The Impact of Twitter on Society with Biz Stone

Explore social media’s impact on society when Neil deGrasse Tyson chats with Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone. Sociologist Dr. Alondra Nelson and journalist Clive Thompson also join Neil and Eugene Mirman, while Bill Nye “likes” the revolution.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson and here's my intrepid co-host Eugene Mirman. Eugene, thanks for being back on StarTalk.

• 0:24Eugene Mirman?

  It is great to be back.

• 0:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. So you're still doing stand-up around town?

• 0:28Eugene Mirman?

  Still doing stand-up around town.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you're seated, you're doing sit-down here.

• 0:31Eugene Mirman?

  Right now, for this, yes. But normally I would stand because I'm a gentleman.

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we're featuring my interview with Biz Stone.

• 0:39Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First, that's just an awesome name.

• 0:42Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it didn't matter what he did in life.

• 0:44Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's just an awesome...

• 0:46Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, he could easily transition to pornography, no problem.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. So, he's one of the co-founders of Twitter.

• 0:53Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twitter has a huge impact on society, not only in social media, but also in... It's moving entire cultures to communicate as one. And I don't want to have that conversation about culture and social media without getting some expertise. Alondra Nelson, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  It's great to be back.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've had you before.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. And so you're professor of...

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Sociology.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of sociology up at Columbia University. So we'll be coming back to you many times in this conversation.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because social media is a sociological phenomenon.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you share common word roots there.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just be ready for this.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Okay, bring it on.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And not only that, Clive Thompson, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Good to be here.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Clive, you're a journalist with the New York Times?

• 1:39Speaker 03

  New York Times Magazine and Wired Magazine.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Wired Magazine and you... How long have you been a... You're a professional journalist?

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've been writing about social media and the internet for about 20 years now. Really since it sort of became the internet.

• 1:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I didn't know it was that 20 years ago.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Well, you know...

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what the hell were you writing about 20 years ago?

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Email, email, uh, email.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm the lone person on earth with an email account. I will be a professor on this... I will be the head of that division of the New York Times.

• 2:05Eugene Mirman?

  And another thing about Netscape.

• 2:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so we're talking about Twitter. I tweet. I tweet under Neil Teish. You tweet?

• 2:14Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At Eugene Mirman. And you tweet?

• 2:16Speaker 02

  At Alondra.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are no other Alondras?

• 2:19Speaker 02

  No, it's like Madonna, Shakira. Excuse me!

• 2:26Speaker 02

  I just, there's more Alondras. I just got there first. Which matters on Twitter, huh?

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you tweet?

• 2:31Speaker 03

  At Pomeranian99.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. There's a story behind that.

• 2:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that sounded like you were a late adopter for that Twitter handle.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Actually, what happened is I got Pomeranian99 in 1999 when I signed up for AOL Instant Messenger. And there's a complicated story behind why I like Pomeranians, but I do. And it was 1999, so there you go.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. And so we're gonna take advice from you in this conversation?

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are the Pomeranians the really crazy cute dogs?

• 3:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're little, they look like burnt marshmallows. They're these fluffy little things.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're completely, because if I were a wolf and I saw that dog walk by, I would just be so disappointed with humans that they turned my DNA into that.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, they serve no function at all.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Alondra, this is technology arising that enables people to communicate without actually being with one another.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And not even seeing one another. Is this good or bad? You're a sociologist. You care about interaction.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think the answer is it's social, right? So it's people interacting with one another. What's also interesting about Twitter is that you can follow someone without them following you. It doesn't, unlike Facebook, it doesn't have to be reciprocal. So it opens up all sorts of interesting asymmetries in the way that people relate to one another.

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're cool with that?

• 3:52Eugene Mirman?

  It would be terrible to follow all the people that follow you on Twitter. Because then you'd have to see a lot of stuff about their food.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  And some of those people are bots.

• 4:00Eugene Mirman?

  Some of those people are bots. But some have like families and it's just pictures of their kids. And you're like, I get it, you have a kid, great.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Twitter has created a kind of a revolution. And we've heard about it in the Arab Spring, how people are communicating with one another. We will even learn later in the show that it's responsible for massive flocking behavior exhibited by humans, something that we'd only ever really previously seen in other animals, other vertebrates, fish and birds and things. So I'm just fascinated by that. But in my interview with Bistone, because I knew he was a college dropout and I'm an educator. So I asked him, I said, I said, if people like you continue to be successful, it puts bad light on me who's trying to get people to go to college. Let's check out what happened when I asked him this.

• 4:51Speaker 04

  I don't look at as dropping out. What I did was I chose to mentor, I chose to have a mentor, I chose to apprentice. That's just a different way of learning. And, and you know, that's, you know, it's different. Yeah, I didn't get a piece of paper, but I did learn a lot from my mentor.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that's the whole point of going to college anyway.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Well, he offered me a job that I thought, well, don't you go to college to get this kind of job? Aren't I kind of skipping ahead in life? So I took the job and then he became my mentor. It's actually a really funny story how I got the job, but you know.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The job.

• 5:22Speaker 04

  I was, I was at college and I wasn't really loving it. I get a job moving heavy boxes from the attic to the lobby of this publishing house called Little Brown Company. And they all go out to lunch one day, like it's a small art department. It's the department that does the book jackets. So they all go out to lunch and I sneak onto the art director's workstation and I find a jacket that needs designing. There's like a little piece of, it's a transmittal.

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a book jacket.

• 5:46Speaker 04

  So I designed it, I printed out, I matted up and I slip it in with the others to go off for approval in New York City at Sales and Editorial. And then I go back to moving the boxes and when.

• 5:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So nobody knew you did this?

• 5:56Speaker 04

  Nobody knows I did it until the art director comes back from New York and he says, who designed this jacket? And I said, me, and he said, the box kid. And that turned into a job offer to be a book jacket designer. So you can understand why I said, well, I got this free ride at college. I got this full ride for excellence in the arts, but I'm not loving college and I'm being offered this cool job. So I make my first, one of my first big decisions in life. Dropout, take the job as a designer.

• 6:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Clive, three out of the four founders of Twitter are college dropouts. What do you have to say? You write about these people. These people, these people provide your journalistic employment for what they do. So, so what, what, what gives here?

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Well, you know, to some extent, this is really about the fact that people who have a really interesting burning idea have trouble making that happen in a college situation. It's not that college wasn't valuable to them. If you look at all of them, they got amazing things out of being in college. Mark Zuckerberg, you know, he, he essentially sort of cut his teeth.

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Facebook, that's right. He, um, he created a little, a little social networking game that gave him a taste of how to do this. You know, before he sort of could get together to make Facebook. So they all get something out of that, but I agree. It's sort of, it doesn't look great, uh, for pushing secondary, post-secondary education. When everyone's Bill Gates, you know, another, another famous dropout.

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Alondra, if, if, uh, what I'm curious about is you're also an educator.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  I'm also an educator.

• 7:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At a university setting. And might it be that college is a homogenizing force on the creativity of its students? And these people are anything but the homogeny of what a college would, would churn out.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Sure. I think it's true that college creates some path dependency. So, you know, um, teaching at Columbia.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Path dependency. Sounds like a studied phenomenon.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  It is a studied phenomenon in the social sciences. So if you get on a certain track, you're, you're more likely to stay on that track. So the path dependency in college for undergraduates is, you know, as, as first year students, 80% want to be either pre-med or pre-law. So if that's your path dependency, that's your track, you're not going to become Mark Zuckerberg or Biz Stone.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ever.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Right? Ever.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Right. Um, until you flunk out of organic chemistry.

• 8:19Eugene Mirman?

  And then you can't help but become a billionaire. Well, that's my second option.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  But I will say, you know, let's not forget that Mark Zuckerberg has just started a book club, and so I think that, you know, he didn't finish college, but now he's sort of having a liberal arts moment, so I want to hang on to that.

• 8:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so Clive, people with this kind of artistic background, do they make more successful internet companies than others who don't?

• 8:44Speaker 03

  It's a little hard to say for sure, but in my experience, yeah, the people who design technologies that understand, you know, human behavior, human psychology, human passions, tend to make the things that we really enjoy doing and that bring out our best. I mean, I think one of the things that happened with Twitter was that they created something that was really simple, that evoked people's desire to communicate to each other in a really simple way. And so whenever someone has an understanding of what people really like to do, what they really want to do, they can make good technologies.

• 9:14Eugene Mirman?

  Is there another way to shame somebody who made some weird mistake that you can watch over and over and write about? No, Twitter's the best way to shame people, by far.

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Clive, I think you made a point a moment ago that Twitter, Eugene, is so simple, and it leaves me wondering, if it's that simple, and that received by the entire social media community, why wasn't it invented 10 years earlier, or right at the beginning, when you're the only one in the universe that had an email account? This is what I want to find out. We'll find out more about the birth of Twitter when StarTalk returns.

• 10:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. Eugene, very good, Alondra, Clive, my people, my people for today. Excellent, we're talking about Twitter, and featuring my interview with Biz Stone. So it's 2005, and Biz Stone is working with some of his partners, one of them is Jack Dorsey, on a podcasting company called Odeo. You ever heard of Odeo? Yeah, because it didn't do very well. And it's not doing well, and they try to think up something else, and they come up with an idea that would ultimately become Twitter. So I had to ask him, what is the genesis of this? What is the backstory of Twitter? Check it out.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  Jack and I teamed up and he took me over to his desk and he said, "You see here on my AOL Instant Messenger chat," you know, back when we used to use MSN chat or AOL chat or whatever, "you could see your friend's name, whether or not they were online or offline, that was their status, but you could also write whatever you wanted in there." And some people were offline, online, listening to the White Stripes, feeling like crap, "I hate Mondays."

• 11:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But this is the...

• 11:10Speaker 04

  The status message...

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the status that would go out to someone who's trying to chat with you.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so they would know what your state of being is.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Right. And so Jack said, "Take a look at this. I got 12 people on here and I don't even have to ask them and I know what they're, I know what they're thinking. Look, this guy's having a bad day. I didn't even have to ask them." And I was like, and he said to me, he said...

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People are automatically keeping it short because it's just a quick...

• 11:32Speaker 04

  It's just a quick thing. And so Jack said, "You've built networks before. You built one of the early social networks. You built, you worked on Blogger, all this stuff. Do you think we can make a whole thing out of just this?" And I was like, "Yeah, let's do it because that's simple."

• 11:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he's talking about Jack Dorsey, which was one of his co-founders at the beginning of that. So this not, this idea, and I remember that seeing these little notices, "What are you, what are you up to? What are you not up to? And if you have a friend and you're curious, this is, these are info bits." And, and Alondra, isn't this voyeuristic? And is that good or bad or, or neutral?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  It's not voyeuristic if you're putting it out there, right? So you're, this, you're making a kind of...

• 12:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it voyeuristic for me to want to know this about you?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  We all want to know that about each other. I mean, you know, we're, we're all social animals. Um, we don't sniff each other like some of the other animals do, but I mean, there's...

• 12:23Eugene Mirman?

  Right. Sometimes it's fine and sometimes it's inappropriate.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  But we're curious about each other.

• 12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly true.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  We're curious about each other. We people watch. I mean, you can spend...

• 12:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you, you, seeing a status update is like sniffing their butt.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  I didn't say that.

• 12:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, you did. No, I think that's a brilliant analogy, just sniffing someone. It's because smell comes at a distance. And you get to know what they're doing, or what their circumstances are. That's a brilliant analogy. Please continue.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  I just think that we're curious about each other. There's a reason why you can while away many hours, you know, sitting in a mall, watching people walk by, you know, sit on the subway, watch people, sit at the beach, watch people. Because we're inherently interesting, and it's not voyeuristic if people are out in public space. And there's not much more public than, you know, putting out to the world to 10,000 or five, a half a billion users that, you know, this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm feeling right now.

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Clive, you have a book, Smarter Than You Think. You speak about ambient awareness as a kind of social sixth sense. Is that what this is?

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. It's the idea that you sort of build a mental picture of what's going on in someone's life, what they're thinking about.

• 13:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Someone else's life.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  Someone else's life, yeah. You're like, so what is my friend thinking about, or reading about, or wondering about?

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're called stalkers, I thought, but apparently not.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, well, like Alondra said, this is kind of a natural thing. We've always done this in our everyday lives, but we couldn't do it over a long distance, right? You know, you could sort of know what someone's doing down the hallway.

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a nosy neighbor looking in the window.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes, there you go.

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, they're baking a pie now. With permission.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So basically, it's a way of sort of figuring out what's going on, not through like a big, long conversation, but a whole bunch of little messages. You know, like if you were to sort of, when you start following someone on Twitter, you see, you know, a little thing they say, and then another thing they say. And after two months, you have this kind of really deep sense of what's been going on. I get it, you're a libertarian. Wrap it up. Sometimes you find it a little more than you need to know.

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Twitter's really something that people connect to deeply. And it's connecting millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world. You have to ask then, all right, when did you realize it would take off? So I wanted to know, what was that moment? Check it out.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  So we built, we rushed and we hacked together the first iteration of what would become Twitter. And it was a toy. It was fun. It was just for fun. It was just like, it made us laugh. One of the very first things that while we were prototyping, and this was another key lesson learned, while we were prototyping, my wife and I had made just enough money off of Google to get myself out of debt and get $50,000 to put down on a 400 square foot house in Berkeley. I got this house and I had watched enough Bob Vila This Old House when I was a kid to realize that when you rip up the carpeting in your house, you reveal the beautiful hardwood floors underneath.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  So during this hot, really hot heatwave day, while we were still prototyping Twitter on the weekend, I decided I would like just start in the middle and just kind of cut the rug right open and rip open, show the hardwood floors. No hardwood floors. I was ruining my house and I was sweating and I was cursing and my phone buzzed in my pocket and it was a tweet and it said, "Sipping Pinot Noir after a massage in Napa Valley." And I laughed out loud. And when I laughed out loud, I realized, wait a minute, I'm laughing at something I'm working on. I must be working on the right thing. It's making me laugh. So we were having fun and it wasn't until March-

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how many people have Twitter accounts at this point?

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Nobody, like just the people at the company.

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  Twelve.

• 16:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twelve people. So you're describing like the emergence of a species.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 16:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Twitter started as basically a toy for Biz and his friends to just play with. But there was a moment when all of that changed. That story, when StarTalk returns.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk.

• 16:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're picking up with my interview with Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. So here they are, just having fun, inventing this new way for his buddies to communicate with one another. And then the idea took a turn. A whole new trajectory for this project emerged. Check it out.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Everything changed in March of 2007 in Texas. And that's when the toy became important in an instant. And I, that's when I realized, oh my gosh, we have created something that has never...

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is alive.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  It really, no, here's the story. It felt alive because of this. What happened was, I heard this story. It was at this, it was at a, it's a, it's a festival called South by Southwest.

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still running strong today.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  Back then, it was kinda like nerdier, right? So, that was the first chance to really see Twitter out in the wild, so to speak. Because at that, at that point, there's about 50,000 people using Twitter. And most of them were concentrated nerds in this area. So, we got to see it being used. And I heard this story that just made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It really transformed my thinking. It was a story about a guy who was at a pub. And he really wanted to talk to the, to his colleagues about what they were working on up in the Bay Area. But it was loud and noisy and there was music there. So, he sent out a tweet that said, "Let's move to this other pub," and he named it, "So We Can Talk."

• 18:20Speaker 04

  And in the eight minutes it took him to move to that other pub, 800 people had shown up. There was a lion at the door. The place was totally filled to capacity. And I realized that, the metaphor that came to mind immediately was that of a flock of birds. A bunch of individuals, suddenly becoming one, and then becoming individuals again.

• 18:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we think of flocking, you think of like birds typically, where they all kinda move together, like this. And, yeah, like that? Is that how we...

• 18:49Eugene Mirman?

  That's exactly how, that's how I remember swans moving.

• 18:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so what does a flock mean? Well, you're individuals until you become a flock. And then when the flocking time is over, you're back to individuals again. So, it's not, it's not like, like the proverbial lemming behavior. Let's all just all do the same thing because we don't have a brain. It's that there's this one moment in time. Where the occasion is just right, where we all need to do the same thing at the same time. And after that, we go back to being individuals. And I had never thought about that, the way he described it.

• 19:23Eugene Mirman?

  This is the first, this is the first example of mobs, but in, in a social setting.

• 19:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, it's, he didn't use the word mob.

• 19:31Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, he doesn't think of himself as a group of people descending on a monster to destroy it.

• 19:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 19:36Eugene Mirman?

  But, a little.

• 19:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So, how much discussion has there been? I guess mobs is the closest early psychology to that.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Actually, sociologists, social scientists use mob as a category. So altogether, it's called collective behavior. And social scientists talk about mobs, they talk about crowds. But, you know, there's, there's a sense that there are these spaces where the kind of normal social norms may break down. And so, because you have so many people and they're not, it's not clear why they're there or they're there for a different category of activity, sort of a revival, South by Southwest or some other kind of event. And so, how are we supposed to behave in this way? Or how are we supposed to behave when we get a cue to go to this certain pub?

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But is it a different phenomenon? Or is it just a change of time scale? So, I can go to the opera and everybody else is at the opera together and presumably we all like this opera. And we're all clapping at the same time and we're all tearing at the same time. But, we bought our tickets a year in advance and paid scads of money for it. Is that mob behavior?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  No, mob behavior would be, we all go to the opera all at once because perhaps we get a tweet on Wednesday at 2:00 PM.

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, now that we have tweets. But what I'm trying to distinguish, between people doing everything together.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which took months to organize, and people doing things together, things together because it took minutes to organize.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  And, yes, yes.

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that, is that sociologically different to your studies?

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Yes, one is, one has norms and one doesn't. So, when something takes moments to organize, it's not clear what's supposed to happen next or why this is happening, right? And so, that kind of gets worked out.

• 21:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the rules, there's no rules?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  There's no rules. Or the rules are being, will be worked out in the source of that sociality.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Clive, are you, do you see, is this a phenomenon you guys write about and talk about?

• 21:19Speaker 03

  The thing I found in my research is how often this kind of flock Behavior happens in really interesting, small intimate ways. Like, someone will mention, you know, a random track, some beat track to some band they like, and lo and behold, they'll discover the 20 other weirdos, one in Russia, you know, one in Texas, who also like to talk about that, and suddenly they're having this little happening, talking about this weird beat track. And that stuff, that's something that was really hard to do, maybe impossible to do beforehand, happens all the time on Twitter now.

• 21:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So clearly, bringing huge numbers of people together is cool, but it can also be powerful. Like, bringing down entire governments.

• 21:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  War on that, when StarTalk continues.

• 22:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. We're talking about the Twitter revolution, and how Twitter can enhance social interactions, and also bring down governments. And so, let me ask you something. In between there, there are other things that have happened with Twitter. Twitter has become a news source. Clive, you're a journalist. You will definitely get scooped by a story if someone's got a Twitter account, and they see something that you might be interested in. We learned about Michael Jackson's death first on Twitter. When the plane was plunked down in the Hudson, someone tweeted, "I just saw a plane crash in the Hudson."

• 22:48Speaker 03

  You know, it's called sometimes citizen journalism, but it's quite powerful, and it's very fast, and much faster than traditional media.

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it only an issue of speed, as opposed to whether a phenomenon would happen at all? Ollandra, could you have a revolution such as the Arab Spring without Twitter?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Sure, we've had revolutions before without Twitter, but they happen...

• 23:09Eugene Mirman?

  Name one.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  I don't know, the French Revolution, the American Revolution.

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They didn't have Twitter?

• 23:15Eugene Mirman?

  One was enough for me, but I believe you now.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1789, they hadn't invented Twitter yet?

• 23:20Eugene Mirman?

  All they needed was a guillotine.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  So surely it can happen without Twitter.

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me re-posed the question then. Yes, we've had revolutions with and without Twitter. Are the revolutions triggered by Twitter of a different social nature than the ones that are not? That have not been?

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Indeed, because the whole world is watching, right? Or reading on their screen, right? So they're watching videos, they're watching, they're seeing images that are on their timelines. And people are also reading about it.

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That happened in 1968 Democratic Convention. The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching. You had the militarized police outside, so...

• 23:53Speaker 02

  But everyone didn't have television in 1968. I mean, you know, the penetration of Twitter, you talk about half a billion users, means that there are people all over the world who are watching this and experiencing this in real time together.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is it just a sped up revolution? Or is the nature of the revolution different?

• 24:09Speaker 02

  It's sped up news of a revolution. Whether or not a revolution ever happens, I think, depends on what's happening on the ground. So Twitter is one piece, I think, of social, of social action that can lead to a revolution.

• 24:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we can ask, what is the responsibility of such an efficient media communicative source?

• 24:31Speaker 02

  That's a hard call. I mean, you know, they have algorithms, they have the ability to censor hashtags that are gaining popularity or not, as is their wish they want. The people, the, you know, the programmers, the man. The programmers who, you know, who create the algorithms.

• 24:45Eugene Mirman?

  There'd be trends all about Justin Bieber if they didn't censor stuff.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  So there are ethical issues that arise with how Twitter is used and how news is disseminated and what choices are made.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I had to ask Biz Stone, you know, co-founder of Twitter, what he thought about people referring to these revolutions as Twitter revolutions. Check it out.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  We were getting lumped into the headlines with every important thing that was going on in the world. But I made sure to tell people at Twitter, because the newspapers were calling it the Twitter Revolution and all this stuff. I said, "It's not the Twitter Revolution." You gotta, you gotta keep in mind, everybody, that these people are bleeding in the streets. These people are dying. They reached for the closest tool. It's not even about Twitter. We happened to be there at the right place, right time, but let's not, let's not say to ourselves, "We're doing this." So I was getting invited to go on all these, you know, night, evening talk shows and all this stuff. And I said, "No, this would be inappropriate." I don't, first of all, I don't know anything about what's going on, so I'm gonna look like an idiot. You'll ask you to comment on international politics.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  What do I know about it? Right. Second of all, these people are dying and, and bleeding and, you know, suffering and... And desperate. And I'm not gonna hawk my wares on the, on the back of that. So I wrote, but at the same time, I was getting sort of pressure from my board, like, "Hey, man, you gotta go on these shows, and we've gotta grow the, you know, and are you some kind of idiot?" And I, and I, I was kinda stuck because I said... The board has to do what boards do, and that's... You know, maximize value. Grow the company, right. And so what did you do? So I didn't, I felt that I shouldn't, my gut told me, "Don't go on these shows." But I also didn't wanna piss off all these media folks, because, yeah, I do wanna go on the shows later, and, and, yeah, I do wanna hype up the product and get the brand out there and everything else. So I lucked out with one word.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  I chose one word that was the appropriate word, which was "inappropriate." I said, "I feel it would be inappropriate for me to come on the program and talk about this." And that worked, because I got back universally. Another one-word answer from a lot of these producers was "understood." And so I was like, "Yes, that worked." Because later on, I did go on all the shows, but, you know, for brighter, sunnier things. And, you know, I didn't, obviously, it's, it was inappropriate. And, and anyone who, at the time, was going on there and claiming that they're, you know, you know, I would say, I said, "Yeah, the Berlin, when, when the Berlin Wall fell, were telephones used? Yes. Did AT&T say, 'We brought down the Berlin Wall'?"

• 27:22Speaker 04

  "No, but were phone calls made? Sure."

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's, after that comment, I fell in love with the guy. I mean, that was noble, it was righteous, it was humble, it was, um...

• 27:38Eugene Mirman?

  That's why they call him Biz Stone.

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the Arab Spring. Twitter was used to organize protests efficiently and effectively. And in fact, The Hill, one of the newspapers in Washington DC, described Twitter as a strategic weapon.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  I think that the simultaneity of what you can do on Twitter is unprecedented. So while it's true that other revolutions or other social movements were able to get at eventually 500 people, 5,000 people, to get them to a march or a protest, to be able to do that all at once is this tremendous kind of leapfrog in the sort of evolution of how social theorists think about social movements. So typically, you do person by person, you do, um, there's a sociologist named Alden Morris who talks about the civil rights movement being an institution of institutions, right? These sort of social building blocks. Twitter allows that all to happen at once.

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So meta-institutions, in a way.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Well, you know, churches, community center, school, you know, building, building, building, right? That's typically how we think of social revolutions, social movements happening. Twitter puts every, and that's how people connect. So there's these little pods or these little, you know, hives that come and connect into a big hive. With Twitter, you connect the hive and then you have to, in some instances, go back and do all of that boot leather work to make the revolution or the social change sort of take hold.

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, of course, when something like Twitter takes on a life of its own like this, even the creators themselves don't know where it's gonna lead. More on that when StarTalk continues.

• 29:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're highlighting my interview with Biz Stone of Twitter, and we're just talking about Twitter as a social phenomenon, a social movement, a, a, a, a social media revolutionary force. And I'm always intrigued when someone who creates something, they try to think of all the ways it could be used, and they can't. Because if everyone has access, the creativity of the masses exceeds the creativity of the creator himself. Let's see what Biz Stone tells us about that.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  I was shocked by several things. One, I thought celebrities would never use Twitter. No way. Because I thought the whole point of a celebrity was you had limited access to a celebrity. You don't get to know my personal life. You want to see me, you gotta watch me on TV or on the movies.

• 30:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got the list.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  But they went crazy on it.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As of this recording.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Same thing with Congress and all those senators.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Top 10 celebrities, you know what top, number one is?

• 30:14Speaker 04

  I think it's Katy Perry.

• 30:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Katy Perry, number two.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  I have no clue after that.

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Justin Bieber, number three.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  I don't know anything.

• 30:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Barack Obama.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Number four, Taylor Swift.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then YouTube, the only non-human entity.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  Oh, YouTube.

• 30:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Rihanna, running out the top 10.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  A lot of musicians.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ellen DeGeneres. There you go, yeah.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Well, she had that famous selfie thing.

• 30:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The selfie thing, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, so this is, everything is not even anything you would have imagined.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  No way, I thought, no way, there's no way celebrities are gonna use it. But then afterwards, I said, oh, well now it seems obvious, they want to connect, they do want to connect directly to their fans.

• 30:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Alondra, is there, is there some usage of Twitter that you can imagine that others haven't yet?

• 31:02Speaker 02

  I think from a sociological perspective, what's interesting is that Twitter has created new social roles. So what your conversation with Biz Stone suggests is now that to be a celebrity or to be a public person means that you have to have a performance of your authentic self to the world in a different sort of way.

• 31:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But why does it have to be authentic?

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Well, it has to seem authentic enough for people to want to follow you.

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It has to be sellable as authentic.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  It has to be sellable as authentic, fair enough. In the same way that, you know, the idea of the Facebook friend has changed the social category of friend. I mean, some of us probably have hundreds of friends on Facebook who we don't know, we don't know, we hardly know them. It's surely, it's changed the way that we think about what a friend is.

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The word has been redefined.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  The word has been redefined.

• 31:41Eugene Mirman?

  Cheeped, I'd say.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  So Twitter has brought to us a whole other ways of having to interact with other people for celebrities and for, you know, non-celebrities alike.

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For me, one of the coolest things about Twitter is its impact on science communication. There's some of that going on, too. It's not just the believers. What do you call it? I think that's right. The Justin Bieber followers, the believers. No, there's like, science, real science communication going on. And what charmed me was that in my interview with Biz Stone, he cited what he thought was the coolest Twitter account ever.

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's not even on Earth. Check it out.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  There was one really fun account that I liked a lot, which was in 2007.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  The Mars Phoenix Lander. The woman who was working at JPL, her name escapes me now, but she created an account. I think she even wrote to me about it and said, "I'm gonna create a Twitter account for the Mars Phoenix Lander. Do you think it would be good if I anthropomorphized the little guy and made it sound like he was tweeting?" And I said, "Oh, that's a great idea." And what was so cool about that was that you could follow along. You know, the little guy was saying stuff like, "Okay, my landing gear just deployed." "Okay, my, you know, I just touched down." So what happened was, which was so cool, was that back then, you know, any kind of news

• 33:13Speaker 04

  from JPL or NASA had to go through communications. You know, if you were gonna find water ice on Mars, you were gonna go through the communications department, and this was gonna be a press release, this was gonna be a whole thing. But, back then, Twitter was like, whatever, who cares? And it was this stupid little thing, right? And everyone was saying it was dumb. And it was just for nerds to follow along. And the woman who was running the account asked her boss, she said, "Can I tweet stuff? Do I have to run my tweets through comms every tweet?" And they're like, "Nah, don't worry about it." So she tweeted, "We found water ice on Mars! Woo, best day ever." So the news about discovering water ice on Mars was tweeted first. And we...

• 33:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Water ice as opposed to other kinds of ices?

• 34:00Speaker 04

  Right. She skipped over, you know, she just skipped the whole thing. And that was a huge thing for us because, you know, that was big news. And it was released on our platform.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I actually played a role in some of that. Not with the Phoenix Lander, but with Mars Curiosity. And I was building my Twitter following at the time. It might have been around a million or so. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be cool if, as Mars Curiosity, which is this SUV-sized laboratory, the largest thing we've ever plunked down on Mars? In fact, they needed special landing apparatus to make this happen with joists and retro rockets and it was a whole Rube Goldbergian engineering marvel to get this thing to plunk down safely. And so I got permission from JPL to open up a private, publicly viewable, but one-on-one

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  communication channel with Curiosity Rover. And it was the funnest thing, like, ever. And then that got storified. Is that what you call it, storified?

• 35:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, when you collect together a whole bunch of tweets that are all related together.

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That all relate. Otherwise, you have to piece this, but this is a utility that helps you turn one story arc out of it. And so it got storified. It's now on the internet. And I was delighted and honored to be given this opportunity. Do you see this as a good future for science?

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, in fact, I think this is a fantastic time for scientists. I interview a lot of them. I'm a science journalist. And it's amazing how many of them have started to have these really active presence on Twitter, on blogs, whatever. And it used to be that they would sit there in their room alone for, you know, years until maybe a journalist or someone called them up to ask them one question. And now they can just sort of, you know, pour out stuff they're doing, talk about it, develop their own audiences, and they all talk about it in incredibly excited ways because they're making these connections to the public that wasn't before possible.

• 35:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they actually are excited. It's not an act.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, no, they're completely... It's authentic.

• 35:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's authentic, childlike enthusiasm.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  And the other thing is that you find is that a lot of scientists are actually pretty good writers, and some of them are really good tweeters, too. Like, they think about language, they have to communicate, and they're pretty funny. They're good in this medium.

• 36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And when StarTalk returns, we're gonna hear from my good friend, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and get his take on the impact of social media.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. We're talking about my interview with Biz Stone and everything about Twitter. The co-founder of Twitter. Guys, the guy's amazing. Just to hear him talk, to hear his thoughts describe what became this revolution with half a billion Twitter followers. I've got a good friend, Bill Nye the Science Guy. He's a friend of the show, he's a friend of mine. And let's find out what his take is on the impact of social media.

• 36:57Bill Nye?

  #TimesSquareAfternoon. That's brilliant. People love to look at other people. That's why we have gossip magazines and whole sections in libraries called biography. When it comes to people looking at other people, it's happening now faster than ever. And instead of just words and images, you can create a whole persona for yourself online. It's like that ancient Greek guy narcissist who drowned while looking at his own reflection in a pool. It started out with just a couple of guys tweeting about what they had for breakfast. But now it's so commonplace, even the NASA rover will tell you what it's up to, even how it's feeling.

• 37:39Bill Nye?

  This is a revolutionary tool that's overthrown entire governments. It's revolutionizing the world. And there's no escaping it. It's everywhere.

• 37:50Bill Nye?

  I got like 80 likes. You know, if Neil were doing this, there'd be like a thousand likes. Help me out, people, come on, help me out. Gotta catch up. Okay, here we go.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill Nye, yeah. So here's an interesting thing about Twitter. I was always curious about this 140 character limit. Did you take to the 140 characters? Because you're used to long form pieces in the New York Times Magazine. None of those are 140 characters. So did this pinch your style?

• 38:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, actually, I discovered what a lot of people discovered, which is that it kind of solved the blank page problem, you know? When people think they want to write something on a blog or Facebook, they might think, well, what have I got to say? By shortening the length of the utterance to like a single sentence, barely a sentence, they made a perfect box that anyone could fill and fill over and over and over again. And that is really what a lot of people have told me they've loved about Twitter, is that by forcing them to think about every word, they sort of enjoy crafting a little sentence, a little witticism.

• 39:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the problem is some people still don't know how to do that. And so they'll have five consecutive tweets, one of five, two of five. No, you're not tweeting, you're blogging. Get off the highway.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  A tweet storm, it's called.

• 39:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A tweet storm, it's a term for that.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  It's called a tweet storm, yeah.

• 39:15Eugene Mirman?

  Do you know how they came about with the decided on 140 characters?

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I wanted to get to the bottom of that as well. So that is exactly what I asked its creator, Biz Stone. Where did this 140 characters come from? What's up with that? Check it out.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  I actually have a strong belief that constraint inspires creativity. When people are, when people have their back to the wall, they usually come up with really creative things.

• 39:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, that applies even through the engineering world. The last thing you want to do is tell an engineer, build whatever you want.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know.

• 39:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'll fail, they'll fail. You have to say, here's the limit. We have a money limit, it has to fit in this volume. It's gotta be this.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  It's like the movie Apollo 13. We got this, this, and this, and we need to make this. Go.

• 40:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Remember that scene? That was a great scene. So 140 comes from the fact that on text messages, there's a 160 character limit. That's the limit universally, text messaging. That's it. So we knew that to be true. And we wanted, our idea, our earliest idea for Twitter was that you would update your tweets with a text message, not on the web, but with your phone. Because the idea was that you could do it anytime, anywhere. Waiting for the train, you know, you didn't have, that was the beauty of it, right? So at first, it was just 160 characters minus however long your name was. So. My name was Biz and Jack's name was Jack. And I said to Jack one day, I said, you know, I got an extra letter on you.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  And he was like, oh, yeah.

• 40:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An extra letter to use to communicate.

• 40:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, sure, it's only one letter. But I said, you know, if somebody's name is longer, I get more space. It doesn't seem, first of all, it doesn't seem fair. And second of all, it's not uniform. And neither one of us like that non-uniformity thing. So the limit is 140, but the limit on names is 15 characters.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there it is. You heard it from the man himself. 140 characters.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  But I think the community, as Twitter has evolved, has come to play a role in how the 140 characters work. So you're not going to retweet a tweet storm, as Clive called it. And you're not going to retweet an elegant, you know, a tweet that's elegant and has a lot of abbreviations where you have to figure out what all the abbreviations mean is not going to go viral and not going to get retweeted a lot. So that's the community sort of choosing what are the norms within the 140 characters. What does a good tweet look like?

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so would you say, is this good or bad for literacy?

• 41:45Speaker 03

  They've done lots of studies now on short forms and texting. And they found that it actually, because they have to think about what the short form means, they have to think about language. It doesn't in any way harm, and it might actually help with aspects of their learning. But I think just on a, you know, as Alondra said, on a literary level, it's been this kind of fun renaissance in people trying to be aphoristic, to say something short and terse. And there's something kind of lovely about that moment.

• 42:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, several Christmas Day tweets, they all had very different reactions from one another. But one I'm quite proud of was about Santa Claus. And I fit it exactly into the, my share. So I said, Santa knows physics.

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Red light penetrates fog better than any other color of light. That's why Benny the Blue-Nosed Reindeer didn't get the gig.

• 42:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's the future of this?

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Twitter is, you know, is well-established now. But these companies always eventually stumble because something new comes along that turns out to be, you know, even more fun or gets us to communicate in some weird, interesting new way. I can't predict that. I mean, I think if I could, I'd be out inventing it right now and I'd be the next billionaire.

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, but you're predicting the demise of Twitter?

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Yes. Twitter will eventually fall down when someone does something even more interesting and fun than what they're doing right now.

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you imagine what that need is?

• 43:03Eugene Mirman?

  Probably some form of hooking up.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  It's probably some form of hooking up.

• 43:08Eugene Mirman?

  I had to guess some that plus news. Some sort of sex news will be what replaces Twitter.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  With pictures of cats. That's right, flying cats.

• 43:20Eugene Mirman?

  And adorable sex news.

• 43:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I wonder, maybe this is the future of the democratization of all the things that used to just happen behind closed doors and ivory towers. Now, everybody has access. Guys, thanks for being on StarTalk. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.