Big Swinging Brains. With Andrew Marantz.

Andrew Marantz has been covering the far-right for about a decade. When Sam was getting ready to leave the movement, someone gave her Andrew's email address, recommended she contact him, and disappeared. Andrew was working on a book about the far-right, Sam needed someone to hear her story. 

In this conversation, Sam, Chuck, and Andrew talk about the state of, well, everything now. Andrew's book, Antisocial, is about the far(ish) right. But, it's also about accountability of tech companies, what might happen if we keep up the guise of a "techno-utopia", and how the future looks bright- only if we work for it.

If being on the far-right is starting to feel wrong, send something our way...
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Transcript

Samantha 0:30

It's very weird to have read the book after avoiding it for so long.

Andrew 0:34

Yeah.

Samantha 0:35

Yeah, it was published in the fall, in fall of 2019 and Covid, the entire world changed. The political landscape was on its way to becoming where it is now. And it was kicked into high gear, it seems like in 2020. so in your opinion, when it comes to I guess all of it, what has changed in your mind? Or yeah, what has changed? Where do you think the movement is now? That sort of thing.

Andrew 0:57

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot to say. I guess a starting point is with this kind of, narrative journalism or whatever you want to call this form of reporting, there's always this kind of tension between the particular and the universalizable. And it's especially when dealing with this kind of subject matter, you don't wanna say you don't want the implication to be like, these are the six or eight people that are the most important, minds of the, new right wing, or these are the people who you need to be paying attention to, to understand American politics or whatever. It's much more these are Tent poles of a narrative that can show you structurally how this stuff works. And like some of the people in the book are more lasting than others, some are more influential than others. Some are, some have, ideologies that are more valid than others. And also, the tour through the territory is about like the underlying conditions and structures that are gonna remain. So I tried to say, especially in a book about the internet, I tried to say as often as I could, like a lot of this stuff will be dated very quickly. A lot of this stuff will be dated between when I write it and when it's published, frankly, in terms of the particulars. But you have to understand the particulars in order to understand the generalizable principles. Even if the individual players go away, even if they're all banned from Twitter tomorrow, the underlying structures will remain.

Samantha 2:28

Absolutely. I thought it was really smart how you would like pepper in or put in like historical events that were basically just what is happening in the current year displayed throughout history. And that's what it felt like though the whole, the entire book felt like this really interesting time capsule, but it was also really prescient in terms of where we are. Like, it was really funny to hear you would just mention Elon Musk and his interest in technology, like at just throughout the book as if he was like a little echo, but it also felt like you were there at the ground floor

Andrew 2:57

And just so that's an interesting example of I would not have known that, he would abandon all of his, car and rocket things and buy Twitter instead. That wouldn't have been my, prediction. But I do think that someone like Elon Musk is really indicative of this pattern of, the people I call in the book, the big swing brains of Silicon Valley, the people who are like these, Fancy themselves to be these great luminaries. And so if it hadn't been him, maybe it would've been whoever, but yeah, that that's a good example of like the individual players may come and go, but the sort of categories that they stand in for, I think are pretty durable.

Samantha 3:33

Yeah. I really loved the passage where you. I guess you got to sit in on a meeting at Reddit where they were deciding like what communities to ban and what to keep and like what was really interesting though was like, even as they were making these decision, who was at Huffman where he was like, screw it, I'll I will ban you. I don't care. I don't have a problem being the guy that bans this despite free speech. And throughout the book, you echo the fact that you are a huge fan of free speech, but you also talk about the trouble of free speech and like you can't really have it without the pendulum swinging the other way. And also like how do you create these rules that are across the board that are fair to both sides? I was curious if your opinion had changed or if you feel like, especially with the purchase of Twitter and. Just these arbitrary decisions of we're gonna reinstate Andrew Anglin but then ban Nick Fuentes after 24 hours. Like what are you seeing happening and where do you think, where do you think the moral arc is bending right now?

Andrew 4:27

Yeah, to put it in terms that, I'll appreciate, I think I think free speech is great and I love free speech is the first thing that I would say. And then the second thing I would say is that it's like table stakes to say that it's almost mean. It's a politician going to Iowa and being like, I love puppies and ice cream and I will, why want Americans to prosper? It's like true but meaningless. Yes, I love free speech. I think free speech is great, but the only interesting content that starts to come into these debates is when we move beyond. This meaningless distinction of are you for or against free speech? Because as you just pointed out, does pro-free speech mean you let a Nazi on your platform, or does it mean you then turn around and ban the Nazi when they do more Nazi stuff? None of that is for or against free speech. It's just deciding how you want to enforce the terms of service that you have. And, you just, it's almost so repetitive to see this pattern play out again and again. Every time there's a new social network or a new ownership of an old social network, they come in and say, this time we're gonna do this in a way that stands up for free speech. I mean, this is the old Twitter too. The old 2010. 2011 was when Twitter called itself the free speech wing of the free speech party. That was, the alternative to the mainstream gatekeepers. They were gonna bust the gates open. This was Reddit, this was Gab, this was Parler, this was, all of them. They all start from this premise, we're gonna be here for your free speech, which is we're gonna cut taxes and, in, in increase prosperity. And then it's like making a difficult political choice. Okay, which taxes are you gonna cut? Which school lunches are you gonna not serve? So like it of course, it's great to let the marketplace of ideas play itself out, but like the way humans work and the way the internet works is people are gonna test every single limit you try to place on them. And then you have to make choices. And once you start to make choices, It's not so simple. So any like bumper sticker size solution you have is gonna fall by the wayside. You were talking about sitting in these meetings at Reddit and I did think it was refreshing that, one of the founders of Reddit, Steve Huffman, who returned as the c e o, he, part of what I found refreshing on it again, was not that I necessarily lined up with all of his conclusions or agreed with all of them, but that he was willing to change. Change my view is one of, was one of my and everyone's favorite subreddits and he hadn't been spending a lot of time there. I think because he started out as this really early crop of free speech absolutist. Let the marketplace of ideas solve all the problems, which by the way, is a very convenient position if you own a business, of course means you don't have to do the work, right? You don't have to hire the moderators, you don't have to think it through. You just say Laissez-Faire so he started from this position of, we'll let everyone do whatever they want and that will be, us being chill and being guardians of free speech. Then he left and read. It just went to shit. Yeah, absolutely. And then he, instead of digging in his heels and making an argument for why his principles had been right all along, but they just hadn't been followed correctly or something, he came back and said, I think we were oriented the wrong way and we need to steer the ship in another direction. And he tried, like he, I think a lot of it was that he took Charlottesville personally and he He and the other co-founder, Alexis Ohanion went to college in Charlottesville. And when the when the Unite the Right Rally happened, they were like, fuck this, we don't want to be a part super powering this. And so they eased off of their former absolutist position. Now again, we can argue about the specifics of how and why they did that and whether it was consistent and whether their triage was done in the right order. But it was just interesting to watch someone change the ideology that had made them a lot of money because of some other principle that came in. And then, yeah, I think that when I was in those meetings, it was like the thing that the Reddit people said that or one of the things they said that was memorable to me was like, If all you can say if all these things are happening, like there are, tiki torches and people are dying and, and your only response to that is the words free speech. You're just not thinking very difficult, like deeply about the problem. Like free speech might be part of the conversation we need to have, but it can't be the entirety of it.

Samantha 8:57

You also had a really good line where you basically said that There is no living without narratives. There're either better narratives or worse narratives. And you spent a lot of time with these people that were quite literally the people creating these narratives. You were very clear about the fact that you did not condone or agree with almost any of the ideology, but do you find that there are narratives other than like society is failing because of the way things are going that the left and right agree on?

Andrew 9:23

Yeah, I think it is maybe not quite as broad as, society is failing or we have critiques, but there but on the broader end, cuz yeah I didn't find myself, sitting with. A kind of AltRight ideologue and being like, the guy makes some good points about women belong in the household or whatever. I wasn't huh, let me try that on and see if I don't, I didn't consider it my job as a reporter to put myself in the position of believe, trying to believe the content of what they told me. I was much more interested in the form than the content or the means by which they could propel some of these obviously, obnoxious ideas into the center of the discourse anyway. But I do think there are, at a slightly, like one layer below that level, I think there's definitely a very poignant sense of alienation and dispirited that, there, there will always be a, some amount of discontent and, disconnection from society that, a lot of, Isolated young people feel. But I do think in this particular moment with, the, just the widening of inequality and deaths of despair and, the the life expectancy falling for the first time in an industrialized economy. And there's a very particular moment of American despair and alienation and atomization that I think for various cultural reasons, the right has been better at tapping into at least on the internet than the left has. And so I do think there was something that I understood or almost resonated with, not in the particulars of their diagnosis of the problem, but in the idea that there were people who were putting their finger on a real problem that. Their opponents on the other side weren't even seeing or addressing

Chuck 11:11

The frustra frustrations are, in a lot of cases valid. They're, there are reasons that people get into that stuff and their reasons are valid. They have valid feelings, but they are just allowing themselves down a path that is woefully misguided.

Samantha 11:29

Yeah, I think, yeah, I think to write on that Chuck and Andrew yeah, I think a lot of people, they have an issue and instead of actually looking internally or looking at reality for it, they just find the simplest enemy or reason for these issues. And if it's the least amount of work, that's what they'll take. Cuz when you're in that much pain, you can't really look within your, you're not able to, you don't want to. I can only imagine, like from your perspective, Andrew watching me go through. Leaving thinking I'm fine, realizing I'm fucked up. The work and all that, I'm, it must have been really interesting to see someone go through that, cuz it's not a visible trauma. It's not, I didn't break my legs and I'm healing like I have to redefine myself.

Andrew 12:14

No, it's very interesting and it was very, I felt very, I mean I guess lucky isn't the right word, but I felt like privileged to be seeing you in all of those stages because, it was very, it was like watching someone like learn how to walk again or something. Yeah. And you can see that takes a lot of work and it's I would've known intellectually that takes a lot of work. But it was very different seeing it happen. Yeah.

Samantha 12:41

I think forever the. Most embarrassing was when you, me and Glen are, were at that and I was like, look, I know the Holocaust happened, but did it happen? Oh God, that was so bad.

Andrew 12:54

This is why I think this idea of pinning people down on what they really believe is sometimes a foolish thing. It has its place when you're like trying to catch a politician, admitting to, that they were lying about some policy or something, but with. Most normal people in most messy actual situations, it's depends on how fucked up you are that day and who got into your head and what's going on in your life and what kind of identity you want to have. And I think it's scary to think about how fluid those things can be and that it could be the same person who in many ways is like not sounding like the same person from week to week. That challenges a lot of our ideas about how people work, but I think it's closer to the truth.

Samantha 13:39

Yeah, I no I totally agree with that and I found it when you would, we were talking about it earlier where there's, what did you say that perhaps there's not indoctrination, but education, and that's where you touch on the narrative thing how do you think critically about things? How do you consider the world? How do you do all, like, how do you do all of that?

Andrew 13:58

You have to think it through. And so I think that one of the things that the Trump phenomenon showed is that media criticism can be a very powerful tool, even if it's not very subtle because there's this very understandable and widespread impulse to be pissed off at the media that has existed for a long time, for very understandable reasons. And, it's like any of these, deep underlying impulses. It's just what do you do with it that feels constructive and like it's addressing the problem at hand, right? If I. I can understand and sympathize with why the average person, gives a lower approval rating to the media than they do to like cockroaches or whatever. I get that on some visceral level, but I also don't think that the useful response to that is for Trump at a rally to be like, yelling at the Lugen Pressa or whatever, or saying you should throw rocks at them. That doesn't seem like the best way to deal with that. It's politically useful for him, but I don't think it helps anything. And it's like how do we deal with these like deep ethical and logical conundrums that underlie, the role of the media in society is the, I guess my answer is like for each individual person who's asking like, Why are you asking? Are you asking in good faith and how much time do you have? So yeah the underlying issues definitely exist and there are like entire journalism ethics courses that are taught on this sort of thing. It's just, it can be used as a cudgle or it can be used as like a productive tool.

Samantha 15:37

Media still doesn't seem, despite the fact that this has been going on for seemingly as long as human history, that prejudice, bigotry, all this, just like this really, these really ignorant takes or hateful takes. But the media seems to think that, if I put this person in the spotlight and just say oh wow. Or obviously you're wrong, but no direct confrontation of it. They think they're doing something and all they're actually doing is creating propaganda for the opposition. what is the moral obligation of the media when it comes to how do you cover something without platforming it in the wrong way?

Andrew 16:07

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great question. There are a million things to say about this. So I did a piece, this wasn't. A lot of, there were like little bits of this in the book, but when Milo went to, on his sort of campus tour that was designed to just, be a sort of classic trolling maneuver, like it was designed to generate attention for him, generate attention for his funders, and also like divert resources from public universities that could be put into education. So like those were pretty clearly the stated goals of what he was doing. And but yet he had found this, interesting like platform through which to do it, right? Because if you go to public universities and say, I'm a speaker, I have first amendment rights, it's like very hard or in some cases impossible for them to turn you down. So it was this very clever maneuver that he could use to piss everyone off essentially. And So I went to uc, Berkeley to cover some of that. And again, like just backing up with every time I had a very serious dilemma on my hands, which was, what are the trade-offs with? Yeah. Me mentioning this person's name, giving them any kind of attention at all. Like I, it would've been very tempting for me to skip that part of the calculus and just say, like this is true and society needs to know about it. And so my job is to report the truth. I don't think you're entirely reckoning with this stuff as a journalist. If you don't, if you stop there, like it may be true and it may be. Okay to report the truth in some broad sense, but you also have to reckon with the idea that there is some transaction going on, whether you like it or not, there is a transactional relationship between people who use any attention as oxygen and you giving them some amount of that attention, even if it's negative attention. Like I didn't wanna put Milo in the New Yorker. I really resented the fact that he was putting me in that position. It just seemed like he wasn't someone who had anything really to say other than I'm an asshole and like everyone in the country needs to spend some of their day watching me be an asshole. And I just resented that and. But I like went through the whole cost benefit calculus and decided, okay, this really does present really interesting first Amendment concerns, and I feel like I can use it as a way to talk through what the First Amendment means in this context. How it's changing, how the kind of classic liberal approach to free speech discourse is maybe missing the point a little bit here. And so when I went there, a lot of the people I found to be thinking it through in really sophisticated ways who were like campus administration administrators, law students, lost law professors, activists on campus, whatever. There were a lot of different perspectives and a lot of it was starting reasoning backwards from what is the thing that. Troll or antagonist wants in the end from all of this. They don't want to change someone's mind. They don't want to engage in a good faith dialogue. They want an image that they can use as propaganda. They want video of themselves handcuffed to the, door of the campus hall. They want images of their people being tear gased, and then if you work backwards from what propaganda are they trying to achieve, then you can think through like to what extent are we playing into their hands and to what extent are we not?

Samantha 19:38

When you described a lot of these people, I mean they sounded like they, they were rage farming and doing all this AB testing and you almost described them. It felt to me as if you were just being like, yeah, we're gonna try this product and that product and whichever one sells more. I spent a lot of time in the movement waiting for someone to either tell me like, Hey, this is the truth. This is what it is. Or someone to be like, Hey, this is all bullshit. And this is just, we're just trying to get attention. For the people that you spent time with what is a percentage, or do you think they truly believed the things that they were saying? Or was it just, are they just like cult like, pragmatic and Mac, like just these little cult leaders of just I just want your eyes on me, or were they trying to sell an idea Yeah. That they believed in? I think there's a range, and not to do the the very sort of annoying, like it's a little bit of both, but I think that there are some, there is a spectrum. Yeah. I don't think that they're, I don't think that every one of them is the same. And and again, like to the extent that these people stand in for kind of archetypes that will continue to exist in the future, I don't think there's any reason that anybody needs to be thinking about what Milo is doing or saying now, but he's an archetype that we can use to think through future versions of, there will be people like that in the future. And similarly with any, I think there's always a combination there were from pure provocateurs to pure ideologues, and there were lots of combinations in between. So for some of them, often what the Silicon Valley gatekeeper people will say is if you just re-engineer the incentive structure, you can get rid of a lot of this behavior. I think that's only true if you know what the true incentives are, and for some people it's just, I can make money from, a link mills or fake news mills or whatever. For other people, if they're real ideologues, you can't make them go away just by removing the incentives. If you're a dedicated enough Nazi, you can be shut down as many times as you want and you're not gonna just give up. Think it was also really smart of you to bring up like this southern strategy and everything in there of if you euphemized your speech and you soften it, like you can effectively get any idea out there where you're just asking questions or making observations and you go by all of the sensors. And I think that is something that we need to reckon with is just for myself and for so many people in the movement, it was like I didn't say racial slurs, so I couldn't have been racist. And it's yes, you could have that is, you are living proof of that concept, right? And so then you can imagine how hard it is for someone like the head of content moderation at Facebook or Reddit or whatever because all they're starting from the premise of if we can just ban all the right slurs, we will fix the problem of racism on our platform. And it's like pretty much exact. That's not gonna work. Yeah, that's not nearly enough. Yeah. In that vein we're talking about, so the Proud Boys I know you spent some time in proximity to them, in that spectrum of ideologue to, to, just attention seeker where, where would you say motivations would lie? I guess I would take the Proud Boys at their word when they say they're a western chauvinist organization, the West is the best, and all that stuff. And that they like getting into fights with people and, being, in getting into brawls and being like a men's club. I think that's all true. I think it's not there are different ways of advancing that agenda and, but and also obviously they do that thing that again, is a classic archetype that will exist long after the individuals are gone, which is. When it's inconvenient for you, you say you're just joking. And then when you wanna really drive home the agenda, you drive it home. I get why people are confused. But these guys told me they were just joking around and, I think that is what they told you. And I think it's if you look at it through that lens, then it looks silly and harmless. And they're named after a song from Aladdin, the Aladdin musical and whatever. It all looks like fun and games. And then if you hang around long enough and peel back enough of the layers, it doesn't look like fun and games anymore. But again, these things are, I don't, I don't wanna use the word dialectic cuz you're gonna kick me off the zoom, but these things are there's an interplay, right? It's not all one or all the other. The thing that the like. So I don't know if you know anything about me, but I was in the hammer skins and in the war kins back in the eighties and nineties, and so like very steeped in skinhead culture. And so like their uniform shirt is a Fred Perry shirt, which is a classic skin skinhead uniform piece. And to my mind that they're not, they there's no ambiguity there. It's, there's a message in that. And like I know that, in the book you mentioned that he was engaging in some slurs and they have that shtick and it's in their tenets that, we're not racist. But I have a very hard time buying that, I would also define a western chauvinist organization as racist. Yes. Abs ab Absolutely. On a macro level. Yes. Yeah. The whole system, it's systemic. White supremacy. But as just in the ability to be ambiguous about Yeah. You know what that means. Totally. It, yeah. Totally. And another thing in the, in these, in those scenes in the book, which again is I'm sure the individual proud boys that I talked to, I would hope that a lot of them have moved on and have, figured out better things to do with their time. But maybe, I know for a fact some of them have moved on. Yeah. Yeah. So confirm. Yeah, exactly. And I do get back to one of your previous questions. What was appealing and energizing about that? I've spent enough time with some of these guys, proud boys specifically to know that if you were of a certain, age and wanted to go to a certain kind of, Energetic gathering that felt subversive and. I get what the appeal is. I'm obviously not condoning it, but I get it. I just think that whether those guys have moved on or not, the individuals I spoke to, what was clear is that they were picking up the message, even if it was between the lines, so whoever could say whatever disclaimers they wanted about this is not a pro-white organization. And then everyone who was there was like, what I'm hearing you say is this is a pro-white organization. So obviously the message is coming through. Andrew, you do make the really smart observation about The kind, like virtue signaling and how, like from day one there's so much indoctrination from the far right, and especially when they come up with these terms that are like, hate to say it, but it's smart. It's really smart, and when you're virtue signaling, like extolling the benefits of diversity and, inclusion and acceptance of others, that it can only be self-serving, that you don't, no one actually means it. Do you think we've become more or less cynical in that way since the book was published? And what do you even think it's, do you think it's true? Do I think it's true that everything is virtue signaling on some level or Yeah, which, yeah. Yeah. I think the more that we retreat into our online selves, the harder it is to tell. Like it was a big revelation to a. Slightly older generation that it was like weird to a certain micro-generation or generation of people that your real self and your computer self could be parts of the same thing. And now I think everyone correctly takes it for granted that there is no real solid distinction Yeah. Between who you are online and who you are. And I think that just is what it is. It's unavoidable at this point, but the more that becomes the case, the more it's hard to tell where to stop with the cynicism. Because The way we've constructed social media, at least for now. It might change when AI takes over and we can talk about that, but for now we've gamified everything and created these quantifiable engagement metrics so that it's just a, it's just a giant sophisticated slot machine. And so if these two premises are true, if your real self is merging with your online self, and if your online self is like passing through this endless set of pachinko machines that give you more bells and whistles and more video game points, the more engagement you stir up. Then of course we're gonna become more cynical about everything because it's like every interaction is a performance. Yeah. And it's all tilted toward you seeing the parts of it that are the most similar to a public performance. And the parts of it that you keep as your private self are like by definition, the parts that you don't see anyone else exhibiting. So you look around the world and see everyone acting in ways that seem like their most callous, idiotic, reactive selves. And of course it is, because that's how the whole thing is designed. But then you make the mistake of thinking that's all that is out there. It's if you lived in the middle of a highway, you'd be like, it really seems like people move really fast and they like stay in their cars all the time and they like, run over animals and yeah, they do that because that's what you do on a highway, because you just don't realize that you live on the median of a highway and there's A whole bunch of other stuff out in the woods that you can't access cuz you're stuck in that place. Yeah, absolutely. I was going to agree and make the comment of something about integrity virtually doesn't exist, but I think it does. It's just, it's not, I don't know, I don't wanna say it's not praise, but it's it's not even considered anymore. It's not about I'm doing the right thing because it's doing the right thing. It's, I'm doing the right thing so that I can get someone to tape me doing it and get the Gold Star. It's just the, it's not the incentive structure that is rewarded under the rules of social media the way we've built it. It's you a lot of times these what, whatever I call them the techno utopians the new Silicon Valley gatekeepers. When someone criticizes the way they've built one of these systems, they like to revert to conversations about human nature and say human nature has always been thus, and people have always gotten into conflict. And people have always had these, bigoted instincts, like racism was not invented by the internet. But I think the reason that they often revert to that is, is that it lets them off the hook, right? Yeah. And it says this is just human nature rearing its head. And this is just reflecting us back to ourselves. And I don't think it's reflecting us back to ourselves flatly, as an accurate mirror. But I think one thing that means is they get to rest on the laurels of if someone does something bad, it's because their human nature is bad because that's who they are. Yeah. Yeah. But we don't, if you. I'm gonna use a lot of metaphors cuz the internet is just itself a metaphor, so I'm just gonna go for it. But if you walk through a casino and there's no windows and no natural light and you can't really tell what time it is and people keep giving you drinks and they're pumping oxygen into the air, so you stay awake and then you lose all your money. Like you made the decision to gamble away your money, but you were in a constructive environment that it was built specifically to encourage you to Yeah. To encourage that. Yeah, absolutely. Pro or the motive of separating you from your money. So circling back to your arc of the moral universe, like your take on that, which. I gotta admit, like at first I was a little maybe disgruntled or something because I, like I'm a, I tend to be a kind of an optimist. I try to be anyway. And I think that, that saying that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice is, it's amazingly hopeful. But then the more I read, I realized that I think that's how you feel about it too. You just don't think that it's something that is an absolute in the universe that we have no input into and that it's, yeah, it's something that we have to drag along, and it is happening, it's happened over the course of centuries and we can see it. But I think part, basically the point of the book was that if we let it slip, it can slip, right? Yeah. So how do we. What is our responsibility as, individual citizens? What is your responsibility as a journalist? What is the responsibility of all of us to help continue to bend that arc in the right direction? Yeah. I think it's it's like we were just talking about how the, Silicon Valley owners and executives like to let themselves off the hook by saying don't blame us. Blame human nature. And I think one way that we let ourselves off the hook, members of society, people who want to, actively participate in making society better. Is that we say, give it time, progress, will happen. It's inevitable. It just takes time. This is a very kind of they call it the Whiggish view of history. It's a very kind of, classic 20th century liberal. Like these things are inevitable. We keep making more progress. We keep making more, global connections and we keep, flattening, barriers and, these things will just happen on their own. And I think that lets us off the hook because like, when has history ever worked like that? When has there ever been a process that has been automatic? If you take a long enough time horizon, things, sometimes happen. But like by then, the ice caps might be melted and, the asteroid might hit the earth. It's like saying, saying the arc of the universe bend toward justice is like saying wars end or like climates, eventually reach equilibrium, and it's yeah, but like lots of scary shit could happen in the meantime. Yeah, we have to try to, we have to try to end this war. We have to try to fix this particular ecosystem. Like we can't just wait for it to happen. I think it's a very powerful motive that we have to as soon as something gets big enough, just say it's out of our hands, but it's never out of our hands. By the same token, it's never entirely in one individual person's hands. It's a collective problem. And collective problems are really difficult. The collective problem of how to change our entire information ecosystem from this one, which seems to be a, moral and ethical dead end into something better when we have, the capitalist profit motive to, to deal with. And it, it's a really hard problem. How do we, Fix the collective action problem of climate change that the invisible hand of the market has completely failed to fix and has in fact exacerbated actively for 50 years. That's a really hard problem, but it doesn't mean that either every individual person can fix it themselves if they just recycle hard enough. Nor does it mean that like you are totally off the hook and you just have to wait for like the hand of God to do it. Like the challenge is to create enough collective power that we together collectively can move the arc of history in the right direction. And if that sounds like a very general proposition, it's because it is and from what I understood that a lot of that has to do with the language we use and like our discourse and our vocabulary and our lexicon. Which I know are all ways of saying the same thing, but. Yeah. And look, I think it can, that, that can also be another way of letting ourselves off the hook that we can only focus on language and say if we all just use polite enough words and then we'll fix all the problems. And I think people get rightly grumpy about that and say language doesn't matter as much as, putting food on people's tables and stuff. And I think that's true. I think the material consequences of people's lives ultimately are the thing that matters. The reason that I focus so much on language in the book is because language, again, these things are not totally separable. Like the language that a politician uses to pass the deregulation that leads to you not having food on your table or that leads to you having toxic chemicals spilled on a train track in your backyard. That's because of language that politicians say to each other and write down in acts of Congress that become laws. It's not this total binary where it's there's the words we say and then there's the actions in the world. It's the propagation of bad ideas. We can't regulate train companies because then the trains won't run on time. That leads to actual death and destruction and material consequences. So I think we gotta get both in order. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's totally a small scale and large scale. All of it. It all counts. Chuck, do you have, I think I did wanna quickly interject and say that Maga Claire sounded like a fucking real one. R i p Yeah. You, she's, she slowly would've like you, you would've liked her. And also, thanks for reading the footnote. That's, I'm a try hard as we know. Yeah, no, that yeah. She seemed really cool. That was a bummer. Andrew, like kind of what do you see right now when you wake up and like you think about your kids and what they're growing up into? Like what, do you have a call of action or is there anything that you're hoping ends up happening in the future? Are you just observing as a good journalist as Yeah, I think there are definitely, thoughts and preferences and opinions I have that go beyond observations. I would like for my children not to live in a toxic wasteland when they grow up. And I think that requires rethinking a lot of stuff. I think like obviously I spent a lot of time focusing on the negative and scary and shitty things about the way we've constructed our internet. And I think that's like a good place to start. But I think one of the things that presents an interesting opportunity about the way we've constructed the internet and just like public discourse is that you don't have to just return to some mythical normalcy, right? You don't have to just say this is what they did in the fifties, so we should go back to that. That's not possible or desirable. Nobody, one thing that I wish I had done a better job of is say I'm not, I don't want us to go back to the Walter Cronkite days. That's not helpful. That's not desirable. It's not gonna happen. I think the internet and, and again, AI and all kinds of, new, discursive structures allow us to reinvent things. I think that's an exciting opportunity. I think we have to reinvent, the way we Build our economy and our lives. I just think that's a really difficult problem and it requires a lot of collective clear thinking that the internet is not currently helping us do. Yeah. What are your thoughts on AI and how it's, I don't wanna say it's taking over, but it's just a matter of time. Like how do you feel about that? Does that give you anxiety about what this could all end up becoming? Yeah. It seems not great. It's telling people to leave their wives and marry the, hit the ai so pretty bad. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And they don't even really know why. The thing is that like a lot of the previous models you could train to just say, okay, Don't do swastikas and then it would listen to you. But now we're in this weird place where you can jailbreak these things more and more easily, almost by accident. And then if you ask the engineers, why did it just tell this journalist to leave his wife that it doesn't, they don't know the answer, which is really scary. And so I think it could be useful to have, some sort of, enforceable regulation that says, if you can't tell us why your thing is doing what it's doing, you don't get to keep making it. I'm not generally, I saw the Terminator when I was a kid. Come on. Exactly. And so did Deon Musk, so it's not so I'm generally, and this is a whole, Discussion for another day. But I'm generally very skeptical of government regulation when it comes to anything related to speech. I think it is a dangerous slippery slope. I just think there are also other dangerous slippery slopes that we also have to worry about as well. We don't have the luxury of just worrying about one at a time. So I'm nervous about government regulation of ai, for example, but I'm also very worried about what happens if there's no regulation. So I think it has to be done in a tailored, smart way, but I think starting with, hey, don't create a black box thing that you don't understand, that has, by your own estimation, a 10% chance of eating us all alive. I think that's a good place to start. Look, I'll be completely honest as I'm sure this will surprise no one, I don't know a whole lot about ai. So I am curious, what about the government regulation are you against? And for what about that is a big deal to you? I guess I think that, if if the, there are many ways that regulation could be done in a ham-handed way or a way that seems to, run against First Amendment norms at least. If you were to have a regulation that just says like all AI is bad and can't happen, then there's a lot of things you would be stifling in terms of artistic creativity, in terms of economic productivity like, and I also just don't think you can pass laws like that. It's the same with social media. If you just said we, the government decree that all social media must ban fake news. You just open up this entire can of worms. What does that mean? So you can't you can't just leave it in the hands of some ministry of truth or something for obvious reasons. I think that what often happens though is that people get so scared of that, that they throw up their hands and say, okay, I guess there's nothing we can do. And I, I think that, the whole point of government is trying to figure out a way to solve these problems in a way that doesn't make them worse than you found'em. And so that's hard, but that it's not impossible, I don't think. Yeah. No, I think that's, that, that makes sense. That is helpful. I, yeah, I do have one more real quick. So having watched Sam go through her process of leaving the movement did that affect in any way your your outlook on the ability of people who are in the movement to leave and change? Definitely, yeah. That was a huge help for me as a reporter and as a person to have. That having that repertorial relationship with Sam was helpful in many ways, and that was one of them, which is, I was getting to a place of I don't know how this stuff is gonna shake out. I don't know if it's possible for people to, find their way out of this stuff. I was really focusing on how strong and addictive and scary some of these rabbit holes can be, and it was inspiring to see someone make their way out and, Not perfect. It's not always like a linear easy process, but it's almost never a linear easy process. Yeah. But it's super it's much more real that way. And it's, to me, the whole point of telling these narratives in a way that is true and like deeply reported and not fictional, is that, this is what it, this is what it looks like, and if you can see what it actually looks like, it's much more inspiring to me than what it could hypothetically look like. And yeah I was very, yeah, it changed the way I thought about a lot of things, seeing that up close, and it definitely changed the way I thought about the internet, because, you can, the internet is like any, super powerful. It's fire or, Wind or any super powerful thing can be used for God or for evil. And so to see someone like, discover how fire can be dangerous and then discover how to like, rebuild, a new like utopian village using fire, it's like a very inspiring thing to see up close. That was nice. Thank you. That was very nice of you. Yeah. The kid that you were talking about in front of the deplorables was his name Zack, the one that just disappeared into the night. Did you ever hear from him again or anything like that? Or do you think, oh how was that? Yeah. Yeah. He also found his way out. And yeah he was another, he was One of the only other people in the, in the similar realm, in the similar column to you of okay, this is someone I feel like I can understand as a full person. And he he found his way out eventually. I think, he was looking for a fun subversive, badass punk rock kind of thing to do. And he also had his reasons for being like, I don't think that any other cultural or political camp is really speaking to me on like an effective level, like in, in a way that resonates with my, affect anesthetic. And so it took him a while to be like, maybe that's not the only important thing. And maybe I've signed up for more than I realized by, because the thing is if you just go on vibes and affect. You, it's like very easy to see how you get your foot in the door, and then before you know it, you've signed up for all this other shit that's adjacent to that, I never I came here for fun party, don't tell me what to say. I can say bad words. And now it's like you're justifying the wage gap and all this other stuff. But I didn't sign up for that, but it's very hard to, Oklahoma City was okay. Yeah. So it's like that given the sort of like negative polarization dynamics and given the I'm on this team and you're on the opposite team it's very hard to get on the train part way. Yeah he found his way. I should check in with him again actually. Good. Yeah. Yeah. I was hoping he was a real person. That was my actual question was he a real guy? Everyone's real. No, I think, hey, this is just an aside, but what did you think of the Waco speech? I just think it gets darker and darker, right? I think it's just like you can't really, we've just seen this with Trump for a long time, whether it's, yeah. Fuentez or Kanye or Waco or any of this stuff, like he doesn't have that many moves left. And so yeah, when you've run outta moves, you just keep going to the bottom of the barrel and it's is this racist enough for you guys yet? How about this? I thought, do you, is his base, I feel like whoever he has left is hardcore in a kind of like extremely dangerous way. I'm assuming his base has diminished like substantially since the beginning of all this, or just even in the past few months. I don't know, but I. It's really strange though, and I wonder the way you're talking about it, where people just wash their hands clean. I think that's what happened with Obama. I'm afraid that's what's gonna happen with Joe Biden, where they're like we can't be, we elected a black president, then we elected his vice president after we made that mistake. We can't be that bad. And I am still nervous that Trump will be elected again. I just, I can't. January 6th happened, the unite, the right rally happened. The fucking A C L U defended it. I wanna say we learned from our lessons and we get better, but there is this really jaded part of me that's we're never going to, Yeah. We always make that assumption of people just generally want to be good, but good is not universal, yeah. And so it's just, I'm still fucking nervous and I think we all should still be, and I wanna be optimistic and positive, but. No I dunno, I don't know. I think that more indictments need to come down, like Georgia needs to get on the ball and, yeah. I mean I think that the, to the point about the arc of the moral universe thing, I think it applies here in the sense that one of the things I was arguing for is not just optimism, not just pessimism, but this concept of contingency. Like anything could go either way. And elections are just a perfect example of this. Are we the kind of country that elected, it's first black president twice, or are we the kind of country that would re-elect a man as debased as Donald Trump? It's we're all of that, those kinds of country? Yeah. We're all of those places. We're all those it, we contain all those possibilities, right? Every presidential election is within the margin of being a coin flip. So the question is, who's gonna get out and work for it? And not to be overly simplistic or however this might sound, but isn't this the basis of like human history? That's why it's cyclical, is because the bad thing happens then we Correct. Or we think we're overcorrecting or whatever. We say okay, awesome, we're great job is done. Like good work team, and then we keep slipping back. There's not that vigilance of Hey we need to put these guardrails on. We need to give a shit about not putting swastikas on chatbots because that will become more. And I think that's the part where, I don't know, I don't know if I'm a free speech absolutist, you asked me that six months a year ago would've been like, absolutely stay whatever you want. But that doesn't mean we're gonna amplify it. But I'm in a place where I'm like, no, just shut the fuck up if you have bad ideas. I don't wanna hear it. No one needs to hear it. I don't wanna hear you say it's just a joke. And the wrong person doesn't realize it's just a joke. So I just, I don't. I don't know. I wanna be optimistic and I think generally I am, but I feel like there's a self-awareness that people like us carry when you're so entrenched in that world man, this is truly insidious. Like this truly will stop at nothing to gain another breath, and we really can't stop fighting against it. Yeah. But I will get off my soapbox now. Thank you. I don't know, was there anything you wanted to plug or say or anything that we missed or anything? Andrew, what is your least favorite question to be asked? I don't think we did any of my least, I think my least favorite question is so what's the whole like, point of your whole thing so I can just like skip the reading it part, but I didn't get that question this time. Get it? Is that a question or is that a statement of It's, so there you, you gotta quote a lot of what's your it's usually what's your argument or what's your, can I go watch your, make a synopsis for me so I don't have to think and whatever. It's fair. I've read books before where I was like, you could have given me the synopsis, so I get it. But it's just there is a thing that happens with narrative where you don't really, you can't sum up the argument in a paragraph that, it is frustrating to people. I also think it was really wise for you to be in these situations and say, look, I'm not gonna claim that anyone is a bad person, but I am going to describe these as bad ideas. You're not a policymaker. None of us are lawmakers or anything like that, but we need to bring this to the table and stop pretending like it's just gonna go away on its own because it's not Totally. Yeah, and it's also I just don't think we're at a place where we can be prescriptive until we understand it. It's I don't wanna be prescriptive about AI until I know what it is and what it's doing. Yeah. You can just, you can get yourself into trouble that way. Even earlier you guys were talking about something and it reminded, oh, like the Proud Boys, the Western chauvinism thing. And that would even go as far as I recently made a friend who. She was like, I moved here from California a couple years ago cause I was leaving a cult and I was like, oh let's chat. And she was like, oh, I was actually like Pentecostal Christian or something like that or evangelical or something. And I was like, oh, there's a lot of overlap with like white supremacy and stuff. And she was just like, I don't think so. What do you mean? How is that possible? And it's I don't think people realize like western chauvinist is euphemistic for a white nationalist, misogynist, or when you talk about Christianity, you're not talk, you're talking about white Jesus. You're not talking about these other concepts. And I think until, again, until we can address these things for what they are there, there cannot be any solutions. So at this point, we just have to keep trying to start these conversations. But not in a, obnoxious share those fake Facebook posts kind of way. But in a we need to say what these things are. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I was thinking about it the other day that in 2017 when I left, I was leaving fringe politics. But if I left today having those same views, I would just be saying I don't support Marjorie Taylor Green anymore. It has become so mainstreamed and like, how do we stifle that? What do we do? How do we have conversations about this? But not in a way where Leslie stalls like, wow. Oh geez, that's bad. But I don't know. We touched on it earlier, but I just, yeah, no, you're right. That was like, it, that was the warning at the time was like, guys, if we're not careful, this fringe could become the mainstream. And now we're in a place where it is just mainstream and we just have to reckon with that. And it's, and I think the first step of reckoning with that is just not. Not harking back to this idea that oh, these fringe ideas what are they doing here? Where do they come from? And it's they've taken over. And so now you just start from that premise. And I think part of that is, is calling things what they are too. Like they, they've managed to sneak white nationalists and then now that has become Christian nationalists. And really those are just euphemisms that the movement was trying for a long time to get into mainstream dialogue. And it softens the sound of white supremacy, cuz nobody wants to be known as a white supremacist, but hey, Christian nationalist is okay, it's part of people like Tom Metzger's intentional plan from the 1980s being enacted in the 2020s, I thought it was interesting, Chuck, you and I, in the first conversation, we had recorded a conversation where it was like the four, so it's me, Chuck, Brad, and Lauren, and we're all like, we all work for life after hate, but we all have experience in the far right. It was really interesting. There was, I made some joke or some comment in call. Oh, we talked about the Lone Wolf concept, and you're like they're actually part of an international terrorist organization. And I had this you mean domestic terrorist? Then I was like, wait, how many calls did I overhear people in Sweden or fucking South Africa? And this it is, it's an international terrorist organization and it was just, it is wild to like, even now, after having been in it, I was like, don't be so hard on them. Wait a second. That's actually, you're being kind. You're being kind. Even in the eighties when I was involved eighties and nineties, we were in touch with people from all over the world. There were hammer skins all over the world, right? To call it a a. An American phenomena is naive. It's international. Yeah. Yeah. No I totally agree with that. Yeah. It's just been very, Illuminating all the conversations that we all had. Totally. But yeah I thank you for doing this, Andrew. No, this is great. Cool. Alright, thank you so much guys meet you. Thanks y'all. You too. Bye. Bye. Bye.