Hey, Secret History fans. This is Seth Stevenson. You're about to hear an episode of the new show from Slate called What Next TBD. If you're already a listener to What Next, Slate's daily news show, you know that every weekday morning, Mary Harris is there to help you make sense of the news. What Next TBD is a spin-off of that show hosted by Lizzie O'Leary, and it offers a different kind of break from the endless scroll of your newsfeed. Every Friday, it takes a look at how technology is impacting

our lives and where we're headed. From fake news to fake meat, algorithms to augmented reality,

what next TBD examines the hidden forces shaping our world and the people who are studying them,

impacting them, and creating them.

The episode you're about to hear is guest-hosted by me. It's about the app TikTok and what it

means that a social media giant in the U.S. is owned by a Chinese company. Give it a listen

and subscribe to What Next TBD if you like what you hear.

Washington Post Technology reporter Drew Harwell is spending a lot of his time these days

working on stories about TikTok, a massively popular app that's experiencing the kind of growth

right now that Facebook and Instagram did back in their heydays.

So, Drew, are you on TikTok? Do you have a TikTok account?

I do. I'm not a creator. I'm just a weird lurker. My editor is also kind of obsessed with it.

You haven't posted any videos? No, I haven't posted anything. I feel a lot of pressure because

everything that goes on there is really funny and smart and clever, and I'm none of those things.

My favorite TikTok video that I've seen so far is a bunch of quick shots of a guy throwing slices of cheese at the windows of cars sitting next to him at stoplights.

And each time a cheese slice sticks to a window, the music is synced so that a huge

beat drops. It's hypnotic.

Yeah, when I look at it, it's, there's always music behind everything, and there's a lot of

pranks, a lot of sort of quick one-liners, a lot of funny visual stuff, and it's all

young people. Is that, is the core

user, the teen, the very young person, the under 25? Yeah, it's almost entirely young people.

That's changing a little bit, but like the high schoolers who would never dream of going on

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