Andrew Marantz

Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert experts on expert. I'm Dak Shepherd. I'm joined by Maximus my house. Hello, how are you and Maximus?

I'm feeling Maximus today. Oh, good. I like you when you're maximum. It's Saturday, even though days are nothing.

It's still the weekend. So we're still going to celebrate. We have a really interesting gentleman today by the name of Andrew Marance. He is an American author and journalist.

He wrote the 2019 book, anti-social, online, extremist, techno, utopians and the hijacking of the American conversation. He went undercover to find out who's writing all these crazy messages on the internet. Yeah. He's really interesting.

He gets to know people that we kind of, I think, in society, deem as like trolls. Well, right on Mofas, trolls, generally. Yeah. And then there's varying levels of that where they're now involved in semi-terrorist plots.

Uh huh. Yeah, get started. Yeah. All right.

Sure does. So please enjoy Andrew Marance. He's an entrepreneur. No, I know her from the New Yorker Festival.

They do these live interviews once a year as part of just like an event. So I did, I interviewed her for that on stage. Yeah. Oh, that's fun.

It's a fun, it's a weird form because it's very, very different from the form you would do from magazine interview. Right. When I'm doing print interviews, I'm not at all worried about how it sounds in the moment. Of course.

Right. Right. I'm literally the only person who will ever hear it. Yeah.

So I'm very used to doing interviews in a way that's really like repetitive, asking the same question six different times circling back to things. Uh huh. And then the live interview format is completely different, especially. I'm also used to doing like adversarial interviews, which obviously, a live interview you don't do adversarial interviews.

Very uncomfortable for people. They're mirror neurons are firing in there. Yeah, they enjoy it. It laughs uncomfortably.

Uh huh. But like when you're, when I'm doing it for magazines, I'm like, you know, I could be there for days, hours, weeks. Yeah. So you get your little digs in there over time.

Yes. It's a whole different form. Yeah. Yeah.

So I'm wondering, like, how often do you go in with an approach or have you ever tried to go in approach where it's like, I'm not going to go out that thing and then end up getting it. Totally. Yeah. And it's all person to person.

Right. It's all just, it's like any other relationship, except in other relationships, you're hopefully not being as weird and duplicitous as you are in a journalistic relationship. Yeah. You know, what is a John Didion said writers are always selling someone out.

And that's a cynical take, but it's also true. It's like, right. You know, look, there's obviously good sides to what journalists do and underthing truths that the world needs to hear. And there are pieces that are just profiles that are celebrating some aspect, right?

That you would like totally all the time. And like, there are times where, like, for instance, I did a profile of Leslie Jones, right? After she got on SNL and her publicist was really nervous and was like, please, like, she's such a nice person. And please don't do a hit piece on her.

And I was like, imagine the universe where I go in and like, wanted to slam at this woman, who's having like the time of her life, this well-earned thing. And I'm just like, I'm going to take her down. Like that's not what I'm here to do. But but depending on your ambition level, the stage of your career, if you're trying to break out and make a name for yourself that you can see where that's on the table for some people.

Oh, and there are always ways there. I mean, in that piece, there were two or three times when I was like, I could do something that you're like, yes, it like falls into your lap and you're like, it's not what I want to do. It's not worth it. That's why journalism is a very like high trust endeavor because there are there are built in checks and incentives.

And there's obviously, I mean, with the New Yorker, particularly, there's this extensive fact checking process that happens not only with investigative pieces where there might be lawsuits, but with every piece, you're essentially the piece is being re-reported. Yeah. And everybody always has a chance to weigh in. So there's that.

But ultimately, I kind of do have to say to people like, you kind of just have to trust me that I'm not going to let I'm know what I'm doing. Yeah. So I increasingly don't do print interviews. It has to pass through your filter.

It has to pass through my filter. That's just how we are, right? It's just going to go in your ear and come out your fingertips. And so that process scares me because so much of what I say is informed by how like hard of done saying it, my delivery, all these different things that get lost in print.

I've agreed to do them for the podcast because I care a lot about podcasts and I care a lot about Monica and I like for us to do that together. But we had New York Times did a piece on us and it was so lovely while we were here. And then over the next three days, I convinced myself, Oh my God, it was this is going to be a hatchet thing like she was posing as someone who actually likes the show. But then we got into other issues that are sticky and I'm like, you know, if she wants to hone in on those things, that's all right there.

And I said it all. Her name is Eliza Brooke. Eliza Brooke. She was lovely.

She was incredibly lovely. And I was like, that was great. But after she left, I was like, I think that was fun and great. And he was like, I don't know.

There always are ways. There always are ways. Can I say though? But then it was very beautiful, kind, lovely, nice, fair thing.

And I was like, Oh, I just completely spun out about it because I'm just so nervous. Maybe I should just be like taking the journalist side in this and ultimately she did right by you. Right. But I don't blame people who are worried.

I really don't. Right. Whenever somebody doesn't want to talk to me, sometimes it's for dumb reasons. You know, I hang out in a lot of spaces where people are like, you're fucking fake news and all this stuff.

I'm like, that's a bad version of that argument. Yes. But I still get where the sentiment comes from. Because you're always taking a risk.

It's always a cost benefit. I mean, but when I remember when I was doing that piece, first of all, I had to spend a long time trying to talk my way into just being around to be a flounder wall with anything involving SNL because one time Lauren got burned by someone who came in and said, I want to hang out. I want to see what you guys are doing. And the cover ended up not at the New York or the covers New York magazine ended up being Saturday Night Dead.

And it was like, oh, fucking sucks. Oh, oh. They let him into the writer's room. And whenever you're in a writer's room, people are going to be throwing out jokes that don't land and you can make them look bad.

So that happened in 1995, I think. And since then, Lauren was just like not doing this. No, no, no. And not happening.

And so then I had to essentially work for months to just sneak around. And again, this is not like me trying to bust some big scandal or some of that. It's just me trying to get the scenic material I need to do a piece that I think is worthy of that I think is good. Yes.

And that I think shows in real narrative time how this person operates and why she's funny. Because it's very hard to capture why someone is a creative mind if you don't see that at work. Yeah, sure. Anyway, it took a long, long time for me to like work my way onto the set.

I got there the week that Lucy Kay was hosting. Okay. And there was three pre- revelations. So it's like, this is weird.

This guy really doesn't want to talk to me at all. I wonder why. And now I think I know why. But she was in the sketch where there was a whole day and there was a lot of just shooting the shit in between takes.

Yeah. And I really wanted to show how funny she is. So they started just riffing. It was shooting on a rooftop and it was her, Louis, Keenan Thompson, Mikey Day.

They were all these people just sort of riffing and they were looking out in Brooklyn and they were like, just doing dumb bits about like, I hate that billboard. And I fucking hate banks because banks are like this, just whatever they saw. And then they saw a bunch of Orthodox Jews. Oh sure.

And I fucking hate Jews because blah, blah, blah. In that moment, I'm Jewish. There was no part of me that was like, oh my God, she hates Jews. Like zero, zero percent.

Right. But I was like, if I wanted to, I could destroy everyone's life. In print. Yes, yes, yes.

It just would not. And so I just had to very quickly do the math in my brain of like, is there any way I can translate why this is funny in the moment? No, there isn't. I'm just going to pretend this never happened.

Yes, for sure. Monica Knight's new favorite thing is to tell Kristin when she was canceled. So like we all virtually live together. Monica is living in her house right now.

And yeah, Kristin will say something where like, that's it. You cancel. That was being broadcast to everyone. You're out.

That's it. That's a wrap on you. And even she, Kristen Bell says things that could get her canceled. We all do.

We all do. It's also hard to write things when you have the little cancellation angel and devil on your shoulder. I can't imagine it's helped your access or your openness of people. It doesn't help with access to other people.

It also doesn't help me as a writer to be free enough to write things down even as a first write. Because a lot of the process of writing is to just try stuff out. Throw shit at the wall. Read it a week later and see if it works.

Be like, oh my God, I can't even type that. Yes. Yes. Yes.

So I've been fascinated recently because I guess I didn't even realize this person existed but both in reading Catch and Kill and listening to the Epstein podcast and I'm blown away with the audacity of some of these folks who do have a humongous secret to hide actually reaching out and having the arrogance to think you can steer the whole thing in your direction. There's no way any journalist was fooled by him sniffing around. You know, just such an obvious. Yeah.

Although, you know, I mean, the Epstein thing and the Weinstein thing stayed buried for quite a long time. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not like it doesn't work.

Yeah. And it's just we'll talk about a swing for the fences. It's, it's, for lack of a word, it's impressive. Yeah.

That level of goal of like, oh, I'm just going to, it's crazy. Well, and the people that I was covering for the last few years have a similar kind of gall to them. They really, I mean, I was covering a lot of people who they knew that there was no way that I was going to be favorably disposed of. Yeah.

They just knew based on where I was coming from. You're from New York. I mean, I literally would be in reporting situations with various alt-right types or whatever. They would call themselves maggot people, they would call themselves deplorables.

They had all kinds of different words for what they were civic nationalists, whatever, white nationalists. And so, I think that's from like actual Nazi Nazi types to very, very soft people who would never ever identify as racist and who would be very offended if you said that. Right. And there would be a few moments, if not endless moments where they would sort of be like, what's your deal man?

Like what are you doing here? How are you going to treat us? Are you going to lie about us? Right.

So all those questions have different answers. Yeah. And I was very clear with myself. Okay.

I'm not going to lie. But I'm also maybe not going to say every single thing I'm thinking because in no situation do you say everything you're thinking? No. But I was like, I think we feel like I can't say something that's not true.

I couldn't say to them. I love everything you do. Yeah. And I'm just saying that your book, Annie Social, Online Extremist, Techno, Utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation is the book that you're referencing that you, as I understand it, it started maybe as an exploration of trolls and then you were observing them online and then you wanted to get in front of them in front of the real people that were creating all these things.

Yeah. Well, so what it really started as was not even about where are the bad people or what are the bad people doing online? What it really started as was what is the internet doing to us? Oh, huh?

What is the internet doing to us as a society? What's it doing to us psychologically, emotionally? What's it doing to our belief structures? Which, you know, I started sort of getting at that stuff in like 2014, 2015 when it was obviously like a big important question, but it wasn't like the question.

Yeah. And it felt like a little bit off to the side. I always felt a little bit kind of like, am I kind of wasting my time looking at like weird parts of the internet? Like I always felt like sitting in the New Yorker offices in the World Trade Center and having these like people I idolize, you know, like some of the best writers in the world, like walking past my office and being like, why are you looking at why misogyny is cool dot com, you know, and I'm like, it's for a project.

Your search history was probably a little embarrassing. Nice. My search history and my algorithms. I'm going YouTube and YouTube would be like, do you want to buy a diamond mine?

Do you want to buy a secret gun holster? I didn't have a foresight to do like a separate work and personal account. So it would just be weird pick up artists stuff and then like LeBron highlights and Stephen Colbert. And so the algorithm was like, who are you?

Yes. You're describing my Netflix account because my kids signed into my name. So I get recommended all these unicorn cartoons and I just, well, they are off based on me. I think it's kind of cool to just confuse the other ones as much as possible.

Sure. Sure. But so it started out as these kind of more abstract questions and less in political context, it didn't seem like a politics story at the time. It seemed like maybe a tech story, a business story, a kind of culture story.

And so I was exploring like, okay, it feels like everything is getting broken into these decontextualized chopped up bits where you never go to any homepage ever anymore is just your feed throwing things in your face. Yeah. That and that goes for everything that goes for brands, companies, people, whatever. It's all just sort of based on what the algorithm wants to send you, which as we just discussed is based on search history, but it's also based on triggering the most extreme immediate emotions as possible quickly.

And so those are good fuel for action. Yes. And specifically the actions of click, scroll, share, comment, those are literally the only things the algorithms can measure. Yes.

The algorithm can't reach into your brain and go like, wow, this thing really made you think it really changed you. It really made you a better person that it is just blind to all of that. All it knows is did you smash button? Right.

And you're going to make sure your attention for this amount of time. Totally. And get you to do things on top of the time, get you to comment. I love this or I love this.

Yeah. That was the only thing to capture. So in a way that wasn't intentional when these Silicon Valley disruptors people set out to do this, I think they really believed, yes, they wanted to make money and all this stuff and they wanted power, but I think they really believed like, we are going to give people what they want. Oh, for sure.

And then they just didn't fully think through. It's like how when you are like building cities and you're like, hey, we've got this great thing called a car and it can get you places faster. Why would we not do that? And then 50 years later, you're like, oh, that's going to literally bake the planet.

It's kind of equivalent. They just didn't think it all through. Yeah. Well, it's moving so fast and their defense pretend someone could be ahead of it is a little naive.

Totally. Totally. I think we'll get into this, but I think there are ways they could have adjusted over the course of that time instead of they've kind of dug in their heels. Well, we just interviewed the head of Instagram and Adam and he was, I thought, very transparent in their many failings.

He was in charge of the Facebook newsfeed before he went over to Instagram and he was being vocal and sounding alarms and all these different things. And yeah, he's just like, yeah, we didn't think of everything. Also, we learned things like real time as the media is learning and pointed it out, but quite often we're learning it at the same time. So yeah, I'm mildly sympathetic to what they're doing.

I am too. It's not like the point of the work or the book is to be an expose of like these are the worst people in the world. You know, you're not like Harvey Weinstein type figures. They're more like, I would say like the people who designed cities and buildings and cars who thought they were building this beautiful, you know, LeCabucier or Robert Moses or any people where you have this beautiful thing being built that also has these massive consequences.

And then it's a question to me of how much can you think and self reflect and be kind of supple and flexible enough to go like the thing you built your entire life on, not only your fortune and fame, but also just your entire life. You think about Mark Zuckerberg's life. Yeah. Yeah.

And then he built on this one thing since he was 19 years old. Oh, and I'm sure when he closes his eyes and thinks of himself, I think Facebook is interm-mesh into that. Oh, it's how could it not be? Yeah.

I mean, it's like, and I try to think of it from the perspective of like, if you suddenly told me that trying your heart is to write beautiful sentences to capture the perfect crystalline reality of the world we live in is actually like killing babies in Myanmar. Sure, sure. Like downstream. What?

Yeah. It doesn't make sense. It would take me a long time. Yeah.

But there is this thing the philosopher Richard Brody who's like a little bit of a sort of backdrop to the book. So, Brody is like this massively important American pregnantist philosopher who kind of hard to pin down simply, but one of my favorite of his books is called contingency, irony and solidarity. Contingency is essentially the end of the story isn't written yet. Everything is contingent.

Everything could have happened one way or another way. Like essentially he's arguing against this idea of progress will sort of become this thing that works itself out. Right. Whether it's through Marxism, you know, there will be this natural class struggle or whether it's through enlightenment, you know, the rationality of humans will naturally lead us.

He's against all that stuff. It's not going to, there's no natural course of history. And has to be decided. It had people have to do it.

Yeah. Yeah. So like it may be the case that human ingenuity and rationality like bring us to it, but it's not just going to be like, yeah, it's not the Hegelians or a course of history thing. And the reason I thought that was important to bring up for this stuff is that when you are someone who just at 19 drops out of college and starts a thing that ends up being the biggest information tool ever known in human history, you're not a philosopher.

You're not a historian. You're building something cool. Yeah. And you, I think you imbibe without really realizing it, just these cultural ideas of like free speech good.

History is a march of progress. We live in a time where, you know, the more globally we get knitted together, the fewer wars will have the more prosperity will have like all these things you don't articulate them, but they're just like the water you're swimming in. Yeah. Yeah.

And so like we're going to knock down all the barriers. We're going to tear down all the walls. We're going to disrupt. We're going to innovate.

I think there's basically no part of your brain going, hold on. Am I going to start a world war and you're not questioning the destination. So you have these ideals and you're like, I'm creating this tool that will help us get to this thing that I think we all agree, right? Is where we're going.

So let's get there fast. Exactly. And so there's this thing where I call it the gleaming vehicle of progress. It's just like, look at this vehicle.

It's so fast. It's so sleek. It's so beautiful. And nobody asks where it's going.

Because it's like, well, it's just like a self driving car. Like it'll get us there. I mean, that there are these two choices that are optimism or pessimism or phones will knit us all together in this beautiful way or throw all the phones. Yeah.

I think the way out is neither optimism nor pessimism, but this concept of contingency. Uh huh. It is going to be what we make it. So rather than let's throw all the phones off a bridge or rather than let's sit back and let the phones do whatever they do, because it'll probably be good.

It's just, we don't know. We have to make the future be what it is. Right. So, and where I was going with the contingency irony, solidarity, the irony part is what he means by irony is this very technical definition of irony, meaning like the ability to reflect on the possibility that your deepest held convictions might be wrong.

And that is something where I think a lot of this is like a lot of people really struggle. So you started by saying, well, how did you get to the trolls? All this very airy abstract stuff that was sort of swimming around in my brain because of how I like to work. And I did not want to say, okay, let me make an argument about this stuff.

Let me make a polemic, and screed about why I think social media is good or bad. What I like to do is take all these ideas and confusions and sort of things that I'm not sure how to feel about and go out into the world and try to weave together people and narratives and moments, like a kind of documentary film, almost art project. But I guess the fact that you're interested in it, before you launch into this, you're kind of aware, obviously you're seeing that, let's say you're on Twitter, where most of us are on Twitter, you're like, oh, wow, there's a lot of angry people. There's a lot of people that are in camps.

There's a lot of fighting. The place I come from is like, this at least aspect of it seems to be the worst of our nature, or that there's this anonymity to it that allows us to act in ways we actually don't act like. What place were you starting from? Were you starting from frustration with the way that social media and the internet's working?

Yeah, frustration and kind of anxiety of like, where is this about to take this? Yeah, some of it was sort of observing Twitter and read it and all these things. And anonymity we should get back to because Facebook is not anonymous, but Facebook is full of problems. So it's not any one of these factors.

And anonymity is one factor, but there's lots of other factors too. Because I spent a lot of time at the offices of Reddit, which is anonymous, but in many ways they're more proactive about cleaning up their messes. Okay. Because Reddit is a super fascinating part of this, but it's the one thing I still don't understand.

Conceptually, literally people tell me about Reddit. I don't know what they're talking about. I met the kid who invented it. Yeah, Alexis, great guy, Alexis loved him.

Even asked him, I don't think I understood it after he was done talking. I'm like, does someone starts a topic and then people just, they write indefinitely on the same topic, is that what it is? This is another thing where being in the room helps you. Like, I just sat in the Reddit offices in San Francisco for a long time.

The basic architecture of it is very simple. It used to just be links. Here's a link, then added comments. Here's my comment on that link.

Okay. I added up votes and down votes. I like your comment. I didn't like your comment.

They're thinking again, because of this kind of basic sort of ten utopian frame, was like, this is democracy. It's literally voting. Yeah. Up or down?

They didn't anticipate pylons. They didn't anticipate what they called regading. They didn't anticipate. What are pylons?

You decide, I don't like pomeranian 67. And I'm just gonna destroy her regardless of what she says. I say her because it's usually her. Yeah, yeah.

The targets of the disagreement immediately unravels into, I hope you get raped totally. Generally, right? There's always some kind of. Or just a right of physical safety to woman.

Yes, or everybody jump in here and down vote her as quickly as possible. And this is part of the answer to how I was able to do some of this work. It was just like, they don't go after men in the same way. I met some real unsavory people.

And they didn't like me because I was a journalist. They didn't like me because I was Jewish in some cases. But I'm not a woman. So like, I'm kind of okay.

Right, it sucks, but it's real. My wife would sort of listen in sometimes I would do these interviews in the house and she could hear. And she'd be like, they weirdly kind of want your respect even though they fucking hate you. For sure.

They kind of just, they hear your voice. It's bizarre. And it's like at a deeper level than it is. Yeah, there's some primal stuff happening.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So Reddit is kind of in a way the purest expression of some of these things. It's very stripped down. The design is very, very old school.

It's like a message board. Yeah, as I would have thought, it's like a message board. It's also gets more traffic than Twitter or Amazon or really Netflix or. And does it have the impact downstream that say Twitter does?

Because in my observation, maybe you can correct me. You would know more about it than I do. I have this theory that the farthest left and right 5% of the spectrum have the loudest voices. And they are commandeering a disproportionate percentage of the news cycle by having these loud clickable opinions and takes on everything.

Yeah. And some of it is left and right. But some of it is just attitude temperament. Some of it's not like I want a 39% tax rate and you want 41% but it's just like fuck you, I want higher taxes or fuck you, I want lower taxes.

It's not really a left or right thing. It's more just like who can get those emotions stirred up. Yes. And that was the thing where these guys, I mostly spent time with Steve because Alexis had kind of moved away from the company.

Stephen and Alexis started together in their dorm room in Charlottesville, Virginia. They went to UVA. Then they went off. They were in their 20s.

They made a few million dollars. They sold the company. They went off. They sold it early.

They sold it early. But does Reddit stuff track upwards towards policy and news cycles and all that? Everything is on Reddit. There's more than a million.

Crazy stuff, right? Like there's some like horrific stuff happening right here. OK. OK.

Like really bad. Totally. Well Reddit is one of the reasons I spent so much time at Reddit specifically is because it is in many ways one of the clearest mirrors onto what social media is because it's so stripped down and it's everything is on there. The worst stuff, the best stuff, creativity, the partnership.

I mean, you know, I was focusing on the anti-social side of it. There's a huge amount of prosocial side of it. And not only on Reddit, but everywhere. Finding their mob, they're finding their tribe.

So going to events, they're forming a life based on all that. Yes. By the way, all the things you said forming a mob, going to events. Yeah, mob was the wrong word.

No, but that's it is exactly like the mirror. It is just both at the same time. It is the prosocial and the anti-social exactly at the same time. Right.

And one can't exist without the other. Yeah. So the reason I wanted to delve into that stuff is not because I'm a masochist or because I like hanging out with the worst people, but because I just felt like that part had been under explored. Yeah.

I felt like essentially the first 10 years of social media was them being just given a free halo effect. Everything was prosocial. Everything was tarot square. And there's these revolutions and the Arab Spring.

I was just like, there's no one really digging. Not no one. There were people. But the collective narrative was not being seen in this balanced way.

So the first thing I looked at in 2014 was this guy in Chicago who was building a clickbait website that was not political at all. It was cats riding skateboards. And he feel good stuff, feels good stuff, wasting time stuff. So I met him at a dinner where I was at a tech conference and I was there to do something else.

But he was randomly seated next to me. And he started telling me what he did. And I was like, it's not intrinsically harmful what you're doing. But you are wasting people's time.

You're not making them smarter. He looked at my little name tag and said, oh, so you work for the New Yorker. Let me tell you how to improve the New Yorker. You need more pictures.

You need shorter sentences. You guys are going to get way more clicks if you just do like listicles. And I was like, fuck you, buddy. You're not wrong.

But the reason I'm annoyed is because you're right. But you just think you're smug about it. Sure, sure. Or that that would be a defendable goal.

That would be good for the world. Yes, it's good for your business. But you conflated. And this became an obsession with me.

People who conflate what's good for them and what's good for the bottom line. And that's a particular internet problem. So I was so intrigued and provoked by this guy. And I said, I'm going to do a profile of you.

OK, great. I hate your magazine. It's fucked. Yeah, I'd love to be a subject of your profile.

And I also was aware that I have my biases. And I'm writing about a new media thing and an old media thing. I don't want to be just like caddy about it. So I tried to really understand where he was coming from.

And he was a smart guy. He was a nice guy. But then our value system was so different, particularly on this point, that he kept saying to me, well, our motto is, if it gets clicks, it's good. And I would say, do you mean good for the money in your pocket?

Or good ethically or quality wise? And he was like, I don't understand the difference. Right. Stay tuned for more on Farm Share Pittsburgh.

If you dare. And I've got to say, I'm going to do this a bunch during this interview. And I'm going to get in trouble at times. But I'm going to do it anyways, which is, what did your parents do for the doctors?

There you go. So I will say I get a little frustrated people that will pat themselves in the back too much. Because if you're born into a household of doctors, you're starting at a pretty good spot, where they've already dedicated their life to helping people. My dad sold cars.

And if he could sell one with a dent in it, then no one saw that was an extra $200. And my dad was fucking take what you can get and run like hell. And so I can relate very often. Monica and I will get in these conversations.

And I'm like, I hate to say it. But I have that obsession and the coveting of money because someone went to that school. That's fair. Fuck that.

The whole system's not fair. I'm going to get mine. So I don't longer feel that way. But I definitely understand how many people are given the worldview of, this is a fucking video game and get some points.

Totally. And so I don't think you blame people so much if that's what they were born into. I really agree. Well, I agree in the sense that I don't think the most productive place to go with that is to go, this is a bad person.

Right, right. I want to condemn this individual as a bad apple. I think this important is what are the systems that are driving people to behave the way they are. It's also I just want to point out it's in it's something I find myself in is it is a luxury to be finding purpose.

I'm so grateful to have the luxury. But for many years purpose wasn't on my agenda. It was like, get some fucking money so I can stop sweating the price of gas. You know, it all becomes like what's on fire.

Yes. That's the Maslow's pyramid. Yeah. And you know, then the question is do you get addicted to that?

I mean, this kid when I met him was a 27 year old millionaire. Uh huh. At what point do you actually rise up to the level of the Maslow's pyramid where you're actually trying to transcend that? Yes.

And again, it's not about moral condemnation in the sense that I don't think this guy's a bad guy. I do think it's important though to flesh out our actual profound disagreements of principle, especially as we get more into the people who are actively tearing apart the fabric of our democracy, which I ended up writing about more. Yeah. And again, I'm probably going to point out some things that will sound like I'm a sympathizer, but in that's not the case.

It's more just for like a sense of emotionally, maybe what's going on with people, which I'm sure you are equally interested in. Totally. This is part of when we were talking about the angel and demon of cancellation on your shoulder. There were times when I was like, I'm so interested in what drives these people and explaining it that I am worried that I'm going to get mistaken for excusing it.

Oh sure. Because I spent, I mean, in the book, I go deep into the life history of people that are doing bad things in the world, just objectively making this world a worse place. And I really, really want to tunnel into what was it with their relationship with their parents. But that's also you have to understand it if you want to be able to create systems that will correct for it.

Yeah. So I started with this clickbait entrepreneur guy in Chicago, then Trump comes down the escalator and I immediately I'm like, okay, all the incentive structures, all the business incentives, the intentional incentives, the psychological tricks, all the things that I saw this sort of innocent neutral kid doing, that's what this guy's going to do and he's going to win. And I am sad to say I made a lot of bets that I won. And I also was like, okay, this my thing that I've been sort of trying to puzzle through and not knowing exactly what the story is, this just became the story of American politics.

So then I was like, okay, now I need to broaden my scope. It's not just about how this kid is making money on Facebook. It's about how the same things that allow him to be a 27 year old millionaire on Facebook are the things that are going to destroy everything we hold dear. I want to know how you go from observing them online to then meeting them.

Well, so okay, so it was summer of 2016. I had been saying kind of internally, like making bets with my editors and people like these forces are too strong. Like Trump's going to win. And eventually I just got something where they're like, okay, tell that story in a way that is not just again, not just you putting out your opinion and sort of writing an op-ed about how but like show me, show me who's doing it.

And we're already hearing rumors even back then pre-election that like maybe the Russians are doing it and like maybe the bots are doing it. And I was like, even if it's true that the Russians are doing it, there's no way that there's more of the Russians doing it. I'm doing your quotes though Russians. Like there's no way that these whatever 200 people who are sitting in a building being paid to do this are having more of an effect on the election than Americans.

We're doing this. We're on the travel. Yeah. There's just like yes bots are a problem and yes, you know, troll farms are a problem, but most of this is real people.

So I'm going to find the people who are doing this. Right. And I was trying to stay within great territory. At first I didn't go straight for just the outright Nazi stuff.

I felt like that was a little too salacious. You want to be able to again not excuse but find some way into understanding. It's very, very hard to find your way into understanding why just an outright anti-Semite just out and out cross burning person. I did end up getting there in the book because while I was reporting the book Charlottesville happened and I went, oh shit, I have to go there.

Right. But I started out with I want to find someone who wants Hillary to lose for reasons that are not just pure blind hatred but like has reasons and is really effective at reverse engineering and hacking the attentional marketplace to make that a reality. I want to find someone who's just sitting at home in their living room doing it freelance. But in a way that would not have been possible without these algorithms.

Like you could do it as a super billionaire Rupert Murdoch type person by just buying up the press apparatus. But the fact that you could just do it from your laptop is new in human history. Well, let me ask you this though. Because we acknowledge the algorithms are virtually giving us exactly what we want to read already.

We're already siloed. How would someone penetrate that algorithm from an opposing viewpoint? So here's how they do it. Well, so there's a lot of wiggle room within.

They're giving us what we want because there's different versions of us and what we want. Oh, for sure. There's the twitchy lizard brain version. There's the deeper more considered version.

So you can, you know, you can get people who don't want Doritos to eat Doritos by giving them Doritos. And that deep and complex, you just have to, it's a tricky to get good at. Yeah. You know, you put lines out to 20 people and you end up finding the one perfect person because a lot of what a New Yorker style thing is is finding the one perfect person who's going to encapsulate a larger right set of concerns.

That's like a fractal of exactly. Yeah. They call it the donkey. Like the person who can carry the weight of the story you want to tell.

Oh, okay. Like Lawrence Wright when he was writing about Scientology, his first piece about that was my article I remember in my life. So if you remember that article, all these articles, this is like super dumb, like magazine nerd thing, but they all have a little thing above the title that's called a rubric and it's called either profiles or a reporter at large or whatever. That one was technically a profile of Paul Haggis.

Okay. Nobody read that and went, wow, I know about Paul Haggis. Right. The life and times of Paul Haggis.

Right. But because Paul Haggis was the quote unquote donkey in that story, he was one carrying the load of the right because you have to go in through someone. So my Paul Haggis was this guy, I hesitate, maybe we shouldn't even like give him more attention. Okay.

So the guy I used, I called him up and said I am interested in how people are using social media to do unprecedented things in politics. Really quick. How do you even, because everyone is operating under an alias or a Fox catcher 29, how do you even find out who the guy really is? Well, the thing is some people are not.

Okay. So he was living out loud. He's been at this for a long time. There's generally a time when they have either been docked or they've outed themselves or something has happened where they go, this is going to be who I am.

Now this particular guy, he was a lawyer. He went to law school. He had a wife and a kid and a dog and they like to go hiking and actually he was on the right path. Yeah.

Well, and this is no when I met him. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Okay. So this every time you meet one of these people and I'm going to tell you about other people that it's going to be the same thing.

Every time it is not the person you expect. Oh, wow. It is never the 15 year old in a hoodie in a basement. This guy was about 40.

This was his second marriage. His wives were non-white. He was really into exercise and fitness. This was summer 2016 and I just want to understand what the fuck was happening on the internet.

So I was like, okay, show me how you do what you do. And right away, I was like, okay, this guy's not dumb. He's not living by himself and, you know, like he's the weirdo in many ways, but he's not isolated. He's not like a Zinske.

He's not a white nationalist in good standing because he kicked out of being a white nationalist if your wife is a verrionian descent. And I actually later found out that his first wife had worked at Facebook and in the divorce, he got half of her Facebook stock, which is how he funds all of his. Oh my God. Some of this stuff is like, if it was a novel, they'd be like, come on.

Two on the nose. Two on the nose. I mean, wait till we get to the guy who's like the top Nazi propagandist in the country who was married to a Jewish woman and who had a black brother and we'll get there. I love that.

Complicated. So. Next messages. We love mixed messages.

And again, you asked me this before, like, didn't they look at you and go like, aren't you going to be on the, you're from New York, all this stuff? Sometimes I would literally meet someone at a party like the deplorable. One of the big parties I went to was called the deplorable. It was their big inauguration party.

That's a cute plan. Isn't that nice? Right Monica, the deplorable. Yeah, yeah.

It was like a half years going in my head. But I, there were times where I just had to go because I wasn't going to lie and because I wasn't going to say the full truth, I just went, you know what, man, just take a look at me like look at my glasses, look at my beard. Just make assumptions and they're probably close enough and they were, and like, it's not that far off. Now, can you just tell me what you want to tell me?

And then usually it would work. And sometimes they would be like, take my notebook and tear it up and be like fuck you. It was like 50, 50. Yeah.

So when I get to this guy's house in California, he's like, okay, I have a laptop I have an iPad and I live stream on my iPad. And like that's it. people text me stuff and that's how I'm in a reverse engineer, the news cycle and like damage Hillary's brand enough that she's gonna lose. I mean, obviously in concert with other people, but like I'm gonna do my part to hijack the narrative.

And I was like, come on man, like how are you gonna? It's okay to watch. So I mean, I was with him for days and days and he does it multiple times a day. He was like, one of the things that people really respond to viscerally and emotionally is someone being sick or disgusting or like, especially a woman.

If I can make people think that she's just diseased and like rotting from the inside, they won't want to vote for her. Never mind that he was like, I have all these things about her foundation and the stuff they're doing in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and I have like, he had all those things on his mind. But he was like, that's not gonna go viral. That's not gonna hit people at these emotional flashpoints that are gonna make them click and comment.

And what's gonna make them click and freak out is she's diseased. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So he goes, okay, there's these little video clips of her where she's blinking in a weird way and I'm gonna say that that's her having a mini seizure.

Uh huh. Or she did an interview sitting down, so I'm gonna say she can't stand up or there's like a little bulge in her pocket. I'm gonna say that's her catheter. And so part of it is just throwing shit out there.

But part of it is also condensing it so that it becomes, that it spikes into the national discourse. Because to your point, you don't just want to get to stay in your silo. You want to pollute the entire national discourse with it. So he'll go, okay, I'm gonna do a live stream on Periscope and I'm gonna get, doesn't have to be a million people.

It could be a thousand people or 500 people. If they're passionate enough and hardcore enough, and we all pick the same hashtag at the same time, and we get enough of the right kind of images and words all in the right kind of combination in it and it spikes quickly enough, that will become a trending hashtag on Twitter. So he would sit in this video conference and go, okay, today it's gonna be Hillary's bags because Hillary's got bags. She's got bags under her eyes.

She's got bags of a catheter bag. She's got bags. So it's like, let's all go do Hillary's bags right now. Go to Twitter.

They all do it. None of this is against the rules, by the way. Twitter doesn't have a rule that maybe they should. But they don't have a rule against you and your buddies hijacking the news.

Right. They all go to Twitter, they do the hashtag. If they do it right, it trends. Then when something is trending on Twitter, that is a signal to every journalist in the world, which is the core audience of Twitter to go.

Okay, so this is now a thing. You have now been objectively given permission to go after this as a thing. Yeah, which will now it's in the public consciousness. So it deserves reporting on exactly which is misleading in a lot of ways, right?

Because most Americans are not on Twitter. Most people on Twitter are not talking about Hillary's catheter bags or whatever. It's just an engineered outrage. But because you've now seen it in the little box, and by the way, there's no Twitter never said that the little box of trending hashtags are the things that objectively the most people are talking about.

It is a proprietary algorithm that they've never shared how they come up with it. So it's not just a volume. It's not a volume thing. It's a bunch of factors.

It's speed. It's concentration to supposed to measure virality. Well, and so these are, you know, these are all proprietary companies that don't share how they do it. But it just so happens that if you just do your homework and learn how to reverse engineer it, you can have this effect.

And then he would just sit me down and explain, okay, so watch, man, watch what's going to happen. It's going to trend. I bet you that if Crystal is a picks it up at CNN, and then he, you know, retweets it and Brian's delta is going to notice it. And then he's going to maybe consider talking about it.

I know it's going to end up on the dredge report and Rush is probably going to talk about it. And then maybe Sean Hannity's going to talk about it. Not because this guy's some kind of like profit or genius, just because he's just like, this is what he does all day. He pays attention.

It's like being like a soft chair. He's a great admin. And then I would go back to my hotel and wake up the next day and scan the headlines and be like, there's some headline that's like, some people are talking about maybe Hillary might be sick. And I'm like, that's because of this guy.

Right? That's impressive. Like all ethics aside, that is really impressive. Yes.

And there was a part of me that was like, there's kind of like an ocean 11 element of it. Yeah, of course. Like you don't want them to rob the thing, but you're kind of like, well, how are we going to pull it off? Well, this technology has increased.

I have only felt increasingly less a part of everything or that the system is so big and to think someone else went the other direction with this and like, oh, no, I can have a huge impact. So he had the clear objective of making sure Hillary didn't get elected. Right. Yeah.

And also becoming a big player in some kind of game. It's an adrenaline rush. It's addictive. You make money from it.