Make Me Smart July 5, 2023

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Kimberly Adams 

Hello, I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make today make sense. It is July 5. Hope you had a good Fourth of July celebration if you celebrated, Kai is out today. But joining me is Marketplace’s Matt Levin. Welcome back!

Matt Levin 

Hey, it’s good to be back, Kimberly.

Kimberly Adams

Good times. Did you do anything fun for the fourth?

Matt Levin 

We mostly just tried to soothe our dog from the fireworks extravaganza that was that was happening. Yeah. I become like a huge curmudgeon. Now, every time there’s fireworks, I’m just like, do we have to? Do we have to do this? Anyway, how was yours? Hopefully, hopefully funnermine?

Kimberly Adams 

Funner. Yes, it was funner than yours, definitely. I had some people over. It’s my uncle’s birthday as well. And so they do fireworks for him every year. So it’s a lot of fun. But yeah, we had a good time. But in the meantime, let us do some news. You’ve got many notes and things in here, go for it.

Matt Levin 

I use I use a lot of bullet points. So I remember what the heck I’m supposed to say. Yeah. So my news item is probably the big tech news of the day, which doesn’t involve AI for the first time in a while. But Kimberly, will you be signing up, or have you signed up already for Threads?

Kimberly Adams

Have not and I’m not planning to at the moment. I was dragged kicking and screaming onto Instagram. So I avoid certain platforms, shall we say, due to privacy concerns. Yeah, it’s not it’s not in the plan at the moment. But you know, we’re journalists, sometimes we end up on platforms we’d rather not be on anyway.

Matt Levin 

Yep. Yep, that’s exactly right. So just by way of background, Threads here is Meta’s Twitter imitation app is what I’m gonna call it. Meta is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. I just still refer to it as Facebook. But this is supposed to be the Twitter killer, Threads. That is this is supposed to take away all the bad things that we have, I guess, traditionally, or at least most recently associated with Twitter, and provide some type of positive public discourse around various topics of public interest and it debuts tomorrow. What was your reaction?

Kimberly Adams

Well known for curating that.

Matt Levin 

What was your reaction when you heard this beyond the like, immediate, “man another platform?”

Kimberly Adams

I mean, that was the that was the reaction. Oh, yeah, the platform, but also it just sort of reminded me that this has kind of been Meta’s strategy. you know, for years and years and years. It’s that, you know, they imitate something and try to dominate the marketplace or or buy it up or something like that. And I just, I wonder if people have kind of just moved on from needing a Twitter type thing. Like since I’m, you know, I check Twitter to see if anybody has DMed me, but other than that, I don’t engage with the platform too much. And I’m alright, you know, I look at Bluesky, I look at Mastodon, but I’m not like hurting in my soul because I can’t be on Twitter all the time anymore. It’s probably better.

Matt Levin 

So that’s exactly what I want to talk about. Is that to me, is the fundamental question here is whether people have collectively kind of moved on from social media at least having such a dominant part of their day to day lives. Because I do feel like since Musk took over Twitter, there has been a reassessment as to “Oh man, I’m on this stuff all the time,” like like obviously Tik Tok is a different thing. That’s not traditional social media. That’s that’s video entertainment primarily, right? But kind of the web 2.0: the Twitters, the Facebooks, even Instagram, even though a lot of people are on Instagram, I do kind of feel there’s been a reassessment here as to the centrality of it in everyone’s day to day life, although maybe that’s hopeful, hopeful thinking.

Kimberly Adams

I’m sure there are some really smart researchers actually collecting data on this at the moment, and I imagine and yes, another six months to a year, we’ll probably, we’ll have numbers, solid numbers on how people’s social media usage overall changed after Musk took over Twitter. And I think that we will see what you’re talking about, which is a decline on overall social media usage. Because one of the things that Twitter did was point back to content on other social media sites. Yeah. How many TikToks do you find out about, did you find out about because you saw them posted on Twitter? How many Facebook posts, you know, were linked on Twitter or screenshotted, on Twitter. And so I imagine that there’s going to be an overall decline in usage. Once we actually get final numbers. I’m certainly using less social media. I’m using more platforms, but I’m using less social media than I was.

Matt Levin 

Yep. The other part of the that is interesting, at least from a strategic perspective is I don’t really understand why Zuckerberg wants to get into this space, because it’s not as if Twitter is a huge moneymaker, right? Twitter, Twitter has never been a huge moneymaker. And revenues among the social media companies are, you know, Twitter is much smaller than most of the other social media companies. So it’s not going to be, you know, a money machine. And then if it is as successful as Twitter, that means if you’re going to be like the center for public discourse that like infinitely increases your odds of being called before Congress to testify, right. And Zuckerberg and Facebook have tried to move away from being in the political theater kind of as much as possible post 2016. So just strategically, I’m you know, I don’t know when I, when I read the news, I was like, huh, they’re they’re doing this huh?

Kimberly Adams

I think it’s an attempt to get revenue wherever they can, even if it’s not much, it’s another income stream. It’s another place to serve ads, because they’re probably looking at older advertisers who no longer feel comfortable being on Twitter, or sure see Twitter as not being effective. So why not grab the money if it’s on the table?

Matt Levin 

Sure, especially if it’s not too expensive to launch. The flipside, though, is that advertising revenue is also going to like Netflix now has an advertising tier, right. And all these other platforms are out there where the advertising money is chasing. So I just think there’s, there’s more competition for them too. I don’t know, it’ll, it’ll be interesting to see. I’ll sign up, though. I’ll tell you that.

Kimberly Adams

Let me know how it is. I just sent you your Bluesky invite, so you can compare the two?

Matt Levin 

I did. It looks exactly like Twitter.

Kimberly Adams

It looks exactly like Twitter, for all of our talk of moving on from it.

Matt Levin 

Yeah, exactly.

Kimberly Adams 

Okay. Well, my news is the Washington Post has this new series. I mean, it’s called “Work: Reimagined.” I mean, it’s not a new series. Anyway, they have a series called “Work: Reimagined.” And it looks at a bunch of different things about how our work life is changing. But the most recent piece in this is about the boomers retiring and why that’s bad news for workers, and how the retiring boomers are reshaping the workforce. And this is something that, you know, we’ve talked about a couple times on here, and it’s coming up more and more in conversations that I have with people, you know, all over the place, you know, I travel and stuff, but I really think this country is not economically prepared for the aging of baby boomers and what kind of needs that’s going to create in terms of health care, workforce, in terms of, you know, shoring up social security and all of these other things. I was just talking to my aunt about this the other day, and you know, not that this is anybody’s fault. Well, yes, it is people’s fault in terms of how our government has chosen to spend our resources. Anyway it’s not the fault of the boomers that this is this is coming, but we ignore the economic consequences of this at our peril. And The Washington Post really looks into how the fact that since boomers are working longer, it’s cushioned the shock to the system a little bit. But it’s, it’s, it’s going to be rough. And the fact is that there are going to be way, way fewer people in the workforce supporting the actual people who need the support in the economy, read the Post piece, it’s very fascinating. And is one of the quotes was, “It’s a hydra of a numbers problem. And we’re not trying to handle any of those heads,” that’s from economist Kathryn Anne Edwards in the piece. But it’s that’s accurate. That’s where we’re headed. So read the piece. If you haven’t started making plans for older family members, or yourself, just be aware of the economy that folks are going to be retiring into, and hopefully living long into after retirement, is going to be probably a challenging one. So that’s my news.

Matt Levin 

Yeah. Do you think this influences the immigration debate at all? Or not?

Kimberly Adams

Not yet, but I think it will. And we only have to look to Eastern Europe, not even Eastern Europe, but just different parts of Europe, to see that where they had a lot of aging populations and not enough labor force and opened up to immigration, and had a lot of people coming in to work. And then that led to a lot of cultural, let’s say discontent, shall we say, in many European countries, but they didn’t have the labor force. And as a result, that is why a lot of these European countries are now way more diverse than they were say, you know, 20, 30 years ago. Yeah, I think that, you know, people complained so much about there not being enough, you know, fast food and restaurant workers, since we’ve come out of the pandemic, you know, without acknowledging the fact that a crackdown on immigration played a key role in that. And as I know, some states, they’re trying to look at ways to bring in more foreign health care workers and improve the visa access for that it’s a federal issue. But there’s people looking at that, because we need more workers and our economy is not producing enough of them. So we’ll see. See if we can get past the sort of rhetoric around immigration. But who knows?

Matt Levin 

Yeah, yeah. I’m not expecting anyone to say anything as nuanced as you just laid out, probably in next year’s election. But maybe after, maybe after.

Kimberly Adams

We’ll see, we’ll see. Alright let’s get some smiles. Let’s do it. Love yours. Why don’t you talk about it?

Matt Levin 

Well, for those that might have missed yesterday’s Fourth of July Marketplace, we do this “My Economy” series where people kind of call in and talk about their businesses, essentially. I like these, but yesterday’s really stood out. This was, I believe, Maria put this together, I think.

Kimberly Adams

Maria Hollenhorst.

Matt Levin

This was a test a …yes, that’s right. Sorry. This was about a business called Hard Hat cats, which is a nonprofit based in New York. It’s run by this delightful woman named Sheila Massey in New York. I don’t know if you knew this, Kimberly, there’s a pretty big rat problem there.

Kimberly Adams

I’ve heard.

Matt Levin

And what and what Sheila decided to do was to take feral cats from animal shelters, and then place them in businesses, apartments, and especially, I guess, breweries and distilleries really have bad rat problems in like Brooklyn, I guess. And say, “Hey, you got a rat problem. We got these cats that maybe don’t like people, but they also really don’t like rats. Seems like there’s a there’s a match here that we can make.” They place 30 cats so far. By all accounts it’s been a pretty impressive success story. It was just a really well done My Economy yesterday, so if you miss the show because of the holiday check that one out. It’s it’s a good one. Jasper, I assume approves. Yes. Yes. What’s yours?

Kimberly Adams

Jasper is useless when it comes to hunting vermin. God bless. Because he’s lost his hearing, first of all, he can’t. And so occasionally he’ll like sniff out and I think that there’s something going on, but then he’ll just give up. But I remember one time I tried to put him next to like a centipede hoping he would go for it. And he just like looked at me like I was crazy. He was like “absolutely not.”

Matt Levin 

He’s above that.

Kimberly Adams 

He’s like, Yeah, this is not my job. Uh, my job here and look cute. Okay, I’ve got two space related stories. Number one, I’m still trying to wrap my head around this major scientific discovery that actually came out a couple of days ago. Or maybe it was even last week where all of this consortium of scientists from all over the world made this big announcement about the fact that the universe is basically bobbing along on all these giant gravitational waves and things about space time. And it’s just very interesting. So I don’t fully understand it. I’ve watched so many videos about it. And like, I hear the scientists explain it. And I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got it.” But then as soon as I’m done listening to them, it’s just out of my brain completely. And so what I’m left with, is the fact of seeing all of these scientists so excited, I think is so nice. It’s just they get really happy, and I’m very happy for them. And I think it’s really cool that scientists who might normally be kind of like competing with each other, somehow agreed to like, not scoop each other on this. And let’s work together to put out this sort of batch of papers at the same time on this thing that’s basically changing the way we think about physics and the way we think about the universe. And I’m very excited to hear more about it. Maybe we can do a deep dive and have somebody like, explain it to me one more time.

Matt Levin 

I would definitely listen to that episode, because I don’t get this.

Kimberly Adams

Okay. All right. The other one that’s fun and space related. You remember the helicopter that was on Mars, that everybody thought was super cool.

Matt Levin 

I don’t, but I don’t track as much as you do. I’m sorry.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, that’s okay. That’s okay. I embrace my nerdiness. Anyway, there was a helicopter on Mars, which was just unbelievable. It’s called Ingenuity. And it was making all these flights on Mars and taking pictures and doing all that stuff. But it has been silent for like, the last two months. And a lot of people thought that maybe it was, you know, having some problems or whatever. Anyway, it’s back up, they’ve reestablished contact. It was mainly because there was “a Martian hill that was blocking the line-of-sight communications with the Perseverance rover,” but you know, you always get worried when you don’t hear from our fun little visitors on the red planet. So glad to hear that we are hearing from Ingenuity again, and their success. And what it’s going to be working on now is a series of health checks ahead of its 53rd Flight, which I guess might take place sometime in the next couple weeks. And so we’ve got on the show notes a story about that. And I thought it was fun. And it made me smile. Yay Ingenuity.

Matt Levin 

Yeah, it’s always nice not to be ghosted by by a helicopter or anything else. So hurray for reestablishing contact.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes, good stuff. All right. Well, that is it for us for today. We are going to be back tomorrow. Please keep sending us your comments and questions or even any little audio snippets that you think might be interesting for us to talk about. We are at 508-U-B-SMART or you can write us at makemesmart@marketplace.org. Make me smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Today’s program was engineered by Jayk Cherry. Our intern Niloufar Shahbandi.

Matt Levin 

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital. You said it was your uncle who had his birthday on July 4.

Kimberly Adams

Mhmm.

Matt Levin

Does that mean he gets a cake on July 4?

Kimberly Adams 

I made him a cake actually.

Matt Levin

Oh, wow.

Kimberly Adams

He wanted the cake that my grandmother, his mother, used to make for him when he was a child. So I had to call my grandmother and get the instructions to make said cake which was basically a strawberry shortcake. And so I made a strawberry shortcake for him yesterday.

Matt Levin 

Nice. Nice. I haven’t had strawberry shortcake in a really long time.