-: Today we're gonna hear from Baratunde Thurston.
But before we do that,
I wanted to give a little context as well.
Yesterday, I think, was it yesterday on the blog?
We announced the Fellows program.
And the Director's Fellows program is a new thing
that we're working on at the Media Lab,
which is I've been trying
to make the Media Lab more of a platform,
and to turn the Media Lab into sort of a network
rather than a container.
And one of the things we're trying to do
is to increase the diversity of the places,
and the people, and the sectors that we impact,
as well as where we get input from.
And the Media Lab already,
the DNA is really, really diverse,
and already kinda stretched
in a variety of different directions.
But we still have a kind of academic filter
in terms of the way we get people interacting with the lab.
And so the purpose of the Director's Fellows program
is to try to go and reach places
that we normally wouldn't reach
through the traditional program that we have.
And some people have asked me,
"So what's the theme around the Director's program,
"or how do you select the Director's Fellows?"
I think the main thing is that since it's about diversity,
it's about every new Director's Fellow should be somebody
that's almost the opposite of everybody else.
So if you can sort of figure out what the theme is,
we're doing it wrong.
The thing that we want
to have the Director's Fellows have in common
is really kind of the basic DNA of the Media Lab,
which is an attention to impact uniqueness and magic,
and also the idea of just wanting to build stuff,
and also to have a really collaborative personality.
And so I want the fellows to become a cohort of their own,
but also to really connect very deeply with the Lab.
And so one of the things we're gonna be doing
is bringing the fellows in to give talks at the Media Lab,
and then also to interact with the students.
And so Baratunde, we're gonna hear from him today.
But later, tomorrow, at 4:30,
we'll be doing in room E240, we'll be doing, E14, 240,
we'll be doing a brainstorming session with students.
If anybody wants to interact live with Baratunde,
please come to that.
And to introduce Baratunde, I can't remember exactly.
I think I met you through the Knight Foundation thing,
right, Baratunde?
And so Baratunde's,
in addition to being probably the funniest person I know,
and I mean, he actually is credentialed to be funny.
He was the digital director of The Onion,
which I think everybody knows.
He recently wrote a book called How To Be Black.
In his bio, he says he has 30 years
of experience being black,
(audience laughs) which is pretty impressive.
But he's doing a lot of really cool things.
He's got a new company called Cultivated Wit,
which is kind of the intersection
between comedy and media and technology,
which I'll hope he'll talk about,
and some of his team are here as well.
Oh, and also, Shaka's here.
He needs to stand up, Shaka.
He's another one of our fellows.
(audience applauds)
-: Whoo.
-: They work together in Detroit
on the Innovators Guild thing in Detroit.
Shaka will be around for the next couple of days, too.
So you guys can grab him and interact with Shaka as well.
But with that, Baratunde, maybe wanna come up
and give us your comments. -: Thank you.
-: Thanks.
(audience applauds)
-: Joi Ito, ladies and gentlemen.
(Joi chuckles) Let him know.
Actually, I think I'll sit, right?
Let's be more, less domineering.
(Joi and audience laughing)
And you don't have to wait until tomorrow
at 4:30 to interact with me.
We could do that right now.
Like how're you doin'?
(Joi laughs) Good, what's your name?
-: Ken.
-: Ken, everybody give it up for Ken.
(audience applauds)
Front row Ken.
We just interacted.
It was good.
-: By the way, there's a Twitterfall back there.
We should actually have a display.
-: I don't wanna see it.
(Joi laughs)
Actually, I'm just back from a three-week,
three-day vacation from the internet.
I stayed in Brooklyn.
I got to know my home borough now.
And I didn't tweet or do any of this.
It's like a slow re-entry process.
You can't just flip all the switches back on.
It's heavy.
It's like not drinking,
and then just slamming a bunch of drinks.
You get sick.
So Twitter would probably make me sick
if I fully dove back in.
I'd love to have some brief sort of opening remarks,
and then Joi and I are gonna go into more
of a conversation dialogue interaction.
And then I'll talk a little bit about my background first,
which for me, and in the most abbreviated version I can get,
it starts before my own life began.
As is true with most of us,
unless you're like an alien that was manufactured,
you came from other lives.
And the one I like to start with is my great-grandfather.
My great-grandfather was born in 1870
in Caroline County, Virginia.
He taught himself to read, was actually born into slavery,
and moved to D.C.
That's how the town I ended up growing up in,
my family started in D.C. in 1896 when he moved there.
And he helped build roads in D.C.
for the Highways Surfacing Division.
His daughter, one of his two daughters,
but the one who I knew as my mother's mother,
her name was Lorraine Martin.
And I found out some years ago
that she was the first black employee
at the U.S. Supreme Court Building.
And that was really astounding news
to find out in 2005 when this is something
that had gone back many, many decades.
And we found, my older sister and I found this out
through our mother's files
that we were trying to sort after her passing in '05.
My mother, born in 1940
to this woman of great accomplishment,
this woman who worked at the Supreme Court as a clerk,
who traveled, a lot of very active civic life.
My mother was a rabble-rouser.
She was out in the streets takin' over radio stations,
fully down with civil rights, Black Power, pan-Africanism.
And she essentially sorta protested outside of the walls
that her mother was a pioneer in breaking through.
And then my mother gave birth to my older sister.
I have an older sister, Belinda, who lives in Michigan,
was a journalist for a very long time,
and now runs a yoga studio,
a donation-based yoga studio in the hood in Lansing.
Her name is Belinda.
And me, who has successfully made a living lying to people
and calling it jokes.
(audience laughs)
And making up news, and playing with the idea of language,
the idea of democracy.
But for me, there's this arc of expression
through the four generations of that family.
There's this arc of increased liberation, increased freedom
from someone literally born into bondage
whose revolutionary act was to teach himself
to read and consume information,
to a woman who got into the halls of power as a pioneer,
to one who banged on those walls,
to me, who gets to redefine them in many ways.
And the liberties that I have are things
that my great-grandfather could not have dreamed of
because of the time and somewhat the place
that he was born into.
So my background includes all of that.
And then I'd say for the parts that I was actually breathing
and grew up in D.C. in the '80s, my mom raised us,
and computers were really important from an early age.
She knew that this was essential.
So we had the first family on the block with a computer,
the first family in the hood with a computer.
Apple IIe was my first computer.
And I used to take things apart.
I was really good at taking computers apart,
not necessarily putting things back together.
But that was the first step, just unplug everything.
And then I'll figure out how to physically recompile them.
And ended up going into pseudo-journalism myself
through my college newspaper,
even through stand-up comedy
as a form of sort of communicating with people.
Language and expression was at the heart of it
with this underlying geekness.
I took two CS classes.
I went to Harvard right up the block.
Took the intro computer science class.
Took the hardware class where you build a computer
from scratch out of a WAFER board.
You program the chips.
And we made a 8-bit processor,
which was the most difficult mental thing
I'd ever done in my whole life.
Whenever I face a challenge,
I'm like, "Oh, this is so hard,"
I remember I built a computer out of wires,
(audience laughs)
and feel slightly more confident about my ability
to solve whatever the problem is.
And so I went to Harvard down the street, grew up in D.C.,
and I worked in this area for many, many years.
I actually worked in a building just at the end,
1 Memorial Drive, doing strategy consulting
in the area of telecom, internet infrastructure, and media,
like the business plans, the cash flow analysis,
and a lot of product development for slides
for executive-level product development.
How can you compete?
How can you stay relevant in this emerging future?
And ended up leaving that when I went to New York
to pursue even more creative things.
And that's where my political blogging exploded.
I found my job at The Onion five years ago.
And sort of has brought me to the place that we are now.
The areas of most fun that I've learned about
in the past few years have been really this intersection
of humor, general creativity,
and all these new digital platforms.
When working at The Onion,
I went through four rounds of interviews to get that job.
They're very specific about who they let
into the walls, into the kingdom.
And they had me write jokes, and criticize the website,
and do all these things.
And I had applied for one job, politics editor.
And I was like, I know politics.
I'm gonna help run the 2008 election coverage
kind of as a producer,
and help build a separate site to house it.
It was called warforthewhitehouse.com.
It was very over-the-top graphics.
And midway through the interviewing process,
they said, "Hey, we have this other job
"we think you'd be great at, web editor.
"We don't have anybody in charge
"of our digital strategy as well,
"and thinking about from a both a technical
"and a creative point of view how we exist in digital form.
"You want that job?"
And I was like, "Yeah, that sounds great, too.
"What about the other one?"
And they said, "Yeah, well, both jobs.
(audience laughs) "Can you do both jobs?"
I was like, "Oh, so like, what's the, new money?
"Like is there a new?"
"Same pay, same pay."
(audience laughs)
Two jobs for one very low price.
So I had to think of it more
as like a grad school with a stipend, but it was worth it.
It was very, very much worth it.
And being able to work with those creative minds,
with the development team, with the design team,
we got to pull off a few amazing stunts.
One of the strongest ones was based on,
there's a cheap way to express yourself in new formats,
and that's to take how you expressed it in an old format,
and then just paste it into the new one.
So if you're a newspaper, you take your headline,
you add a link at the end, and you tweet it.
And you say, we're on Twitter now.
You're not really on it.
You're kind of just skimming the surface of it.
You're not a part of the community that's there.
You're not engaged in a level of interaction that's native.
You're not speaking the native language of that platform.
One of the things that we did at The Onion
was try to escape that copy and paste mentality about media.
We had this video game as a part
of a satirical news report, Onion News Network.
The headline was New Video Game Consists Solely
Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face.
(audience laughs)
That's ridiculous, and so was the video that followed.
It's what you would imagine from The Onion.
It was right on the edge, super funny.
But in the video itself,
they showed these frames of the game.
And there was no plot to the game.
Literally, faces just emerge, you press the space bar,
and the face was exploded.
So on our digital side, we're like, well,
how do we do more than just post a link
to this video on our various feeds?
Why don't we make the game?
Can we actually make this thing interact,
this thing from our imagination that we're asking
the audience to partially complete,
even though we've given them some video
to get at least 1/3 of the way there.
Can we give 'em the whole thing?
So we built the game.
And we released it for free on the web,
and people played it, and people reviewed it
in The Voice, as if it were a true game.
Kotaku even wrote a review of it, an actual gaming site.
And then we said,
why don't we put it in the palm of your hand?
Like if you're on a subway, you're frustrated,
wouldn't it be nice
to have this cartoonish release of tension?
And so we made the iPhone version of the game.
And we put in hours, and hours,
and hours of programming time.
We submitted to the Apple Store,
and they rejected it because they're fascist,
(audience laughs) and
do not believe in freedom nearly as much
as America's Finest News Source did.
But there were many trigger moments in my time there.
I think that stood out as one
where you make a leap that was significant.
And you go from an organization
that printed all of its ideas
and left all of the rest to your mind,
to one that engaged in rich media
and painted the picture with 30 frames or 28 frames a second
that said here's a lot of it,
to actually putting the keyboard in your hand
to say you walk around the world.
You immerse yourself in that.
It was a very creative and cutting-edge use of technology,
because it was anchored
in this whole other type of storytelling.
So that was fun.
That was insanely fun.
I take Foursquare very seriously.
And as a personal matter, I love being mayor of places,
and I ended up having a mayoral battle
with a friend of mine.
We played it out like a real political campaign,
and we held rallies, and we printed up T-shirts,
and we had campaign staffs.
And it was just an absurd performance way
to kinda what can you do with this platform
to make it more interesting?
So where my mind is going now,
and where my team's mind is going now,
we have this business called Cultivated Wit.
And the name comes from Horace,
this ancient Roman philosopher slash poet,
which is not a combination you see a lot of today,
philosopher, poet, and soldier.
It's a very, very good package.
And he said, "A cultivated wit,
"that which badgers less, can convince all the more.
"Artful ridicule can do more to address contentious issues
"than can severity alone."
Yeah, you're like, right, ugh.
Like this is like, you preach that.
If there were a Bible, I'd like smack it respectfully.
(audience laughs)
I don't just smack Bibles.
That's a weird behavior to do.
So the phrase Cultivated Wit is popped out of that.
And we're working on that.
We do a lot of work at this intersection of creative
and digital heavily through comedy.
We have an event series that we run,
which should feel right at home in a place like this
called Comedy Hack Day.
And you take your typical hack day, you add comedians,
physically add comedians to the mix
of people pitching and building to some degree,
and certainly demoing.
Add comedy as the theme,
the goal that you're trying to build toward.
And the first one we did,
I'm also excited as someone who's done a lot of solo work.
This wasn't my idea.
So it's nice to be surrounded by other people.
This is Craig's.
Well, Craig and Brian are in the back.
They can wave and you can throw questions
at them later if I get tired.
But the winning app was this thing called Shout Roulette.
Lets you find people on the internet you disagree with,
and then yell at them.
(audience laughs)
So you register your opinion,
and find somebody else with the opposite opinion,
opens up a real-time video chat,
and then you just shout, and you get it off your chest.
And in the end, you might find that like,
oh, hey, you have something in common.
You're not that bad.
Or you just are full of more hate.
I don't know, there's no (audience laughs)
(chuckles) optimization for good in that app.
But it was a lot of fun to see this time
of disparately creative people come together,
the coders and the comics,
and build something really magical.
We are in the proposal stage of an app
called Location-Based Racism
(audience laughs)
that does what it sounds like.
You're used to all these location apps
helping you find things you want like food trucks,
or donuts, or bacon, or whiskey,
like things you can imbibe or eat.
You don't ever really think
to search them for racial ignorance,
and turns out there's a lot out there,
and a lot of it's tagged to locations.
There are amazing tips in Foursquare that indicated,
this is where it had first occurred to me.
There's a bar, Downtown Boston, called Hennessy.
And if you search through the tips at Hennessy's,
you'll find the most amazing thing, I think,
ever written inside of Foursquare.
It's a pretty long one, but I can't forget it.
It says, this bar is all about being racist.
Stop, okay, probably not, but let's keep going.
(audience laughs)
And they don't recycle cans.
(audience laughs)
Stop.
No correlation whatsoever
between loving the planet and hating black people.
All right.
Let's continue.
Go to the bar next door, stop.
Ah, we got a little option.
Maybe this is the next door's businesses
tryin' a way to undermine their neighbors.
Last sentence in this tip, bouncers aren't lesbians.
(audience laughs)
And so you're like, okay,
this bar is all about being racist,
and they don't recycle cans.
Go next door, the bouncers aren't lesbians.
You're a confused individual,
because you can't hate racism
and love homophobia at the same time.
You're doing it wrong.
But this was all exposed in an amazing tip
in an app that's not about that at all, in theory.
The designers didn't have that in mind when they built it,
but it's there, and it's part of the data.
So we seek to expose things like that,
or the New York Police Department's program of stopping
and frisking every young man that looks black or brown,
and seems to be a threat.
And that's a programmatic sanction from the mayor down,
we're gonna do this hundreds of thousands of times a year
in a population that is by and large innocence above
from suspicion and certainly of crimes.
How do you do that, but in a way that is humorous?
So we're building out experiences, products,
community around these themes.
And for me, it's very satisfying,
'cause it feels consistent with my background. (chuckles)
It's an evolution of my own family's story,
and a way to do it within a context
and a group that's beyond just me as well.
So I think that's enough raw material,
and we can jump into more of the discussion side,
and hear what you guys have to say.
-: Thank you, Baratunde.
And just so people know, at three,
we'll kind of open it up to questions and comments,
so if you have any thoughts. -: Or sooner.
-: Or sooner, yeah. -: If we run out of stuff
to talk about. (Baratunde laughs)
Is somebody watching the Twitterfall for?
Yeah, so Stacie's watching the Twitterfall.
So if people are watching this on the stream
and have questions, go ahead and tweet the questions.
-: Oh, what's up, stream people?
I never, (Joi laughs)
people always forget the streamers.
I'll never forget the streamers.
(audience laughs)
-: So one thing,
as you were talking about what you were doing,
so the Media Lab, I think very early on,
we brought design to science and technology.
We brought user interface to science and technology.
And the Media Lab, a lot of the original stuff
that Nicholas and others talked about here
was really making computers social,
creating sort of a way for people
to interact with technology.
And you hear people talking about how they get more news
out of Jon Stewart than they do out of the normal news.
And so in a way, kind of what you were talking about,
comedy is sort of a user interface.
-: Yeah. -: For getting your head
around difficult topics,
or being able to handle really hard issues.
Do you see that parallel,
and do you think about your comedy work
as a sort of user interface?
-: Yeah, I do.
And calling it a user interface
makes it sound really important.
(Joi laughs) And I love what I do
to sound super important.
It sounds like a program at the Media Lab,
the Comedy User Interface Group.
(audience laughs) Be a great thing to start now,
so let's just do it.
Yeah, no, comedy, I think of it as a language.
I think of it as an interface.
I think of it as a way
to translate something often difficult, something awkward,
something complicated, contentious,
we could go back to even that Horace quote,
and make it more addressable to other people.
Stand-up comics do it.
Richard Pryor did it in amazing form.
And everyone who's followed since has attempted,
and in many cases, achieved, that same level of translation
where it's like you're willing to hear it from this voice
because there's this other element.
It's the sugarcoated pill.
And that pill is insight, point of view,
knowledge, information, but there's this wrapper
that says, all right, I can pay attention to that.
I'm gonna go to a club,
and maybe hear about police brutality in a way
that doesn't make me feel so brutalized as a human being.
Or expose me to something I didn't even know existed.
Right, so whether you're the victim
of a certain part of the world,
or you're ignorant of a certain part of the world,
a comedic layer can introduce you,
or help, to some degree, heal you
in dealing with what that process is.
My own history, I've been very political.
My early comedy was news,
and it was very sit at a desk on stage.
I would start at The Comedy Studio up in Harvard Square.
I did open mics at Passim every now and then,
and The Comedy Connection, which was Downtown.
And a lot of my explicit goal was like,
I wanna inform people.
It was very self-righteous, mildly problematic,
perspective was a little too literal.
And I've adjusted since then,
but that initial urge was there's stuff going on
and I think people should know about it,
and also, I have a point of view on it
that I arrogantly think other people should know about,
and so I'm gonna yell into a microphone,
and stand above you, and tell you what's going on.
There's definitely an ego element to it.
So yeah, I think comedy's essential
as one of the tools we use to understand our world.
And as we think about where the world is going
and the level of complexity involved in it,
whether it's the geopolitical complexity
of trying to understand all these nations
and the resources they're at war over,
and the different peoples who are intermingling
or not between them,
whether it's all the tech,
when everything that's happening in this building is insane
from the perspective of 50 years ago,
much less 500 years ago.
So we are churning up all kinds
of new piles of data information
with no new tools to interpret at the same pace.
And some of those tools are gonna be tech tools.
We're gonna have algorithms to understand the algorithms.
And we'll have robots to feed the robots.
And we'll have apps to define,
and intercept, and create the apps.
But there's a human layer, too.
And comedy's a big part of that human layer,
'cause laughter, that's magic, right?
That's a deep emotional, physical, hybrid thing
that is emotional and intellectual at the same time,
but it's a very special feeling.
-: I was just thinking of this as you were explaining.
'Cause we always talk about play as well,
and sort of interest-driven learning.
We've got this group, the Lifelong Kindergarten.
-: Lifelong Kindergarten?
I love that. -: Yeah, it's up there.
-: Is there a sandbox? -: And the idea is that
kids learn a lot more. -: You pee in a sandbox?
(Joi laughs)
-: They learn a lot more in kindergarten,
'cause they're excited.
And then you sort of stamp that out of them, right?
Because you're not supposed to play
if you're gonna be serious.
But what's interesting is that I think about user interface,
and online services, and software,
and then recently with social media and stuff,
we've started talking about virality.
And it feels like comedy is like the virality of play.
Because the thing is like a lot of stuff
is fun once you start playing with it,
but to try to get the kid to play in the first place
is actually pretty hard.
And there's a lot of work my sister and other people
at MacArthur are doing on connected learning,
which they found, the short version,
and she has a bunch of longer nuance version
that you should read,
but the thing is that there are a lot of tools
to learn what you wanna learn,
but to try to get kids to wanna learn
is actually pretty hard, right?
And I think that what's interesting,
and then I'm gonna bounce this off of you
to think about, to ask whether
you've thought about-- -: And I will disagree
forcefully with you.
(audience laughs)
-: Just don't shout at me.
(all laughing)
But I probably shouldn't be afraid, right?
Yeah, so. (laughs) -: Probably not. (laughs)
-: So do you think about comedy in that way
as a way to pull people into play?
How analytically do you think about this?
I mean, do you think about this?
'Cause I know virality, the people who do it scientifically.
-: Yeah.
-: They're always building products that go viral.
And people who think virality is kind of like an art
never get it right, 'cause it's not a repeatable thing.
It actually is pretty scientific,
how to make a social media thing--
-: Yeah, that's a touchy area.
And I love the idea that there's more science to art
that we've yet to determine.
But if we do it too much, we kill the art.
-: You'll be out of a job.
-: Or I'll be out of a job.
Like robots making jokes,
that's not a future I look forward to.
(audience laughs)
And I've felt relatively protected
from the industrialization of the world.
Bot comedy hasn't taken off yet,
and I hope it doesn't too much.
So there are some rules to the road.
When I first joined The Onion,
and actually, I've taken improv classes, there are forms.
Right, there are structures.
I took a stand-up comedy class when I first started here
at the Boston Center for Adult Education.
I had studied comedy writing with some crew in New York.
And then being at The Onion is another type of institution.
There are various rules.
There are ways to think about comedy,
whether it's deconstructing an issue.
The deconstruction is an improv form
that has a very particular style to it.
There's just comparing two things
which aren't naturally put together, this high contrast.
There's misdirection,
where you think you're talking about this one thing,
and then boom, you switch 'em over to here,
and that surprise is part of the magic of the joke.
Magic, though, is an essential part of it.
And there's only so far down the road of magic you can go
with a stethoscope and a meter
before you're no longer on the road toward magic,
the ole reset destination,
'cause there's something unknowable.
And part of it, I think we get closer,
but it's not my goal to codify comedy completely,
and make myself obsolete. -: That's what chess
Grandmaster said until they lost to a computer.
(Baratunde laughs)
One of our other fellows is Maurice,
who's actually a chess Grandmaster.
-: Yeah, yeah.
-: And it'd be interesting at least
to see how funny you could make bots.
You know what I mean? -: No, there is.
So I'm thinking back to some of the other examples
that came out of the Comedy Hack Day we did.
There was a team of two.
It was a programmer who had access
to a natural language processing library
and USA Today's RSS feed through a Mashery API,
and then there was a comedian.
So the two of them created something called Fox the News
where they took legit news stories
and made them read like nonsense and unbelievable things.
The way they describe it,
Fox takes real information and makes it sound like BS.
(audience laughs)
And so they would pull in a story,
and they created a rule set,
which is for every kind of noun, pronoun, verb, et cetera,
they built their own library of ultimate terms,
and substituted those in.
And I would say, my estimate may be a little off,
'cause I don't remember all the headlines,
probably 30% of what they created
in terms of the raw output was legitimately funny.
And you're like, ah, that's pretty good.
And then 70% was robot nonsense.
(audience laughs)
And you could kinda see what it was trying to do,
but it read false.
It's like using Google Translate both ways.
English to Spanish back to English.
It's like, oh, I see what you're trying to do there,
but that's not native.
It's like writing an Objective-C for iPhone
versus using some sort of other tool to kind of approximate,
or forcing HTML 5 to do things it wasn't meant to do.
So I'm done with the metaphors,
but I think there is a long way we can go
toward getting there. -: Right.
-: And there are some rules to creativity
and constraints to creativity that help.
And if there's a way programmatically, or robotically,
or some other way to get there, that's fun to think about.
-: I'm gonna pile on the metaphors,
because, (clears throat) (Baratunde laughs)
'cause at the Media Lab,
I think one of the things we talk about
is learning through construction
rather than learning through instruction.
I think we also actually believe
that you can't codify everything you need to know.
-: Good. -: And you actually
have to do it.
We believe in the apprenticeship model.
And so what's important, though,
is you do need to learn how to use the machines,
you do need to learn how to code,
you need to learn how to make stuff,
but the final part of learning
is kinda hanging out with each other.
And how much of comedy is are you born with
versus (Baratunde laughs)
you can, and so you can't-- -: 13%.
-: (laughs) 13%. -: 13% of comedy
comes from genetics.
(audience laughs)
27% comes from your childhood environment.
5% is diet.
(audience laughs)
-: You know 73% of all facts are made up,
and statistics are made up on the spot.
-: It's actually 71%, but uh,
(audience laughs)
I see what you're trying to do there.
(Joi and Baratunde laughing)
Yeah, I mean, God, that's an unknowable question.
I do think there,
here's what I have found personally
and also through some of what our company's worked on.
Personally, I don't think, I was not a funny child.
I really wasn't.
I don't remember myself.
I was a very self-righteous, super political, preachy kid.
I was all, "No justice, no peace."
And I was like standing on the stoop,
and ranting against things,
and holding people to account.
Yeah, I got mad.
The whole city of D.C. where I grew up in,
that football team's called the Redskins.
That bothered me.
I'm like, how could we do this?
We're a Black city.
We know what that team would be called if it was us.
(Joi laughs) How do we accept that?
'Cause I was like, "I'm boycotting the Redskins."
Since then, I'm not a fan.
I wish them losses every time.
(audience laughs)
It's only for that reason, too.
It's only the politics.
So for me, my comedy voice came out of, I think,
partly there was some genetic thing.
We have art in our family.
My mom and my sister both played instruments and or sang.
There was a lot of pressure going on in high school
that exposed me to the need for a release.
I found a bunch of humor.
And as a kid, I listened to a lot of comedy with my family.
Though, I don't think I produced anything
of worth in that time zone.
And then I made a choice to give it a shot.
And my first piece of feedback
from that experience was positive.
So I was like, let me try this again.
Then it was just iterative, right?
It's like anything that probably happens
in this type of environment.
And I was good enough at it that I could also say,
well, I like it, 'cause we like the things we're good at.
And the more you like, the more you,
and so it was a self-reinforcing thing.
And now it's 11 years since I've taken
to a stand-up stage from the beginning.
And I think I'm pretty good at stand-up.
I'm not the best, but I'm well beyond where I started.
And it's like, okay,
so a lot of it was there's some instinct there.
There was some native talent.
There was environment.
There was a lot of practice, and a lot of commitment.
The 10,000-hour thing,
whatever that number really is, has an effect.
And there's a ceiling on some
based on some of those other factors.
So yeah, you can teach, and get closer.
You can also, I think,
when I was alluding to the company stuff,
it was interesting to watch developers
who thought they were funny
work with comedians who knew they were funny
but didn't know anything really about tech.
And sometimes it worked brilliantly.
And you're like, oh, both of you grew in this process,
and you learned from each other.
In some cases, you're like,
you're a dude who sits at the computer all day long.
And the jokes, there was one,
they created this virtual girlfriend
that was really annoying.
And that was their big joke was like,
let's make a virtual girl who we can't relate to.
It's like, where is this coming from?
Feel like this has the analog in your life right now.
And there was one,
it was just like kicking people in the balls as an app.
Not a physical one,
but you can virtually kick people in the balls.
It's like, okay, that's interesting.
But then we had, I think, one of the more successful ones
outside of the winning one was we had people
from the Sunlight Foundation had come in with their API.
Sunlight believes in transparency in government,
and does a lot of things to expose money in politics.
And they had a database of fundraisers,
political fundraisers.
We had a comedian who's mostly a writer,
and then coders and designers.
They had a great designer on that team,
so it looked really, really good.
And they created this tool called Lobbyists From Last Night.
And it lets you figure out what your legislator
was up to the night before in terms of fundraising activity,
and then send them funny, taunting tweets.
So you're like, oh, at Chuck Schumer,
how was your dinner last night?
Oh, subsidized as usual?
Me, I just ate some wings as I normally do.
That wasn't an exact line, but it was things in that order.
And none of them alone could've built that.
And so the collaboration
between the quote unquote creative person
and the quote unquote technical person,
even though they're both creative in different languages,
was unforeseeable prior to the age that we live in.
You could tell a stand-up joke
and rant about money and politics, and get so far,
and you could build a really earnest tool
exposing money and politics that other people
who are into really earnest tools spend their time on,
and like foundations that care about that sorta thing,
but the voting public is not searching
the Sunlight Foundation API as a general rule of thumb.
So there is something in the back
and forth between those two ways of thinking,
and in the combination of those,
that achieves more that magic side
that's really fun to think through and play with.
-: I'd never thought of using the Sunlight Foundation API
to make something funny.
So that ties to another question I wanted to ask.
'Cause you were in Detroit with us.
-: That's right.
-: The Innovators Guild, hanging out with Shaka.
And I remember on one of the student mailing lists here
at the Media Lab, there was a story in The Onion,
and there was a raging debate
about whether it was funny or not,
'cause it was very politically incorrect.
-: Was definitely funny.
(audience laughs)
-: And it was probably funny. -: If it's zero,
less a binary choice.
(Joi laughs)
-: But what's interesting is,
so the question that I have is one,
can anything be made funny?
-: Mm. (laughs) -: And is it funnier
when it's really, I mean, I guess,
yeah, I sorta know the answer,
'cause the really funny stuff on The Onion
is really usually on the edge.
But I mean, how do you decide that edge?
And do you think that everything can benefit
from being made funny?
'Cause Detroit's,
a lot of stuff that's happened there isn't that funny.
It's pretty serious. -: Yeah.
-: But do you think that it would be better for everybody
if you could make a joke out of everything like that.
-: No.
Definitely no to the last version of that question.
Would it be better if everybody
could make a joke about everything?
That's 100% negative.
Because there are elements in what is funny.
Who's delivering it?
Who's the audience?
Where is this taking place?
Time is a variable in this.
Community is a variable
in this. -: So there's a picture
on your blog of some White kid reading How To Be Black.
-: Yeah. -: It was kind of funny,
just because-- -: Yo, white people
reading How To Be Black in public is my favorite thing.
(audience laughs)
It's really, and actually, the people who buy the e-books,
they're just cowards.
They just don't wanna be seen in public transit
with such a brave, brave book. -: It's already happening.
-: Almost everything can be made funny,
but definitely not to everybody.
And there are comedians in Detroit tonight
making fun of things that are happening in Detroit,
positive things, horribly negative things that's funny,
that they think it's funny, their audience thinks is funny.
There is a level of trust, and buy-in,
and shared experience that's great.
But if somebody visits Detroit and then goes back home,
they're like, yeah, Detroit's wack,
blah, blah, blah, add joke, add joke.
That's more condescending, or dismissive, or disrespectful
than it is in any way honoring
the full context of what's going on there.
It could be funny.
It could also just be a dick thing to do.
And the line between being funny,
being an asshole is often very thin.
You have a lot of people,
politics is a great way to see this play out.
Somebody like Rush Limbaugh,
whenever he gets above a certain threshold
of intolerance from the larger world,
and is held to account for some of the statements,
he says, "I'm a comedian.
"I'm just a comedian, right?
"I'm just making jokes."
He's doing more than that.
You're helping set an agenda
for a whole political party and movement.
And so there's something else going on there.
And so using comedy as an excuse
to just be blindly mean and disrespectful,
it's certainly not honorable.
I don't know if it's fully comedy.
It's maybe an edge case.
It's bad comedy.
In the stand-up world, in the very early,
you learn in some version of stand-up
is people who talk about the homeless in their stand-up.
Oh, I saw a homeless guy, and he was so poor,
and smelled so bad, (laughs) am I right?
That's not funny.
That's just someone who's weaker than you,
and you're being a bully using your rhetoric,
and your microphone, and your access
to an audience to pick on somebody
who really can't defend themselves in that context.
It might be perversely funny.
But it doesn't mean you can't talk about homelessness.
And it doesn't mean that The Onion, the Haitian earthquake,
The Island Nation Called Haiti Recently Discovered
was something like the headline.
Brian's gonna hate me for butchering it.
(Joi laughs)
Essentially, we did this story about this new land of Haiti,
which we all just became aware of.
And oh, wow, there's a whole civilization there.
They have water, and people, and all this kinda stuff.
And on the surface, it's like,
ah, you guys are really messed up.
You're making fun of the earthquake and the hardship,
the people who suffer from it in Haiti.
That's a selective or limited interpretation.
Actually, it was making fun of this nation's awareness
and reaction to it where it's like,
Haiti's been going through stuff forever
as far as most people's lives here are concerned,
and we never bothered.
And then only when it was something like orders
of magnitude greater tragedy,
are we like, oh, we gotta text Wyclef,
and help out the Haitians, and do all.
What about the week before?
What about the month?
What about when we were financing coups, right?
Like there is not an acceptance, an understanding of that.
So you can talk about anything topically and make it funny,
but I don't think every way you do it is necessarily funny.
-: And one use of humor that you haven't talked a lot about,
but I was thinking about a lot when,
so you've started hanging out with Ethan Zuckerman.
And he and I were involved a lot
in this project called Global Voices,
which was to create blogs all over the place.
And the thing that I was interested in is,
as I was traveling around Japan, and the Middle East,
and other places, was that,
and they do a lot of research in civic,
of sort of doing an analysis
of how much international news versus domestic news.
-: Yeah.
-: And I remember, I'm sorry, this is kind of long-winded.
But I remember asking the editor of Newsweek
why they don't write more about Africa.
'Cause Ethan has a lot of data
that shows people just don't write stuff about Africa.
And well, he says,
"Well, people don't wanna read stuff about Africa."
And that's when I kind of came up with this phrase
called the caring problem.
'Cause you only read about stuff you care about.
And you can push people to publish as much as they want,
but if people don't read it, it doesn't really matter.
-: Yeah.
-: And I can't remember, there was a politician,
and I should attribute it, but he said,
"Doesn't matter what you know if you don't care."
And so to me, caring is actually the really important part
of information, right? -: Yeah.
-: And so Global Voices,
a lot of that was to try to give people voices,
because direct voices will help people care.
-: Yeah.
-: Because a journalist in the middle doesn't translate
into the caring as much, or statistics, right?
And so I thought a lot about blogging in first-person voices
as a patch for the caring problem.
And when I moved to the Middle East,
one of the things that really plugged me in
was when I saw a really funny Arab comedian.
-: Yeah. -: Making fun of his culture.
And it was great, because then we realize,
oh, we're the same.
We're laughing at the same jokes, right?
And one of the criteria when I interview people for jobs
is do they laugh at my jokes?
-: Really? (laughs) (audience laughs)
-: Thank you for laughing-- -: Keep that in mind.
I want a job, clearly.
I thought I'd hack that app browse.
-: But I guess just kind of on the caring thing.
So you talked about using humor to transmit information.
-: Yeah.
-: But what about connecting?
Do you do that?
Have you done anything in that space?
-: Informally, and I see people doing it all the time.
I think comedy can be an empathy-building device.
And if you can get past the core nugget of data,
or insider information, or whatever,
it comes in part back to the approachability.
It's like, oh, I'll listen to the comic talk about it.
I won't listen to the politician talk about it.
'Cause I see them coming from a mile away
with a letter after their name,
which indicates where they stand, and where I do or don't.
And so the comedian can kind of
do an end run around the expectation
of predicting where they're gonna land,
and how they're gonna say it.
One of the things I had started looking at
over the past few years was the global realm of satire.
And at part, it happened 'cause I was traveling.
With being at The Onion,
and being pretty public while I was there
in terms of talking and doing press,
people started to just come to me.
Like they're like, oh, I want The Onion.
There's Baratunde, he's on Twitter.
I'll just throw every Onion question to him.
But it also meant that I got fed a lot
of Onion-like activity from around the world.
And so people would send me,
oh, check out this newspaper in Venezuela,
El Chiguire Bipolar, which is like The Onion of Venezuela.
Or check out this Chinese cartoonist.
He's doing really subversive satire.
Check out this Nigerian website, Wazobia Report,
which is doing all this really interesting stuff.
Or Afghanistan has a version of The Office.
Did you know about that?
And so started building
this very informal catalog and register.
And as I read those, it does help build some empathy.
My most extreme case,
and the word translation was really the issue,
I was in Amsterdam.
I was in a project high-rise
populated by their underclass population,
which is mostly Surinamese people from Suriname.
And they had this organization within the projects
which is like a local radio station.
They taught kids, (coughs)
excuse me. (clears throat)
They taught kids media literacy.
And they did a show once a month
or once a week, poetry and comedy.
And they're like, "Yo, do some comedy.
"You gotta do comedy.
"You're from America.
"We're gonna love you, do some comedy at our show."
And I was like, I don't know if this is gonna work,
because they speak Dutch and I don't.
(audience laughs)
And it worked.
It worked really, really well on both sides.
And I think the more extreme,
I wasn't surprised in hindsight as much
as how much they got my material,
'cause they're citizens of the world
much more than Americans are.
They speak multiple languages,
and they get a lot of English from our culture,
which is exported so heavily.
But I didn't speak any Dutch.
And I was still finding myself laughing at the Dutch comics,
because you could get enough.
You knew certain words, you're like,
oh, that sounds like, the way they use their faces,
there's a cadence, and a tone, and a rhythm
in the way music works,
and in the way lyrics are often
in the background of why you like a song.
And I was like, oh, he's talking about his father.
My father was like that.
He's talking about a teacher.
My teacher was like that.
And so we built this empathetic connection
across a massive language divide,
but because the language of comedy was there,
I was still able to be a little bit more connected
than if we had just been sitting next to each other
on a bus assuming that we had nothing to say to each other.
-: Mm-hmm, yeah.
This is a slightly, again, I'm gonna use a metaphor.
But you know how you had--
-: Welcome to metaphor hour with Joi and Baratunde.
(Joi laughs)
-: You know how you had, you had,
you have professional journalists,
and then you have this user-generated content
in the blogs. -: Right.
-: In the rise of blogs.
And I think there was a diminishing of the cost
of production and distribution of content
allowed people to have a voice.
And I would argue that the quality of writing
of the average person increased with blogs,
'cause you would write.
And not all of it, but just generally,
you had people who like myself.
I probably learned a lot of, I became a better writer
by consciously writing every day
on my blog for several years. -: Yeah.
-: So what about user-generated comedy?
(Baratunde laughs) So now that you,
I mean, you could always sit around the corner making jokes,
but if you're tweeting, and you're posting to blogs,
and you're getting feedback,
you put 10,000, $10,000 (laughs), 10,000 hours in
to become a professional comedian.
-: And $10,000. -: $10,000.
-: As a special certification.
-: (laughs) Is it Harvard?
-: No, definitely not. -: Did you get a Harvard
comedy degree? -: (laughs) Definitely not.
(Joi laughs) That cost way more
and you get way less.
(audience laughs)
-: But do you think that people are funnier now
because of the internet?
-: (laughs) These are some interesting questions, man.
(audience laughs)
And I don't mean that defensively.
I think they're actually interesting questions.
I think there's more comedy in the world
than there ever has been,
as there are more photos in the world
than there ever have been, as there are more--
-: Gross national funniness is up.
-: Yeah, GNF is up.
GNF per capita, I don't know.
(Baratunde and Joi laughing)
So a couple of examples.
So let's think about Twitter.
And think about the professional class
of comedy people on Twitter,
whether it's The Daily Show's Twitter account, The Onion,
Mike Birbiglia. -: And Baratunde.
-: Right, it's like a certified comic voice
is using this thing versus everybody else.
And what Twitter has done is raise,
the median is higher, the mean is definitely higher
for quality and variety of comedy that gets out there.
The great deconstruction of gateways to any sort of power,
whether it's government power, financial power,
political power that's being challenged by our new media,
that's being challenged by our new connected world
where I don't need a contract to make a TV show.
I could just use my phone.
That applies to comedy, too.
So everything that's disrupted,
all this disruption in media
that's happening in journalists,
and high production value, filmmakers.
It's in musicians.
Look at all the music that's out in the world.
That's happening in comedy, too.
And you can find some of the funniest stuff,
and whether they're an actual comedian or not
is far less important than five years ago.
And so in some ways, you see people
from this world plucking from this world.
You see agents, and managers,
and bookers looking to YouTube to cast and find talent.
I've gotten so many gigs 'cause somebody saw my YouTube,
or they were following me on Twitter.
And they're like, oh, that's enough.
This is years even before the Twitter thing.
Years before I had any portfolio to lean on,
I was just some dude who put some stuff on YouTube.
And they're like, oh, do you wanna audition for a TV?
I mean, that's crazy.
That's not how things are supposed to have worked.
There's supposed to be an A&R rep in between saying,
you are funny, you are not,
you get a chance to prove your funniness, you do not.
The chance to prove is more of a given.
So I think there is more funny.
I think there's a lot of,
there's a lot of average nonsense that comes along
with opening the gateway to everybody,
just as there's a lot of terrible photos.
If I see another portrait video, I'm gonna lose my mind.
Just turn your phone sideways, just do it.
Use the whole screen.
With the black bars like that is really frustrating.
And same with writing,
there's a lot of terrible writing out there.
But the volume of good writing
is definitely higher, I think.
I think the volume of comedy that is quality is higher,
and certainly the volume of crap.
Whenever you open the door, it all comes in,
all of human comedy.
-: Is this where the parallel ends?
Is there a massive disruption
in the comedy industrial complex?
-: So process-wise, there's some things that are different.
I think within The Onion context,
there are jokes that Twitter got to way faster,
and we just had to let 'em go.
Even if they were independently conceived of
by Onion contributors and writers, it's out there now.
There's a public record.
So all those previously private jokesters,
whether they're on a stoop, or in a classroom,
or at a bar, at frat house, or the church,
they didn't have an audience
beyond people physically around them.
Me and you talking, me making a great joke, it dies there.
And so Chris Rock comes up with a very similar joke,
you got no claim. (laughs)
He's Chris Rock, A, so shut up,
but B, there's no chance that he knows that you did it.
Now you have to look out a little bit more
as a professional comedic producer to be like,
well, what's my new angle?
It somewhat raises the bar.
It makes things harder.
It can narrow the pool.
Or you have to up your speed
just to plant your fellow flag the fastest.
That's definitely been a disruptive change.
And I think you see a lot of people
just doing their own thing.
People who are building weird comedic things online,
people who are starting.
The web series explosion is a huge disruption
in the traditional comedy talent pipeline where folks,
you have to convince someone to listen to you first,
and then listen to you again,
and then you write a treatment to get a show together,
and then you shoot a pilot, and then they judge the pilot.
Is this worth our investment and time?
And then they focus group it.
And it's based on five people's fears of losing their job
and also their taste, (laughs) right?
So first is fear of losing your job, second is taste,
and then someone in there is your finger on the pulse
of what the people want, what your demo is,
who you're gonna sell it to,
what advertisers are gonna put images against this content.
Who cares now?
You can make a show, and you throw it out there,
and you build an audience,
and things have been turned around.
Issa Rae is one of the best examples of this.
She has this series, Awkward Black Girl,
and she is an awkward Black girl. (laughs)
And she made a show to reflect her experience.
She's like, I don't see enough images
of black women who are geeks,
who are livin' in this sort of lifestyle, so she made one.
And she didn't wait around for some executive
to give her the right to build.
She didn't ask anybody's permission.
So yeah, it's definitely disrupting comedy.
-: Do you know this site, Damn You Auto Correct?
-: Yes.
-: So we've got Jeff Howe here,
who's from wrote the book Crowdsourcing.
But it's kind of like, that's an interesting thing,
because it's like, well,
they're all accidents caused by Apple,
and somehow they just happen spontaneously nature,
and then they get collected by some people.
And there's obviously curation going on,
but the funniness is coming from a machine, right?
And maybe this ties into some of what you're gonna do
with your company as well,
but how are you thinking about the way
that technology's gonna,
so obviously, it's changing the way
that people find each other and the communication of it.
And I agree with you about the bots.
But there's still something funny about,
and can you write apps that are just sort of,
so maybe you don't, they're not,
it's like you were saying, copy paste.
Yeah, so maybe a bot's not gonna become a comedian.
-: Yeah.
-: But a bot can be very unintentionally funny
like Damn You Auto Correct. -: Absolutely.
-: Can you make that kind of stuff?
-: This is part of the fun is thinking about not so much,
in any of these arenas almost,
it's certainly every time.
How do we preserve what we know,
and sustain it into the future?
That's one way of thinking about the future.
The future's out there, we're here.
Here's everything we know today.
How do we move it forward?
That's usually not how things unfold.
What happens is the future happens.
(laughs) It just sort of comes to us,
and new things emerge that were never conceivable,
much less actually possible in the previous era.
A television show makes no sense 100 years ago.
An app makes no sense 50 years ago to most people.
There's a few cutting-edge folks.
There's a few folks on the edge of sanity
who may have had a peek, right, on to what might be coming.
But in general, we couldn't even bother to think of it.
So when you look at all the mass of stuff that's out there,
there's probably a massive pile of new comedy
that we couldn't do 10 years ago, maybe even today,
that we will do 10 years from now.
Comedy in the data is one such thing.
And how do you find patterns in all this data science,
data analysis, data analytics?
It's like a huge buzzwords, a lot of dollars go big data.
What about big comedy data?
What about big comedy,
and the ability to find absurd patterns in existing data,
whether it's tax return data, or gun ownership data,
or racist tweets about Obama data, right?
There is something that's there that we can expose
that wasn't there before.
The Texts From Last Night is a great example.
The Damn You Auto Correct is a great example.
Aggregation, a lot of comedy is repetition,
and it's building this case.
You have another example, and another example,
and another example, and then a counter.
Right, one, two, and then the third is different.
How does that play out in a world of a machines,
in a world of algorithms, in a world of large data sets,
in a world of software?
Errors are great examples.
Google Voice has,
they inserted this really fun element of personality
in a product that I sometimes love and sometimes hate,
'cause it feels like they just abandon it to some degree,
and that's my phone number now.
But when you are typing a text message
through the web interface and the Google Voice,
that's one of the best parts of it for me
is like I can type real sentences
and send them to your phone, and not look like an idiot.
So you type a message,
and it shows you the number of characters left
in that message, and it counts down.
So you start at 160.
I think it goes down to zero.
And then when you roll over that, you exceed that limit,
then it iterates, and it puts a number two dot,
and then another countdown.
So you're like, okay, I'm in my second message.
So I like to push things and just try to break 'em.
That's just a fun thing for me.
Not people, but certainly software.
And so I'm just like typing,
cutting and pasting large blocks of text.
Wonder what happens when I get to the third message?
And the third message was, really?
They took the countdown away.
They wrote, really, question mark, exclamation point.
(audience laughs)
That was fun.
Somebody was cool at Google that day.
And I don't know if they got formal approval,
if some engineer just snuck it in.
In their user testing,
they may not have dumped an essay into the input field
to know that this was in there.
It's like a rare edge case.
But where would that exist in a cash world,
or at a physical manufacturing different world,
or in a world of the telegraph before texting even happened.
Photo manipulation, images, and all the volume of images,
the filters that we're putting on things,
the morphing of one face into the other,
what JibJab does with putting your face into a puppet
and creating your own song.
I could probably just run off 10 other things,
but if you look at any trend that's out there in the future
that's coming toward us, especially if there's volume to it,
we could think of five comedic takes right now
on what might be.
And we might be right on one of them,
and then we'll miss three others. (laughs)
And the comic of the future is gonna be on stage
with a tablet, (chuckles)
and they're gonna throwing lasers to the,
there's some weird stuff.
Or creating a real time site as a part of their act,
which we couldn't do before,
'cause it took too long to build a website.
-: I just saw a future.
It says Baratunde Thurston, director,
MIT Media Lab Center for Data Comedy.
I was like, that'd be so funny if we do that.
-: I'm gonna laugh at your jokes all the time now.
I like that.
-: All right, so we're gonna exactly on time.
-: Look at you. -: Switch to questions.
So thank you for the first 2/3.
-: Yeah.
-: And if anybody has,
go in the mics. -: Part three, you guys.
-: Got mics there.
-: Can the streamers ask questions?
-: Streamers can ask questions.
-: Okay. -: Here.
But if the people wouldn't mind going to the mic
to ask questions that would be great.
We don't have mic runners, right?
No.
So do you mind?
There's a mic right there.
-: And if anybody else has a question, just start lining up.
It makes it a little easier.
About anything.
About the company stuff, the comedy stuff,
the Blackness part.
(audience laughs)
-: I'm very short.
We have a question from your fellow fellow,
Christopher Bevans.
-: Oh, yeah.
-: Who, if I can find it.
-: What's up, fellow?
-: He sent in from Twitter and he would like to know,
what was your first aha moment
that you could integrate your strengths,
comedy, social media, and technology?
-: Ooh, first, first, first.
(sighs) Comedy.
Probably the swine flu.
(audience laughs)
Three years ago, almost four now, I think it was 2009,
we were hit with a swine flu epidemic.
And there was a big media storm.
It happened on a Monday.
I'll never forget, it was actually a Monday.
I feel like I'm talking about a war.
It was a Monday at 2:13 p.m.
And the swine flu was all over the internet and the news.
But nobody knew anybody that had it.
And so it was like this big media virus
more so than an actually influenza virus.
And I thought,
oh, I wanna like to make a swine flu Twitter account,
and have some fun with it.
And I look to see was there already
a Twitter account called the swine flu?
And there were several, but they were all legit.
They were all sharing scientific information, warnings,
how do you know if you have the swine flu,
like bullshit, right?
(audience laughs)
And I was like, well, how do I do something meaningful
and useful with my talents, at least,
which have nothing to do with science very limitedly?
And so I created @The_Swine_Flu as a parody account.
And it was fun because it wasn't,
for me, it was an acting job.
It was a gig.
And I thought of this as a character first.
And I was like, okay, who is the swine flu?
Like if it had a face, what would it look like?
What would its Twitter bio be?
Where would it eat?
Where does it travel?
Who does it follow?
What are all these element?
What are the hashtags it uses?
And so it was a little violent piglet was the notion.
Profane, very arrogant, rude, condescending,
and just off-putting.
And I wanted it to be not me.
'Cause I don't think of myself as most of those things.
And it was secret.
So I got a chance with that experiment.
I ran it for two weeks.
Got a couple thousand followers in two weeks,
which is crazy in 2009.
Got an interview with The Huffington Post in character,
which was fun.
Created voicemail accounts, and Facebook pages,
and Gmail accounts,
just trying to round out a full personality
that was more than just a couple jokes about the swine flu.
And at the end of that, I was like, oh, I think this was,
I think something different, for me, happened here.
Not that I was the first to do it.
Possibly on that scale, the first of a few.
And then @BPGlobalPR ran with it,
and @MayorEmanuel, which blew it up,
millions of followers, and @InvisibleObama.
All these sort of reactive to major news memes
through a Twitter character voice
has become a regular part of the Twitter field of comedy.
But I think that was the first instance I can remember
where this was the stand-up comic in me,
this was the news junkie in me,
and this was the geek and the tech nerd in me
finding expression through kinda one thing.
Thanks, Chris.
-: Hi, how you doin'?
-: Good, how are you?
-: Good.
So I wanted to know how media and technology
affects you as a stand-up comedian.
-: Yeah.
-: So if you have a particular gig in Chicago,
and someone in the audience is videotaping it,
and they put it up on YouTube.
And then you go to L.A., and try to give the same gig,
and are people like, we've heard that joke,
we saw it on YouTube?
Or do you have to constantly change your narrative
for each place that you go?
Is it a different script to keep it fresh?
Or do you find that the jokes that you're telling,
people have already heard
because people will tweet the joke out,
and then people will put it up on YouTube,
and then it's on Facebook,
and then you can't use the joke anymore,
because people are like, we know the punchline?
-: Yeah.
-: Does that complicate things?
-: I'm at this point in my career now
where I have security staff of six very large men.
(audience laughs)
And when you enter whatever room I'm performing,
and this doesn't count, 'cause it's not really a show,
they confiscate your shit.
(woman laughs)
And they keep it until after the show. (laughs)
No, there is a,
it's becoming a challenge.
It's another way that comedy's being disrupted by tech.
Most people don't know how comedy works, stand-up comedy.
Sketch is very different.
Improv is its own thing.
And comedy videos, and scenes in movies are their own thing.
But stand-up comedy, I think Last Comic Standing's
probably done the biggest job of educating the public
on the process behind a stand-up comic.
Most people who go to a comedy club,
which isn't most people, they think that that's person's
just making it up on the spot.
They're like, yo, you're a genius.
How did you do that?
Well, they did it because they put in hundreds
of hours into each joke.
And they've refined it,
and they've adjusted their facial expression,
and their timing, and their word choice,
and their pace to find the perfect version of that joke.
And then they put it next to another
and another to build a 30-minute set
that's this overarching story
that may have taken them a year all told to put together.
And you think, oh, that's what hecklers do.
They're like, I'm funny, too, watch this.
And they usually aren't,
'cause they find out in a drunken state
that it takes a little bit more
than just your friends telling you you're funny,
or having one good joke.
So the internet, and media, and tech,
for me, in a direct individual case,
I have not suffered much creatively
from the sort of we've heard that before phenomenon.
We saw your YouTube video on that.
I think very famous comics do.
Sarah Silverman has talked about this
on a couple of interviews and podcasts.
It definitely breaks the process.
And the adjustment to that, you could try to fight it,
like confiscate your phone, the way TV show.
I was in the audience in a Oprah show once,
and they do, they literally confiscate your phones,
'cause they don't want you revealing to the public.
Same with the Olympics, and anyone who has exclusive rights.
The audience in the room used to have exclusive rights,
and now they don't.
Because people are recording, and sending it out everywhere.
The club booker used to have exclusive rights,
and so did the comic who created it.
So it's growing as an issue
for people who are big enough for folks to care.
Any comic you just go see,
you probably haven't looked at their YouTube, too,
'cause that's a lot of effort.
That's a lot of manual labor on your part to pre-screen,
and then heckle the comic later,
'cause you made yourself unhappy, 'cause you ruin the punch.
But if it's someone who's on television,
and then you're like, oh, I was checkin' out their YouTube,
and I went to the show,
you had that same joke two weeks ago.
It's like, yeah, it's the fuckin' process. (laughs)
So either the audience adjusts.
And a lot of people are happy to hear the same joke.
No one complains about musicians
playing the same song 1,000 times.
They demand it. (laughs)
Play the first song you ever wrote that got popular.
I don't wanna hear your innovation.
(audience laughs)
Keep your new ideas to yourself.
Play the thing that makes you sick at night.
(woman laughs)
Right, that's what the audience says to a musician.
To a comic, it's the opposite.
Don't do the thing you perfected.
I wanna hear the new, unfunny stuff.
(woman laughs)
So similar stages, lights, smoke, liquor,
very different expectations on both side of that line.
But there is, I see in a lot of my comedic colleagues
using the web to test things out.
Reddit has a whole category for people testing jokes.
And one of my friends, Myq Kaplan,
he's from the area, M-Y-Q, he uses that a lot.
Twitter has a public notebook,
and a way to test, oh, this joke got a lot of reaction,
or a lot of retweets, or a lot of faves.
Then maybe I can use that as a pre-screen
to what I put on stage tonight.
But it's usually like just reading your funniest tweets
on stage is also not a good idea.
(audience laughs)
People kinda see through that.
You have to do it in the stand-up language,
which maybe involves some different things.
I don't know what the long-term future of that is,
but I think it's related to exclusivity,
training of an audience, creative process is being undone,
and then the birth of a new creative process
that might supplant the whole thing.
If it keeps going, then what does stand-up become?
That's a relatively young art to begin with.
It's not like thousands of years old.
It's like 50, (chuckles) maybe 100.
Thank you.
-: Anybody else have a question that I can--
-: Yeah, do it.
(Joi laughs) -: All right.
So you've referenced a couple of times
the analogy between comedy and music.
And I was thinking about how in music,
one aspect of what makes it interesting
and enjoyable for the audience is the actual content,
but a huge part of it is delivery.
And I was just wondering, in your opinion, in comedy,
what percentage is the content,
and what percentage is delivery?
-: Content is 62.57% (audience laughs)
Delivery is 30.
And then the remainder is inebriation of the audience.
(audience laughs) (audience member clapping)
The audience is part of the show.
And same joke, same delivery, different result
could be barometric pressure.
Delivery's hugely important.
And you see people at the extreme ends play with that.
There are some people who,
and delivery's always a part of it,
because that's just how you, that's the interface, right?
You don't just experience a joke in some vague mental state.
You hear it, or you see it play out,
so you have some sense-based interaction with the material.
How much effort the performer puts into delivery,
how conscious they are of it, that varies.
And so you have some people who are like all about,
I wanna write the best jokes I can.
And the delivery, maybe it's not the best,
but you can hear the writing.
In the back of the room when you hang with comics
and they're watching other comics,
one of the greatest compliments is like,
man, you are really a great writer.
And like, how do you know?
I didn't see your writing?
Just I heard your jokes,
and there's a construction to them
that your content is tight.
Maybe your delivery, you're stammering,
or you're not smooth, or you don't have command,
you don't project a level of confidence,
and audiences are very fickle about performers looking weak.
If the performer looks weak, you start to feel bad for them.
Empathy becomes sympathy, and that's a vicious cycle.
You don't wanna feel bad for the person on stage.
And then at the other extreme,
delivery, yeah, some people are all show.
Was it all hat and no cattle, is that a thing
that people from somewhere in the country say?
I don't know.
(audience laughs)
Form and substance, right?
It's the age-old argument.
So they're all form and no substance.
And like, you're a great, great showmanship,
really great entertainer are some of the polite ways
of saying your content's not that great.
But you have a great way of presenting and of interacting.
So there's no rule.
There's a spectrum.
And different performers fall on different pieces of it.
Back to what we were talking about earlier
in terms of data comedy, comedy as an interface,
new interfaces, like new technological interfaces
for comedy could be really exciting.
We haven't pushed the bounds that much yet.
We've taken TV and put it on YouTube.
We've taken jokes, and written them down,
and put 'em on Twitter.
When you think of all the sense we have,
you think of the haptic stuff that's going on
in sense technology, is there a comedic use of RFID?
I don't know, there might be.
Doors or signals that get triggered as you walk down a hall,
and the third door you pass,
there's some joke attached to it about your lunch.
Or the refrigerators,
your refrigerator to talk trash to you,
because you got so much rotten food in it.
There's a whole different ways to,
I'm not trying to make it infinite,
but I think we will look back into like,
oh, yeah, they had no imagination in 2010
about interfaces for comedy on the delivery side,
even with the content not changing that much.
Thank you. -: Thank you.
-: Yeah.
This dude.
-: I'm wondering, you are yourself,
and you're able to blend all of the things
that you love doing for a profession.
And you're very visible, and you go to a lot of places,
and have to be introduced.
So in terms of what you consider yourself as being,
what is the biggest departure
that somebody introduced you as?
'Cause you're probably a tough person
to introduce to a crowd.
So you consider yourself one thing.
What was the most funny way that someone described you
where you just had to reset yourself
before you started talking because--
(speaker drowned out by Baratunde laughing)
-: Probably somebody at a show said,
this Black dude over here is gonna talk to you.
(audience laughs)
And that's not all of me.
I'm much more than a Black dude.
It's definitely,
I'm thinking through intros, and I'm trying to see.
I don't know if they're necessarily funny.
It's hard to sum up a person in an intro, any person,
even if you think of that person as,
oh, you're the VP of finance at Destroy America Bank.
(audience laughs)
Or whatever their occupation is. (laughs)
And they probably think of themselves
as something more than that, like a father, also.
(audience laughs)
Actually, for me, the most challenging thing was,
at least in my current ability to recall,
being at The Onion, people never got my title right.
And I was politics editor and web editor when I started.
And then people just started dropping the politic.
They're like, web editor of The Onion.
But then a lot of people would just cut that.
They were just like, the editor of The Onion.
And that was not me, that's a whole nother dude
(audience laughs)
who earned that in a different way. (laughs)
It's like being introduced, like somebody dropping the vice
in front of president, right? (laughs)
Like, oh, no, I'm not, that's Obama.
I'm just Joe.
I'm just Uncle Joe.
(audience laughs) (audience member clapping)
That's it.
And then I had to backtrack for them, and be like,
actually, I'm not that awesome person you thought I was.
I'm still awesome,
but in a slightly different way over here.
In a way you definitely respect less.
(audience laughs)
And it just put me in a position of apologizing
and reducing myself as the first words out of my mouth,
actually, I'm not that much of a big shot.
I'ma sit over here in the orchard.
So, yeah, that intro did not capture.
They captured a whole nother person.
-: Thanks. -: Yeah.
-: Stacie, do you have 'em?
Yeah.
-: The streamers.
-: The streamers are back.
I love 'em.
-: From Jason Flom.
-: It's a great name.
-: He would like to know what you would like to see
in our nation's schools in regard to the intersection
of comedy, creativity, tech, and education.
-: Oh, that's very simple. (laughs)
(audience laughs)
Only comedy, creativity, tech, and education?
(Baratunde and Joi laughing)
All right, I'll throw agriculture in there just to show off.
(audience laughs) (audience member clapping)
(Joi laughs)
Kids, I haven't worked very much with children in comedy.
Some of my friends have.
One friend, he works at a summer camp,
and he teaches kids comedy.
Have another friend, he actually here in Boston,
Corey Manning, and he works with kids
doing comedy classes for adolescent age people.
And there's somethin', kids do get it.
Their brains, there's a certain level
of cognitive development you have to have
to get a certain type of joke.
You're not ready for it.
You're literally not grown up enough to get it.
But kids have their own language and their own thing.
And when we're in a...
I don't think my first step
in adjusting the education system would be add comedy to it.
I think there's some other things we can get out of the way
before we start down that path.
But some collaborative, co-creative thing
that gets teams of kids together that uses improv
possibly more than stand-up as the comedy metaphor,
and gets them in a round saying yes to each other's ideas
and building on top of them,
and has a project oriented around it,
whether it's an editorial project,
build a story, make a movie,
tell a tale, do a short story.
Having humor be a part of that
and giving them the license to explore
would be a great indirect way
to pick up some of those skills.
Memorization obviously doesn't work very well,
and we're wasting a lot of our time
testing things that don't matter.
So I think getting those out of the way
is a higher order priority.
But taking whatever creative writing used to be
and adding a team element to it,
teams of kids in improv fashion
with a comedic element trying to build something,
whether it's a robot, or an app,
or a story, or a video could be a lot of fun.
And I think we would unlock,
kids are much looser creatively than adults,
so we might even find something we didn't expect there
in a positive way,
because they've been given permission to think freely.
-: What's up, fellow fellow?
-: Hey, what's goin' on,
fellow fellow? (Baratunde laughs)
How does race impact the interpretation of your comedy
in terms of expectations?
-: I don't think about race at all.
(audience laughs)
It's funny you should bring that up right now.
But how does...
So
I'm gonna ask you to ask the question again
just to make sure I hear it right,
not to be annoying. -: Yeah.
-: So in terms of expectation of your comedy,
how does race impact? -: Okay, thank you.
See, I would've answered another question.
At this point, it depends on the community.
Some crowds and communities know what I represent.
And they're like, we want a geeky,
social media-esque riff on ad platforms.
Baratunde's your guy.
There's no gap between the weird things I do
and the weird things they expect.
But in a more of a club scene,
or in some audiences, there's a massive gap,
because audiences have been trained,
and audiences just being people,
on what someone who looks like me,
and in this case today in some instances,
dresses like me should sound like, should think about,
should care about, and should do at this time.
And I don't meet most of those expectations.
I fit the mold visually and sort of statistically,
sadly in this country, of a criminal, right?
That's what people expect behind the scenes.
No one will admit that.
Out of respect to every Black man,
no one's gonna ever say that,
and no one really thinks conscience that way.
But we've been programmed to anticipate that.
Or some type of entertainment that's rapper, athletic.
And I'm definitely not a rapper.
I do yoga, does that count as athletic? (laughs)
Not in the way they're thinking about.
You can't be badass in downward dog
in the way that people expect.
(audience laughs)
With my hardcore downward dog face, what?
(Joi laughs)
No, no intimidation factor, whatsoever.
So that's some of what has come in,
those are some of the expectations at the beginning.
I think what has happened with me with the book especially,
and talking explicitly about race and using humor in that,
and with all this tech stuff, the South by Southwest stuff,
and just there's the nerdy stuff,
it's part of a trend that I'm seeing
of the shifting expectations of images where you have,
and I'm just a part of that.
I do not claim to lead anything on that level.
But whether it's Issa Rae's, or Donald Glover,
or W. Kamau Bell, his TV show on FX,
there's some other images emerging.
And a lot of those images are made possible
by the lack of gateways on control
of the distribution of imagery to begin with.
I was like, I don't have to wait for your limited experience
executive to determine what kind of comedy goes on BET.
It can be nerdy PowerPoint comedy.
Kamau Bell does PowerPoint comedy every week
on a national TV network
that would not have been possible in '88,
probably not in '98, maybe in 2008, definitely today.
So I feel optimistic about the trend,
though the gap in expectations is still there,
and a lot of it around race
because of how people have been conditioned.
Thanks.
-: So if we don't have other questions,
I actually have a question.
-: Oh, wow.
You gotta go over there to ask it.
(Joi laughs)
It's phase three, it's a different thing.
(audience laughs)
-: So you were talking,
I'm talking about what to talk about.
(Baratunde laughs)
You were talking about your new stuff.
-: Right.
-: And it's like you have friends that say,
tell that joke again, tell that joke again.
But you were talking about some
of the work that you've been doing.
And you touched on some of it in the earlier half.
And I don't know if you remember
what you talked about. -: I do.
I have an in-depth searchable of everything I've ever said.
And the exact time code of it.
I am part robot.
But the things that I talked to mostly earlier,
I talked about the Comedy Hack Day stuff,
which is really about physical community
around this theory of creatives
and techy types getting together to form Voltron
and then put good things in the world.
Talked about the apps, the Location-Based Racism stuff.
The area that we work with groups as well.
A lot of what we have,
we are a combination of my own experience
plus other comedic and technical experience
running the comedy room at The Onion as Brian did.
He ran the writers' room,
and that takes a certain orientation to not just creativity,
but actually producing things.
You have a room full of very funny people
who don't do anything, (laughs)
and don't reliably do anything,
and don't consistently at a high level
do the things that they reliably do.
So he is a part of our team,
and it's very, very essential for that area especially.
I'd say the thing that I didn't talk about
that's worth noting is what we do with other people.
We did work with BBC America as a paid client.
It was some marketing work
to help them promote this new TV show called Copper.
We ran messaging, very comedic messaging
around this app they built
that lets you merge your face
with the face of a criminal from the 19th century,
'cause the show was called Copper.
It's based on police in the 19th century in New York City.
So that made sense and that was fun.
The thing that took even more of our creative time
and resources was with the Ford Foundation.
And they had this organization
called Fight for the Future that they fund.
They're trying to get people to vote with their friends,
increase voter participation.
And they had an idea that they could make fun of,
or somehow shame nonvoters
and the excuses that they have to not vote.
So we took that on as a bit of paid work,
and came up with this Your Excuse Sucks campaign.
So that was the name we had.
Yourexcusesucks.com houses everything.
We had the hashtag, #YourExcuseSucks,
which didn't have much activity before we launched this.
And we identified the eight major reasons
people say they're not gonna vote.
I don't have time.
It's too complicated.
I don't live in a swing state.
All politicians are the same.
By not voting, I'm actually voting
'cause I'm taking a stand against the system.
And other forms of bullshit.
And according to, it was sort of optimism,
you can still argue it,
but we were interested in using comedy to shame you,
and getting your friends to send these videos around,
so we would undermine that excuse.
And that was fun to do.
It had a mission attached to it,
which is like participate in your democracy.
That's usually not a bad thing to promote.
You'd be hard-pressed to find someone
actively against civic participation.
If they are, they're a very small part
of the community and wrong.
So there are ways that we are thinking
about working with other groups
to bring some of what we've learned in our actual experience
and some of what we're seeing
through our network of people to bear on their problems,
whether it's through a workshop
like here's the five principles of blah, blah, blah.
Ditch book marketing, 'cause I have a whole story
to tell about that now given my hoodified nature.
And social television promotion,
or just comedic digital storytelling
as a way to engage with the people around you.
We are experimenting with who else
and how else to keep working in that space,
not just on our own projects,
but kinda being in the world as well.
-: So you're like the ideal of comedy design.
(Joi laughs)
-: Not bad.
The ideal of comedy design, I like that.
-: Someone would like to know
how your vacation from the internet was.
-: Oh. (Joi laughs)
For context, I just got back from my 24-day vacation where,
and I stayed home, and didn't use the internet mostly.
Unplugged all the social media things,
Facebook, Instagram, Google Plus, Foursquare.
Never checked in anywhere.
Never tweeted anything.
Didn't email either.
Didn't even look at the inbox for 24 days.
It was great.
That's a good question.
The shortest answer is it was wonderful.
I recommend everybody do it.
The slightly more interesting answer
is that I found a different,
I promote sometimes on purpose,
sometimes just, I think, by example
in the rooms I end up in, connectivity,
like constant kinda you gotta be plugged in,
you gotta know what's going on,
you gotta be aware of your surroundings,
you gotta know who's voting for what,
and where the money is, and what apps are out.
There's a hustle, and an addiction, and a stress to that
that I vastly underestimated
until I was in a position to not worry about it.
And I had not realized how much time I think
about what to say. (laughs)
I gotta tweet something.
I gotta tweet something really funny or interesting.
Or what links are going up?
What's going in this newsletter?
What am I gonna reply?
It doesn't matter.
How am I gonna find out what's going on in the world?
It's fine, the world still goes on.
And you still know the things that happen.
I found word of mouth was the thing.
I found out news from my friends,
or from a cover of a newspaper at the grocery store.
I invited people to parties.
I just had to text them all.
I was allowed to call and text.
I wasn't totally cutting myself off.
I was allowed to use the web for reservations.
I'm not trying to go back in time.
I'm just trying to restore some sanity to my mind.
And it was a really good experiment
that I plan to repeat in a smaller scale
on a more regular basis.
It was nice to look people in the eye
as I walk down the street
instead of always lookin' in this window.
We have a 3D HD fully-immersive window
provided by biology right here.
Why force it into this low-res nonsense here?
It's such a much more richer canvas.
And I met people.
I would just go to a bar and just start,
instead of occupying my time reading about events elsewhere,
I was just talking about events right here
with the people sitting next to me.
And that was...
It's another sad testament that I am couching this
as some sort of revolutionary act, (laughs)
but that's just called life.
But the way we are trending, that won't be life
for the first-world versions of us in a majority
in the not-too-distant future.
We're gonna be augmenting everything,
that we're going to be adding layers of stuff in between,
and we're gonna be always knowing about something elsewhere,
and maybe losing some of the connectivity here.
Knowing about the details of a conflict over there,
and not knowing about the conflict
with your neighbors next door.
So it was good to kind of reground myself in New York
in just thought for the sake of it with no goal.
Didn't write anything.
I didn't do essays on being quiet.
I just was quiet.
It was good.
-: I'm gonna just riff off of that, 'cause it's just funny.
When Hurricane Katrina was happening.
-: Yeah.
-: I was on vacation in a cabin
in the state of Washington with my wife,
and I was on the computer.
And she was like, "Why are you on the computer?"
And I was like, "Well, Katrina's happening."
And I started snickering.
And she goes, "I thought you were worried
"about your students during Katrina."
And there was a picture of you drinking.
'Cause it was a Google Hangout where you sitting
and drinking. -: Oh, yeah.
-: She says, "So, who's that?"
I said, "Well, it's like a fellow,
"and he's drinking." (laughs)
-: Oh, you mean Sandy.
-: During Sandy, sorry.
-: Okay. -: Not Katrina, during Sandy.
-: I was Google Hangouts did not exist during Hurricane,
liar.
(audience laughs)
I'll cross-examine this dude.
(Joi and Baratunde laughing)
-: It was just kind of odd,
because I find myself sitting there for a couple of hours.
Well, you were reading your book, too.
-: Yeah, yeah. -: But mostly drinking.
(Joi laughs) -: No, that was,
talk about tech, and comedy, and natural disaster.
That's a huge opportunity.
But that's the next business.
I walked home during Sandy, 'cause I'm stupid.
And I had planned, my office, we work out of Betaworks
in New York City in the Meatpacking District.
And I thought, that's a strong building.
I will stay there to do my book launch hangout,
'cause it's likely to not be knocked over,
or flood, or anything.
But I didn't use the more relevant data,
which was evacuation zones and floodplains. (laughs)
And it got close, it was like around 3:00 p.m.,
and then there was a British TV station
that I had previously been on some years ago.
They're like, "We'd love to get reports
"from what's it like in Manhattan right now?
"Do you mind going out,
"and then coming to our studio in Columbus Circle,
"and telling us what it's all about out there?"
And I was like, "Maybe."
But then the storm, it got worse, and worse, and worse.
Finally, my friend, actually, Kenyatta Cheese,
who many people here probably know or know of,
I was staying with him and Tricia Wang, his girlfriend,
who's doing work in great areas here, too.
And he was like, "You need to get back to Brooklyn now."
And there was no subway.
Okay, so I walked home through the storm.
I had to turn it into a media event.
So I live-tweeted my storm walk, and Instagrammed it,
and SoundClouded it, 'cause I'm not so smart all the time.
Very intelligent sometimes, not so smart.
That wasn't so smart.
But I made it without getting bludgeoned
by a flying stop sign.
-: And now I just remember,
and we'll finish soon. -: Yeah.
-: But I made a joke about you being late,
about you not being able to get.
And your fans got all mad at me.
Said, give a guy a break.
He's been walking through a storm.
(Baratunde laughs) I was like, man, I forgot.
His fans aren't necessarily funny. (laughs)
-: Yeah, no, people, and especially on Google Plus is like,
you find different communities
have different tones to them.
There's no generic fan of anything, right?
Whether it's a senator, or a newspaper, or a media person.
Your Twitter vibe has a certain tone.
The Google Plus vibe has another tone.
My Google Plus crew is much more tech people,
and I think they're literally worried about my safety
coming home through the storm. (laughs)
And then so you come in like, he's late,
like, you're so insensitive.
He could be hurt out there.
He could be in the puddle in the street that's flooding.
And fortunately, I wasn't.
I was a few minutes late, little CP time,
but it had nothing to do with CP.
It was everything, it was like Sandy time.
(audience laughs)
-: Well, thanks, Baratunde.
-: Thank you very much.
This was fun. (audience applauds)
Thank you, Media Lab.
Thanks for the questions.
Thank you, streamers more than most.
-: Thanks a lot.