Best Of: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover / Comic Taylor Tomlinson
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From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, we're going to talk about the fact that we're in a time of crisis.

Today, how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. That's the subtitle of the new book, Character Limit, by Kate Conger and Ryan Mack. They're both tech reporters for The New York Times. They'll talk about the chaos Musk created inside the company, how Musk moved further to the political right, and how Trump, if reelected, wants to appoint Musk to head a new efficiency commission.

And we'll hear from comedian Taylor Tomlinson, host of CBS's late-night talk show After Midnight. Tomlinson started doing stand-up when she was 16 and took a class with a Christian comic. Then she started testing her material on the church circuit. Church audiences are very supportive as long as you don't say anything dark, edgy, or blue. And Maureen Corrigan reviews Rachel Kushner's new novel. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

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Trump has said that if he's re-elected, he would appoint Elon Musk as the head of a new efficiency commission with the mission of conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms.

How have Musk's drastic efficiency reforms and other major changes worked out at what was Twitter and became X after Musk's takeover? Musk laid off or fired about 75% of the staff, eliminated rules banning hate speech and disinformation, alienated many advertisers as well as users of the platform, and lost money.

Musk has made major financial contributions to Trump's reelection campaign and has endorsed him on X. My guests are two New York Times tech reporters who are the authors of the new book, Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.

Kate Conger has covered the tech industry for over a decade and has been reporting on X and Musk. She's based in San Francisco. Ryan Mack is based in Los Angeles, and he's reported for more than a decade on wealth and power in Silicon Valley. Musk is the wealthiest man in the world.

Kit Conger and Ryan Mack, welcome to Fresh Air. So if Trump wins, he wants to appoint Musk to head this new efficiency commission. So first of all, Musk is a major contributor to a Trump super PAC. How much did he give? So it's actually not clear how much he's given thus far. There's been a lot of talk and discussion about him giving up to $180 million to the super PAC commission.

But we're still waiting to see whether or not he will give that money. What's kind of undeniable, though, is that he's very much involved and he is very much for the election of Donald Trump. You know, he has hosted him on X on X spaces and done interviews. He has said he's going to run this government efficiency commission. So he is all in.

Considering how much money he's donated to a Trump super PAC, this efficiency commissioner possibility has the appearance of being very transactional. Like, you gave me a lot of money, you're going to be the efficiency commissioner. Yeah, and I think there are a lot of questions as to what that would look like and what types of conflicts of interest will be there. I mean, this is a man who runs...

Yeah.

to Tesla, which is being investigated by the DOJ for comments that Musk has made about its self-driving technology. There are a lot of, you know, potential conflicts of interest that I'm not sure they have even thought about. You know, this is something that came up in their interview a month ago on Spaces where Musk was interviewing Trump. He suggested he could run something like this. And now it's part of Trump's platform.

So this efficiency commissioner thing, when Musk took over Twitter and tried to make it more efficient, he laid off or fired about 75% of the original staff at Twitter. Let's talk about how that went. What are some of the key parts of Twitter that were gutted?

There's almost no part of the company that was left untouched. We saw Musk make serious cuts to management, to engineering teams, to teams that worked on content moderation, advertising salespeople, security, janitorial services. Every part of the company was reduced in some way. And Musk continued cutting in the first several months of his ownership of Twitter, which

And, you know, we talk in the book about this moment where he got frustrated that Twitter was not saving more money and called...

Almost everyone who was remaining on the staff at the company at that time into this hours-long conference call over the weekend to go through the company's budget line item by line item and ask people who were responsible for those items to explain why they were spending that money. And it's a scene that I keep coming back to thinking about this efficiency issue.

platform that he's running now and if he will try to hold a conference call with all of the Office of Management and Budget and run through the government spending with them or how that's going to work. So what impact do you think this had on the bottom line of the company? Because it looks like he saved a lot of money and salaries and related things. But in terms of income to Twitter and then X, what impact do you think it had?

I think the impact was really significant. We know that Twitter prior to the takeover had had moments of profitability and Twitter now has not been able to hit that benchmark.

Obviously, there was a lot of cost savings that came with these layoffs. However, there's also been this massive advertiser exodus where many of the people and companies who provided the majority of Twitter's revenue have backed away from spending on the platform because they've been alienated by some of Musk's decisions in running the company and some of the more erratic things that he's posted on the platform.

Yeah, one of the reasons that many advertisers, big ones, backed off advertising on Twitter and then X was Musk's approach to content moderation. That's one of the groups that he gutted, the content moderators.

And in his definition of free speech, which he advocates in general and also on his platform, he thinks any type of content moderation that excludes hate speech or misinformation is a crackdown on free speech. So what impact did that have on advertisers?

Elon made a lot of changes to the kinds of content that was and was not allowed on Twitter. He brought back accounts that had been banned by the previous management for spreading misinformation, for inciting harassment, for spreading lies.

about the outcome of the election in the United States and elections abroad. And so there's this whole swath of new content that came onto the platform as a result of his takeover that was...

Within the bounds of the law, certainly, but the kinds of content that advertisers did not want to see their brands standing next to. And so that resulted in a lot of advertisers pulling back their spending or pausing their spending altogether so that they could wait and see how Elon would address those issues and decide.

Instead of addressing them, he sort of turned on advertisers and it became a very contentious relationship where now he has sort of told some advertisers not to spend on the platform at all and sued major advertising groups that have questioned these policies that he's put into place. Did any of those major advertisers who left come back? Some of them have, and they've come back often in groups.

smaller amounts, smaller spending amounts than they were spending previously on the platform. So they'll pause spending altogether, usually wait a little bit for the controversy to die down and then reinstate their advertising. But what we've seen them do is to spend at a lower rate than they did previously. And we've also seen like a yo-yo effect. You know, some people come back and then, you know, Musk will do something. For example, you know,

with the great replacement theory, and then that will drive advertisers away again, and then they'll slowly come back and something else will happen. So we've seen this pattern over and over again, and I think at some point advertisers are going to realize that they're just tired of this and that there's other places they can spend their money. We were talking about how many people Musk fired or laid off after taking over, and his approach to doing that was very anxiety-producing.

Um, can, can you tell us about one of the more stressful ways that he laid so many people off? Oh man. I mean, there are so many periods where he did that, but one of the key moments was something called the fork in the road. And we detail this in the book, which is, um, you know, there have been already a round of layoffs at the company. This is about a couple of weeks into his ownership and

And he still feels like there needs to be more cuts. And not only does there need to be more cuts, but the people who are at the company really need to, you know, stand by him and stand by what he values and what he believes in. And so he sends out this email, which includes, I think, a Google form.

that ask people to opt in to staying at the company and being quote unquote hardcore. Like, you know, you have to dedicate yourself to this company. You have to work long hours. And I think folks had, you know, less than 48 hours to opt in to this choice. And, you know, these are, this is like not a quick decision, you know?

It's like some people were on vacation or maybe they didn't see that email that day.

were essentially let go. And it was so chaotic that on the day of the decision that it's supposed to happen, Elon Musk and some of his executives, you know, are holding these meetings to convince people to stay, you know, they're like pitching them on, on why they should stay, you know, you're going to make a lot of money, you're going to make a huge impact. This is a generational entrepreneur. And, you know, these meetings are going on.

On the literal day. And that was, you know, I think thousands of people left at that point, Kate. Yeah. And you can tell that it's something that he just decided to do sort of on a whim as he does so many things in this story. But yeah.

The option for employees who wanted to stay was to click yes. I consent to the new hardcore version of Twitter. So part of what he warned people about, like, you're going to be working very long hours. It'll be stressful. And it also sounded a little bit like a loyalty oath. Like, if you can't pledge loyalty to this new version of Twitter, you're fired. It's time for you to leave. It was totally a loyalty oath. You know, this is...

You have to bear in mind, like, someone like Musk, he sells people on missions, right? At SpaceX, you're trying to get humans to Mars. At Tesla, you're saving the environment and you are electrifying, you know, fleets of cars. But at Twitter, like, people didn't have a mission to be sold on. Like, they weren't sold on this idea of free speech.

They had seen him, you know, go back and forth on the actual acquisition, not want it and want it again and, you know, really jerk them around. And now he's asking for their full and total commitment, their loyalty pledge. And I think by that point, people had just kind of had it with him.

And another thing was so many people basically got fired because they didn't sign this kind of loyalty oath. They couldn't keep track at Twitter who quit and who remained.

Right. So this was an issue with the way it was set up. You know, he asked people to say, yes, I want to stay, but he didn't ask for people to click another option if they wanted to leave. And so it set off this real scramble within the room, the remaining people employed on Twitter's human resources team to figure out who had actually resigned from the company and whose access they needed to cut off from internal systems.

Among the costs that were cut was a cleaning company that cleaned Twitter offices in San Francisco, L.A., and New York. And...

No one was immediately hired to replace that company. So there was a period when you described like overflowing trash cans, like sweat, smells of like sweat and decaying food, toilets not clean. Some people were going to like nearby cafes to use the bathroom there. How did that happen?

Yeah, that was just one of the sillier scoops we got when we were reporting at the New York Times, you know, before we wrote this book. And we were just hearing from sources that, you know, that we don't even have toilet paper in the office. You know, we have to bring it from home. And I remember writing that story. And, you know, later on, we got photos from the New York office and their toilet paper is kept in kind of like a lockbox in each stall. And I think a janitor has to open it to like release more toilet paper from

So someone brought toilet paper from home and also had to jerry-rig kind of a metal hanger and attach it to like the railing as like a spool so that people had toilet paper to use. And, you know, just underline the absurdity of the whole thing and just the amount that Musk was willing to cut and the amount of pain he was willing to put people through in this bizarre takeover.

My guests are New York Times tech reporters Ryan Mack and Kate Conger, authors of the new book Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

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As you point out in the book, content moderation and how to deal with misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech have been very thorny issues for all of social media. So tell us more about how Musk's view of free speech affected his approach to content moderation.

What Musk wanted to do was to allow many more types of content back onto the platform. He believed that Twitter had gone too far in taking down content, you know, particularly around Twitter.

misinformation related to COVID, misinformation related to the elections. And he objected to those things and wanted to put a stop to it. What he said he would do was allow any kind of content on the platform so long as it followed the local laws of the regions in which Twitter operates. What we've seen now, though, is that hasn't exactly been what Musk has put into practice at X.

Very recently, the company was kicked out of Brazil because Musk was refusing to follow content moderation orders from the government there. He gutted the department that dealt with content moderation. Musk also brought back a lot of people's

from the right whose accounts had been suspended. You know, Trump's account had been suspended after January 6th, when he was considered to have helped incite the attack on the Capitol and then do nothing to stop it, while still insisting that he won the election. And also a lot of people on the right, the far right, had their accounts suspended. But Musk brought a lot of them back, including Trump. Who else did he bring back? People who are considered extremists.

Off the top of my head, I mean, there's quite a few. Someone like Andrew Tate, for example, who has a lot of anti-women content, who was banned from the platform, was welcomed back and is often kind of recommended on the For You page for a lot of folks these days. Someone like Nick Fuentes, who has met with Trump in the past and is a known white nationalist who leads a group called the Grapers. You know, that is someone who has come back under Musk.

You have Alex Jones, the head of InfoWars, who spread conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook, who was brought back onto the platform. So just these types of characters have found X to be a welcoming place.

Some of Elon Musk's own tweets would have violated previous content moderation policies. And I want you to each choose an example of a tweet by Musk or now a posting on X, I should say, that would have violated the content moderation rules that existed before Musk took over.

So one of the really interesting ones that comes to mind is one that actually still seems to violate X's policies today. One of the few policies that Musk held on to was a policy against manipulated media. So deep fakes, things where you're using AI to trick people into believing something that isn't true. And

Now that X is rolling out its own AI generation service called Grok, we've seen Musk generate images depicting Kamala Harris in this sort of communist type uniform and post those on the platform. And there's been this argument of like, well, you know, he's posting something that

violates the manipulated media policy that's still in place today. But he's also, you know, doing it to push a political narrative that he aligns with and to promote his own AI products. And so it seems like when it comes to Musk, there are exceptions to every rule. Ryan, you want to choose an example too? I'm trying to think of one tweet that is violative of

X's policies today. But I think the thing about Musk's posts is that they are often in a kind of gray area where there is an interpretation of them where he's not violating a rule or he's not saying the worst possible thing. I think of his attempt to walk back his engagement with a tweet that suggested the great replacement theory is real. This theory that

Jewish people are helping to bring minorities into the U.S. to replace white populations. You know, just a horrible conspiracy theory that he engaged with, which got him a lot of flack at the time. But, you know, he was just replying to it and he wasn't necessarily saying it himself. And I think that's what you see with him a lot of the time. He'll post things

something like interesting as a reply to a race baiting tweet or hope put like exclamation points in reply to You know some hateful content

He knows what he's doing. You know, he is engaging with them. He's boosting them to his hundreds of millions of followers. You know, he's now the most followed account. And whenever he does something like that, people will then see the original post and they'll engage with it themselves. And I think that is kind of in some ways the most dangerous thing about what he's doing is that he is, you know, effectively endorsing some of the most hateful content by simply replying to it.

Elon Musk in recent years has really drifted further to the right. And you trace it back to the lockdown period of COVID. What happened then that you think moved him further to the right? Yeah, it's really interesting to trace his Twitter usage and what it revealed about his politics. I mean, he joined Twitter 2009, 2010, and was just kind of posting a lot of normal people content, you know,

I went to the ice rink today. I saw Kanye West at the SpaceX factory. And there's very little politics. You know, and over time, he starts to use the platform more. And he's not really so much engaged with politics. But I would say 2020 is a shift for him. He gets very upset with, you know, how California is handling COVID. And a large part of that is because Tesla, which is

largely based in California and has manufacturing operations, can't manufacture its cars. And so he lashes out at the state of California, at its policies during the time as we're trying to stop the spread. And he downplays the seriousness of COVID. He makes some pretty awful projections about the virus itself. And he just seems to go more and more to the right on that issue.

There's other things that are happening in his life at the time that we go into in the book. You know, he has a trans daughter who seems to change his view on liberals and the progressive left.

And, you know, this hatred of wokeness, essentially, which is kind of an indefinable term. But he makes this this kind of bogeyman that he believes Democrats are supporting and that the Republican Party is, you know, the party for him, that, you know, this is the party that's going to push back on all those things. And it creates this kind of cocktail for him to kind of, you know, link up with Trump in 2024. Ryan Mack, Kate Conger, thank you so much. Thank you. This is really wonderful. Thanks, Terry.

Kate Conger and Ryan Mack are tech reporters at the New York Times and the authors of the new book, Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. Rachel Kushner's new novel, Creation Lake, has been long listed for the Booker Prize. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says, this tale of spies, subversives, and Cro-Magnon man may be Kushner's coolest book yet.

Rachel Kushner is one tough customer. She disdains sentimentality and traditional storytelling, instead challenging readers to keep up with her and not to flinch. In acclaimed novels like The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room, Kushner has written about political extremists, motorcycle daredevils, and artists living on cigarettes and turpentine fumes.

Given a literary track record studded with broken glass, it's surprising that Kushner has taken so long to try her hand at one of the bleakest genres of them all. Creation Lake is an espionage thriller, sealed tight in the soiled plastic wrap of noir.

Existential dread and exhaustion are its signature moods, double-crossing seduction and sudden death its plot devices. Orson Welles fans may find themselves humming the iconic theme music from The Third Man as they read Kushner's latest novel.

She's Wells' partner in grime in terms of her stylized depictions of the world as a spiritual and moral vacuum. The main character of Creation Lake is a hard-drinking, good-looking 34-year-old American woman called Sadie Smith. At least that's her name for the time being.

Sadie has been known by lots of names, aliases, in her work as an undercover agent, at first for the FBI, more recently for anonymous private clients. That's all we know of Sadie's backstory. Like many fictional spies, she arrives on the page scrubbed of a personal past.

Saidi's current assignment requires infiltrating a radical farming collective in a remote region of France. Local water supplies there are being diverted into planned megabasins for the use of agricultural corporations.

Some of the construction equipment of those corporations has been sabotaged, and the anarchists living on that collective are the prime suspects.

Deploying her self-described bland good looks and a breast augmentation, Sadie initiates what's known in the spy trade as a cold bump, a seemingly random encounter with a filmmaker named Lucienne, who's an old friend of the co-op's leader.

Soon enough, she and Lucienne are living together, and Sadie wields her status as his girlfriend to insinuate herself into the anarchist group.

But seductive as Sadie is, she meets her match in an intellectual seducer of sorts, an elderly philosopher named Bruno, who advocates pre-industrial, even prehistoric modes of living and serves as a guru to the anarchists.

For months, Sadie has been monitoring Bruno's emails back and forth with the group, hoping to find incriminating sabotage plans. Even as she dismisses him as a lunatic, Sadie becomes intrigued by Bruno's rejection of modern life and his decision to retreat underground long ago and live in a network of caves beneath his farm.

We are headed toward extinction in a shiny driverless car, Bruno says in one of his emails. And the question is, how do we exit this car? The idea of making an exit from her own car, her own vacant life of disguises, takes possession of Sadie.

You don't read Rachel Kushner for the relatability of her characters or even particularly for what happens in her novels. Instead, she draws readers in with her dead-on language and the yellow-tipping-to-orange-thread-alert atmosphere of the world she imagines.

Here, for instance, are snippets of an extended passage where Sadie makes a pit stop on her drive from Paris to the secluded region where the collective is located. Pulling into the parking lot of an abandoned inn, Sadie tells us, "...the air was damp and warm and close, like human breath. The lot was crisscrossed with patterned ruts from truck tires."

It felt like a place of aftermath where something had happened. I peed in the wooded area beyond the open lot. While squatting, I encountered a pair of women's day-glow orange underpants snagged in the bushes at eye level.

This did not seem odd. Truck ruts and panties snagged on a bush. That's Europe. The real Europe is not a posh cafe. The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport. A girl or woman fallen on hard times had left her underwear in these woods. Big deal. Her world is full of disposability.

Like Bruno the philosopher, Kushner is a dazzling chronicler of end times. The only thing that isn't disposable in her novels is her own singular voice as a writer. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner.

Coming up, we hear from comedian and late-night talk show host Taylor Tomlinson, host of CBS's After Midnight, which calls itself the smartest show about the dumbest things on the Internet. This is Fresh Air Weekend.

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Build the maze and drop the marble to hit the target. Perfect for kids of all ages. Shop ThinkFun for all your game needs at Target.com. Our co-host Tanya Mosley has the next interview. Here's Tanya. My guest today is comedian Taylor Tomlinson. She hosts CBS's After Midnight, which bills itself as the smartest show on TV about the dumbest things on the Internet.

Yep.

This is real. He uses a scale from elite to nah, which I think is the metric system. I'm not sure. I'd make fun of this, but this person clearly has watched every episode of the show, so I think I might be in love? This is the only ranking I care about. Some late night hosts worry about ratings and ad sales. Not me. I wake up in a cold sweat. Like, is Reddit user 21puppets gonna think my blazer is mid-

Seems a little f***ed to do to the only woman in late night. That was my guest Taylor Tomlinson performing the opening monologue on CBS's After Midnight, which took the time slot vacated last year by the Late Late Show with James Corden. When Tomlinson took that slot, headlines described her as the youngest female late night host on network television.

Taylor got the stand-up bug when she was 16, performing at open mics in church basements and schools and coffee shops in Orange County, California, where she grew up. Her humor is self-deprecating and rapid-fire, and almost nothing seems to be off the table. Her topics range from the perils of dating on apps to finding out she has bipolar disorder.

Taylor has three stand-up specials on Netflix, Quarter Life Crisis, Look at You, and this year's special, Have It All. She'll soon be traveling the country performing stand-up with her Save Me Tour. Taylor Tomlinson, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me. So you've been doing your show on CBS for a few months now. Yes.

And I heard that Stephen Colbert gave you advice when you first started hosting. What did he say? Oh, gosh. I mean, Stephen is the executive producer on our show, so he's given me so much great advice. But some of the most helpful advice he gave me was sort of just to not expect myself to be perfect right away.

I think that really helped me set my expectations for myself and say, you're not going to be amazing right away and you don't need to be as flawless as you think you need to be. He's like, people are just going to be happy to see you and happy to hang out with you.

You know, like that's what I love about our show and late night shows in general. I think they're a real comfort watch for people. They're consistent. They're something that people watch either every night as they're going to sleep or like in the morning while they're getting ready or on their lunch break. And I love that our show gets to be something like that. I love being a part of something like that, a daily point of comfort for people.

Well, it definitely feels like you're gaining your stride. You're settling in the seat, even though there is no seat. You're standing up the whole time. Yes, exactly. And people describe this show as kind of like the jeopardy of dumb internet culture. How do you describe it? Oh, I think that's a good description. I mean, it has a lot of elements of so many of my favorite shows growing up. Like, I think there's

a combination of like, whose line is it anyway? America's Funniest Home Videos. Yeah. And all the late night shows. I think it's sort of settled into that. We're like, there is a monologue now. There is a talk show portion that started as us kind of making fun of it and now has sort of evolved into almost like an actual talk show. So, and you know, you watch most late night shows now and they are playing games. They're just doing it with like one guest. Right.

So what I thought was like setting us apart is actually something everyone's doing now every night. So I think the late night space is changing and evolving across the board. And I think the Internet has a lot to do with that. And so our show focusing on the Internet specifically in the dumb trends and the funny little videos that go viral as opposed to like hard hitting news is maybe what sets us apart a bit. Yeah.

One of the things that you talk about in your stand-up, you joke about the anxiety you feel, you joke about your mental health challenges in a way that normalizes it. I actually want to play a clip from your 2022 Netflix comedy special, Look at You. And in this clip I'm going to play, you talk about how you came to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

I'm so glad I know that I'm bipolar now. I mean, I have the right meds, I got a mood ring, I'm handling it. But when I first found out, it was a very tough pill to swallow, and I've swallowed a lot of pills. Because when you first find out something like that, you're like, oh man, am I going to tell anybody? Should I tell anybody? And if I do tell people, am I hot and or talented enough to be an inspiration?

Like if I have a thing and someone else has that thing and they find out I have it too, are they gonna feel good or bad with that information? Because when I got diagnosed, they started listing names. They were like, you know who else is bipolar? Selena Gomez. And I was like, that does make me feel better. She is very pretty. Okay, I'll be bipolar.

That was my guest, Taylor Tomlinson, in her 2022 Netflix comedy special, Look at You. How did you push yourself to say, I'm going to joke about it? Because you take so many parts of yourself and bring them on stage. How did you decide that, like, hey, I'm just going to let this out? I remember my therapist said to me, maybe we don't talk about this on stage. And I was like, I've already done it.

Wait, by the time you told your therapist, you had already started talking about it? I think she knew before, but later on she had said, well, maybe that's why we don't talk about it on stage yet. And I was like, well, I didn't try something last week and it worked, so I'm probably going to start talking about it. Because once you write one joke and it hits and you really like the joke, you're like, well, it's got to go in the act. And

I'm so glad that I did because I got such amazing feedback from people who had been struggling with their mental health as well, not even just from like a bipolar two diagnosis like I got, like from a variety of things and how it made them feel seen and less alone. And that was so rewarding and amazing and comforting for me personally.

But when I filmed the special, I felt great about those jokes. And then in the months waiting for it to come out, I started panicking and was like, oh, no, I can't unshare any of this. And...

Over the years, I've gotten better about editing myself and deciding what is going to go in the act and what I'm just going to keep private. But it's a lot of trial and error. You know, like sometimes you don't know that you want to keep something private until you try it out on stage. And so you tell thousands of people and then go, well, I'm going to keep that private. Is it the reaction that like brings that awareness or how it feels? A combination of both, maybe. Yeah.

For me, I think it's how it feels. Because if something bombs, you're like, well, I just need to rework that. Like, I can write a joke about anything at this point. If it doesn't go well, I just need to rework it or find a different way into it. But the guiding light for me has been, even if something kills on stage...

do I feel good telling it every night or do I dread that bit coming up? Like I have done jokes about very personal things that I took out of the act because I was dreading getting to that part of the hour every night and

And I was like, ooh, that's probably a sign that I'm not ready to talk about this yet or I shouldn't be talking about this yet. I also run jokes by family members and friends before I do them because a joke is not worth destroying a relationship, in my opinion.

Your mom died when you were eight. And there's just this joke in one of your specials where you say to the crowd, do you think I'd be this successful at my age if I had a mom who was alive? Mm-hmm.

Do you really believe that? Oh, yeah. That was something I said in therapy. I was having a heart therapy session and I sort of in the middle of venting in tears. I was just like, but, you know, I probably wouldn't be successful if my mom were alive. So maybe it all is fine. Right. And it was not funny in therapy, but it was funny on stage because I do kind of feel like that even now. I mean,

I'm not saying that everybody in comedy or any creative person has to come from this dark place and the only way you're funny is if you have a darkness about you. Like, I don't think that's true. But for me, that changed who I was and who I was going to become and it changed my sense of humor and it made me try really hard to...

prove myself in a way that I don't think I would have if she were still alive. Because after you lose a parent, you're still trying to impress them and you're still trying to be somebody that they would have liked and respected and loved and been proud of. And you're hoping other people who knew them tell you that. So I

I do think that a lot of me trying to become somebody of note creatively was due to that. I mean, there's a lot of things. There's a lot of factors, of course. But I think that was certainly a huge, huge one. How did you discover stand-up? I took a class in high school when I was 16. I took a class from a Christian comedian at a church.

I think we worked off of Judy Carter's book. I think it's called like the stand-up comedy book or the stand-up comedy Bible. And it was really just like lists of things that made you angry, lists of things that made you excited, lists of things that made you sad. And I think it was just to get you thinking about what you had strong feelings about and

Because that's going to be the easiest and most interesting thing for you to write about. So I definitely think I still do that. I think when I'm actively sitting down to write new material, I do make lists of just topics I could see myself discussing in front of audiences for the next two years because I know I'm going to have to sit with it for a while.

Some of your first gigs were the church circuit. What kinds of things would you joke about on the church circuit? And what is exactly the church circuit?

Look, churches put on events. Churches put on comedy shows. The only difference is they do an altar call at the end. But it's a stand-up show. It's someone doing 45 minutes to an hour of stand-up with an opener. And some of these churches are like theaters. They're 1,000 people to 5,000 people. But yeah, most people are like, you're performing in churches? Is that even a thing? Yeah.

And I just fell into it because I was, you know, a church kid. Like, that's how I got into it. It's not a cool story. But I think a lot of my jokes were...

about how young I was because I felt guilty making adults sit through a child talking for that long and watching a child try to get good at something. Like, I wanted to make them feel comfortable and call it out right away. I can imagine they're a pretty supportive audience, though. They were. Yeah, church audiences are very supportive as long as you don't say anything dark, edgy or blue. Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about your family. So many folks who knew your mom have basically taught you about her because she died when you were eight. I'm really moved by you saying you're hoping that those who knew her actually see her in you and are proud of you too. As you get older, do you see yourself in her?

I don't know. I think you're right that I do rely on other people's accounts of her because there's only so much you remember when you lose somebody at eight years old.

So when people do give me those compliments, it means a lot to me. Like my aunt has said to me, like, oh, your expressions on stage will remind me of her. Like she and my grandma will say like, oh, we saw you make this face. And we're like, oh my gosh, that looks like Angela. And that means so much to me. And growing up, like I wanted to be a writer before I wanted to be a comedian. And they would say, your mom was such a great writer. And

There's so many ways I'm not like her. Like, she was an extrovert. She was very bubbly. She was very charismatic. She was gorgeous. Like, she was so many things that I wasn't and am not. I can pretend for a little bit, but I'm not one of those people who's just exuding light, and I think she was, and...

I don't see myself in her in a lot of ways. Like, I don't think I shine as brightly as she does. And I, in a weird way, feel like my becoming a comedian and a professionally creative person and a writer is, like, my way of honoring the potential that was wasted by the universe taking her.

You've said you suffer from eldest child syndrome, so you're like the eldest of four. And you grew up Southern California, as we mentioned. Very religious. The church experience changed for you when your mother died. You describe it as being fun, and then it wasn't. Can you say more about that? I think it just rocked my world. I think it just went against what I had been told. I had been told...

If you believe and pray and stay, you know, faithful, God will answer your prayers. And we had so many people praying for her and she believed she was going to get better. And so to watch your mom die of cancer, even while she

everybody gathers around her and lays hands on her and supports her and prays for her. And then for them to turn around and go, well, God did heal her. He just healed her in a different way. She is healed. She's healed in heaven. And I was like, whoa, okay. The rewrite on that is crazy. Like, it made me question everything. And slowly over the next 10 years, I

I felt like I was struggling to stay in it the whole time I was growing up. And I just felt like I was a bad Christian because I didn't, in my heart, agree with everything. The idea that we would have figured out

exactly who or what created us and what's going to happen when we die. I just can't even imagine feeling that way. I just have no idea what happens and I don't know how any of us would figure it out. Not that I'm against the idea that there might be a God or something more. I'm not at all. I think that's just as likely that there's nothing. But I really struggled with

Like we have this book, we have this manual and everything written in it is what we believe and absolutely true. And so, yeah, I just sort of as I got out of school and started doing stand up and stand up is, you know, you're hanging out with people of all ages from all walks of life, like coming up in comedy clubs and everything. And it really broke me out of the sheltered childhood I was coming from.

Well, Taylor, this was a pleasure to talk with you. And I really thank you so much for this conversation. This was so nice. Thank you so much for having me. I really, really appreciate it. That was Tanya speaking with comedian Taylor Tomlinson, host of the CBS late night show After Midnight. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering today from Al Banks.

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