Dr. Implausible: One of the favourite classes I taught, I taught it twice, was a, um, basically sociology for engineers class, science and technology studies. So and it was a mandatory class and we’d get a lot of engineering students in their fourth year coming through. Whether it was a summer session or a regular session, making it engaging for students, it’s outside their area. They don’t necessarily know how to deal with like a sociology class or ask some of those questions, but, you know, knew enough of that kind of background that we could like talk on the same level.

So the assignments would be like, okay, um. Deconstruct, uh, Andy Weir’s The Martian when it came out with Matt Damon., look at that as from a systems theory perspective for, uh, PokémonGo was big that year. So it’s like, okay, let’s go out, let’s find all the different sites on campus and then we’ll talk about that as a network and we can use that to kind of deconstruct some of these topics. So making it engaging in a way for the students was helpful. I could see sometimes you’d ask a question of the engineers and you could see light bulbs going off in their heads and in the class, I’m just like, okay, this is amazing. I love this feeling.

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. 

I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places that started with different letters.

I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst. Thankfully, someone in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good.” And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing, for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. 

Today, I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works. 

Just a note, before we get started, I recorded this with my guest about two weeks before the impending TikTok ban, which by the time this posts has probably gone into effect. But we are going to be talking a lot about TikTok and how unique it was as a platform. If that interests you, you’re really gonna love this one. 

So let’s get into it. 

I am really excited about today’s guest nerd. It is the pseudonymous Dr. Implausible. No explanation, no secret identity reveal. He’s a media and tech researcher focused on the intersection of art, Technology and Popular Culture. Creates content across various social media platforms, but you can tune in to his ImplausiPod podcast and the Implausi Blog where he tackles topics like empathetic technology,, soylent culture, which I’m excited to get into, agentrification, and the growth of AI.

And we may dip into some of his other projects. Um, we’ll stick mainly to the internet persona to respect the secret identity as we would with any evil super genius who agrees to come on the show. With a lot of irons in the fire, we got a lot to tackle. Dr. Implausible, thank you so much for joining me on Nerds That Talk Good.

Dr. Implausible: Hey, thank you so much for having me here. Really appreciate it, Joel. I’m excited to be here. I know we’ve been talking back and forth for a few weeks and, uh, see it finally happen now, um, I’m kind of hyped. So yeah, ask away, let me know what you want to know. 

Joel: I’m, super excited. I’ve been, uh, discovered you through TikTok and then been following on you on a lot of your other channels, um, with what you’re, what you would like to share. Can you open up kind of with your nerd origin story? What, what got you into this? What got you, uh, into the subject matter?

But then. Talking about it.

Dr. Implausible: Oh, let me take you to a time called the seventies. You know, it was, uh, I was pretty young. I think we had like two and a half channels on the TV. We didn’t have cable or anything back then. I, so I got reruns of like Star Trek, the Animated Series and like Six Million Dollar Man and a few other sci fi TV shows back in the day. And I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons around 1979 1980 with the Basic and Expert sets and played with some other Cub Scouts and then slowly, you know, taught myself to read through the various sci fi books that were in the library at the local school and, well, not taught myself, but you know, uh, expanded my vocabulary through the underground and that was kind of the nerd origin story.

I remember seeing Uh, Star Wars A New Hope in 77 in like November or December that year and riding to the theater in the back of my dad’s car with a couple friends and uh, yeah, so we go way back to kind of the origins of nerddom as it stands, and yeah, it’s been good since. Um, and then the, the modern origin story, I guess, is, uh, it’s kind of always bopping around that area in the, uh, You know, late 90s, early 2000s with the rise of MMOs and Magic Gathering and Warhammer and, uh, as things shifted online, I was kind of more involved with graduate research, but I was kind of always bringing that back in and looking at how the things I was seeing discussed in, say, the world of technological development were reflected in some of the earlier media stories.

That I had seen so I could like point to direct precedence within say technological development and that informed some of the research I did in grad school which was on the influences of science fiction on the development of virtual reality systems and then that kind of proceeded into getting a PhD on looking at, uh, art and maker spaces and, uh, the role in a couple of different realms there.

And then, uh, we shifted into social media after I finished PhD. Kind of drifted away from the academic stream. And I fell into like saying, okay, I need to get this out. I need to discuss this with people, need to communicate this. And, uh, and then the pandemic happened and we got, uh, TikTok and a whole lot of other social media sites.

So it’s like, well, let’s, let’s engage with the people and tell them about all the cool stuff that I’ve found out. That’s been a blast. It’s been a lot of fun.

Joel: Given those dates, you’re a couple years ahead of me on the curve, but I also, in the mid 90s, discovered the cyberpunk and some of the earlier stuff like that, so right there with you. I took a different turn. I was I actually did finish a my BA was in communications.

We’ll dip into some of that in a little bit, I’m sure. Coming up, were you driven almost like a little bit of a, almost a bit of a polymath to just collect and graze and see what was coming up from These different subject matters. When did you decide that you wanted to share that and that you wanted to communicate that back out?

Was that during the the post grad or the grad school when you had to, they threw you in front of a bunch of students who could care less? You had to figure out how to talk about it?

Dr. Implausible: yeah, I think that was a part of it. I mean, I had a, during the MA period, I had a couple of classes that I had to TA and I didn’t mind getting up in front of an audience that had a little bit of, uh, uh, experience with that through Toastmasters and a few other things that were work related about public speaking. Um, I’m a large dude and by large I mean I’m like six foot six, so I can’t really hide in a crowd, so you’re always gonna be kind of out there to a degree. So, so getting up and public speaking was never the issue. Um, but the, the real origin story is from some mis misheard lyrics from a Taylor Swift song. So, um, during my grad school era, a friend, a friend of mine was really involved with early Twitter around ,like 2008, 2009, and they were able to really leverage that to promote their own work, getting more, get involved with the larger, um, tech and academic community and, and participate more fully in the conversation that was going on.

Twitter wasn’t really my thing. I’d been on like Usenet and a couple of web forums and stuff prior, but, um, For whatever reason, Twitter, I kind of bounced off. And so I missed out on that curve or that kind of window where Twitter was really going through some good growth. And when TikTok came around a little bit later, I realized, okay, well, maybe here’s a new opportunity, a new platform, a new format, new medium, and, uh, there’s a good chance to jump in. Circle back to Taylor Swift. So, um, there’s, there’s the one, one song, uh, You Got to Calm Down. Um, and she’s, she’s singing that, um, “we’ve all got crowns,” um, you know, and she’s basically telling the haters to go away that we’re rocking it. I misheard the lyrics that say we’ve all got crowns. I heard it as “we’ve all got crowds.” And I thought it meant that because they could leverage an audience in a platform and bring that to bear, it didn’t matter what the haters were saying, that they were, uh, generators of an audience and that gave them clout. And I thought, well, if you need to have an audience to have, uh, a stake in the public, uh, discourse, they need to engage with, uh, An audience at some point, and even if it’s, you know, 50 or a hundred or a thousand people, then you need to be out there engaging with the audience.

So thank you, Taylor. And to all the Swifties, I love you for that. But, um, it’s, it was my hearing. I misheard the lyrics, but I think there’s still great lyrics. Don’t get me wrong. Uh, but the Eras tour came nowhere near me, so I couldn’t go up and, you know, thank her in person or anything. 

So, yeah, here we are. 

Joel: So a little bit of a prophetic word from our Queen Taylor. That’s awesome. That’ll be headcanon for me for those lyrics. I’m awful with lyrics as well. Um, that’s really interesting. And I guess that does speak to what a lot of technical practitioners or founders or the people that I interface with a lot.

Um, they try to rest a lot on their own technical prowess, or I built this thing and the thing is cool for its sake. And, art can be done for one’s own pleasure, but really to get the most impact, it’s something that you want to share.

And I think that’s a hard thing for technical people to do. Um, because they want to, Overshare. They want to share everything and sometimes bowl over their audience. And you’ve gone from, you know, teaching, uh, doing the research, publishing, maybe some longer form stuff to, I guess at the time TikTok was still a one or two minute video platform. I can’t remember when they added 10 minutes, but you, you do very well in giving enough depth and, and sharing and getting people interested, but I, you know, I don’t think you’re, you’re, um, Your audience or this crowd that you’ve built is necessarily, uh, on the same academic level.

I mean, they’re not taking your class. They’re just interested in, in the talking. What do you ascribe the reaction that you’ve got to or the way that you’ve been able to build that, um, that discourse? 

Dr. Implausible: Yeah, I came in when it was like 15 seconds to one minute, and then they went 3 and 10, and, and I still kind of, I, I, chafe against like the 10 minute line. I think the, um, beauty of the medium is in its brevity and kind of getting to the point. And so sometimes I end up talking a little bit longer, but it’s, it’s getting to that point, you know, a little bit more than a vine, but you know, I think that’s part of it.

Like if you get down to it, if you have to condense. Your talk to an elevator pitch, um, you’re cutting out all the intro stuff. You know, all the, “In a world” kind of thing that happens at the start of a movie goes away and you have to get like right to the centrals of it. So, um, I think that’s half of it that you’re focusing on the elements that are relevant to your audience.

And it’s not about me, and it’s not about, you know, this other thing, and it’s not what I can bring. Okay, here’s what matters to the audience. And then the flip side is that, um, one of the things I’ve been very conscious of doing, and I think I mentioned this in a blog post or podcast or whatever, is, uh, a Seinfeld reference, and it was George Costanza on Opposite Day. And, you know, George is like, My life sucks. I always do this. So he starts doing everything completely differently. And I’m not saying I was like, um, incredibly toxic online or anything, but it’s just like, okay, be supportive, be helpful. Don’t, uh, don’t do a mean post. Even though I’m talking about tech, I’ve seen like artist pages where they continually talking about religion and politics and atheism or, you know, skepticism or what have you. I mean, maybe that’s where they’re at. If you’re continually engaged in a fight with the audience on stuff that isn’t relevant to you, you’re going to get ratioed. You’re going to get reported. You’re going to get your account closed down and you’re not talking about stuff that’s core to what you’re wanting to talk about, what your message is.

And I see this happen time and time again with a lot of creators. So, there’s a number of things that really make TikTok a really great platform. One of those is the draft feature that if you’re all skeptical about what you might be posting, save it as a draft, put it on 24 hours and that’s it.

And if you come back to it, okay, is it still funny? It’s still, is it maybe mean? Okay. Just delete it. Let it go. And, and stop putting out, stop polluting the hot tub is basically it, right? You don’t want, it’s a, can be a party where everybody can be having fun, but if you’re messing up the hot tub , then no one’s going to have a time, and so just a conscious act of not making hostile content.

Joel: I think also what you said about understanding your core, but understanding your audience’s core and what’s bringing them to you goes a long way. Um, and maybe some of these, these creators or these personalities that step I’m doing little fiddly air quotes, “step out of line” or “step out of their lane,”

That may have been an authentic moment to them, but it just wasn’t, it wasn’t the vibe. It wasn’t what the algorithm had put these people in front of you for. 

And you pull no punches, when you’re talking academics or technology, philosophy. you use the higher level language, but I don’t feel ever that you’re speaking down to anybody, which I also think is a challenge with academic content or with technical content.

It’s like, let me tell you. What I’m thinking, as opposed to, hey, let’s muse about something right now. This is what I think. What do you think? And you almost always end with a, with an engaging question. I mean, that is, that is the, that is the platform and the template of social engagement. “What do you think?”

Um, but I think it’s, it shows a genuine discourse. Does that come naturally to you, uh, given your, your, your background, or was that something that, that you discovered worked on the, on the platform?

Dr. Implausible: It’s something I discovered working through, um, academia and teaching, English as a second language and doing feedback for students. So a lot of that was, um, Trying to explain something like post modernism to a bunch of freshmen students.

Or I taught, one of the favourite classes I taught, I taught it twice, was a, um, basically sociology for engineers class, science and technology studies. So and it was a mandatory class and we’d get a lot of engineering students in their fourth year coming through. Occasionally you’d get a few. You know, film study students or something walking through like, Oh, science and technology, you know, like, okay, fine. And they, they weren’t necessarily fitting in. There weren’t the core audience there. Whether it was a summer session or a regular session, making it engaging for students, it’s outside their area. They don’t necessarily know how to deal with like a sociology class or ask some of those questions, but, you know, knew enough of that kind of background that we could like talk on the same level.

So the assignments would be like, okay, um. Deconstruct, uh, Andy Weir’s The Martian when it came out with Matt Damon., look at that as from a systems theory perspective for, uh, PokémonGo was big that year. So it’s like, okay, let’s go out, let’s find all the different sites on campus and then we’ll talk about that as a network and we can use that to kind of deconstruct some of these topics. So making it engaging in a way for the students was helpful. I could see sometimes you’d ask a question of the engineers and you could see light bulbs going off in their heads and in the class, I’m just like, okay, this is amazing. I love this feeling. Um, and maybe that’s why I’m also on social media now. Cause I, I like that, see that feeling or, um, I’ve seen somebody going, “Oh, wow. I never thought about it that way.” And. I know it’s hard to change someone’s thinking, but, uh, you can maybe kind of bring them to it.

And I’ve never been able to like put it right in front of their face and say, here it is, but you ask engaging questions and you can lead them along the way to developing those critical thinking skills. And I think that was a big part of it too.

Joel: I think the best class that I took in my undergrad was, Physics 100. It involved no math, no formulas, purely theory, and the subtitle was Physics for Poets. And it was a gre it was a great class, um, it was very funny because it was supposed to be the easy A, but it was the easy A if you actually engaged.

And my three buddies and I would sit in the back of the class, Passing a bottle around. I mean, we were hooligans, but we were shouting the answers. And, uh, true story, I actually missed the, uh, um, the final exam. I had flat tire, missed the final exam, walked in late. And there was the professor speaking with my two buddies.

Everybody else had left. There was like 15 minutes left in the period. And he goes, “Just sit down, have a conversation. If you can keep up with us, I’ll pass you.” And I mean it was, because he was meeting us where we were. You know, we were not, math is, mathematics is not my thing at all. So I was never going to understand the formula behind a concept.

But I’m a storyteller. Theatrical by nature, you know, I’m inquisitive. So he, he leaned into that and it didn’t hurt that he, uh, handed out full size Snickers bars when you got an answer right in class. So talk about engaging with the students.

Dr. Implausible: Okay. I’ll remember that for the next time I teach an 8am.

Joel: and he would, and it was a huge lecture class, he would whip it at you like sitting in the 

Dr. Implausible: Hold on. Okay. We’re awake now. Yeah,

Joel: It was pretty funny. Um, I’m, I’m a little curious because a lot of the people that I work with, um, are technical. They’re technical founders. They’re people who have, who have invented or improved on a technology.

Um, and a lot of them are looking at the technology from where they sit, right? Um, you have a, have a perspective, uh, not only of, you know, The, the historic, the, the artwork philosophy stuff that has come before, but then the interest in, um, in futurism and science fiction. We talked about this before when we chatted briefly, you almost have a, have a perspective shift of the past, the present, and now when it comes to technology.

Um, you had a post on the California ideology recently, and I’m going to sum it up terribly. I’m going to super simplify it, so correct me if I get it wrong, but it almost is the tech will save us all laissez faire libertarianism that we see from the tech sector. What advice do you have to people who are in that creation of technology to take those perspectives that, um, that, that you have because you’ve studied this?

Dr. Implausible: Okay, two things, I guess. Um, and, and this will tie into some of the work we did. One is to remember, remember why you got there. Remember why you’re building it. So remember your inspirations. Um, and the second is to think that empathetic view of technology, to think of the user. Um, so when I started the PhD, it was focusing on, um, What are the aesthetic influences that drive the development of new technology?

And how can we track that? So, uh, you’re doing field work. How can you operationalize that research? Um, so locally there aren’t a lot of tech development companies that aren’t oil and gas related, but there are a number of maker spaces and there are a number of, uh, events that were kind of like the bridging that gap between art and technology.

So I started in participant observation at those sites. One of the events was, uh, something called the Tikkun Olum Makers. It was a makeathon for persons with disabilities. It’s a kind of a worldwide organization, but there was a local chapter of it, and they’ve been running for a few years. So I talked to the executive committee there.

I went to all the meetings that went to events and stuff. And so they’d pair teams of engineering students and volunteers with persons with disabilities, which they called Need Knowers, because they knew what they needed out of the technology to, um, you know, work on something over the course of a hackathon that could help them.

 There was a, like a, a bike for a low above the knee amputee, a double leg amputee. There was a, uh, motorized seat cushion for persons that are confined to a wheelchair.

A number of different devices. That made Um, life a little bit easier for these persons with disabilities. And often they’re things we find, uh, if they exist in the market at all, they are at such an exorbitant cost that they’re beyond the reach of a lot of, uh, a lot of customers.

And it’s, it’s a, like a gap within the technical, technical market, because it is such small market people that might be interested in, right? It’s like one-off or custom development. So they really felt, uh, they really fill a good need. And so. Talking to the people involved with it, they said, you know, these are engineering students, they said, I learned more in this project, like the two months leading up to the Makeathon and engaging with the clients, they learned more from doing that than they felt they did during their engineering class.

Like it was a more rewarding project than what they did in their final year. And so they were engaged with the client personally and finding ways to meet their needs in a short amount of time. It was fantastic. Um, now, one of the things that I asked them is, okay, well, what inspired you to go into engineering? And often it was science fiction or, you know, they, they, they like cool things in Star Trek or Star Wars or whatever the science fiction of the day was. And sometimes it wasn’t, but it was always like, okay, well, what brought you here? And it was that engagement, allowing them to be reflective about their own practice. Uh, as a technological, uh, tech, technology creator or technological innovator, um, and yeah, they’re able to bring that forward. Now, some of these groups were able to take the stuff that they developed through the hackathon and bring it, you know, engage with, uh, an incubator locally and bring it to market.

You know, there was enough of a development there. And, uh, It was, so we, we could see that as like, um, you know, exactly that incubator and inception point for bringing new technologies to market, even when you don’t think there’s necessarily there. So, um, yeah, think what you got, got you there, think of the user and engage with it emphatically, because, I mean, you might be designing something for yourself and that’s often what we see when we look at like that idea of democratize innovation, right? That’s always like, uh, a doctor works on a particular tool and says, well, I need a scalpel that cuts this way, cause this is what I’m doing for my work. And then they, you know, take it back to the manufacturer. The manufacturer brings it to market. All of a sudden we have, uh, you know, something new and it gets spread to a number of other doctors. Uh, and it becomes accepted practice within the, you know, the medical industry, for instance. But if we step back, we think about that from, you know, a A more broader perspective, you don’t necessarily know what somebody else is asking for or needs. So you have to engage with them and, and figure that out.

And I think that’s a little bit of what the communicative practice of technology is, right? So that’s why we preach empathy.

Joel: I always appreciate your, your, uh, I won’t even call them clapbacks on TikTok, but when, when people are decrying how horrible AI is or how horrible that is, and, you know, you, you always seem to be that voice to step in and go, “yes, but you have to understand other audiences, underserved audiences, and what a boon this could be to them.”

And I guess it comes from that experience. I just last night was at a demo day for a local, tech accelerator called Conscious Ventures Labs. And they are specifically looking at how do we define value and I’ll give them a shout, shout out to Jeff Cherry at the Novella Center for Entrepreneurship and the Conscious Venture Labs.

They try to define value differently and say that it’s not just for shareholders. Value has to be downstream, cross stream, it has to be, it has to benefit people. Because if you’re just pumping up bottom line and you’re just, just putting money in a small select people’s pockets, you’re not really doing good.

And tech has the potential. And maybe this is a touchy live wire, but why do we always as a species or why do we always seem to forget that and drop to our baser instincts? Why are we like this?

Dr. Implausible: Okay. That’s, that’s the deep question. Let me put a pin in that one. We’ll, uh, we’ll get the brain cells working in the background here and see if we can come back to that one a little.

Joel: Well, I guess it feeds into the Soylent culture, which was another topic I wanted to dip into, which is this sort of idea of media and culture eating itself, right? I’d mentioned my background in, in, in communication theory and, and, uh, um, I was very excited to see that post where you, where you call out, uh, the McLuhan theory. And again, I’m going to completely butcher it, but you know, this was many years ago in my undergrad, but you know, the content of any new medium still contains the content of the older medium. And you kind of have this, thing eating its tail. But then you go on to, um, describe Soylent culture, uh, almost as, as the continuation of that.

Could you share a little bit about that? Cause that was interesting for me.

Dr. Implausible: you know, so Soylent culture came out of, I mean, it’s that ongoing conversation I have with a few colleagues, uh, you know, we meet on a weekly or bi weekly basis and just kind of chat about things. Uh, but it was that, Kind of observation I made last year, I was talking about, um, uh, the commodification of audiences. And, uh, so this is a work by Dallas Smyth from the 70s and it’s the, you know, if you’re not paying, you’re the product kind of thing. Um, and that adage just kind of filtered through into various other sources, but I don’t, a lot of people don’t bring it back to him and they don’t quote him for it. Uh, and he said this was a challenge with communication theory at the time, as they didn’t recognize, they were so focused on the content that they were missing what was actually happening with respect to commodification of the audience. And what I said at that time was that what was happening is, um, I think it was Reddit and Twitter were all exploding because the AI companies were taking all this content that they weren’t really focused on because they were focused on, okay, we’ve got this data on our audience. Let’s sell that back and advertise.

They didn’t think that they could monetize the vast amounts of like archives of conversations that were there. And so when the various AI companies came and like script Reddit and then turned it into like output for ChatGPT. Or, uh, Claude or any of the other, uh, tools, then they’re like, Oh, wait, what’s going on?

So I’m basically saying it’s like Ikea. You know, they cut down the forests, put it into a wood chipper and, and glued the sawdust back together in different ways. And that’s basically happening with some of the large language models. And it seems like as we develop that a little bit further, it’s like it’s feeding our culture back to us, right?

We’re getting this development of. New types of art. I’m going to, I am on the side that AI art is art. It’s just a different kind of art, but, um, it’s being produced at the cost of everything else we previously created. And so Soylent, not, not the current, um, energy, uh, slash protein product, but Soylent, the Charlton Heston version is, is like, um, This idea that, uh, you know, that in the grim dark, green filtered future, that, uh, the material that makes up, uh, the food products is actually the bodies of the, the populace.

So, um, it, it’s kind of horrific, and you see it in a lot of, you know, science fiction, like, uh, Warhammer 40,000, and a few other things. But. That reconstituted mass being served back to us just seems so evocative of a way to describe what’s happening with the generative AI tools that I had to jump on it. 

Joel: And that’s a film, man. I was lucky enough to room with a film student in college. And that was one that broke my brain and did tend to stick with me. Yeah I definitely caught onto that when you said Soylent, I was right there.

I’m curious though, it’s not all doom and gloom. It’s, the technology is not I think we poo algorithms a little bit. Everybody’s got an algorithm for this or that. My next door neighbor’s got a medical device robot, which helps rehabilitate stroke patients by using new AI and algorithms and things like that.

So there’s a lot of, promise in technology. What’s the stuff that you’re really excited about? Like where do you see promise? We might not see a AI Van Gogh, but I think too much focus is on this generative AI LLM. What are the other tech areas? CES is happening right now.

Dr. Implausible: Honestly, for me, it’s, it’s in robotics. I know robotics is maybe not quite as, uh, sexy as say the LLM stuff, but it bridges that gap between the digital world and the physical world in ways that say the LLMs and the generative media doesn’t. And it’s a much more mature technology. So it’s further along on curve, but I think what we’re seeing with robotics and the precision and the mobility. And it being able to engage with a world model around itself. Like, you know, your Roomba maps out your house, but now all of a sudden you have an idea of what that space is. So seeing that embodied nature of the robotics starting to come about. It can be a little bit terrifying, but again just, I think there was the one thing by Boston Dynamics where they showed the walking robot doing backflips, working in a construction site. If you are working on a construction site and you can, you have one of those that can work as an assistive tool to move around an extra board. Like normally you have several helpers. So yes, always the concern is technological unemployment and job loss with the, that comes with it. Which is a challenge.

We need to be very clear about what we’re going to be doing with that as a society. But it’s also, Okay. So how can we make one person more effective with it? Maybe it means a worker has an exoskeleton. Maybe it works, means they can work in job sites that are risky. Maybe it means we have the telepresence units.

And I think I was critical of Elon Musk during his recent showing off of those robots. Oh, they’re billing them as robots or they’re really telepresence units. And if they’re telepresence units, we can have robot or telepresence firefighters in, you deploy them en masse in in the Pacific Palisades in California when there’s a fire.

And you can have robots in the hazardous situations and not be putting the persons at risk. And I think we have fantastic opportunities for expanding our reach, expanding our abilities in those ways with some of that. So I think that, that’s amazing to me. And then, we’ll see what happens with things like Neuralink and cybernetics. I think that’s a lot further off, but seeing mobility aids and prosthetics being able to be used more widely is also really promising. And something I’m keen to keep an eye on. Yeah, fantastic stuff there.

Joel: Musk and his company seem to be chasing the headlines and missing the obvious wins. Like you said, a telepresence, that would have been huge, because so far we have, um, iPads on sticks that, like, go up and down hospitals, and, and, they just are glorified FaceTime. 

Dr. Implausible: Exactly.

Joel: I’d love to know what your personal tech stack is. Where are you? You did a post recently about the, with TikTok shutting down the platforms that you will go to and you won’t go to. And, I, I think we’re both connected on, over on Mastodon and there’s this whole Fediverse movement towards trying to replace TikTok with, with loops and stuff like that.

Um, what are your personal rules maybe about technology or building your tech stack. How, how deliberate are you about those decisions?

Dr. Implausible: So I think what I was trying to say there is our choices are always going to be circumscribed a little bit, but try and do the least amount of harm, and if something comes to your attention that, Hey, this has made a bad actor, then you need to really evaluate that and step away from it. Um, there’s all, there’s usually alternatives. Um, generally I will opt for open source. Uh, so like for audio, I’ll use something like Reaper. I pay for Reaper cause I’m using it, you know, to produce we’ve done 40 podcast so far. I don’t, so I don’t have a problem with paying for software. It’s not about pirating it, it’s, but it is about finding one that meets your needs and allows you to use your material so that you’re not necessarily locked in either. I think that’s a big thing. I know we were talking on Notion earlier, I use Obsidian as a notebook, but before that I was just using multiple, multiple, like Windows text files. It’s, um, I know there’s, uh, fancier options, but I need something that kind of bridges that gap. And so, uh, technologically I will. Opt for something that allows an open license or, or broad use and is generally something that isn’t locked into a particular device. So I can move it around a little bit. I’ll try. Uh, right now, Mastodon, like I said, Loops if it gets out of the beta stage it is right now, it has some challenges that it doesn’t do the things that make TikTok sticky.

And we can talk about that in a quick second, if you want. But because it is open and available, maybe it is an option. Uh, I think, uh, TikTok, well, let’s talk about it right now. So the thing, the three things that TikTok really brought to the table was I think the algorithm providing you stuff that you found engaging was really fantastic.

And. It’s the earlier way I described it is it was like a remote control. It was like, uh, Rick and Morty and the Interdimensional Cable in that you’re continually just flipping through a new channel of, “Hey, what’s on this channel? Oh, what’s on this channel?” Flip up. That’s you’re flipping up on your remote control.

If you had one back in the day and you’re going through your TV, but your TV just happens to be the handheld in front of you. And that is what made that experience so sticky for a lot of people. The two other things that made it sticky were the ease of creation. Click a button, and it was doing fantastic work, uh, with, you know, allowing view and audio and add in a few stickers, add in a few elements, and then they added more features to it, the AI elements, the, uh, um, automatic, um, um, Captioning all these things. It’s an incredible video editor. And I think that gets lost. Everybody talks about the algorithm, but if you just say it’s a video editor with like a Dropbox and you can share it with your friends, which is kind of what Loops is right now, then it would still be good . And then it was ease of sharing it. Um, you could I could send it to my friends. They could get it. They could take a look at it. It would be fantastic. And they go, and you know, that cross channel communication didn’t really need a whole lot to get, especially someone’s shorter TikTok. It didn’t need to be embedded in it. It’s just like, Oh, here’s a funny cat video or whatever. And similarly, um, that going back to the McLuhan quote that you mentioned, and you got it right, I think, in a, broad perspective. I’ve forgotten the exact phrasing as well. I’ll, I’d have to go get my paper back off the shelf. But we’d see early Twitter posts or people would take a television show and cut them into one minute episodes.

“Here’s part 22 of this episode of The Office” or something, and you’re kind of going through, going, Oh, geez, where’s the rest of them? But, um, that ability for it to, uh, You know, take all these other elements of media. So, “Oh, somebody just made a picture of a painting.” Okay. “Or here’s just the audio for something and you can take it and stitch it and engage with it.” And that was the thing, the idea that Henry Jenkins talked about, about spreadable media. TikTok was so good at allowing people to take media and engage with it and do something with it in their own way, remix it using the audio or duet it. And you had all those goofy duet chain things going around and all that kind of stuff. And so those made TikTok magic, the spreadability, the uh, ease of creation and the algorithm of showing you stuff that would be engaging to you. And it’s kind of, um. Commodification has taken place with the increased focus on ads and, uh, you know, blue check content and the like has kind of, uh, slowed that down a little bit. I’ve had to put on some high filters about stuff I think is dead content, and I can’t really take out sponsored posts and the like, but, uh, it’s still pretty engaging and sometimes it’s right and you have fun with it, so, you know. It’s a, it’s still a fantastic tool.

Joel: Yeah, I don’t think it’s easily replicated. Um, just because it did organically grow almost like Twitter did, uh, by the user base and they, they added a lot of really great features. I don’t, I don’t think anybody’s going to be able to swoop in and replace it. Um, my background with the government and Homeland Security, I get some of the concerns, but I also wish that some of those concerns were applied more broadly to, you know, domestic and Western properties vis a vis Zuckerberg’s announcement the other I guess it was yesterday or today on the Facebook thing that’s neither here nor there.

I want to wrap kind of just more about I mean, obviously You do this because, ’cause you, you dig it and you’ve been in the medium and you’ve been in a lot of this, this cross subject matter for a long time. But what, what do you personally do to, uh, to stay fresh at it? Because it can be a grind.

How do you keep what you’re trying to put in front of people fresh? Personal, uh, interests, personal, um, inspirations. What juices you up?

Dr. Implausible: Yeah. Um, sometimes you don’t have juice. I mean, and I think maybe that’s the first, first step to realizing it. You’ll see people, “Oh, I was away for two weeks and I had to take a break” and they’ve, they’ve come with some commiseration. And I think maybe the first thing is to be gentle with yourself, is that. You’re allowed to take breaks. You don’t have to continually on. You don’t have to, you know, doing that. “Oh, I need to post once at 8 a. m. before this crowd comes on. And then again, at like one and then, you know, five,” and you’re trying to optimize for the content. Like you said, you just have to talk to it and get it out there.

So if you’re feeling that “not entirely on,” take that break and, you know, sometimes we can’t, we have deadlines and we have, uh, you know, other obligations. So we have to come up with it, but you know, be, be gentle with yourself first and foremost. And if you’re not feeling it, come into it. But, uh, how’s it, how’s it fresh?

I’m never going to run out of topics. I don’t have to use AI or anything like that. I think of four and a half years of posting, I’ve used. Two pages from my dissertation. I’ve used, you know, a couple paragraphs from a couple of the things I’ve written. I’ve done a few, you know, there’s always new stuff coming out.

But aside from that, when I started doing the podcast, I sat down and I just. Did, okay, top list. Okay. I can talk about these academic authors and talk about these topics. I can talk about the shows in context of like Appendix W and there’s three shows. I can, uh, you know, Oh, here’s a, here’s one coming up. I’ll talk about Andor.

It’s going to be four episodes. Um, there’s, uh, there’s such a vast wealth of topics out there. And there’s always an angle within your core about something that’s relevant. So, uh, news came out about. Okay. Facebook or Meta or a new tool. What’s your particular take is me talking. Okay. What’s the pop culture background of what just happened yesterday?

Is there something that we saw in a science fiction book three years ago that maybe we can use that and talk about? Current topic through that lens. So think about what your frame is, think about what your lens is, and use that to engage with the topics of today. I don’t have to continue to be going back to some 30 year old novel.

And sometimes that’s tough. I’m reading something from the sixties and oh man, it’s a little rough when you’re doing that analysis. Like going back, uh, going back to some of that old sci fi is a little. Real cringy, but you can talk about it in terms of concepts and ideas and, and, you know, uh, engage with what’s going on currently in people’s lives and make it relevant for them.

And I think that’s one of the ways to keep it engaging. So, uh, yeah, focus on your audience and what you bring to that audience. You know, that, uh, keeps me jazzed up and, you know, if I’m not feeling jazzed, I go for a walk, I do something different and you find a new hobby and maybe you find a new community and bridge out.

I mean, I’ve talked about so many different things. Uh, that idea of niche down never, never kind of stuck into my brain, but, um, maybe that’s to my detriment, but I, uh, I feel good about it, and I never, I’ve never put out anything I hated. There’s a few I’ve had take down because the comments got like crazy, but uh, nothing, or I just stop comments on them. But there’s nothing I’m like, oh this is awful, I should, I should never have said that. So, like I said, remember, drafts are your friends. So, yeah, there we go.

Joel: Yeah, I think if you know yourself, if you’ve done that pre work to have your full list, not your full list, but this is one of the things I do with my corporate clients and my coaching and mentoring is, if you stop yourself cold because you don’t know what to write about, it’s because you haven’t done a bit of upfront work, that kind of message therapy, and you know, you can come up with the player’s handbook of like 20, 30, 50 topics that I could talk about, and that’ll always be something you can go back to, and then knowing the audience, it’s that, that symbiotic relationship or whatever. “No, they didn’t really respond when I talked about this.

Maybe I won’t do that next time.”

 Just to wrap things up, I’m bummed that TikTok may be going away, but where else can people find you, engage if they want to follow along, I have totally been enjoying the ImplausiPod and, it’s just, it’s got that cozy core and your voice just makes me want to just, It’s with a cup of tea.

It is like, it’s like a comfort to me, even if I don’t understand everything. So I’ll say that, but where else can people find you?

Dr. Implausible: Okay, so I guess the podcast is the primary way right now, and that is also on YouTube because of the changes that Google made to, you know, got rid of Google Podcasts, and now it’s on YouTube uh, through that, so the RSS feed just picks that up. Um, I will I hope to start doing just some video essays. I don’t think it would necessarily be a podcast episode, but that’s the goal there. YouTube Shorts is not TikTok. It’s not the same thing.

So I don’t know how I feel about engaging there in the same way. So that, that’ll, uh, I can’t necessarily promise that. Uh, so Implausipod.Com is the main site for the podcast. Uh, Implausi.blog, which I realize is awkward, probably horrible to spell, but that’s where I’m trying to get some of the written parts of it out, as well as all the transcripts and other material, On socials that I engage with, which right now includes Blue Sky and Mastodon, as well as TikTok. It’s just Drimplausible or Dr. Dot Implausible. Uh, one, one version of that, and that’s about the only places I’m at. It’s a little bit limited, but it’s also in my control and knowable and manageable to me.

So I don’t do a broad, uh, push out to everything. Uh, so I am where you can find me, but, uh, that’s an intentional choice on my part. Uh, I’m not looking askance at anybody who does, and I realize we all have different, uh, you know, needs. We’re trying to get messaging out. Uh, I’m just going with something that I can handle and that’s fine.

Joel: This has been phenomenal. I got a stack of books that we, we could talk about. I actually went up into my attic and pulled out like all the stuff that I was reading in college, but we don’t, we certainly don’t have the time for that. Um, but this has been just, it’s, Just really cool. Um, it’s, it’s always awesome when technology introduces you to people that you’re kind of on the same wavelength.

I’ve been a big fan. Just how you put yourself out there , totally authentic and, engaging. So, I hope that my listeners got something out of it. They know where to find you. Uh, thanks so much for joining me, man.

Dr. Implausible: Hey, thank you for the opportunity, Joel, and I appreciate it. And if your listeners have any questions, just reach me, uh, . And, uh, yeah. And if you want to do book club sometime in the future, you just let me know. Okay. Reach out and we’ll figure it out. But again, thank you so much.

I’ve enjoyed this chat.

Joel: I am on it. Awesome. Thank you.

Dr. Implausible: All right.

Joel: If you want links to the resources mentioned on the show, head on over to the episode page. And for information on booking a message therapy workshop, getting your hands on the MessageDeck, to check out my upcoming book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. 

 Until next time, happy messaging.

 Remember, you don’t have to speak well, you only gotta learn how to talk good.