my list and I do really like the app and I'm finding it. I find it like strangely motivating. Now it's like I'm accountable for the stuff I plan to read at night. So I recommend checking out Goodreads.
Michael Calore: I like that about it. The thing that I really like about it is that it's easier to find books by authors that you may have never heard of. Like you get a recommendation or you read a book by somebody and you're like, wow, that was great. What else has this person written that other people have also liked? It's a great way to get into that world.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. And you said that you can click on genre or author like Elena Ferrante. I've never read, but if you click on that author name in Goodreads, it gives you a list of not necessarily the best selling ones but the ones that are most popular for a variety of different reasons, gives you a sense of like where to start if you're looking to delve into someone's oeuvre.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Lauren Goode: I just really wanted to use that word.
Michael Calore: Nice. Good one.
Lauren Goode: Casey, are you on Goodreads?
Casey Newton: I am on Goodreads. I don't read as many books as I'd like to because Twitter destroyed my mind but I have in the past used Goodreads.
Lauren Goode: Excellent. Have you read the Elon Musk book?
Casey Newton: I haven't which shame on me. But again, Twitter has destroyed my mind. So ...
Lauren Goode: That's right.
Casey Newton: My only defense is that it appears to have destroyed Elon Musk's too.
Lauren Goode: That's right. Mike, what's your recommendation this week?
Michael Calore: My recommendation is a simple burger. So I'm a big fan of burgers and yes, I'm a vegetarian person. So I mainly eat like veggie burgers and impossible burgers and beyond burgers. However, I will say that the burger is not as much about the filling, it's about all the stuff that you put on it. So I have been trying to find good burgers in my neighborhood. And every restaurant in my neighborhood does this crazy burger where they put jalapenos and they put onion rings on it and they put all kinds of just stuff that does not belong on a burger. So my recommendation, since it's very rapidly becoming grilling season in many parts of the country and around the world, I would like to recommend that you get a hamburger on your menu that is a very simple burger. So I'm talking about lettuce, tomato, red onion, mustard, maybe cheese, and maybe something tangy and fermented like a pickle or banana pepper or relish, something along those lines to give it a little bit of tank.
But that is really all you need on your burger. You don't need to put onion rings on it. You don't even need to put avocado on it. And I say this as like a big avocado person, it's too much. It falls apart if you put too much on it. Instagram is like a very bad influence on the burger world because these Instagram burgers that have like 18 patties or have like peeps and stuff on top of the burger, those are just making-
Lauren Goode: Peeps? Like Easter peeps?
Michael Calore: Yeah. It was Easter last week. I understand it's a joke, but at the same time, people make these elaborate burgers that they take a beautiful Instagram photo of and then what they don't show you is that they go to eat them and they completely fall apart. So get a really good high quality bun brioche, if you're a brioche person, a whole wheat if you're a whole wheat person, but a good bun is essential and then put a minimal amount of toppings on it. And that burger will sink in a way that your Instagram burger wishes it could. That's my recommendation. Simplify your burgers.
Lauren Goode: I have much respect for the specificity of this recommendation.
Michael Calore: Thank you. And I know that people are going to disagree with me and I don't care. I'm not editing this tweet.
Lauren Goode: See, it's funny you say that as a vegetarian because my thought when I first tried the impossible burger some years ago at this point, I think they were a Code Conference several years ago when they were first coming out, was that it was the condiments that actually made it. It was those, I don't know, that combination of flavors and sort of the tanginess of different condiments and onions on top and that sort of thing that made me believe it was a burger even though it wasn't a burger.
Michael Calore: Yes. A burger is all about what you put around it. A possible burger is a great example because they do the whopper, impossible whopper. So you go to Burger King and you get an impossible whopper and you eat it and you're like, wow, that tastes exactly like a whopper. It's because it has all the whopper stuff in it. It has that sugary sauce, it has that bun that's all sugared up. It has all the stuff that they normally put on a whopper. So it doesn't really matter what the "meat" tastes like. It's the same thing as if you just take a regular burger and you just put regular normal things on it that are high quality and are not sugared up. It will taste like a good homemade burger regardless of what kind of burger you use. Also, if you like some specific kind of filling like a veggie burger or an impossible burger, and you want to actually taste that, the fewer things you put on your burger, the more of that thing that you actually taste.
Lauren Goode: I wonder what Casey's favorite burger topping is.
Casey Newton: I mean, I feel like if it doesn't have a good crunchy pickle, not a real burger. You need that acid to cut through the richness.
Michael Calore: You do.
Casey Newton: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Wow.
Michael Calore: I'd agree on that.
Lauren Goode: Sounds like a good policy for Twitter too.
Michael Calore: You need the acid.
Lauren Goode: For some of those acidic tweets.
Casey Newton: You think there's not enough acid on Twitter right now?
Michael Calore: Well, if Elon buys it, there certain will be a whole lot more. All right, now I'm starving. So we should end this show. Casey, thank you so much for joining us this week.
Casey Newton: Thank you so much for having me all.
Michael Calore: How do people find you on your Substack?
Casey Newton: So you can go to Platformer.news. You can sign up for free. I'll send you one piece of journalism a week or you could pay to subscribe and support independent journalism which would be an amazing choice you could make, but totally up to you.
Michael Calore: Excellent.
Lauren Goode: Everyone subscribe. It's very good.
Michael Calore: Thank you for subscribing to Casey's Substack, and thank you all for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter. Just check the show notes. Also, you may have noticed we have a new publishing schedule. This show used to come out on Fridays and now from now on, it's going to come out on Thursdays. So you are welcome Thursday listeners. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth. It was entirely his decision, so blame him if you don't like it. We will be back next week. Goodbye.
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