797: What I Was Thinking As We Were Sinking

Ira Glass

I've had a bunch of bike accidents in the last year and a half. And the moment that things go wrong is always the same. These accidents happen during my morning commute. And they always happen when it rains.

I have this very light bicycle I got. And when it rains, something about this bike on the city streets-- a metal grate, a slippery patch of any sort at all, can make the bike slip out from under me. I have broken a clavicle. I banged up my wrist. I've given myself some kind of bruise on my right arm that still wakes me up at night, months later.

And in each of these three accidents-- you know, like, when you're falling, there's that second or two when you realize you're going down, and you're on your way down, but you haven't actually hit the ground yet? Weirdly, it is enough time for a bunch of thoughts to go through your head. And all three times, like I say, it's been the same. Somehow I get very calm and I think, oh, this isn't going to be so bad. I'm not going very fast. The ground isn't that far. Is a car coming? OK, no car is coming. I figured out how to fall. It's going to be fine-- this time.

And I think everybody knows how a person reacts under duress, it can tell you something about them. And I think what this set of thoughts says about me is I am optimistic even when there is no factual basis for it at all. Like, at the exact moment when I'm going to collide with the wet surface of the street, a moment when things are definitely not going to be fine, I'm thinking, things will be fine.

I think this optimism has kept me in faltering relationships. When I mentioned all this at our radio show story meeting this week, one of my coworkers, somebody who I've worked with closely for years, told me-- he has never said this-- that he thinks my optimism is the single most important quality I have. He said he'll tell me there are 17 things that can go wrong with some plan that we have. And I'll just go, eh, let's go for it. Though I have to say, after three accidents, I have learned not to ride this particular bike in the rain. Thank you very much.

Today on our program, we have stories where things go very, very badly for people. They are on the way down and in that moment of crisis. What they're thinking reveals so much about who they are. Some people, it leads to new insights. Some, it leads to no insights at all. And some are hit with a lightning bolt of inspiration and figure out how to save themselves. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, "Pirates of the Cari-BEAN-TOWN." One summer, a while back, a group of friends got in trouble, got in over their heads, almost literally, in the middle of Boston Harbor. Our producer, Ike Sriskandarajah, tells the tale-- though, for the purposes of today's story, call him Ishmael.

Ike Sriskandarajah

I was there. It was over 10 years ago and I was a new resident in the Boston area. My good friend, Sophie Tintori, introduced me to some people she knew well. We liked the same kinds of jokes and could only afford the same kind of rent. So we moved into a big house together. And soon, we got to the stage in any relationship where someone suggests taking things to the next level.

Ike Sriskandarajah

True. But did you know the word "catamaran" comes from Tamil? Kattu maram, "wood tied together." Those are my guys. So that's one thing I know about boats. And maybe more ancestral knowledge was just waiting to surface if I owned a boat.

Here's how it happened. Our friend Max brought us the opportunity. He knew a person who knew a person who needed to get rid of their boat. For $400 each, Max could make us Massachusetts boat people. Having double that in my bank account, I signed a check, sight unseen. And when I finally got to meet our boat down at the harbor, it felt like we had gotten away with larceny.

I wish you could have seen it, a 1950s Hiliner, a glamorous little wooden motorboat with an engine hanging off the back, polished wood, two rows of white vinyl seats, chrome finishes. Think Italian vacation, like The Talented Mr Ripley, but right here on the Boston Riviera. Also, like Boston's own Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley, a new high-society life was waiting for us.

The first time I got on the boat, it really felt like magic. We honked just the right number of times and a bridge opened up for us like a bouncer unclipping a red velvet rope to the VIP section. We entered the Charles River and stopped to admire the sailboats swirling around us.

A small motorboat pulled up to us. The man asked if we were stranded.

No, sir, just enjoying this beautiful day. Thanks for asking.

Well, you know, you're parked in the middle of a regatta.

Oh.

He looked us over. Do you guys work for Google?

The plan to cosplay our way to high society was already working.

Max knew the next step. We had to announce our old boat as the newest member of Boston's watery glitterati, which meant a christening party. Max had been practicing for this moment his whole life. The man loves extravagant gestures.

He invited friends from near and far to the Charles River Esplanade and asked everyone to wear white. He showed up in black, a rented black tuxedo. Max stood on the front of the boat, named it Marjorie, after his own mother, and smashed a purple bottle of Andre sparkling wine on the nose.

Now I don't know if you believe in curses, and we didn't know it right away, but Max invoked roughly three curses in that moment. Wearing a black tuxedo to a white party of your own design, that's more of a faux pas, not a curse. But number one, renaming a boat, that's a curse. Number two, Jews like Max don't name children after living relatives. Now, the prohibition doesn't specify boats, so let's call that a half curse. Number three, smashing champagne on a used boat-- I heard that's a curse, but only if you consider Andre sparkling wine to be champagne.

Now it's impossible to say which curse attached itself to the Marjorie. But moments later, the sky darkened and we all scattered as sheets of rain fell upon us.

The next day, the clouds cleared. Our friends were still in town so we tried to take them out again. Now this is where the story really begins.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Nine in a boat that was maybe made for six. But our captain, Max, had just completed a boat safety course. And he told us the only limit for boat capacity is having enough life jackets for everyone, which isn't true. But we didn't know that and Max denies ever saying it. Squished together, two in the front seat, four in the back, three others perched on the sides, we headed out.

Ike Sriskandarajah

The Marjorie wasn't built for high-octane thrills. Someone says, we should get back soon. But Sophie overrules them. And then, just like the American munitions that rebelled British ships in these very waters-- cannonball!

Ike Sriskandarajah

The back of the boat dipped below the waterline and Boston Harbor began to enter.

Ike Sriskandarajah

This is Ben Ewen Campen, a moral pillar of our group, the kind of friend your mom might ask, is Ben going to be at the party? We lived together and co-owned this boat.

Ike Sriskandarajah

It's still a lovely summer day. We're still on our beautiful boat. But suddenly, I'm tearing an aluminum can in half to bail us out. Turns out, half a soda can only scoops as much water as your own cupped hands.

I look over at Sophie, the most MacGyvery of us, to see if she has a better idea.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Maybe the weight of nine passengers was too much. Or maybe Sophie's full-throttle aerials had split the seams. Or maybe (WHISPERING) it was a curse.

Here's what we know. We're alone. We're in a small boat. We're far from shore. The nearest land to us is Logan Airport. And that's when it begins to dawn on me. If we have to jump off this boat and swim to the closest land, we would be army crawling up the banks of a government-controlled airspace.

Ike Sriskandarajah

I'm picturing my white friends being wrapped in tinfoil blankets and fed cocoa, and me being perp walked off the tarmac by Homeland Security. Not today, government black site.

Our options are shrinking. Our bails aren't bailing. The engine's not turning. There's water, water everywhere. I think we're going to sink.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Toby David is visiting from Philly. A gifted speech maker, he helped christen the Marjorie just the day before. Now he reminds us he is not a good swimmer, asthmatic, and does not like cold water.

Ike Sriskandarajah

A silent panic falls over us. It is a moment that demands leadership, decisive action. We turn our heads to our captain, Max. He found this boat, named it after his mother, sold us on the dream. And now, like a monomaniacal Ahab in a Red Sox cap, Max denies there's any problem at all.

Ike Sriskandarajah

But there are two. One, we're stranded in the water. And two, our captain has gone mad. We only know how to deal with the last one. Everyone shouts at Max. Admit it. We are in trouble. You need to call for help. But Max is sitting in the captain's seat, one hand clenched around the steering wheel and the other turning the key in the ignition, like the engine wasn't underwater. The expression "hope floats?" Not true and very dangerous.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Cath Spangler went to college with Max. She is the ninth passenger and the one outsider. When Max invited her on a ride, he had not mentioned there would be so many of us. For most of the trip, she was shy and off to the side. But now the strangers surrounding her are screaming at the one person she knows. And he has lost control.

Ike Sriskandarajah

And in that moment, Captain Cath is born.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Like Boston's own Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, she begins solving the unsolvable problem. Namely, if nine passengers get in a boat which turns out to only have eight life jackets-- not one per person as we had been led to believe, Max-- and now some of those life jackets are unreachable in the underwater part of the boat, how many passengers are totally screwed?

Ike Sriskandarajah

Cath hands out the remaining life jackets based on need. The water is rising. We are coming apart and preparing to abandon ship.

Ike Sriskandarajah

She climbs to the front of the boat and starts waving her arms to the pilots in airplanes over our heads, to nearby boats in the water, anyone who might be able to come to our rescue.

Ike Sriskandarajah

An actual rescue boat just within waving distance.

Ike Sriskandarajah

They must have radioed for a tow boat because one arrives within minutes. The captain calls down, do I have permission to perform a life rescue?

Who says no to that?

Ike Sriskandarajah

Toby is admirably honest about what happened next.

Ike Sriskandarajah

We climbed off the boat to safety. And just like Matt Damon in Saving Private Ryan, we were going home. Cath says she looks back at this moment a lot, that it's become pivotal to her understanding of herself. She's proud that she jumped in and saved us.

It was a tragic ending for our captain. From the safety of our tow boat, I can still picture him down there, alone on the Marjorie, refusing to abandon ship. And that was the last time I ever saw him. He died that day.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Captain Max died. My friend Max survived. A little bruised-- his ego and his reputation for big schemes with little consequences. And while the boat became the story Sophie likes to tell more than any other, not Max.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Max spent more than a decade feeling terrible. The rest of us spent that same amount of time wondering why our friend Max was trying to gaslight us and sink us. But we'd never talked about it. None of us have. And when Max and I catch up for this story, it becomes clear that he has a completely different memory of how it all went down. He says he actually did the one thing we were begging him to do.

Sea Tow is boat AAA, the boat that performed the life rescue. Max says he called them on his phone way back when the engine first stalled out. That's the reason we got saved that day.

Ike Sriskandarajah

No. I didn't believe him. I just interviewed five of our friends who had no memory of this at all. So I followed up with Sea Tow. Turns out they keep meticulous records. And there it was, a call for a tow, July 17, 2010, charged to our membership under Max's name. It cost $50. Help was on the way. I guess in the chaos, Max just forgot to tell everybody on the boat.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Our story had hardened over a decade, but was built on a lie. Max had kind of done the right thing. And Cath wasn't the one who saved us. The sadistic editors at This American Life made me invite Cath back to share our findings.

Ike Sriskandarajah

The final curse on the Marjorie had the longest fuse and a devastating payload. It added an asterisk to a heroic deed and turned a failed captain into a guy who kind of did the right thing, but was really confusing about it. Please heed this precautionary tale. Beware of curses. Don't try to be a Massachusetts boat person for just $400. And if you already called Sea Tow, tell your friends.

Samson The Truest

(SINGING) Well, gather round and hear this tale, all you sons and daughters, of a cursed motor boat at the bottom of the Boston Harbor. Captain Max sold them on a dream of heading out to sea, you see. They emptied out their bank accounts and bought the Marjorie-re. Marjorie, Marjorie. They emptied out their bank accounts and bought the Marjorie.

Well, Captain Max was standing proud on that fateful morning, torso bare and the wind in his hair. Suddenly, without warning, the engine died, the children cried, and the ship filled up with water. Captain Max said, I'll see you all at the bottom of the Boston Harbor, in Davy Jones's locker.

He said he'd never call for help, but did he anyhow? Or was it Cath that waved them down? We'll never find out now. Loose lips can sink this ship. Secrets never travel. Captain Max in his watery grave, how do you like them apples? Marjorie, Marjorie. Captain Max went down with his ship. How do you like them apples?

Ira Glass

So that story was by Ike Sriskandarajah. The sea shanty was written for us by Sam Geller, who was there that fateful day. He is Captain Max's brother. He performs as Samson the Truest. Other writers in the song, Aeriel East, Chances with Wolves, and Glasser. Gordon Minette played the accordion.

Coming up, ship gets a new captain who immediately throws half the crew overboard, he says, to save the ship from sinking. We hear an insider's true, real-life account. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, What I Was Thinking as We Were Sinking. We have stories today about what goes through your head in the middle of calamities, big and small, and what those thoughts tell us. We have arrived at Act 2 of our program. Act 2, "Going Down With the Censorship."

So the SS Marjorie cost our producer Ike and his friends about $400 each. The ship we're going to talk about next is significantly more expensive by $44 billion. That's what Elon Musk paid for Twitter back in October. The company has been sort of famously foundering in the water since then.

And some of the most revealing details about what it has been like on the inside at that company, among the people who work there, have come from reporter Casey Newton and his colleague, Zoe Schiffer. They make the newsletter, Platformer. They've had so many scoops.

Casey also co-hosts a podcast called Hard Fork that The New York Times puts out about the tech industry that, can I say, I love. Highest recommendation. But to get back to our story, there's been one person in particular at Twitter that Casey has been wanting to talk to, a very senior employee at the company who, while just doing his job, ended up having to take on two of the most powerful people on the internet and in the world. Those two people-- Elon Musk and the former President of the United States, Donald Trump.

Casey wanted to hear all about that, and also what it was like for the guy, what he was thinking, what he was doing, once Elon took over and the place started taking on water. Here's Casey Newton.

Casey Newton

Yoel Roth did a lot of jobs at Twitter over the years, but it was always the same kind of job. He was in the content moderation business, one of those people who decides which of your posts can stay up on the internet and which ones need to come down. And he got his first glimpse at what life as a content moderator would be like while he was in college, on a date. He's gay. So am I.

Casey Newton

And even in these early days of the web, there was already a team of people who were deciding what you could and couldn't post there.

After the date, Yoel had one thought.

Casey Newton

Yoel was in grad school. He got his PhD and, soon after, a job at Twitter. They gave him a small desk. This was 2015. The office's most striking feature was probably--

Casey Newton

Besides Bieber, what Twitter was really known for back then was its trolls. The site was plagued by users harassing other users, particularly women. That year, I co-reported a story about how the site's then-CEO, Dick Costolo, wrote a memo saying, quote, "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years."

That was the backdrop for Yoel's new job. As an intern at Twitter the previous year, he spent part of his time moderating content. He'd seen this video of a dog getting abused. He removed it from the site, but for years, it haunted him.

Casey Newton

More than anyone ever talks about, it's this mostly invisible job of content moderation that makes Twitter usable for the average person. It's what makes every forum on the internet usable at all. And Yoel was good at the job. He got promotion after promotion in his department, what Twitter and a lot of other tech companies now call Trust and Safety. It's a hard job. And it just kept getting more complicated.

The way Yoel tells it, there was a wild new case to examine almost every day-- foreign governments impersonating their enemies, real people organizing harassment campaigns, impossible debates over what should count as hate speech, and regular meetings over whether to put labels on tweets that didn't quite violate the company's rules but would benefit from more context, like about COVID.

In 2020, the biggest case yet landed on Yoel's desk. It was a case about a user who kept causing problems. And this guy's fans were even more rabid than Justin Bieber's. It was the President of the United States, Donald Trump.

This is a couple of months into the pandemic. Trump had tweeted that mail-in ballots in that year's election were going to lead to widespread fraud. And just to lay my own cards on the table, I thought that was really bad because they won't lead to widespread fraud.

Anyway, Twitter's policies prohibited misleading people about the voting process the way Trump was doing. But the company had never taken action against the president's tweets before. Yoel had to decide what to do.

Casey Newton

The company decided that instead of removing the president's post, it would put a label under it, a label that just said, "Get the facts about mail-in ballots," with a link to a page that pushed back on Trump's claims.

Casey Newton

On some level, we probably understand that, in a moment like this, someone has to take a physical action to type the words, "Get the facts about mail-in ballots" and click the button to attach the label to the post. I've talked to dozens of content moderators over the years, but I've never talked to someone who had moderated the president of the United States.

When it came time to take action, only a handful of people at Twitter had the power to do it. The company had locked down access after an incident where a former contractor, on his last day working there, briefly deactivated Trump's account. Shout out to Bhatiyar Duysak, who says it was an accident. Also Twitter had just introduced this idea of putting labels on misinformation a couple of weeks before.

Casey Newton

Also, because this is how life goes, Yoel and his husband were moving houses the day all this happened.

Casey Newton

At that same moment, Twitter's communications staff was going to announce the decision.

Casey Newton

If they made a movie about Trump and Twitter, you can imagine how they'd shoot this scene, with the Twitter employees hunched over a console in a control room, high-fiving. But in reality, of course, it's the opposite. Most content moderators try really hard not to bring their own political beliefs into the job. In a way, the legitimacy of the whole company they work for depends on it.

Shortly before that Trump tweet, Twitter had explained its reasoning for adding labels to misleading information with a blog post. Importantly, the post was signed with Yoel's name. But soon after that first label showed up on Trump's tweet, his name was everywhere.

Casey Newton

Twitter had to hire security to protect Yoel and his husband. It had all taken him by surprise. He'd expected the criticism, but not that he would be the target. In cases like this, people would usually come after the CEO or the company itself. But soon, Yoel realized that what his harassers were doing was much more effective.

If you make companies believe that their employees could be hurt for enforcing the rules, they might be more reluctant to enforce them. Twitter didn't stop though. They kept putting labels on his tweets. And Trump, of course, lost the election-- though that's probably not how he would describe what happened. And after the January 6 attacks at the Capitol, he lost his Twitter account too. Yoel did not press the button on that one, but here's a detail about that day that I love.

Casey Newton

In other words, if you follow Trump, Twitter has to remove him from your list of follows.

Casey Newton

As it turned out, the site stayed up and Trump was banned-- for a while anyway. It was such a strange moment. With the click of a mouse, Twitter had managed to do something that Congress attempted twice and failed-- to punish Donald Trump in a way that had real and immediate consequences for him.

Trump headed off to Mar-a-Lago. Yoel got promoted. He was running the whole department. And that's when another mouthy rich guy started to complain about all the rules on Twitter. That guy was Elon Musk.

In April 2022, Musk announced he'd acquired a big stake in the company. A few days after that, he announced his intention to buy it outright. As soon as the news broke, Yoel's employees started asking what it meant for them. Elon had been tweeting a lot about free speech and his feeling that Twitter didn't have enough of it.

He posted a photo of six people in dark robes with the caption, "shadow ban council reviewing tweet" and "Truth Social exists because Twitter censored free speech." Also stuff like, "Next, I'm going to buy Coca-Cola and put the cocaine back in," and "Let's make Twitter maximum fun."

Some employees working in Trust and Safety worried that "maximum fun" might mean Elon would dismantle their whole operation. Yoel was willing to give him a chance though.

Casey Newton

At the same time, Yoel knew that his more concerned employees might be right, that he was aboard a ship that might be about to sink. He knew he needed to be alert for the signs. His solution was to make a list, to write down the red lines that he would not cross, no matter what. Most days, his job was to enforce other people's rules. But with Elon coming in, he wanted to write down some rules for himself.

Casey Newton

And so on a notepad by his desk, at his house, he wrote down his red lines. "I will not break the law." "I will not lie for him." "I will not undermine the integrity of an election." By the way, if you ever find yourself making a list like this, your job is insane. Then Yoel wrote down one more rule.

Casey Newton

Yoel's list of rules got its first test pretty quickly, on the day Elon officially took over Twitter. It was the end of October. Lawyers were finalizing paperwork. And Twitter staff was attempting to enjoy the annual company Halloween party. The scene was surreal.

Casey Newton

Lots of people did dress up though. Employees brought their kids. There were balloons and face painting. I've talked to so many people who went to this party. And every one of them has added some bizarre new detail. Some people saw a guy dressed as a scarecrow walking around with what appeared to be a handler. They wondered if it was Musk. It turned out to be a hired performer.

Casey Newton

Such an important lesson-- always trust the reporters. Pretty soon afterward, Yoel gets summoned over to the part of headquarters where Elon and his team had set up shop. He was nervous.

Casey Newton

Elon's aide explains that they're worried about an insider threat, someone who might try to sabotage the site on their way out. Yoel tells them, sure, I can help with that. He explains some steps they can take to protect the company. And to Yoel's surprise, the aide says, OK, you're going to tell that to Elon. And then he leaves and comes back with Elon Musk.

Casey Newton

Yoel also had recommendations about the midterms and the upcoming presidential election in Brazil.

And so Yoel stayed. He was surprised in a good way. On Twitter, Elon talked about the company as if it should barely have any rules at all. But in that moment, one on one, Yoel thought he might turn out to be more reasonable. Maybe spending some time inside the company would show Elon the real value of those rules, which is that, without them, you lose your users and you lose your advertisers.

And Yoel felt like Elon could be sensible. One of his first requests was to restore the account of The Babylon Bee, a right-wing satire site. But Yoel explained how it had broken Twitter's rules and Elon backed off.

Casey Newton

After that, things began to move really quickly. About a week later, Elon laid off half the staff. Suddenly, Yoel was one of the highest-ranking employees from the old Twitter who was still working at the new one. And it seemed like Elon liked him. After some trolls went after Yoel for some of his old tweets, Elon tweeted that he supported him.

The US midterm elections took place mostly without incident, same for the election in Brazil. Elon kept pushing his teams to move faster, even as he was laying them off. At first, Yoel said that Twitter still had enough content moderators to keep the site safe. But the cuts kept coming and the work got harder and harder.

Soon, Elon unveiled his first big idea for making lots of money and recouping the $44 billion he had spent to buy the company. Yoel and his team thought it was insane. The plan-- to let anyone get a blue "verified" badge for their profile for $8 a month. The company called it Twitter Blue.

The risks seemed obvious. People would just make new accounts to impersonate brands and politicians and other celebrities. Yoel and his team wrote a seven-page document outlining the risks. But the badges went on sale anyway. And almost immediately, impersonators started buying them and wreaking havoc.

In maybe the most famous case, someone impersonated the drug maker Eli Lilly and said that insulin would now be free. The real Eli Lilly's stock price dropped more than 5%. It was a vivid illustration of why companies like Twitter make rules in the first place. Impersonators were suddenly all over the site.

Casey Newton

We reached out to Twitter for comment but didn't hear back. Reporters have sometimes gotten automated poop emojis, but I didn't even get that.

Yoel had spent a long time gaming out scenarios for what might make him leave Twitter. He made that whole list. He wouldn't break the law for Elon. He wouldn't undermine an election. But ultimately what got to him was something he didn't foresee. It wasn't on the list. It was something more personal. He knew this bizarre plan wouldn't just make people lose trust in Twitter. They would lose trust in him.

Casey Newton

The day after the launch, Yoel and Elon got on the phone. Elon thought the problem could be fixed if Apple would just hand over all the credit card information of the people doing the impersonations. Yoel had to explain that Apple would never do that. He also asked Elon to slow down the rollout of Blue so that they would have time to hire and train more content moderators to look for impersonators. Elon didn't understand why that would take longer than a day.

Casey Newton

Yoel had made up his mind to leave. He called a couple of his employees to let them know.

Zoe is my coworker. I am immensely proud of her, even if she did kind of mess up Yoel's plans. The car Yoel was driving that day was a Tesla, by the way. He was leasing it. He'd been trying to return it but couldn't get anyone to respond to him. Maybe they'd all been drafted to work at Twitter.

Yoel laid low for a few days. He spent some time writing, and published an op-ed in The New York Times. It explained, in a very dry and principled way, why he'd left. That's when some rando account reshared something Yoel had tweeted from 2010 about relationships between adults and minors. Around that time, he'd been working on his dissertation, which called for tech companies to do more to protect minors at gay hookup sites like Grindr.

But Elon replied with a tweet, quote, "This explains a lot." Then he linked to Yoel's dissertation. Quote, "Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult internet services in his PhD thesis." Not true. But Yoel's phone exploded with abusive messages. It made the backlash to labeling a Trump tweet look minor by comparison.

Casey Newton

When Yoel had first used the internet, it felt like a small, self-contained space, separate from what we used to call real life. But by the time Yoel quit Twitter, the distinction between online and off had collapsed. And it had collapsed, in large part, because of the company he worked at, Twitter.

The site brought together so many of the world's most influential people and then pitted them against each other in these all-consuming daily battles. And the anger coming out of that could drive people to do things, violent things. Pretty soon, Yoel and his husband were overwhelmed with death threats.

Casey Newton

And so once again, they moved. I met with Yoel at the temporary house that he and his husband are staying at while they look for a new place. After all this, I thought Yoel might want a different kind of job. I would have wanted a different kind of job. The internet had almost killed him, or threatened to anyway. But still, somehow, he's optimistic about what the internet could be in a way you almost never hear anymore.

Casey Newton

Yoel's idealism about the internet feels radical, given how destabilizing it's been, how destabilizing Twitter has been. But I know what he means. Back when he was a teenager, the internet gave Yoel a place to discover other gay people, the chance to talk to everyone in the world instantaneously. It gave him a career. It gave me all those things too. I remember life before the internet. It was a less frantic time. But it was also a lonelier one.

Here's how Twitter is doing since Yoel left. Hate speech is on the rise. Advertisers have fled. Banks that funded Musk's takeover have marked their investments down by more than half. Musk himself has warned repeatedly that the site might go bankrupt. I kind of hope it does. Because what's happening at Twitter right now is teaching us a lesson it's taken us way too long to learn-- that people like Yoel, they're not the enemies of free speech online. They're the ones who make it possible.

If you get any value out of social media at all, it's in part because of them. They clean the place up, make it feel good to be there. They pull us back when we go too far. And they do censor us. And of course we hate them for it. We convince ourselves we'd do a much better job if it were us. That's what Elon thought. Look what happened.

Nobody likes the guy enforcing the rules. But watching Twitter sink into the ocean, you can't help but notice how much you miss that guy when he's gone.

Ira Glass

Casey Newton. He's the co-host of the podcast Hard Fork, from The New York Times, who are our collaborators on this. He also writes the newsletter Platformer. His story was produced by David Kestenbaum and Davis Land.

Samson The Truest

(SINGING) Listen up, children, and give your respect to this tale of a captain in another cursed wreck. Elon was his name, commandeering his game. He took over the ship, seeking only more fame. For his rockets and cars, he had tons of acclaim. But Elon wanted more and it ended in shame. Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, Elon wanted more and it ended in shame.

He dragged all the watchmen out from their crow's nests and forced them to walk down the plank to their rest, leaving no one to look out, no one who knew best. The ship fell apart in a watery mess. Whoa, oh, oh, oh, the ship fell apart in a watery mess.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced by Sean Cole with Zoe Chace. The people who put together today's show include Michal Comite, Andrea Lopez Cruzado, Aviva DeKornfeld, Bethel Habte, Valerie Kipnis, Alaa Mustafa, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Charlotte Sleeper, Alix Spiegel, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman and our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Kendra Stanton Lee, Devin Pacholik, Emma Laz-Hirsch, Shawn Allee, Jeremy Butman, Imran Ahmed, and the Sea Tow captain who rescued the Marjorie and spoke with Ike, who would like to remain unnamed.

Our second sea shanty in today's show was also written by Samson the Truest, Sam Geller, strings and engineering by Jesse Kotansky. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. You can stream our archive of over 750 episodes for absolutely free. Also, there's a list of favorite shows if you're looking for something to listen to, all kinds of other stuff there. Again, thisamericanlife.org.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he and Kendall and Roman and Shiv were in the deep end of the pool. They were struggling. They were nearly drowning until Torey looked up and realized--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Samson The Truest

(SINGING) Whoa, oh, oh, oh, put a bow on this sinking show. Whoa, oh, oh, oh, put a bow on this sinking show.