Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em Podcast 48. Elon, Elon, Elon
Twitter seemed so simple at first. Both of us joined in 2009, and Nancy loved the economy of form, though Sarah was confused by the purpose and character count. She wound up live-tweeting things like, “Her hat is weird.” Thirteen years later, Twitter is the white-hot center of a cultural debate over politics, civility, and the future of journalism. Elon Musk is trying to build the plane while he flies it, and it’s unclear whether that plane is finding new altitude, or crashing into a mountainside.
We discuss former head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth, ambitious world-builder/left-wing pariah Bari Weiss, and of course Musk himself, who has become #1 hero and public enemy. (This was recorded before Musk polled Twitter users to ask if he should step down. They voted yes, by the way.) Nobody knows where this wild ride is heading, but Sarah cautions against what folks in AA call, “Contempt prior to investigation.” Nancy agrees, with a parable about how she actually does like eggplant.
In the paid-subscriber-only content (on Substack): Sex sells, but who’s the customer? Not Nancy, who has zero interest in hearing about other people’s sex lives (or discussing her own). Not so fast, says Sarah. Sex is an expression of character, one of the deepest connections you can find with another human, and the problem is not sex writing but the shallow, performative way it’s written. Then we discuss: MILF Manor!