Episode 1155 - Bad Internet w/ Matt Furie, Arthur Jones & Andrew Marantz
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucktologists what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast wtf welcome how's it going with you are you cooking have you locked your kids in a room what's happening
Marc:Are you cleaning up?
Marc:Are you okay?
Marc:Are you gardening?
Marc:Does this help you garden?
Marc:I need to get some shit done in my beds.
Marc:It doesn't matter.
Marc:None of it fucking matters.
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:What is happening?
Marc:You want me to tell you who's on the show?
Marc:Let me do this.
Marc:And then I'll weave the tapestry.
Marc:if it's possible, if I can riff it.
Marc:But this is a unique show.
Marc:It's a different type of show.
Marc:We do these shows just exploring a certain subject with people who can.
Marc:That is the kind of show we have today, and it's a good one.
Marc:Let's start here in that it's Labor Day.
Marc:And one year ago today, last Labor Day,
Marc:We had Dale Baran on the show.
Marc:He wrote a book called It Came From Something Awful, which was about his time engaging with the online world that actually became the alt-right.
Marc:Now, I'm always a little late to the game.
Marc:I don't know where everyone else gets their information.
Marc:I'm not always on the pulse.
Marc:I remember during the lead-up to the 2016 election, seeing these hashtags, MAGA, MAGA2016.
Marc:I didn't know what MAGA was, and then I started noticing this frog...
Marc:was in a lot of different iterations, was showing up in these tweets.
Marc:And I was like, is this a fun thing?
Marc:Is it a fun thing?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:What's MAGA?
Marc:And is the frog fun?
Marc:Well, Pepe the Frog was actually, I don't know if he was fun, but he was casual.
Marc:He was not loaded up.
Marc:He was not political.
Marc:He was sort of laid back in his inception.
Marc:And Pepe was involved in what Dale Baran was talking about a year ago, namely memes and shit posting on message boards getting turned into the language and organizing principle of the racist neo-Nazi movement.
Marc:And they appropriated Pepe.
Marc:Pepe was the creation of a guy named Matt Fury.
Marc:You can get the original Pepe books.
Marc:It was a panel that was in some sort of rag up in the Bay Area.
Marc:But there's a full book from Fantagraphics called Boys Club.
Marc:It just was reissued in a new edition from Fantagraphics books.
Marc:And it's got the original Pepe in it.
Marc:Before he was used as the mascot of the alt-right sort of neo-Nazi momentum online.
Marc:Now, when I talked to Dale Baran a year ago, he mentioned that there was a documentary being made about the creator of Pepe the Frog and how he was trying to reclaim Pepe.
Marc:So today I talked to that guy.
Marc:His name is Matt Fury.
Marc:The doc is called Feels Good Man.
Marc:The director, Arthur Jones, will be here as well.
Marc:And after I talked to them, I wanted to follow up on this trajectory of the alt-right and what happened with Pepe as and it was a precursor to what we're seeing now with QAnon.
Marc:So in order to sort of tackle that.
Marc:And contextualize it, I talked to Andrew Marantz.
Marc:He's a staff writer for The New Yorker, and he's been reporting on this stuff, the online subcultures, for years.
Marc:He actually wrote a book about it called Antisocial Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.
Marc:It's available now, but it comes out in the paper back September 15th.
Marc:So big show of stuff, all right?
Marc:I'm trying to deal, as we all are, and some days are better than others.
Marc:I feel like my grief is, I don't think it's being repressed, but maybe it is just a function.
Marc:But I reflect almost every day about my loss, about our loss.
Marc:in a broader sense.
Marc:And, you know, I reflect on my relationship every day.
Marc:A day doesn't go by where I don't think about the passing of my girlfriend and what led up to it.
Marc:And, you know, it's rough, but it's getting easier.
Marc:I talk to people.
Marc:I spend time with people.
Marc:I'm trying to
Marc:have a life, but it's a solitary life now, a bit.
Marc:You know, I am here at the house myself.
Marc:So I try, you know, I'm loading up my brain.
Marc:I'm figuring now it's time to read.
Marc:I haven't really been able to read with a lot of consistency since the grief, since the tragedy, since the horror.
Marc:Point is, I'm loading up.
Marc:What is it about?
Marc:Why is my brain doing that?
Marc:I'm listening to the jazz.
Marc:I'm reading about the jazz.
Marc:But here's the deal.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Look, I just feel like, what is the point?
Marc:But then I realized, like, I think if you're of my ilk and you're relatively smart, but maybe not a fully well-rounded intellectual of the academic sort, I mean, because most social and critical theory is for academics, for those within that world, or for students who don't understand it and won't understand it, no matter how much they pay attention in class, it's just going to be those two guys who smoke too much who are going to get it.
Marc:But I want to tackle it.
Marc:So why am I loading up, though?
Marc:Where are we going with this?
Marc:I think what's going to happen, I think what it is, we're going to watch all the Criterion movies we can.
Marc:We've been watching a lot of Cassavetes.
Marc:We're going to read up, maybe get into those philosophy books, maybe some poetry, kind of load up.
Marc:If these were your interests coming up, you have the time now, and maybe you'll hit the wall like I did, and it's time to start loading up.
Marc:Load up on the philosophy.
Marc:Load up on the poetry.
Marc:Load up on the movies.
Marc:Load up on the difficult music.
Marc:Load up on the cultural commentary and cultural criticism.
Marc:Fill it up, man.
Marc:Fill it all up.
Marc:Deal with mathematics if you want.
Marc:Deal with logic if you want.
Marc:Restart the fire in your brain.
Marc:that you were driving at when you gave up for something easier that would get you through life.
Marc:And once you load up, I think that the ultimate goal that we're working towards is that for those of us who want to load up, we're going to load up the brain, load up the heart.
Marc:And at that moment, that moment of catharsis,
Marc:If you want to call it that in these end times where we all can't breathe at the same time, when we all look up and see the flash, that final moment for those of us who are on the upper ground.
Marc:For some people, they're going to be in the basement.
Marc:They're going to be in the bunker.
Marc:They're going to be underground just by coincidence.
Marc:They might make it through.
Marc:But for the rest of us who are all going to die at the same time and whatever the cataclysm is unfolding in that moment, if you've done your homework and you've loaded up your brain, even though it seemed senseless in that moment, that flash of vaporization, we will all understand Charlie Kaufman's new movie.
Marc:I'm thinking of ending things.
Marc:That's when it'll make sense.
Marc:If you've done the proper homework at that final moment and it'll be a collective experience, those of us who are baffled, who are critical, who don't feel versed enough, if you do the proper loading of the brain at that moment of collective catharsis, that is the end of the species, we will all simultaneously understand I'm thinking of ending things.
Marc:And some will be saved.
Marc:Oddly, that prophecy might be true.
Marc:But the rest of us, those of us who did the homework, will understand that movie.
Marc:And then everybody else will be the meek and they'll have business to do.
Marc:Business.
Marc:Only a businessman can run a business into the ground.
Marc:You can have that one, Biden.
Marc:That's from my buddy Lipsight.
Marc:Lipsight and I were working it out, talking it through, figuring it out.
Marc:So here we go.
Marc:Let's get on with it.
Marc:Matt Fury and Arthur Jones.
Marc:Matt Fury is the subject.
Marc:Arthur is the director of this new documentary.
Marc:called Feels Good Man.
Marc:The subject is, as I said, Matt Fury and his creation, Pepe the Frog.
Marc:It's now available on most digital video on-demand platforms.
Marc:This is me talking to Matt Fury and Arthur Jones coming up.
Marc:So, look, I watched the movie a while back because Giorgio sent me a copy of it.
Marc:I'm glad you guys found a home for it.
Marc:Where is it going to?
Marc:Where did it end up?
Guest:Well, we're taking it out on our own in terms of VOD.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:So it's available for rental on September 4th.
Guest:And then it's going to be the season premiere of Independent Lens on PBS on October 19th.
Guest:Oh, that's nice.
Guest:Which is great.
Marc:So when I first started seeing Pepe the Frog around, it was late.
Marc:And I don't know the strip.
Marc:I don't know where the strip ran.
Marc:Matt, where was the original?
Marc:Was the strip actually called Boys Club?
Guest:Yeah, originally it was like a zine that I was just making for fun in San Francisco in the early 2000s.
Guest:So I just made a little zine and then it was kind of it just kind of was like in the small press kind of scene in San Francisco in like the early aughts.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:Like what's which small press over there?
Marc:Like it wasn't a last gasp thing?
Guest:No, it was called Buenaventura Press, and they were based out of Oakland.
Guest:And, you know, we would go to the L.A.
Guest:Comic Con in like 2006 and the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco, you know, in the early 2000s and stuff.
Guest:So I don't know.
Guest:It was just kind of a silly comic that I would try to kind of encapsulate my 20-something aimlessness into comic book form.
Marc:Your life experience living with a bunch of other dudes?
Marc:Yeah, pretty much.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My, um, you know, living in San Francisco, like post college, um, was kind of like a way to keep going to college, you know, cause it's kind of just a tight knit little sleepy town anyways.
Guest:And everybody kind of like lives up next to one, one another and we all just eat burritos and, you know, hang out and, uh, you know, just try to postpone adulthood as long as possible.
Marc:Oh, no, I did it.
Marc:I lived in San Francisco.
Marc:I was there 92 through 94, lived down on the mission.
Marc:And you really sort of you definitely got that feel that there are a lot of people that either came here after college or for college and just never really changed their clothes for a decade or so and just kind of hung out.
Guest:Yeah, you roll out of bed, get a burrito and hop on your bike and hang out with your friend.
Guest:It was cool.
Guest:And like the early 2000s, my partner was working at the Punchline San Francisco.
Guest:And so she's seen you perform there a number of times.
Guest:And, you know, I kind of was exposed to a lot of like stand up comedy back then.
Guest:She was a server?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah, she was.
Guest:She was, you know, she was a skinny, short haired girl that could carry a lot of glasses on one tray.
Guest:It's pretty impressive.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:So she had to deal with my contingent.
Marc:Indeed.
Marc:My community.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:She's probably got some stories to tell, I would imagine.
Guest:Well, yeah, she, you know, she just loved going out to, you know, they would go out to eat after the shows and stuff.
Guest:You know, she hung out with, like, Chris Garcia and Brent Weinbach and Shang Wang.
Marc:Oh, the nice guys.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So, yeah, the nice crew of comedians.
Guest:And then I got to meet them, too.
Marc:Those are good guys.
Marc:Yeah, Chris used to open for me a lot.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So, all right, let's get into this Pepe business.
Marc:So, the strip was really...
Marc:Like when I read that, cause I got the Fantagraphics book that, uh, I guess Eric put out, um, boys club, which is a, you know, it's a great book.
Marc:I guess it's all the, uh, the, the comics from that you did.
Marc:What'd you do them like weekly or did you do them?
Marc:The zine have like a, just a few of these panels in there per zine.
Marc:How many zines did you put out?
Guest:I did four zines total, and I did about one a year, and they had about 40 pages each.
Guest:So I wasn't very ambitious with the comic stuff.
Guest:It was just kind of more of a hobby.
Guest:So I aimed to do just one a year, which had about 40 gags in each issue.
Marc:Yeah, I like it.
Marc:And it's like primarily four characters and Pepe the Frog is one of them.
Marc:And they're sort of like living the life of a bunch of, yeah, like people like you.
Marc:But they're not.
Marc:One's a wolf guy and one's a frog and one's a kind of a, what is the other one?
Marc:Is it a rodent or a bear?
Marc:Is it a dog?
Yeah.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:They're kind of nondescript, like animal critters.
Guest:You know, it's kind of like, ironically, I was trying to kind of transcend, you know, race by just making kind of Muppety characters, and it ended up being what it is.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But I guess we can go to you, Arthur.
Marc:This is your first documentary.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I never thought I was going to necessarily make a film.
Guest:I come to this as a fan of Matt's comics.
Guest:I bought them in the late 2000s.
Guest:I'm a real obsessive collector of independent comics.
Guest:And I'd done some animated TV pitches.
Guest:I'd sold an idea to Comedy Central and Cartoon Network, and none of that stuff quite worked out.
Guest:So I'd been kind of on the very fringes of TV development.
Guest:Um, and Matt and I were kicking around ideas about maybe doing like a boys club cartoon together.
Guest:And we had like a couple of meetings in LA about that.
Guest:And, um, people are just obsessed with the story and the negative baggage surrounding Pepe.
Guest:And so after we had those meetings and nothing really came of those, I pitched Matt on the idea of doing a documentary and, um, he agreed to do it.
Guest:All right.
Guest:So wait, so you come down here and what year did you come down here to pitch?
Guest:Um,
Guest:Oh, when did we do that, Matt?
Guest:That was like 2017, like early 2017 we pitched.
Guest:You know, I've been living in L.A.
Guest:now for like seven or eight years.
Guest:I used to live in New York.
Marc:OK, so by that when you go out to pitch, Pepe the Frog has already been co-opted.
Marc:He's not the cute kind of doofus from Boys Club.
Marc:It was at the height of Pepe's Nazi identification.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you would go into these rooms with the sketches, with Matt's books, and people would be like, wait, isn't that the frog?
Marc:Isn't that the Nazi frog?
Guest:Well, I mean, people knew what they were getting into when they took the meeting.
Guest:I think they maybe didn't understand the breadth of exactly what was going on.
Guest:But we had like a pitch deck where we explained what the baggage of Pepe was.
Marc:But this was not about trying to excise Pepe.
Marc:Pepe from the baggage.
Marc:This was just like, yeah, I mean, we get it.
Marc:You know, it seems like a bunch of weirdos have co-opted the frog for their nefarious memeing.
Marc:But this is still a good story about these four.
Guest:No, we were acknowledging the current cultural moment.
Guest:Like, you know, you can't go out and just do a boys club comic without any acknowledgement of what was going on in the culture.
Marc:What was the pitch that Pepe in the boys club is struggling with his identity?
Guest:As whether...
Guest:Well, sure.
Guest:I mean, it's more complicated.
Guest:Well, what do you mean?
Guest:We wanted people to really understand that Pepe came from something.
Guest:He came from Boys Club and that there is a backstory to Pepe, that he wasn't something that was a meme.
Guest:and then kind of became co-opted and turned into propaganda, that there was a backstory.
Guest:And then we wanted the cartoon to basically tell this sort of Alice in Wonderland-style story where Pepe gets pulled out of the bubble of Boys Club, and he has to find his way back home.
Guest:And the things that he encounters along the way are all sorts of, you know, internet weirdness and nastiness.
Marc:Well, that's a great idea.
Guest:And he has to kind of fight for himself.
Guest:And no, you can sell it.
Guest:no no i don't know matt what's your take on it i don't know i don't even draw anymore i'm afraid i'm gonna come up with like the next character of like nambla or something or be like the the little the little baby lion to represent i don't know child abduction or something i don't know this this has stopped you from drawing this experience
Guest:I'm just kind of taking a break.
Guest:I'm just kind of I think I think it's a combination of all this stuff and the pandemic and California is on fire right now.
Guest:And I don't know, I just I'm losing my motivation to just be a creative person.
Guest:I just want to be a person.
Guest:So that's what's happening with me.
Marc:I hear you.
Marc:So you guys decided that you couldn't sell the thing, you know, with contextualizing Pepe into the narrative that he was in and also the narrative he came from.
Marc:So what was the decision making process around doing the doc?
Guest:My decision-making process around doing the doc was I felt like the story was really important.
Guest:I feel like the story of how social media has torn culture apart is the biggest story of our generation.
Guest:And I thought Pepe was a really unique case study to talk about that.
Guest:He's a case study that's really funny and weird.
Guest:And Matt is in a very relatable place.
Guest:There's been a lot of documentaries about the internet.
Guest:There's a lot of documentaries about...
Guest:economics of social media, but none of them feel like movies.
Guest:And I really could see when we were starting this process that this would make a really good movie.
Marc:Well, you were able to integrate like the, you know, the cartoon itself, do some animation and then tell the story of having something fairly innocuous and funny and innocent to a degree, you know, just be co-opted.
Marc:You know, I think also initially in a relatively innocent way,
Marc:And then it became malignant.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, I mean, one of the reasons that Pepe was so easily co-opted, first as a totally innocuous meme, something that was just like a funny reaction image, and then later it was weaponized politically, was
Guest:but was because people really didn't understand Matt's backstory.
Guest:They didn't understand boys club.
Guest:You know, there's a lot of cartoon characters that get appropriated in pretty nasty ways in the internet.
Guest:For instance, SpongeBob SquarePants gets Nazi-fied all the time.
Guest:He's like a sweet, innocent character and people love putting a Hitler mustache on him or whatever.
Guest:But whenever you see that, you know that that's a derivation of SpongeBob.
Guest:You're aware that there's a corporation that protects him.
Guest:And with Pepe, people didn't understand the backstory.
Guest:And so for the movie, you know, I loved Matt's comics.
Guest:And whenever I would see Pepe on the Internet, I would actually feel like a palpable sense of loss.
Guest:Like I would feel like, oh, Pepe's lost in the machine somewhere.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I felt like I maybe understood this story in kind of a unique way.
Guest:And so I was passionate about having people understand the context for the character.
Guest:And then, you know, also like I know you've talked about this in your podcast, Mark, but like I grew up in like the fog of conservative media.
Guest:My dad is basically just like lost to AM talk radio.
Guest:Like I grew up like in a small town, super conservative.
Guest:I felt like I had to like unred pill myself in like my late teens and early 20s.
Guest:And so as I sort of saw my dad move from like a like a Bob Dole social conservative into a Trumpy, I felt this sense of wanting to make a piece of art that was really about sort of the cultural moment that would like cut through the static and tell this larger story about where we're at.
Guest:And I felt like Pepe was an amazing vehicle for it.
Guest:I also I mean, I did want to help Matt.
Guest:And I think like, you know, I hope that this movie like is able to tell like a really story that's true to the core values of what Matt is a dude cares about.
Guest:And then also the original comics.
Marc:Well, Matt, what what when did you first realize that something was, you know, that that Pepe was in trouble?
Guest:Well, I mean, the interesting thing about Pepe is it's been like an Internet kind of meme phenomenon for way too long.
Guest:Like I think it kind of peaked in 2010.
Guest:It was like really popular with like little kids and stuff.
Guest:So I was actually pretty stoked about the whole Internet phenomenon.
Guest:I would get like emails from like kids that would, you know, they'd want to.
Guest:sports t-shirt with Pepe on it or like their their trombone club or their photography club and stuff like that and it was just really popular with kids and stuff and I think it's it's still weirdly popular with kids you know especially kids that kind of grew up with it as a more innocent internet meme thing like it's a big it means a lot
Guest:to them for some reason and I always like to gauge reality by a kid's reality more than an adult's kids are just much more open to cartoons and imagination and stuff like that and that's something that I've always been drawn to it didn't really get truly sensationalized until the election
Marc:In terms of like it becoming its meaning shifting where it became clearly identified with a political agenda.
Marc:And and am I wrong, Arthur, in saying that that happened sort of collectively with the it seems like although many of the the the young white dudes
Marc:who were passing around Pepe's image and meme on 4chan or through Reddit, that there was still like, it wasn't quite politicized until it seems that a lot of them were radicalized by older white nationalists.
Marc:Is that what happened?
Guest:Well, you know, it's a complicated story.
Guest:You know, the Internet doesn't sort of move in a straight line.
Guest:You know, there has always been kind of this meme on 4chan where they think it's funny to Nazi-fy things.
Guest:And that was something that had been kicking around for years on 4chan.
Guest:The real moment that Pepe kind of twisted and got weird in the mainstream press was in late September, early October of 2015.
Guest:And in a two-week period, things went really sideways for the character.
Guest:The first thing that happened was there was a school shooting in Oregon at the Umka Community College.
Guest:And the night before that shooting...
Guest:It's hard to prove for sure, but there was a 4chan post that was basically outlining how the shooting was going to go down, and it used an image of Pepe in a ski mask holding a gun.
Guest:Then two weeks later, two weeks after that, Donald Trump, which at that moment was like a laughable presidential candidate, retweeted himself as Pepe.
Guest:He retweeted an image of Pepe with his hair standing behind a podium.
Guest:and it was this weird moment of fracture in the zeitgeist where I was like, what do these two images have to do with each other?
Guest:That's kind of like in some ways the inciting incident for the film.
Marc:Yeah, I just think because it seems that there was the meme culture and using Pepe
Marc:fairly extensively again was um he he definitely represented something different even to those angry dudes uh before maybe the incidents that you're talking about i think what that is true i think that once you i think what we're talking about here is once they realized that this thing had power and traction and they could start sort of culture jamming real life
Marc:You know, with Pepe that, you know, they broaden the scope of the game, you know, the game of 4chan or the something awful board where everyone's trying to outgross each other out or or do whatever their games are playing within themselves.
Marc:I think that once, you know, the shooter thing happened and once Trump does it, they realize that they've got traction.
Marc:you know, in a broader sense.
Guest:And certainly the certainly the end game for any troll is to get some sort of validation, whether that's in the mainstream press or getting like an outsized reaction from whoever they're trying to like troll.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I'm just curious, how does it you know, what was the moment or the evolution of it sort of becoming, you know, a lapel pin on Richard Spencer's jacket?
Guest:Well, you know, Richard Spencer started to use Pepe because he knew that Pepe was powerful because he realized that Pepe was a great way of obfuscating his agenda.
Guest:The right has always had a hard time basically finding like a youth culture kind of contingency within the party.
Guest:And I think people were recognizing that some of the same stuff that was happening in the older generation was echoing out through 4chan in a variety of ways.
Guest:The people on 4chan are filled with like, you know, self-loathing, self-hatred kind of reactionary personal feelings.
Guest:But they're also filled with a real sense of generational entitlement.
Guest:They're mostly white guys who feel as though culture has been stolen from them.
Guest:They're guys who are in the basement, who spend a lot of time alone.
Guest:They're extremely online.
Guest:And they feel as though they don't have a lot of control in their personal lives or much agency in culture.
Guest:And they're mostly anonymous.
Guest:So Pepe really became an avatar for them as people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so in the film, what we tried to do was we basically use the emotions of Pepe to kind of work as like a narrative baton for the story.
Guest:So, you know, we move through sad Pepe to mad Pepe to angry Pepe to smug Pepe.
Guest:And then finally, we end in like this violent Pepe and then Pepe becomes Trump.
Guest:And that's like the sort of narrative spine of the film.
Guest:But, you know, it is a pretty complicated journey, but Richard Spencer really only started to use it purely as propaganda once it was kind of officially declared this noxious symbol.
Guest:It was something that had been used partially as a joke up until that point.
Guest:And then, you know, Nazis have always used sort of trolling and insincerity as cover for their real agenda.
Guest:That's not necessarily new, but doing it in the Internet age is.
Guest:And so Richard Spencer realized there was a young, activated group of people that were excited by his message, and he could give like a wink to them by using Pepe.
Guest:And then I think he hoped to, like, sort of galvanize a larger group of people around both the character and his message.
Marc:So, all right, Matt, now let's, like, you come from a different generation of creatives in a way.
Marc:It seems like Pepe, you know, in just San Francisco in general, just the nature of underground comics, the nature of independent comics, the nature of drawing, that this is, like, it seems like a more...
Marc:organic world than the world that Pepe eventually got swallowed up by.
Marc:You know, the intimacy of your relationship with your creation was fairly specific.
Marc:And it doesn't seem like you're really that much of an online guy in general.
Guest:No, I'm not.
Guest:Yeah, I've gotten a little more paranoid about online stuff.
Guest:I just, I don't know, I just get into these kind of loops of, you know, looking at the news or, you know, I've been reading this guy, Jaron Lanier, that wrote this great book called 10 Arguments for Quitting Social Media right now.
Guest:And he makes some really good points.
Guest:Like one of the chapters is...
Guest:Because social media hates your soul and stuff.
Guest:And then he'll go on to explain why social media hates your soul.
Guest:You know, this whole new generation of likes and shares and follow for follow and stuff.
Guest:And then how all of this data is mined and used.
Guest:You know, whoever's got control of all this information kind of like controls the... The information controls the planet.
Guest:And, you know, I can go get totally weird with it.
Guest:So I just choose to still do what I've always done, which is...
Guest:You know, I do a little bit of publishing, but a lot of my work is just drawing pictures and selling a physical object for money.
Guest:So you get 50-50 if you go through a gallery.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:It makes sense to me.
Guest:There's no overhead.
Guest:You know, I just need a piece of paper and some colored pencils and I'm good to go.
Guest:And as long as you, you know, as long as I can keep some momentum going or keep myself entertained and try to say something important, you know, I've always wanted to...
Guest:you know, make something that outlasts me, you know, and unfortunately, the thing that everybody always wants to talk about is, you know, this stupid frog.
Guest:So I don't even like talking about it, to be honest.
Marc:I think it's interesting that you don't like talking about, but I think that's sort of, you know, the point I was trying to make was that, that like the work you do and how you do it and your sensibility around technology.
Marc:And I didn't know, is Jaron Lanier, is that a new Jaron Lanier book?
Guest:Relatively new within the past few years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was like in a virtual reality back in the day, like, you know, in the late 80s and early 90s and, you know, Minority Report.
Guest:It's basically about him, kind of like a Hollywood version of that.
Guest:And I have a computer.
Guest:I have an iPhone.
Guest:I really do kind of yearn for the old days of the Internet.
Guest:I think the idea of the Internet was good.
Guest:You know, I think it's cool to connect people and to be with all this information and stuff.
Guest:But I just love like Web 1.0, like the old homepages and stuff.
Guest:I love, like, the home-baked quality of it, how you can go to, like, GeoCities, and, you know, before memes and even GIFs and everything, people just had their own little homepage, and you could just find all this cool niche stuff, and everything was kind of linked together, and, you know...
Guest:I yearn for the more innocent day, but now you can't even go on anything without having a million ads up your ass on YouTube or Instagram or any of this stuff.
Guest:It's just so inundated by ads.
Guest:I just don't even want to deal with it anymore.
Marc:It's assaulting.
Guest:And all the clickbait and stuff.
Marc:No, no, I get it.
Marc:I definitely get it.
Marc:Like a good part of this movie was about getting Pepe back to a degree or at least trying to fight that fight.
Marc:Like you have this this thing that you created that you have a relationship with that has a disposition, a point of view, a personality.
Marc:It's fairly specific.
Marc:It has context that you created.
Marc:And now it's been co-opted by monsters and it's all over the place.
Marc:And it's the wrong message that this thing should be associated with.
Marc:So I know that.
Marc:a good part of this movie, whether you like to talk about Pepe or not, was trying, and I think it was a noble experiment that seemed to yield some results, was to try to wrestle your creation back out of the maws of the alt-right, out of meme culture, out of being used for that type of messaging.
Marc:Did you have...
Marc:When you first saw him being used, Pepe being used in that way, did you want to do that from the beginning or is this something that made you more and more sad and you were more compelled to do it as time went on?
Guest:My instinct in the beginning when I was assaulted by reporters and stuff about this stuff was to just downplay it.
Guest:I tried to just say, you know,
Guest:everything changes.
Guest:This is just a phase.
Guest:Once the election's over, you know, it'll just move on to the next thing.
Guest:Pepe's bigger than politics and all this stuff.
Guest:You know, Pepe's like a global phenomenon.
Guest:I tried to focus again on, you know, kids, youth culture version of Pepe, not like this kind of very niche, very specific Nazi shit that was happening.
Guest:I tried to just, I tried to ignore it.
Guest:I tried to downplay it and I tried, you know,
Guest:And unfortunately, I had my words used against me and, you know, I had a whole different set of experiences because of that type of reaction, because of how it was spun in various ways.
Guest:So they were holding you responsible?
Guest:I think that they really wanted answers.
Guest:And they were looking to me to give them some answers about this Internet phenomenon that was way bigger than me.
Guest:And the only answers that I could give them is my own personal experience, my own opinions about it.
Guest:And I'm not sure.
Guest:And then that would become a news headline or something.
Guest:So they would be kind of using me to chime in on these big issues that, you know, I'm a...
Guest:sensitive guy and i i want the world to be a happy loving place that's safe for children and animals and everything else so i would just talk about that stuff and then i just kind of seem like a dippy hippie so that you know i'm i'm just me though you know right but so when did what was it who's was it arthur who gave you the idea you know in it to to start fighting to free pepe
Guest:Um, no, uh, honestly, uh, you know, I try, I, I've tried various, I tried being creative, you know, I, I tried to like start a save Pepe campaign, hashtag save Pepe and have my friends draw pictures of Pepe that are positive and stuff like that.
Guest:And then the trolls just turned all those into like, you know, horrible things.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:You know, and then I tried, you know, I killed Pepe in a comic strip because I was like, you know, kind of over talking about it and stuff.
Guest:And then that backfired on me.
Guest:Everybody's like, why'd you kill Pepe?
Guest:But really, I think, you know, there's a lot of things that were bugging the shit out of me.
Guest:Like there's some principle is making this Islamophobic children's book with Pepe in it.
Guest:And that's when I had to lawyer up and start suing people and stuff.
Guest:So that was a lot of fun.
Marc:So you had a lawyer up to protect – at some point it became – like that was what did it, someone creating an Islamophobic children's book with Pepe.
Marc:You decided to fight for your intellectual property.
Marc:Is that what happened?
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean I was trying to figure it out, but that was when – that for some reason –
Guest:Everything made me feel kind of sad and out of control, but that really resonated with me on a different level because it was geared towards children and using my character to espouse this really hateful narrative.
Marc:The thing that I like about the movie, more so than the information, specifically the information in it, which I didn't know a lot of, but having talked to Dale about it, was really about the nature of creativity, the nature of exploitation, the nature of appropriation, the nature of propaganda, the nature of...
Marc:You know, the way the Internet kind of works in creating communities both for good and bad.
Marc:And then just sort of the basic struggle of an artist trying to sort of fight this fight against these forces that are either evil or just faceless.
Marc:So to me, the film works on a lot of levels.
Marc:in terms of even for kids.
Marc:I gave the movie to my friend Al.
Marc:I wanted him to watch it because I thought it would provoke some intellectual activity in his 15-year-old around the power of creation, of creating even a comic and what that can do and what can happen to it, both in the artist's hands or in the hands of the nefarious forces of evil.
Guest:I was talking with Ayanna last night, and she's like, you know, you're like the...
Guest:you're one of the only people that have kind of gone through it.
Guest:And I'm not, there's other people that have been affected by memes and stuff like that.
Guest:But she said, she was saying like in the future, um, there's going to be like, you know, support groups for people that have been affected by memes or something, you know?
Guest:So like, uh, you know, uh, we could all get together and, uh, and talk our, speak our woes about how we were exploited online or something.
Guest:It's going to be Pepe, Rasta, Bart, um, Calvin peeing on the Ford logo.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But it's sort of a little deeper than that.
Marc:You know, it's also a story about the complete corruption of innocence, you know, you know, on a level of there's something really heartbreaking about the type of, you know, if I can sort of be empathetic for the type of.
Marc:guys that are involved in these 4chan communities and these communities that are entitled or angry or they feel displaced, that anger comes from somewhere.
Marc:And I think that their innocence was corrupted somewhere.
Marc:I don't know how or why or what causes the depth of their pain, but to take this kind of sweet character, and I know maybe I'm reading into it,
Marc:And then corrupt his innocence and make him a monster.
Marc:And then you, you know, Matt, who has sort of an appreciation of child's mind and seeing things as a child would in order to sort of create a type of happiness.
Marc:You know, to me, it's really a painful, tragic story on all levels.
Marc:even on behalf of the perpetrators to some degree, if I'm going to let my empathy go that deep.
Marc:Does that resonate?
Guest:It does, because I think, yeah, you got to let everybody in your heart kind of in order to heal yourself.
Guest:And, you know, it's for everybody's benefit.
Guest:And I think the more you kind of divide people...
Guest:The more, you know, you just see life as an us versus them and not a we kind of a thing.
Guest:The empathy thing is it's real.
Guest:I think a lot of real problems come from people that are in their own little world and just kind of are really just thinking about themselves.
Guest:And I think.
Guest:that the internet can provide these little places for people that are in these really hyper specific kind of alienated worlds and they can kind of band together and cause chaos.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, um, I understand that too.
Guest:Like I used to go on chat rooms and, you know, fuck around with people and say stupid stuff.
Guest:And, and it was fun trolling people and stuff.
Guest:Um,
Marc:So I get that.
Marc:It's interesting that, you know, you know, after Pepe, now it's now it's entered the grown up world.
Marc:I mean, QAnon is sort of the next phase of of what what kind of started with with Pepe in a way.
Marc:But it's for an older generation.
Marc:That, you know, the virus of that conspiracy, which is bullshit, which started as sort of an Internet joke, has now blossomed into into a full fledged belief system.
Marc:And it might undermine the entire fucking world.
Marc:And, you know, you're like so, you know, Pepe, I think, was a kind of a stepping stone into that for grownups, you know.
Marc:But I didn't mean to interrupt you.
Marc:And what we were sort of talking about was the heroic attempt to, through sourcing through friends and stuff, you found a lawyer that would help you out?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I was with another lawyer even before the lawyers that were in the movie.
Guest:So I've been struggling with this for a long time.
Guest:And it wasn't until I found a bigger law firm
Guest:that could represent me pro bono that I could actually make some progress because, you know, being an independent artist, you can't afford a lawyer and stuff.
Guest:And this thing got so blown out of proportion that I could actually use it to my advantage.
Guest:And, you know, it actually gave me a little bit of clout and it gave me the ability to reach out to, you know, a large law firm.
Guest:And I just told them,
Guest:I don't want to talk about it anymore with anybody.
Guest:I don't want to talk to press, and I want to stop all this stuff from happening.
Guest:And they were like, okay, okay, we'll do that.
Guest:And they were stoked.
Guest:You know, Lewis wanted an opportunity to talk to Vice magazine.
Guest:I don't think there's a lot of opportunities for somebody in his position who's like a copyright lawyer, you know, who works for like...
Guest:wave runners and stuff like that to actually have a voice on the national stage and to really be able to change the narrative when it comes to this really divisive, hateful, you know, political American stuff.
Guest:So they were stoked and I was stoked to have them.
Guest:So it was a mutually beneficial situation.
Guest:that I'm still thankful for, and I'm still utilizing their expertise because I'm still getting weird emails about Nazis and QAnon and people like this using Pepe.
Guest:And unfortunately, I can't do much if they're just posting stuff online, but if they're trying to make T-shirts and shit like that, I can stop them.
Guest:They can't make money off of it.
Guest:I'm doing my best.
Marc:Well, good.
Marc:And Arthur, so, like, that part of the story was sort of the turning point, right?
Marc:That's your act three, right?
Marc:That's the beginning of the act three then, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, we thought, you know, I think Matt's a really relatable protagonist in the film because he is in the situation that no one's really been in before.
Guest:He's someone that there's not easy solutions or easy answers to any of it.
Guest:He first tries to reach out to his community of artists to help him.
Guest:And he's aware that that's something that might get subverted.
Guest:But it's something that feels like something that he can actually do that feels like an art project.
Guest:And then he has to go and basically navigate the legal system, which is very difficult to do.
Guest:Most cartoon characters...
Guest:You know, whether it's Mickey Mouse or whatever, have like huge corporations that have law firms on retainer to protect their IP.
Guest:And as an independent person, you don't.
Guest:And the other thing is, like, you know, Matt was put in a position where he, you know, he really has to protect the character's copyright.
Guest:You have to be actively policing the copyright of the character in order to, like, continue to use the copyright.
Guest:So it was something that I think Louis Tompros and Stephanie Lynn, who are his attorneys who work at Wilmer Hale, felt like this was like a really righteous challenge for them after the election.
Guest:And, you know, it was kind of interesting.
Guest:They actually came to Sundance to see the film and Louis got a nice like, you know, applause break when he when he his first line in the film is it's not often that a nerdy intellectual person.
Guest:copyright attorney gets to fight the alt-right.
Guest:But when someone asks us, we're ready.
Guest:And like the audience burst into applause.
Guest:It was a really sweet moment.
Guest:His wife leaned over and like squeezed his arm.
Guest:That's sweet.
Guest:Yeah, it was sweet.
Guest:So that is the third act of the film, you know, and I, the movie is about a lot of stuff.
Guest:Obviously it's about like, you know, artistic agency online.
Guest:It's about how trolling moved off of these like weird message boards and then into our mainstream politics.
Guest:But, you know, it's really about Matt,
Guest:doing something.
Guest:It's about Matt realizing that he has this problem and that he can't ignore the problem.
Guest:He has to deal with it.
Guest:And that's going to set him up for praise and ridicule and all these different things.
Guest:And so, you know, to tell a story about the complications of the Internet, I think we needed like a very relatable central figure.
Guest:And I think Matt was that person.
Guest:But, you know, as you can hear even here, like asking Matt these questions as a friend was often like difficult for me.
Guest:Like it's something that I think he has a lot of mixed feelings about and it's very understandable, you know.
Guest:And now he's promoting the film for us, which I mean, I appreciate.
Guest:But I also feel like.
Guest:There's a part of Matt that wants to leave Pepe, which he drew as like a, you know, 26-year-old, 25-year-old behind and move on to like being a father, being an artist, having like this other life that isn't attached to this character that he made in his 20s.
Guest:So the movie is also kind of about growing up.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I'm sorry that Pepe keeps dragging you down, Matt.
Marc:I mean, you know...
Guest:It's not your fault, but... Well, you know, the cool thing is, man, to be honest, I'm a huge fan of this show.
Guest:I remember listening to the interview that you did with RuPaul, and that really kind of... I've always liked RuPaul, but that went so deep, and I thought...
Guest:You know, that just really struck a nerve with me.
Guest:I think it hit me really emotionally.
Guest:And it was a really cool story.
Guest:And just the fact that I'm on now talking about this, even though I hate talking about it, it's a blessing.
Guest:And, you know, it's something that I wouldn't have gotten the opportunity to do otherwise.
Guest:So I appreciate you having us on the show.
Guest:And, you know, so I got to just try to focus on stuff like this, which is positive.
Guest:It's all just...
Guest:as Ram Dass would say, grist for the mill.
Guest:It's the good, it's the bad, you just got to grind it all.
Guest:And I'm here to help Arthur, too, because he's my buddy and he's promoting this film.
Guest:I feel awkward promoting a film that I'm the subject of, so I don't even feel comfortable watching the film with my own mother.
Guest:Your mom does love the movie.
Guest:I watched the film with your mom.
Guest:She had a lot of questions.
Guest:We went to dinner afterwards.
Marc:Well, they never know exactly what you're up to, the parents.
Guest:She was very proud.
Guest:She was over the moon after the film.
Marc:Oh, good.
Guest:She called you a warrior.
Guest:Yeah, it was sweet.
Guest:It was very sweet.
Marc:She's a very proud mother.
Marc:So, well, Matt, I mean, in speaking of that, how is your quality of life now?
Marc:I mean, outside of the world ending, I mean, you know, in terms of your little world that you've created for yourself, you're still in the Bay Area?
Guest:Yeah, my world's good, man.
Guest:I'm doing a lot of gardening.
Guest:My kid's about to start kindergarten.
Guest:I'm just chilling.
Guest:I'm enjoying my summer, going to the beach a lot and stuff.
Guest:So it's fine.
Marc:So now is has there been some, you know, maybe maybe the part I won't ruin about the movie is how Pepe was used proactively in a revolutionary way at the end, that there was sort of a nice turn of events for Pepe a little bit.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, we had a literal deus ex machina moment.
Guest:We were getting the film ready for Sundance with a very different ending.
Guest:And actually, Mark, when you were interviewing Dale Baran, who is a consultant on the movie, he was in town to do your podcast.
Guest:And we kind of end the movie with this nice little interview with Dale about what was going on with Pepe in Hong Kong.
Guest:That is a spoiler, but I think it's an important story.
Guest:Um, and he came in and like did this little interview that just was like, kind of put like the perfect little period at the end of the film.
Guest:So it was nice to have him in town to, to be able to do that.
Guest:Um, yeah, there's, you know, the thing that also the end of the movie speaks to is like, what was going on with Pepe in America, in the United States in 2015 and 2016, um,
Guest:you know, was unique.
Guest:Pepe, simultaneous to that, was being used in, you know, Malaysia and Taiwan and Hong Kong and all these other places.
Guest:You know, as it first happened as a meme, it was a reaction image in gaming communities.
Guest:And so that happening in Hong Kong just really popped up because the character is so globally popular.
Marc:um yeah but it created like a pretty amazing moment to end the film on which uh i still can't believe it's it's weird and maybe in a different time in a different world matt you could have eventually had a theme park of some kind i know yeah weirdly um yeah ayana said that she always thought i would have a theme park one day so
Guest:Who knows?
Guest:I think a water park would be Matt's speed.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I love water parks.
Marc:Well, look, fellas, I think you did a great job.
Marc:I found it very provocative, and it fills in a lot of, I think, gaps for a lot of people my age and older who don't really understand this stuff and the power of it and how it affects them, but also younger people as well.
Guest:Well, I mean...
Guest:Pepe seems like a ridiculous story, but ultimately QAnon came out of 4chan too.
Guest:And there's 11 different candidates that came out in different Republican primaries across the country that all have had some sort of allegiance to QAnon.
Guest:So even though Pepe does seem like this ridiculous stone cartoon frog, it does speak to this larger irreality that's happening in America.
Marc:The larger what kind of reality?
Yeah.
Marc:Irreality.
Marc:Irreality.
Marc:I mean, I haven't heard that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's not an alternative reality.
Marc:It's a nonreality.
Guest:Is it a word?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Maybe I just like it.
Marc:Irreality.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That that's becoming a it's manifesting as a belief system.
Marc:That's, you know, more than almost more than a reality.
Marc:It feels to me that the way it's taking hold of people's minds is is more like a religion than an interpretation of reality, which is problematic.
Guest:It's well, I mean, it appeals specifically to evangelical.
Marc:Right.
Marc:No, I know.
Marc:Yeah, it is.
Marc:The channels are already there.
Marc:The neural pathways have already been carved.
Right.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Somehow the book of Revelation flows directly into QAnon.
Guest:But I mean, I guess just the larger point is these things that kind of start in these like fever swamps of the Internet work their way up and they take control of the attention economy in unique ways.
Guest:And it's something that, you know, hopefully we all have to just be aware of because it's becoming like a bigger and bigger problem throughout society.
Marc:Well, thank you for shining some light on it, fellas.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Take it easy, you guys.
Marc:Thanks, man.
Marc:Okay, thank you.
Marc:So that was a good conversation.
Marc:I enjoyed talking to them.
Marc:We learned a lot there.
Marc:You can see the movie Feels Good Man, now on most digital and video on-demand platforms.
Marc:Now, picking up where they left off, I wanted to talk to Andrew Morant, whose book I like.
Marc:I didn't finish it yet, but I'm going to finish it.
Marc:His book is Antisocial, Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.
Marc:You can get it now, but it's going to be out in paperback.com.
Marc:on the 15th of this month, September.
Marc:And he's been writing for The New Yorker for years.
Marc:And the evolution of the conversation that we started a year ago with Dale Baran kind of moves into this QAnon thing.
Marc:And Andrew's been kind of tackling that.
Marc:So I thought he was the guy to talk to.
Marc:So this is Andrew Marantz.
Marc:And we're continuing the conversation.
Thank you.
Marc:How are you, Andrew?
Marc:I'm good.
Marc:I'm good.
Marc:Creating on a curve.
Marc:I asked somebody that question, a friend of mine on text, and she said, I'm not great.
Marc:I'm not horrible.
Marc:And I said, well, when everything is horrible, it's hard to be great.
Marc:yes exactly okay so here we are the conversation has been hijacked yeah what started with with 4chan and reddit and you know through the minds and eyes of disenfranchised angry high school males who were then sort of turned out by older creepy neo-nazis and and then sort of fractioned off into n cells and then sort of that kind of coagulated with russian troll uh meme language and the pepe stuff and then all of a sudden the
Marc:I think the big addition to what is becoming this amalgamated mess of propaganda is the infusion of QAnon.
Marc:But also, I think it seems to me to be the sort of the realm of radical evangelical Christianity.
Marc:Is that right?
Marc:Is that where we're at?
Marc:Has everything coagulated?
Marc:Is there a natural evolution that you see to this QAnon thing?
Guest:Yeah, there's definitely an evolution.
Guest:And so my book came out last year.
Guest:It actually hasn't even come out in paperback yet.
Guest:And already, as with all these Internet things, some parts of the specifics can start to feel dated.
Guest:But the underlying systemic forces are exactly the same.
Guest:So when I was writing about this stuff, it was more in the phase where it was Pizzagate rather than QAnon, right?
Guest:So it hadn't yet metastasized into this grander thing, which we can talk about.
Guest:But the underlying systemic forces of how social media works, what it's incentivizing people to do, the kinds of feedback loops it's drawing people into, the system is still working exactly as designed.
Guest:So a couple of the individual... As designed by who and for what reason?
Yes.
Guest:As designed by the social media company.
Guest:So the reason that I call my book antisocial is because the word antisocial applies to the creeps and propagandists and disinformation agents who I hang out with.
Guest:And I would sit at their side and watch them destroy America.
Guest:And I would kind of call them and say, hey, you are doing this thing from your laptop in Orange County, California, or in Michigan or in wherever.
Guest:Can I come sit in your kitchen and watch you destroy America?
Guest:And they'd say, yeah, sure.
Guest:And so I would do that.
Guest:They were the kind of antisocial ones, but it's also antisocial in the sense of, hey, guys, social media is doing this to us in a very concerted way.
Marc:So the design of social media, the intention was not to destroy America, but but you're saying that fundamental to the design of it.
Marc:the way these loops create by amassing followers around ideology and then by other people sort of entering it through random tweets or reactions, that the design of it, which was idealistically to bring people together, it's doing that, but in the most malignant way.
Guest:Correct.
Guest:So it's bringing people into these forms of community.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's also doing at the most basic level what the algorithms are designed to do, which is just to maximize and monetize attention.
Guest:They're just trying to suck in your attention, get you to stay on the platform for as long as possible.
Guest:And often it's not even the human beings, but it's the algorithms who are figuring out that if you want to get someone to stay on your platform for eight or 10 hours a day, actually the best way to do that is to radicalize them to some kind of new cult ideology that they will then
Guest:sit in their bunker and explore and do all this research.
Marc:But again, that seems like evil intent.
Marc:So radicalizing for an ideology in terms of the people that created this stuff would have been more like around brands
Marc:Right.
Guest:So the people who created these things are not like there's going to be this thing called QAnon and everybody's going to get converted to it.
Guest:They're just thinking in their techno utopian way, we're going to put all this freedom out there and we're going to bring breakdown barriers and reduce friction.
Guest:And that's going to make the world a better place.
Guest:It's going to bring everyone closer together.
Guest:Because they just sort of were operating at this very basic level of, you know, not to be a dick about it, but like Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college, right?
Guest:So he never read like sociology and philosophy and history to see how these things could derail.
Guest:He just learned enough coding and got, you know, enough positive feedback and, you know...
Guest:frankly, financial rewards for that coding that he thought, oh, coding is the way of the future.
Guest:The more I can disintermediate and put power in people's hands, the better it'll be.
Guest:And there was this basic underlying philosophy that the best stuff will spread and the cream will rise to the top.
Guest:And then the really dark, gnarly stuff that we're talking about
Guest:He obviously and the people who created this stuff obviously didn't foresee.
Guest:I'm going to convert everyone to this weird cult that thinks that.
Marc:But it happened in in sort of the kind of fun, loving way initially that that someone like Zuckerberg would have intended it to happen.
Marc:Like, you know, like for Pepe to sort of be appropriated and then sort of, you know, repossessed by the alt-right as this kind of funny way of getting kids involved with hate was sort of like it's turning it on its head.
Marc:But that is the inverse of exactly what Zuckerberg and what Twitter guy Jack was thinking of happening, only it was happening for the wrong reasons.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:And it's not like every individual instance of how this can be abused would have been foreseeable.
Guest:But one of the analogies I sometimes use is starting a social network is like hosting a big house party.
Guest:And so you set the conditions that set the vibe of the party.
Guest:So you're not necessarily responsible for the actions of each individual person, but you decide whether you're carting people at the door.
Guest:You decide whether you have lighted fire exits.
Guest:You decide if people are allowed to smoke inside.
Guest:And if you let people smoke inside, someone else has an asthma attack.
Guest:And
Guest:You know, so you're setting the conditions.
Guest:What are you liable for?
Guest:What are you liable for?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then suddenly two billion people are at your party and it's like, oh, shit, this has gotten out of hand.
Guest:And there's a lot of them that are bad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or who are being conditioned to be bad by the atmosphere.
Marc:Well, OK, so let's let's do it.
Marc:Let's then go from that point about radicalization now, because it's happening on different tiers.
Marc:Like, you know, initially in some of the stuff you covered in your book, you know, you had these kids who were angry and proficient at at
Marc:coding and computers and at hacking and everything else.
Marc:And they got off on each other's ability to troll and make the most disgusting jokes and try to be as immoral as possible.
Marc:And that kind of spread into this other ideology.
Marc:And some of them were radicalized by right-wing thinkers.
Marc:And then it sort of goes from there.
Marc:But that is the 4chan Twitter model.
Marc:But when you're talking about my dad's generation or boomers, sitting there
Marc:you know, not on Twitter, on Facebook and in front of Fox News that are also, you know, being radicalized because it just it just seems like what's happening to them is different because and we can talk about this.
Marc:It seems like the incentive of the kids was to fuck with things, whereas, you know, people of my parents generation or boomers that are younger than them think they're seeing something relatively objective because of the format.
Guest:Oh, totally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There are different levels of intentionality and how much people know what is a game and what is reality.
Guest:And I think where that you were talking before about how these things coagulate and congeal together.
Guest:One of the things I kept seeing when I would call these people and say, OK, let me sit in your kitchen and watch you do this.
Guest:They weren't always the 15 year old, you know, living down the hall from their parents.
Guest:Sometimes they were.
Guest:But but other times it would be like I'm a 39 year old married guy with kids who, you know, goes for a hike in the morning.
Guest:And then when I come home, I want to, you know, make sure that Hillary Clinton can't become president.
Guest:And the easiest way for me to do that is to, you know, make up some kind of viral rumor about how she has Parkinson's or something.
Guest:And I'm going to put together these little scraps of evidence that I saw her blinking once.
Guest:So therefore, I'm going to freeze frame that, say she's having a seizure, make that go viral.
Guest:Then that's going to be recontextualized by the Drudge Report.
Guest:Then the Drudge Report gets picked up by Fox News.
Guest:So there are people who are kind of in between things.
Guest:complete prankster amateurs and professionals.
Guest:These are people who actually are kind of getting good enough at reverse hacking news cycles that they not only can make money at it, but they can also like inception things into the mainstream of the news cycle to the point where I would be hanging out with somebody watching them do that.
Guest:I would go the next morning and read the newspaper headlines and I would go,
Guest:That newspaper headline exists because of what I watched this guy do yesterday.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And then it snowballs into this larger grand theory of everything because of all the the political energies it's tapping into.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But then but then you get people like my dad who, like, you know, is sort of like a shallow political moron, you know, regurgitating not even Fox News to me, but but, you know, the other one.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And that's the new one.
Guest:Well, this is the thing that I think a lot of times people underestimate.
Guest:And, you know, I hope that we don't underestimate it again going into 2020 is the degree to which a lot of people don't make decisions based on a well thought out rational analysis of the world.
Guest:And that's not even like a knock on anyone.
Guest:It's just a lot of times politics is based on an impression I got of someone.
Guest:I don't feel good about that guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He reminds me of someone I like, you know, and and like that's how people vote.
Guest:That's I think a majority of people vote.
Guest:So this this way that we go about doing this political analysis and saying, well, his trade policy is like this and her foreign policy is like this.
Guest:That's all well and good.
Guest:But like that's a very outdated model.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:And especially with a generation.
Marc:What we're finding that ultimately is that most people do it that way.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And generationally speaking, most people are not sophisticated in terms of policy or what it really implies or judicial picks.
Marc:And then you get people like you're talking about.
Marc:I mean, I guess you were probably talking about Mike Cernovich before.
Marc:But see, these guys, they've got blood on their hands now for what they've unleashed on the world.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They knew what they were doing, too.
Marc:I know.
Marc:But whether they were pranksters or not, they're not political people.
Marc:They're fucking hucksters.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Well, well, you can be a political person and a huckster like we have a president.
Guest:Yeah, I get it.
Guest:So so there are people who, you know, the more I spend time with these people, you know, Cernovich is one.
Guest:There are others that they go from this.
Guest:They go on a spectrum from.
Guest:nihilist prankster you know i just want to fuck shit up to committed ideological you know nazi misogynist whatever there's a whole spectrum but what they have in common is that like you say they're not great political thinkers they're not you know a lot of them like to think of themselves as like intellectual or you know sort of like amateur philosophers they're not that what they are is and when i would write about them for the new yorker and then again in the book i would have to reconceptualize okay what are these people like
Guest:And ultimately, what I kept coming back to is their propagandists, their media figures.
Guest:They're all what they're good at is taking memes in the original sense of memes, the Richard Dawkins sense of the word, and propagating those memes into the bloodstream of the national discourse that that they're actually good at.
Guest:And it wouldn't have been worth my spending that much time with them if they didn't have that very genuine skill set.
Marc:Now, now, but I guess my question and leading into like, it seems to me that.
Marc:That QAnon has absorbed a lot of the momentum that was that that was the infrastructure was put in place by these guys you were talking about.
Marc:Now, I don't know whether guys like Milo or Sronovich are dormant or they're done.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:But it doesn't matter because now, like, there's this bigger arcing thing in this this mother of all conspiracy theories, which is QAnon, you know, is incorporating really centuries old conspiracies.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Protocols of the elders of Zion kind of stuff.
Marc:It's such like it's all old timey Freemason-y, you know, protocols of Zion.
Marc:All this shit has been around for fucking ever.
Marc:And now it's sort of been brought together now.
Marc:But when you talk about propagandists in their own right, and maybe they are, they do think that whether it's a mixture of nihilistic fucking with the system or they believe that.
Marc:On some level, they want their guy to win and they believe it ideologically.
Marc:When you have something like QAnon that absorbs all this stuff, is there a Q?
Marc:Is there somebody operating this thing on a day-to-day basis?
Marc:Is there an American version of Vladislav Surkov?
Marc:You know, you know, do we have I used to think there was that guy with the beard in Trump's orbit was the guy.
Marc:But is there is there so who's guiding this?
Marc:Because it seems like a fundamentally more than just a Nazi model.
Marc:It's a Russian model of of of setting up theatricality, news events, propaganda.
Marc:It just it seems like someone's guiding this.
Marc:Is there?
Guest:Yes and no.
Guest:So there are people.
Guest:It's not like there is a Surkov or a Goebbels who we know about.
Guest:I mean, maybe history will reveal that there were people, you know, Bannon likes to claim that mantle sometimes.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, people talk about Stephen Miller.
Guest:People talk about, you know, Dan Scavino.
Guest:But I don't think of it, at least as it's unfolding.
Marc:Who was the other guy with the beard?
Marc:He was head of the campaign.
Marc:Parscale.
Marc:Parscale.
Guest:Parscale, yeah.
Guest:So I profiled Parscale for The New Yorker.
Guest:I actually think that with a lot of those people, Parscale being one of them, the fact that they're actually not that unusual or not that visionary is kind of an interesting part of the point that you can just be an average dude.
Guest:Parscale is just a guy from Kansas who...
Guest:Literally, the way he got into the organization was they needed someone to build a cheap website for the Trump real estate business.
Guest:And he raised his hand from San Antonio and said, I'll do it for five thousand bucks or whatever.
Guest:And they were like, oh, we like that.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:I remember reading that about that, that you wrote about him.
Marc:But I guess I got I got distracted by the beard and my own projection of insidious.
Guest:A beard that good can can go a long way.
Guest:But yeah.
Guest:But yeah, I think that part of and why I was referring to the systems earlier is that if you hit your wagon to one of those big systems, you don't need to be a bold visionary.
Guest:You don't need to be a great speech writer or know how to build an event because the car is already in motion.
Guest:The car being Facebook or Twitter or Reddit or any of these things.
Guest:You just kind of have to get in and let it dry.
Marc:So, OK, OK, so that there's there's no because that becomes a question.
Marc:I know that Trump's policy or whatever it is, his behavior is being informed by Hannity and some and some Republican think tanks and a few sort of more, you know, policy minded people that, you know, that have charmed him.
Marc:But in terms of the propaganda that's going on and his sort of kind of.
Marc:Is the word tacit support?
Marc:Is that the word I want of it?
Marc:It doesn't surprise you, but you're does it?
Guest:No, I think that I think nothing is supposed to surprise us anymore.
Marc:But right.
Marc:But like when he sort of gives a little nod to QAnon, you know, like he's just playing to to his his his bleachers.
Guest:I mean, I literally think that the way his kind of brand of narcissism works is that literally all he asks is do these people like me or hate me?
Guest:Did this person call me a hero or a loser?
Guest:I think a lot of his worship of Putin, his worship of, you know, name your strong man.
Guest:is that simple like putin said a nice thing to me once therefore i like him so i think but they also know he's a fuck the fundamental of you know real strong men who are willing to kill on purpose and own it know that he's a sucker totally right but but he doesn't know that they know that and i think the q anon stuff i think that all he needs to know is are they on my team or are they on the other team i mean it's
Guest:A completely terrifying form of moral bankruptcy, obviously, if you're anything.
Guest:I mean, we know he's not going to be good at the job, but even to be inhabiting that seat, you should be able to say this is a scary, murderous cult and I don't want anything to do with it.
Guest:And the fact that he's not willing or able to do that, I don't think is unique to this situation.
Guest:I think it's just they're on my side.
Guest:And I think he also gets at some deeper instinctive level that, as you say, it's tied in with a kind of vibe of millennialist Christianity, that it's tied in with a vibe of kind of feels like proto white nationalist stuff.
Guest:And that's all stuff that appeals to him, too.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But it is like essentially a functioning, self-feeding kind of, you know, unprovable mythology that that tends towards, you know, Christian end times prophecy and white nationalism.
Guest:Well, and at its core, at the simplest level, it's just literally an extension of all the propositions that I was watching those people setting up in 2015, 2016, 2017, and trying to deal with the cognitive dissonance of none of those predictions being able to come true, right?
Guest:So just at a very basic level, if you're a gung-ho pro-Trump propagandist going into his campaign—
Guest:And he's saying things like, I'm going to lock Hillary up.
Guest:I'm going to make America great again.
Guest:I'm going to bring all the jobs back.
Guest:Just all the stuff he's saying.
Guest:None of that stuff is going to happen, right?
Guest:So if you follow sort of cognitive dissonance theory, which is this psychology school going back to the 50s of sort of saying...
Guest:this is what happened with the original cult of Christianity that, you know, these people are saying, Jesus will come back within your lifetime.
Guest:You can sell all your stuff.
Guest:You know, you don't need anything because the world's about to end.
Guest:The longer that goes without happening, the more people double down and proselytize and say, okay, you know, instead of abandoning this ideology, I'm going to do all these kinds of psychological loops to try to make it real.
Guest:And it's the same thing at play here.
Guest:The more you believe Christ,
Guest:Hucksters lies and con artistry, the more you either have to jump off the train or you have to stay on the train and work even harder to make those things turn true.
Marc:So the the ability to suspend your disbelief or to believe like Christianity in and of itself as as a template within the human mind makes this thing possible.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, and it doesn't even have to be Christianity.
Guest:But yes, that as a template or, you know, there are sects of Islam that do this.
Guest:There's there's waiting for the Messiah and Judaism.
Guest:There's also just there's also just, you know, living in an abusive relationship with someone who keeps saying they're going to do something nice for you.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But there's also the fundamental belief, and I sort of am of the school of Becker on this from denial of death, that there is almost a genetic compulsion within the human psyche to believe in something bigger than yourself in order to feel like your life is relevant or part of something.
Guest:Definitely.
Guest:You know, there is a need, especially right now, especially I don't think it's an accident that it's kind of growing during the pandemic and when people's lives are sort of spiraling out of control and when they don't really have any way of finding a sense of purpose that, you know, and look, this is a basic dynamic that I saw over and over again, too, is this notion of the red pill, right?
Guest:The red pill, as we all know, it's from the Matrix.
Guest:It's sort of the pill that unlocks the truth.
Guest:It's the same thing as Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole.
Guest:It's this ancient, you know, it's Plato and the cave.
Guest:It's this ancient human archetype.
Guest:But the internet allows you to have this endless series of red pill moments where you go, the scales fall from your eyes and you see the truth.
Guest:QAnon is like an incredibly labyrinthine, endless cycle of those.
Guest:So you can always find another puzzle to unlock it.
Guest:It can be this, yeah.
Marc:I get that.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:It is the rabbit hole.
Marc:I understand.
Marc:And it's being fed daily.
Marc:And you can make all sorts of connections throughout the entirety of history.
Marc:This kind of conspiratorial thinking, reading signs and symbols.
Marc:How clear does it have to be?
Marc:Look at this logo.
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:That kind of shit.
Marc:You know, it's been around a long time.
Marc:And, you know, and it's very attractive because, you know, it gives people a false sense of intellectualism.
Marc:It gives them a false sense of history.
Marc:It gives them closure on things.
Marc:It serves their ideology.
Marc:I understand all the reasons why it's appealing to a certain type of mindset, even to somebody like me.
Marc:But not, you know, I'm not, you know, I know enough about myself to be like, you know what, take it with a grain of salt.
Marc:But I see what's happening now.
Marc:And fanning flames is one thing.
Marc:But someone's maintaining this thing.
Guest:Well, look, in terms of who it was originally, there are different theories.
Guest:One theory is it was just a joke.
Guest:And it's like those 4chan guys you're talking about where they just all they ever want to do is, you know, mess with people and troll.
Guest:And, you know, it could have been that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It also totally could have been someone who was sitting around some outer ring of the White House or some executive agency who said, well, I don't really have that much to do all day because all the president does all day is watch TV and try to shut down government agencies.
Guest:So I'm going to freelance and create this whole mythology online and see if it goes anywhere.
Guest:It could have been that.
Guest:But it also just could have been... One financial incentive that we can track right now pretty directly is that...
Guest:Q, whoever or whatever it is, Q can only post originally on 4chan, then on 8chan, then on this thing, 8kun.
Guest:8kun is this very endangered website because people keep posting shooter manifestos on it.
Guest:So all of the most deranged, radicalized people on the internet, not all of them, unfortunately, but a lot of them, congregate around this website, and a lot of them end up being violent maniacs who shoot people in mosques or synagogues or whatever.
Guest:And every time that happens, this website gets booted offline.
Guest:The people who run that website, they're these two American guys who live in the Philippines.
Guest:And they are like, their other businesses are like pig farms and porn, basically.
Guest:So they're real wholesome, lovely fellows.
Guest:Sort of similar.
Guest:Yes, exactly.
Guest:Pig farms, porn and conspiracy cults.
Guest:And but they but they there there are people who believe, including the guy who founded this site.
Guest:There are people who believe that the people who are running this site either know Q or RQ because they have a direct financial incentive to keep.
Marc:But these are morally bankrupt people.
Marc:These are not people that think the best will rise to the top or that eventually it'll play itself out.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So those original sort of techno utopian elites that we're talking about.
Guest:Yeah, these are very far from that.
Guest:Those people like the original sort of techno utopians, the ones who are paying attention have actually taken a turn now and are trying to have a more nuanced view.
Guest:So a lot of what I was tracking was how the guys who started read it.
Guest:actually turned from that kind of blind techno utopianism, the cream will rise to the top to a more nuanced view where they said, actually, we got to get this under control because this has become this feral nightmare.
Guest:So the HN guys are the most morally bankrupt people on the internet.
Guest:They don't give a shit.
Guest:They just want to watch it burn and they want to make some money.
Guest:And so they will do things like, you know,
Guest:they showed up for congressional testimony, wearing a Q lapel pin.
Guest:Like they're, they're just trying to make money from it.
Guest:But, um, but how do they make money again?
Guest:Explain that to me.
Guest:Just traffic and ads.
Guest:I mean, but yeah, so that, and it's a pretty small business.
Guest:It's not like a, you know, billion dollar business, but, um,
Guest:The people like the Reddit people and to some extent the Twitter people, they are trying to go, okay, well, we're not going to totally abandon the idealism that we started this with, but we're no longer going to do this complete laissez-faire, you know, free speech above all.
Guest:We're going to start to say like, okay, if there are people who are going to,
Guest:try to incite violence.
Guest:Like the guys who started Reddit actually were from, they went to the University of Virginia, which is in Charlottesville.
Guest:And so I was talking to them right after the Charlottesville thing happened.
Guest:And they were like, oh shit, that's our town.
Guest:That's our alma mater.
Guest:The people who organized this white supremacist march were doing it in part on our thing that we made up in our dorm room at the University of Virginia.
Guest:And then they let me sit in the room and watch them as they deleted all these Nazi subreddits, which they never would have done in the early days.
Guest:They never would have done it and they never would have let me watch.
Guest:But they had realized they'd kind of grown up from the 22-year-olds who were like, free speech, anything goes and it'll figure itself out.
Guest:The marketplace of ideas will sort it out.
Guest:to evolve to this other place where they were like, OK, we have to be the bosses.
Marc:But, you know, it's interesting is those kind of people still exist.
Marc:These free speech kind of like laissez faire attitude people.
Marc:But they don't seem to realize that, you know, if they let their their their sort of not utopian concepts, but what they're seeing is constitutional concepts just go on unregulated.
Marc:They're going to be killed by the people that they've created.
Guest:Yeah, I don't get, you know, I get how this is.
Marc:What does Ben Shapiro think he fucking is?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:I so I the thing that's weird about slippery slope thinking is that everyone can only kind of do one slippery slope at a time.
Guest:Like you hear the slippery slope argument of if we shut down this person's speech, who's next?
Guest:What if we shut down someone else's speech?
Guest:I get that.
Guest:I think that's legit.
Guest:Lenny Bruce, you know, got arrested for obscenity.
Guest:Like I get all that.
Guest:But where's the slippery slope argument that goes?
Guest:If we let the Nazis march around with guns.
Guest:What's going to happen if the Nazis get too much power?
Guest:Like, shouldn't we be worried about that slippery slope argument?
Guest:I just if you're going to be paranoid about one thing, at least be paranoid about all of it.
Marc:No, for sure.
Marc:And I just don't you know, it's that kind of stuff without getting off on a tangent.
Marc:It's very hard to understand whatever the fuck is wrong with Stephen Miller.
Marc:He's a Jew, man.
Marc:And Jew from Santa Monica.
Marc:Yeah, I know.
Marc:And does he does he think he's going to get a pass when the shit goes down?
Guest:I don't.
Guest:I do have to say I've talked to some pretty hardcore Nazi propagandists and not old school Nazis, but like the new Nazis, right?
Guest:Sort of in league with Richard Spencer types.
Guest:And watching their minds explode when I bring up Stephen Miller is so interesting because it's very core to their ideology that the Jews are the central problem.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And if we could just name and get rid of the Jew and I'm like, seems like a Jew is running your shit, guys.
Guest:And they're like, we don't know what to do with that information.
Guest:It does not compute.
Marc:Really?
Marc:They don't know what to say?
Marc:They've not said anything on it to you in any specific way?
Guest:They will say, you know what?
Guest:That one really confuses us.
Guest:Like, he really seems to be on our team.
Guest:And we don't know.
Guest:So you're telling me that Stephen Miller might be the Jews' only hope?
Guest:He's the one he's the one who can get through the door.
Guest:I mean, these are I mean, he was friends with Richard Spencer in college.
Guest:Like these are there's it's not that many degrees of separation.
Marc:But that's a pathology we're dealing with.
Marc:And, you know, his timing and history is something.
Marc:But there's something a little screwy up there.
Guest:Well, but that but it's related to the other pathologies we're talking about this notion of sort of contrarianism and kind of this addiction to kind of being pugilistically engaged with the world.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, it's there are people who get into stuff like Pizzagate or QAnon or whatever, because it's just kind of a video game and they're kind of just exploring it.
Guest:There are other people who get into it because they're like the only narrative that can be true is the narrative that the institutions don't want me to believe, that society doesn't want me to believe, that my parents don't want me to believe, that my children don't want me to believe.
Guest:The bat.
Guest:I want a bat.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I want something to go to war with and I want something to make me feel unique and special.
Guest:And like you said, it's not that hard.
Guest:hard to relate to that basic impulse like i have this thing that no one else knows about and you know i i you talk to some of these people i actually what's what's really interesting is when you talk to people who've been all the way down the rabbit hole and then come out the other side but who still remember what it's like and they will tell you like how often does that happen
Guest:Less than you want it to.
Guest:But there are a few people.
Guest:There's this woman who I spent a lot of time with who was way high up.
Guest:They called her the first lady of the alt-right.
Guest:She was helping to plan the Charlottesville riots.
Guest:And she got David Duke a hotel room with her credit card and all this stuff.
Guest:She made it out.
Guest:And when she first met me, her brain was so scrambled that she was like, I know the Holocaust definitely happened.
Guest:But like...
Guest:was it 6 million though?
Guest:Do we really know how many it was?
Guest:Was it maybe like a thousand?
Guest:I was like, no, I think they really know.
Guest:Like, I think they've done the research.
Guest:And she was like, yeah, I know, but I did it really though.
Guest:Like she just, her brain had just been fried from this immersion in this world.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:So you're saying like because, yeah, oddly, when I was a kid, it was 10 million.
Marc:And at some point they made a concession.
Marc:I don't know why.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:When I went to synagogue, it was 10.
Marc:And then it was like it was probably more like six.
Marc:And we're like, well, OK, but it's called making a deal.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't know with.
Marc:But so that's the question.
Marc:Like, so when these people get radicalized, you know, whether they signed up for it or not, even people like my father, you know, after a certain point, there is no return kind of.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For some people, it's really hard to get out because you've burned some bridges.
Guest:You've like put some stakes in the ground.
Guest:Oh, in your world, you've burned bridges.
Guest:In your world.
Guest:You've said like, you're all going to be, I'll get the last laugh.
Guest:You're going to see.
Guest:I mean-
Guest:Going back to the Christianity thing, there are preachers every so often who will literally predict the end of days.
Guest:And they'll say, it's going to be October 22nd, 1844.
Guest:This is before any of this, 10 years ago or something.
Guest:I did a piece where, do you remember, I think it was 2011, where there was a guy who took out billboards in Times Square and was like, May 24th, 2011, that's the day.
Yeah.
Guest:And so I went to Times Square because I'm like a reporter and I'm curious about this stuff.
Guest:And I picked someone out of the crowd and said, what are you doing on that day?
Guest:Can I be with you?
Guest:And he was like, yeah, he was like a firefighter from Long Island.
Guest:He was like, yeah, you can watch me get sucked up into the sky in a tornado.
Guest:So I went to his house in Hicksville, Long Island.
Guest:And it's like funny, but also like he had a four year old daughter and he was like, OK, honey, when this happens, you're going to want to walk out to the backyard.
Guest:We're going to we're going to stand together.
Guest:And his wife was like, I swear to God, once today is over, you better never bring this shit up again.
Guest:Like she was not a believer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so I stayed with him until like the time passed.
Guest:Like he was literally he called and ordered a pizza and he literally said to the guy, could you please hurry?
Guest:Like it's coming.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:And then I watched him as the time passed and he was kind of doing some quick math of like, maybe I got the wrong time zone.
Guest:Maybe it's happening in the Hawaii time zone.
Guest:And then by midnight, he was just like, I don't know what to do.
Guest:He just like stopped texting me and I, you know, just made sure with his wife that he was OK.
Guest:And she said, yeah, he's OK.
Guest:But like, how do you come back from that?
Guest:How do you go back to your buddies at the fire station and say like, whoops, sorry, guys.
Marc:Well,
Marc:ultimately if enough time goes by, you know, they're like, that was weird, right?
Marc:You okay?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you know, that's not the same as like telling them, you know, that Jews are terrible and, and that, uh, or that everyone in the government is a child eating pedophile.
Marc:We should kill all the Mexicans.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Marc:I mean, it's a little different.
Marc:The guy just had like, yeah, he had a dream.
Marc:It didn't happen.
Marc:Now he's back.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right, right.
Guest:But there is a lot of pride wrapped up in it.
Guest:And if you build your identity around.
Marc:That's the fucking problem.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's that fucking that pride.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, you can't admit you're wrong after a certain point until something horrible happens.
Marc:But how horrible?
Guest:It's your identity.
Guest:Like if you're, you know, the media told like even at the look at something as simple as how much how many YouTube compilations there are of the media getting the 2016 election wrong.
Guest:There's just this feeling of like, we knew this was going to happen.
Guest:And you motherfuckers in the media, you got it wrong.
Guest:That feeling can just be extended to any.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:And then and also like there's there's if you're proficient in formats, you know, everything looks like official.
Marc:Everything looks like news and people.
Marc:I don't hear that talked about as much as it should be, really, is that anybody can make a pretty professional looking thing.
Guest:Well, this is the key when I was talking about these amateur slash professional propagandists.
Guest:That's what makes someone be able to transition from amateur to professional.
Guest:Because you can register a website, you can make a Facebook thing, and you can get it into as far...
Guest:propelled into the mainstream of the discourse as you want.
Guest:That's why I sometimes get hung up on this semantic thing when people say fringe.
Guest:I'm like, I don't know that this stuff is fringe because you can get it into the mainstream of the news cycle within five minutes if you're good at it.
Marc:Well, yeah, it's a content-hungry news cycle that spans the planet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There are people who...
Guest:The people who were good at it, they would show me, okay, this is how I'm going to get this to trend on Twitter.
Guest:Or this is how I'm going to get Sean Hannity to mention this.
Guest:Or this is how I'm going to get this to become a drudge headline or whatever.
Guest:That's so weird.
Guest:And then they would break it down, reverse engineer it, and you would watch them do it.
Guest:And this is what I mean specifically when I say that this is the system working as designed.
Guest:The people who founded these things did not know what the content was going to be.
Guest:To some extent, they were agnostic as to what the content was going to be.
Guest:But if you had told them your trending algorithm will be just habitually gamed and not just by foreign actors or whatever or spies or agents, but by just people using the system well, I think if you could go back in a time machine and tell them that
Guest:hopefully they would have a little bit of pause and go like, okay, we thought we were building this system that was going to be a heat map of conversations and what people were interested in.
Guest:But the fact that it could be gamed by anyone at any time, just through these outrage mobs and just through, and it's not even that hard.
Guest:It just means that, you know, one of the sort of refrains that I keep coming back to is this philosopher, Richard Rorty, who has this whole concept of
Guest:contingency irony and solidarity and that because things are contingent, the story of history has not yet finished being written.
Guest:It can go any way.
Guest:And so you have to change how we talk is to change who we are.
Guest:What we talk about, what we value, who we are as a society, that's always up for grabs.
Guest:So then you put that sort of underlying philosophy together with the notion that how we talk is we talk to each other through these internet boxes that are all manipulated according to heat cycles and outrage mobs and clickbait and manipulating our emotions.
Guest:It's not a good thing.
Guest:If how we talk is who we are and how we talk is through these broken slot machines of generated emotion and excitement and manufactured engagement, it's very hard to see how that dynamic gets broken.
Marc:Not only the dynamic, but it's really, you know, it's not who anybody is.
Marc:It's really kind of a kind of brain fucking technology that that holds people hostage and uses them as puppets.
Marc:It's a trance almost.
Guest:Oh, yes.
Guest:It's preying on.
Guest:And this is why, you know, when people try to make the point that these that these are businesses like any other business, I think to some extent that's right.
Guest:And to some extent it's wrong.
Guest:But I think.
Guest:At a basic level, it's like if what you do is sell food and then somebody comes along and tells you that high fructose corn syrup is killing people, you go, well, I'm still in the food business.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So until someone comes along and shuts me down, I'm going to keep selling this food.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And people like it.
Guest:People like it.
Guest:Watch that.
Guest:They'll get their revealed preferences.
Guest:They keep buying it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So what are you going to come in and tell me?
Guest:I don't have the freedom to give people what they want.
Marc:Well, there's there's the argument against the cream rising and also the argument against free market capitalism.
Right.
Guest:Yeah, it's very tied up in the free market stuff.
Guest:We've been in this sort of spell of the last 40 years of saying, well, if people didn't like it, they wouldn't buy it.
Guest:If it weren't a good product, it wouldn't be doing well.
Guest:You know, it's all this like self-regulating thing.
Guest:It's this Milton Friedman thing.
Guest:It doesn't work like that.
Guest:And you can see it directly in this metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, right?
Guest:The market has spoken.
Marc:So let's wrap it up in thinking about, because I don't know what Jaron Lanier said, but the idea has been put in my head, and it seems like we're talking about that, that the interplay between human psychology and social media platforms is fundamentally changing humanity and the human brain, right?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:In specific ways through this algorithm and this sort of self-feeding thing.
Marc:How is it changing the human brain specifically in your mind?
Guest:Well, so the most basic thing that these platforms are doing is targeting and manipulating what social scientists call activating emotions.
Guest:So the fundamental thing about the algorithm is whatever makes you feel not only the most emotions, but these specific kinds of emotions, and you can list them out, those are the things that win.
Guest:So again, this gives the lie to this notion that the cream rises because...
Guest:They've built it in such a way.
Guest:It's like building a slot machine and you go, okay, people respond to colors.
Guest:People respond to this kind of noise.
Guest:It happens in this pattern.
Guest:If you vary up the pattern, people are like labyrinths.
Guest:They respond better to it.
Marc:And also you can specifically manipulate people based on their choices.
Guest:Yeah, that's micro-targeting.
Guest:So you know, okay, people who...
Guest:buy milk on Thursdays and drive this kind of car and whatever.
Guest:And it's all correlation.
Guest:It's not like you're psychic and you're looking into their brain.
Guest:It's just you have a big enough sample size and so you know what the patterns are.
Guest:There's also a technique that I sort of, I don't know if I made this up or whatever, but I call it macro targeting.
Guest:So there's micro targeting, which is cutting the population into these little slivers like
Guest:retired military moms who like paintball or whatever.
Guest:There's also macro targeting, which is it works on everyone.
Guest:Anger works on everyone.
Guest:Fear works on everyone.
Guest:Disgust works on everyone.
Guest:Loathing.
Guest:So these are things that, you know, and people will say to me, oh, you know,
Guest:You call the book antisocial.
Guest:You're always talking about the negative side of these things.
Guest:You're so down on social media.
Guest:What about all the positive things?
Guest:What about Black Lives Matter?
Guest:What about Me Too and all this stuff?
Guest:And I think the point is that stuff is very real.
Guest:And there really are movements in human history that would not have happened or would not have happened as easily if not for the internet.
Guest:But I think what's crucial to remember is that these activating emotions that these algorithms prey on, there are positive activating emotions, but the ones that are easier to prey on are the negative ones.
Marc:Well, it's interesting because like that, like disgust, loathing, anger, fear that, you know, that to give those all voice and relief is actually, you know, it's that's actually Pepe's catchphrase.
Marc:It feels good, man.
Guest:Feels good, man.
Guest:I know.
Guest:Well, this is why these things tend to curdle.
Guest:I mean, this is the Jaron Lanier argument is that you can start out as the positive emotional side of the ledger and it tends to curdle over time.
Guest:The more it gets caught up in the gears of the Internet, because, you know, because you're being played, you're being played in the algorithms, the algorithms lift up certain things and downgrade other things.
Marc:But but but QAnon.
Marc:So what we're establishing is that it's a self feeding monster that people can engage in and passionately and create little subgroups around it in reality or online.
Marc:It seems to be going both places.
Marc:It encompasses a lot of right supremacist thinking, a lot of racist thinking, a lot of conspiratorial thinking.
Marc:But I guess the question is, as we've established here, is it's not fringe.
Marc:It is mainstream.
Marc:It is dangerous.
Marc:And it's not going away.
Marc:So where do you think this takes us?
Guest:Yeah, it's not.
Guest:I mean, we should we should be clear.
Guest:People have been killed over this.
Guest:A train has been derailed in California by someone who's a believer in this cult.
Guest:It's definitely dangerous.
Guest:And also in terms of it not being fringe, not only did the did the president not rebuke it, as you said, but there are multiple people now who are confirmed self-admitted QAnon believers on it in Congress or campaigning on it, running for Congress.
Guest:And at least one of them will will almost certainly be in Congress.
Guest:So like it's not just like.
Guest:oh, there's this crazy offensive belief system.
Guest:Like it used to be back in the day.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it's like the LaRouchis or, you know, like the LaRouchis or like, you know, the Dixiecrats or whatever.
Guest:But like these are people who go around saying like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are like trafficking children and harvesting their adrenal glands and they're like functioning Satanists and
Guest:And like they're sending secret messages to the children to try to indoctrinate them.
Guest:And those are going to be their colleagues.
Guest:It's kind of like the best you can hope for is that they're just saying it cynically to get elected because they know.
Marc:Oh, God, I hope so.
Marc:But I feel like there's there's that that's that's the minority.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:No.
Guest:And these things, it's like these things can get embedded into our politics.
Guest:I think it's hard to see now because this stuff is so lurid and so freakish and so vivid that it's like it has to be fringe because it's so crazy that, you know, we have this sort of natural impulse in the kind of like, you know, descended from enlightenment values corner of the
Guest:universe to say things will kind of self-correct, you know, the freakish and bizarre and anomalous will not stay.
Guest:You mean the cream will rise to the top?
Guest:Exactly, exactly.
Guest:That is like the intellectual galaxy brain version of that.
Guest:And as you are saying, it's in itself bullshit because, you know, these things like...
Guest:This is what people were saying about birtherism.
Guest:This is so insane.
Guest:This is so fringe.
Guest:This is so freakish.
Guest:And now, like, birtherism has the presidency and multiple members of Congress, and we just don't notice it anymore.
Marc:People want to believe, too.
Guest:It's like what happens with the pandemic or whatever.
Guest:You have this horrific freak show happening day after day, and then you just get habituated to it and go like, oh, it happened again today.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And until that's just what we're living in.
Marc:It's not happening today.
Marc:It's not normalized.
Marc:It is reality.
Marc:These people now run things.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And the woke people, the Winston Smiths of the world, it's only a matter of time before they get hammered into believing.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:This is why I do think that I make room for a certain amount of like repetitive hysteria in my own world where I'm like, it's okay to constantly be saying what is happening.
Guest:This isn't normal because it's better than the alternative.
Guest:You just accept it.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it is it is a weird fight and a weird struggle.
Marc:And the more you talk to you who you think are like minded people, what really becomes revealed in the face of this is not that your friends are going in a direction you don't necessarily know or understand.
Marc:It's that most people are fucking shallow and they don't know how to focus on information that will keep them sort of engaged in the proper narrative around this.
Guest:Well, this is the thing I think I think that most people are.
Guest:Empty inside in like a profound way and and and almost in like a Buddhist way, like there is there is just some a kind of like bubble of empty air at the core of of people that, you know, the woman I was referring to who became a Holocaust denier and sort of rose up through the ranks of this white identity movement.
Guest:Right.
Guest:She was and this happened to a lot of the people I spoke to.
Guest:She grew up in New Jersey, had a lot of multiracial friends growing up.
Guest:It's never the cartoon of the trailer park, whatever that people want it to be.
Guest:It's her family was not a broken home, whatever, like all the stuff.
Guest:And then I followed her through this whole talk to her for dozens and dozens of hours, got to know her really well, still still in touch with her.
Guest:And at the end of all of it, she kept asking me, like, you know me in a way better than I know myself.
Guest:What is your assessment of me?
Guest:Am I just a bad person?
Guest:Am I a monster?
Guest:Did I have hate in my heart?
Guest:And to my mind, I was like, I just think that's the wrong question.
Guest:I think the issue is that there's this emptiness at the core of a lot of our decision making and a lot of our thinking where we don't go, oh, now I can tear my mask off and reveal that I've always hated Jews and black people.
Guest:But it's just like when I was in high school, people were doing the Obama thing.
Guest:So I did that.
Guest:And now I ended up through these bizarre set of life circumstances meeting a guy and he led me toward this other group of people and I was in love with him.
Guest:So I went along with it.
Guest:And now I'm a Nazi.
Marc:And like that's like a that's a codependency problem.
Marc:She should probably go to an Al-Anon meeting.
Marc:Yes, for sure.
Marc:There's that.
Guest:But it's but it's but, you know, everyone has that set of personal issues that can lead them down these alleys.
Marc:They don't have a functioning set of personal principles that were sort of forged, you know, from their heart.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the thing is, I think that what we mean by principles and what we mean by consistent beliefs is often a little bit more of a chimera than we would like to believe.
Guest:I think a lot of it is contingent on the fact that everyone else around us is doing some version of us too, some version of that too.
Guest:And that's ultimately why I really worry about
Guest:changing how we talk than in turn changing who we are.
Guest:Because if everyone around you is saying this is what isn't the new normal, some large percentage of people are going to go along with that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And it's sort of like, you know, Burroughs, I think, once sort of I don't know what the context was, but he said that the human brain is really a fairly simple and recording device.
Marc:Yeah, because that'll get you to that nothingness pretty quickly.
Guest:Yeah, and then you wake up one day and you're shooting your wife.
Guest:You never know.
Marc:Well, that's a great way to end.
Guest:Gotta always go out on a high note with this stuff.
Guest:Thanks for talking to me, Andrew.
Guest:It was great meeting you.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Thanks so much.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:Did you fill your head up with that?
Marc:Add that to the mix.
Marc:That's what's happening now as we move towards the great catharsis.
Marc:Andrew's book, Antisocial, Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation is out in paperback September 15th.
Marc:And now I will play my Stratocaster for you through an echoplex.
Marc:And it sounded fun.
.
.
.
Marc:Boomer lives in Monkey and LaFonda and all the flying cats.