You're listening to serious inquiries only. Oh, Hello and welcome to serious inquiries. This is episode 109.

I'm your host Thomas Smith.

Joining me today is Tom Curry from Cognitive Dissidence,

one of my favorite podcasts and one of my favorite people.

We had a really interesting discussion.

It started off framed around taking criticism online

and dealing with maybe unpleasant people

or insults online. And then actually we kind of morph to talking

about whether or not Twitter is real life and how much technology has changed the

way we interact. Really interesting discussion.

This happens to be a topic that Tom has thought a lot about and he makes some very fascinating points.

One thing I have to note, I'm terribly sorry and Tom should be more sorry but he had a mic cable issue that he didn't know about because he was recording on a separate source so I always record a However, the backup that I'm recording is over Skype and it's through a lower quality mic than what he was recording.

So there's a time early on when his mic goes out. It pretty quickly comes back and then toward the end unfortunately his mic cable quit and I have to switch to my other recording.

Sorry about that. nothing we can do, I did my best, it sounds fine, like if the whole interview

were in that quality, I don't think anyone would really notice, but because it starts off in a way

better quality, I think that it is a little jarring

so my apologies for that but I just didn't want to have to scrap we talked for two

hours so a lot of that is bonus content.

The majority of the interview you're about to hear

is in the higher quality.

But apologies for the hiccup.

It was something that he didn't know

...