A quick programming note for listeners, while we were finalizing this episode,

a New York City grand jury returned a sealed felony indictment of our disgraced former president,

Donald Trump. And we'll be covering that story for you next week.

I feel a little bit bad advocating for TikTok because I know there's problems with it

psychologically, with like dopamine and how it affects your brain. But honestly,

I just think it's incredibly ironic that the US wants to crack down on TikTok

an international company that's stealing our data and yet they'll let so many domestic

companies like Facebook steal our data at the same time.

Hello and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host Brian Boyler.

I'm going to age myself a bit here. In fact, I think this is probably a decent way to ballpark

a lot of people who are about my age. I don't have a TikTok account and I probably never will,

or at least not one that I'd use for any of the apps intended purposes.

My team and I actually discussed whether I should create one for myself before we recorded

this episode for research purposes, but I kept not doing it and then just chose to read about

how TikTok works instead. But I've seen tons of TikTok videos because I do have a totally

unremarkable Instagram account and some of the people I follow there repost TikTok videos

to their stories, which means my sense of what TikTok has to offer is highly filtered,

highly curated by people who I know and trust to some degree or other.

So if you're in my demographic, too old to have a TikTok account, but not old enough to find

Instagram totally befuddling, you may not fully appreciate the fewer TikTok has created in U.S.

politics. TikTok is the spy in American's pockets. Your company continues to feed our children

the dangerous and harmful content. Quite frankly, your testimony has raised more questions for me than

...