Attention Wars: How Lies Spread Online Have Real-World Consequences | Renée DiResta

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1:06Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students, of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

1:56Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So in June of 2011, I sold basically everything I own. My wife and I got a little U-Haul and we drove across the country. We moved into a back room, a little apartment on the ground floor, a big old house on St. Charles Avenue. It's at first in St. Charles. I've posted pictures of it before. It was hard. It was hard to walk away from my job in American Apparel. It was hard to fly across the country and pick out this place, be very excited about it. My future wife immediately burst into tears when she saw it for the first time because I had not apparently picked well.

2:39we ended up moving across the street to 2nd in Britannia, one of the favorite places I've ever lived in my whole life. But I would go every day, I would take the streetcar, ride my bike uptown to the Tulane Library, where I used my sister's college ID. And I started working on this book. I had no idea what it was going to be called. I had no idea whether it would get published or not. The working title became Confessions of a Media Hitman, and then eventually became Trust Me, I'm lying. I had been the marketing director for American Apparel. I'd worked at all these bunch of controversial clients and brands.

3:12And I'd sort of seen where online media was going. And I was pretty disgusted slash terrified about it. It was the thing I would talk about at every dinner party, every person I met. I was, do you know how this sausage is actually made? Do you know how this actually works? And then I read this book by Upton Sinclair. He wrote a book called The Brass Check in the early 1900s. After he wrote The Jungle, he wrote an expose of how the media system worked. Then I read everything I could possibly find on this topic. And I kept thinking, maybe someone wrote like a modern version of one of these books.

3:43And they hadn't. So I wrote my own book. And I ended up taking it to a guy named Steve Hanselman, who I'd met at a conference. He was Tim Ferriss's agent. And I'd already been rejected by Robert Greene's agent. I'd already been rejected by this other agent who I've since worked with a bunch. He's a great guy, a bird. But anyways, nobody thought it would work except for Steve did. Steve was like, you know what, I think this is a book. And he took it to New York and we sold it. Funny thing, living in New Orleans, I didn't tell anyone I was working on a book. And when the announcement for what became Trust Me, I'm Lime came out, they were, whoa, you're working on a book.

4:17That's so great. And then I realized that most of them thought I was just unemployed and they didn't care. And those are some of my best friends to this date. It was a wonderful time in my life, but I was also processing something dark and foreboding that I was really, really alarmed by. When the book came out, a lot of people blamed me, a lot of people got upset with me, and they didn't totally get what I was trying to do with that book. I was trying to show how things were with the idea that they should not be this way. Was it a memoir and an expose? It was a how-to and a also please do something about this.

4:49One of the models I was using for it is Michael Lewis, a New Orleans native, as it happens, his book Liar's Poker, which is sort of a Bible on Wall Street, but also at its core, a withering critique and condemnation of Wall Street. All this is to say, this is my first book, very different than Stoicism. But I remember as I was writing, Trust Me, I'm Lying, thinking, oh, I hope I get this out in time. Like, I hope I'm not too late. Like, I thought the book was very much of this moment. The idea that it would still be selling 10 plus years later, that I've updated it twice, that it would, you know, be influential in major political parties, major electoral races, all sorts of crazy stuff.

5:33I never would have guessed. I don't talk about that sort of chapter of my life that much. Although, look, I do think part of being a Stoic is operating and acting in the real world as messy and complicated as it is, making mistakes, trying to fine tune your ethical framework as a result. These are all the struggles that I was going through. I knew what Stoicism was, but I found myself in a profession where I was really good at and pretty well compensated that did not match up with that. And the wrestling with that, I've talked a lot more about. One of the books that helped me with that is the novel, The Harder They Fall by Bud Schulberg.

6:09I have a reel about that. Actually, maybe I'll run that clip right here. You should listen to this. This is one of my all-time favorite books, The Harder They Fall by Bud Schulberg. It's this novel about this corrupt boxer and a public relations agent. And I remember reading this book and I remembered it having changed my life. So I reread it recently. I thought it was the book that spurred me to leave the sort of corrupt, broken marketing world behind and become a writer. And you can see why I continued in that illusion until recently. I was just rereading the book and I found this page, this page 253 in the book.

6:49And it says, how many guys in America would throw up a job that averaged them 400 bucks a week just because the job pinched their souls a little bit? Hell, even Beth, that's his girlfriend, could see the wisdom of that. It wasn't as if I was mortgaging myself to Nick for life. Why another couple of years of this, or maybe a hike to 25 grand the second year, and I'd have enough of those little green coupons to take things easy, get my play out, wrap it up, if I felt like it. And meanwhile, think of all the valuable material I was getting. Why my plans weren't changed, my integrity was still intact.

7:22I was just racking up gradually instead of all at once. like Gus Leonard, a boxer, who figured to take an awful beating from Stein for$65 ,000, coast through the Toro fix for an easy$36 ,000, and then live out his days on a farm like a country squire. I was just thinking like a moonstruck freshman when I was out there on the edge of town deciding to blow Nick off. That's a corrupt mobster. He says, this wasn't selling out. This was just playing it smart. And I even wrote here, I said, is it? Is this you? That's what I wrote to myself. And so as I was rereading this, I was, ah, yes, it was. This is the epiphany.

7:58This is what hit me. And it made me change my mind. It's made me what changed my mind. It made me quit my job and become a writer. So it made me pursue stoicism and write the books that I've done. And then I looked it up on Amazon. I read this book in 2008. I didn't start writing my first book till 2011. I didn't quit American Apparel fully until 2014. I knew what I was supposed to do, but I put it off. I kept putting it off. I lied to myself just like the main character of this book did. What I was deluding myself with is what he says on the last page of the book. He says, I know the goddamn trouble with me.

8:37I have enough brains to see it and not enough guts to stand up to it. Thousands of us, millions of us, corrupted, rootless, career-ridden, good hearts and yellow bellies, living out our lives for the easy buck, the soft birth, indulging ourself in the illusion that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch. So the book taught me that, gave me the tools, but I was too scared. It took me too long to come around to it. Not just a couple months, it took me three years and then another couple years after that. And so as they say, it's not about epiphanies. It takes longer than that. Didn't quite get there as fast as I could, but maybe you can learn from my example and the cautionary tale that is this wonderful book, which we carry at the painted porch.

9:25I hope you check it out, but you can see why this book means so much to me. And it's also an important stoic concept. It's not what you talk about. It's ultimately what you do. Anyways, this all sets up a guest I really wanted to have on the podcast, Renee DiResta, because she much more of this moment, I was writing, trust me, I'm lying, before TikTok, before podcasts, really, before Substacks, before a lot of things, right? Certainly before Trump. I had to update the book in 2016 for the sort of fake news era. But she studies the way that people attempt to manipulate, harass, and target others online.

10:03Her new book, Invisible Rulers, is about the virtual rumor mill and how propagandists can shape public opinion. A previous guest, Jordan Harbinger, mentioned Renee in his episode, and he said I should talk to her. And I checked out her book, and it was awesome. She's a technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She's briefed world leaders, advised Congress, the State Department, and a myriad of organizations on how online manipulation can take different forms. And then as a Stokes should be, she's actually engaged in this. Before she wrote this book, was actively involved in a campaign in California to get rid of some of the vaccine exemptions that were making it possible for people to endanger others pre-pandemic, right?

10:46And this is what first sort of turned her on to the way that, you know, sort of online misinformation can have very real world implications. I think her book is fantastic. As I've said before, if you don't understand how media works, if you don't have real media literacy, you are at the mercy of forces, and I would say fools, whose power and avarice and danger you cannot really even comprehend. And so Renee came down to Bastrop, we had a lot to talk about. We talked about my books, we talked about her books, we talked about a very real, fascinating conspiracy theory that originated in Bastrop County in 2015, that I think predicted a lot of what was to come.

11:27You can also see Renee in the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, which came out in 2020. You can follow her on Twitter at NoUpside or check out her website, Renee DiResta. And her new book, Invisible Rulers, The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, is a must read. It has a great little line on the cover that says something about how if you can make it trend, you can make it real. And I think that's powerful. So check out her new book. Look, Stoicism isn't this abstract philosophy detached from life. It's a philosophy that should help inform and shape what we do, right? That's why I ultimately transitioned my career.

12:05I think Renee decided to get more involved in this space because she wanted to make a difference. She moved from venture capital to this sort of academic side of things, which I think is really interesting. And understanding the world we operate in, how messages and ideas spread through it is a critical thing. That's why I wanted to have her on the podcast. So I hope you enjoy this episode.

12:41Did you know you're sighted in there? I was going to ask. It's funny because when I got the inbound from your people, I was like, oh, that's so funny. And then I was like, I remember where I was when I read your book. Really? Yeah. We can talk about it if you want to, but it was all right. Marcus Aurelius is also cited in there, funny enough. And I remember that because the fact checkers, I hired my own fact checkers for this because I was like, I'm going to get sued if I don't. Well, also people assume that your publisher includes fact checking, which it emphatically does not. It does not at all.

13:13And there are all the, I mean, this is basically what your book is about, but there's all these parts of society that we assume like adults are like in charge of or like checking and there's all these just yeah it's crazy but no I was I was trying to see if I was in it but uh I couldn't you are you're in a footnote if you I don't know if they put you in the index but you are most definitely 100 % in because I actually control F'd and I was like I'm glad that you brought that out actually I uh yeah I can literally tell the story I remember where I was when I read your book when was this? It was in 2014.

13:43My son was six months old and I was on the Russian river. It was like my, uh, like a beach, obviously, but it was like riverbank read. I was, uh, so excited that, um, I was finally getting a break from the, from the baby. My husband had him for a bit. And what I remembered about it was by this point I had started doing the work I do now, not in any kind of professional capacity, just as like an amateur. And I read your book and I was like, shit, here's somebody else who's saying it. Like it's in writing. I'm not crazy. It was very validating, actually. Well, I didn't make the index. But you're definitely in the footnotes.

14:16I remember when I was doing my first book, I was like, do I have to make the index? Like, is that my responsibility? And then they're like, no, no, no, we take care of it. And I was like, oh, okay, great. And then I never thought about it again. And then I was like checking one of my royalty statements and they charge you for someone else doing the index. And I was like, oh, I just wouldn't have done an index then. Oh, that's funny. I didn't even look at that. they gave me the index and it was like way too overlong with way too many niche words. And I was like, this does not need, nobody's going to look up this word.

14:44No, no one uses it at all. I, even on my own books, sometimes I'll pull them up on Google books to search them to find something. Yeah. I have the PDF. I really have the PDF just so I could, uh, yeah. But no, you're definitely, you're cited in there. It was funny when I wrote that book, which seems insane to me that I wrote a book basically about fake news before fake news was a thing. I was writing that book in 2011 and researching it in 2010, which is, I don't feel like I could have done something that long ago, but I vividly remember the reception to that book, which was not good. I think I remember, I think I looked at your, I pulled down the current version, right?

15:24Because I'd read that you'd done like some update or something. I think it was three times. Oh, did it? Three times? No. Wow. Okay. I was thinking when I did that book that people would be like, thank you for pointing this out. Right. And what actually happened is I wanted to write a book about media criticism. But when you do the when you look at it, basically books of media criticism never sell. Yeah. They get lots of media coverage and never sell. So I was like, OK, I'm going to I'm going to show how to do it as a way to get people to actually read it. But I thought I thought people in media would be smart enough to say, OK, he's this is the device he's using.

15:55But it's fundamentally saying things that we're concerned about. But it was very interesting to watch. Basically, I was sort of I remember being portrayed as the bad guy. Yeah. As some sort of like lone actor who if people just didn't do stuff like this, the system would work fine. And then it's not a thing I am super excited to have been proven right about. Right. Over the subsequent years. Right. That's that's sort of how I felt, too, with a lot of the a lot of the writing I was doing in 2014, 2015. 2015, I was in venture capital and I had a startup. And so this was not my job. And I just felt like I'd seen the future and I had to tell people, not even the future, I'd seen the present.

16:35It was already happening. But it was only going to increase. And I felt like I had to somehow make clear what was different and how it worked. And I remember being at the CDC and having this conversation in, it would have been like, God, 2015, mid-2015 or so, and saying like, you guys have to realize this is happening. And them saying like, oh, that's just some people on the internet. I was like, oh my God, this is going to be a disaster. They do not get it. You have this sense that there's people whose job it is to understand the industry that they're in. Right. And then you realize like, oh, that's not true.

17:10Like you don't get how it works. And definitely the people whose job it is to sort of prevent things from happening don't get how it works. And you kind of have this, you have this like insight into like, oh, no, no, this is what's actually happening. And then you think, oh, if I just tell people about it, that will fix things. Like they'll magically figure out how to react. And that's just not true. And then having it, my own experience, and like the book does become something of a memoir as it starts to happen to me, was realizing that I was then constrained by what was essentially institutional comms that didn't know what it was doing.

17:42Yeah. And we had this really, you know, kind of, honestly, one of the most frustrating experiences of my life, candidly, where we're saying like, okay, when we're constantly telling election officials and public health officials and so on and so forth, no, you need to be proactive. You need to be speaking. You can't let the narrative get established without you in it. Right. Got to be transparent. Got to be clear. Got to be direct. And then, you know, and then your own institution is like, shut up and say nothing. You know, like, this is the wrong advice. Like, this is the wrong advice. What do I do about that?

18:08Where how am I, you know, how do you how do you buck that? You know, and how do you how do you try to convince them that they're wrong? and realizing that what we knew to be true from studying how online rumors worked for three and a half years, like in the most academic, you know, like structures possible, like not practitioner at all. Like I said, I moved into academia in 2019. And then you realize that like, it's the same as every other institution that's collapsing in the new system that doesn't understand what it's doing. That was really striking to me because we see the media, the media's job is to hold sort of institutions accountable, right?

18:44And they're really good for the most part at going like, okay, this is wrong. We uncovered this thing. We're going to expose this thing. And they sort of expect when they criticize an institution that the institution will take that criticism and change and respond and reform. And I just thought it was so interesting to watch the media's inability to do that to itself. There's a famous Latin saying about like who watches the watchman. And you realize like there actually isn't a great culture of accountability inside media. So I was like sort of shocked by that. And then I read this book. Did you read Upton Sinclair's book, The Brass Check?

19:20No, I never read that one. So after he wrote The Jungle, he wrote this, like, a similar book. It's nonfiction instead of fiction, I guess. But he basically writes an expose of early 20th century media. Oh, interesting. And it's, like, about newspapers and wire services and yellow journalism and all this. He writes this huge – because he's now this very famous figure and he's extremely left-wing. So he's – and at that time, newspapers were very – were sort of puppets of capitalists, right? It was like part, it was its own industry. And so he's like, this is a constant target. And so he's kind of doing this book about what it's like to be covered by the media and how inaccuracies about him are spreading and just all the problems.

20:03I'll give it to you. It's in the bookstore. But he writes this, like, we celebrate the jungle exposing the meatpacking industry. And then he writes this other book exposing the media, but we see the media as heroes. So that book doesn't have the same resonance. because it's also a thing that very few people can relate to because you're not personally a recipient of it. You don't have the same experience. But I remember just reading that book and going, oh, this is the same thing. We've always had these problems and you realize kind of the vulnerability. He has this line in the book that I think about all the time.

20:37Basically, he's saying that we are dependent on the media to decide who we put in government and what laws we past, what things we do. So basically we're dependent on what governs public opinion. Like how we find out about stuff is really the system we live in. And then you go, oh, we don't have a great system. Yeah. Like it's really vulnerable. Well, and it's, it's your book focused on what we still called media, right? You were talking about the era of the bloggers, the blogosphere. We still called them bloggers then, you know, now they're, uh, now they're citizen journalists, you know, and I felt like the influencers came a little bit later.

21:12I don't know if you were. TikTok didn't exist. Yeah. And there was also the idea that like, we don't even position ourselves as media now, right? We have the reach of media. We have the sort of the megaphone of media, but we don't pretend to be journalists, right? That's not what we're doing. And so that model of the influencer, I thought was just this really unique character that only exists like in this environment. You see, you have celebrities previously, but you don't have the self-made, we speak for this entire group of people. We are of that entire group of people. And so I saw that evolution from some of what Dan Gilmore wrote about citizen journalists and what you wrote about bloggers and this idea of what is media, as all of a sudden everybody has the reach, but perhaps not even like a nod to the sort of ethics or just entirely this completely different beast.

22:01And so I wanted to write a little bit about that evolution, which I think was came out a little bit after because you were writing in that era with that sort of, you know, Gawker was still the thing. Right. I remember I remember reading like guest of a guest and stuff. I was on Wall Street at the time. Yeah. And being on help a reporter out and, you know, the sort of the newsletters and the things that you mention and then watching that evolve even more into like now we're just going to abandon the entire pretense of what it means to be media. And we're just going straight into like we're profoundly influential.

22:27And here is the here's the incentives that govern like this new system that were even more, I think, self-interested than the ones that you were writing about 10 years ago. Yeah. In the Upton Sinclair book, he's talking about basically it's like journalism was considered a low profession. So it didn't have like a social structure. It didn't have ethics. It didn't have institutions that gave awards. It was just like, it was kind of a low class profession. And so people just did whatever they could to get ahead in that position. And then sort of what comes out after that is like our modern conception of a journalist as this sort of heroic, ethical, like socially significant figure, which wasn't necessarily codified in the law, but it was codified culturally that like to be a journalist meant you believe these things and you act according to these principles.

23:11Now, we didn't always live up to that. There was that. And I felt like what I was writing about was sort of the breakdown of some of that. And the idea of like, look, we say like a journalist shouldn't own stocks or own stock in a company they're covering because there's a financial conflict of interest. But if you're paid by how many page views you get, then there's a conflict of interest. what I was struck by and thinking about when I was reading your book is like, I was talking about this sort of corruption of sort of money and attention that's flooding into journalism. But what's interesting to me about where we are now is that in many cases, I guess I was overestimating the financial incentive as a problem.

23:47Like I was going like, people are doing this to get page views because they put a little ad unit there and they make a certain amount of money per page. What's so interesting to me about our online culture is that it's not that it's disconnected from money, but it's much more just like a game of attention and fame and influence. Weirdly, it's more ideological than I would have guessed, considering how non-ideological it was not that long ago.

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25:43That's human with two N's dot com slash stoic for an extra 15 % off with code stoic at checkout. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a bestselling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

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27:01Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

27:21What you had in your era was there was still a sense that you had to appeal to a mass audience just a little bit more than there is today. And that's because it hadn't yet split into algorithmic curation in quite the same way, right? So a lot of the stuff related to feeds or related to what we now call like the interest graph and that sort of stuff, the ways that a platform determines who you are, right, tags you as being of a particular ideology. And it does it very fast too, right? And when you have that, then it means that you're just going to see more of the thing that it's kind of tagged you as being.

27:54And if you're competing for attention as a creator in that economy, then what you're doing is you're trying to really double down and reinforce and reach that audience that is actually accessible to you. Because there is no such thing as like the sort of mass audience where everybody had that unified experience, even in the early days of the internet where I think we probably all read some of the same blogs. The sort of like superstar bloggers were very much still a little bit more in that model of like a media class, a journalistic class. And you do start to see that fragmentation as they begin to realize that feeding an algorithm and targeting a group is actually the path to sort of like what you might call like niche fame, niche power.

28:40And it does become like, you know, you see people doing things for like, originally it's like fake internet points, right? But then you can actually monetize the fake internet points and the realization that the cloud that you have online can translate into everything from paid placement or promos to, you know, now much more directly like what Elon did with Twitter recently, where you can actually monetize your own feed, right? You can participate in rev share, which creates a whole new incentive structure for, you know, for creators on that platform that wasn't there before. You kind of have these moments where you kind of get a peek behind the curtain and it's hard to like see things the same way.

29:12I remember I was talking to this journalist at Cochran. I was asking him to correct something. And he goes, like, what do you mean? You know, he was like, don't you? I was like, this hurt this person's feelings. And he says something like, don't you understand? This is like professional wrestling. Yes. And that was that was like a big part of the whole thing. Yeah, that was a big part of my understanding of sort of that era. And then it's funny, I moved, I moved to Austin in 2013. But I moved out here to Bastrop County in 2015. And where I was like, I thought I understood this stuff. And then I understood in a new way.

29:42Do you know the Jade Helm? Yes, of course I do. That was here. I remember that. So for people who don't know, I guess the army is doing a series of training exercises as they always do. And somebody puts forth this conspiracy theory online, that this is actually an attempt for the federal government to take over the states, which of course is nonsensical because the federal government is already taken over the states. We fought a whole war about this, but it was fascinating to watch this thing bubble up and people get worried about it. And then if I remember correctly, the governor of Texas sends out the national guard to observe the, so essentially setting forth potentially a clash between state and federal troops.

30:27And I watched this happen. And then I remember thinking about it. What was so different than some of the things that I saw was like, I couldn't see what was in it for anyone. Do you know what I mean? Like, it was the Obama presidency, I think it's also important to note, right? So there was this, the, my recollection of that was very much like, you know, we're going to make sure that, you know, the sort of Obama crew in Washington can't interfere in Texas sovereignty. Yeah. I'm trying to remember where I was even living at the time. I think I would have been in New York at the time. But I remember that because we kind of made fun of it.

30:59Yes. Yes. We're like, oh, there's Texas doing its thing again. But no, it was what I found disturbing about it. And I remember it was in a slide deck I made for a talk and the talk was called The Lunatics Are Running the Asylum. What I found disturbing was not that there were, you know, people with weird theories about Obama or Texas or whatever else. It was that the government, the sitting governor, holstered the conspiracy theory. That was what I thought, like, okay, that's sort of an alarming turn of events, right? Where people in charge of actually fairly massive economies, candidly, are feeding into this or feeding the beast and that they see this as a way to win points with the base by reinforcing the worst impulses.

31:43Well, that's the subtitle of the book, right? If it trends, you can make it real. And so I think what was so striking to me about that thing was, first off, this wasn't like here you had a crazy person or whatever making something up. Although I guess later they found out there was like the hallmarks of sort of a Russian intelligence operation. Yeah, they were very much in that one. Yeah. But so you have this crazy view that exists, but it's not like everyone is talking about it. It basically doesn't exist. It's so small it doesn't exist. But then someone for, again, not financial, like Greg Abbott is not propagating this theory for financial reasons.

32:19He's propagating it for sort of political reasons and then taking real action. So you have this thing that's not real, that becomes real and potentially has enormous consequences and ends up sort of frittering away. It was just striking that something that's so nonsensical could generate a very non-nonsensical response. And then now you have a potential faceoff between like actual troops over a thing that some crazy people think is real. And then there's kind of this person in the middle who knows better, but is doing it anyway, as if it's happening still on the Internet, but it's not happening on the Internet.

33:02It's in real life now. Yes. I think that transition. Again, this was the same thing when I think about the CDC person who's like, these are some people on the Internet. And I was like, oh, you don't get it. You really don't get it. Those people have incredible power now, actually. That is the entire point. It's the power of the online crowd to make something happen in real life that I think they haven't quite internalized yet. And this has been my frustration with a lot of the institutional responses we've seen, the idea that you can still shape public opinion just by putting out your fact check and a PDF on your website.

33:37And You assume that like your authority remains unchallenged because you, you know, you kind of have the benefit of the decades of trust and you think that that's going to continue indefinitely into the future. And they don't see it as both real concerns, right? Plus what you might call manufactured concerns, right? Where the realization that attacking an institution is actually quite lucrative now, right? It's going to, as you're alluding to with Jade Helm, right? You bolster your base by feeding into the nonsense, even if you know it's not true because you get, you know, you derive your own value from that.

34:07And so the institutions are now in a position where they're both dropping the ball in real life and then also being unfairly tarred at times and they don't know how to differentiate between these two things. And so largely their response is to shut up and say nothing. And then that just creates a sense that you'll be a punching bag forever and you're going to continue to try to ride this reputation that you've had. And that's just not the way the world works anymore. So what's the Marx-Durelist quote in the book? Oh, it was – I'm going to butcher this, but the things have no power over you, right?

34:35You don't have to be obligated to respond in this moment. There's my paraphrase. You probably know the exact quote. I was trying to explain it actually in the context of like, so how should the crowd react, right? When you see these things go by, what should you do? This is a question I get asked a lot. Do you quote, tweet, and mock them, right? Sometimes people do that. It's funny, right? It gets attention because, again, it's speaking in like internet culture. Like, we're going to make fun of this. That's how we're going to dunk on it. And that's how we're going to get across the point that it's ridiculous.

35:00And that's very useful. I saw you wrote a lot about Alinsky and Rules for Radicals also, which is a thing that I think about constantly. That book is always in my head. But the reason I used the Marcus Aurelius quote was just this idea that you don't actually have to do anything. You can let it go by. What an incredible experience it is to let someone be wrong on the internet without weighing in on it. He talks about in Meditations how you have the power to have no opinion. Yes. And I've not always created it, but what I've gotten better at spotting is going, okay, this person that's saying the thing, like, first off, what they're saying is not real.

35:36This is nonsense. They themselves may not be real, but what they are trying to get from me is a real response. So, like, I see sometimes, like, people sharing stuff, and I go, what you're outraged about does not exist. Yes, 100%. It's not like we're talking about some fake controversy. The opinion that you're upset about is so perfectly absurd that that's the point. It was designed to make you angry and share it. And that's the win. The win is not convincing anyone of anything. It's bogging you down in nonsense and also getting you to feel a little bit more contempt, a little bit more frustrated, have a little bit more despair that everything is impossibly corrupted and broken and no one is understanding what's true or real when really you're dealing with like a very small minority viewpoint that almost nobody shares.

36:30And winning is not acknowledging that it's true. Not always, but a good chunk of the time. I think that's exactly right. I think I talk about it. I'm trying to remember which example I was giving, but you remember the situation Covington Catholic, right? There were these boys with the MAGA hats and they were at the Lincoln or Lincoln, Washington monument area. and I remember I had gotten out of bed in California. I was living in California this time. Everything's three hours behind. And I opened up my phone and Twitter was absolutely outraged. My entire feed was outraged about this situation. And I was texting people and I was like, what happened?

37:02You know, thinking there was some actual violent confrontation or something. And they're like, well, these, you know, these boys, these jerks, like we're yelling at this Native American elder. And I was like, you know, by this point, I feel like I've seen enough of these things that I'm just, I'm not going to weigh in. The world does not need my contribution in this moment. Yeah, he looked a little bit like a jerk from the photo. oh, I get it. But then, of course, what happens is you do see then the full video comes out later. The initial image is not conveying the truth of what happened. Then subsequently, three hours later, there is additional footage of, so these are the, for people who are not familiar with this necessarily, there were a kind of group of kids from a, I think, Catholic school, maybe it was down in Kentucky, that had a, Covington Catholic was the name of the school.

37:40And they're wearing these MAGA hats. They're there for a protest, I think, or a march related to abortion rights in some capacity. There are some Native American elders who are there for a different reason. And you have this man with the drum and this boy with the MAGA hat, and it becomes something of an iconic image. It looks like they're facing off. And then what you come to find out several hours later, maybe almost eight hours later, is that there had also been a third group, these Black Hebrew Israelites, right? And the Hebrew Israelites, if you've never encountered them, will just sort of scream things at you as you walk by, right?

38:08It's a very, you know, the sort of belief that they're a kind of lost tribe of Israel, right? The sort of religious chosen ones. and so they will scream scripture and other things. And so they had been sort of instigating with the boys. They'd been going back and forth with the boys. The Native American group then kind of came and stood between them. And this was like the actual dynamics. But what was amazing about the entire thing was, one, depending on, you know, how you viewed that spectacle was entirely shaped by like what media universe you were in, right? And so depending on which online faction you were part of, you saw very, very different footage and arguments for what had happened there.

38:40But two, and what kept, you know, what really stuck with me was that it didn't need to be an online moment at all. Like nothing had happened. There was no violence. There was no actual confrontation. Like some people yelled at each other at a protest outside of, you know, welcome to D.C. This happens all the time, you know. and uh and and you don't need to to take that and to to sort of like turn it into an outrage moment on the internet you know was just uh you know i just felt like oh god here we are again like we're just gonna have to keep doing this over and over and over again the idea of you know the image the spectacle right this is the thing that we're going to pay attention to and everybody's going to be entirely consumed by it for an entire day there were lawsuits fought over that by the way there were like multiple defamation cases i think some settled you know some were dismissed this was a It actually had pretty significant repercussions for the kid who was a teenager.

39:27It was a mess. Well, there's this impulse that you're like, the world is falling apart. Crazy things are happening. I don't like this. And that by yelling about it on the internet, you're affecting the situation in some way, which you are fundamentally not doing. And you do get this sense that there are people who feel very politically active and engaged, But they are active and engaged, not in the donation of money, not in the volunteering of time, not in running or operating political parties, and not even in voting, but just in talking about the thing a lot, which is really just sort of mob action.

40:06And so like, like, it just it feels so minor to say, but like responding to comments on the Internet is not only not your job, it's not contributing positive or negative to the situation in any way. The only thing you're doing is benefiting like these social media companies that sit in between us and like our dissatisfaction with the world, the levers of power. Then there's like social media companies in between that go like, let me just channel that energy for you. And by the time it gets here, it's very weak because you spent all your time arguing with these people who, again, may or may not even exist to say nothing of whether they're representative of public opinion.

40:50And so you just you spend all this time talking on the Internet. And then I think they call this the narcotizing dysfunction. You feel you feel like you are a hero of the republic. Yeah. You're in fact the opposite of a hero. You're not doing the things you could be doing. you're just using up a lot of time on the computer. There was that term like slacktivism. I feel like that was around the time that you were writing your book, actually. I don't think you hear it mentioned quite so much anymore. Now it is seen as this interesting shift, right? What does galvanize action? Because you do see online activity coming to galvanize real life action, right?

41:23And I do talk about that. There's some pretty significant moments. January 6th, of course, is one, right? Where you do see the sort of... Yeah, what happened online became real. Of course. Yeah, so there is a progression, like a pipeline for it to happen. But in those moments online, there's that sort of the sort of roiling outrage machine. I think this is where I the appeal to the sort of Marcus Aurelius quote was just the idea that you can you actually can check out like you really don't have to weigh in. It's kind of a freeing experience when you realize that the world doesn't need your take, you know.

41:52Yes. The Marcus Aurelius quote that I have been thinking a lot about pertaining to what you write about and then obviously the pandemic. He was writing during the Antonine Plague. And he talks about he's like, look, there's actually two types of plagues. He's like, there's the virus version where you get it and it can make you sick and it can kill you. And then he's like, there's this other plague you can get that can like destroy your character. And I think it's been so interesting to watch. Most of us don't have long COVID, but there's other people that have like long Internet COVID. Like, you know what I mean?

42:22Like, yes, they are. They are still living in a world that something touched them. I mean, you could say it's on both ends of the spectrum, but it's really on one end of the spectrum where now their entire worldview has flipped. Their values have flipped. Their circle of influence and people that they're interested in is now defined from this thing they picked up in June of 2020 because they saw a blog post or a Facebook post or someone sent them this weird YouTube video. It's fascinating to watch someone just get taken over by this idea virus.

43:08Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

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45:14One of the things that becomes interesting, some of the people that I try to trace through the book were influential in 2015. You know, I was, so for those who don't know, I was like a mom activist in California and, you know, I had my first baby in 2013 and in 2014 was the Disneyland measles outbreak, right? And I'd come from New York to California and I was like, what is wrong with this state? This is crazy. Of course. You know, because they had this thing called the personal belief exemption where you could just decide that you were not going to get your kid a measles vaccine and like everybody was supposed to be okay with that.

45:45Like you had just made that determination. And I thought like, we live in a society. How does this work? You know, this was very foreign to me as a New Yorker, as a transplant where you don't have like that type of exemption simply didn't exist, right? You had a medical exemption or you had a religious exemption. And if you were religious, you had to actually prove that you were religious. You couldn't just, you know, find faith like in relation to vaccines. You had to have it in other capacities. And I got very involved in how do we improve vaccination rates in California schools because I was sending my kid to public kindergarten, right?

46:14He was going to go to public kindergarten. And he was a baby. So this was my sort of long-term plan was to try to help improve that. And some of the people that we're writing about and talking about in 2015, their influence grows massively between 2015 and COVID. And by the time COVID is ready, by the time COVID happens, they already have an incredible organizing infrastructure. They have massive numbers of followers. They have been speaking about how the measles vaccine gives you autism and all these other things for now the better part of a half a decade online, right? And meanwhile, the CDC has done absolutely nothing between these two events to in any way shift or modernize its communication.

46:53Again, these are just some people online. And I thought this is going to be an absolute disaster. Like this is going to be an absolute mess. Before the virus even made it to American soil, anti-vaccine activists in December 2020 and that would have been December 2019 and January 2020, are out there making videos about how this is really great for us guys. They're going to rush through a vaccine and we're going to finally be able to tell the people like what they've ignored all along with these polio and measles vaccines. And so it was very much a, you know, they really saw the moment they had the organizing infrastructure and they went for it.

47:25And what I thought was so fascinating about that, like I followed these characters, you know, the sort of evolution over the years, the amassing of more and more influence as people become deeply entrenched in factions. But what you also start to see is people who have never talked about that topic begin to migrate their content to that topic because all of a sudden that's what people are doom scrolling about. That's what people are looking for. And so all of a sudden now you might have been a standard political influencer, but here is the thing that you're going to talk about now. You might have been a sports influencer, but you can talk about vaccines and sports.

47:58And so all of a sudden you have this topic and what you start to see is like just the pivoting of content to where the attention locus is. And it's not that they have any, even I would argue significant, you know, there's interest in the topic, but it's not that they want to become experts in it. It's just that they're really able to galvanize, to capitalize on that attention. And so you see the sort of pivoting, all things become COVID. And then as the pandemic, you know, as people return to normal life, you know, now two, three years later, what you do start to see is the, again, some of them are, they have long COVID or they had some sort of significant issue with a vaccine or whatever.

48:36And there is like a personal reason to do that. But it is the, then the migration of the so-called COVID influencers as they, now they're moving back into politics. We have an election, right? That's what we're going to talk about now. There is, you know, whatever abortion rights becomes a thing briefly in there, you know, you have the, you see them basically just like migrate to whatever the outrage of the day is. And the culture war just becomes a constant stream of like, I will pivot my content to talk about this, this, this, this, and this. So I can maintain that energy, maintain that attention, not because I even have necessarily a deeply, sincerely held viewpoint or expertise or whatever, but just...

49:09Well, it's a weird combination of supply and demand. So there are these bases, Like there is this sort of latent belief in an idea. And then there's also the, I am an influencer and thus I have to create large amounts of content to keep my machine operational. And so it's like, who is leading who? It's this fascinating thing. And I think they're kind of, I would maybe argue there's like two different types of influencers. There's someone who's like really into a specific thing and they love that thing and they know that thing and that's what they talk about. And then there's people who are sort of attracted to influence itself.

49:49Like, I want to have attention. I need to have an audience. I need to be important. I'm gravitating towards the energy of being popular and important. And I think we've kind of watched now that the space has existed for a while. You see there's like the people who are like, this is what I do. So I talk about it, whether it's popular or unpopular. And then there's a group of people who they go, well, how do I go over here? How do I go over here? And you kind of watch, that's what I mean, where you sort of watch them get infected with a version of a virus where like they were, you talk about like the guitar guy in the book.

50:22He's like a guitarist, but he's not that popular. And then he touches a trending topic or the trending topic touches him. And then finally he gets, it's like he gets the thing he's always wanted. Like the virus finds the host. And the host is like the hunger for attention and fame and the love of like surfing that. And then so now he's like, that's my thing. Like, do you know who J.P. Sears is? Yes, I do. Fascinating case. Fascinating case. I remembered his stuff. You could not have made up that story, by the way. It's so preposterous. It is a wild story. I remembered him when he made fun of like lefty things, right?

51:04I lived in California, but I was always like a New Yorker. And the sort of like, you know, mocking the sort of hippie yoga culture and stuff like that. And I was like, this is actually very, very funny. But then it becomes kind of like pointed and it gets meaner, right? And you do see that it stops being – and I don't mean that it stopped being funny in that it started making fun of something I liked. It wasn't like, oh, I am having a defensive reaction to this. I just thought like it's just not funny anymore. Because it crossed from being satire and making fun of excess to what felt like a much more, I am attacking a political opponent.

51:43But I don't know, maybe you can put your finger on it better than I can because it was just a... He was sort of of the culture he was making fun of before. So like health and wellness culture, right? And he sort of knows all these people and he gets it. is probably his diet's not that different than the people he's making fun of, but he gets the absurdity of it, right? There's a self-awareness to the criticism. And then what I understand happens is he's also, I mean, you can't make a living doing that. He's basically like a low level, like regional standup comic. So the lockdowns happen and now he can't perform in these clubs.

52:17So now this thing has touched him personally. This makes him angry. He talks about it or writes about it or whatever. He puts a piece of content out in the world that is about this thing that he doesn't normally talk about. And then that becomes popular in a way that none of the other things had or becomes popular in a way that's new and fresh and different. And then if you're the person who is just like, I do what's, that becomes you, right? Now that's, you're like, you go to where you're getting traction. You go to where there's getting attention and then you're going towards it. It's also coming towards you and it consumes you and it changes you.

52:51And I think what's different about it now is the things he's making fun of or criticizing or talking about are him attacking other people. So it goes from like. That's true, I think. You know, and it becomes it's just funny. It's the greatest illustration I've ever seen of the horseshoe theory. Right. You have you have him over here making content and then he goes all the way around and becomes the very same thing, but for different reasons. Yeah. And arguably becomes much more popular as a result. And so it's this strange thing that you watch happen. And I've just seen it happen. So you're like, you're over here and now you're over here.

53:29What change? And you just watch someone get consumed and become almost unrecognizable. Did he wind up selling supplements also? Of course. Yeah. I feel like the supplements are always the red flag. Well, ultimately, I think that's an interesting part, which I'm not immune to, is you think about, okay, so people acquire these audiences and then what to monetize an audience almost always requires a very high margin product. So supplements are it. And supplements are a very high margin product by definition because there's not very much in them and they're worth a lot to people. So you tend to see certain things go into those spaces.

54:09This is why like Fox News is always like reverse mortgages or gold. You can often tell something about the quality of the product from the type of advertising or sponsorship that's in that space. Yes. I spend a lot of time for my job on every social platform and Truth Social is by far the one with like the absolute most bizarre ads. And it's like diabetes scams and stuff like that. Like it's actually kind of sad, actually. It's a reflection of like what you might call like grade A advertisers are not there. And so you have this sort of weird collection of products that are geared to the sort of demographic, but a lot of them are actually borderline scams.

54:50My feeling with the supplements thing is that there was a great article, and I'm trying to remember who wrote it. It was years ago, and it was pointing out that Gwyneth Paltrow and Alex Jones used the exact same sort of supplement culture, brain force, whatever. And she had some like hippie name for it and this, you know, that spectrum. Well, I think the supplements thing is interesting because it probably should be something that's regulated and it's just not. And because it's not, there's high margins in it. But what I've come to understand is that the scammy advertisers is a feature, not a bug of the site.

55:23So like I was reading something once about like a Nigerian scammer. So, you know, you get the thing. You and I read it and you go, this is obvious nonsense. This is no Nigerian prince, whatever email. They'd never type this way. And the point is, it's supposed to generate that reaction in us because we would waste that person's time. Even if we replied, we'd eventually realize, oh, this is not how things work. I'm not going to do this. And so the thing is trying to select for credulous people. Right. And it's trying to select out incredulous people. And you realize, oh, yeah, the purpose of a lot of these ecosystems or things is to is to get the gullible people in one place.

56:02because then you can sell them stuff, whether it's political ideas or whether it's certain sponsorships or scams like that. It's trying to herd people into different audiences and you realize, oh, there's the content and the advertising are of similar quality and that that's what's happening. And so if you're reading something or consuming something, you go, what are these garbage ads? You should probably go like, oh, that's actually a helpful signal. It is. We see them on, there's all these AI generated content farms now, right? This is the sort of new, you always see like propaganda evolves for whatever the technological architecture of the day is.

56:37And so tons of what I look at now is just AI generated content farms. And it's like the Macedonian teenagers of 2016, right? Where the entire point of a lot of the, you know, a lot of the fake news, so to speak, of 2016 was designed to just push people to heavily ad-laden sites. That's how they were making their money. They actually didn't care ideologically who they were writing about. They just felt that this particular audience was more of a mark and that was what was going to get them their revenue. And what you see now with the AI-generated content sites is very much this. It's the same kind of like pushing out content to try to make people click to a site.

57:07And then you see the entire thing is created by machines laden with ads. And it is a red flag, I think, when you see that kind of stuff. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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