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Check it out at plored.ai slash dailybeast and use beast for 10% off. That's plaud.ai slash dailybeast and use code beast for 10% off. Hi, I'm Molly John Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong Un. I'm a left-wing pundit and a writer at the Atlantic Envow.
And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN HLN guy and current cable news and I'm producer Jessica and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with the wisest and funniest people in science and media and politics and help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down and on the new abnormal we'll talk about the people who got us into this nest and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. What a fantastic show we have today.
First we're going to talk to Dalia Lithwick who writes about the courts and the law of her sleep and hosts the podcast Amicus. And she's going to talk to us both about Trump's little dust up with the National Archives and the world in a post-stobs decision. Then we're going to talk to Max Fisher who writes to the interpreter from the New York Times is the author of the chaos machine, the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world. We're going to have a fantastic conversation with them but first let's have some fun.
Andy Levy, Molly Youngfast, another day in Paradise, student loans, $10,000 forgiveness for people who are not on Pell Grants, $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. I'm thrilled though I would like to see more for Pell Grant recipients because the people who get Pell Grants are really the people who need this money more than anyone but I think this promises kept baby, promises kept. Yeah or at least close to it. I think they promised sort of more than this.
Yes but they are politicians. Yes no exactly as far as politicians go this is as close to a promise kept as you're probably going to get. Yeah this really has boy conservatives are not happy about this. God they really are not.
I love to drink some conservative tears. I'm loving it. Yeah they need a big old plate of coke I think. More importantly is Ben Shapiro going to be okay?
I don't know that he's going to be okay although he does have all the PPP loans he took out and never repaid to keep him comfortable. There seemed to be a very big trend of people who were highly upset at student loan forgiveness and then we saw on Twitter yesterday or I guess Wednesday and Thursday a lot of this you tweets with links to those same people in some cases tens of thousands in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars in PPP loans that were forgiven and I know they're not exactly the same thing and PPP loans are sort of made to be forgiven if you could. Yeah fuck that it's money it's free money. Exactly.
Exactly. Exactly. No I agree. Yeah I agree and it's just and we have given Biden his fair share of shit on this podcast and I oh yeah but he has had he's had a couple of pretty good weeks now it's nice that this is coming not long before the midterm elections and it's just nice and it's nice to see dark Brandon just in full effect.
You just said dark Brandon I will use this to make fun of you later. Please do. But yes I agree I mean I think look it's funny because this guy from fate who works at Facebook best known for causing genocide in Myanmar was saying that PPP loans were never meant to be repaid but student debt was meant to be repaid. Fuck you.
I mean fuck you. Like you know I say this as someone who didn't go to college because I had a misspent youth but had I gone to college I came from a very pretty much background and my parents would have delighted in pain for all of my college and you know what I'm telling you it's this is you know the people who are complaining about student debt are you know this is America is increasingly unfair and it's not fair that some of us had wealthy parents and that some of us didn't and fuck them like you know student debt this is the floor 10 in my mind. No I agree. Look I had student loans and I I guess if I remember correctly I got a deferment because I went into the military but I still had to pay them because I'm dumb and so I went to the military after college so I didn't go on the GI Bill so the GI Bill did nothing for me because I didn't go to grad school or anything like that so I deferred my student loans and then I was just very blessed beyond I was very bad about paying them back and they went into default and it was this whole thing.
The bottom line is I ended up paying like I think three to four times more than I should have and I went through all of that and I keep seeing these things saying it's so unfair that I paid my back and other people didn't have to I don't want people to have to go through what I went through and it's worse now because college is so much more money so you're taking out even more loans. I mean I went to college in like the 1890s you know it was like it was 25 cents a semester. Right and there's a report I mentioned McConnell went to college when college cost you know $800 a year or $300 a year and adjusted for inflation that's $2,000 not $80,000 so I mean it's fucking ridiculous. I think that student debt forgiveness is great I think that Biden could have should have done more but I understand why he didn't because I think he was worried about.
Look I mean he may still have trouble in the courts we have a Supreme Court that believes they are the final authority on everything and their goal in life is just to crush all democratic dreams so we may still you know this may not be the end of this but Biden is working to do what he said he would do and that's good. No absolutely and we love to see it and we love to give credit where credit is due and all the people who yelled at us for saying that Biden was not doing a great job we are now saying he's done a great job over the past couple weeks because we are nothing if not fair here on the new abnormal. Exactly that's how we were all very fair on the new abnormal. So we had some elections this week too.
There was a midterm election that was a midterm primary and a special election in New York's 19th which is a bell weather not unlike Guam no I'm just kidding Guam is not a bell weather but was a bell weather and this bell weather said that Democrats could theoretically keep the house or at least that's what Steve Cornaki told me. Well if anyone is going to know it would be Steve Cornaki but this is yeah this is an election with you know that had a pretty good public and candidate in terms of popularity. Right and not a Nazi. Right exactly.
You know which is not always the case. No you can't assume that in fact you can generally assume they are unless proven otherwise at this point but this was a guy named Mike Mark Molinaro and he lost to Pat Ryan up in the Hudson Valley area of New York and this was one of those weird districts it went for W it went for Obama it went for Trump and then it went for Biden. Yeah so there's apparently a large contingent of the schizophrenia up in this division. I'm kidding of course I'm not being able list I'm not making fun of new urban people.
There's nothing wrong with mental illness in fact we like it a lot and some of us even have it. Yes all of us. But I do think that that's a good point they're rich they're white and they are not swinging back to Donald J. Trump which I think is ultimately where this goes.
It's such an interesting and strange little district of rich white people. I think because we do this part because we think of the teams as being so entrenched in their particular affiliations you know I part of me I think in the back of my head I always think of like Republicans as everyone be I mean I don't because I have Republican friends but there certainly is a feeling that some of these Republicans will defend anything Trump does but clearly that sounds so true and I think it's worth thinking about now you know there's been such a malpractice first with Dobbs then with the Senate now you've got these Trumpy terrible Trumpy Senate candidates now we're looking at the House you know most people you would get on this podcast who work in the sort of hundred tree field would say you know Democrats are going to lose the House but it seems like this is starting to show a different narrative. Yeah look I think the Democrats are still going to lose the House. I don't think it'll be as big a loss as we all thought you know even a couple months ago.
I think it's gonna be really tough for the Dems to hold the House you know maybe not impossible but it's gonna be tough and it looks like it's all going to be sort of decided by the suburbs. I think am I right on that? Like you said you know not everyone is firmly entrenched but basically in the broad strokes you know the urban areas are generally blue. Rural areas are generally red but I think it's the suburbs where there's sort of this mix of people that are maybe you know more red on economics but you know you start banning abortions and a lot of people in the suburbs are like hey this is not what I signed up for when I voted for a Republican.
I voted for lower taxes and you know I didn't vote for a 10 year old girl who was raped to be told she has to carry that baby to term or she has to be spirited away to another state like that's not what I want. So I do think that you know a lot of this is going to be decided in the suburbs and there were some other special elections in the recent past that the Dems didn't win in suburban areas in like I think it was Minnesota and a couple other places but they outperformed Biden. I think the suburbs are going to be interesting in these upcoming new terms. Now Molly please tell me why I'm wrong.
I'm not going to argue with you about that. I would just say that I think that Biden is not tied to candidates the way Trump is tied to candidates. So one of the things that Biden White has has done intentionally or not intentionally is that they don't demand fealty and so Biden can have a lower approval rating and still candidates like John Faderman can run 10 15 points ahead of him which is good and it's very good when you have a president who has a lower approval rating. I mean right now he's at Reagan which is better than what he was before.
I do think it's interesting that you have the converse with Donald J Trump which is that you cannot be a Republican candidate without swearing fealty to him and ergo that's going to be a big bucking problem for these people because remember Glenn Yunken won by pretending not to be Trumpy and you're going to have a situation where you have these people who have just you know weeks ago been like every woman should be forced to carry a baby until 5,000 weeks and we should not teach anything in schools and we should jail all Mexicans to now those people have to appeal to normal more moderate financially you know fiscally conservative but socially liberal suburban women who are like what the fuck is happening here and so yeah I think that's going to be a problem. I hope it's going to be a problem because quite a lot rides on that. No I think you're exactly right and it's you know the Republican party right now as you know we've said and everyone has said it's a cult and it's a Trump cult and the Democratic party for all its many many flaws is not a Biden cult. I mean I cannot imagine Joe Biden leading a cult and that's a good thing.
I don't want a cult leader running a political party and it sucks that that's happening on the Republican side but I think you're right and there's like there's really no way for candidates like Oz and Masters and JD Vance to untether themselves from all the stuff you just mentioned it's too late and no one you know they've picked their horse and you know in JD Vance's case he like like they made up these personas and that's what they're stuck with now and you know we'll see what happens but right now it's not looking good for Oz it's not looking good for Blake Masters in Arizona it's not looking particularly good for JD Vance I don't think in Ohio and or it's at least within the border line there it's you know close to the margin of error and I think you're right I think I think there is a decent chance that they are being tied to Trump which is sort of what the RNC didn't want and you know we've seen stories bubbling up about how they didn't want Trump to declare for the presidency before the midterms and a bunch of other things because they don't want candidates to be tied to him but they are being tied to him in most cases they've tied themselves to him right it doesn't even matter what he does like they got so the RNC got so invested in stopping Trump from doing things they forgot to tell their own candidates not to sort of to self-identify as Trump cultists yeah I hope you're right and you know I hope we're both right and I hope that that turns out to be a negative for the Republicans I still don't think the Dems can hold on to the House but I would love to be wrong believe me I would be the first person in line to shout yay if I'm wrong about that my favorite thing though I have to say is Trump fighting with McConnell because what you really want in the run up to a midterm election is the head of your party fighting with your Senate minority leader that is the thing like ronda mcdaniels is in her room weeping into her pillow mitch mcconnell is not in opposition leader he's a pawn for the democrats to get whatever they want mitch mcconnell is a broken down hack politician so I mean I have to say like trump versus mcconnell into the midterms mwah I love it nothing is more fun than trump and mcconnell feuding mcconnell's been pretty you know he's been out basically saying that the Republican senator senator candidates aren't their best on the other hand he is also throwing money at us and also to advance and dance right but I guess he has no choice you know he's sort of stuck with the with the hand that's been dealt looking you know mcconnell's not wrong and mcconnell is bad he's a bad guy and we all know that and more than that he bears the blame for the current Supreme Court makeup I think oh yeah he is a legitimate politician like he knows how things work in a way that Donald trump just doesn't and he knows that running these guys there's a very good chance that this is going to cost the republicans what looked like was going to be a senate majority after the midterms and that's not such a short thing anymore and the senate I would not be surprised if the democrats kept the 50 seats you know who kept the narrow majority and mcconnell knows this and he knows exactly why he knows it's because the republicans nominated people like us and masters and vans and and people like that so he's out there for once in his life he's speaking the truth and so obviously trump doesn't like that and those are all his guys you know those are all his guys he's talking about so this is a straight up mcconnell trump fight and it's the internet meme of the guy staring at the windows saying yes ha ha let them fight let them fight yes because it's just sickos sickos yeah love to see it dahlia lithwick writes about the courts of law for slate and hosts the podcast abacus is the author of the upcoming book lady justice welcome to new web normal thank you for having me it's a real honor and a treat well the feeling is mutual we have a lot to talk about but I think of you as a court person among other things and so I wanted to first start by talking about jobs because like it feels like finally it feels to in my mind like the pundit world has finally caught up with the rest of the world on dabs which is like holy shit this was a big fucking deal yes this was a big deal and it wasn't the narrative wasn't hey this will really goose the vote in november the narrative is like people will die yeah yeah I agree when dabs happened I mean you have a long history of you know being a court person were you just shocked that it actually happened I've gotten to the point molly where my answer to that is that like shanfreude is not nearly as satisfying as I thought it would be like the 14 seconds that I got to just like sit in the smug satisfaction of I told you this was coming wasn't nearly as nourishing as I believed it to be I think most court watchers would have told you and probably did tell you that after SB8 happened in texas on the shadow docket in the september before that was the so-called vigilante bill that allowed people to collect 10 000 bounties if they civilly sued anyone in texas who had an abortion and the supreme court was like oh this is so complicated I guess we'll let it go into law and then they heard it again and they said oh it's so complicated I guess we'll let it go into law and then you know we had the oral arguments and dabs it was very clear from the arguments and dabs that john roberts was alone trying to kind of forge a compromise position that there were gonna be five votes for overturning row and then in case you missed all those you know road signs there was the league so I think we all knew it was coming I think I guess what I can say surprise me was that in light of the league in light of justice elio's massive fact-checking history checking actual historians saying like maybe don't like cite the witchburner he changed nothing he changed nothing in the opinion or virtually nothing other than to you know take some pokes at the dissenters and some of the concurrences and so I guess I was only surprised by the meta picture which is that the court given ample opportunity to pump the breaks if not just on you know this wholesale reversal of roe and imperiling the lives of women and writing an opinion that didn't seem to give a damn about women none of that no no pumping of breaks and in fact I think hitting the accelerator and just the utter lack of regard for the outcry that as you say I think the pundits were missing all year but that was happening on the ground I think that surprised me that the court didn't look around and say maybe it would be better for our legitimacy not to be you know cruel and vicious yeah it's so interesting to me because the reason why they passed roe in such a broad way back in 1973 almost 50 years ago was really because you had these doctors who didn't want to operate on patience or even treat them because they didn't want to go to jail and you're seeing exactly the same thing which I think is so interesting because it's like none of us I mean even I who wrote like five million pieces on abortion I didn't see that this was actually gonna ultimately be these doctors who refused to treat as like the thing that really moves the needle but it's interesting now to see like a new court season coming up soon and they have a whole docket of ways they want to remake the world again they're these partisans and they're killing their party I mean isn't that sort of interesting it is I guess I would say just to your first point it's really really interesting that you know both Justice Alito promising us in the majority in Dobbs that oh we're returning this back to the states right and now all controversy and then the just incredible fatuous attempt to make that same point by Brett Kavanaugh who you know assures us we will all sleep easier at night post Dobbs and then just in the last you know two days we've seen Idaho and Texas come out with these which is totally clashing rulings about the exact issue you just described which is you know the Biden HHS issued this guidance under M. Tala you know this emergency medical treatment act that said that essentially ERs cannot refuse if they take Medicare money to provide stabilizing treatment and now we've got doctors who are like I have someone with sepsis you know I have someone who is bleeding out I have a nic topic pregnancy but they're still a heartbeat and as you're saying these are physicians who at least theoretically are there to provide emergency care who are going to lose licensure or be sued by some lunatic who wants a bounty and so I think just in the last two days we've seen Idaho and Texas come to vastly different conclusions on whether the states can just essentially eviscerate a federal statute and that's going to go to the court I suspect we're going to see that on the shadow docket in the next couple of months the court's going to have to resolve that but to your larger point and I think this is really you know the guts of it for me is that the same court that has worked to open the floodgates for dark money right in Citizens United and that has restricted the vote in Shelby County and restricted it again in Bernovich and done everything they can to sort of choke off democratic processes is going to do it again big time I think with this independent state legislature case which we can talk about it or not but this is an absolutely existential case about voting and how we vote and I think that your larger point is exactly right which is how does a court that has 30% approval ratings pass these crazy crazy sweeping sweeping doctrinal changes whether it's abortion or guns or voting or you know vivisecting the EPA all the stuff they do that the public freaking hates like by huge margins and then turn around and say to us it's just as just as Alito said in Dobbs well if you don't like it vote well and they don't like it and they are voting and they hate it and I think that that we just need to be very very clear that the kind of perpetrators of the crime are also the beneficiaries of the crime here and that it's really really dispiriting and cynical I think in the extreme when Justice Alito says if you don't like it vote when he has devoted his career as has so much of this super majority to making voting harder and harder but I do think ultimately what they're seeing at least so far and again we're not psychics and if anything we've learned that when pundits try to predict the future it's really ugly is that they people don't like it and they will vote and if Democrats manage to eke out keeping the house and the Senate they're gonna have to fucking fix the court because that's why they will have been given that power that's exactly right and it's exactly why I started where I started which is if we had been having this conversation one year ago right before SB8 was blessed in Texas I would have said to you the conventional wisdom among court watchers is that yes you get a lifetime appointment and yes you can't be removed unless you commit high crimes and misdemeanors and even then right and as a consequence the court is exquisitely attuned to public opinion because the only power they have right this goes back to the federalist papers is public legitimacy and I always would have said in the face of absolutely just you know cratering cratering public support for the institution and by the way like leaks and death threats to the justices that the justices would tend to kind of rain it in and at least pretend like they care and the shock to me this year and this is you know we could just call this the Clarence Thomas and Jenny Thomas portion of the show but they give me the opportunity to rain it in they just double down and my friend Leah Lippen from the scrutiny podcast called this the hashtag yellow court because they're just all in for everything and they don't care how bad it looks and so I think you're really correct descriptively to say the only check them on that it isn't protest right it isn't even voting because they're making it order to vote the only check has to be massive structural court reform the kind of stuff we have refused to talk about for decades and I think the kind of stuff by the way that the Biden commission like was like oh someone should do something about this but not us I think like at this point right they have to talk about term limits and jurisdiction stripping and adding seats and all that stuff yeah and again we don't know but if they manage to keep the house and the Senate Biden is going to be really miserable because he's going to have to do something because the people will have given him a mandate and he will not want to and so it will be a weirdly uncomfortable and horrible position for him to be in but he won't be able to keep power unless he doesn't I think that's right and I also think and this is again what you're going to start to see in this Idaho versus Texas Smackdown about how you enforce you know on the one hand these just like vicious state trigger laws on abortion and how you kind of balance that against you know a federal HHS mandate to treat patients in the emergency room and I think you're going to see just further fracturing of blue state law and red state law and we're already seeing you know that in red states we've got prosecutors who are refusing to prosecute you know folks who are involved in abortion providing I mean I just think that the nullification that you're going to see on the grounds in the states is so on the one hand none of this gets solved by anything that the Supreme Court can do we've got the Supreme Court just saying you know I think at every level last year so many of the cases you know that we haven't talked much about the the gun case uh... brewing but like I just read brewing as a license for vigilantism and a license for the idea that you can just walk around with your gun on the New York City subway shooting people because Justice Alito thinks that makes you safe and so I think one of the things that I think Biden has to think about you know when he gets the house in the Senate and it's like we should just flag this because it's interesting the number one concern we're hearing this week are like democracy and violence concerns like over the economy and I think one of the things that the court has on loose is this kind of choose your own ending legal structure where the states can do what they want and I think that that's really something that the administration the House and the Senate need to think about how to reign in vigilantism. Can we talk about the National Archives?
I want to have a long conversation with you about states right whatever I'm not going to do it because Jesse will come in. Can we talk about the National Archives? We can! I'm a little worried about the nature of this relationship but yes we can!
It's interesting because there's so many people coming after Trump it's hard for his people to defend him because all they want is this narrative that Biden is going after Trump and there's so many different elements that are going actually going after Trump. Can we talk about that? Yeah I mean there's something sort of uniquely and beautifully American about the fact that the hero this week is the like National Archivist, Deborah Wall, right? Like in the end of the day it's a librarian that's like speaking it to Trump but I think that's right I mean I think for all the ways in which they tried to turn the Mar-a-Lago search into a referendum on you know defunding the FBI and the deep state.
Once you've got the National Archives involved it just doesn't look quite as deep stated it looks like the dorks are on the ramparts so bless the archivists wherever we find them. And she's been looking for these papers for a long time. Right and I guess we should also just talk about how it's a Trump person who leaks this like the letter from Deborah Wall that gets you know two Trump's attorney who's trying to just like resolve this quietly and discretely in the face of just flagrant flagrant like lies from Trump and like claims that you know by his lawyers that now you've got everything and she's still trying to sort of like tidally and without drama get this resolved and the Trump response is we should leak this because it's gonna make Trump look better. So yeah I mean I think that that in some sense what you're saying is true which is this is part of the walls closing in right it isn't just the FBI it isn't just Merrick Garland.
Now we've got you know a long long long effort on the part of the archives to get these documents which you know we should be cleared like top secret unbelievably classified you know we're hearing now from the New York Times and the Washington Post that some of the secrets that have been exposed are just unbelievably existential so this isn't like you know he took some stamps and ashtrays and like Bobblehead he just really has imperiled national security and that you know I think that the narrative that has come out is that at every turn giving the opportunity to comply they just like wave their hands like Will Ferrell and didn't comply and now you know here we are and so it's really really I don't see any way that this is good for Trump and at the same time I guess you know that because you're the cynical too what reality dictates doesn't always matter they just double down on whatever bonkers thing they're saying and you know millions of people believe them so I guess what I'm saying is if we look at this like rational people this is incredibly damning the events of this week not to mention the Bill Barlet or that we just saw but whether it has any actual salience for a population that is probably willing to stay well those are going to start part of the you know deep state too I don't know it is so interesting that we are in a situation where the Trump whatever it is the campaign mechanism that continues has decided that they're just going to leak everything right from the FBI agents names who searched Mar-a-Lago that was in Breitbart to the you know they just decided they're just going to you know whatever they leak is going to make them look good I mean John Solomon published that letter which also I mean they I feel like they leaked the stuff before reading it I think it's that and I think I'm going to say disparagingly that it a little bit is also that vigilante point that I think that there is I wrote a just a like despondent piece at the end of last week about there is a way in which this is just classic stochastic terror right this is classic you know get the names of the FBI agents out there get the name of the archivist out there make sure that the judge who signed the warrant you know can't go to Friday night services at his synagogue and I think that there is undergirding this a real call back to what we saw around January 6 which is you know if we can terrorize the Ruby Freeman's of the world if we can terrorize the Brad Raffensburgers of the world we can effectuate what we want through like violence and intimidation and I don't say that with any joy but I do think that sometimes when I ask myself you know what is the strategy here because like you say it makes no sense for their side to be leaking things that damn their side I often think the strategy is rile up you know people who are already scared and angry and predisposed to believe conspiracies so that somebody does something violent I hope I'm wrong but it just feels like sometimes all roads lead there I mean again I don't mean to like think this through but when domestic terrorism be bad not to go out on a limb here bad in that it kills people also bad in that it's actually bad for the people who encourage it ultimately you know you would think so and I love I don't mean to think this through here that should be your album but like I think that like when I try to sort through January 6 and all the ways in which domestic terror not only was so bad but like quite literally imperiled the life of the vice president and Charlie and and and who's office did we see yesterday that they were in it romney I mean Nancy Pelosi I mean everybody yeah it's crazy and so I think again as a tactical matter does it make sense to be such an nihilist that you want to bring the country to its knees no because you and I think rationally it does no good in the world to have a bunch of vigilantes running around enforcing what they think the law is but look at you know the resignations mass resignations of you know nonpartisan election officials because they're terrified look at the mass resignations of school teachers because they're terrified look at the mass departure from health care because people were terrorized I mean I do think that in some very very scary authoritarian world view having everybody afraid to show up and do their jobs to vote to provide provide services is kind of the end game and I hate saying it because it's so grim but I think that if that kind of Steve Bannon type of high-level chaos really does serve your long-term goals which is just destabilized everything it makes a kind of dark certain kind of sense oh thank you dahlia please come back you will never invite me to your party again I would love to come back I would love to come back Max Fisher writes the interpreter for the New York Times is the author of the chaos machine the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world welcome Max Fisher thank you so much for having me I'm really excited to be chatting with you we're excited to have you the chaos machine the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world I'm worried that I have that that my brain has been so rewired that I can no longer focus oh absolutely yeah okay there's a reasonably good chance if you are listening to this podcast you're probably spending enough time on social media which is to say any virtually any at all on a regular basis that it is it is destroying you in ways that you are probably not quite aware of in addition to the ways that you are aware of there's no question I think that I'd like to add that if you're listening to this on one and a half time which I am very guilty of you're even worse off so explain to us a little bit about your theory here so the the book for me really started with a question that I think a lot of us had and I know that I had coming out of the 2016 election when there was this sense that social media played some kind of role in the Trump phenomenon and maybe something that went beyond like just the kind of the Russians on the platform or Breitbart News is on there or you know sometimes your aunt might post some memes about politics that turn out to be correct but there was some deeper influence happening and that if you're on it you feel angrier you feel a little bit more polarized people on it seem to have a more tenuous grasp on the truth and presumably this is having some sort of effect on our politics and society but nobody's really sure what that was and it was something that I didn't really consider my remit because I break within your times in the national section and I cover mostly conflicts and global politics and things like that but it was something that I started really thinking about like a year into his presidency first of all because these manifestations of social media weirdness kept popping up like that you know of course you remember Charlottesville riots which seemed again like something that emerged out of social media but it wasn't quite what but then also the genocide in Myanmar which I don't know if people remember was this just explosion of communal violence but it was something that Facebook systems had played such an aggressive role in spinning up racial hatred and conspiracy theories that even the United Nations accused the platform of playing a called a determining role in the genocide which at that point it sounded you know crazy there a social network could be driving an entire country into this level of violence and everything I was thinking a lot about because I was traveling around a lot of that time and I kept hearing these stories everywhere I went that sounded a lot like social media's role in American politics or its role in Myanmar or maybe a little bit of both and suggested that maybe they weren't actually so different you know it would be like a village in Sri Lanka that hit suddenly burst into violence or a conspiracy theory that was whipping through schools in Germany and simply making all the parents crazy and it just felt so uncanny how it was the same pattern over and over again but no one really understood what was connecting it or how how could a social media website just a little app on your phone actually be doing all of this anyway and that was when I started this now four or five year project to answer this question of what does social media actually do to us what does it do to us as individuals what is it due to our behavior and our cognition and what does that mean when you pull it out to a grand scale to our politics and society and it was something that I investigated or tried to investigate as best I could by you know traveling around to all these different places and countries where these things are happening to try to tell the stories of individuals who were grappling with radicalization misinformation communities that were trying to provide a parallel to it the part of the story that felt really important to me was to basically try to understand and nail down the science of social media's effect on us and that meant spending a lot of time and this was really fascinating I really enjoyed this part of it a lot of time with neuroscientists who were tracking social media's effect on our brain behavior psychologists who were tracking how it affects our sense of right and wrong and how that might work evolutionary biologists who were kind of talking about you know how the human animal developed in these ways that had these kind of cognitive shortcuts in it that social media learned how to exploit and turn against us political scientists network analysts and even a lot of dissidents and whistleblowers within Silicon Valley and within these companies themselves and that brought me around to finally pulling together with a lot of their help what I hope is the kind of first fully comprehensive and rigorous and scientific assessment of how social media has changed us in the world and where that's taking us. I want to go back to the Myanmar question can you just talk a little bit more about that for our listeners? The first time I went to Myanmar was in 2014 when the country was just opening up and you could not find a smartphone I mean literally was this authoritarian military dictatorship and SIM cards were basically illegal you could get them but they were many thousands of dollars in Myanmar's a very poor country in Southeast Asia so nobody could afford them. There were really nothing in the way of personal computers no ETMs and then as a result of this opening up process which was driven partly by the Obama administration the country was democratized you could also Silicon Valley played a huge role in Eric Shiffr Google was one of the first people to kind of be on the ground and saying that by bringing Google and Facebook and Twitter to the country it was going to kind of cement its opening as liberal democracy and be the kind of testing ground for Silicon Valley's dream of wiring everyone through this enlightened totally free digital ecosystem and it was going to be so great for Myanmar in this free society and then I went back three years later and it was not how it turned out the entire country was wired to Facebook I mean everywhere you went people would have a smartphone there have their nose and it people spent hours a day on Facebook as well as on Twitter and some of the other platforms and WhatsApp but it was Facebook that had completely dominated the media ecosystem it had dominated the way that people message with and therefore relate to one another I mean interpersonal relationships which is something that maybe an American listener can identify with as well and it done this through this thing called zero rating where they basically offer their service functionally for free in a country where cellular data is otherwise prohibitively expensive so just completely captured this market and the effect of taking an entire country and suddenly plugging it into Facebook writing the entire society through this platform ended up becoming this kind of horrifying experiment in what actually happens and changes and there were a few changes again I think all of which will actually sound really familiar to an American one was that hardline extremist voices who had had maybe some kind of reach but just within their kind of narrow niche suddenly became like the biggest voices and the biggest media platforms in this country would be like you know the song with a lot of me and my suddenly became the New York Times CNN and every YouTube influencer wrapped into one because the platform found that is supposed to really engaging pushed him out to tons of people misinformation especially ones that tapped into this kind of simmering pre-existing racial resentment which just run rampant because the algorithms on Facebook knew that if you put this in front of people it would tap into something in their brains that would just be irresistible and they would share it shared shared and that would make it feel true to everybody else because it seems like there's this great consensus of the country's Muslim minority this group called the Ranger are out to get us and this built up over a few years despite repeated calls from rights groups in the country some of whom visited Facebook's headquarters in California to say please please shut down or at least slow down your algorithm or at least moderate the platform better because it's going to cause a genocide and in fact before the genocide started in 2015 the platform had spun up a few really horrific mob incidents riots that look actually much respect a lot like what happened in Charlottesville but of course Facebook if they did anything at all it was not something that was evident to any of the rights groups who were tracking this in the country and through a number of forces not just Facebook's fault but also the military trying to stir things up also some pre-existing violence between a couple of minority groups on the country and this spun up into just all against all communal genocide that drove the bulk of this pretty significant minority group basically out of the country in this really horrifying orgy of violence and throughout all of this Facebook just refused to shut the platform down there was this moment that really sticks with me where a reporter asked Adam Osary who at that point was the head of Facebook's News Feed which is like the most important part of the platform it decides what you see and what you don't see why don't you just shut down the platform in Myanmar until you can sort this out and until you're not maybe potentially driving a genocide that is seeing whole villages raised and Misary responded that he thought the platform was doing too much good in Myanmar to shut it down which just really said it all to me I thought yeah I mean I have to say like every time you know we interview five million people a week for this podcast anytime I have anyone on about social media the first thing they tell me is some horrendous story about Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook doing something just beyond the pale like you know I had known I mean in Myanmar actually the Rohingya are suing Facebook right yeah there's an attempt to bring some kind of liability I don't know what kind of prospects it has but yes I mean the UN saying Facebook did this is helping their case for sure yeah I mean I just it's such an incredibly you know what I grew up I mean I don't know maybe we're the same age if you're younger than we are then we hate you but how old are you 37 great all right that's okay but you know I grew up with like you know Exxon as the evil company that was ruining the world you know and and it really seems like that it shifted to Facebook so talk to us more about the book though what really surprised you I'll tell you but I think that Exxon comparison is actually a really interesting one that speaks to one of the examples that I'll give you because I mean first of all these size of these companies it's a little staggering and it's easy to kind of lose sight of how big they are but I think the big ones are still even after their difficulties financially the last year are still multiples larger than ExxonMobil than the world's largest oil company in terms of the market capitalization and the effect that oil companies have is really significant but it's unless you're in a place like in Indonesia where their oil companies trying to you know push a village off their land the effect is mostly kind of environmental and I mean literally in the sense that it's climate change but also environmental in the sense that it kind of drifts into you from the outside world but these platforms are they're in your life they are mediating in ways that the companies and the platforms try to make invisible they don't want you to see it but they are mediating your relationship to the outside world to news and information to your peers and your friends and even and maybe most powerfully to your own identity and that that is what I think makes it so important to understand the incredible influence they will then I'll give you like you asked an example that the automated systems let me put it this way you think when you open up your Facebook video Twitter feed that you are seeing what your friends or colleagues or your family members are saying and thinking but that's not true because that your network produces far more content that you could see and also the platforms increasingly pull in lots of content from people outside of your network so what you're really seeing is traces made by automated systems by what we kind of shorthand as the algorithm even though in some ways it's much more complex and it's bigger than that that choose what we see that choose what goes viral doesn't go viral it choose that present to us and these turn up to be this was something that I was really struck by talking especially to the scientists who researched this that these algorithms turn out to basically be the most powerful experiment ever designed at doing what social scientists do at identifying our instincts at identifying how we really work because they iterate billions and billions of times but they're not they're not just an experiment they're also trying to to surface and to exaggerate beyond what is possible in the offline world the instincts and the impulses that will get us to not just roll not just to spend a lot of time online but to keep posting more and more ourselves because that feeds the beast it hooks in other users and it further exacts evades the platforms effects and communities a whole bit kind of filtering those tendencies through one another and there's one example of it I think of a lot because I think it's one that is really significant but I don't know it's actually been reported before it appeared in the book and it's something that will not immediately sound relevant to America unless just by promise it hits home really really hard really quickly so in Indonesia and this big country and Southeast Asia that I reported a long time ago there was this incident where seven villages in different parts of the country with no connection with another whatsoever all simultaneously rose up in this spontaneous mob violence always against some innocent guy from another village who just happened to be traveling through and lunched and killed him and I was looking into this when this happened in early 2018 working with an Indonesian woman activist who had been tracking this as it was happening and it turned out that in every case it traced back to a single viral rumor that appeared on Facebook and what's happened between the two platforms and that rumor had initially come from this really small account with neural audience, no reach but the platform had picked it up identified it correctly and with almost this like spooky level of precision that it would be just freakishly engaging to people by hitting on exactly the kinds of conspiracy and identity panic and call to collective outrage that we now know from a lot of research are what best drive engagement on the platforms and so these systems automated systems with Facebook had pushed this conspiracy out to so many users so aggressively and so quickly and in a way that was designed to so powerfully hook into those users instincts for collective action because that's what the platform wants us to act by posting and response to things that users in those seven villages all rose up into violence at once and a few months after this I went to Facebook to interview a bunch of their senior people for a different unrelated story and in a meeting with a couple of the folks at Facebook who are meant to lead the response to exactly the sort of re-world crisis I told about and not even to ask about it as a reporter but just you know one person to another hey you should know about this they seem really significant and you were in a position to do something about it so I'm passing it along and they just kind of shrugged and said okay and didn't ask any follow-ups didn't ask the names of the places the woman who identified it and said oh I hope someone looks into that one day and here's the part where I bring it back around to what was relevant to the rest of us the rumor that had caused all of this chaos is something that is going to sound familiar claimed that a shadowy group of elites were in league with minorities to kidnap kids and to harvest their organs and their blood and the reason that might sound familiar is that a few months later the same rumor got promoted in america facebook and youtube as qunon and around the same time just before it became really big as qunon I have found an identical rumor or nearly identical being pushed by the platform and a few other countries around the same two and it was this weird thing that the system was so smart and so powerful that it converged on this one particular combination of words as something that was going to electrify users so much and pull them into the platform so much that we do what facebook wanted and what youtube wanted which is to get them to spend a lot of time online but that also had these really horrendous consequences for the rest of it and I also think about this story a lot because it's a reminder not just of the power that these systems can be held over us which is easily to lose sight of that it's not like reading a headline it really does have an effect because it's participatory because it's social and communal but also because there's no one at the wheel there was no one at facebook headquarters who plugged this into the system and said please do a qunon in every country it was just these systems that are automated that kind of run out on their own to figure out what's going to look us in and then do it and then maybe someone catches it on the back end or maybe not or in this case someone did catch it but nobody cared enough to stop it and they don't care because it's helping the business so facebook is basically where qunon began facebook was an important vector for it to kind of blow it out but it really started yon forchan and han yeah which i spent a decent amount of time on forchan and han and a couple of the other like old style social networks in the book because i think it's important to understand that they we don't think about them a lot because they're not the companies some of them don't even make any money they don't feel like these huge forces in our lives but they're still out there they're still driving a lot of the you know what we call internet culture that then gets yeah exactly and it gets filtered up into the bigger platforms and also wanted to spend time on them to show that obviously i just told a long story about the power and importance of algorithms but a lot of the most powerful and affecting and significant things that facebook do or not just facebook i'm sorry but social platforms as a whole do come from much simpler mechanisms that you can find on a reddit or forchan where it's you know uploading and huge numbers or posting things anonymously is facebook the most evil of the platforms it sure sounds like it i mean if the big platforms forchan and han are obviously the really evil platforms but so i'm going to give you a wheezely answer sticking to i tried to make every claim in the book really rooted in rigor and empiricism there's you know three trillion footnotes at the end of it most evil is something that i don't feel i can assess empirically but i will say that even though i know i've talked a lot about facebook today that a very large number of the people who i spoke to who studied this and who are really deep into it including people in the valley which say you know facebook it's a lot of detention and it gets a lot of headlines but youtube's influence and their apparent disregard for the consequences arguably go far far beyond facebook even it is not always as immediately apparent i felt it was important because of that it's been a really big chunk on youtube's influence and and the ways that it is driving a lot of things that we might not even immediately think of is coming from social media mx youtube itself thank you so much max andy lee v molly young fest incredible incredible week of fuck that guy is um who is your fuck that guy yeah you're right it was not an easy call this week i'm gonna go with i don't know if you heard about this there was a thing where the fbi went into a place called marlago in florida that is a trumpman property and they recovered a bunch of documents that apparently the former president took with him when he left the white house even though he shouldn't have and they've been sort of all over the place with excuses for this one of them is that you know and the ultimate excuse for trump is that their mind their mind because he's a five-year-old and now some emails have come out to show that his trump's own lawyers agreed that the files needed to be returned this is uh pacipaloni who was uh one of those white house counsel to the former president said that he agreed with an email that he received from the uh national archives of record administration that these documents should be returned to the government so you've got the white house counsel saying yeah these are not his property they should be returned but you know trump don't care and he's gonna keep going on this and there's i've lost track of the number of different excuses they've given for having these documents up and to including you know nuclear stuff he talks about how this is all political plot against him and all of this and now we've got emails from his own attorney saying that yeah you're right these these documents should be returned so the fact that here is not pacipaloni but is of course the former president of the united states not the current president of the united states donald j drumph that's right i called him drumph i'll go there i'll go all right you want to know who my fuck that guy is please i don't know if you know this but i'm old enough to remember when he was known as client number three i'm not that old so i don't remember please shawn hanniday oh a microcoan client for his uh rental properties using the word rental properties because i don't want to get sued by shawn hanniday shawn hanniday very mad one of the things i love about him is that he'll get so mad like he's like a little you know he's like a little doll he gets furious i guess dolls don't really get furious but shawn hannity very mad i don't know if you know this but john fetterman said he's a big liar which he is it's kind of the brand of the fox news opinion host john hannity said he's gonna sue john fetterman good luck enjoy is one of my children says let's go does one of your children really say that yes but ironically and i can't wait till you have children and yeah i'm coming to the podcast that is funny yeah i uh am not really clear other than hannity saying he may be hearing from my lawyers very shortly i'm not really clear about what he's upset with the weird thing to me is this is such a conservative mindset thing hannity is mad that fetterman won't debate him you're not running for office john fetterman it's not fetterman's job to debate you but you know what i would like to say i think fetterman would crush of course you should hannity is a real fucking idiot not a question but just the other like this privilege and just like how dare this man not come on my show as if that's part of his job no fuck that guy on that note we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from the daily beast in future episodes we'll be talking to smart folks from the daily beast and beyond from media culture politics and science will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world we hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again in the next episode want more great listens check out our comedy podcast the last laugh and our star started the daily beast podcast at the daily beast dot com slash podcast if you enjoyed this episode consider becoming a daily beast subscriber subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcast as we cover what might become the darkest timeline head to the daily beast dot com 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