Episode 91 - BONUS - Transitions (The Alien & The Robot)

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in the year 2013 an extraterrestrial and an android encountered each other in a human village since that time they've worked together to understand the strain today's episode transition we should start with the juicy stuff let's do it and that's all you what is that [Music] oh i mean i'm planning on cross posting this episode onto the main feed this is big stuff i forgot [Laughter] yeah so we have this band called gunger and that's been part of our they make beautiful things i'm not gonna dignify it with a laugh i thought it was real funny um so we've been that was the toughest possible joke of all possible jokes that was the dumbest one that could have been made i appreciate it mike um so yeah we've been making music since well it started as michael gunger an integrity signed artist i am a friend of god wrote that with israel houghton his version of it was far more successful than my version of it but uh then on we went to the michael gunger band and then on we went to gunger about 2009 and uh it's been a ride it's been a quite a wild ride yeah and we decided this week monday time to put it to bed time to let her go peacefully into the night but how can you do that when you have a tour coming well it's gonna be the farewell tour it's gonna be the farewell tour it's i'm gonna admit it's it's a little sad and it's a little exciting yeah it's kind of not just a little it's it is sad and it is exciting um the reason the reason for it is uh and now i'm realizing how many times we've cried wolf on this podcast and then i'm not actually crying wolf we've always liked it we made it we're crying yeah right away i'm not um we have realized over the last several years that everything that you experience in life comes through these stories that you experience that you believe and art is certainly no different uh i mean if you think about if somebody told you that there's a new uh creed record nickelback record coming out that probably that they say it was amazing unless you're unless you're already a nickelback fan you're probably not going to check it out why because you already have that story pretty firmly established in your head about what it is and what we've seen with the music that we've released for the past several records due to the stories that we started the music with and all the interpretation going through those lenses is that what we what we think we're saying what we think we're making with the music uh is often it's not perceived that way it's perceived through an entirely different lens than where we're coming from right now and that's i think that doesn't only impact the listener i actually think that unconsciously impacts how we create as well i think that we know that there's a lot of people that are interpreting what whatever gunger is going to say as a brand through a certain story through a certain lens and um so then us knowing that it's like it's like i know if i'm speaking to a spanish-speaking person and that you know it says you have to kind of adjust uh how you're saying what you're saying in a different language um that's not the greatest analogy but hopefully you get the point what we're saying is being impacted by how what we think it's going to be perceived as by by the stories that we think are out there um so that's it's just made making music difficult with the algorithms and the all the google search results really being quite specific uh and any new music we'd put out there's just no way you're gonna hear it like if you click ganger on spotify you're not gonna hear it this new music until you know like 30 songs down maybe not that far but 10 songs down because i don't know how it's possible for us to beat the algorithm of beautiful things it has so many listeners still um and it's not that we despise that old stuff that's part of the issue too we don't we actually have grown to love the journey that we've come from and the whole thing that has happened but it's left gunger as a brand feeling a little bit more like a difficulty to deal like to try to navigate around than uh than a tool to help us make the art that is really true to where we're at right now so uh we're going to let it go and it was also kind of noticing that this this tour is called the end of the world tour the last song that we recorded on a gonger record was death it was this i also realized it was the sixth album that we made six days take a rest death it just it was all too much i was like oh my god this is meant to be it's the end it was too poetically appropriate and the last show of the tour is at home is in la which at the el rey theater which is my favorite good that's good it's where we've done my favorite gunger shows of all time at the lra theater the el rey theater was the first place ever in my life people have chanted science mike when i was on tour with you and we did that weird thing where i gave like little talks in the middle of concerts it's very weird but when i walked out people started chanting science mike before i said anything that's good memories in that place which is also weird because maybe some folks here don't know since this community is larger and haven't not everyone's been around in fact most people haven't been around almost everyone hasn't been around for the entire arc of the literature's journey this started as your attempt to de-christianize gunner yes that's what the litter just was a spin-off brand yes for the christians to go to it didn't work out i was like we got all these conservative christians hanging around our facebook page maybe they'll we can push them over to the liturgists [Laughter] but that that has taught me a lot about like what you think you're doing what you what you put as your language as what you want to do out in the world is not nearly as important as what you actually believe and who you actually are in the world uh so we started the liturgist thinking this is i mean generally christian work for christians when we started it was we were both of us still liked a lot of the thoughts from other traditions but yes and we said we wanted to make worship resources for atheists yeah so it was like yes because we kind of were atheists it's a real it's a real interesting focus starting the work we spoke very christians we did i mean our language we were intentionally very christian um thinking that that would be a good home for to steal all the christians that were coming at gunger too but uh that's not how it turned out so yeah transition i mean we're still gonna make music i think uh we still plan we have a bunch of music recorded on this computer that i'm that we're recording into right now um but for years we've we've wondered like should we have changed our name at iron mountain because that really was a totally new chapter and when i look at the like who we were when we started gengar it really is just an entirely different thing it would be like me releasing the liturgist podcast as a bible study resource yeah at my baptist church in tallahassee just like keep rolling with it it's like morning everybody i got another school lesson here you can download it at the liturgist.com podcast it's a new series called buddhist it's this a new series yeah so we have feelings about it but it feels like the right thing but i do hope a lot of you come out and see us then for the last time things will be the last the last time to seek hunger to sing some of these songs for the last time i mean that hasn't really struck me yet i don't think well now that i'm in trauma therapy and friends with hillary mcbride i just spend all my time listening to my body and when i thought about that last chance to hear these songs i could feel the sadness in my body like a heaviness in my stomach heaviness in my chest heaviness in my eyes so there you know like any transition there's there's grief involved and grief for me i mean we you know we've talked about this off the air and i think i probably mentioned on the air i i'm i'm a gunger superfan but i'm a really like i am mountain and later gunger fan i'm you know like we became friends then i went back and listened to your earlier stuff and i was like this is great music but for how i see the world clearly i am mountain and beyond is more compatible with like how i understand the world but those are like records i listen to a lot and i do uh i do look forward um to going to gender shows as weird as that sounds especially if i'm not involved in them and uh yeah i'll be very excited and pretty sad at the el rey um yeah i plan on you but i also recommend you making you making far weirder shit now with no no rails on whatsoever man isn't it it's just like it's hard to let go of things that you love and we really do love the work that has come out of it and the journey that we've experienced through it and uh it just feels like sorry for the cheesy christian language here but new wineskins time that's this you can't i guess why do i got to be so jaded to say cheesy christian like it's the jesus thing to say that's a nice it's a nice analogy old old wine skins new wine skins um sometimes you just gotta embrace the uh impermanence of everything and uh this one this one was a lot of our identity a lot of my sense of value and worth in the world came from what we were doing with gunger so to let that go it's a big deal i feel no pressure but i would i'm trying to invite as many important people that have been part of congress to already as possible i'm glad you said you're coming if you want to i don't know what it would be but anything on the stage with us for a minute or something i just i want to and i want to involve in that show as many i could i could lead a collective cry i just walk out there and just say bye gunger and just cry and just every say anyone who just needs to cry together wouldn't make the most riveting show in the world just like and now weeping with science yeah we'll i don't know we'll think about it whatever whatever i can do to support thank you i just want to see the damn show that's what i'm excited about yeah it's one of those weird it's a weird feeling david g gonna be thumping that base yep but uh for el rey i gotta i haven't told john joseph yet but hopefully he'll be there as well i love him both as people and as bass players but you're sexually but i'm yeah i'm sexually musically aroused by john joseph [Laughter] yeah john joseph is nasty that's a big one yeah i had other things i want to talk about on the episode let's go transition where else are we going impermanence i i can't i can't move on as easily it really uh i mean i'll be i'll be honest with you god sorry uh oh you didn't did you hear that no oh my phone rang in my headphones it was quite loud because it came through my computer i didn't have the did not disturb my computer on um [Music] shit what was i saying what were you saying i don't know i was saying it's not so easy for me to move on oh i was yeah i was telling tom our booking guy uh this news yesterday and telling them and hearing and then i was starting to remember some of the songs that i have in the computer and i was like oh that could work well as a ganger song and i get like the last couple days i'm like should we really do this but the more that i lean into it i mean it just really does feel right and if you're hearing this audio that means uh the trigger has been pulled it literally isn't too late until the episode gets i guess that's true i mean talk me off the ledge now mike if you want to this is your last chance i mean it makes the most sense and there's a difference between retiring gunger as a brand and a project and you or lisa retiring from music altogether yeah if it was the latter yes i would be yeah i think very persuasive why that was a bad idea but on the brand i'd actually i do think it like you're not apple going from making computers to making phones your apple going from making computers to making cheese [Laughter] like it just doesn't wait what yeah this doesn't make any sense um and so yeah i think i think you do the most honor to the gunger catalog by setting it out as a completed body of work that does speak to a transition but let's let your earlier stuff be your earlier stuff and let's your newer work escape its shadow slash gravity well um i mean i you know i think the long wild life trilogy is the best thing y'all have ever done thank you and um the algorithms were just like hey everybody don't look at this don't look at this here's beautiful things [Laughter] um and i i think if that would have launched under a distinct identity yeah i think it would have done a lot better hmm the other especially because if someone does find a song on spotify from the one wild life trilogy the next song they hear is much more likely to be an old worship song so it like pulls them out of the headspace entirely yeah exactly that just occurred to me in this moment yeah if you just look up a song yeah just like literally somebody says a good thing about one song wonder yeah wow and then bigger than my imagination yeah it's a stretch um one other strange aspect about the course of gunger's evolution and my my evolution my spiritual journey is to use that apple and cheese metaphor it's almost like we went from making computers to making cheese and then now i'm trying to make like artificially intelligent cheese [Laughter] because i i like i'm back to spirituality in a more like i really am interested in uh some of the some of the same ideas that we started with like the communal spiritual expression the connection um it's not just to me i don't just want to make music that is like showcasing my ego as a cool ego i'm not cool enough i've found that i make a better transparent light for uh broadcasting a picture of the world of real of something else other than my my own ego as the object so a lot of that has been coming back in values but it certainly can't be what it used to be it's not like we're gonna go back to the christian music circuit and be playing all the worship festivals um so it's it's it would almost to change again to to become more spiritual overtly or whatever um at this point it just feels like it's so been so much back and forth so much is this what is this and then finally there's some people they're like okay fine cheese apple cheese i like apple cheese and then i'm like yeah but have you seen the keyboard so i think just a fresh slate would be like even just for me because i don't know how much of me saying that even thinking about in those categories is a result of me unconsciously trying to please as many of the gunger fans as possible i don't know because it it's hard for me to parse all those feelings out um because a strange thing that happens after you sing the same songs for a decade gunger is not just about us anymore because it's these songs the reason we still sing beautiful things at shows is because it's not our song anymore it's like lisa and my song it's become this we hear stories every time of what that song has been in people's lives and they've as they've lost loved ones that they've gone through divorces as they've all gone through all sorts of pain and they've had this like experience where our music has been a big part of their life journey and so they came to the show because of that and we're just gonna like not sing it uh so it's part of the wii that has gathered around a ganger show um so i love that wii it's just too convoluted to be able to it's hard to know what to make for that brand now so a clean slate creatively artistically feels like uh the best move both creatively hopefully hopefully eventually marketing wise where we can have a better shot of having new material be the thing that people hear when they go to our i mean beyonce made a lot of great stuff with destiny's child yeah wasn't that what they were called yeah yeah i'm not i'm a i'm a post destiny's child beyonce yeah you know what i mean but if she just stayed with that brand what she's done now would be couldn't couldn't be and i also think like kind of the back to spirituality notion the most interesting conversations in the world about spirituality right now are happening in music but none of it is laid labeled spiritual yeah yeah none of it right like i can think of so many records recently that i've just been like wow yeah yeah like that informs my theology but they're not by those artists don't label themselves inside of any spiritual tradition and they didn't release those records yeah i think escape letting the spirituality conversation escape the shackles of subgenre yes is allowing more people to reflect on what spirituality means yes yes and i'm super interested in that it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the 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happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists amen amen and amen uh what about you how are you transitioning in life well one of the ways this is the rare uh alien in the robot where i have an outline oh boy so i'm going to uh is that the first question yeah i i'm usually pretty anti outline for the show we got a lot of talk about this week uh so one of the ways i'm transitioning is uh trying to figure out how to transition the liturgists away from a collaboration of two loners that frustrates all their friends into a proper media organization and we took a baby step that way in inviting you all to apply uh for an associate producer position with the liturgists and i just want i just wanted to give an update there because i've gotten concerned emails and questions from people who have applied and i've responded to none of those but there have been a lot i've seen them so don't worry if you're like oh my gosh did i not get it we have interviewed zero people for the position of associate producers so if you're like oh no they i didn't make it that's not true no one made it we can't even figure out how to interview everybody i'm just being real we don't even know how to interview you we actually thought about inviting like three to five of our earliest kind of favorite candidates to help us interview everybody and tell us how to interview you in particular and tell us how we should structure your job that's a real conversation we had uh the good news is uh we've gotten a a a friend of the liturgist podcast reach out who has a lot of experience in the media world who has offered to just help us figure this stuff out so the bad news is we are not immediately interviewing people for the associate producer position because we got to figure out how to do that the good news is if you're sending your application you're still in the running to be an associate producer on the literature spot on the in the liturgists there were some amazing people really amazing that's really really amazing i will say i'm probably going to go take the listing off the website yeah and we're going to close the entries because if we just keep letting all these applications come in literally every day then we will never ever ever interview people because did i mention more applications come in every single day seven days a week because they do i guess there's a lot of listeners on the podcast i don't know um but like it's it's still really important because we have huge plans for season five we've talked to you about but that is a point of transition that we aren't managing super well yeah but we are making good strides to figure out how to actually we are in fact after this podcast we're having a meeting with a smart person yeah to help us look at that so i just want to say that and don't hear this that the associate producer candidate physician is paused or cancelled it's not we literally just don't even know how to hi we don't even know like when you start you're supposed to get like an employee handbook or guidelines we don't have an hr person we don't know they come to my in my backyard can we legally hire you what is what is entailed in that we don't know do we have to do the e-verification system i don't know you see what i mean there are some serious fundamental problems with the organization in regards to hiring that we don't have worked out they're not unsolvable problems yeah and we're moving towards solving them we're moving towards solving them but he's going on tour and i'm writing a book so that that's a that's a transition you see why i wanted to say this though yeah they they deserve to they deserve to know i haven't said anything previously because i was embarrassed because in theory i have management experience and in theory i have a degree in organizational leadership on paper we're the right two people to figure this out but i was like i'll replay the process in my mind because i used to hire people all the time step one call sheila in human resources oh we don't have a sheila in human resources what do i do now sheila if you're listening sorry for mentioning your first name although i really do miss you especially right now uh yeah so that's transition two good one but i've got three plans i know what the third one is facebook facebook is trash is that what it is facebook is trying is that the third thing you have on your outline yes that was the third thing i haven't turned his computer but the print was too small i was like look it even says facebook is trash but i was like oh that's tiny font that's a really tiny box yeah facebook is trash um in case you don't follow the drama around social media you may be aware that world governments are investigating facebook for discouraging the awful activity you may be aware that journalists around the world have uncovered nefarious and awful activities by mark zuckerberg facebook's founder and ceo like what like early in facebook's history using facebook as a vindictive tool to get back on other people hiring private investigators to look into and dig up dirt on competitors and former employees just real creepy awful things most recently it turns out that facebook started something called facebook research and targeted at teenagers people under the age of 18 and offered them 20 dollars a month to participate in facebook research all you had to do was install a developer certificate on your iphone which if you don't know what developer certificates are don't worry about it it's a way for companies to use iphones and run their own custom software that's what it's meant for but facebook use that to bypass the very stringent privacy safeguards on apple's app store and analyze 100 of the traffic to the internet and to the cell phone network coming from that teenager's iphone as well as every single thing on that iphone and maybe one of the most flagrant disregards for human privacy ever this is a big deal this is a huge deal this broke i don't remember who broke the story first it spread quickly across the union when you say everything on that iphone literally ever their photos anything they want if you've got developer certificate on the device you can grab anything so that that means there's a person going to that teenager's phone and somehow snooping around how does it they don't have to a machine pulls everything off everything anything they want but we don't know the whole thing with the developer certificate because i used to have these in my corporate world it's for a device a corporation owns that's why you're allowed to do anything you want because it's but like if you if you get a company phone from a company you work for and they own it they've got a right to everything on it and i you know they should it's their phone wow but the enterprise development guidelines specifically say you can't use that for anything other than your phone or employees who opt into your company's program and facebook used that with teenagers that don't work for facebook right so so they paid them so they could be part of the company which doesn't work doesn't hold up but that's what they were trying to do that's what they're trying to do and uh last night the nerd internet went crazy absolutely crazy including i saw a lot of prominent nerds deleting their facebook account last night and then this morning apple revoked facebook's enterprise developer certificate which is a huge deal it means facebook all their custom apps they use for their employees stopped working this morning so facebook the company is in chaos today wow um but you know and a lot of nerds were like i guess it takes a mega corporation to push back on a mega corporation yeah seriously because whatever users claim or facebook doesn't give a shit but apple's big enough to shove facebook around basically um and uh that's the so all facebook's apps stop working and it can also affect their ability to test upcoming versions of the facebook app and the instagram app at scale so this is a this is more than a slap on the wrist that apple has given facebook but the the thing is you know and we've we've did a social media episode on the podcast i think didn't we do a social media yeah yeah so i probably have talked about some of this but i have huge concerns over the role multinational corporations play on social media which is sad because i actually love social media like the ability to connect people the ability to get educated from multiple perspectives the ability to engage and organize advocacy for public good social media has a lot of really promising aspects but then mega corporations are publicly traded make it shitty because they monetize your activity and your personal data and they change their algorithms constantly to try to get you compulsively addicted basically to the platform so that you can't find a healthy role for facebook or instagram or twitter or any major social networking platform in your life do you think they really use those words like in their meetings like can we get people addicted no they say game of gamification gamification that's the lingo in that world is that like a game huh you know games are rewarding games are fun there's rewards when you do things so but yeah that's absolutely i mean they've they've hired behaviorist and behavioral neuroscientists at these companies to maximize engagement you all can't see the air quotes but basically make this stuff as habit-forming as possible wow which they do for their shareholders they make more money the more you use social media i don't want social media that preys on my personal data i don't want social media that creates compulsive behavioral patterns but there's been no alternative and like one of the things that depresses me the most hashtag black lives matter and hashtag me too these incredibly culture shaping movements started by women of color and and trans women end up increasing the market value and capital of silicon valley companies run by kind of anti-social white dudes so that like really doesn't just upset me it offends me um but that's the way like social media is structured now this what was originally called web 2.0 has become this incredible consolidation of media power on the internet which was originally about destroying consolidated media power that's how the internet one started so i've been so fed up and i've been thinking about how to delete my facebook and twitter accounts for how long have i been i don't know it's been a while it's been a while but what there's been no alternative um until now you're gonna go to mastodon well before we will but we can talk about your stuff well i just wanna i wanna like it all sounds nefarious and shady and we've talked about this before and i remember knowing more about why it's so nefarious but privacy why what's the value of privacy for you it seems to be a very high prior like value for you yeah it's a it's a big value for me right it's disturbing when algorithms can learn things about you that you don't disclose publicly for good reasons not just dehumanizing it can have serious life consequences okay that can give me an example if you are an evangelical mega church pastor is questioning their sexuality your google search history can destroy your life whereas if you're allowed to go through your process yeah you can make a transition that protects you but what are you what is the fear so that facebook knows that pastor john strait guy is not straight [Music] what is facebook has an api bug which they have all the time that lets applications look up people's user data and then someone else builds that information outside of facebook and discloses okay and that's not a hypothetical instance yeah that stuff has happened yeah it has happened frequently okay i just think it's an intrinsic right we have i think there's a reason in america that unreasonable search and seizure is a constitutional protection we should have a right and expectation to personal privacy um you know i if if if someone could have figured out i was an atheist in those years when i was pretending to be baptistic i've ruined your family i could have killed myself yeah yeah like the the consequences are severe uh so the flagrant and casual disregard that facebook incorporated and twitter and indeed in my opinion google have four people's privacy is deeply concerning to me the problem is facebook has so many users it's the only place you can connect with almost every single person in the developed world um twitter's got a lot going for it in terms of of culture um some of the most interesting voices in the world are on twitter um instagram you know it's a great place to share share photo content view photo content and then google unfortunately everything google does they're they're decent to great at google search is is great gmail is is is really solid email um even though it's literally mining your personal email anonymizing it not super well and then using it to sell advertising to you it is a free way to have a fast email account but when we're not when advertisers are the ones paying for everything the products are built to the needs of advertisers and so you are the product being sold to an advertiser by facebook and i just i guess i worked in the advertising business too long to feel comfortable with being a product that advertising companies consume you'd be surprised even good people what they'll do when they have two months to hit certain numbers or they or people on their team lose their job it's the entire wall street incentive structure is is there not a way i'm not saying this to it's i'm not saying this to justify any of the corporate behaviors but to this is happening i do you see a way that it really will stop happening that'd be a first question and then second second question would be how can individuals that have privacy concerns up their privacy security game as far as like when you do private web browsing or or are there certain things you can do to like cut off the google and facebook from knowing what you're doing it's really hard because um even if you delete your all your google accounts and all your facebook accounts and stop using chrome um so many websites use google analytics and so many websites have facebook tracking pixels in they're still going to get something so you've got to use a lot of script blockers some people go as far as setting up their router in their home or even the the networking stock on their computer from blocking all the ip addresses of all facebook and google servers wow if you block all of google's a lot of websites don't function really if you block all of amazon's most of the internet doesn't function because so many websites are hosted on amazon web services um so that's tough uh so i i i'm gonna spend after my book gets done the rest of 2019 i'm going to go on a personal quest to demulti-nationalize multinational corporationize my digital presence online so i'm leaving everything google really i'm leaving everything facebook twitter email everything email everything i'll be migrating the liturgist.com to a better service than google apps really um which i'll do in a way that doesn't disrupt the organization at all that is one thing that's actually in my core competency yeah um but yeah i'll be i'll be and as i do that i'll be letting people know how i did it in ways they could as well but it's it i mean it'd be more than it'd be more than one episode of literature's podcast talk about everything you have to do so do you do that do you do that as prince maybe there's no difference for you you do that as principle or as do you actually think that culture can change the trajectory of where we're headed with i think culture can change the director of where we're headed culture got us to where we are yeah and although ella facebook has certainly some really powerful incentive structures and barriers that keeps it in such a dominant position i do not think they are in any way insurmountable um we have for now a free and open internet which is what allowed facebook to rise and i can also believe can cause facebook to fall that's fucking rock and roll that's the problem with us like here's why we're a terrible business you've got two punk rock idealists who are officers of a corporation and so our business partners are like it would help the business if you guys posted more to social media and i'm like actually i think my next year project is to destroy social media because i don't want to be a cock in the machine exploiting these listeners man like i fought the i fought the church yeah on behalf of these people i'm going to fight facebook on their behalf as well god damn it that's what i'm talking about and i you know i i started a facebook thread on my personal page about how facebook is terrible and people like what are you doing and we'll talk about in a minute my first step um but then someone else is like well all my friends are here and i was like well i'm lucky that i can just try a thing and a few thousand people try yeah it's me but that's what it takes like if nobody will ever be the first to kind of put their neck out uh then you know i i i was texting vishnu uh last night i said i think over time facebook is a more existential threat to culture than donald trump it was quite that was quite a text to get i believe it so mastodon tell me about mastodon because i tried to sign up i couldn't even fucking sign into the thing you have an account we did you're talked about very often especially your silence non non-posting no picture so i think i think what happened is i signed up for the account and then i took a break for whatever reason i interrupted and then when i went back and so i had to like download some other thing you shouldn't have to download anything the good news is i know the admin of our mastodon so we can get you in no problem for sure but then i went back to the sign in page and it just didn't it didn't make any sense so let's talk about mastodon first before we get to your account in particular mastodon is a a mastodon is an animal uh an a predecessor to the mammoth right this is a specific animal why do they name a social networking platform mastodon because like many things in the open source world it's very whimsical and it started making fun of twitter which on mastadon is often called hate bird or the hate birds really yeah so instead of a tweet they wanted to be able to make a toot t-o-o-t you told me that when we first started i was experienced uh turned off me too so i don't want to tell anybody i've been to yeah but here's the only thing i would say there was a time when posting on a wall and tweeting were equally like what i can't take this seriously you see what i mean yeah like they've these metaphors become so entrenched so quickly but they're not very old and i remember when they were ridiculous so anyway so tooting doesn't feel weird to you now at this point it does not it's it's about three days of like are you kidding me and then it's just like tweeting did you see so-and-so's toot right oh it is it's a thing wait a second someone named jenny just joined surely that's not my wife i don't know well maybe we'll see uh with the honey badger may have joined mastodon while we're sitting here wow um so it started as a joke around tooting and then became a social networking platform but what's different about mastodon than twitter or facebook is it is not controlled by multinational corporation and cannot be because it's an attempt to take a web 2 idea web 2.0 which is social media and put it back in a web 1.0 framework and i know that's confusing if you're not a nerd it means mastodon is built around a bunch of servers controlled by different people talking to each other and you're like that doesn't make any sense that's how email works so if you have an email address you've got a name an at sign and then a domain yeah yeah yeah and all different email domains can talk to each other it doesn't matter what domain you're on but no company controls yeah email just like no company controls masted on so what we've done is set up a liturgist mastodon server that can talk to every other mastodon server in the world so we've got it right around a thousand liturgists on there right now in a community that has over 2 million people in it so mastodon's not as small as as people might think now why mastodon today is mostly made up of people who felt marginalized on mainstream social media so that means there's a lot of disabled people on mastodon that means there's a lot of queer and trans people on mastodon there's these communities that flocked there for safety and mastodons architecture is designed so the kind of harassment that happens on twitter and facebook is a lot harder to do why how um well for example um you can't search across mastodon right so if you're um a white supremacist yeah you can search for certain hats hashtags and just harass as many people if you want when you search hashtags on mastodon you'll only get results for people on your server or accounts connected to your server wow so mastodon is structurally designed to make it impossible to become a media figure that dominates the platform and the way that happens on facebook and twitter interesting so even though i am the most followed person on the liturgis uh mastodon server and one of the more followed people now you know i'd say probably top five percent of all mastodon users i can't say something that suddenly spreads all the way across mastodon any more than i could write an email that's spread all the way across email wow so it's designed to to make everybody more on a level playing field and the ui is made in such a way that there's no incentive to make something viral it doesn't really display how many likes or boosts the basketball version of a retweet you have the focus is on conversation and communal engagement not on popularity fine which means what's happening on our master instance is really substantive conversations that are weighty without being hostile so everyone's really supportive of each other but we're having conversations about like capitalism versus socialism we're having conversations about like how to be a youth pastor during deconstruction people have questions about sex and sexuality uh you know there's like it's not a superficial conversation but it's good natured in a way that you would expect people um to be when they all listen to lyrics podcast together um so it you know and there's a lot of other features too these have these things called content warnings so if you're gonna post something you you think could be triggering or upsetting to someone else you can hide it behind a content warning and then people can choose whether they want to look at it or not so that's all good i think the most exciting thing is because we have so few people you can get a really great username a lot of people's mastodon handles are their first names so i'm just at mike on our instance wow um and you're just at vishnu now if you wanted someone to reach you who isn't on the liturgist server they'd have to say at mike at social.theliturgist.com which is a little weird at first but you've done it before it's an email address with an at sign in front of it it's how mastodon handles work so my goal is to start investing mastodon's my first effort to see if this is plausible and i will say we've got a lot of great social media stuff out there we've got a slack group we tried mighty networks there's a lot of private facebook groups or official pages of anything we've ever done i've enjoyed this the most um because the slack group a lot of people go on the slack group and i mean a lot of people and say i just don't understand this yeah if you've used twitter you can get your head around mastodon pretty quickly and because of that it it it's more lively and more engaging like i'm sitting here watching our server timeline and there's enough people on it now that it's always kind of moving really but it's not moving so fast that you feel like you're missing something and because it's a chronological presentation it only shows posts in the order they were created there's no algorithm trying to get you compulsively engaged with the platform that's nice so you tend to kind of go on catch up with what happened and then forget about it for hours because there's not going to be some juicy thing you miss if you don't get back on so i would call it like not only uh does it undermine multinational corporate control of social media it also starts to rehumanize social media which is probably my favorite thing about it that's cool i like it made me go back to the beginning of the conversation we talked about how even unconsciously kind of knowing what the biggest part of the gunger audience listening audience is going to like unconsciously impacts how i feel about the work that i would put out on the brand and i've noticed that on twitter as well i kind of have an instinct for what my following is going to like based on the number of likes based on the number of retweets what like i kind of kind of sometimes i know here's oh this is kind of a tweet that people would like to hear and there's like a you're rewarded with the hearts and with the retweet signs and and uh i think that impacts how everybody tweets so to not have that as part of the architecture it's like a constantly clean slate for everybody to be able to just be more themselves it seems that's what it sounds like when i've had post takeoff on mastodon i haven't even known interesting until i start getting quite a few replies but even though it's not compared to even a mild tweet on twitter yeah it's so laid back and so easy so what i'm finding is and i have incredible anxiety with social media these days i don't feel anxious at all when i use mastodon at all i feel completely calm so i feel like excited and open about engaging with people in a way i don't even with people who are liturgist listeners on facebook or twitter because the cultural assumptions are different um so if you're interested in joining us on mastodon uh you just go to social.thelitus.com sign ups are easy and free and if you have any questions just send a toot i think yeah it's tough just make a post and i think you'll find the community is cute quick and supportive that'll that'll have to be adjusted too i literally don't even notice it now well how often does it like when you're on there it says literally every time you try to create a post you press a button that's blue that says toot literally every time i guess it does help you like take your thoughts less seriously yeah you'll see you'll just see the community is different like at our people that's the other cool thing okay i've really got to tell you this we get on mastodon meaning we the liturgists and it once we got to about 300 users we were talking so much um you can track trending topics across the entire mastodon web called the fetiverse and uh we started making well federation universe but yes it's all very nerdy we started making hashtags trend and one of them was hashtag the liturgists so liturgist is trending on all of mastodon which is pretty wild if you think about it and uh some people started being like what the what the fuck is the liturgists like nobody knew and so this person says uh i was getting ready to block an instance because it looked like it's religious and this person is on an instance that's explicitly for queer and trans people and uh said i was getting ready to but then i i did a little digging and saw that these people are explicitly anti-homophobia anti-racism anti-white supremacy.right and we're like and i dug in and looked it looks like a really healthy community and so i'm trying to figure out like how is there a religious community that's healthy like it's making me reconsider what i think about spirituality and religion and i just don't think there's this space in the capitalist exploitive structure of facebook or twitter to create that kind of a nuanced redefining shift in someone's thinking just by being present kind and open well you're good at sales mike mccarthy only when i really believe it that's my fatal flaw as a marketing person i gotta believe it i'm gonna have to go like find my password now i can't even log in here it's not whatever i know the admin all right wait does that mean you have a a physical server with oh yeah at your house no no no no i get used to hosted server hosting service our server is located in france interesting yeah i don't trust the united states fair enough wait so you've you really you chose not to be in the u.s that's correct i'm one of those eu privacy controls yeah it's a lot more difficult for the feds to make a request to get on our data [Laughter] [Music] it will be nice to have my own logins because i can't log into our patreon account because uh mr privacy i can get you in there he's got a secret room that i have to go into that has a secure server and i can log in you logged in from an ip6 device for macedon yeah see that doesn't seem very private ip6 addresses are not not real traceable okay it's built on the protocol all right well everybody's changing everybody's dying everything's happening the alien [Music]