Jamie Bartlett | Internet Subcultures and the Social Media Rage Machine

0:00Today we helped a latte for Sam coffee shop get an insurance quote simply and easily and made sure a floral delivery van was able to make someone's day. We're the Hartford with decades of experience insuring millions of unique small businesses. When it comes to your small business insurance. Thank you. One size absolutely does not fit all. Get a quote or find an agent today at the Hartford dot com slash small business. Score more with the college branded Venmo debit card and earn up to 5 % cash back with Venmo stash. Got paid back? With the Venmo debit card you can instantly access your balance and spend on what you want.

0:40Like game day snacks, gear, tickets and more. The more you do, the more cash back you can earn. Plus there's no monthly fee or minimum balance. Sign up now at Venmo.com slash college card. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. Select schools available. Venmo stash terms and exclusions apply at Venmo.me slash stash terms. Max$100 cash back per month. Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Today I am joined by Jamie Bartlett, who I think has one of the most interesting jobs in the United Kingdom. Even if it can be a little bit difficult to define what it is, he is essentially a writer and podcaster on internet trends and culture.

1:17I first got to know him about 10 years ago at a Google retreat and he has been welcome on Jimmy's Jobs of the Future at any point. It partly came on because he's got a new book coming out called How to Talk to AI, which we will be releasing our discussion around that as a second separate episode in a couple of weeks time. Here's Jamie Bartlett on his job. On to today's episode. Make sure you subscribe so we can continue to get bigger and bigger guests.

1:52Jamie, welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Now, I'm going to ask you what your job is. But first, I was going to have a go at describing it. Because we've known each other for about 10 years. And you're like part investigative journalist, part policy thinker, right? You had a role at Demos. I did, yeah, a while ago. Yeah, I guess so. Internet culture, which is now like internet culture. And, of course, podcaster. and probably had the UK's first biggest podcast with Missing Crypto Queen in 2019. Yeah, maybe. Master of all trades and yet... How do you describe your job? Well, I don't ever dare...

2:34I think all of these different things have sort of fallen into and I sometimes feel like a bit of a fraud because I'm not really a proper journalist but I've done work that you'd call journalism. I don't think I'm a proper policy analyst but I've done work that you'd call policy. And I've just sort of found my way through. I'm one of those people that left school, didn't know what to do at all. I had no idea. I did a degree in history because I just thought, well, that's, I don't know. I like that at school. I had no vision of where I was supposed to be going. And I just kept sort of falling into things somehow.

3:11But I've always been... What did your parents do? Oh, well, neither of them went to university. my dad was a self-taught computer programmer. Oh, wow. Yeah, and my mum was like, she was a sort of stay-at-home mum. Yeah, but my dad left when we were sort of 15, 16. So, yeah, I just had no vision. I didn't know what I was doing. I never had a plan for my life. But I was always so interested in weird subcultures And I came fascinated by just, with the internet in particular, feeling like back in 2006, around 2007, around that time. This is amazingly fascinating. It's a new place where you can research groups, cultures, trends.

4:06And nobody is an expert in this field, really. and I felt like this is and maybe I've always been a bit like this I feel like I could carve out a little space here I could be the person that becomes the expert in internet subcultures and I thought I'm gonna I've heard about the dark net and stuff like that and then I wrote a book about the dark net and I suddenly became like one of the experts on the dark net yeah because no one else had done it and I'm digging around these weird forums and I'm phoning people and meeting the people that are on the dark net in person and trying to find out what they're really like in real life and it just there just seemed to be so many interesting new things you could study and in a world where no one knew what they were doing I was the the one-eyed man in in the valley you know what I mean and and I quite liked that I mean obviously now it's not the same but yeah yeah so that was that was that was always my fascination and I'm trying to trying to explain these scary things that happen on the internet to my mum or my grandmother but remembering that for most people there's a there's technology journalists and there's policy people and we write about this and we think about it and then 80 90 percent of the population are behind with that and it turns up and it changes their lives and they don't really understand it and it can be quite terrifying and i wanted to explain that world to people whether it's crypto coins and bitcoin darkness subcultures weird i've spent ages on eating disorder forums yeah red pill reddit groups i followed tommy robinson around europe for weeks on end just trying to explain the things that were going on to the people i knew this was going to affect one day you know yeah and what was your sort of first ways of kind of distributing that like so if you're looking at these kind of like internet subcultures in the late noughties yeah like where were you writing about it well I was I mean I was pretty old school I I was just like my dream was to write a book or my dream was to appear on the BBC or something you know I had no vision in terms of I'm going to create an Instagram following or a YouTube channel nothing like that I was old school I was just I I liked the prestige of you know writing a book yeah stuff like that so it's quite old-fashioned in a way yeah um and I think I've I've never really been brilliant at like pushing myself out there and marketing and and that sort of thing it's not really that's never been my my thing i probably should be better at it what was it what were the first kind of like early jobs that you did what even before that like what was your sort of like because you can go back and link all these things though right a little bit i find well i don't know i mean like early early jobs was anything i mean i worked nights in supermarkets and stuff and I just yeah I just um do you know I was so competitive as a child that even when it came to this is just stupid but when it came to getting good grades at school I just wanted to beat everyone yeah not for any reason other than winning it's so bad isn't it and when I did when I and when I worked in a supermarket I wanted to be the fastest at stacking the shelves yeah I'd work as hard as I could.

7:19And that's the only thread that I can really run through this. I just like trying to be the best at stuff and trying to be really good at things. And other than that, no, I had no idea. Do you know what? Because I worked at Demos, the think tank that you'll know. That's where I think we sort of... Yeah, and in the policy world, it's sort of well known, but outside of that, outside of Westchester, most people wouldn't know it. It was Tony Blair's favourite think tank for a while, apparently. I think it's like only... 3 % of the population can name a think tank. Yeah, right, right, totally, totally.

7:52And I went for a job there. I didn't even know what it was. I didn't even know what a think tank was. And I got the job. And then I sort of, you know, something was going on in, it was 2007 or 2008, I think, and Facebook was sort of growing fast and we saw these Facebook ads everywhere. And I thought to myself, there's this movement called the EDL. It's a really interesting movement. I wonder what's going on there. seeing them marching up and down they look sort of like football hooligans yeah but really i could see that what they actually were was a facebook group with a small quite militant offline wing yeah and i thought you know all those facebook ads that you can you get when they're trying to sell you jeans and they're trying to sell you tickets i wonder if i could target edl supporters using the Facebook ad system to ask them if they'd fill out a survey for me.

8:47Okay. On Survey Monkey. Do you remember Survey Monkey? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I set this thing up and I put like£50 budget behind it and then I went home for the weekend, came back and I had like a thousand members of the EDL had filled out a survey. And I was like, oh my God, there's this whole world out there that I can research. And that was my first real way into starting to think about internet subcultures and how to get into them and study them. and that has remained with me. And how do you do that? Because I'm always like, whenever one of your kind of like podcasts, interview series comes out, etc.

9:21I am always like, how on earth did he get these people? Like, where do you, what are the things that you use kind of in the modern day? Because your most recent series, Fakery on BBC is fascinating. but you talk about how one of the individuals has been on all the big podcasts, but he's nervous about the BBC in particular. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Dr. Asim Malhotra. Yeah, the only thing I can say about getting contributors, like getting access to people, obviously you spend a lot of time trying to find emails and phone numbers and through the contacts that you know and all of that stuff, right?

10:04And sometimes it takes absolutely ages and you try and work out if you know someone through someone else and have they put a review on this website and can I link? And you just basically, there's techniques. Detectives. There's sort of detective work to find people. The number one thing that's the most important of all, and the reason people tend to talk to me, I hope and think, is I've never done like, could you call it gutter journalism? Like sort of taking someone down or being really unfair on someone. I've always tried to be really fair on the people I speak to. I've never gone for some cheap wins.

10:38I've always tried to reflect them quite fairly. And so there's not much written online where I seem too partisan or people are slagging me off too much. And I know for a fact that every single person that you ever try to approach for an interview researches you and decides whether you can be trusted. And if they find that you've written this about someone and you're really partisan on that subject, they won't. They won't trust you at all. yeah it's one of the things I advise every single new journalist is you've got to have integrity like as much integrity as you can on every single thing you ever write because it will stay there and they will find it and then you might miss out on the interview of a lifetime because of something you wrote when you were 21 yeah that's so do you think of yourself more now as a kind of like journalist investiture no do you know what I don't I really don't I try to think of myself as a as a technology writer yeah because because my partner's a journalist and she's actually got like degrees in journalism proper yeah proper journalist like she knows how to use all the devices she knows about the media law properly yeah and i just have just done like i say i've done journalism yeah and i don't consider myself a journalist i don't consider myself an investigative journalist but i've done some of that and then maybe that's true for a lot of people now yeah like the concept of a professional journalist is a bit blurry a lot of people that just write opinions or blogs or make podcasts and call themselves journalists and a lot of activists call themselves journalists yeah and i i don't like that i think that's quite dangerous so i try and be quite honest about this i'm not a journalist i was actually thinking about a term for that yesterday funnily enough and i was thinking whether you could call them jacktivists essentially like you know people that are and it's where podcasting has come to the fore as well right because people have left the BBC because they want to have more opinions and so on.

12:30And I get the BBC is a bit of a straitjacket and so on. But they're sort of now kind of, yeah, I just think it's almost going too far with a lot of that stuff where people just won't trust it. But the problem is with all this stuff is the algorithm rewards the extremes, right? Yeah. It's as simple as that. Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, we know this now, don't we? I think this is now part of the furniture in terms of understanding how the media world works. not just the extreme but the emotional you know the emotion is what people want even emotion and emotion doesn't have to be extreme you know it can be just authentically you've been very upset you've been very frustrated you've been very angry but that it does seem to reward emotion and that is the logic of social media I mean it's it's designed to encourage that it's everything short everything snappy everything's got to be shareable and we know that humans love emotion I mean, emotion is what sells in storytelling.

13:26I mean, emotion is everything. And when I write podcasts, you're looking for ways to put emotion in all the time. And I think the difficulty is for someone like me or you, maybe, who know that, see the risks of that, but also sort of do it as well because it kind of works. Yeah, I know. We have this constant tension here about clickbaity titles and whatever but then I'm always like you know when I go towards that with the younger team who often want to do that I'm I remind myself that Headlines were that as well and have been for a long time as well right so it's yeah like it's always attention but it definitely can go too far at times but it's I wouldn't know any of your political opinions right and we've sort of known each other for almost 10 years now and so on and I've read and listened to lots of your stuff you are You're right with that, that I couldn't actually tell you where you stand on anything.

14:25No. That makes you sound really kind of... But that's obviously sort of you deliberately... Yeah. You kind of have to sort of do that. I do. I really do that on purpose, intentionally. I think I could... There's many things that I think and feel, and I think I have the same urge of a lot of people. And I'm not even a BBC staffer. I just do freelance stuff for the BBC. but I want to maintain a position where everyone from any side would listen to the contents of what I say I've I've been on quite a lot of libertarian podcasts and they'll listen to me and they'll sort of respect what I've got to say I go on very left-leaning ones I go on right-leaning ones the minute you seem to take a strong political position I think you can be discredited but the other side won't hear it won't hear the content they'll think you're pushing a political agenda and then I won't reach that audience I mean I for a long while I wrote a weekly actually three blogs per week for the telegraph on technology for a whole year I did that but no one ever sort of thought oh he's a right winger yeah I was never putting in politics it was all about what the tech is and I wanted to reach that audience but I write for the Guardian knows I do loads for the BBC I wrote for the spectator a lot i'm just and i feel like i've got something useful to say i think i can translate big trends and technology for ordinary listeners and i don't want to alienate half of them by suddenly spouting off about what i think about brexit or what i think about ed milliband or whatever who cares whatever it is yeah sometimes that's frustrating because i've got ideas and views um but i just think on balance it's better if i sort of keep them to myself and And you know what?

16:09I feel like you're just stirring the pot sometimes. You're just, I worry about the anger and the rage machine like we all do. And I've written about that for 15 years about the growth of the rage machine. Before we were all angry. I was, I mean, I was, I wrote a paper in 2008, 2009 for Demos about how parties like UKIP would be, would be the best on social media. They would win the social media war because the style and the content that they were producing was more in tune with the logic of social media. Yeah. So I've been talking about this for a very long time. But I feel like if I get stuck into it, all I'm doing is making it worse.

16:52I'm just making it. I'm putting in more anger and emotion and rage and just making making the whole thing sort of keep going. I know I worry about that with the jobs debate as well, because I am worried about what's going to happen with jobs. but I feel you end up sort of stoking it and there is a challenge because the posts do do well on LinkedIn when you're writing about job losses or whatever and you're increasing profile and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, trying to balance that out with some positive news. I think centrists need to get more emotional, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If Kennedy won the TV debate in 1960 against Nixon but the people listening on the radio thought Nixon won, yeah that's the sort of turning point of the tele forever televised u.s politics and the logic was that kennedy was more in tune with the dominant form of communication of the day yeah uh that is that is true today as well obviously with social media and what politicians and style of politics just is in tune with the logic of the platform where people get their information.

17:58And I'm afraid it isn't sensible, serious, policy-focused, you know, centrists. It's not. But then there is this explosion of podcasts as well. There is. But Paul, it was quite interesting yesterday that we had Pat McFadden in here, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Sitting in this very chair. In that very chair. Oh, my goodness me. He was, we were talking because he was like in the last Labour government and so on. so I was asking him about changes and so on and obviously I'm almost going to start banning people from saying it because he was talking about social media understandably and so on but actually we both talked about how the House of Commons has essentially stopped having debate and it's just like it's basically just like one big clip farm studio type thing now all the politicians just getting up and then clipping up for socials afterwards and I was saying that maybe it almost needs to go back to banning the cameras in the Commons So you still have it all audio recorded and whatever.

18:57Because actually it was brought in relatively recently. It was only brought in, I think, in 89, 90 at the end of Thatcher's premiership. Because, yeah, it's not. It's just people getting up and making a series of points, right? Yes, exactly. They're clipped up. And this was obviously happening quite early on, quite a few years ago. And I think it's a good example of how the logic of the platform gradually sort of changes the behavior of the people that are using it without anyone saying, without anyone writing down this is the new manifesto for our media campaign. But it just it gradually sort of seeps into the culture and the norms and the way people behave.

19:38And here's another problem that I see absolutely everywhere. I think it is getting harder and harder. And again, this has been obvious for a long time for politicians to truly understand what people actually think. And I think that's true of all of us. Even though you know, rationally, intellectually, you understand that that one tweet that Elon Musk has posted, that everyone's retweeting is not necessarily an indication of how everyone feels. you will still somehow deep down be like oh god everyone's going crazy what's going on oh my goodness me and and it's people are struggling i think to get a sense of what the rest of us think and feel and i think it's getting quite badly skewed by social media and has been for quite a long time there's all these perceptions of other people and other people's opinions and your political opponents and what they're like these often completely out of sync with the reality yes and and that is because we are constantly getting the highlights reels of other people's lives or the clips of other people's lives or we're getting pushed it's called nut picking we are getting pushed the the worst versions of our political opponents at us here's one of the great myths of social media that you create this that it that it creates an echo chamber yeah oh just surrounded by like-minded people like just telling me constantly what i believe already and uh that makes me more but confident that i'm right uh i don't know about you but is that your experience my experience is just seeing everyone online appearing to be completely mad yeah it's totally wrong about everything so it's the opposite in their sort of yeah left wing i'm not in an echo chamber i'm surrounded by lunatics who disagree with me and i think i'm the only sane person on the planet uh which is it's complete opposite of an echo chamber But it's a skewing of how you understand and perceive other people.

21:38Yeah. By seeing little clips of them constantly and never in real life where you get the chance to actually talk. And you're right, podcast is a better format for that. And in some ways, I'm going all around the houses here, I know. Everybody, when social media, maybe there was the real panic about how it was destroying our ability to concentrate. It creates yuck wow culture, I think Susan Greenberg, a professor, called it. Low attention span, everything's just really emotive and exciting, and it's rewiring our brains. And the content is irrelevant. It's about the format. It's about the short, sharp, quick, urgent, immediate, always a crisis sort of thing.

22:22And I think we're getting addicted a little bit to crisis as well. long form podcast taking off you may disagree strongly with joe rogan and what he does or what he says but he and many others have normalized the idea that you can sit down and listen to two people talking about complex subjects for two or three hours yeah which is brilliant that's what we've been begging for desperate for this just because you might not always agree with the specifics it creates a culture of listening and thinking deeply about something which is which is which transcends the subjects themselves and so i am quite hopeful in a weird way about the norms of podcasting i never expected instagram to be so full of people talking yeah clips of people talking calmly sitting down talking like this these things are driving me crackers because everyone's got them now and it's like i just see them on instagram the whole time i'm like it's Were you the one that came up with this?

23:23Well, no, I'm not sure. But it felt really innovative when we got it installed 18 months ago. For those listening, I'm putting the podcast slats that are on the wall. Imitation, the best form of flattering. Exactly. Are you a fan of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future? Hi, I'm Sonny, one of the producers behind the show. And we don't just make this podcast. We produce some of the best business content out there, working with global brands and founders. Over the past year, we've flown around the world and demand keeps growing. And with four prime ministers trusting us with their appearances on this show, you're in safe hands.

23:59So if you're already in the market for a podcast or standout business content, why not start with us? Drop me a line at sunny at boxlight.io, try our podcast calculator or book a meeting at boxlight.io. That's boxlight.io. Now back to Jimmy. um what talk let's go into podcast a bit more because you have done loads of different ones and some of the really big signature ones from the kind of bbc what are the ingredients for a good podcast and just tell tell us about a few that you yeah so i guess the the three that most people would know me for is um the missing crypto queen you mentioned gigantic story a woman who's who stole billions of dollars in a crypto ponzi scam and then disappeared went on the run in 2017 and and after we made the podcast about her trying to find her and expose the scam she went on to the fbi's 10 most wanted list where she still remains today there's five million dollars reward for information leading to arrest if anyone knows where she is get in touch share the reward with you i don't know where she is i also made one called believe your magic which was about a munchausen by proxy case and i wrote one called a very british cult another bbc one about a self-help group that was essentially a front for a cult.

25:17I've made some others as well. These aren't the same as your podcast, obviously. These are like limited episodes. Yeah, but I tell you what, when I was listening to the self-help one, I did think to myself, gosh, I was definitely in a period of transition in my career then and was thinking I could see how I could fall for that. And then also I was a bit like, well, this thing you're doing with Jimmy's jobs, you've got to be careful it doesn't turn into that like but it's it's there's a lot of this sort of stuff like out there right like oh yeah oh my god there were clever and bright people that that fall in that's what i'm always struck by yeah your stories is that you find quite you know normal people for want of a better word that seem to fall for these well that's okay so the what's what are the ingredients of of that and that's one of the ingredients really the audience has got to see them you know there but for the grace of god go i yeah type stories and when you're talking about a crypto scam like a giant crypto scam really wanted to make sure people understood that they might have fallen for this yeah given the right conditions the right marketing you're at a certain point in your life this could have been you so you're you're hopefully drawn in by that um so you also ideally would like a compelling protagonist i don't want to sound like i'm some kind of screenwriter but there are certain there are certain things yeah and in the case of the crypto queen there was a scottish woman in particular jen mccadam who'd invested her life savings into this scam and then you sort of chart how she did it and what that meant for her because a story can be you know i mean a million people invested in this crypto scam but that that phrase about a million people's statistic and one person is a tragedy is very true because we needed one person to sort of stand in for the million people that lost their money and someone who can speak well, who's often quite emotional.

27:18We talked about emotion, very emotionally open and honest about it because people are drawn in by that. And then ideally for me, you do need, if you're doing six to eight episodes, you do need to know whether a story can handle that. And again, sorry to sound cynical, it needs to have certain twists and turns you think it's going this way it goes the other way there's a sudden turning point here where oh my god we've got a new lead and we're going off in another direction and so the listener's always guessing a little bit but not every story has that and you can't always make them up you can do a little bit you can kind of create sort of cliffhanger moments but not to a huge extent and then to me the way we did the crypto queen i wanted people at that point in 2019 there were two million people in the uk that held crypto assets and i believed that no more than one percent of them understood what they were yes and i wanted this to be a way for ordinary people to be warned about the risks of investing in something they didn't understand now they do that on crypto podcasts but crypto podcasts are boring I had the chance here, and the technical crypto podcast, I had a chance here to do a story about a missing woman on the run that we were going to try and find.

28:36And through that through-line journey of looking for her, subtly drop in through different interviews, like how crypto works and how blockchains work and how the FCA works and how multi-level marketing works. and putting little things in all the way through. So each episode is actually quite different, but you've got a thread running through it. So look, there's all these almost slightly technical, I don't call them skills, but like storytelling techniques that really make it work. But to me, sometimes just certain stories just have a bit of a magic about them. And that was a good story. I mean, we got a tip off for an amazing story there.

29:17That doesn't happen. Where did the tip off come from? person well actually yeah i'd done i'd done a ted talk um a few years before that about how how to use bitcoin to buy drugs off the dark net right so i'm a little bit well known for that and this bbc journalist georgia who was the producer she calls me up out of nowhere and says i've been at a dinner party and this person is trying to sell me this new cryptocurrency called one coin so i went home and had a look and apparently the woman's gone on the run and she disappeared so I thought it'd be a cool podcast if we tried to find her and I was like okay that sounds great had no idea that I'd be doing it nine years whatever eight years later still doing it and it involves organized crime and gangsters and the FBI and all sorts of stuff but that's where it started and that's another thing I always say to to journalists like new journalists old journalists know this already so many of the stories you get is from just like you're at a dinner party you meet someone down on the street and you see something and you've got to be really alert to the world yeah because there's stories everywhere absolutely everywhere and if you're not if all you're doing is walking around looking at your phone yeah you're gonna miss it you've got to really listen so that that story which sort of defined my career really came from uh someone at a dinner party pitching one coin to a journalist who was like this is interesting i'll look at this do you think that is the story that defined your career then I think everyone I think everyone I'm not very famous at all but anyone that does know me generally knows me for that, before that I was known as the dark neck guy, that was all good, I like that, that's a bit mysterious then I was known as the crypto queen guy I suppose I'm really grateful for that and the reason I've kept going with this story and believe me, I did not, there were many times when I did not want to carry this on at all.

31:15I just wanted it to stop. But the reason I kept making episodes, even though it got more and more dangerous and more and more scary in a way that I never planned to do, was because I felt a bit of a debt of obligation to the millions of people that listened to it. And I think sometimes as well, when you're doing these sorts of stories, you're doing it for the mass audience, hopefully, but you're also doing it for the people that were the victims of it. Like, I think a lot of people now look to journalists to explain to them what happened to them. I think Jen McAdam in that story, OneCoin, part of what we did was explain to her and to the one million other victims of that scam how they fell for it.

32:06We're outsiders coming in. We look at it from all different angles and I don't think they even really understood themselves until we were able to tell it to them in the form of a big story. And in a way, similarly with a very British cult. So explaining to the people that were in it how that happened to them. And that's a really privileged position to be in, in a way. So I'm grateful that that became a bit of a defining story, even though there were times when it felt a bit like a weight chain around my leg. um tell us the story of a very british call yeah so that was a self-help group um operating in the uk for many many years all the sort of usual self-help stuff stephen covey seven habits of highly successful people and all the all the usual stuff that that a guy called paul war had had created uh making vast promises about his connections and entrepreneurial opportunities that they would have in the future.

33:08But the people that joined it, those things never came off. They ended up spending hours and hours a day on Zoom calls where they'd be subtly turned against their families, separated from their families, end up dependent on the group. They had to write loads of lines, didn't they? Yeah, they had to go through all of Paul War's lectures and all his Zoom calls.

33:30Obviously, the group denies that that's what they are, that they're a cult. I should probably say that and we had to say that many times obviously on the podcast but yeah and that was another example a bit like the crypto queen of people getting sucked into how you could see a lot of very smart thoughtful people got sucked into that you could understand it and it was a sort of a warning and one of the fascinating things there is how people in other similar groups can't always tell themselves what's happening to them but if they hear it on a podcast talking about a different group yeah they sort of recognize more easily their own experience if that makes sense so other people in self-help groups that are problematic might not know themselves when they hear that podcast they're like hold on a minute that that's what's happening to me here as well but you can't critically analyze your own situation when you're in those groups no you can't yeah um separate um but i was just i was just the writer of that one i wasn't the presenter yeah but i think one of these things i talk about this a lot obviously but is the it's a sort of longing for status right and people sort of desperately wanting that and i think there's a strange thing that's partly happening it's partly social media just the internet generally that's sort of like taking a lot of those kind of traditional status markers away and there's also this one as well which I'm very intrigued by at the moment which is the desire to be seen as self-made is like more important than ever.

35:09We now have this weird thing in our kind of British politics where people sort of introduce themselves like the Romans did basically by the occupation of what their father did. It's a fascinating kind of switch of things. What are your kind of reflections on the status that these people are searching for amongst these kind of subcultures oh yeah there's definitely i mean i i think in all of in all of them you you can see people finding great connection with other people in there it's not just status and status obviously i know you've had will store and he talks about this of course brilliantly um status of course really really matters within a group as well and people who run things like cults are acutely aware of that and they push people down and raise people up.

36:03But the people that are in there,

36:08I suppose one of the examples I can give is when I did follow Tommy Robinson around and people underestimate the sense of camaraderie in all these groups. I spent a strange year when I wrote this book about radical movements well i spent time with loads of transhumanists spent time with loads of radical environmentalists spent loads of time with tommy robinson and the sort of right wing radical populists or whatever nationalists whatever you want to call it um totally different groups and i saw so many similarities between them like saturdays it was a social event everyone wears the same clothes on the edl march and everyone wears the same clothes on an earth first demonstration yeah as each other they all have secret language and secret codes and styles that signifies their belonging to the group and when I was with the environmentalists for example we'd often do these and sit around and be engaged with them and they'd they'd do really weird things like they'd have these sort of overly bureaucratic circles where they discuss ideas and you twinkle your fingers if you agree and you do something else if you disagree and they spend hours and hours and hours and talking about how do we reach out to the working class and I used to think well you You're not going to if your Saturdays are going to be spent sitting around in circles talking about intersectionality and twinkling your hands.

37:33Because that alienates the people that you're trying to bring in because they'll feel like they're not part of your tribe. And so much of it was just tribal groups together finding meaning with each other and finding a purpose. I mean, I even did a study of radical Islamists even before any of this. and so and a lot of it felt to me this was in 2007 it was being like part of a gang like part of a gang where you you know you had your friends and your people and your phrases and your terminology and all of that stuff so every single group that I've ever studied a feeling of belonging and being part of something has sort of run through them all and I just I think when people understand that they might understand a bit better why certain groups are popular yeah and and i hate to say this but from my background i found it a lot easier walking around with the radical right-wingers than i did with the radical environmentalists i'd say my politics i i couldn't understand why there weren't more radical environmentalists when i look at the data and the statistics and the future but I felt more at ease with the people that part of the radical right well that's just where I grew up I just felt like these were people I went to school with I went to a comprehensive school in Chatham in North Kent just didn't seem, people say oh it must have been so scary and I was like it just felt like I was with people I went to school with and you sort of understand then how much of it is about being part of a group and part of a community yeah we will come on to uh ai shortly in the second half but what what are the things that you would if to look to the future of your jobs like what would you like to do like what's kind of on the bucket list you've done such a varied amount of things like is there something that you would really like to do i mean i i i i just i sort of think i have fantasies really about like opening a surf shop in cornwall or something i mean even i can't surf and i've tried and i'm rubbish i don't know man like it's tight i feel like for for 15 or 20 years i feel like i've been sort of at the bit of the edge of all the stressful technological changes that are going on and you're just worrying constantly about nervous thinking about what's this mean yeah where is it going to go and sometimes i think oh i'd just love to go and do something that was nothing like this at all and you know unfortunately with artificial intelligence that might in fact be exactly the only thing i can do so that would be quite convenient in a way so yeah i mean i can't i Honestly, I don't know.

40:31Go back to my beginning. I never had a clear vision. I never had a... I want to be a doctor. I want to be a thing. I want to be an engineer. Nothing. I've never had that. Let's see what comes along. Kind of. Well, come on to that. But a lot of what... We should probably just touch on it a bit as well. Louis Theroux's Manosphere documentary as well. Have you watched it? No, I haven't. Probably because I'm just annoyed that... It's been around for such a long time. and everyone's been talking about it for ages and now when it's too late, the big hitter turns up and does something, which I'm sure sparks the conversation.

41:06I'm like, we needed this conversation 10 years ago and people were writing about it and nothing happened. I know. But it's better than never, obviously. It is, but it is amazing how much cut through it. Yeah, I know. What's been funny about it is that everyone has kind of felt the need to have their say on it on socials as well. Like, it's a strange, because obviously, coming from my background, politics, you talk about a cut-through moment, I mean, it's done that and beyond. Adolescence was another one. It was a different thing. Obviously, drama often does that as well. Same as post office scandal.

41:39Post office scandal as well. Clarkson's Farm as well. Yeah, certain things. It's a good lesson, in a way, for politics, isn't it? It's just certain, all the little noise that goes on in the background, and you stress about it, and then just there's these big moments where big things happen. And I've always found... I used to think in journalism that the skill was getting the story first and now I've come to see that the skill is getting the story at the right time you know what I mean oh I did this thing on the dark net ages ago it was too early it wasn't the right time, it's all about timing and obviously the timing obviously the marketing and it's Louis Theroux and everything yeah yeah definitely but you know I tend to think in the world we work in we forget that most people are quite a long way behind on some of the subjects we cover.