Phone-a-friend: Tech Realness with Nitasha Tiku
10/7/16 - In this phone-a-friend episode, Amina talks with BuzzFeed News tech writer Nitasha Tiku about Silicon Valley's storytelling prowess, how she dishes up smart and incisive journalism without alienating sensitive tech founders, plus the new TV show Westworld.
Transcript below.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Spotify.
CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Destry Maria Sibley
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Ad sales: Midroll
LINKS
Nitasha looking like a Krispy Kreme donut while writing about Glossier
Elon Musk gets heady at Code
WSJ's unmasking of Theranos
Read more of Nitasha at BuzzFeed | Twitter
TRANSCRIPT: PHONE-A-FRIEND: TECH REALNESS WITH NITASHA TIKU
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Gina: And I'm producer Gina Delvac. On this week's agenda a phone-a-friend between Amina and BuzzFeed tech writer Nitasha Tiku. They discuss how Nitasha writes so incisively about touchy tech founders without hurting their feelings too badly, typical spin tactics of Silicon Valley, and the apps, TV shows, and Instagram accounts that they both love right now.
[Theme Song]
[Interview Starts]
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend Nitasha Tiku.
Nitasha: Thanks for having me.
Aminatou: I'm super excited to have you on the show because you're one of my earliest SF buddies.
Nitasha: I know!
Aminatou: Ugh. Okay, tell me everything. What do you do Nitasha?
Nitasha: I am a writer for BuzzFeed's tech bureau in San Francisco and I focus on Silicon Valley, the intersection of tech and culture which is increasingly crowded these days, and I kind of just dig into whatever I think warrants a closer look.
Aminatou: I love that you said that it's really crowded because that's true but I like -- you know, let the record reflect that over the years you are one of the few people that makes tech writing not seem boring and also does it really honestly.
(1:50)
Nitasha: [Laughs] It's really hard. You see this with a lot of the reporters in our bureau are from New York and there's this sense that the San Francisco reporters are sort of a little bit more chummy -- close -- to some of their sources and some of the people here, the New York people, are coming in but they're coming in with a lack of knowledge and just kind of maybe some ideas about how tech people function.
And so you're constantly trying to collaborate for like knowledge but fairness and also you need access to the people in order to -- before you can call bullshit you kind of have to know what they're saying. And that's incredibly hard with private companies because they're under no obligation to talk to you.
Aminatou: [Laughs] Just like . . .
Nitasha: Did I accidentally just throw shade at San Francisco?
Aminatou: No! I don't think you threw a lot of shade. I think that's, as someone who works in tech, it's definitely something I have noticed. It's like more than any other industry that I've worked in people take press very personally, you know, in a way that kind of doesn't make sense. It's like you know that reporters aren't there to do your PR bidding right? It's actually their jobs to do reporting and I'm sorry your startup -- your dating startup is not actually saving the world.
Nitasha: I know. It's been, like over the course of maybe the last five years it's been . . . the most surprising thing to me is how sensitive they have been to their own criticism. But that really has translated into changing the narrative more so than maybe changing some of the practices and I just have an increased appreciation for how good they are at storytelling which is like essentially marketing.
Aminatou: Marketing! [Laughs]
Nitasha: Yeah, makes the world go round.
Aminatou: Yeah, right? Okay, but let's back up. How did you decide that you were going to write about tech? That's such a specific thing. And also you lived in New York for a long time.
(3:45)
Nitasha: Yeah, so my first job out of J school was at this business magazine called Ink and at the time I had been really focused on green businesses and do-gooders and there just wasn't any appetite for that.
Aminatou: Is that what you really wanted to do?
Nitasha: No.
Aminatou: Or did you like fall into it?
Nitasha: No, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I would throw out the business section of a newspaper for my entire adult life until this started.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Nitasha: And I was trying to search for like what -- you know, how can I carve my own niche? And the most interesting thing in a magazine focused on small businesses was tech. So I got to talk to a lot of the founders who are big today. You get to see the trajectory of how someone can become -- like say Travis Kalanick.
Aminatou: CEO of Uber.
Nitasha: Yeah, CEO of Uber, sorry.
Aminatou: Let's tell the people.
Nitasha: Sorry, that's like a San Francisco liability. You know, he was like this startup dude that was in your GChat trying to get you to promote his latest freebie offer in New York that sounds wackadoo and none of the regulators are into it and now he's this like . . .
Aminatou: Damn.
Nitasha: Yeah, insane billionaire who could potentially usher in self-driving cars and change the way cities are laid out in theory.
Aminatou: Does he still GChat with you?
Nitasha: No, I am persona non-grata. I'm sure there are others too. There's lots of others. Uber obviously has a very contentious relationship with the press.
Aminatou: That's crazy. So you're at Ink, you're writing about green business, then you're like this tech thing, this thing has legs.
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: And then I still think that the thing that I said earlier in the sense that you make it seem not boring at all, it's not . . . you're like Wall Street Journal tech column or this straight reporting, you really carved out a place that was like how to talk about how tech culture affects all of us. And also, you know, lifestyles of the rich and techies.
Nitasha: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I think it comes from not being -- like every time I start a new story it's almost like I have to start from scratch to try to make it conversational for myself. It wasn't necessarily even that I thought tech had legs; they just had a lot of ideas and really big personalities and you could start to see how things were changing.
(6:00)
Like even Four Square, at the time it seemed really revolutionary that somebody would be broadcasting their location, that you could walk by a store and find out information on it as you're passing.
Aminatou: Yeah.
Nitasha: That's kind of what's been nice about moving out to San Francisco. I still think about it as me trying to explain the culture to my friends back home who have no inherit interest.
Aminatou: Yeah, because we're living in the future over here.
Nitasha: Yeah, yeah.
Aminatou: People, it's like kind of shocking how we use all the apps. We know about them first. Our luggage is smart. We can track it. All of this weird -- yeah, it's a weird town to live in but if you care about all of this stuff obviously.
Nitasha: Yeah, especially weird town because all of that changes in your phone and not necessarily is reflected when you look around at whatever, the grimy income inequality and general troubled state of San Francisco streets right now.
Aminatou: [Laughs] Yeah. It's getting dire out here. You know one place -- so you worked at Valleywag also for a long time.
Nitasha: Yes.
Aminatou: So you're somebody who came out of the Gawker meat grinder but people still like you.
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: And you still have sources and you moved on to a bigger and better job. How did you do that?
Nitasha: Well I had -- like with all of the press around the Gawker bankruptcy and finding out that Peter Thiel was behind all of this it's like the first time that it's been . . . I've been kind of thankful to have been almost entirely invisible at Valleywag where a lot -- you know, every time there would be like a piece in the Times or New York Magazine about it literally my name would not get mentioned.
Aminatou: Which is crazy.
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: Because you were the other significant half of that.
Nitasha: Yeah. But right now it's been kind of beneficial for me because I'm not associated with the worldview necessarily. But if you go back and look . . . but the piece I interviewed for my pieces, and if you go back and look at it, I do stand by what I wrote. I think because I came from a super boring business magazine, not that Ink is boring but I was not doing the most fun pieces while I was there . . .
Aminatou: [Laughs]
(8:15)
Nitasha: Because I came from that background I mean I was forced to bring more nuance into some of my pieces because I'd been following these people for years. I know their backstory.
Aminatou: Yeah.
Nitasha: I know, you know, not necessarily from their mouths; it's actually just like kind of as, you know, on the outskirts and you're trying to find out as much information about these people as possible. So it's just not possible to go at it with a bludgeon.
Aminatou: So it's like you left New York, you came to SF, and all your sources still loved you and they follow you around. I don't know, I'm fascinated by this because I think that . . . we had Kara Swisher on the podcast a while ago too and this is something that we talked about, just this thing about you have to be tough on people, especially in this industry that's so self-congratulatory.
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: But you still have to cultivate them and you have to stay in their good graces. And, you know, I think that a lot of that is you're tough but you're fair. So people really respond well to that.
Nitasha: Yeah, it took me a long time to be able to go in the front door as opposed to talking to ex-employees or speaking to somebody. I mean I have so many -- most of my information comes from off-the-record conversations which I think are incredibly useful to give your stories texture. Even if you can't quote them, and it's incredibly frustrating not to be able to put out information that you know, at least I try to use it as a way to make these characters and people and their motivations come alive. But it's honestly so frustrating to have to just calibrate every single thing you say to these very sensitive egos even if you think you're being fair. And I mean I think in their defense there is the impulse, like I was saying kind of a New York based outlook on Silicon Valley, to think of them as clueless, solution-oriented, spoiled, rich brats.
(10:14)
Aminatou: Yeah, but they kind of are. [Laughs] You know what I'm saying? I'm not saying that's everyone.
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: But you and I go to the same parties.
Nitasha: Oh yeah.
Aminatou: We go to the same demo days and a lot of times I'm like you're not solving anything. You're literally trying to replace a task your mom used to do for you into an application.
Nitasha: Right. I mean there is that strata of company but I think that that -- the solving the world, that's what I'm saying about them being really good at narrative because they don't actually believe that. They were taught . . . they have a formula that they follow of what to say to make -- to get more investment because if you make your product sound like the market for your product is much bigger then you're able to get more money and expand more quickly.
Yeah, they are . . . [Laughs] I guess that is true they are a little bit of that stereotype but they're also that stereotype in very different ways. You know, there's like we saw this happen at the Ellen Pao trial. It's like it's not all brogrammers. You know, brogrammers are very different from like an old-school, old money VC. Very different from a kind of self-styled futurist ala Peter Thiel. I think the goal is to learn what kind of . . .
Aminatou: Self-style futurist just makes me want to die. [Laughs] I just want to die.
Nitasha: But there really are self-styled . . . like Elon Musk's most recent press conference about SpaceX, I actually don't even know what he was -- I wasn't present. I don't even know what he was promoting but all of the press that came out of it were dates that he's going to send people to Mars. Like I put it in my iPhone calendar. I was like "In September 2016 Elon Musk said by 2023 he will send the first person to Mars." And there's no . . . you're incentivized to make those promises because there's no repercussions. You won't . . .
(12:05)
Aminatou: Yeah, but he can't even deliver a Tesla on schedule so why am I supposed to believe he's going to send a human into space on time? Also he just exploded a satellite. [Laughs]
Nitasha: Right, but he went from working on PayPal to building a rocket. Like the truth is nobody knows. I don't know -- I feel 90% certain he won't hit the 2023 deadline or 99% certain but, you know, what will happen between now and then, whether he will be able to raise the money. He's very good at getting federal money and soaking up all the talent and be able to do this. Who knows? But in the meantime it's really good for Tesla stock and it's really good for SpaceX to have their fearless leader be shuttling humanity to Mars.
Aminatou: So I saw him speak at the Code Conference that you were also at I guess this summer.
Nitasha: Oh yeah.
Aminatou: And I have never . . . it's obviously like I know who Elon Musk is. I know what Tesla is. I know all these things. But seeing the way that people in the room -- somebody next to me was crying. It's like he was talking and this person started crying. And I was like okay, this is real. And then he gets to this point -- and also, you know, there's like seven women in the room. Let's not forget this is also what's happening. But all these men are getting very emotional and you know he's like giving this big speech or whatever or I guess Kara's interviewing him. And then he gets to the part where he talks about how we're in the fake video game or whatever.
Nitasha: Mm-hmm.
Aminatou: The thing that I've had to Wikipedia like 30,000 times.
Nitasha: Yeah. [Laughs]
(13:42)
Aminatou: I looked around me. I will not name names because these are all people that you know sitting next to me. And they were so enthralled. They were just like hanging on to his every word. And I looked around and I'm like am I the only person that feels like we're getting Catfished right now? [Laughs] This is not real. Like none of this is real. But I had never seen that before. Like this sounds really naïve and dumb but I'm just like I've lived here three years and I've never experienced the fanboy, the like tech fanboy moment.
Nitasha: Right.
Aminatou: And I was like I guess this is their Beyoncé because when I go to the Beyoncé concert this is how I am.
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: But seeing other people react to him that way was so crazy. And by the end of it I was like fine, I've also drank a little bit of the Elon Kool-Aid. And then I'm in the ladies restroom and some woman -- some big tech PR lady is like "Isn't he so handsome and hot?"
Nitasha: Oh boy.
Aminatou: I'm like no, he looks rich. [Laughter] I hear what you're saying. Yeah, but that was new for me, experiencing that tech fanboy moment that people have.
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: I was like is this how people were when Steve Jobs was still alive? Probably.
Nitasha: Yeah. But imagine the scope of Elon's ambitions are so massive, it's like they seriously are looking at somebody who's descended to the next level. That's like deity -- like Beyoncé, like deity worship.
Aminatou: [Laughs] Yeah, but he doesn't dance in five-inch heels. The man didn't write Halo so I don't know.
Nitasha: As far as the computer simulation that thing really drove me crazy because if you're saying like we're being catfished, the catfish . . .
Aminatou: Can you explain it to the people? Because clearly I can't explain it.
Nitasha: Sure. All you need to know is basically the chances are higher that our reality is a simulation. This isn't real reality.
Aminatou: [Laughs] I'm like laughing all over again.
Nitasha: But the thing is this is a conversation, like we're being catfished by a college sophomore. This is a discussion many people have.
Aminatou: Yes, I know, then I dropped out of those classes and stopped talking to those kids in college.
Nitasha: Right.
Aminatou: But when I moved to this town this is all people talk about is downloading themselves in the computer all day.
(15:48)
Nitasha: Right, which is like . . . it's really intoxicating. I love any kind of time travel/future/singularity movie. That's my jam.
Aminatou: What's your favorite singularity/future/space whatever movie?
Nitasha: [Laughs] I mean I think I probably have to go like Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Aminatou: Whoa. [Laughs]
Nitasha: Which I highly recommend and endorse. It was a spin-off of Terminator and Lena Headley who plays Cersei in -- is that her name, Cersei?
Aminatou: Yeah.
Nitasha: In Game of Thrones, she plays Sarah Connor, the mom of John Connor who . . .
Aminatou: You know I didn't even put two and two together that that's who that was.
Nitasha: Oh yeah.
Aminatou: So thanks for IMDB fixing that for me.
Nitasha: You are welcome. And she is just incredible and it goes into a lot more detail of some of the stuff that makes like Skynet and the possibility of that so interesting. You know, there are like Turing tests and people doing chess games and men falling in love with robots. [Laughter] All kinds of things.
Aminatou: Yeah, that's -- I mean that's definitely happening. You know, it's funny. I'm just like . . . this to me, it's kind of like religion. I'm not saying I'm an atheist; I'm just like it doesn't keep me awake at night.
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: And the same thing with downloading ourselves in the computer. I'm like it does not keep me awake at night but it keeps this entire city awake at night.
Nitasha: Well I think like the possibility -- like death, the inevitability of death keeps everybody awake at night because these are people who if you believe your sense of exceptionalism only you can lead us -- only you are seeing the future and can lead us to the future. And, you know, if you have like CEOs who are in their 40s and 50s and an employee workforce that's about 25, you know, how much longer can you stay and impart your wisdom and build the world in the image you would . . . you know, the way you would like to remake it?
So I don't even think that they . . . I don't know. I mean there's definitely two schools of thought and you can see it like veering off billionaire-to-billionaire almost in the same way that we see freedom of the press veering off from like Jeff Bezos of Amazon's view versus Peter Thiel's view. And you're just like watching . . . I mean that's what I felt like at Code Conference. You're just watching these people fight proxy wars of different kinds of belief systems.
Aminatou: And we're all pawns in their game.
Nitasha: But all of them are billionaires, yeah.
Aminatou: Mm-hmm.
[Ads]
(21:15)
Aminatou: Okay, that's enough about downloading ourselves in the computer because it gives me anxiety. I was like maybe I should look into this. I just want an iPhone battery that lasts more than six hours a day. My tech expectations are . . . if my phone stops crashing on updates then I'll believe you that one day we can go to space but we can barely keep it together down here.
Nitasha: Exactly. I have to email every -- as every single person downloads iOS 10 I have to email them a tutorial, like give them some tips.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Nitasha: It's so unintuitive. Like we were both sending -- I think when I downloaded it -- those dumb black pictures with the pink things.
Aminatou: Oh I still haven't figured it out.
Nitasha: Everybody does that when they start, yeah.
(21:50)
Aminatou: Okay, I haven't figured it out. You know the only people in my life who figure that out? My friends' parents.
Nitasha: [Laughs]
Aminatou: How come all the like -- the tech, the low-tech people in my life, they know how to send me one of those drawing boxes and I am struggling? It's like I can barely -- I don't even understand what the stickers do.
Nitasha: I mean probably because they're only using iMessage. I mean my mom is amazing at Bitmoji. She only uses iMessage and Bitmoji.
Aminatou: I'm like terrified of Bitmoji.
Nitasha: It's fine. Whatever.
Aminatou: Do you have a Bitmoji that looks like you? I'm just convinced they don't create Bitmojis of color but that's also like I don't know that this is true; I just decided it was true.
Nitasha: I know that you can make an Indian-looking Bitmoji very realistic.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Nitasha: My brothers and my moms are so hyper . . . like it makes me happy when my mom sends me a Bitmoji because it's like looking at her face. This sounds really troubling but it's true. Like they have the wrinkles and the skin color and the face shape, right? I didn't feel like man was accurate.
Aminatou: Man.
Nitasha: But I don't know how much time they spent on it.
Aminatou: Yeah, I just don't -- yeah, Bitmoji's another one of those technologies. I feel like I was really on top of tech until I moved to SF and then now . . .
Nitasha: You're more on top than anyone else.
Aminatou: I'm just like -- I'm struggling to keep up. But you know the thing you said about how the workforce is really young? This town is the first place where I felt old.
Nitasha: Oh my gosh.
Aminatou: And I'm not old. I'm like -- I'm 31. That's ridiculous. But I remember my first day of orientation at Google you get on the little shuttle and I look around and everybody has a backpack and they're straight out of college. And I'm like what? Is this what life -- is this what life is? And this was the first time that I was like okay, I'm a different demographic than what's going on here. [Laughs]
Nitasha: Yeah. The homogeneity is alive and well in race but also in age. Like I saw you know that bar we went to, Evil Eye? I saw a guy with white hair walk out of it the other day at 6 p.m. and I was like [Gasps] because that's my blog. I hadn't seen a guy with white hair on the . . .
Aminatou: You hadn't seen an older person? Yeah.
(23:54)
Nitasha: Especially having fun or partaking in culture.
Aminatou: I know. We are surrounded by 22- to 25-year-olds.
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: I don't even know how they graduate them so fast that all -- it's all I encounter in the workforce.
Nitasha: Yeah. And you can sense I think a real panic and fear in the way that youth is valorized.
Aminatou: Yeah, it's like all we have is 20 -- 30 under 30 lists, genius by 25.
Nitasha: Right. Oh, but like in tech in particular I think because that's the fear that you will not be able to keep up with this rapidly-changing technology and only the youth who have been raised on the new technology will be able to control it and manipulate it and truly understand it and like innovate on it. And so you have these investors who are in their 40s and 50s, maybe late 30s, also kind of like, you know . . .
Aminatou: Just like who are the children I know who can build . . .
Nitasha: Yes, vampiring out. [Laughter] On the youngest -- youngest smarties they can find.
Aminatou: Oh my god, we're all vampiring out. What apps are you loving right now? What's your favs?
Nitasha: I mean Instagram.
Aminatou: That's it right?
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: Are you a big Snapchatter?
Nitasha: No.
Aminatou: I'm falling in love with Snapchat. It has finally happened for me and I was like oh, everybody is bad at this. It's great.
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: Also mostly because of Kylie Jenner.
Nitasha: Exactly. Kylie really drives my consumption of a lot of different media.
Aminatou: She's making like movies on . . .
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: She should win an Oscar for some of these movies -- the short movies that she's making on there.
Nitasha: It is truly incredible. That is why I look at most . . . I mean it's kind of embarrassing, you look at your searched, it's like Kylie, Kim, Kendell, and then my genuine closest friends in the world. [Laughs]
Aminatou: Yeah, I'm not following my friends on Snapchat. My friends are not as good as the Kardashian-Jenners, sorry. That's not happening.
(25:50)
Nitasha: Yeah. I mean the problem I had with Snapchat is I downloaded it too early and when you download apps at first, especially if they're only being written about on Tech Crunch, it's you and a bunch of VCs and some tech bloggers and it's like the least fun thing possible.
Aminatou: Oh, like me and dating apps. [Laughs]
Nitasha: Yeah. Except dating apps in San Francisco never graduate beyond that but imagine Snapchat if it's only venture capitalists. It's really not fun. So I loved the medium but then I was like this is so boring.
Aminatou: Yeah, it's like you can only . . . you should only sign up for an app after like DJ Khaled has colonized it.
Nitasha: Exactly. That was a rookie mistake. But that was like 2012 so I've learned since then.
Aminatou: Yeah. But, you know, unfortunately for us we're dog fooding a lot of these apps. So I think that's what happened with me and Peach. That's why I was like I'm . . . so much promise.
Nitasha: Ugh, Peach. I knew it was going to fail.
Aminatou: It had so much promise.
Nitasha: It didn't have any promise.
Aminatou: It kind of had promise. It was like the place where you could dump all your like . . .
Nitasha: It was LO number two. You could tell it didn't have promise based on -- I mean I feel salty about Peach because I wanted to . . . again you also never know what's going to happen but it's very hard to picture a new app getting actual traction or that much market share. Part of the reason why Instagram and Snapchat loom so large in our imagination is there's so many people using it. And now you only see that kind of intense -- I feel like for messaging apps that kind of intensity from Asian messaging apps or whatever Facebook wants to throw its weight behind. You know, for a bit, like I hate Messenger but I'm forced to use it.
Aminatou: I'm back on Facebook in a big way. Facebook is back in my life. I check it every day. I post every day. I love seeing all my friends' babies. I have come full-circle -- thank you Mark Zuckerberg -- it's my favorite application.
Nitasha: [Laughs] It's unavoidable. I use it as a news filter. That was the strange thing about people getting so worked up about trending topics. I feel like the newsfeed is really where all the power is because those are the articles that you see.
Aminatou: But who's reading news on Facebook?
Nitasha: Me.
(27:55)
Aminatou: But that's like legit the equivalent of how . . . you know how our parents used to read the news on Yahoo and then they would tell you crazy stuff like did you hear about the shark attack?
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: And I'm like where are you hearing this? Then I realized it was the Yahoo News scrolls.
Nitasha: But you need as many filters as possible because there's just so much. Like I find the news cycle incredibly overwhelming. Even if you're only keeping up with tech news like the amount of things that happened just this morning are like astounding. They found out that Yahoo had built a program to let the government search incoming emails for some . . . this is kind of unprecedented.
(28:30)
Aminatou: That news hasn't even hit me yet. [Laughs]
Nitasha: Yeah, so you've got to . . . it's like Twitter is no longer useful if you follow too many people so you've got to look at moments and that's like hokey as shit even if it's fun and easy.
Aminatou: Yeah.
Nitasha: A way to just turn the volume down. And same with Facebook. So it's true I would end up like an uncool mom if I only read Facebook but . . .
Aminatou: You're going to be cool forever because you cover -- no, and I've decided moms are the coolest people on the Internet.
Nitasha: The best. I mean they're amazing.
Aminatou: First of all moms introduced me to the Starbucks app which the Starbucks app is the best app in the App Store. I don't know how to tell you this.
Nitasha: I believe you.
Aminatou: So you wrote this profile of Glossier recently and I really enjoyed it because I felt like it hit all the Natasha Hall marks. It was great. It was fun, it was smart, it was critical and fair, but I loved how you were like oh, here's this beauty company that operates as a start-up. Not many people would give them that kind of cred. You know, part of having people who are diverse or have different backgrounds is that they see all of this stuff and I think that a lot of your body of work has been that. It's that you're just like "Hi, I'm not like a white bro working here."
Nitasha: Yeah. [Laughs]
(29:50)
Aminatou: You know, you're like "I know who Karlie Kloss is so I have other -- I have other ideas for sourcing."
Ann: I mean I think that they get credited, like she -- the CEO of Glossier, Emily Weiss, she was onstage at Tech Crunch Disrupt which is a tech conference and she has tech investors, like the same investors, behind Warby Parker and Bonobos and other things so they do get credited as that. But I found it . . . I thought that they were actually doing . . . like a lot of times tech companies will brag about, you know, having a monopoly on how to use social media to their advantage and it's like these are the same people who are kind of brushing off Kim Kardashian. Like they don't see there are people using their tools to do exactly what they're saying. It's just not predicated on like a new algorithm or some tech; it's predicated on using Instagram, using Facebook, using social -- Twitter distribution, learning how people talk on that and mimicking it. Or it's a much more socialized way of using these platforms. So in that way I did think that they deserve credit to use that kind of startup thinking.
Aminatou: Yeah. Okay, that's fair. They're not . . .
Nitasha: Like there's so many -- you know, the line is completely arbitrary. Like why is Warby Parker a tech startup? Why is Bonobos a tech startup? Why is Soylent a tech startup?
Aminatou: If you take venture capital you're a tech startup, right? Isn't that the conventional wisdom?
Nitasha: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I'm just like I'm straddling the fence a little bit.
Aminatou: Let's start our own company. We can do something. We can be like Elizabeth Holmes, some sort of like catfish like bullshit idea and then we can wear turtlenecks and we would like kill it.
Nitasha: I mean like mastering the narrative, she was so good at that. The things that drive me crazy when you go back and read old profiles are the little signifiers that she drops in. Like not just the turtleneck but she'll be like "I never took a vacation in ten years. As a child . . ."
Aminatou: I know. Or how she became vegan. [Laughs]
Nitasha: "As a child I built a time machine." Like the idea -- this is why there's . . . she knows the formula. There's a very established formula right now. You know, you have to have been interested in something as a child. Like for example in the Elon Musk biography he -- which I think is very positive towards him but the author makes the point to emphasize that Elon tries to stress he was concerned about space at age eight. Like you had to have had -- be prenaturally disposed to whatever fanciful thing you're doing.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Nitasha: So they . . .
(32:15)
Aminatou: And that's not a thing that you can fact-check, right? It's like literally you write your own mythology.
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: And a lot of these people all have -- yeah, Elizabeth Holmes, what was hers? It was kind of crazy. She had some weird . . .
Nitasha: She thought she built a time machine.
Aminatou: Yeah, she had the time machine and then she had something with a disease.
Nitasha: With a letter to her father, yeah.
Aminatou: Yeah, the letter to her father was a bit much. I was like this is -- this is crazy. But you know what? Everybody ate it hook, line, sink, and she almost got away with it. She's like the white Joanne the Scammer.
Nitasha: Well she . . . it's hard to fact-check those things. It's hard enough to fact-check the products as they move into different categories. Like the Wall Street Journal's investigation of Theranos which was incredible, like I think that they deserve a Pulitzer for that, but they spent a lot of money because lab tests are expensive. So you can be kind of skeptical of it, you can try it yourself, but when you move from testing and being skeptical and critiquing an app to critiquing technology like that it's just very hard. Like you just -- only the experts know and as the experts in medicine had been saying these people don't have a peer-reviewed paper, we can't see it, so Theranos' argument and generally startups' argument is this information is proprietary. It's our secret sauce. We can't tell you.
Aminatou: Yeah, except that you're giving medical tests to human beings.
Nitasha: Yeah. Exactly, exactly. When it bumps up against real life that's when it gets scary.
Aminatou: Yeah, but don't you think that story specifically is such an indictment of tech press in the sense that like all those stories were there. People had been making the noise forever. And it literally took a guy who was like . . . he was reading a New Yorker profile of her and he was like this technology seems weird.
Nitasha: Yeah.
(33:50)
Aminatou: I'm going to look into it, you know? And it took -- it took an entire team that was not tech reporters who I don't want to say they were brave or had courage but they had the curiosity to follow that instead of like putting her onstage and being like oh, look, a woman founder. You know what I mean? Even though she'd invented this very scientific thing a lot of the reporting about her was about her lifestyle, you know?
Nitasha: Right. Well I mean sure, certainly like the tech press, there are a lot of indictments to be made about the tech press. But I don't . . . the thing is she was heads down -- she didn't do any press for a while. Then all of a sudden she came up and it was like who has the time to do this many covers? Venture capitalists and maybe scammers. [Laughs] Like so she does . . .
Aminatou: Yeah, scammers have a lot of time on their hands.
Nitasha: Yeah, yeah. Be skeptical of somebody on the cover of a magazine.
Aminatou: She was like in Glamour -- you know what I mean? She was doing all the tech magazines but also she was doing . . . you know, she's like Vanity Fair New Guard, like Glamour Woman of the Year, all that stuff.
Nitasha: Yeah, so I think it's mainstream press too. And I know what they were thinking. It's like oh, finally an attractive woman that we can put on our list of blah, blah, blah under 30 or what have you. So of course they're going to put her on.
Aminatou: Yeah, she even dyed her hair blonde. I was like you are my hero. Just everything.
Nitasha: Yeah. Yeah, so I would say it's an indictment on all those kinds of fluffy profiles and then if you think about it from the tech reporting perspective I think it really . . . it just emphasizes how there are so many holes. Because say you're the person who wrote something and thought Theranos is kind of fishy. Tomorrow you might be writing about Elon Musk claiming that he's going to Mars or the day after, like a food delivery startup, you need somebody who is trained . . .
Aminatou: Like that -- yeah.
Nitasha: Yeah, you have to be -- you have to know more than them to be able to call bullshit. And instead I think we're seeing like the tech press all pile onto the same stories over and over again. You know, they're kind of writing for each other.
Aminatou: I'm excited for our scam startup one day.
[Music]
(36:10)
Aminatou: Okay, we're not talking about tech anymore. I just want to talk about pop culture because outside of writing for tech you're actually a very cool, fun, awesome person.
Nitasha: Yeah! [Laughs]
Aminatou: What are you watching right now?
Nitasha: Oh, I just saw the first four episodes of Westworld, HBO's new show.
Aminatou: Yeah, how do we feel about that? Because I saw the pilot and it was slow and I was like I don't know about this.
Nitasha: Yeah. I find it incredibly compelling. I mean I watched -- I thought I would just watch one and then I mean I have an endless appetite to like find out what the secret mystery is. Like J.J. Abrams has fucked me over so many times but I will not give up on maybe, maybe this time it's some fantastical twist.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Nitasha: And Westworld, it's set in a future where it's a western theme park where all these robots are incredibly lifelike, artificially intelligent, and people come and they pay a shit ton of money to come and do whatever they want to these lifelike robots. And in this world it's really sadistic and -- they like shoot, they want to shoot them, kill them, rape them, do all of these things, and the idea is to kind of explore how . . . at what point should we start applying human ethics to virtual robots? Like it looks very twisted when you see it this way but if you think about . . . it's like an extrapolation from Grand Theft Auto. At what point do you start feeling bad about the people that you run over? I don't play GTA. [Laughs] I know you run over people.
Aminatou: I play GTA. Yeah.
Nitasha: When they start to look like you . . .
Aminatou: There's not a moral code in GTA unfortunately.
Nitasha: Yeah, yeah.
Aminatou: Ah damn, Nitasha. Okay, fine. I'll watch Westworld. What else are you watching?
(37:50)
Nitasha: I have -- I'm constantly searching for shows that will occupy my mind but not make me think about work and that's increasingly hard to do. Not make me think about work or the true state of the world.
Aminatou: [Laughs] Also like Empire.
Nitasha: Yeah, Empire. Right now I'm into Braindead, the show from the creators of The Good Wife.
Aminatou: I have not seen that.
Nitasha: Also a little bit of an alien twist on it. So it's like set in DC and these bugs from outer space -- sorry, spoiler -- these bugs from outer space crawl into people and the bugs are the reason why people are increasingly polarized. So they have like this stereotype of Lefty who keeps saying like "Did you know the people in Denmark are happier than normal people? And they are bleeding heart liberals."
Aminatou: [Laughs] Normal people.
Nitasha: Yeah, they get happier people. So it . . . that kind of fantastical element makes it a little bit easier for me. And now I'm just like watching old reruns of The Office because I'm so starved for something that won't make you think about contemporary events at all.
Aminatou: Oh my god.
Nitasha: You have to go pretty far to get away from Donald Trump.
Aminatou: Yeah, it's like I . . . he occupies a lot of my brain.
Nitasha: Yeah.
Aminatou: Like time. I hate that. Who are your favorite accounts that you're following on Instagram? You follow some pretty good ones.
Nitasha: I do?
Aminatou: I know because you tag me in them.
Nitasha: Oh right. [Laughs]
Aminatou: And it's always ridiculous stuff.
Nitasha: Yeah. So I love the what do they call them? The influencers. The influencers on Instagram, yeah.
Aminatou: Instagram influencers. Instagram whos. [Laughs]
Nitasha: Yeah. There's this woman Elizabeth Smart who's a photographer who has like the cutest kid known to man and it's just like -- it's kind of like low-key celebrity because you're having kind of the same narrative in your head about them like how did they get so cool? Where did the money come from? Wait, how did you lose baby weight in two weeks? You know, how can I get this life? Except it's at one level closer to you. And so they have also a little bit less pretense maybe.
(40:00)
And just, I mean I don't know, I find it endlessly fascinating the way people present themselves on Instagram and Snapchat. I mean that's the other reason I don't like Snapchat that much. People are like "Oh, it lets you be real." I mean maybe in the individual snaps you're sending people but it's still so fucking stylized. Like people could be sending pictures of like themselves on the toilet, their disgusting homes, their messy whatever. It's really not that -- it's always like your fun Sunday adventures.
Aminatou: Yeah but it doesn't look good. So here's my rant about Instagram: people who have bad Instagram accounts I don't even understand how it's possible. Like there's this one girl I had to unfollow, she's like friends of friends, but every picture she posted it was just gross. And I was like listen, there's like ten thousand million and one filters.
Nitasha: You mean aesthetically gross?
Aminatou: Yeah, aesthetically. It's just like she doesn't understand how to take a picture. And I was like listen, there's literally a square so for all you dumb people who don't know composition it'll . . .
Nitasha: Right.
Aminatou: I just think that it's so easy to be like, you know, air quotes, a good Instagram curated account. That is impossible on Snapchat. Stylistically -- aesthetically it does not look good and I think that it also forces people to be more like goofballs, you know what I mean? It's like . . .
Nitasha: I really feel it's a conscripted amount of goofballness, like I . . .
Aminatou: No, absolutely. But it's like conscripted to the filters right? But it's like you can do a goofy voice here. You can do whatever. But with Instagram it's like you can literally be . . . it's like somebody created an app where you can be your best self every day. It's like everybody on Instagram is a liar and a scammer, like we're all liars.
Nitasha: Yeah, I have to remind myself of this.
Aminatou: And the people who don't understand that, you know, who are always like "I have Instagram envy and Instagram jealousy" I'm like you're such a fucking idiot. Buy yourself a macaron. Have -- like wear many bangles and borrow your friend's bulldog and pose on a nice cushion and you can also have that life.
(42:00)
Nitasha: But you have to have a kind of thought about your grid. That's the thing, you could maybe be like savvy about individual pictures but if you've been on it for a while and you know there's multiple impulses you can play to.
Aminatou: I don't think about my grid.
Nitasha: Yeah, but if you scroll through your grid it looks clean. Like some people who -- you're kind of at what point did they decide I'm only going to show pastels and off-filter images? Like I . . .
Aminatou: [Laughs] No, it's true but that's the advanced level. That's the advanced level.
Nitasha: Right.
Aminatou: I'm just the basic like on Mondays we're eating popsicles. On Tuesdays we're -- you know, you're doing a jumping shot at the beach or whatever.
Nitasha: Some people are only just catching up with saturated colors and composition.
Aminatou: Exactly. I know but it's just, you know, I don't know. It's like Jenna Wortham wrote this thing last week about how on social media you should be more like Beyoncé because Beyoncé's essentially a cyborg. She only shows you what she wants to show you. And I don't know, I was like I . . . obviously I agree with that and I have such a hard time understanding why most of the general population doesn't understand this. I'm like you're following all these Instagram accounts. They're all scamming you about their happy lives. You should do the same thing.
Nitasha: But like what a great scam. I mean how effective is it that you have to keep reminding yourself that this isn't real? It's unbelievable to have so -- to be able to inspire so much envy from essentially just like, you know, well-timed . . .
Aminatou: I guess, but it just like . . .
Nitasha: Well-timed portraits.
Aminatou: I don't know. I feel like we have all been on the Internet long enough that we know the game. It's like here's -- it's like people who are serious about like this is for my family and friends, those people have private accounts. You know what I mean? That's how the game is played.
(43:55)
Nitasha: Yeah. Well I'm borderline on that now so even people like me haven't figured it out. Because at some point it was -- the selling point was that you're not searchable and no one can find this and this is the way you talk to your friends, like the way you used to post after a vacation a Facebook album or somebody's birthday party would get a Facebook album.
Aminatou: Oh my god, those were the days. [Laughs]
Nitasha: I mean can you even imagine?
Aminatou: Yeah, remember in college like a night out? That would get its own album. Yeah, those days are gone because we have jobs now.
Nitasha: Like how slow was that? You had to come back through vacation, scroll through your camera roll.
Aminatou: Put a USB into your computer, like the cord, connect to your computer. Yeah, those days are gone. I feel like you figured it out. You were very gregarious to the people, you know, in your . . . I don't know, in your public-facing life. But in your private life it's like, you know, you keep a lot to yourself.
Nitasha: [Laughs]
Aminatou: Maybe that's our scam Nitasha is we're going to figure out some sort of like a privacy lifestyle like hyper-curated just be happy all the time app.
Nitasha: Yeah, that puts increasing distance between what you really do and how you present yourself.
Aminatou: Okay, I'm excited about this. Thank you so much for joining us on CYG.
Nitasha: Thanks for having me.
Aminatou: You're the best. Where can we find your work?
Nitasha: At buzzfeed.com, the website.
Aminatou: Great. And what's your Twitter handle?
Nitasha: It's my first and last name.
Aminatou: Perfect! And I'm not going to dox the rest of your social media. [Laughs] Just because you are . . .
Nitasha: You know you are -- like you already have the scam going BTW.
Aminatou: Oh my god, are you kidding? Of course! [Laughs] I'm just like . . .
Nitasha: You're the best at this. Like Amina has been away from San Francisco for the whole summer as she cruelly informed me. We're no longer even in summer.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Nitasha: And you think you know where she is or what she's doing from her Instagram but you have no idea.
Aminatou: You have no idea. It's like you've got to text me for that information.
Nitasha: Yep.
Aminatou: That's how that works. [Laughs] That's right, we're all going to be more like Beyoncé.
[Interview Ends]
Gina: You can find us so many places on the Internet: on our website callyourgirlfriend.com, you can download this podcast anywhere you listen to your favorite shows or on iTunes where please always leave us a review if you love us. You can tweet at us at @callyrgf or email us callyrgf@gmail.com. Same handle for Facebook and Instagram, we're @callyrgf. You can even leave us a short and sweet voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. And this podcast is produced by me, Gina Delvac.