The Present Age

Parker Molloy: My guest today is Matt Negrin, a senior producer for the Daily Show with Trevor Noah. And just about the only person on the planet, I know who gets more irritated about the way politics gets covered in the media than I do. Matt, thank you so much for joining me.Matt Negrin: No, I'm obviously happy to have a contest with you about who is more angry at the media on a daily basis. It's a contest in which we both lose so full in on it.Well, I was thinking about this. So this is going to be the first episode of my podcast for the new year, because I had to take a month off because I was just like, “Why am I doing this?”I take a month off because I celebrate January 6th privately. And so I really just a full-on month of just remembrance.Yeah. Well, I mean, if Christmas starts in November, January 6th starts in December.January 6th creep is a real issue that we need to address, people are putting up their January 6th gallows way too early.So I feel like the two of us started the Trump years as relatively sane individuals who just happened to consume a lot of news media. What happened to us?The question is how did we become totally crazy while also feeling that we're the only sane people in a world in which everyone else is crazy, right?Yeah. Pretty much.To me, it feels like the beginning of the Trump years, or the beginning of the Trump term was like, okay, obviously this is a catastrophe, but maybe, just maybe our trusted news media will do the right thing and we'll hold this guy accountable. We'll check him, we'll provide a level of accountability that you and I haven't seen in our lifetimes really. And obviously, that didn't happen. So I think the ongoing frustration with that is what has, at least for me just made me question what is going on with this industry that I was a part of? That I spent almost a decade in, how did I not see that this was kind of inevitable? And then when I left the industry, I was like, all right, now I feel like I can talk about this stuff freely, which is kind of a bad sign that people in journalism can't talk about what's really happening.And that's been kind of the undertone I think of journalists will tell you privately in the DMs that they agree with what you're saying, but will never say it publicly. And that's bad.The Present Age is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.Yeah, well, on that sort of the same kind of thought, I get a lot of people who will text me or DM me to say they liked something I wrote and I'm like, "Cool. I would appreciate a retweet." And they're like, "Sorry, I can't."It's just, "I'll get in trouble if I do that." I've heard from so many people at newspapers and TV networks who say the same thing. And they're like, "God, you're so right. Thank you for doing this. This really needed to be called out." And my response is always, "You are totally in a position to call this out yourself." And they all say, "Ah, you know I can't do that." And it's like, “ha ha.” Yeah. Well, that's fun. Thanks for your help. But I'm just going to sit back and let this profile of Greg Gutfeld just kind of go out and get tweeted about, and I won't do anything about it.Yeah. “I won't criticize it because I don't want to get in trouble with the bosses.”Exactly. I don't want to mention how we gave a platform to Josh Hawley. I don't want to be the person who does that. It's not my role. Yeah.So speaking of giving a platform to Josh Hawley and giving a platform to Ron Johnson and giving a platform to Roger Marshall and Rick Scott and Mike Ron, and all of those. So is Chuck Todd your nemesis? And does he know that he's your nemesis?Okay. The word “nemesis” requires the person to acknowledge your existence. So I think the answer is no, I don't think he has ever once acknowledged at least explicitly, any of the good faith. I would say criticisms about Meet the Press, but I've heard from enough people to know that like yeah, he's aware of it. They're aware of it. They're all aware of it. And one of the NBCPR guys, Richard Hudock has engaged with me on Twitter. So has another producer for Meet the Press. So yeah, they're aware, but they do not respond anymore and I think part of it is because they probably know it's not a good look to be fighting on Twitter. But also I think they know that some of these things are indefensible.So you can't defend Chuck Todd for putting Roger Marshall, who is a Senator who voted to overturn the election on Meet the Press. You can't defend that. It's an obvious message that Chuck Todd thinks it's okay to give a platform to people who tried to overturn the election. And that's simply something that if you're a good faith journalist, you probably don't agree with. So I don't relish the idea that there's a guy on TV who is my nemesis, but at the same time, why aren't more people talking about this? It seems very dystopian. I don't know. What was your feeling after January 6th? I feel like there were a bunch of us on the left who were saying we have to hold these people accountable by not giving them platforms or at least by branding them explicitly every time they're mentioned or on the air with a reminder that they did this thing. Right. Do you remember that feeling?Oh yeah. I mean, I wrote an article for Media Matters in December 2020. So it was before January 6th where I was just like, “What they have done is an unacceptable attack on democracy, et cetera, et cetera.” And yeah, so then of course, then January 6th happens and the-You brought up Mike Braun, that's a triggering person for me because I remember in December, I think it was December 6th, I hope I'm right about that. I'm going to Google it real quick because I'm pretty sure I'm right. I've just ingrained all this stuff into my f*****g head. Yeah. December 6th, 2020, Mike Braun was on ABC's This Week and he floated this conspiracy theory that boxes of ballots were being hidden under a desk in some state and that there was a video showing how the Democrats were trying to steal the election. So this is a month after the election. It's, I guess three weeks after Biden was declared the winner. And you have a sitting senator on ABC talking about this conspiracy theory. That is at the time, the media was feeling out this world, right?“How many senators are going to help Trump try to overturn the election? What is the line?” And Mike Braun was seen as a non-crazy Republican by a lot in the media. And then he goes on This Week and pushes this thing out. To me as a producer or as a host or as a person at ABC that should have been the cutoff line, like okay, we're ending this interview. And it just went on for six minutes. They didn't even talk about the thing they were going to talk about, they just talked about voter fraud and that's millions of people who are seeing that and thinking what is this video? What is he talking about? Maybe there is something to this. That to me was like, Mike Braun is not Josh Hawley, he is not Ted Cruz and that's kind of the point.They can all be pushing this conspiracy theory or different versions of the conspiracy theory. And the media is going to accept them because they don't have this outwardly crazy Marjorie Taylor Greene-ish stain on them. Mike Braun looks like an honorable person, but if you look at what he really does, he goes on Newsmax and talks about the same thing. So that's why that guy is very triggering for me. Months later you have Donie O'Sullivan, who I think is a really sharp reporter at CNN going to these QAnon rallies, interviewing people who are saying the election was stolen. And they specifically cite the thing Mike Braun talked about. So, this is how misinformation spreads. It spreads on mainstream media. And the fact that these networks keep putting these people on, to me, indicates they either don't know their role in it, or they're just totally fine with it. I don't know what another option would be.Yeah. I mean, that's... God, I remember when I first got hired at Media Matters, one of the first things I did was I flew out to DC because we decided to do a thing where I would work in the office one week and then spend a few months working from home and then kind of repeat that. And I flew into DC and I saw a guy wearing a shirt that just had a big letter Q on it, standing on the steps of the Supreme court with a selfie stick, taking a picture where he is making a real tough guy face. And it was just him by himself. And it was the first time I had ever seen anyone in person wearing a QAnon kind of thing. And I thought, “Ha ha, that's so funny.” It's not so funny anymore. Part of the issue is that these views aren't debunked on TV instead what you get is you get, "Hey, do you think Joe Biden won the election?" That's not good. Presenting it as a question is part of the problem.Right. And there are multiple journalists who have done this in GOP primary debates over the past year, there was one in, I think it was Hugh Hewitt who did it in the, oh, what race was it? I can't remember, but he was moderating a debate. And he said, do you believe Joe Biden won the election? Okay. You're a journalist on MSNBC, you should not be allowed to do that. There was another local news reporter in New Mexico who was moderating a special house race primary and, or I think it was actually the general election, and she said, "Who do you think won the 2020 election? And how do you plan to work on work with others who disagree with you?" Don't frame this as an issue, it is not an issue.Part of the problem with the Q stuff that, what you just said made me think of is, when QAnon first started becoming a topic that the mainstream media had to talk about. They did it really poorly. And I remember the Q baby at the Trump rally, someone held up a baby with a Q on the shirt and it was like Q baby. And then QAnon went nuts. And then someone was wearing a Q dress and the letter Q. And so then the media had to be like, all right, let's do QAnon. I remember Lester Holt, the anchor of the NBC Nightly News, doing a whole thing on QAnon, on what is it? And they just really did not do a good job explaining that.This is rooted in antisemitism, a conspiracy theory that feeds a lot of extremist impulses. It's an online-based thing. Ben Collins and a handful of reporters do really good work on this stuff at these networks and the rest of the journalists there just kind of don't, it feels like they don't read it or they don't talk about it. They just kind of say, QAnon, it's part of the right-wing. No, it is so much deeper than that. And it's basically all the people at the January 6th insurrection are QAnon believers. Technically, if you wanted to extrapolate a lot of those views, Kevin McCarthy believes half the s**t in QAnon, but you would never get reporters saying Kevin McCarthy is a QAnon believer because he hasn't said "I'm a QAnon believer." But he does believe that George Soros is in charge of the federal election takeover or whatever. That's a Qanon conspiracy theory. So he is a Q believer. And it shouldn't be weird to say that, it should be the reality.And part of the problem I think is that these things start online and journalists generally seem to not take things that start online seriously, which is a gigantic problem because so much of our lives are online. So you have all these journalists who've been around for 20, 30 years, or whatever. And things are not the same now as they were then. And so you have newer journalists, you have people like Ben Collins who are doing great work with a lot of this internet-based stuff at, in the... Who else? Brandy Zadrozny.Oh yeah. Yeah.Yeah. Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins are kind of like the tag team misinformation reporters at NBC.And yet, sometimes NBC will do things that touch on those topics that they don't involve those two and which is just mindblowing.Right. Feels extremely strange. Yeah. Feels extremely weird. Yeah.That's why I find your approach to the internet generally kind of interesting because you're trying to fight misinformation with tweets and with... I like your TikToks.I haven't done them in a while.I know, but they're funny.All right. You know what Parker I'm going to do one today or tomorrow, just because you have formally requested it. I'm taking that as a request.But no, I mean they're good. And TikTok is one of those places where it's one of those things where I start to feel way too old and it's weird kind of aging into something where it's like, “Oh no, a social media platform feels like it's too geared towards the younger kids.”Yeah. But there's a version of TikTok that doesn't have to be that for us. I think TikTok is popular among the generation younger than us because it's so easy to embrace video culture and phone culture. All we have to do is just kind of lean into that. It doesn't have to be us being like, ah, we're the old cranks. It can just be us being like, okay, I'm going to just slightly change the way that I view how to get a message out. There are older people on TikTok who do really, really well. And I think it's because video just comes naturally to them, but the medium is video rather than text. I think that's just the big difference.And I appreciate that you put in the effort to try to find that because I do feel like there's sort of a formula to a lot of the way information travels online and TikTok is a place where a ton of misinformation just thrives because it's harder to check. You can't just do a word search to find something on TikTok. You have to actually find out that some creator on there believes objectively insane stuff.And then go, “Okay, so this person's a Q creator, so what do we do about it?” And I don't know what the answer to that is other than the fact that most of the time, if you bring this up to a lot of the older, the legacy journalists, they will go, well, it's just the internet. That doesn't count.It has the same tone-deafness as an article that's written about people having a reaction to some viral moment. And the headline is like, "The internet loves..." It's like, no, no, no, the internet is a collection of people, they're expressing themselves on the internet. The internet is not a sentient thing. I think the approach to social media has to be, and this might sound very pedantic, but I think that journalists, writers, and kind of like the conversation havers or the conversation starters either rely on social media or use social media to develop their kind of first and second level takes on things. And that's why it's important to get in there early and point out that like, okay, this person, an example from today, Alyssa Farah, who's spreading misinformation about the vaccines, who is hired by CNN, which is insane.Let's get in there early and point out how she was a writer for WorldNetDaily, a conspiracy theorist birther website that was run by her father. And then she worked for Donald Trump for a year, spreading COVID misinformation. And now is hired by CNN. Getting in there early hopefully shapes the way that other people see that story. But a lot of, as you just said, legacy journalists, they might be on Twitter. They might be looking at tweets, but they don't really participate in the conversation.And one example of this that I just remembered was in September 2021. So 3, 4 months ago when Ted Koppel, who is 81 years old, the most legacy journalist you could have, went to Mayberry, the fake town in Andy Griffith. It's like Mount Airy in North Carolina, which is the inspiration for Mayberry. So he goes there to do a trolley tour and talk to Trump voters. And all he did was exactly what you were just saying earlier was like, "Who do you think won the election?" And they're like, "Mm, Donald Trump." And he is like, "Interesting." Like, this was a really bad piece of journalism that CBS Sunday morning aired as how quaint, this cool little town. Oh, the people here have some interesting thoughts. Hey, these are people who are radicalized on Facebook and Fox news. They think that QAnon, they think that Q is the leader of a secret plot. These people are psychos and you should not be giving them this platform. And Ted Koppel has no idea what any of that is about.No. None. He's like, how could you believe this? Well, I mean, because the internet told me. I mean, just as we're discussing this, it was only a couple of days ago that Joe Rogan was pushing some sort of vaccine misinformation on his show, which is kind of his thing.He really leaned into it.Yeah. And someone corrected him and he's like, shifting the goal post to be like, "Well, actually I read somewhere..." And that's all people, I mean, need that's all people need these days is just, "Well, I read somewhere that something agreed with me." I mean, I could write something that says, yeah, the vaccine makes you grow a third arm. I don't know. And, it's not true, but I could put it on the internet.I think the way that this clip, if anyone wants to check this out, I feel like if you go on Twitter and search, Joe Rogan, Josh Zepps, Z-E-P-P-S. You'll find this clip, but it was Joe Rogan pushing this idea that young kids can develop a complication if they get the vaccine. And then this guest was like, you actually have a higher chance of getting it if you get COVID. Rogan was like, no, that's not true. And then they look it up, which is the only thing redeemable about this is, well, at least they looked it up. And then it turns out that Joe Rogan is wrong, what he was saying was false. And then as soon as he realizes he's false, he just questions the nature of journalism.He's like, “Well, how do we know that? When we read these things, it's like, where are we getting this information?” Buddy, you Googled it. You looked it up, this is a reflection of how you do your own research and how you are relying on your own preconceived notions of what is true or false based on what you need to say. And because he knows his listeners want to hear the skepticism, the hesitation, just the falsities, he will lean into it and he'll go back the next day and the day after that and keep pushing it, having not learned a thing, because he's not interested in educating people, he's interested in amassing a following. And that is what you kind of see all across right-wing radio, smaller podcast networks, even these like Fox shows, OAN, Newsmax. It's all people who are probably mostly in on it. They know what they're saying is b******t. And if they happen to believe it, that's even worse. But I feel like most of them don't, they just know that it's really good for them. Although it's impossible for us to know, I'm not in Pete Hegseth's head, he might really not wash his hands. He might really think germs don't exist.See, now you sound like a New York Times reporter circa 2017 where you're like, I” can't say ‘lie.’”“I don't know it's in his heart. I don't know what's in Donald Trump's heart. He might not be lying. He might truly believe, Donald Trump might really believe that Hillary Clinton used the Venezuelan treasury minister's brother to facilitate a deal with Barack Obama's niece. He might believe that. He might believe that and we don't know. And so we have to call it, like an untruth or a false claim.”An “unsupported claim.” “We will give it one Pinocchio.”Oh, man, the Pinocchio system. I mean, if there ever were a metric for how we need to evaluate our world, I love seeing Glen Kessler, the Washington Post Pinocchio guy give Biden four Pinocchios. If you gave Trump four Pinocchios on anything, no one else can ever get four Pinocchios. There cannot be a comparable way to say Joe Biden also did a bad, come on, there is no comparison. Joe Biden misstating a percentage on COVID cases is nowhere close to Donald Trump being like "Ghosts voted in the 2020 election."So in November, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy tweeted, "The only way fascism wins is if the free press covers fascism versus democracy, like just another cats and dogs political fight." I have bad news for him.First of all, zero Pinocchios.That's true. But that's exactly how it's been so far. And that's what kind of worries me. At the time you quoted that and you wrote "Two hours ago, Chuck Todd invited a fascist big liar on the top-rated Sunday show to state that vaccines don't stop the spread of COVID and didn't offer a chance for a Democrat to respond to anything he said." And I think that kind of sums up where we're at.Parker you giving me the play-by-play of my own tweets is any Tweeter's dream. Let's go back.“And then you got this many likes and then...”Oh my God. Okay. Yeah, it's good. This is net-positive. I think for the cause, which is people in Congress have a bully pulpit. They can go on TV and talk about this stuff. They can tweet stuff. They can give interviews, they can write op-eds. They have an outsized voice in the conversation because of the way that our media respects elected officials for better or worse. So it's good that Chris Murphy, Brian Schatz, Ted Lieu, Eric Swalwell, Tim Ryan, all of these kind of resistors, the lefties are taking up the message for media reform or media awareness, media literacy. I don't really know what to call it. So I like that. I don't think enough of them are doing it to make it as successful as we'd want it to be, but it is good that they're aware of it.And to your point, it also is really unfortunate that the media doesn't really change at all. And it's not just Chuck Todd. I think Chuck Todd is one of the prime examples of it because he has the biggest platform on Sunday mornings and that still has a sizable audience. And it influences a lot of discussion for at least 18 hours on social media. But there are others too, who kind of either agree with the worldview or not the worldview, but agree with the philosophy of we still need to give these people who deny vaccines a real platform, or just giving Ted Cruz a voice on anything seems crazy to me. But there are a lot of journalists in that world who believe it.And so the cats and dogs thing, the political horse race thing is a separate criticism to me. Yes. Politics is covered with this frantic nature of who's up, who did a good zinger, who didn't, and there's a place for that. And it's anything before 2015. That doesn't really longer apply, I think. But that is also different than giving a role or sorry, giving a platform to the people who are rooting for the end of truth and democracy.So it does go hand in hand, obviously, those people who want to cover politics as a horse race also probably think that those people should be given a platform, but they are kind of two different issues for me. And I mean, one of my unpopular among our cohort opinions is that I do think politics can be covered in a horse race way at times.I don't think that's necessarily bad. I think polls are interesting and good for the most part. It's when you're polling things like critical race theory and then running a headline afterward that's calling it education instead of what it really is, which is just racism. And I think the sanitization of those really dark elements of the Republican party is what happens when you cover things through a horse race prism in 2020, 2021, 2022. So that kind of needs to change for us to have a more honest media, but obviously a very low chance of that happening.Yeah. Well, there's, God, there was something recently, let me, I'm just going to find this. So there was a poll that Harvard did and I'm trying to find- Okay. So this poll, this was polled by Harvard's Center for American Political Studies survey.“So how do we even know where we're getting these reports,” I'm being Joe Rogan. “We're Googling stuff and just reading it.” No, I'm kidding. Go ahead.And here was the question. There are only two possible answers. Do you think the schools should promote the idea that people are victims and oppressors based on their race? Or should they teach children to ignore race in all decisions to judge people by their character?Wow, that's amazing. So it was obviously 70% weighted toward the position of “Wait a minute, we shouldn't be doing the bad thing.”It was 63/37 in favor of ignoring race in all decisions.Just great. Wow.And the funny thing is, so someone tweeted, this is an actual question from the survey and Andrew Sullivan responded "And a good one." That's what he said. Well, no, it was not a good question.The idea of doing push polls, in general, is kind of slimy, but something on that, the wording of that is so deliberate and so designed just to get a Fox News headline that it feels, I don't know, it's gross. Ugh. Yeah. I hate hearing that. Oh my God. Some of the words in those things, what was it "completely ignore"?Yeah. Yeah. It was "Should they teach children to ignore race in all decisions to judge people by their character." The fact that they had to add "in all decisions" was like-Isn't Mark Penn part of a polling group that's called Third Way or something, or some middling, his whole, I could be misrepresenting him. I thought he was part of the Third Way thing or No Labels or something.He is the Stagwell group. I don't know what that is even, but…I was going to say some of these fake Democrats, or fake centrist people are part of this idea that there has to be a third option. It doesn't have to be Democrats or Republicans, oh, but your question here is two very extreme options right now. If only there were a third way or a more purpleish answer to this quagmire.The funny thing is, so this poll, the pie chart they used for it is the red and blue, and blue is people are victims based on their race and red is ignore race. So I think it really gets out there.Obvious. Yeah. I remember in 20- I think 14 or 15, Fox News, it might have been Doug Schoen, that guy who did a poll and it was, “Do you think the country is going to hell in a handbasket?” That was the question.There was the Lou Dobbs one that was like, “Is Trump doing great, greater or greatest?” It was basically that old Colbert bit.Okay, that screenshot to me is the defining screenshot of Trump propaganda. “How would you rate President Trump's handling of the China virus,” is what it said. And it was like “Very good, great, and super.”Stuff like that, it is made not just for the Fox News audience, it's made for the internet. And that's why I'm so interested in this topic generally, because the way we talk online, people like to be like, “Well, no, it's not real life. It's the internet. It's not real life.” What do they think real life is?I know. Honestly, but also I'm glad Twitter is not real because real life sucks. Twitter is where I want to be now.Only marginally better than real life, which is also bad.Have you seen real life? It's terribleSo the last thing I wanted to ask you about before I let you go is, so when the New York Times got rid of their public editor position, they told people to tweet. They said it was unnecessary because people could just tweet. Twitter is the public editor, which that seems like a bad idea, but also there is no group of people less inclined to change or reflect based on tweet responses than New York Times reporters, it seems. How do you think that’s been going?I have a feeling that the intention behind that, I think was good. I think the intention being, “We want to hear from readers and we acknowledge that social media is where our readers have the fastest and most direct way to let us know what's going on. And a handful of our reporters engage with people on social media that can all in an ideal world, in which everyone is acting in good faith and willing to acknowledge their own shortfalls or errors, which can lead to a much better transparent reporting process.” That, I think, was the intention. In reality, obviously, it means we pile on the New York Times for bad headlines, and they, I guess we don't know what their real response is, but it feels like they don't change anything in a significant way.But that said, there's no way that all of these comments can't live in their heads at some level, which is why I do feel like having rapid response to bad framings or all these diner stories. I want to think that it's good because it will affect what they do in the future. I don't know if that's true. Part of the reason that I am skeptical of how effective tweeting at journalists is, is because a lot of the journalists at the New York Times are really good and they do really good reporting and exposes and then some f*****g editor will undermine it all with a shitty headline. And people don't understand that reporters don't write headlines, which for the most part, is the case. Reporters have very little to do with the headlines as a...This is my big brag of the day. I used to be an intern at the New York Times. I was on the copy desk and the copy editors write the headlines and they work with the reporters on it if they want to, but editors write the headlines and then a different editor rewrites it. And then a page one editor rewrites that. It goes through a whole process. The headline is normally what we're most upset about because that sets the tone for the story. And we are rightfully upset about that. Those editors should be better at that.It's also the only thing that most people see. Most people don't click on stories. At this point, this thing is so outdated, but it was a 2010 survey [Ed. note: it was a 2014 survey], I hope that there's a new version coming out at some point, but it was an old survey that was basically 60% of Americans haven't clicked on a story in the past week. So they're getting everything from what they see on Twitter and what they see headlines as they pass by.Wow.So that's why you can't just have a little misleading tweet or a little misleading headline Because that's what most people will see.Did you read that story or did you just read the headline that said 60% of people?Just read the headline that said 60%.Sounds good.And the funny thing is, I remember when it came out, Chris Cillizza wrote about it and it was like, "Dude, how do you not understand?!”The clickbait master.Well, as it relates to headlines, yes, I think everyone acknowledges that's a huge issue. And I think that should put more emphasis on the role of editors at newspapers, like the New York Times, which by the way, there are a lot of headline writers there and headline writing is kind of an art at the Times and that needs to be reevaluated because a lot of their headlines have been really bad. And we get a lot of the reaction to it in this, I think, okay. So I think a lot of the reaction to those headlines kind of snowballs into this narrative that the New York Times is being out of touch, being tone-deaf, whatever. And then it's easy to go after the people on the byline, the journalists who write the story are the only ones with their names on it. And the editors aren't.That, I think, is not always fair. That said, if Peter Baker writes a stupid story and is quoting people stupidly and is making bad analysis about how January 6th is just a red versus blue reality thing, sure, he's wrong for doing that. But I think a lot of the times when [people] are going after headlines, it's good to know, it's important to know that the reporters, aren't the ones who write the headlines and this is such a weird thing to try to educate people about because it's not intuitive. You would never think that that's the case, especially because in a lot of new media websites or digital publications, reporters do write the headlines and they often write it tying into the story, which is fine. That's a good way to write for a digital audience, but it's not always the case at these legacy papers that we focus on because they do have a huge circulation.I'm also thinking right now of the cliche Buzzfeed writer, who's like, "Okay, I have to do a story on the 43 greatest kangaroo gifs." And then the editor's like, "How about we do the 43 great kangaroo gifs?" And the writer's like, "That's not the headline I want."“It will restore your faith in humanity.”Yeah. “I would never say that.”And so, yeah, Matt, is there anything else that I haven't asked that you want to mention or any projects you're working on or anything?Oh, man, you covered so much.Anything at all. The floor is yours.I have a perfunctory plug for this thing we did at the Daily Show where we've put up these January 6th monuments. If anyone wants to check this out, just go online and use the hashtag daily show monuments. But it's basically a tribute to our wonderful Freedomsurrection heroes who tried to overthrow the government on January 6th. And we just felt that we needed to honor them, kind of the way that civil war generals are honored in the south. So we put up some monuments to them. I would encourage everyone to just educate yourselves about our history and our heritage before the woke right-wing mob tries to tear them down.See, what we need to do, though. If you really want to be like the way that civil war monuments are celebrated in the south, we should wait 70 years and then put the monuments up just aggressively too.Okay. This is a really crazy thought is in 70 years, what will, Parker you and I will have to do a podcast in 70 years and see if people even know what January 6th is.I hope I'm dead.I hope I'm dead in seven years.Seven, 70, whatever. It's all the same. But Matt, thank you so much. It's been a lot of fun talking to you.This is the least angry I've been in so long.I know. So now it's like, I'm going to close this and go look at Twitter. Yeah. I'm sure things will be fine.We'll go get angry together online.Sounds good.Thanks, Parker. Thank you so much. Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

This is part 2 of 2 of my conversation with Matthew Sheffield. If you haven’t checked out last week’s episode, you may want to do that here:Parker Molloy: A lot of criticism of Democrats seems to ignore the asymmetric nature of partisan media. There's a massive right-wing infrastructure in place that can keep the same topic and headlines for an indefinite amount of time. This makes it easy to pick a topic re-alert invented to hammer away at for their own political goals, and I think we saw that recently in Virginia about critical race theory and all of that. And you have people like James Carville offering advice like stop the wokeness, but what he seems to miss is it's not Democrats who are pushing these narratives. If Fox News wants to spend every night between now and the next election claiming that Biden quadrupled everyone's taxes or made it illegal to breathe oxygen, they can, and some people will believe it and they'll repeat it.The Democrats who lost these recent elections, they didn't run on critical race theory or defund the police or anything like that, or LGBTQ issues, which, trust me, I wish the Democrats were as pro-LGBTQ as right-wing media make them out to be. But I don't know what they're supposed to do, or even more importantly, what legitimate news outlets are supposed to do to counter this. If Democrats weigh in on every nonsense issue that comes up... As we're recording this, we're in day two or three of them freaking out about Big Bird. There's a new target every day that gets thrown out there. If they weigh-in, they lose because they're weighing in on something as trivial as Big Bird. If they ignore it, it just builds up and so all of it's a long way to ask you what... How do you fight back against that when the infrastructure is so... It's a very strong infrastructure that right-wing media has built. You have Fox and Gateway Pundit and Daily Caller and Daily Wire and all of that; they keep bouncing the same ideas back and forth. Oh, commentary from a Daily Wire contributor turns into a Fox and Friends segment with that person, which then gets put on Daily Caller. It's this very incestuous, basically. It's an echo chamber. And people often talk about there being, "Oh, the liberal bubble, get out of your liberal bubble." That was something we heard over and over and over after 2016, and then after 2020 there was a big push to, "People have to get out of their liberal bubble," again. The answer is always people on the left need to do this. It's never people on the right need to get with reality. That's never something that gets brought into it, and that's one way I feel like mainstream outlets are failing us is that they don't realize, or they refuse to urge people on the right to maybe be less extreme. You hear after the recent elections, there's been this push, hey, oh, does Joe Biden need to move to the right? Has he been too extreme? He hasn't really done anything extreme. The policies he's proposed have generally been pretty well supported. There's nothing crazy in there, especially when you consider that when Republicans passed the tax bill in 2017, it had something like a 30% approval rating. It was super low and they passed it anyway. And it remained unpopular, but they didn't care.Matthew Sheffield: Well, there's a lot to unpack there.Oh yeah, I'm sorry. That went on forever on my end. The first thing I would say is that after Republicans lose elections, they don't think, well how can we move to the center? What is the message that we can say that will make people like us? They don't do that. They never do that. In fact, what they do is to say, "How can we change the environment so that our ideas can propagate better?" And nobody on the left does that. And part of that is why I started my website, Flux, to try to focus on some of these larger issues and larger trends. In terms of Christian nationalism and the Republican mind, I just did a long interview and discussion about how this works. The Left Behind novels. People have heard of them but did you know that they were written by the... from one of the co-founders of the Council for National Policy? No, I didn't.Which is a right-wing networking organization. The Left Behind novels are designed as political propaganda. That's what they're for; that's the point of them. But people just think, well look at this stupid moron Kirk Cameron movies and whatnot. Of course it's done. Whatever. Understand-Yeah, that God's Not Dead; that whole series of movies, too. It's all the same.Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, of course it's dumb, but you have to go to the next step which is what is the point of these things? Why do they exist? How many people are reading them? And in the case of the Left Behind, those things have sold over 100 million copies.Yeah. Which, in fairness, it's a cool premise for a book, but it's definitely... I feel like it's a cool premise that could've been done in a less super propaganda type way, which I guess that just becomes the Leftovers.Yeah, the end of the world, Satan trying to kill everyone or the demons or whatever. Hell, that's every f*****g superhero.Yeah, it's true.Marvel literally has a god character, Thor, in its pantheon of superheroes. Yeah, it is a cool premise, for sure, but people have to understand what does it... The way that it's executed is designed to tell the audience who reads the books or watches the films or whatever that Democrats are the literal, not metaphorical, literal servants of Satan. Yep, that's... Yeah.And that reality that there are 10s of millions of people who think this. Have you ever seen that discussed on cable news? No.I don't think ever.No. And if it was brought up, people would get slammed for, "Oh, your generalizing," which, okay, but if one Democrat somewhere saying, "We should defund the police," gets turned into, "This is what Democrats believe," there's no... No one goes, "All Republicans believe that forest fires are started with a Jewish space laser," like Marjorie Taylor Greene said, but that's kind of how things are when it comes to you find one fringe-type character on the left and that becomes this is what Democrats believe, this is what the left believes.Yeah, or even in the case of Black Lives Matter, there were some acts of arson or criminality that were conducted, but if you act... I actually was watching the... I live in Long Beach, California; I was watching some webcam footage that people had, the public webcams, and I saw the protests. They were in an area and then they left, the protesters left. And then some people drove in from who knows where and then broke into a store. They had nothing to do with these protests, they were just looters and were not affiliated with the groups. But nobody reported that.Yeah. Well, and also with that, there was this narrative last year as that was happening, "Oh, Democrats support riots and mobs and violence and looting and burning," but I don't know, there might have been a couple who were outspoken on the more extreme ends of whatever was happening, but for the most part, Democrats were like, "Violence is bad, violence is wrong. No violence. Stop it." That sort of thing. But it's-Well, and then, yeah... Oh, sorry.There was this idea that Joe Biden was... these were Joe Biden fans. No. No one who goes and calls themselves an anti-fascist is a Joe Biden fan.They hate Joe Biden.Yeah. Joe Biden, he's the middle of the road. I don't know. He's, "Is Pepsi okay?" as a person, you know?Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.That sort of thing. He's no one's first choice. Yeah. But I would say, though, that, yeah, I don't think, though, that the mainstream media is adequately positioned to cover this. And Democrats and democratic leaders and funders and activists need to understand that the mainstream media will never be up to this task. There is nothing that you can say to them because most of them operate... Their training is basically show up in a building and try to find people and ask them about legislation. That's the only thing they know how to do. They don't know-Repeat whatever gets told to them, which that's one of those things that, especially during the Trump era, was pretty obnoxious because you'd have respectable mainstream reporters tweeting out whatever nonsense Trump said that day or whatever-Yeah, "I had the biggest inauguration attendance ever."Yeah. One guy who used to do that a lot was this CBS reporter, Mark Knoller, where he would just say nonsense. Trump would say nonsense and he would just type it up and send it out and everyone would be like, "Why are you doing this? You understand that this is straight-up untrue. You don't need to share it word-for-word without saying-“Are you a stenographer?”Yeah, well exactly. And then he... I forgot, there was-He retired, actually.Yeah, he retired and then immediately started popping up in the replies of some... I forgot who it was but some democratic lawmaker said something that was a slight exaggeration and he popped in to go, "Actually..." And it's like, where was this guy? Where was this guy the past four years? But-Yeah. Well yeah, so basically what has to be done is that there has to be multiple organizations started who will not only document the lies but also actively push back against them and then also try to stay in touch with the democratic base and get them to be engaged and continue to be engaged, then also to... And then there also need to be groups that are out there telling people who vote Republican, "This is who you actually are supporting when you support these people," because I can tell you so many people who I know, they have no idea. I personally didn't know about this stuff and I worked in media commentary and analysis and I didn't know how crazy these people were. And so the mainstream media isn't going to report it because they are so upset. The only thing that they can understand is an elected politician said this. And sometimes they will debunk it, maybe. But most of these people in the right-wing ecosystem are not elected politicians, and that's by design. Charles Koch, he actually did try to run for president, actually, I think it was 1980, and he got completely destroyed because no one likes their ideas. They don't care about public opinion. They're not going to put themselves out there on the ballot. And so you need to understand that these activists, that these donors are the actual powers behind the right. The politicians themselves are literally just window dressing; that's all they are. And in fact, Reverend [Norquist 00:56:40], who is one of the most powerful and wealthy right-wing activists out there, been around forever, has said, "The only thing we want in a president is a monkey able to sign legislation that we write," basically. That's what he said. And that is their attitude. This guy has been around in politics literally since the '80s at the epicenter of Republican politics. You have to understand if you're a reporter that that's who you should be covering or paying attention to. But again, you can't count on the mainstream media to understand-They're so set in their ways and stubborn, even now after the entire world has been working remotely, not in offices for two years, if you go to any mainstream media publication and look at their job listings, they'll all be like, "Must live in New York, must live in DC." It's like, did you not pay attention to any f*****g thing that you yourself experienced? The answer is no, they did not. If they can't even learn from their own experience in their own industry, you can't count on them, so don't try them.It reminds me of those stories of people who had really serious COVID and then survived, and they're still not getting the vaccine. It's like, dude, how? How are we here? How did we end up there? Here's an example I was thinking about from last week. There was this segment that CNN ran during New Day that was about... It was a trip to the grocery store with a family of 11. First off, the average size of an American family's two point something. It's very small, not 11, so right there you're not talking about the average American family in any way, shape or form. The family they spoke with lived in Texas so they flew a reporter down to Texas because when they aired it, he was in New York, so they sent him down to Texas to meet with this specific family to go shopping with them for a piece to illustrate how Americans are struggling to pay the bills with the way inflation is going. And then when you looked up the people who were being interviewed in these stories, they were very clearly pretty partisan. That's fine. They had Facebook posts about, oh, gas hasn't been this high since, well, the last time a Democrat was in office, which is not true. But beyond that, the story comes out and there were a number of false claims in it, which could've just... They didn't go down there and film three-and-a-half minutes of footage, they filmed probably an hour at least, and they could've left out portions where one of the family members said things like, "Oh, milk went from $1.99 up to $2.79 this year." It did not go up 80 cents. It did not increase by 40%, which is what the argument was there. And when you're buying 12 gallons a week, that's a lot of milk, yes. Yeah, when you're buying 12 gallons a week even at the amount that you're talking about, that's $9 which, yeah, adds up but it's not necessarily a lot, a lot, I guess. But the whole story hinged on that where they also said, "Oh, well if in June $1 was worth $1, now it only has 70 cents worth of the same buying power," which is not true, obviously. That would be the worst inflation in the country's history if in five months you had 30% of the purchase power of the US dollar disappearing. But CNN left those in there, didn't challenge any of the statements and aired the segment. And when people pushed back on it, when people said, "These things that she said were false and you included them in the segment without really challenging them at all," they got angry. The person who reported it out who flew down to Texas to meet with this family, the person who did that went and called people who were criticizing him a******s on Twitter. Now, that's not something that... I don't know, CNN has a history of firing people for tweeting things that are bad or for saying things that are controversial. You had Reza Aslan, he lost his show because he tweeted that Trump was a piece of s**t, which okay, that's fair if you want to fire someone for that, but then you have this dude calling your audience a******s for correcting misinformation that was put out there. It's frustrating because there are very, very clearly separate rules that the right is allowed to abide by and the left has to abide, sort of like how the New York Times will buckle under pressure to bend over backwards to try to appease right wing criticism. They'll bring in... Oh, let's have Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton come in and write op eds for us. Let's invite Eric Erikson to write an op ed for us about why we need to come together after he took a page of the New York Times and shot bullets into it. These sorts of things that-Well, and a guy who called a Supreme Court Justice a pig f****r.Yeah. Well, I think it was a goat-f*****g pedophile. That was, I think, what he said. Yeah.Whatever it was, yeah-Yeah, it was not good.... about civility. It was a lot. And these are the people who get voices, these are the people who get... They pop up on CNN all the time. It's really frustrating as... Not just as someone who wants to live in a society where we can all... I would love to debate the merits of different tax policies or to discuss what the US role in foreign policy should be or something like that, but there's no policies being discussed, it's just culture war straight up and down. It's just Democrats want to kill you and that's why you should vote Republican. That seems to be the message, and it's unhinged. And I don't know how we all coexist. I would like to, but-Well, like I said, I think the right a long time ago decided that, well, the mainstream media isn't going to promote our candidates for us and do the pure propaganda that we want so we'll just go and start our own things. There isn't really any appreciable... Not really. There are some liberal outposts here and there, but certainly not anywhere near the amount of... There is no equivalent to right wing talk radio, and people sometimes will be like, "Oh, well there's lots of popular left wing podcasts." And it's like, well, sure that's true, there are some, but guess what? Head over to the Apple podcasts top news and politics and see who dominates that. It's ain't NPR, I'll tell you that. Yeah. Well, and same thing with Facebook. One great illustration, I think, of the way that right wing media can game the system is I always thought that the way Facebook reacted to this pretty flimsy 2016 Gizmodo story about supposed suppression of conservative ideas, and in reality the complaints seemed to be mostly that Facebook wasn't promoting conspiracy theories about the IRS targeting only conservative groups but not liberal groups, which the IRS was monitoring both groups because you have to be careful when you're an overtly political organization applying for tax exempt status. That's how it's supposed to go. They were mad that these stories about how the IRS were not trending and they were upset that the Associated Press was being weighted heavier than something like Gateway Pundit or Steven Crowder. And I always thought that was a moment that things really started to spiral totally out of control.The article was published, and within hours you had every right-wing media outlet screaming about it being censored, the RNC weighed in on it. And within days, Facebook set up a meeting with high-profile conservatives. You had Brent Bozell, Jim DeMint, Tucker Carlson, Glen Beck, all of these people went to Facebook and met with Mark Zuckerberg to talk about what they can do to make them feel better about things to assure them that it's not biased against conservatives. Facebook took a bunch of the recommendations. Facebook immediately fired the team that curated its trending section, replaced it with an algorithm that didn't differentiate between nonsense stories and actual news. And then in the months leading up to the election, it just fed readers false stories about things like the Pope endorsing Trump or Megyn Kelly endorsing Clinton and a bunch of conspiracy theories. [crosstalk 01:06:52] It seemed like a pretty clear-cut example of conservatives seizing on an opportunity to weaponize a sense of being wronged, a sense of being the victim to claim bias to their advantage. Facebook bent over backwards to make sure that they felt okay. They carved out special rules so that Trump could lie in his ads. They did all of these things. And what's the conservative position on Facebook? It's still biased against conservatives. There's nothing that can be said or done that would change that because it's not actually about correcting a bias, it's about pushing for an advantage. I don't know. Do you think that I make too much of that Facebook example? Because it's stuck with me for five years.Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, I wouldn't say it's more of a... It's just a good test case or example. But that sort of thing happens all the time. But that's why I do think that there needs to be more... There are some progressive publications out there. Let's say the Nation or New Republic or Talking Points Memo, et cetera, but they are more about progressive interpretations in reporting of the news. But they aren't about actually combating right-wing stupidity and lies and activism, and so basically these people have had waging a one-sided war on mainstream institutions so it's no wonder that they have been favored by them. Your former colleagues at Media Matters have started a new project where they're tracking the most popular Facebook posts, and the most popular Facebook posts are almost without exception right-wing propaganda.Yeah. And this is something that Facebook could choose to just do rather than eat up all the resources of Media Matters to do that, but alas, Facebook is a secretive organization that worries me. Well, their key investor is Peter Thiel. Yeah, which-He is Mark Zuckerberg's mentor. The “tech companies are biased against conservatives” lying always gets me because it's so clearly not true but it's impossible to convince people that it's not true. Well, here's the thing; and this goes back to something I said earlier, that conventional right-wing Republican leaders are... They're much closer to the radical conspiracy theorists and outright fabricators than people realize. The primary reason that Facebook took these criticisms seriously... There were two reasons. One was it was a business decision. They wanted to make sure that half of their audience wouldn't, well... Or 35... Facebook is majority elderly people now, so that's... they didn't want to piss off their Republican mainstays, so that was number one. But then number two is that when you look at the way that disinformation works and is distributed if you have automated filters put in place against disinformation, they will disproportionately affect Republican politicians, and that's because... But nobody ever takes the second step which is to say, "Okay, so if that's true that these filters are doing that and it's indisputable that they do, then that means that Republicans are basing their politics and messaging on lies." That's what that actually means and that's the thing that we should be pointing to as the problem in this discussion. It isn't the algorithms. The algorithms are based on detecting exaggerated or fabricated statements and so they are neutral. They are not having things that are based on, oh, let's make sure to take points off if it's a Republican saying it. That's not how they work. They are neutral. They are literally math formulae. That's what they are.The thing is, though, these... If Facebook wanted to, it could say, "Yeah, it affects more Republicans than Democrat politicians because that's just the reality of it." They could but they would piss off millions and millions of their users, which obviously they don't want to do. They instead kind of try to back off.Yeah. But still, I don't think that point is really made very much even in the... There's tons of critical coverage of Facebook now that's come out in the mainstream press, but I don't think any of it's really touched on. A lot of the problem that Facebook has in terms of disinformation and falsehoods, it isn't because of Facebook's audience or the people who use it, it's because that right wing activism is based on lying. That's the root problem. If you talk to people who actually work in machine learning and content moderation, they actually do discuss this stuff, but it's only within that very small little universe that these discussions are being had and they need to be had on a much greater degree because... I'll give you an example. Sam Harris, the atheist author who has drifted over to the right the past few years, he did an interview recently where he said that... Somebody had asked him, "Why is it that you seem so... Almost all your content is about criticizing "woke" stuff? That you never talk about Republican extremism or Christian nationalism. Why don't you do that?" And his response was, "Well, because that stuff is so obviously wrong that I don't need to criticize it because it's wrong and so I have to focus on cleaning up my own side." And it's like, bro, do you realize who was the president of this country? Do you realize what is the top-rated cable channel in America? He has no idea. And to be honest, I do think that there are a lot of people in the A political technocratic center or even center left who have that opinion because they have no awareness or contact with right wing media. There's a very easy mistake that you can make which is to think that because you don't know about something that it doesn't matter. And the reality is maybe you don't know about this thing because you're wrong. Which is an important lesson all around. This has been just a totally fantastic, extremely long conversation. I am so thankful that you took the time to chat with me today. Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

This week’s podcast guest is Matthew Sheffield, the founder and editor of Flux, a new online community for progressive writers and podcasters. I was interested in talking to Matthew about his earlier life experience as someone who was present when right-wing media really started building the echo chamber. The interview went pretty long, so this is part one of two. The second portion will be posted next week.The Present Age is a reader-supported newsletter. Please subscribe. Thank you!Parker Molloy: Joining me today is Matthew Sheffield. One of the first things I wanted to ask you is can you tell me a little bit about your connection to right-wing media? How it started, what you did, how your views changed over time, how your involvement changed over time. You offered to share the tale of your exit from the world of right-wing media and I would absolutely love to hear it.Matthew Sheffield: Okay, all right. Well, my background is I was raised as a Fundamentalist Mormon, and Mormons basically, a lot of people don't know, but Mormons actually are the original Christian Nationalists. Mormonism was founded on the idea that America was the choice land above all other lands. That's literally in the Book of Mormon. And that Christopher Columbus was moved upon by the holy spirit to discover America even though he never came here, but... And so Mormons, to some degree, kind of created the environment then rubbed off on a lot of people. I was brought up in that environment very much to a large degree. I have seven siblings, and my family and I, we traveled all over America doing an informal ministry because Mormons don't actually have ministries; they're not allowed to have them by their church. It's a very centralized bureaucratic church, and so I was in that. Part of it was that we were so disenchanted with the regular Mormon church. It wasn't fundamentalist enough for us. But luckily, we were not into polygamy, so that was at least good for us in that regard.But I didn't want to go on a regular Mormon mission because when you turn 19, that's what young men are expected to do. But I was so disenchanted, I was like, "No, I want to do something else." And it was, unfortunately, a really bad idea in retrospect, but in any case, we started traveling around America playing classical music on the street, literally. That was my misspent youth. We did that, and in the course of doing that, for whatever reason... This was the pre-internet days. We actually watched the evening news on TV, and our family watched the CBS Evening News. During the imbroglio over Bill Clinton's impeachment, we decided that we thought Dan Rather... One of my brothers and I decided we thought Dan Rather was unfair. In retrospect, he's obviously shown he's a fairly progressive guy. But anyway, we decided we were going to start a website called ratherbiased.com, and it basically was blogging before there was even a word for it. We got picked up all over the place. I guess people liked it, or some people liked it. We did that for a few years until we got thoroughly and utterly sick of talking about Dan Rather, and so we quit the site in 2002 and we got so many requests to bring it back for 2004 from our... Because we left the site up but we didn't want to do it. But so many people were like, "Please, please bring this site back." And so we said, "Fine, we will." But we had decided at that point we're definitely going to stop no matter what after the election's over. Well, after the election was over, we actually kept going because Dan Rather had gotten involved with that document scandal where he used fake documents to say that George W. Bush had avoided the draft in the Vietnam War. I think that's probably true that Bush did that, but when you're using documents that were typed up in Microsoft Word and you're presenting them as if they were made on a typewriter, that's pretty embarrassing. Anyway, that just exploded in popularity. We thought, my brother and I, we were tired of our family ministry by that point but we had no way out to go and do something on our own. None of us had ever had an internship, none of us had any friends because we lived basically a nomadic lifestyle. We grew up in trailer parks and tents, so yeah, we had no network. I went to I think eight different colleges, and I have two other ones from my high school years, so I've got 10 universities on my transcript. Originally, we thought, well what if we had a website that brought together left and right-wing media criticism? We actually started recruiting a bunch of people for it, and there was a ton of interest for it and people liked this idea. We actually found... before they had signed on with anyone, we found Matt Yglesias. We also found Ezra Klein while they were in college and a bunch of other right-of-center people, and so a lot of people wanted to do this but then we got to the point where we realized, oh, we don't have any money. We can't pay anybody to do this stuff and we have no way of raising money. We're like, f**k, I guess we'll have to just go into right-wing media because we have no other options. It was a weird moment because I remember I applied... I had never even applied for a job before, and so I went up and applied for, I think it was Nordstrom Rack or something like that and they never got back to me, and I was like, man, I don't know. I have no idea what to do. My university people had no interest in helping me, and so we're like, all right, well I guess we'll team up with a media research center and start News Busters. News Busters was basically like a large format version of what we had been doing at ratherbiased.com, and they had apparently seen what we were doing. Actually, we ended up getting more publicity for our stuff than they did, and so we started News Busters. After that, it was basically the first-ever think tank blog publication out there as far as I know. And then a bunch of people started trying to get into that business as well and Heritage Foundations did it, and actually, Media Matters, as I understand, was inspired by what we were doing to some degree. And then I started a business basically sort of duplicating that idea. Had only Nordstrom Rack gotten back to you, this could've all been avoided. Apparently yeah, yep. We did that for a while and then I actually tried to do that... After we started working with them, the first day after we moved out... My brother and I actually had money, we could move out so we did as soon as possible. And I was 27 at the time, and we both... The first Sunday after we left, moved out, my mom had put up a paper on our kitchen because we were living together, actually. She put a paper on it for the address of the local Mormon church, and my brother and I, we got up on Sunday morning with enough time to go to it, but then I looked over and him and I said, "I don't want to go. Do you want to go?" "No," so we didn't and we never did. We never went again after that. Anyway, long story short, our faith in Mormonism and religion generally collapsed after that, but not our interest in right-wing activism. I, for a number of years, tried to make space for non-Christians in the Republican party. And, well, ultimately that was a fool's errand as I soon discovered. Well, not soon, I eventually discovered. I guess the big catalyst for that discovery... Well, there was a couple of things. One was that I kept noticing how people were stealing my ideas on the right. I would go to an organization and say, "Hey, I've built these things here that have millions of readers that are nationally known. I could do that for you." And then they would say, "Well, I don't know, I don't know," and then a few months later big fundraising campaign: We're doing this large website and we need your money. Of course.Yeah, and so that kept happening to me. At first, I thought, well maybe it's just because I'm not... I don't know. Because I grew up in a trailer park and I don't know anybody. I'm not an elite Republican consultant or whatever. And that's what I thought for a while. But then eventually I decided to start writing a book to try to improve conservative politics. And by improve, I also meant to help them become more responsive to public sentiment, so public opinion. And in the course of doing that I began researching why do they pursue these ideas that people don't want? Where does that come from? I had always stayed away from the religious right just by being not religious, but I actually started reading their stuff and I was horrified at what I was seeing. I remember reading a story of this man who was, he's a Hindu priest and he was invited to give the... The US Capitol has a daily prayer session at the beginning of all their... when they're in session, and they invite different people do to it. And this guy, who was a Hindu priest, was invited to do it. And so he got up to do it and people started... They invaded the Capitol, actually. This was a predecessor of January 6th, and no one has ever heard of it. But this happened, and they invited the rotunda and started screaming about Satan and, "We have to stop this." They were demanding that he be arrested. It was awful. I was like, is this what I am helping here? And so I started trying to rewrite to, I don't know, oppose that Christian nationalist extremism, but eventually, I got to the point where I realized, you know what? The reason that they do these things is because they think they're God's servants. I could write all the best words, to use Trump's phrase. I could have all the best words, the best-written book in human history and it wouldn't matter because they're doing these things because they think God wants them to do it. And their ability to distinguish between their own ideas and the will of God is none; it's nonexistent. And it was a profoundly depressing realization because I had thought that there were sincere motives about policy and America and the public service and things like that, but I realized, no, it isn't that. And so I had written 80,000 words at that point, and... And I actually had a publisher as well, but I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it so I pulled it off the... I withdrew it. I went into depression, actually, I did. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, and it was like, I didn't want to do that, though, because this was the second existential crisis in my life. Most people, they may have one, but here I was having a second one.How old were you at the time?I think I was 39, 38, something like that.Yeah. Two big, existential crises by that point-Before you're 40. That's rough. See, my trick is that I start with one and I just keep that crisis going my entire life. Which, actually, just really quick, one thing I was thinking about because I actually had not heard the story of the Hindu priest. I just googled it and I'm honestly amazed that I had not ever heard of this, and I'm going to read up on it later, but one thing you said that caught my attention was that... And this is something that I have always been trying to figure out is that people do these things because they honestly believe this is the will of God and all of that stuff. And I've always wondered, these people actually believe? Because the way that a lot of people involved in the religious right seem to act, it's kind of like if there's a hell, dude, you're going to it. I've read the Bible cover to cover and I know that a lot of the attitudes just aren't consistent with any actual teaching. There's no way that people can actually believe all this pretty hateful stuff when it comes to treating other people as equals and whatnot. But you said that you think that, generally speaking, the people involved in the religious right actually do believe in what they're saying. They're not just saying it for the sake of advancing their political worldview, but rather that they actually believe these sorts of things. Oh yeah. No, they-It's their responsibility to-No, they believe everything that they say.Well, that's kind of terrifying. It is. After I had discovered that, I started publishing about it to some degree, or trying to. And a lot of people didn't even want to publish what I was writing.I'll give you an example. I had written a 5,000 word piece for the Atlantic. Somebody there had asked me to write it. And I showed how Ben Shapiro's right-wing views were not really different from this white nationalist guy named Nick Fuentes. And I literally had audio of him bashing Jewish people; Ben Shapiro bashing Jewish people on a white nationalist podcast.Oh yeah, was it Red Ice Radio?It was.Yeah, I've listened to that one too. I probably saw it because you posted it somewhere.I'm guessing, yeah. But yeah, nobody had seen that before. But most people who follow politics I would say haven't seen it, and so I was able to... Anyway, I finished the story. It was impeccably documented. There was no possible way that anyone could sue you based on this story because it was 100% true. I based it on the... Fuentes, he and his fans had started trying to... Basically, they were trying to take over the Turning Point USA audience because they both are effectively going for the same group; right-wing, young Christians. And so they were showing up at Charlie Kirk events, and they showed up for one out here in Los Angeles with Donald Trump Jr., and they humiliated him. I told the entire backstory of how this happened, why it's so hard for Charlie Kirk's... Why his audience keeps becoming white nationalists. And anyway, so I sent it to him and the guy who was my editor, he said, "Oh, this is fantastic but, I'm sorry, I can't print it." And then I said, "Well, why? Why can't you print it?" And he never responded. Oh, that's awful.It is. That attitude, though, I kept encountering it over and over and over. There is this sentiment among a lot of elite journalists that they don't take these people seriously. They think that they're just a bunch of redneck losers who are masturbating into a teddy bear, or whatever; to Jesus and Donald Trump pictures. That's how they see them. And they have no idea that these people have gigantic, massive audiences. I've heard people say, "Oh, well I don't want to give so-and-so a platform." And it's like, they have a bigger audience than you, okay?Yeah, that was always funny when I was at Media Matters and I'd post an article that I wrote about Tucker Carlson, and I'd have someone who's like, "Why are you giving him a platform?" And it's like, I hate to break this to you, but he has far more viewers than I have for years, exponentially so, you know?Yeah. There is this naïve attitude that a lot of people in the establishment left have. They don't understand how small of a space they occupy in the American mind. For instance, I remember having an argument; I was on a debate show one time with somebody who was at the Free Beacon, and they were trying to say, "Oh, Alex Jones, he's just this fringe figure." And I said, "Alex Jones has about 10 times the audience, web audience alone, of your publication. Does that mean you're a fringe figure?" And of course, they didn't respond to that.Yeah. That's a great point because... And it kind of shows... What am I trying to say? That's a great point and it gets at something else that I've been thinking a lot about which is this idea that, oh, don't pay attention to Alex Jones, don't pay attention to Marjorie Taylor Greene, ignore them, ignore them. These people are fringe, as their audiences keep growing and as their influence keeps growing. That's something that just happens in politics, and I see people brush off fringe elements of something. And I'll just kind of think to myself five years from myself, that's not going to be fringe whatever gets said there. Alex Jones, that's been one hell of a trip following his career for as long as I have. Yeah. Well, and now Tucker Carlson, the number one host in Fox News and the highest-rated television personality in America is basically Alex Jones light. And Alex Jones himself actually said this the other day. He said, "I've been so pleased to see what a great patriot Tucker Carlson has become." And then meanwhile the rest of the liberal Hollywood elite continue to do business with his paymaster, Rupert Murdoch. Ultimately, people need to understand that this is not Tucker Carlson doing this, this is Rupert Murdoch doing this. And if you, as a Hollywood studio or movie star or whatever, you work with him in any capacity, you are supporting Tucker Carlson. Yeah. I worked at Media Matters, which is kind of the... I don't want to say the flip side because I feel like it equates the two, but it's the left-leaning counterweight to News Busters, basically, for about two-and-a-half years. And while Media Matters I think does some great work, in my view it's an organization that the right dismisses out of hand and mainstream outlets often seem reluctant to rely on for fear for being slammed by the right for relying on some study that we did over there or some data that we pulled or even some quote that we found because that's 90% of what Media Matters does is just taking clips in context and posting them to the site that's just like, hey, on Alex Jones' show today he went on a five-minute rant about whatever. Those things are good to know because most people aren't just going to sit there and listen to three hours of Alex Jones every day, and that's probably for the best. But one thing that was frustrating about that is that working at Media Matters kind of made it really difficult to get a lot of my arguments through the noise. And so one thing I really want to ask you is just what don't people get about right-wing media that perhaps coming from you and not me, from your point of view, from your involvement in all of this as you were realizing this and making your decisions to distance yourself from that movement, what don't they understand that you might help them get it? That you saying it might help them get it. Sorry if that was confusing. There is a few things. One is that the generic Republican Capitol hill professional class establishment is much closer to the white nationalist or Christian supremacists fringe than you have any idea. And just as an example, the... You've got a number of Republican members of Congress who have said that biological evolution is a lie from Satan. That is a ridiculous extremist position, and a lot of Republican officials believe it. Mike Pence believes it. And there were real implications, real-world implications of these beliefs because it means that you don't accept science. And in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, that's is a reason that they were so prone to these stupid conspiracy theories or dumb medical things. Yeah, people always say, "Well, I don't understand, why do Republicans like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin so much? Why do they like it? It must be Trump." And it's like, no, it isn't because there are 70 years of religious nut jobs selling people herbs and spices and telling them that these are God's cures for cancer or pneumonia or whatever. They've had a business of this and nobody paid attention to it on the left or in the establishment press. This is a cancer that has been growing in America, and you have to pay attention to it, not just when they invade the Capitol and try to kill the vice president. It's something that has to be... The average person has to know how radical these people are. And the connections are just so clear. You mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman that I remember people, after she was first elected, were like, "Oh, this is just a fringe person. Republicans are not going to respond to her. She's just a freak Qanon person." But low and behold, she is now one of the most prolific Republican members of the house at fundraising. She's rolling in money and is routinely defended and promoted by Fox News. It's almost like there is this old internet meme, the rules of the internet, right? You remember those? I think it was 50 or whatever it was, but rule number 34 was if it exists, there is porn of it. And there was basically a rule 34 of conservative politics. If it's insane enough, eventually they will believe it. And that's what people need to understand. There is nothing too crazy or too dumb that they won't believe. But here's the other thing, in terms of right-wing media: It is their ace in the hole for politics. The Virginia gubernatorial race, it's such a great example of that.Oh, absolutely.Here you had Glenn Youngkin, who is basically a Mitt Romney clone, boring, rich, out-of-touch plutocrat; destroyed people's lives in private equity.The ideas and experience of Mitt Romney but with the sweater vest of Rick Santorum. Yeah, basically. And so this is not someone that a normal person would want to vote for. It just isn't. But what was key for him was this lie campaign that was ginned up in right-wing media. And they had two primary lies. One was that they had fabricated several incidents about supposed transgender bathroom violence.Well, yeah, no, but it's important, though, to... Since I mentioned it, though, I have to... There was this incident that... alleged incident that happened in a school in X-urban Virginia around DC. Loudoun County is the county. There was a male student who apparently occasionally cross-dressed or something like that, but did not identify as transgender, had apparently had sexual encounters with a female student in a bathroom multiple times. One time I guess she said no and then he proceeded to rape her. And then the school was... The district allowed him to transfer over to another high school after the incident. And by the way-That's an issue, but-Yeah, but here's the other thing, though, is this was the policy of the former Trump administration. Betsy DeVos had said that... The secretary of education at that time had said that students who are accused of sexual crimes, they needed to be continued... to have continued access to their learning environment; that that was very... Instead of being concerned about students who had... That these students might again commit the crimes, or whatever, that they were accused of. They wanted to let them keep going to school. This was the Republican policy, and so the district allowed the male student to go to another high school, and apparently went into... He was accused of doing another assault, a sexual assault of a female student in the classroom this time at the second school. But at no time was there a transgender bathroom policy involved with either of these incidents or even a transgender person. Yeah, which seems important to note when people are trying to stoke those sorts of things. But even if it was a trans person, there's no school in the country that's saying, "Hey, let's make it legal for trans people to assault people in restrooms or assault people in classrooms," or anything like that. No matter what, what the person was doing was wrong in any case, and that's what's so frustrating. But it was also... And I might just be getting ahead here. When all of this happened, it was before that school district had taken up a policy.Had that policy. Yeah.Yeah, so-The first incident, yeah. And then the second incident wasn't in a bathroom.Right. Well, exactly. And with that first incident, one of the things that personally frustrates me about it is that the argument seems to be this happened because of this policy, this trans-inclusive policy. And it's just not true. It can't be true. And the tricky thing about it is arguing this point on Twitter or whatever else immediately gets you going, wow, you're defending this person? And it's like, no, I'm defending the people who had nothing to do with this but are getting blamed for it. It's frustrating.Yeah, it is, it is. I'll tell you one of the last straws for me from trying to stop reforming the right to start opposing it was if you remember when Mike Pence was the governor of Indiana. They had passed this law that allowed... They called it a religious freedom law. This is, I think, their most successful evil scheme ever is trying to rebrand these Christian supremacism as religious freedom. But the way that law worked was basically anyone could claim a religious objection to any law and say, "That goes against my religion so I don't have to follow it." And that actually was what the law said. I was still loosely conservative when that came out... or when that was signed, but I kept hearing in right-wing media, "Oh no, that's not what it does, that's not what it does. It just protects people to have their... from having their rights violated." And then I would ask people, "Well, have you actually read the law? How do you know that?" And they'd say, "No, I haven't read it."And then finally I was like, all right, I don't want to have to read this but I'm going to read it. And luckily for me, it was only two or three pages, the law, thankfully. And I read through it and I was like, wow, these people have totally lied about what this law says. And I was like, I'm done, I'm done with this. I can't do this anymore because they have no regard for truth. Either they have no regard for truth or they don't care about what truth is. Once I had that realization... One thing that's important, I think, for people to realize is that right-wingers do not believe in facts. When people are like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to fact check them," and whatnot, they don't care about facts. What-No. It eats up time on the end of the people who are trying to correct misinformation or correct facts or fact check.Yeah. No, it's fine. Look, I'm not saying you shouldn't do it-No, of course.... but what I'm saying is that you can't persuade them of facts because facts don't matter. All right-wing reasoning, it's not empirical-based. And I hate to get too philosophical here, but in logic-You are on a podcast named The Present Age, so feel free.All right, well in formal logic there's essentially two types of... There's more than two, but two basic types of reasoning. There's empirical reasoning, which is where you look at... You use observation then your senses to deduce what reality is, as you can perceive it. And then there is another kind which is a priori, from Latin, from before. And because right-wing Americans are overwhelmingly either Christian or Jewish fundamentalists, they don't believe in empirical reason or deductive reasoning. They believe in a priori reason, and so for them their opinions about the Bible or the Book of Mormon in the cases of Mormons... Their opinions about religion are facts. Not only are they facts, they are timeless, eternal truths. This is an aspect of right-wing epistemology that almost nobody who has had... That if you haven't come out of that environment you really don't understand it because they don't really talk about it, of how they reason because they just all agree that the Bible is literally true in every aspect. And so that is the truth, and so everything must comport with that, with our understanding of religion. Otherwise, it's a lie. But the problem is, of course, the Bible is not literally true, and so effectively, they... Because they believe in moral absolutes but their morals are based on lies, basically they have moral absolutism and factual relativism while accusing everyone else of moral relativism and factual absolutism. And they're right, of course, to say that because everybody else, we want to have our opinions based on facts and based on what's real.Which is why it's kind of funny that so many on the right seem to try to brand themselves as I am all facts, all logic, all... There is that strain of Ben Shapiro type right-wing pundits who go, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm just telling harsh truths. Facts don't care about your feelings." It's always so mind-boggling that something like that would take off as a... something like that would take off as a slogan for a movement that is honestly pretty detached from facts, but yeah.Yeah. But it makes sense when you understand that for them a fact is that homosexuality is evil, a fact is that marriage should only be between man and a woman, one man and one woman. These are facts from their standpoint. It is a fact that Jesus was crucified for the sins of the world and was resurrected on the third day. That's a fact. Basically, though, they have an inverted epistemology, and that's why it's so hard for a lot of people who are educated, especially liberals, educated liberals to understand them, that they really... they cannot believe that they actually are so dumb, basically. It's hard for people who have had, let's say 20 or more years of schooling to understand that there are people out there who think that education is a lie. Sure. And to be clear, I think it's one thing to blame the intellectual leaders of right-wing movements for this, but on an individual level it's so much harder to understand where people are getting their news, which is why media matters. How the press covers anything, it's important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, right-wing media is how their entire political structure is based on now. The average Republican activists or voter, they can just be submerged continuously in this information and lies. They can wake up to their Christian morning podcast - The Daily Wire has one now - and/or any number of these Christian radio stations that have millions and millions of listeners but nobody outside of their audience has ever heard of them. And then they drive to work and can listen to local talk radio on their way to work, and then they get to work, they can turn on their talk radio while they're doing their tasks and read their thousands and thousands of websites, and then they go home and they can watch their propaganda videos on TV and YouTube, or wherever. They have no awareness of anything that is not in that ecosystem. I always hear democratic consultants and politicians saying, "Oh, our people just don't vote in the midterms. I wish they would, I wish they..." Well, you know why Republicans vote in the midterms? It's because of right wing media and that are telling them every election, "This is the most important election ever. If you don't vote now, Jesus will be crucified again," basically. That's the type of hype. And they're subjected to it every day. I would like to do something to try to educate and keep left-of-center voters motivated, but it seems like the Democratic establishment is like, "No, we'll just run some TV ads."It's definitely frustrating to watch as... It's just honestly sometimes seems like Democratic politicians in the Democratic establishment generally doesn't-They don't care.Again, I want to believe that they see this very obvious thing that's happening, but they just don't respond to it as though there is a genuine issue at hand. Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

Parker Molloy: Hello, hello. My guest this week, today, whatever, you're listening to this podcast is Michael Ian Black. Hey.Michael Ian Black: Hey.How's it going?That was quite an introduction.It was. I'll record something. I'll record something before this, talk about... I'll be like—You're making a big assumption that people are going to know what that means or who I am.No, no.That's just a giant leap that you're making.I'm going to be like, “He's the guy from that show Ed.”“He's that guy that maybe you saw on TV several years ago.”“Did you have VH1 in the early 2000s?”“That's right. Then you know my next guest.”Yes. That will be the intro I'll record. Yeah. So thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me for this podcast, which will be listened to by tens of people. Maybe hundreds if we're lucky.Well, that's more than come to my comedy shows lately, so I'm thrilled.Yeah. Which kind of leads me into what I wanted to chat with you about. So my podcast and newsletter are both about communication. That's just the general idea, which is great for me because it gives me the opportunity to talk about pretty much anything, because pretty much anything falls under the category of communication. But specifically I have been really interested in stories about how the pandemic has forced people to change how they communicate. For instance, pandemic's caused a lot of people to recalibrate how they interact with the world. You've got bands forced to put off touring and instead trying to sell tickets to livestream concerts, reporters had to rethink news gathering to account for a world where people isolated themselves away from society and just ate up whatever the Facebook algorithm gave them that day. How has the pandemic affected your work, and your ability to work, for that matter?Well, it devastated it. My main sources of income are acting, performing, and I guess those are my two main sources of income. So showbiz shut down, venues closed, and so there was a year and change where it was very, very difficult for me to make any money whatsoever. I joined Cameo. That was helpful. I made Cameo videos for people. That was my main source of income for 2019 and 2020, which, you know, that's not great, but it was a help.Cameo is interesting to me because half the time it's like, oh, that's really sweet. You got that celebrity to wish so and so a happy birthday. And then the other half of the time it's “haha, you tricked such and such celebrity into saying something coded and really weird.” And “tricked” is questionable, as it is, because some people just might be like, “Sure, I'll say whatever you want.”That's me, I'll say whatever you want.Anything.If you want to pay me 85 bucks to say, “You know what? Hitler had some good ideas,” I'm happy to do that.Cool.Whatever you want.That right there is just going to be my promo for this episode, just you saying...I'm service-oriented, I just want to make people happy.Yeah, I'm like, how can I get more people to listen to my thing? I'll let Michael come on and talk about—I'm not saying it's my opinion. I'm just saying you paid me to tell you, and I'm fine with that.But yeah, that's kind of the general vibe is just this idea that... Especially people involved in performing, whether it's comedy or acting or even writing. Your book came out last year, right?Yeah. My last book came out in September 2020.Yes. It was called A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to my Son, which you sent me a copy of that, and I read it, and it was great. And it was mostly serious, but also funny. One thing I found interesting about it was really just the fact that you focus on a lot of darkness in that book. I think you opened it with talking about mass shootings, right? Or something like that. How challenging is it to be funny in a world that is not funny, that has so much darkness; climate change and the pandemic and mass shootings and all of that stuff?Well, I'll take the question generally speaking first. Which is, I'll say it's... Humor has always been the way that people cope with terrible circumstances. Humor will always find a light through the cracks. It's just a coping mechanism, it's genetic, it's just who we are. The way you alleviate suffering often is just to make light of it, just to make a joke of it, just to flip the awfulness on its head, even if it's just for a second. So I think that's just who we are as a species. Specifically, with this book that I wrote, which does start with school shootings, I gave myself permission to not try to be funny. I gave myself permission to just say what I thought about stuff, and if there were jokes along the way, so be it. But I definitely wasn't trying to make it a funny book in any way, shape, or form, which is why the subtitle is A Mostly Serious Letter to my Son, because that's what it was.Yeah, yeah. Yeah, If someone bought that thinking they were going to get a lively romp of happiness, that's not-A lively romp of school shootings and the problems with contemporary masculinity, this wasn't the book.Yeah. That's not the book for you. Yeah. So that's interesting, just kind of how comedy as sort of a release valve to cope with things outside of our control.So comedy is just a form of creative expression. All art is just... I think it's all the same thing. It's all how we deal with the condition of being a human. It is just our natural impulse to create. We don't have a choice. It's just part of who we are as a species. So it's going to express itself as art or music or comedy, or whatever else. I was going to say architecture, but I don't think it really will express itself as architecture.I mean, it could. Did you hear that there was a recent that article about the billionaire who was like, I'll give you $200 million if you let me design it?“If you let me make a giant coffin for your students.”If I was really rich, that is exactly the kind of thing I would want to do. I'd be like, yeah, I'll give you money, ... if. And then just put one really strange condition on everything.“No, it's going to be a state... Look, guys, it's going to be a state-of-the-art dorm. I'm going to pay for the whole thing. The only thing that's a little weird about it is to get up and down it's chutes and ladders, and the chutes are all water slides, and they all end in a vat of hot chocolate. Can we just agree that that's okay?”I want to build Willy Wonka's factory. We can house people in there. Yeah, that's totally what I would do.One thing that I also wanted to ask you about, because you are so much better at this than I am, is you listen to people a lot on Twitter when it comes to... Because your comedy isn't necessarily political, but that doesn't mean that you're not involved in the world around you or anything like that. And I've watched some really interesting interviews that you've had. You went on Dave Rubin's show five years ago, or something like that, and had an interesting conversation with him. You went on Adam Corolla's podcast last year, which I mean, he's a comedian, but he's also extremely political. And you have these really interesting conversations where you're able to kind of diffuse, cause them to put down their defenses for a little bit, to have honest conversations, which is honestly lacking in now.Because half of the time if you watch Dave Rubin, he'll be going on some rant about how trans people are bad or something like that [Ed. note: in the off chance that Rubin or his fans see/hear this, before they respond, “Uh, he’s never actually said ‘trans people are bad,’” understand that I am speaking generally about his tendency to invite anti-trans people on his show to give them a supportive space to argue against basic legal protections for trans people — with virtually no pushback from Rubin; additionally, while he’s had a couple trans people on, they’re “pick me”s who’ve essentially adopted the right-wing stance on whether or not trans people should be legally protected from employment/housing/health care/public accommodations discrimination]. But the conversation that the two of you had was really interesting, because it was focusing on these commonalities and how to agree on the goals and maybe disagree on the methods of getting there. What's the secret to doing that, to breaking through to people? Because I think that's something where I find myself hitting a wall when speaking to people who have extremely different political views than me, but you seem to be better at it.Well, I think it's a couple things. The first is, part of what I learned on Twitter was you got to understand what you're trying to accomplish. If you're just trying to rile up people that's easy to do and fun and funny, and you'll absolutely be successful at that, no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on, no matter... If your goal is just to upset people, that's super easy to do. And sometimes that is absolutely my goal. Sometimes that is just the funniest way for me to get through my day is just to upset people. And sometimes, incidentally, people on my side. Sometimes just I'll say something that I know is just going to rile up my political allies and watch them go nuts, because it's funny to me. If the goal is to actually have a conversation and engage with people, and that is absolutely sometimes the goal, I think you said it yourself in the question, just listen, just listen.And before you listen, take the leap of faith that that person has sincere beliefs that they think are reasoned and logical and come from a good place, that they think that their worldview is the correct worldview, that they're not inherently malicious people. And I think if you do that, those two things, you'll tend to have a pretty good conversation with somebody. And I think most people aren't malicious. I think most people aren't malevolent. I think most people do believe what they're saying. Now there are some people whose beliefs are so abhorrent that I couldn't have a conversation, a reasoned conversation with them, I don't think. Or there's some people who I think are so far up their own a*****e that you can't get them to crawl out of there to even sniff around anything else.I don't know how productive it is to have those conversations. I went on Steven Crowder once and we couldn't even agree, we couldn't agree on anything. We couldn't agree that... He kept using the term rape culture, which I agreed with him wasn't a helpful term, because I wanted to broaden out what the conversation was to include the sort of petty indignities that women, mostly, mostly women, have to deal with on a day to day basis, purely on the basis of their sex. And we couldn't even get there. We couldn't do anything. And I think he's a good example of a guy whose head is just so far up his own a*****e that it's impossible. And this is before Me Too, by the way, this was sort of in anticipation of Me Too happening.Yeah. Yeah. That's actually a great example of someone who I think is, maybe doesn't... Maybe he believes what he says, but he also seems to enjoy making people angry. That kind of seems to be-And that's a good business model. That's absolutely a fantastic business model. And I wish I could do more of that. I wish I was capable of that, but I don't think I could live with myself.Yeah. Every once in a while, I'll kind of think to myself, I'll be like, “Man, I could be making absolute bank if I was one of those people who was like, hey, I'm a trans person, and I don't think I should have rights.” You know, it's like, there—Oh my god, are you kidding me? If you want to run the biggest grift in the world, that's it.Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And there are a few people who do that, to immense success and that's...Candace Owens, case in point. I mean, she's not trans, but...Yeah, right. But yeah, that sort of thing, that was kind of... I forgot who made this video, but someone took... It was a video of right after Candace Owens was hired by Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA group. And it was [after] criticism of the group, which had been falling into this cycle of “accidentally” hiring white supremacists, as one does, and then they hired her. And basically, it was the same stuff that the white supremacist that they just had to fire were saying, but the messenger was different. And so it gave everyone permission to go, “No, see? I'm not saying it, she's saying it. And she's a member of this group and therefore it's fine.”It's beautiful moral licensing. Just a beautiful example of it.Yeah. And that's what frustrates me, because it makes me feel so cynical about all of this. Because I like to think that my writing is decent or that I make decent content, whatever that means these days. But my income is modest. And if I spent all day writing rage posts on the newsletter and sending it out and picking Twitter fights with people, I'm sure I could be doing much better than I am right now, but that's not why I want to do this. I don't want to be someone who just makes the world an angrier place, which I understand that sometimes we're all angry. Sometimes I'm angry, at things that are both, real, imagined, totally in my head, worries about the future, just all sorts of stuff. But I want to make the world a nicer place, a place where we can all coexist, even though that seems to be-That doesn't pay as well.Yeah, it doesn't pay as well. And also it's too easy to say, well, why can't we all just get along? Because some beliefs are incompatible with others. If someone believes that it being illegal to fire someone based on them being gay, because of their religious beliefs say that they cannot have someone who is gay working for them, for whatever reason, I don't know how that's compatible with basic human rights and basic legal protections. And that's where there's those frustrations that come in, because I don't know how you reconcile these things. And because one side needs to win, I guess, or because these aren't necessarily things you can compromise on. You can create cutouts and laws and stuff like that, but when you're really breaking it down to on a societal level, it's difficult to have these conversations because no one wants to do that in good faith.Because it's not helpful to their cause, especially if the people you're talking to are political activists and not just people hanging out, or someone on a podcast or something like that. It's a lot of really hardcore, I have my lines to say, I'm going to say them, and that's it. I am not going to accept whatever comes into my ears. This is all a performance. And that's what so many of those debates are, when people are like, oh, well, we're going to have a debate on my YouTube channel. No one's ever listening to each other, they're just shouting over each other.Yeah, of course.It's exhausting. And I feel like that's part of the problem that we're in these days, is just that that is what is popular and that is what sells, and that's not... there are negative consequences to that. And your style of humor has always been either snarky, deadpan kind of stuff, or just really great storytelling. And I forget what it was, I think when I saw you at... when you came here to Chicago in 2018, that was it, you had a joke about... It was this lengthy joke about Subway sandwiches, that just like... I can't remember it, but I just remember being like, this is just excellent storytelling. This is perfect. This is great. And I guess it would be better if I remembered it, but...There's nothing to remember. It's about a half hour long story about getting my sandwich made at Subway. And what the appeal of it to me was that I was taking half an hour to describe getting a sandwich made at Subway.Yes, exactly. And it was good, it was fun. And I can't do that. That's a skill that someone has to have, to be able to make people laugh by talking about something so bland, something so every day, and in my view, I imagine that has to be kind of difficult, in a world where there's a lot of really intense things happening around us. And to be like, hope everyone's ready for my discussion about sweeping the floor today, something like that, where you really just kind of take all of that tension that people have going into a room and you can feel it release with the crowd. But I feel like that might not transfer to settings that aren't a bunch of people in a room, which has to be—Yeah. You're going into a space where people are there to laugh, and they're very specifically wanting you to take them wherever you want to go. They're inclined to follow, they're inclined to be lost in it the same way you would be lost in a good movie. You don't forget your troubles just because you're watching a Star Wars movie, but for that hour and a half or two hours, you're like, okay, I'm willing to invest in Anakin and Palpatine and whatever. I think a comedy show is similar. There are comedians who obviously really specialize in political comedy and you're going there because you want to be riled up, and because you want to laugh at politicians and the state of the world and everything else. And that's all great, and I do a little bit of that. The gift of it, if it is a gift, it's a craft, is in just taking the room and sort of bringing them along. That's the job.Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's good. Are you working on anything right now? What's up in your world?Nothing. I'm so unemployed.You're so unemployed.I'm so unemployed. I'm touring a little bit. I'm doing a couple podcasts. And I'm desperately trying to figure out how to make a living. What does this pay by the way?Making a podcast? Not much.My appearance on your podcast specifically, what does this pay?Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, remember how we gave you a ride to your hotel after that show... We drove you?Yeah, yeah, yeah.So, there. This is just you paying me back.Oh s**t. So I was in the hole? Oh my god.Yeah, you were, We drove you a whole five minutes from Thalia Hall to wherever you were staying that one time. That's really all I've got. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me today. I really appreciate it and hope that... I hope things can get back to normal for the sake of comedians and musicians and just society. I think we all want that. That should be one goal that we can all rally around is-Apparently not.Yeah. Hey, wouldn't it be nice if this pandemic thing was over? Yeah. No. What? Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

Parker Molloy: So you've been writing this awesome newsletter over on Substack, called The Sword and the Sandwich. Can you tell me a little bit about that?Tal Lavin: Yeah, so I launched, actually, this month, October 4th, and it's a really odd... It is an odd mix. Like, I recognize it's an odd mix. The sword is first of all, because I own a bunch of swords, and love them, but also, it sort of symbolizes like I'm writing about the American right and far-right, and then the sandwiches are very literal. Like, for a really long time, I have been obsessed with Wikipedia's list of notable sandwiches, which has hundreds of sandwiches on it, from all over the world, and I have wanted to address this in some systematic way. I love projects that have structure that I can f**k around within, like a sonnet.So the premise is I'm going through every sandwich on that list. It's very arbitrary, you know? Obviously a Wikipedia thing, so it's... But I'm treating it almost like a sacred text, and then going through it and writing essays, or interviews, or recipes, or stories about each sandwich. We've covered the American hero, the bacon sandwich, and bacon, egg, and cheese, and now this week, we're on to bagels, which is exciting for me, so yeah, this week's content is harrowing tales of child abuse and bagels.That's just such an interesting combo. And just to be... Like, those are separate posts. They're not-Oh, yeah, it's not-They're not one in the same.Yeah, so it's like Monday is the s**t that will horrify you, and then Friday, we're riding into the weekend--is the stuff about the American right.No, Friday is the-Horrifying bagels.No, I really aim not to traumatize anyone with my sandwich posts. These are nonviolent sandwiches. It's like I need the break, psychically. Maybe readers do too. Sometimes, it's really hard to shift moods, when... Like, the current series is about corporal punishment in evangelical households, and the sort of ways it impacts people as adults. So it's really hard for me sometimes, to switch modes. I almost resent it. I'm like, "Ugh, now I have to write about bagels," but then I spend an hour researching and writing about bagels, and I feel better, and then dive back into hell.Yeah. Well, as you mentioned, you published the first of a three-part series on corporal punishment, evangelicals, and the "doctrine of obedience," as you write in the piece. I found it fascinating because I honestly didn't... I've never really thought about the history involved in all of that. I'm used to people on Twitter being like, "I don't think it's wrong to hit kids. I got hit, and I'm fine," and then you look at them, and you're like... They're not fine.No. Yeah.No, it's like, "Oh, you think you're fine. But are any of us, really?"I'm not.I'm definitely not.I'm so not fine, and I wasn't raised evangelical. I'm a Jew, and I'm a childless Jew even, so it's not... I can keep some distance from the material. Well, obviously so many people shared their pain with me for this series, lots of different facets of their pain, their stories, how they're coming to terms with it, how they're healing, and to me, not to be melodramatic, but it felt like, "Oh, this is why I became a journalist," and like, I have to hold this pain gently, and treat it well, and treat it as the sacred trust it is. I mean, I don't believe in any god, but whatever. Sometimes I think of things as holy or sacred, as just a stronger word for like really important. Feels necessary.I've been astounded at the response. I mean, I tried to... I have a tic about historical research. Like, almost every piece I've ever written has some element of history in it. I also dove a ton into primary sources for this piece, which in this case was Christian parenting guides, of which I read big swaths or the entirety of like three or four books, and then tons of people's testimony about how these doctrines affected them.And then, I looked at what's the historical context? Like, why did all these books start getting written in the '70s and updated in the '90s? I mean, corporal punishment obviously has been around forever, but like, corporal punishment as sort of a political necessity and as a theological doctrine really arose as like... and the evidence is pretty clear, in the books themselves, and also in like the historical record, that they arose as basically a backlash, both to the work of Dr. Spock, who wrote Baby and Child Care, and he was super popular, and everyone loved him, and he was also an antiwar activist in his later years, and got arrested protesting Vietnam. And he said don't hit your kids, right?It's hard to overstate how much these authors hate Dr. Spock. Like, they hate him. They think he sucks, and he's the reason everything's wrong, but anyway, you have this Dr. Spock influence telling you not to hit your kids, and then essentially what these books posit, or what they feel they're reacting to is like, a lot of the movements in the '60s were student-led. The antiwar movement, the gay rights movement was a youth-led thing in many cases, or perceived as a youth-led movement, the feminist movement was really led by young women, and the sort of curative, the corrective force is writing these books.James Dobson, of Focus on the Family fame, his first book was called Dare to Discipline, like he's like, "We're fighting against this godless heathens that tell us not to hit our kids." So basically, they're saying chaos and social disorder starts in the home, and you have to hit your kids to get them in line.I cannot wait to read the second and third piece of this, because the first one is great. It really starts to get into Dobson, and The Pearls, and all of that stuff, and the responses have been heartbreaking, that I've seen from people, where they are talking about how it affected them on a personal level, and on one hand, it's amazing that the story has resonated with that many people, and that that's clearly captured what they're feeling and what they're going through, and I mean, that's just you being a great writer, and interviewer, and researcher. I mean, beyond that, it's just so profoundly sad that there are so many people in this world who have been hurt in that sort of way. They haven't felt able to express these ideas themselves, for fear of backlash or for fear of coming off as weak. That was another thing that I saw in some of the replies here, but-Or because they were taught that it was holy, that it was ordained by God, and a lot of the people, the people who spoke to me, have left evangelicalism. There's a process, it's like a very common term, and sort of ex-evangelicals. Basically, it's just calling it deconstruction, sort of tearing down the doctrines you were raised up with and figuring out a new way forward, and I really applaud people who are doing that work. It's very difficult. It's very painful.My Substack's really new. Like, I have 3,000 subscribers. It's small. The post, as of now, it's been out for less than two days, and it's gotten 50,000 views almost. I think to me, that's just an indicator of how it resonates, how people... I mean, first of all, I think there are a lot of outsiders who are sort of horrified, and then there are a lot of people who are like, "This was my childhood. I've never heard it discussed this way. I've never connected these dots." And the heartbreaking thing is like people are so grateful, grateful, that someone cares, anyone, about what happened to them. Generations of kids, generations. Like, the people who talked to me ranged from 22 to 65. It's very much a live issue, and it's still happening, although spanking is, thankfully...I hate the term spanking, actually, because spanking, I think has a lovely place in kink, but when you're talking about it in child-rearing, you are talking about hitting kids, so I've actually sort of very consciously, in my public speech about this stuff, stopped using that term, because it feels like a euphemism to me. You're talking about hitting children with the intent of causing pain.That's exactly it. I made the mistake of not writing down any questions, because I was like, "I know you. We're going to just-"We're just going to vibe about-Yeah, and it's like, "Oh, man. This is so dark and hard," you know? But that's what I love about your writing. You wrote this amazing book, Culture Warlords.And yeah, it was about basically me f*****g immersing myself in online Nazi life for like 18 months, and it was hard. It was a hard thing to do, as a Jew, as a person, who doesn't like seeing clips of murders on my phone all the time, presented as just and right. But I guess yeah, my beat is like looking into darkness and coming back out with a report.It feels weird to be like, "You're so good at this," you know? This thing that involves hate, and darkness, and pain, but your book was my favorite book of last year, and it's one of those books that I recommend to anyone who's at all curious about what's happening in the world, because I don't think you could talk about any current event without talking about how so much of our lives is affected by the far right, and white supremacist groups, and antisemitic people, and it's really kind of scary how much all of that overlaps, you know? You have the white supremacist groups.They tend to overlap in their beliefs with a lot of the evangelical groups, which tend to overlap with a lot of the anti-LGBTQ groups, these sorts of things where there's a very powerful and strong coalition of people that, I don't know, they just make the world a worse place by what they do and what they say, not by existing. I mean, I'm all for people existing. I want to make that clear, but I think that their actions and what they do just makes things so much harder. Is there anything in going into writing that, or in just your work generally, that surprised you? Were there any ideas that you had, that you had to challenge and rethink along the process?Well, so one of the big... How do I put this? Okay. I will answer your question after, but this is something that... Culture Warlords was my first book. I had never written one before, and it has some first book syndrome, which is like I put too much of myself in it, you know? Where it at points bordered on the memoiristic in ways that I now look back on with a little bit of regret, just in the sense that it feels a bit self-indulgent sometimes, like we didn't need a chapter on my childhood.The other major regret I have is not including... I did address transphobia in these contexts. I didn't address it as much as it deserved. Like, it should have had its own chapter, and I'm working on a second book right now, called Lone Wolves Run in Packs, which is about sort of debunking the sort of Lone Wolf theorem that people radicalize in isolation, that sort of white supremacist terror arises because individuals make choices. It's much more about the communities that these kinds of extremism arise from.And I know transphobia is going to be at the center of a lot of what I write, because it is, at the moment, as Judith Butler very eloquently articulated recently in The Guardian, at the forefront and center of all of these rising fascist movements. And I mean, it is all interconnected. Like, that's what makes it sort of endlessly fascinating and sometimes a bit overwhelming, is like you don't know when to stop researching.For example, part two of this series is about basically how child corporal punishment affects romantic relationships in the future. Essentially, it's like if you grow up in an environment where you're told... where you accept pain as your due, and specifically in an environment where God is invoked constantly, your sinful nature is evoked constantly, and one of the more terrifying aspects of this whole Christian corporal punishment thing is like, there's a very strong recommendation in all of these parenting books. It's like, "After your kid gets spanked, first of all, if they cry too much from spanking, they're trying to manipulate you, so spank them again. And then also, like hold them, and tell them you love them, and explain, like whisper to them gently about obedience."It's creepy as f**k, to me, but it also is like, this is trauma bonding. Trauma bonding is a concept in psychology. It's a big way of how abusive relationships work, where basically, you're traumatized by someone. They hit you, they belittle you, whatever, and then they make up with you afterwards, and hold you, and comfort you from the trauma that they inflicted. So, these parental doctrines are essentially... And they're not unique to evangelicalism. I think the unique part here is that sort of theologically mandates in some circles and some biblical interpretations, but like it is pretty common, and the people that I see, who are defending hitting kids in my mentions, are like, "My parents always apologized after, and told me they loved me, and I turned out great," and like, "Did you? Because you're defending hitting kids to me. Like, you're pro-child assault, so I don't know how fine you turned out."But at any rate, at any rate, basically my A thesis of the second part, and this absolutely bears out in the 150 people that talked to me, many of them, and most of the people who responded to my questionnaire, which is a smaller subset, said like, "I was primed for abusive relationships. Like, I was primed. I knew how to pretend. I knew how to conceal my emotions. I was taught that I was worthless. I was taught that I deserve violence, and I could expect it from the people that loved me. Like, that was the lesson of my childhood, and of course, it went on to affect what I accepted as proper treatment in romantic contexts." And there's tons of other s**t. I mean, sorry. I'm babbling at this point, but it's like...You know, now I'm like reading a whole new set of primary sources, with Christian homeschooling materials, and these doctrines about patriarchy and submission, and like specifically it affects girls very strongly. Men are also affected, boys and men are also affected for sure, in slightly different ways. And I mean, of course it's all connected, right? If the people that I talked to did some really brave work in moving away from the ways they were raised with this kind of brutality, many people don't do that work, for many reasons, and go on to reproduce it in their lives.Like, it's really, really hard to say, like, "My parents, who loved me and who I love, hurt me, and did wrong," or like, "I hit my kids, and I was wrong to do that." It's like really, really, really hard, to make those moral distinctions, to assess your past and present critically, and a lot of people are neither inclined nor able to do that. And with all the empathy and respect that I can muster, I think one of the roots of authoritarianism in our country, and especially among the Christian right, is...And this is a nascent understanding. It's not backed with science. It's more just like what I've been researching lately. I think there is a current of tremendous violence that undergirds this culture. It's like, because hierarchies of sex, of gender, of spouses and children as property, you know, are at the core of this doctrine, and enforced by often brutal, often daily physical violence. So it's a self-reproducing ideology in that sense.Right. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, that's a great point. You know, one other thing I wanted to kind of touch on here, not to change gears too sharply, but one thing that I think that both... Because we both worked at Media Matters for a little bit, and one of the things there is just sort of examining the right-wing media ecosystem, which exists on big and small scales. You have Fox News, which is large, but you also have weird little networks of right-wing bloggers, that coordinate very closely, and that's not something you see on the left as much, or at all. That's why there's this ability of people on the right to really get people who oppose them to be quiet, to shut up, to go away, to not bother them because it becomes not worth it.And I know that there have been times where I've seen something, and I'm like, "I want to write about this," and then I have to think, is it worth it? And when you wrote your book, that was after you had already not only been targeted by randos online, but you had ICE giving you s**t. You had DHS upset, because you tweeted about an ICE agent's tattoo, which you were not the first person to tweet that, and you were really one of the few people who actually said, "Oh no, I mistook that tattoo. I am sorry. My mistake."But it was clear that there was this idea that you were influential in a certain sense, and they wanted to just make your life kind of hell. What was that like, and how does that affect what you write about and how you write about it? I mean, in the sense that there has to be sort of this fear that every time you go into writing these stories that you're going to get targeted. And I know that it can take a major toll on you, and I think that... I don't know. Just any time I see something like that happen, it just breaks my heart, because you do such great work, and yet you've had the federal government giving you a hard time, and trying to push you out of your job.Yeah. I mean, it sucked. That was back in 2018. But it recurs daily, in this very warped way. I got Ken Klippenstein in The Nation, to kind of tell my story through... We sued ICE under FOIA to be like, "What do you actually have?" And they didn't have my tweet, because I had deleted my f*****g tweet, which by the way, didn't say, "This guy's a Nazi." It was just a picture of the tattoo that ICE had tweeted out, without the guy's name, and it looked like an Iron Cross, and then like a picture of an Iron Cross. It was sort of like a question mark. Whatever. It was a late-night thing. I'd seen it tossed around in different circles already online.And I deleted it after 15 minutes. I was like, "I made a mistake," you know? People pointed out it might be a Maltese Cross. And the next morning, ICE issued a press release, blaming me. We FOIA'd their emails, and they were like, "Ah, we don't have her original tweet." No one had it. Like, given all the people that picked over every aspect of my life, you think someone would have screenshotted that original tweet if it truly virally influenced a trend. It didn't. It straight up didn't. That's not factual. But at the time, I mean, I was very young. I mean, not very young. I was younger, and naïve.You're like, "It was three years ago."I've aged 40 million years in the interim because that was my first... I had written a bit about the right. I'd started writing about it. I wrote my first piece about the far right in 2017, so I was pretty new in that realm. I'd had a couple of Daily Stormer pieces about me or whatever, but... It sucks, it hurts, it's weird, but when you are public, you kind of expect it. I was public on a much smaller scale than I am now, and I was employed. I was a fact-checker at The New Yorker.Oh, god. It was just like we were getting so much... The fact-checking department was getting hate mail, and at the time, right? I was very earnest. I loved my job. I loved my coworkers. It's still the best job I've ever had, probably ever will, because it was fascinating. I was learning something new every week. Like, I got to do research all the time, and it was great. Great. I called fascinating people constantly. But like, I really was like, this is... I was very like, this is impacting poorly on the company. This is impacting poorly on my peers. Like, I must sacrifice myself, because I just don't belong here anymore.And of course, like I was getting so much hate mail, and segments on Fox about it, because ICE painted a giant target on my back over a lie, because I was a convenient target. I mean, it's like The New Yorker. She's a Harvard graduate. She's Jewish. She's fat. She's the media. Whatever. Like, I was a very convenient culture war proxy. It was also at a time of very intense outrage at the whole babies in cages thing, so it's like let's throw some meat to the lions or whatever, and the meat was me.I mean, so it's like, I was so naïve, and so traumatized frankly, that I was... It was an awful week. Like, I self-harmed for the first time in ages. Like, you know? And it still comes up constantly. Any time I say anything, someone will be like, "Didn't you accuse a veteran of being a Nazi?" I'm like, "No, I didn't." Anyway. But like then you sound all tinfoily, when you're like, "The government was lying." Like, it's hard to... And I was stupid. I was stupid to resign, and thus cement a narrative that I'd done something wrong. I have so many regrets about how I handled all that s**t, like now, now that I've been through the fire a bunch more times.I will say, though, it severed me from traditional journalism, at least staffed traditional journalism. Like, I've written in a lot of publications, from The New Republic, to Vice, and whatever. I've had freelance bylines all over, but I've basically, besides a brief stint at Media Matters, which I got laid off for pay, for like money reasons, like they were trimming down their extremism department, which seems like a weird decision in retrospect.Yeah.Like, I haven't had a staff job since, and now I'm Substacking. I appreciate the stability of Substack. I also am like, obviously there's TERF ambivalence. Like, the first Substack experience I had was like Glenn Greenwald being like, "How dare you tweet," you know? And saying like I think Substack shouldn't have these outspoken TERFs on it anymore. Which f**k Glenn Greenwald. He's just like a troll all the time. I call him “Glerb” in my head.Glerb.Anyway. Whatever. It's not so interesting. I've written about... One piece that kind of goes into my reflections, and what I'd learned from that whole shitty, depressing incident, and its various ripple effects, like Laura Ingraham calling me a terrorist and stuff. I had a conversation with Lyz Lenz, who writes the Men Yell at Me newsletter, where we talked about kind of what it feels like to get these kinds of mobbings. They are absolutely techniques to silence. They are very frequently employed by the right, because the right has a much stronger villain of the day kind of methodology. That's what they do. That's like... We've studied right wing ecologies of information, and like, essentially it's like, yeah, a villain of the day can go through so many iterations, from all of these ideologically completely uniform, like punitively distinct media brands. It's a little like the five minutes of hate thing from 1984, and when you're the subject of it, it's very... And I've talked to a lot of women particularly, and transwomen, women through queer women, just women, basically, through... I'm sorry to make that... I didn't mean to make that as a distinction. It's just more like the different loci of vulnerability.We're good.It's like been almost exclusively women, through the process of like, "How do I get my information offline? How do I deal?" I have some practical tips, mostly just sign up for DeleteMe. It's a useful service. Anyone who's a journalist, frankly I think should be signed up for it, because you'll have... Chances are, you'll have your time in the hopper, especially if you are not a conservative white man. But like, a lot of it is emotional guidance. Like, the way I describe it sometimes is like having the roof ripped off your life. Like, you feel like you're just toddling along, a relatively insignificant figure, and suddenly, you're in a national spotlight as villain of the day. It's a f*****g traumatizing experience, really. I feel like this podcast is you asking reasonable questions, and then me like just rambling.No. I mean, it's all very fascinating, because it's hard to explain to people who haven't gone through anything like this, because on a smaller scale, I've gone through this. Like, there was one time, I was at home, and I was just sitting there, and Andy Ngo posted a thing that was... It was like a photo that showed his backpack, with white dots on it, and I said that it looked like a pigeon pooped on him. I thought that was just kind of funny, and I closed Twitter, and I took a nap. Then when I woke up, I had people who were like, "Wow, you were cheering for him to be poisoned with cement milkshakes and beaten to death," and I'm like, "What the f**k?"So then I delete my tweet, and I say, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to be taken that way," et cetera, et cetera, and one thing I've learned is if you publicly acknowledge something and if you publicly apologize for it, they go, "Ha, we've got you." And that happened with... I remember there was one time, there was a trump rally, where David Weigel at The Washington Post tweeted out a photo that showed the rally kind of half empty, but he took it from a weird angle. It was an accident. He accidentally showed the rally looking small, and Trump himself, who at the time was the president of the United States, tweeted out a demand for an apology, so Dave responds by saying like, "Yeah, sure. I'm sorry. That was a mistake. Here. Here are some other photos from the event. We're good, right?"And then the response to that was Trump then said, "You should be fired," you know? It's this whole thing where if you ever acknowledge that maybe you got something wrong, that is what they just cling onto and create their narrative around.Yeah, I mean-That's why it's so frustrating.... it's “don't show the whites of your eyes” kind of vibe.Yeah.Oh, Andy Ngo is such a putrid f**k. I really hate him. I called him a... I think I called him a fascism-adjacent dipshit in my book, like down on paper. I wish it was in the index as like, "Ngo Andy, fascism-adjacent dipshittery of,"See also.Like, yeah. Right? He sucks, and he's so deeply transphobic and racist. Like, all of his... It's interesting. Like, he's a very big purveyor of the five minutes of hate format, and he always highlights gender-nonconforming protestors. He highlights black protestors. It's very calculated. It is very... obviously comes from very deep-seated bigotry on his part, and to me, that is just factual. It's the way he works, and he knows who his audience is, and he is who he is. We met once, because I was covering this conference. It was like him and-Oh, I remember that.It was in the book, yeah. It was like him and Tim Pool, like organized this conference to prove how tolerant they were, and I wound up being chased out.Yep.Which to me was pretty... And then they were like, "You were chased out? You just walked away, while being followed by people." And like, okay.Well, and also you were live-tweeting it at the time, so it was very clear what was happening, you know? It's like anyone who was reading your tweets saw that you were... they were... There were people there who were treating you horribly, and then you-Well, Ngo said I look like a pigeon, and that I'd waddled away, which like, pigeons are very noble birds. They can eat garbage without any adverse effects, and they successfully hide their young offspring such as I've never seen a baby pigeon. So, I admire the pigeon as an urban bird, and I don't find it offensive. And you know what? But whether I waddled, or sauntered, or whatever, people were screaming at me, and I would describe that as being chased... It's so surreal. You wind up in... I think I opened the chapter on that rally by just being like, "I'm sitting at home, arguing about whether I was chased or not." Like, you wind up in these obscene, stupid semantic scenarios, and they were like, "We're going to get security footage from the casino." It was held at a casino, "Like to prove that you weren't chased." And they never produced the security footage. They found like one security chief guy who was like, "No one was chased, probably." Because of course he would say that, right?Yeah. They're not going to be like, "Yeah, someone was chased, and we just kind of sat back and were like, huh."Like, "Yeah, people routinely get ideologically run out of our casino." Like, you know? And they're so enamored of gotchas. They also love choosing the most unflattering pictures of me online. I think also when you're a woman, and like, so they inherently see you in this sexualized way, the sheer amount of fucked up s**t that's happened with my photos... Someone posed as me on 4chan, and it was like, "I'm Talia Lavin, a journalist, and here's a bikini photo of me to prove it," and three separate times. I had posted one bikini photo in the history of time on the internet, and like, it's just weird s**t, like saying, "You look like a neanderthal," or weird Photoshops. You know what I'm talking about.Oh, absolutely.Like, it's very sexualized, and it's also this mix of like, "You're disgusting, and I'm going to sexually demean you, and..." Like, I will say, that's one of the things that I know has left some residual psychic s**t. Like, I've had periods of my life where I look in the mirror, and I'm like, "Am I the monster they think I am?" You know? And it really depends. It's like, if I'm having a good day, mentally, it all just slides off my back. If I'm having a bad day, it can sink in. And this, "Don't feed the trolls" s**t, like they're not going to go away.No.If you feed them or not.Yeah.Like, you know? It's not... You can't blame people who are targeted for how they react.Right. Yeah, and that's the thing. It's like, I still don't know what the right way to respond to-There isn't like-... harassment is, because there's not, yeah. It's just a bad situation, and it's... I mean, that's part of the reason... I don't know. I felt there came a time where I couldn't just mentally commit to having a full-time job, if that makes sense. I mean, I kind of got to this point where my mental health had just deteriorated from a lot of the same stuff that you were just kind of talking about, where-Also Media Matters specifically is like, look at horrifying and traumatic s**t all f*****g day.Yeah. It's like, I love the-Write it up in these little bulletins that no one reads. Like, I mean, it's great, and they do great work, but like-Great work, but-... it is a tough organization to work in.Yeah. I mean, and I feel like it's only gotten harder over the years, because it used to be like, "Hey, look, Bill O'Reilly said something that wasn't true." And now it's like, "Oh, Tucker Carlson invited the grand wizard of the KKK to..." You know, and you're just like, "How did we get here?" And especially the people there who have to do so much of the research on 4chan and all the online stuff. That is-Well, I mean, that was my job.Yeah, that was you.Every time I talked to... Every time someone would say to me like, "Oh wow, I can't believe that you have to do..." I'm like, "At least I don't have to watch NRATV every day. I don't have to go through 4chan." I mean, people would point out to me whenever something I tweeted would end up being screen-capped and posted to 4chan, which was sometimes helpful, and sometimes I was like, "I don't need to know this," you know? And it's just-It's like, "Just FYI, they're posting pictures of you on 4chan."It's like, "Oh, cool, cool, cool." But yeah, I mean, it's tough, and it takes a toll on you that I don't... I don't know. And it's hard to just go, "Well, it's only a few people. It's only 10 people or 100 people out of millions out there," you know? Or something like that. But I mean, if 100 people are tweeting about you nonstop, or messaging you, or trying to start a harassment campaign, it feels like it's the whole world. It really does, and it eats away at... It was eating away at my ability to stay focused on work, and doing what I wanted to do, so I mean, that is personally why I was like...You know, it's like I had a lot of reservations when it came to making a jump to trying to do a newsletter, and especially with Substack, but ultimately, I was like, I think this is the better option for me personally, because it provided a certain level of stability, a certain level of just me being able to write a bunch of things in advance, and if for two days, I can't work or can't function, essentially, then I'm okay, you know? That's kind of one of the plus-sides there.Yeah, I mean, freelancing is super “publish or perish.” It's like, if I don't write, I don't get paid, and sometimes it's hard. I mean, yeah. I mean, that resonates so much, and I think like, I mean, people have asked me, or concerned family members have been like, "Why don't you write a cookbook? Like, why don't you do something different?" I'm like, "Yeah, no I will." Like, my third book is definitely going to be like a food-focused memoir. That's the plan. But I have... And when I'm talking about my current work, I'm...Oh. Oh, now I remember what I was going to say, about why it feels so powerful when even a relatively small number of people are coming after you. My therapist, not to be like, "My therapist," but my therapist, who I started seeing just before the whole ICE thing, and he's lovely, and we've been in this therapeutic relationship for years, he's like, "It's evolutionary." There's a reason why we selectively remember bad things, selectively prize, or sort of focus and obsess on bad voices about us. It's because there is an evolutionary mandate to be aware of criticism, so you don't get kicked out of the tribe and lose your security and your food. Like, there is an evolutionary mandate to keep an eye on criticism, and it's a self-preservation mechanic in its way.It only becomes maladaptive in this completely unprecedented context, of like within a minute, a million people can see your stupid thing. Like, Twitter I think in particular, is very the sort of, "I'm talking to my sphere, and then suddenly it gets catapulted into a much larger one." Like, that's a unique feature of the platform. It's part of what makes it fun, is being able to see voices that you never would have heard, and people from all over the world, and all that stuff, but it can entail this relatively traumatic leap from like, "I'm just talking to my buddies," to like, "Now everyone's criticizing me for something," and sometimes, it's from people who are leftier than me, and sometimes that can be more painful, because I'm like, "I probably agree with you. I just wish you weren't being such a dick about it."Yeah.Or, "Am I wrong? Should I retire and become a Benedictine monk?" And then it's from the right, and to be honest, that's less painful for me most of the time, because I'm just like, "Ah, I'm used to genocidal f*****s being horrible, because I'm anti-genocide."Whoa, bold position, anti-genocide.I mean, like I don't... Yeah, and like, I... Ugh, whatever. So, context collapse is a major thing, but also, there is an evolutionary... Not that I'm so into evolutionary biology, because I think it's a lot of b******t sometimes, but there is a survival value in looking at critique. It's just the level, and ubiquity, and immediacy of that critique. Like, these are not your tribe. They're not going to imperil your food, but you're still wired to be like... You know?Yeah.To keep it in mind, because they also might kill you, or whatever.Yeah. I mean, it is good to... There is that line, of is it good to be aware of criticism or not? There are obviously things, you know, threats to your life, and those are important to know, and to be aware of, because you don't want to be harmed by someone, you know?Or your family.Yeah, or that is another one. I mean, I've had situations where it's been... I've gotten messages from people who were talking about my family, and where they live, and stuff like that. It's like, "What is wrong with you? Why would you do this? Because you disagree with something I wrote online? Because you disagree with me?" Those sorts of things, it's... A lot of it's-It's very... Yeah.Yeah, it's a product of this time of hyper-connectedness that we live in, you know? And the way we communicate, which is kind of... I mean, that's kind of the angle that I'm trying to think about a lot of things. I mean, that's kind of the premise of my newsletter, is just-The present age.Yeah, it's like here we are, and everything is insane, and I don't know what to do, you know? But we're trying to get through it. I mean, with the pandemic especially, so much of our communication has shifted to the internet, that might not have been before, but I mean, in my case, and maybe yours, it's like, yeah, it was already on the internet, but you know? It's like, I was already spending way too much time on social media before the pandemic, before it was cool.It's like, I'm a weird recluse.Yeah, exactly.Like, half my friends are online. Like, yeah.Yeah.I mean, I think it just helps me to reframe. I think a lot of people who are in this experience, especially in the first time or first several times, are like, you know, "Am I weak for feeling bad?" I'm like, "No." It's human nature, you know? You're not weak. Like, please don't beat yourself up about having feelings about people saying terrible things about you. Like, you know? That's part of my like Talia's pep talk for traumatized victims of the right-wing hate complex thing. You know, and there's also the like, "Am I wrong for seeking it out?" I'm like, you know, it can be a discipline thing, to try to not seek it out all the time. Well, yeah, it's also human nature. Forgive yourself for that, for wanting to know. That is also a very natural impulse.In my case, I mean, stuff does happen that I need to be aware of. You know, when literally the organizer of Unite the Right, Jason Kessler, posted my mom's office address on a Nazi blog. S**t like that, like I need to know. I need to warn, and I feel so f*****g guilty that my family has to suffer for my choice to traumatize myself every day. I mean, it is interesting. I do feel like the evangelical series that I'm working on now is like... is interconnected with a lot of this stuff, in ways that are maybe less explicit, maybe less overt, but I think it is interconnected. I also think these are just stories of pain that deserve honor and telling, and careful telling.But I do think it's interconnected. I also think like, you know? In my experience, if you deep dive and learn a lot about one thing, you see the way it shows up in lots of other places. I've rarely regretted learning a lot about a subject in my time. Like, could I be focusing on the Charlottesville trial? Could I be focusing on militias? Could I be focusing on what are the Oath Keepers up to lately? Like, could I be focusing on the antivax white nationalist nexus? Of course. There's so many topics. There's like-Yeah, there's no shortage.Yeah, I had to explain to someone, when I'm talking about like I study the far right, there's a massive range of topics, covering tens of millions of people. It's not like, "How could you have such a narrow beat?" It's not narrow.No.And it almost mirrors in that sense, like my experience of academics. I was very serious as a student, and I didn't do a PhD. I thought about it, but it was like I was studying one poet, and all their works, and how they came to translate things the way they did, and the deeper you dive into one topic, the more of a world it encompasses. Like, you learn one thing, and you learn the history of it, and something else, and something else, and something else, so I rarely regret my sort of history-based and deep dive model of things.It's sometimes very intensive. It requires a lot. I think I've bought, for this project, I have bought eight or nine books already, including some that are only available on paperback, so I'm going to get a copy of God, The Rod, and Your Child's Bod in the mail, which I then... Once I read it and use it, I plan to publicly burn it.Yeah. I mean, that's going to... I feel like buying that is something that ends up getting you on a watchlist or something.You'd think, but you know what? Like, corporal punishment is legal in public schools in 19 states.Yeah. I mean-It's legal in private schools in 48 states. My home state of New Jersey is one of the two that's banned it in private schools.There you go. See? “New Jersey. We've banned something.”Jersey pride.Yeah.Jersey pride. And I feel conflict when I'm talking about should it be... Like, many countries have outright banned corporal punishment, of any kind, even by parents. You know, even by parents, whatever, including by parents. Sweden was the first, in 1979, and like, is that what I'm advocating for in the US? If we had a less s**t justice system, and a less racist justice system, and whatever, it's such a punitive and carceral society, maybe. That's not what I'm advocating for when I'm just saying like, "Don't hit your kids" on social media a lot lately. I do think it's a very reasonable demand to say like, ban it in schools. Like, because people get paddled in schools every day, and it's disproportionately black students that get paddled.And that's-By paddled, I mean struck with a board to cause pain.Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, and I mean, that's another issue in itself, is that you know, with any policy, with any sort of action, it's the enforcement of said action or policy tends to affect marginalized groups more than everyone else basically, but I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. You are one of the smartest people I know, one of the best writers I know, and I cannot recommend enough that people subscribe to The Sword and the Sandwich for both sword and sandwich posts, because-Yeah.... you will learn something in both.Yeah, I'm like looking at all this stuff about the history of the bagel right now. I found this New York Times article from 1960, that called bagels... What was it? "An unsweetened donut with rigor mortis."Like, okay, first of all, it's so good. I'm unabashedly pro bagel in my life, so-I don't trust anyone who's not pro bagel, to be honest, so-Yeah, so there is the sandwich part. The sword part is, you know, rougher, but they're both valuable in their own way, and thank you so much for having me on.Of course. Any time.Yeah. And I enjoyed this kind of loose, wide-ranging conversation.Yeah, it was great! It was so much fun. I really appreciate it. Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

Parker Molloy: Joining me this week is Pete Croatto. Hey Pete.Pete Croatto: Hey Parker. How are you?I'm doing okay. I'm hanging in there. I'm surviving. It's becoming fall. It's getting cold outside. I love it.Me too.It's rainy right now. It's fine.Matches my mood. I love it.So you wrote a book about the NBA and how it became so entwined with pop culture. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and your book?Certainly. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I'd consider myself to be a sports writer. I mean, I've written about sports for years and for Slam and the old good Deadspin and Grantland and various outlets. But I've always been driven kind of by my curiosity about certain topics and yeah, and that's kind of kept me afloat, but I've never really been a beat reporter or a sports reporter. And I'm pursued by my curiosity more than anything.So about eight years ago... Wow, it seems like a long time ago, I wrote a piece for Grantland on Marvin Gaye's National Anthem at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game. And that piece was about... I interviewed 25 people and it was 2,500 words and it was a piece I'm very proud of and it's still on the Grantland site. But in writing and reporting that story, there were just a lot of unanswered questions. And the one thing that I kept going back to was how did the NBA get to a moment where Marvin Gaye went from being this scandalous choice, who does this rendition of a national Anthem that is soulful and R&B flavored and really is unlike anything anyone has ever heard before, where that becomes normal, where that becomes like where someone like Fergie singing the National Anthem is normal or...How did the NBA become the cool sport? That whole point in the market transition between the old stodgy NBA and the NBA that we see today. And I couldn't really explore that in a 2,500-word piece. And I kind of became convinced that this was a book. So through several years later and a lot of false starts and a lot of questionable decisions on my end, I wrote this book. But yeah, never really been a sports writer. I've been a freelance writer for 15 years now. I started off in newspapers and just by happenstance and good fortune, I got into sports writing.Well, that's cool. Yeah. I mean, I really liked your book because it- It really took this... Which, up until I've moved a few months back I had it next to my desk, but now I don't. It's a good book it's called From... I don't want to get it backwards. From Hang Time to Prime Time, right?There you go. Yeah.Yes. From Prime Time to Hang Time, to whatever time to... Yeah.The orange book. That's what I call it.It’s the orange book with the TV head and the dunking. I'll be sure on the transcript of this to include a photo of the book cover so people will know what the hell I'm talking about. But yeah. The book is filled with a ton of really interesting stories and it's something that I kind of thought about, but haven't necessarily put in much research trying to look some of the stuff up. Because I mean, I remember it was just... I mean, it seems like it was just a few years ago, but it's possible it was longer, where players would be fined for not wearing the proper attire to the pre-game stuff. It was very uptight and fairly recently, and now it seems like it's gotten to this point where the players have really taken it upon themselves to express themselves and to kind of ease out of that sort of era. What do you attribute to that?That's a good question. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that if you look at the NBA's demographics now, it's mostly African American. And I think as time has gone on hip hop culture has really become mainstream more so. With each year that passes by, it becomes more and more ingrained into the culture. And that's really what you see now is you see things that would've been, again, dismissed 15, 16 years ago are now just sort of... It's normal. It's the way things are. I mean, it takes a long time for things to become embraced into the culture. And I think what you're seeing now, again with the whole fashion element of the NBA becoming a very hip hop league, a league that isn't very suit and tie like the NFL. That I think that's a very much a reflection of who's in the league and also how the culture's changed.You made a good point just now with the dress code. I really think that had everything to do with David Stern being the NBA Commissioner at the time. And David Stern is a key figure in this book, but at the time of the dress code ban, I think he was in his mid sixties, early sixties. And he was at a time in his life, like a lot of people where you get older and you don't understand things. And when you don't understand your first reaction is to chastise or to ban, or to make a rule, instead of asking questions and understanding what the intentions are. To me, David Stern's failings as a commissioner kind of came to light as he got older. And he got older and the players kind of stayed the same age, they're all still men in their twenties and thirties for the most part and younger as the NBA draft became more about getting high school kids in there.Yeah. Definitely. For some reason when you said that, the first thing that popped into my head was David Stern doing Matthew McConaughey's line from Dazed and Confused. He's getting older, they stay the same.Yeah. I'm not going to even adventure to do impression of David Stern doing Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. I have so much collateral as a public person. I'm going to make sure to stop right there.Yeah. You don't want to become known as the guy trying to do David Stern as McConaughey.No, nobody wants that.But yeah, I mean, so one thing that I do is I... A few years ago I started to get into video games again. Because that's the thing, whenever the world gets crazier, I pick up a hobby that seems to be from my childhood. I was just showing you earlier. Baseball cards, that's my new one. Picking up baseball cards. So a few years back, I just kind of on a whim was like, "I'm going to buy a Nintendo Switch because that way I can play games" because I was playing a lot of games on my phone and what would happen is I'd get popups that were always terrifying. It was always like, "Hey, Trump just did this crazy thing." And it was like, "oh no, that is not relaxing. I can't relax when I'm holding this thing that constantly tells me what's happening in the world."I bought a Switch. And then from the Switch, I ended up getting a PlayStation. And once I had the PlayStation, I started buying all the sports games as they came in. Madden and MLB: The Show and NBA 2K, that series. And so in the latest one, latest NBA 2K game, which came out just, I don't know, like a month or two ago. It's really interesting how the cultural elements plays into the whole thing. If you do the MyCareer mode. Yeah. There's this thing where you can do certain things and get points toward becoming a music mogul. Or you can do something else and, and start your own fashion line.And it's really interesting how much non-basketball stuff plays into it. But it seems to work. I mean, a while back, I was tweeting about playing it where I'm like, "there is basketball in this game at some point." But the player that you are in the MyCareer mode, it's like a guy who made videos and he's a YouTube star and now he's basketball star. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense because it's not actually a path to the NBA that you actually seem to take, but it's a lot of fun. And I thought that it was really interesting to see how that kind of worked in. One thing I have been thinking about, which is also kind of represented in the game in the sense that there are a lot of, really not so subtle, advertisements built into that like the dude who plays Jake from State Farm.I saw that. That was crazy.He's in the game. And he shows up several times. At one point he's in your apartment. You come back from a game and he's like at your table. It's weird. It's very strange.Do you think any player in any sport wants to hang out with Jake from State FarmProbably not.I can't imagine anybody like Russell Westbrook or Aaron Rodgers actually wanting to spend their spare time with Jake from State Farm.Yeah. So he's in there, but then I thought, "Oh man, that's not really subtle," but that reminded me of how now on the uniforms for the past few seasons, there have been all these ads. What are your thoughts on the advertisements on the uniforms? I'm not a fan. And I mean, I feel like it'd be weird to be like, "yes, I love this," but how much?See, I'm not a giant fan of them, but I understand why the NBA does it. And what you mentioned before about this whole... The marketing being folded into NBA 2K, which is delightfully absent from the NBA Jam console arcade game that my family got me, that's what the NBA's always done. The NBA has always had an alliance, sometimes an uncomfortable alliance with his advertisers and it's been this way forever, starting back to. I mean, how many leagues have advertisements for their own product? The NBA action, it's fantastic. So that has been baked into the NBA for years. So the logos don't really bother me. I don't like them aesthetically, but to me, this is what the NBA's always been about.One of the guys I spoke to for the book, Joe Cohen, who founded MSG Network, he delivered the quote, which I think explains everything about the NBA and why we're able to roll with the punches as well as we do. He said that the NBA's tradition is that it has no tradition. So all these things that you see with the video games and the patches, and even the advertisements on the floor, have you noticed this, where it kind of switches over every quarter? Those things seem weird and kind of Orwellian, if I hope I'm using that term correctly, but they-Well, no one else is, so.I'm going to hop on. It all seems doomed because the NBA has always been about never staying still. I'm curious to hear your thoughts of this, because the one uniform thing that bugs me to death is the whole home and away concept, now. Teams don't seem to wear a light color for home or dark color for away, now it's reversed. And it takes me five minutes to figure out who the hell's playing who. Is this in Phoenix or LA? I don't know. That annoys me more than the patches, but the patches, it's a bit much. But the NBA is in it to make money and that's what they do year after year after year.Yeah. I mean, I was glad to hear that there was a tweet earlier, right before the season started, from the Bulls that were like "white uniforms are back at home" and it's like, "Finally. Finally."It's a relief, isn't it?Because yeah. It was weird, because, I mean, growing up in and around Chicago, the Bulls were everything to me, especially in the nineties.Oh God. Yeah.I was 14, 15 years old. And Michael Jordan doing all that stuff. It was great. It was wonderful. And yeah, I was like "the red uniform is better, but white at home." And it was just sort of tradition that kind of kept going on. In other sports they have their traditions. Football, darker colors home and white away, which I think is kind of... Really makes sense in the sense that you've got the away team all muddy and...Yeah, I love it.They look like they've taken a beating, which is kind of I think somewhat of the idea behind that. And then there've always been exceptions like the Dallas Cowboys would always wear white at home and white on the road. So almost always white. But yeah, it's been interesting to see the uniform sort of flip around like that. I mean, I'm a big fan of the interesting and kind of out there throwbacks and remixes and all of that stuff. I mean, some of them are better than others. What are your thoughts on those?And there's a lot of thought because in the few moments that I have to myself, my mind kind of goes in these weird directions and I'm of the belief that there hasn't been a great uniform in any major sport that has been created past 1985. I mean, if you look at the classic NBA uniforms and even NFL, Major League Baseball, the four major sports, I can't think of a... I am hard-pressed to think of a great uniform that came out after 1985. So I love seeing the throwbacks. I love seeing in any sport. I mean, there are some exceptions that are horrible. I remember the Eagles a few years back had that horrible blue and yellow combination. And the Steelers had one that where they looked like barber poles with black... Or bumblebees.But for the most part, I love throwbacks. And the thing too with throwbacks is that for all these leagues, it's a money maker because you can now sell like all this stuff online or at Mitchell & Ness. And everyone comes to go about that happy. But with the NBA, every time they unveil a new uniform, especially those ones that were, was it the city uniforms that came out? I just cringe. I love the classic seventies, eighties, even early nineties uniforms. And those Bulls' uniforms are a good example. They're classic.Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing, that Bulls can't really change them because not much has changed about their uniforms over the years. I mean, they've had some differences, they introduced the black uniforms in the nineties. That was one. The black-Those I like.The red stripes.I liked those pinstripes. Yeah. Those are cool.Those were cool. And then they replaced those with an all-black that didn't have the pinstripes, which is fine. My favorite uniform growing up, I mean, was always the Sonics' uniform. The green with the white stripes across. It just said Sonics.Love those uniforms.Those were my favorite. And I was very disappointed when they updated those in, I think it was, '95 or '96.So you're more disappointed about the uniforms being updated. Were you more upset about the uniforms being updated or the Sonics being stolen from Seattle? Is it a toss-up?It's a little of both because it's like... I don't know. The Oklahoma City Thunder? Come on. That's...And those are terrible uniforms.Yes.I don't know. The Sonics' uniforms in the seventies are great. Those are great uniforms. The Bucks' uniforms in the seventies with sort of their kelly green with red, they're gorgeous. I don't know. I'm trying to think of a uniform from like... You know who has good uniforms now in the NBA? I think the Warriors have really good uniforms. I think they're clean. The logo pops. The color scheme is great. It's a beautiful uniform. But yeah, most uniforms now, I look at them and it just looks like, I don't know, it looks like something a middle-age dad would wear to a picnic. And not the cool middle-aged dad, but the dad who's maybe been divorced, trying to find their way, they pick up this cool tank top at, I don't know, Kohl's or another gentleman's store. And it is just not a good fit.But look, I'm very different. I'm not the market for the NBA. I'm a 44-year-old white dude. The NBA's not looking for my dollars. So I don't think Adam Silver or anybody else in Olympic Tower is going to be returning my phone calls about the uniform. So.Yeah. I have suggestions, just screaming those out there. I remember in the nineties, there were a lot of really drastic shifts in uniforms. Especially mid, late-nineties, the Rockets adopted that—Awful.Weird blue with 3D silver.Awful. It was awful. Awful.It was a mess. You had the Detroit Pistons, that was one that was a big change.Yeah. There-I didn't hate it, but it was just so different that you-It was very different.Where did this come from?And I think I remember reading somewhere, and I could be wrong about this, but I think all those designs that you saw and there are only a... And look, a few of the teams kind of stuck to the traditional ways of having their uniforms, the Lakers, the Celtics, the Knicks to a certain extent. I remember reading this and I could be wrong, but around 1996, which is when the shift started to happen, there was sort of a movement to make the logos more kid-friendly and to make it more eye-popping. So again, that meant that 85% of the teams, the logos, and the jerseys got bigger and bolder and more colorful, and they weren't as subdued as past, but the Rockets' one was awful.So the Rockets on the box was another example. The Jazz with that airbrushed mountains, which looks like the fun of an off-brand Seltzer company. It became, again, geared toward the kids. It's funny, in perusing Twitter, which is never a good idea.No.No. As you know better than anybody. Perusing Twitter, you do see a lot of older NBA fans, which I think is great, but the thing is those fans are going to stay no matter what, like "I'm going to be an NBA fan, regardless of who's wearing what." But again, the entry point, I think the uniforms and the logos and the court design stuff, those are sort of gateway drugs to get casual fans involved because like, "I'm not going anywhere." So, if the Bucks want to actually put on deer uniforms in two years and play, they can do that and get away with as long as the game doesn't fundamentally change. So yeah.Yeah, that's good. That's a great point. I mean, and really interesting. I guess I hadn't really thought about the fact that it was kind of more kid-friendly. I was just like, "it's really in your face." It was like-It really is. Yeah.It was like the Mountain Dew generation.That's a good point though. Those logos and those uniform designs, let's say from like '98 to 2004, 2005, they could go on an energy drink can.Yeah. Oh, absolutely.The colors are the same. The logo. And again, if you're a traditionalist who grew up with Dolph Schayes and two-handed set shots, that angers you because it's unfamiliar and it's ridiculous. But if you're someone who grew up in that era, in the eighties and nineties where it's like, "well, every year there's something different." Like, "it's all right." It's the same old stuff. It's the same. Change becomes consistency. When you get used to that, it's golden.Yeah. Definitely. One non-uniform thing I wanted to ask you about, which— Actually, one more point on uniforms. My favorite uniforms of all time are actually not an NBA team's uniform, but my favorite basketball uniforms of all time, it's a two-way tie both from the year 1996. You've got the Olympic uniforms, which I love them.Those are good. Those are with the cursive USA.Yeah.Those are nice.And I love the font that they use for the numbers.That's a good one.And also the 1996 All-Star uniforms, the...teal. It was when they were playing, I think it was in San Antonio. So it used to all be like-Oh, God. Yes.Be like... The... teal and the pink and the orange were the alternate colors down in this first list.See, those uniforms are so bad they're good. They go around. Those uniform... Yeah. I think Mitchell & Ness now sells them. But they look like they're playing for a Mexican food league.I guess. Kind of.But that's the appeal. But that just goes to show you too, if baseball did that, the s**t would just be nonstop about like, "you're denigrating the game," but the NBA can deck their teams out in uniforms where it looks like team Taco Bell playing against like [inaudible]. It didn't really bother anybody. It was like, "that's odd."It was fun, it was different.But then we went about our business. And that's kind of the whole NBA right there. Again there's going to be stuff, but if you get to see Michael Jordan play who cares? And I'm sure that— that was the Jordan All-Star Game '96. So yeah, I'm sure. So you weren't caring about what he was wearing, right? It was just, he's Michael Jordan, that's all that matters.Exactly. And yeah.I have to ask you, do you have either one of those jerseys?I have the USA one. It's a Shaquille O'Neal jersey — number 13.Right. He was 13. Okay.Yeah. Two years ago, actually, I went back to my parents' place to kind of just rummage through their basement for a little bit. And one of the things I did was I was picking on all the old NBA jerseys, those old Champion jerseys and-I love those jerseys.Yeah. Those are always great. The one thing that always bothered me was that they would never be accurate, the Sonics' jersey didn't have the white stripe across the front. It just said Sonics. And it's like, "What is going on? Why don't you look good? How are you?" It made me want to shell out the money to get the actual replica jerseys. But then again, I was like 10 years old, so I didn't have any money at the time.So you didn't have $300 to put down on a Kendall Gill Sonics Jersey. You didn't have—Exactly. It was Shawn Kemp that was that- That was the one who was close to my heart. His dunks were amazing.The embarrassing jerseys that I have. Every once in a while, I'd go to outlet malls and I would just sort of buy whatever was around when I was a kid. The one Jersey that I have that I think is probably... I wish I had kept it because I think it was just so... Again, it was like the All-Star Game jersey for 96, so bad it was good. I actually spent like 20 bucks and I got a Sean Bradley, 76ers jersey with the 76 on the back. And I wore it playing pickup. And I was terrible. When you're playing pickup, you should never wear jerseys, I just think you always look like a chump.So that went right back into the drawer. I wish I had kept that though because that's one of those classic hipster jerseys. And I had a Tim Hardaway Jersey that I got rid of. Yeah. I had a few of them, but Sean Bradley is probably my prize in terms of get a load of this.Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Always fun to kind of keep up with the jerseys. But yeah. So anyway, so the one thing I wanted to ask you about was that, in the course of your reporting because... How many people did you interview for this book?Oh man. 350 for the original interview. And then you throw in the ones from previous reporting, it probably adds up to about 350, 360 total.So who was the most interesting interview you had and what was something that, before you started writing the book, you didn't know, that you learned and surprised you, that you found interesting in the course of reporting it out?I'll answer the second question first if you don't mind because it's always easy to come with that answer. I mean, I feel like I learned something every day. That was the joy of writing this book. And also the joy of just reporting anything is you get paid to learn and you get paid to, expand your horizons and get some perspective. So, I mean, every day I would go to my wife and be like, "Hey, you're not going to believe this. David Stern actually toured MLB studios to kind of get ideas for NBA entertainment." And after a while, my wife tuned me out and got back to reading her book.I feel like every day I was learning something. And every day there was another nugget I wanted to include, another nugget I felt I had to get in. But the thing that I think really stuck out in the reporting was just how important Larry O'Brien, the original commissioner was to the NBA's ascension. And that's for two reasons. The first reason was that at the time Larry O'Brien was a major political player. He was a two-time head of the Democratic National Committee. He was a member of JFK's inner circle. He was LBJs Postmaster General. So when the NBA hired him in '75, it was almost like a step down for him. I mean, now, if you're the commissioner, that's the summit. That is a career highlight. But for Larry O'Brien, it was a step down.But with Larry O'Brien, his hiring gave the NBA instant credibility, which is what it needed. The other thing too with Larry O'Brien was that he hired David Stern to work full-time. And he basically had David Stern be his right hand man saying, "Hey, look, I don't want..." Basically, Larry O'Brien was more of a figurehead. He was somebody who was just sort of there to keep things moving along. But David stern did all the dirty work. So by Larry O'Brien getting David stern out there to work with the GMs, talk to the labor people, talk to the owners, by time Larry O'Brien retires in 1984, David stern has a five year head start on the job. And on top of that he not only has that, but he has free rein to do whatever he wants. It was just a perfect setup, kind of like in baseball where the setup man leaves right into the... Is closer. That's really what it was with O'Brien and Stern.In terms of the most interesting person I spoke to. That's the thing, there weren't a lot of duds. It's funny, when you talk to them, many people think, "Oh, well, this guy's an a*****e or this person, does he have anything interesting to say?" But really, 95% of the people I spoke to were just great and they had amazing revelations. But the person who I thought was most interesting was a guy by the name Mark [inaudible 00:29:53], who was a former Nike executive, because to me, he had insights into Nike's dealings with the NBA and how they kind of brought Michael Jordan to the forefront and how they turned him into this sort of commercial property that I didn't know. I mean, I thought were just invaluable.But yeah. I mean, that's the thing. It's so hard for me to say, "Well, this person was by far the best person or the most interesting person," because when you talk to all these people who spent years, either working for the NBA or working for the NBA. And a lot of these people were in their thirties or twenties, a formative time in their lives. They're going to have interesting stories. They're going to have amazing memories. So really talking to just about anybody for this book was just a treat. And it was an honor to have them share a part of their lives with me, because it was a big part of their lives. It was a part that they were proud of, for the most part.Yeah, definitely. That's really interesting. And yeah, I mean, your book is filled with so many really interesting stories. And I really recommend it. If anyone who cares about basketball or sports generally, or even just culture, how we live our lives, it's a good book to pick up.And I definitely recommend that people check it out. I will, of course, include links to it and all of that in the transcript of this on my website. But yeah. The last thing I wanted to ask you was just, if you had to try to convince someone to check out pro basketball, to watch the NBA today, is there one story from the past that you think would be like a good bridge into the present?Oh man, that's a great question. To me, I think the social history of America can be told through the NBA because to me, that is... Look, if you start off with Bill Russell and his social justice moves in the 1960s, it moves on to the seventies, which becomes a more marketing-driven, more image-conscious time. Then it feeds into the rise of television, the rise of cable TV, and then with the 1990s you have the shoe industry becoming this colossal cultural force, which the NBA tied into, the same with hip hop. There are so many storylines and so much history that is imbued into NBA's history. To me, it's one and the same.I mean, we always talk about how you can fall. Who is it that said, I think, was it... Kind of forget who said it, but someone once wrote or said that to understand the history of America, you should follow baseball. I really think with modern American history, follow the NBA, because you see everything, not only in terms of just cultural history, but also in terms of African American history. And in terms of just the change in the athlete becoming an activist. I mean, that is a huge part of the NBA's history, is in the sixties, seventies, and today with LeBron James and other athletes kind of stepping up to the forefront. So to me I wrote this book in the hopes that someone who hates sports, who doesn't know, who can't tell Michael Jordan from Barbara Jordan could read the book and gain an* understanding as to the NBA's place in the modern American culture.And I think that's the beauty about sports is that sports really aren't about sports. So anybody who says, "well, the players should shut up and dribble." They're not getting it. They're not understanding the players as people and that this is a league. Every sport's about people. People shape the narrative, and this is what we're watching right now. We're watching people stand up and speak out, which was something that's always been part of, I think, the narrative in American sports.Great. That's an excellent point. We'll have to leave it there. Pete, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me about this. I really appreciate your insights on this issue and so much more. Is there anything other than the book that you want to plug?I don't know. I mean the book, yes. I mean, if you can... Oh, well actually, yes, you can buy my book at any major retailer. But also my brother, Dave has written a wonderful children's book called Batbot!, Which is from Golden Books. And it's out now. My soon-to-be five-year-old daughter had me and my wife read the book to her repeatedly for about two weeks. So it's really good. So if you're a Batman completist or you have a little one who loves Batman, please buy my brother, Dave Croatto's book, it's called Batbot! And can get it at any major online or brick-and-mortar retailer. Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

On this week’s edition of The Present Age podcast, I chat with writer Thor Benson about some of his recent work covering mental health and the pandemic.Parker Molloy: Hey, joining me is the Thor Benson. Hello.Thor Benson: Hi. Thanks for having me.Yeah. Thanks for taking the time to join the podcast. I am very interested in some of the things you've been writing over at... I read the two pieces you wrote for NBC. Can you tell me a little bit about those and how they work into your larger work basically? Also, let people know who you are.For sure.I'm an independent journalist. I've been doing this for about a decade now. Started as a freelancer, have been a freelancer most of the time, but I've had staff jobs here and there. I've written for Daily Atlantic, Rolling Stone, NBC, Business Insider, all kinds of people. And during most of the time I've been writing, psychology has been a pretty big focus of mine, all kinds of science writing and tech writing, and neuroscience also interests me. And when the pandemic started, I was very worried about how it was going to affect people mentally in terms of being quarantined, and isolation is not good for people. It was necessary, of course, because it was God damn pandemic happening.So I was thinking about that a lot and I started researching it and talking to experts and writing about it here and there and then I connected with an editor at NBC at some point, and we were talking about different ideas or what articles we could do together. And I was like, "I've been really wanting to write this big all-encompassing article about the psychological effects of the pandemic, and I feel like we've been in it long enough now that we can have some observations." So I reached out to a ton of psychologists and finally found some that actually had data and stuff to share about how people are dealing with things, and it's really interesting. And then we parlayed that one into another one about people were being crazy on airplanes, they're still doing it, because of mask rules and I think just from being cooped up with each other and being stressed. And so I did an article about that too.Well. That's cool. So what kind of stuff did you find when you were talking to these people? Was there anything that surprised you or was it what you expected?I would say the effects of it were expected, that people would have anxiety and depression and maybe even PTSD from these experiences. What was shocking was how confident everyone I talked to was about if these effects would be long-term and they all seem to think for a lot of people there are going to be long-term effects that won't go away when things go back to, quote-unquote, normal.Well, that's something that when we were first chatting about this, about doing the podcast, you sent over your articles and I thought this is perfect because my mental health has been absolute s**t since the pandemic started. It wasn't great before the pandemic, but that's a different story for a different day. I don't know, there's something about just the whole world having similar issues that make me feel slightly better, but also really worse. It's that weird oh, I'm not alone. Oh no, the whole world is falling apart, that sort of attitude.Part of the reason I was inspired to write about this and why care about these things is because I've dealt with anxiety and depression in my life, so I get it. And so I wanted to hear what other people have to say about it and what you can maybe do about it. I don't know.So what can people do about it? Is there anything to keep themselves from stressing out too much?I could give my personal advice based on what I know of psychology. I think it's good to make sure you're not isolating. Don't constantly be ingesting the news and just try to have some perspective. I feel like things are better now than they were the worst of the pandemic. At least I'm vaccinated now, I can see people and not be so worried.I don't know about you, but I'm still terrified of catching COVID.Yeah, I definitely don't want to.I don't know. I see people post online, Twitter, being like, "Oh, got a breakthrough infection, this sucks." And then there'll be like, "Well, I was really sick for three days, but I didn't go to the hospital." Great. That's good. But also I'm going to do whatever I can to not get sick for three days, just generally speaking. In normal times I'm not going around licking doorknobs or whatever, just being like, "Well, what's the worst I'm going to catch? The flu? Meningitis?" That would be bad, but that sort of idea. And I understand that I'm lucky in a sense that I live with my wife and my dog and my cat, I have not been alone as so many people have been.And I even begin to imagine how frustrating and bad for my mental health it would be if I were alone. And it's something that I'm trying to understand, trying to understand how we communicate in times where we're apart. And that's one of the general ideas of the newsletter that I'm doing, the podcast, that sort of thing, how we communicate in times of hyper-connectedness where we're not in the same room, we're not in the same city, that sort of thing. And so can you tell me a little bit about what's happening on airplanes?So I've often been called overly empathetic. When I see people acting this way I'm like these are douchebags, but I feel bad for them because obviously, something's not going right with them. And so I was like, "I'm not going to excuse any behavior, it's wrong to be aggressive on airplanes, but I'd like to figure out if there's maybe a reason they're behaving this way."Reminder: The Present Age is a reader-supported newsletter. If you enjoy this or other posts, please consider becoming either a free or paid subscriber:And so I found these two psychologists who had done a lot of research into how the psychological effects the pandemic were playing out in people's behavior and they said that, "Yeah, essentially when the pandemic started, it was really stressful and we didn't know what's going to happen and then it just kept going, and so we just had this acute stress response all the time, chronic stress. And so you're always on alert. You're always a little stressed out, even if you don't notice it. And when that builds up over time, people just start lashing out, especially when things like masks have been so politicized and everyone's it's us versus them. It's not surprising that people, when they're asked to put on a mask or something, if they have these views would get really aggressive maybe in ways that they wouldn't otherwise through a pandemic."And I understand that to a certain extent. I don't think anyone likes wearing a mask. Some people might not mind it. Personally, I don't mind wearing a mask because I've always worried about how my face looks when I'm in public.Try having a beard. It looks so weird with the beard.I like wearing sunglasses too, because I like people not being able to see my eyes. It's very strange, but the combo is perfect. It's basically being totally in disguise. I was thinking back to a few years back, I remember there were some cities responding to protests about... I can't remember what the topic was. I think it might've been Confederate statues possibly. I don't know. It sounds like a thing people protest, but there were some cities around the country they were implementing these rules that banned people from wearing masks for a while, which is funny in hindsight where it's now we're like, "No, no, no, please wear a mask. Please cover your face, please don't let us see who you are." But that's interesting.And one thing I've also been thinking a lot about when it comes to the pandemic and how we're adapting to all sorts of things, even just on my end, we got a puppy in January 2020, and so it wasn't the plan for us to be constantly around. And now he has these extreme separation anxiety issues where we have to make a point of leaving to try to condition him to be okay with that sort of stuff. And I can't even imagine how that affects people with children or people with their extended family members who need in-person care, that sort of thing. Is there anything that you've been reading about or anything that came up about those sorts of worries or is that beyond—Well, no, there's definitely been some research into it. I haven't read a time, but as far as I can tell this whole situation has been very traumatic for parents and children. Parents because they're trying to take care of their kid and that's already stressful enough and then you add the pandemic stressors, worried about the kid getting sick and are you getting sick and not being able to take care of the kid. And then for the kids, if they're quite young they don't know why they're putting this thing on their face and they don't really understand something as large in scope as a pandemic and maybe they weren't able to go to school and see their friends. So it's been really tough.I'm sure. And that brings me a little bit to the other piece you sent me, the one for the new station that was about climate anxiety and declining birth rates. Can you tell me a little bit about that piece?So I want to say, as I do in the piece, right away that I think the biggest factor in the declining birth rates is economics. It's really expensive and income inequality is bad, but there's also, I believe, some psychological components there. We just have a really uncertain future we're facing, and especially when you're going through a pandemic you think about climate change and you're like, "Things are only going to get worse from here," and that make you less likely to have children or maybe have fewer children. Research seems to show that people are okay with the idea of replacing themselves, but they don't want to go beyond that, so maybe they'll have two kids and a lot of people seem to be worried about if by having kids there'll be contributing to climate change because kids use up resources like we all do.I don't know. I think the one thing that came out of the pandemic for me is just the fact that I think... Let me see, how do I phrase this? I think the one thing that really hit home when it came to the pandemic, that really stuck with me, is just those existential questions of humanity living... Because for a while, for a long time, I didn't really think about that much and I didn't think anything. I thought oh, a thousand years from now there'll be people doing whatever, but now I'm honestly like, "I don't know, maybe we got 100, 200 years left tops."These sorts of things that obviously will not personally affect me in the sense that going extinct, but there is that aspect of it where my mind has been blown by these sorts of existential threats to humanity that stick around. And I don't know, one thing I've been thinking a lot about is just the fact that at some point in the future, no matter how famous a person is, there will come a time where no one remembers that person. Whether it's 500 years, 1,000 years from now, and it's just weird and I blame the pandemic for sending me down a philosophical rabbit hole that has ended up there.Well, I think one of the things that pandemic did to people's minds, and I feel this all the time, is it makes us think about such big things. And it's hard to think about big things all the time. Throughout the day I'm like, "Oh, how our infection rates in France? I'm never looking up health stats in France or Japan or something pre-pandemic, unless I'm working on an article like that. But you constantly have to think globally, and same with climate change, it's we're all screwed kind of feeling. I think your best mentally when you're very focused on just what's around you, I'm walking down the street, I'm going to meet up with my buddy, grab a sandwich on the way. That's very simple and easy to think of, not like the end of humanity.God, that is something I'm trying to work towards, to be more in the moment rather than thinking about how everything could fall apart. But it's difficult.It's easy to spiral.Yeah. One thing with the pandemic that I can't quite get over is just the fact that... I don't know. My one hope for climate change was that hey, there's this big problem we'll come together and solve it. And it seemed maybe a little bit of wishful thinking, but now there's this big problem and we found a way to make it so much worse with the pandemic, people refusing to wear a mask, which is the mildest inconvenience possible, people being asked not to go to Applebee's or something for six months, these things, people were like, "This is tyranny and I will fight it."And you're just like, "What are you even doing, man? Why?" And I think that part of it comes down to just that there are people who a big part of their personality is they don't like being told what to do, even if it's beneficial for themselves and others. And honestly, if it was just themselves, I wouldn't really care. I would be like, "Fine, make the decisions about your life that are going to affect your life," but when we have 30% of the country that refuses to get vaccinated or refuses to wear a mask, that sort of stuff, it just drags this whole thing on. So I'm worried about climate change and that's something that, while I was certainly worried about before the pandemic, has only gotten more intense. Any word or words of wisdom or anything you've learned along the way on that topic?To start, I'll say, let me just say, I may or may not be writing an article you'll be very interested in. Secondly, everything's so polarized these days and it infects everything, you would think certain times we could come together and I think we've seen that doesn't seem to be the case.I'm trying to think of who wrote this thing. There was an article that some conservative dude... Let me just find it. Damn. No, can't find it. I Googled won't get vaccinated because it makes you mad, and it didn't turn up what I wanted to, but it was this conservative dude who wrote an article right when vaccines got made available and was just like, "I'm not opposed to vaccine, but I'm not getting it because it makes you mad," and that's what I want.Oh, it makes us mad?Oh yeah, it makes us mad.I was like you get the injection, suddenly you're raging.28 Days Later vibe. But it's that “own the libs” ethos.There are a lot of people on that side of the aisle. It's the “own the lib” thing being contrarian as a personality somehow or... I think a lot of them work at The Daily Wire.Well, I feel like if I leaned into the contrarian angle on things that I would have significantly more subscribers. Every once in a while I'm just like I should just sell out, I should just start advocating against my own rights and stuff, make bank being like, "Trans people shouldn't be allowed blah, blah, blah." Stuff like that, and there are trans people that do that and they do well for themselves. So I don't know, I guess that speaks to our extremely broken media ecosystem.Yeah, definitely. You and I both tweet about that a lot.And that's why when the advice is maybe don't follow the news all the time... When I was at Media Matters, that's what happens. I reached that breaking point where I was like, "I can't watch the news everyday all day.," And then when you get into 2022, it's just going to be non-stop election stuff for the entire year. And then beyond that, once you're past the midterms, it becomes presidential election season. So it's just never going to end.Right after Biden was inaugurated, they're like, "So is Trump running in 2024?" I was like, "Can we have a moment?"God, it's so exhausting, but at the same time I feel like it's important. And I feel like the work that we do, the type of journalism that we do, these pieces by you are very important in that regard, they make the world a better place by existing because they help explain the world and your work doesn't sit there and say, "Republicans are morons."No, that's my Twitter.But these articles are great and I wish that the stuff that you wrote was as popular as whatever the hell Ben Shapiro's writing today on his blog. And you could pick any day, any day, whatever Ben's writing is probably bad. So that sort of idea.All I ever see is a little bit of video clips.He's something else. I'm trying to think. I was going to ask you something, but then I totally forgot. Let's see if it comes back to me.How's it been going doing the newsletter thing and all that?Yeah, so doing the newsletter, it's slow going. It's been very gradual, it's steady growth, but I'm not quite where I need to be financially.For sure.But that may change. Before I left my job at Media Matters, I made sure that I had a little bit of stability underneath me to hold me over while I tried to build this thing. And so it's been slow going, but I really like the freedom to write about whatever I want and not have to pitch it and not have to make it fit some editors idea of what I should have, but sometimes that results in my pieces just being long and rambling, chaotic for no reason.I tried to do the newsletter thing and I just couldn't seem to pick a lane. I was just like, "I'm going to share a fiction piece and then I'm going to write about something Republicans are doing." And I was like, "This is not cohesive."That's another reason that I decided to pick something that was just super broad, communication, that means everything. Everything is communication. Sending emails, communication. Watching TV, sure. That sort of stuff. But I don't know. I'm excited about the future of journalism in that sense, that there are these avenues that are outside of traditional publications. Because I know free freelancing, which was initially my plan, was to freelance, it's just so annoying having to pitch things and to get rejected or to not even hear back. That's always the worst where...I almost never get a response to my first email, I always have to follow up.It's so frustrating. And so it finally got to the point where I stopped pitching op-eds to places like New York Times, Washington Post, not Wall Street Journal, they would never do that. But it's these sorts of things where I'm just like, "If someone wants me to write a freelance piece for them, they will reach out and then I will assess it." How's freelancing going?It's good. So you probably saw I was in Europe for a while. So while I was there I was trying to keep it going but also enjoy the trip. So I was doing half as much work as usual. And so now I've been back for three weeks and had to ramp things up again and things are going well, I'm doing some good freelancing with... I don't know if I'm allowed to say but basically it's someone who I used to work with a lot is bringing me back into the fold.Well, that's cool. That's cool and cryptic, but is there anything else before we wrap this up? Is there anything else you want to add or where can people find you online, anything you want to plug?Yeah, just follow me on Twitter, friends, it's Thor underscore Benson B-E-N-S-O-N, Thor like the superhero because everyone thinks it's Thorn for some reason when I say it.I was debating when I was setting up, I was like, "I should just come prepared with all sorts of questions as though I thought I was scheduling an interview with Chris Hemsworth or something. I'm sure that doesn't get old.I'm used to it. It's just part of my life.Cool. Well, that's great. I'll be sure to link to all of your work in the transcript of this. To do that, people can go to readthepresentage.com. Cool. Thanks for stopping by.Good to be here. Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

My guest on this week’s podcast is singer-songwriter and [checks notes] king of Halloween Nick Lutsko. I’m really excited for this episode, and I highly recommend checking out the audio version if you can, as there are a few song clips in there (as well as a live/acoustic version of one of Nick’s songs at the very end).You can follow Nick on Twitter at @NickLutsko. His Patreon can be found here, his Bandcamp here, and his YouTube channel here.As always, if you enjoy the podcast and/or the newsletter, please consider subscribing and sharing my work on social media. There are free and paid subscriptions available. The Present Age is a reader-supported newsletter, and I appreciate your support!Parker Molloy: Nick Lutsko! Thank you for joining me today. I appreciate it.Nick Lutsko: Yeah, thanks for having me.So you just released the third installment of your Spirit Halloween trilogy, I guess.Yes.So how'd that come into existence for people who are familiar with the first two, but not the third?So, I did the first one mid-September of last year, unsolicited. This is the Spark Notes version. And the whole, I guess, kind of joke about that song was it's a theme for Spirit Halloween, but really it was more just a ploy for them to pay me for writing. The song was about my payment for the theme.Right.So, they reach out and they actually did pay me some money and they were really cool about it. And then they got in touch, said they wanted to do another one. So then after the unsolicited first entry, I did a sequel that they paid for. I guess technically they own it. And then they reached out early this year and made it pretty clear they wanted to do something again this year and they wanted to up the stakes. I think the language they used was, "How do we top last year?"Yeah.And my response initially was like, "If we're going to top last year, I think we need to get a significantly bigger crew." And when I say significantly bigger, that's more than me and my little brother who shot it. The first one was just me on my cell phone. The second one was me and my little brother in my house. And then for this one, I was proposing like, let's get a crew and a production team that can actually work on this thing and make it legit and cinematic and all that.And their response was sort of, "We don't want to lose the weird guy in his basement vibe." Which is fair. It might have also been a, "We don't want to spend way more money on this." So it just kind of forced me to get creative. At that point, I think I'd already kind of had the idea that I wanted to set the song as like, "We're coming out of the apocalypse," and like, "Things will return to normalcy," or not even that, "It'll be a utopia because Spirit Halloween is back."Yeah.And that was kind of the gist of what I was pitching to them. And I really didn't know how I was going to be able to shoot an apocalyptic wasteland in my basement, or I really dug myself into a hole because I wrote the song and I was happy with the song and then I had no idea how to shoot it. And I reached out to Brielle Garcia, who has been a follower of mine on Twitter.And it's kind of funny because she pulled my own card of me making stuff for Spirit Halloween unsolicited and she started doing unsolicited Snapchat filters for this dumb, fake gremlins movie that I made. And so I knew that she was way more technically savvy than I am. So I reached out to her and said, "Could you help me out with some of these visuals?" And I had no clue what I was getting myself into because she was able to do things that I could have never done in a million years.Sounds cool.So, yeah, yeah.How long did that take you guys to film and because it definitely seems like a larger production than anything else you've put out.For sure. Yeah. Well, I shot it all in my garage. My wife shot me in my garage as our baby was like chilling in a playpen in the corner. It felt very silly because I'm supposed to be interacting with this apocalyptic world, but I'm actually in my garage.And I have no idea if she's going to be able to do the things she says she's going to do because usually that stuff's done on a green screen.Yeah.But yeah, I think it was all done in about a month. I shot the footage in my garage. I sent it to her and yeah, it was insane, the amount of work that she did and how quickly she did it.That's cool.The way she explained it to me is, I think she uses video game engines maybe.Technology has just really advanced to where people are capable of doing things out of their bedrooms. It would've cost millions of dollars and tons of time, just a few short years ago. And I guess a lot of people haven't even figured out how to do some of these things and she's just on the cutting edge and yeah, it's pretty crazy that it was only her and I working on it and opposite sides of the country. She's in Seattle, I believe. And I'm in Chattanooga, Tennessee. So it was a cool project.Yeah, definitely. And I think that, because I was going to say, the first time I heard your music was all the Super Deluxe stuff that you did.Yeah.I guess, one of, sort of the benefits of Super Deluxe kind of disappearing or going away or whatever is the fact that then you kind of like, you were not just hidden behind the sort of the curtain there.Right.It was like, "Oh, hey, this is the dude who did the emo Trump songs or the Alex Jones thing."Yeah. Exactly.Because that was the thing. And I think it, that stuff resonated with me because it's like, so I'm 35, so the early-mid 2000s were high school. And at the time I was really into bands like Taking Back Sunday and Thrice and Thursday and all that. And there was this sort of holy s**t moment for me, where it clicked for me that Trump's tweets and sort of self-pitying statements were about being unfairly attacked and whatnot really read the type of the bands that were trying to make music like that, not them but the weird knockoff where it's like, "Oh man, you're trying too hard." You know?Right. Exactly.And from that moment on, anytime I'd see something stupid he said, I'd be like, "Oh man, this is like some kid with Hawthorne Heights lyrics as their AOL instant messenger way thing." You know? So I'm glad that that made it into my timeline because then that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole where-Nice.Then I was checking out your other music that is not comedy and-Cool.... so I was kind of, can you kind of tell me what are some of the differences between Nick Lutsko serious singer-songwriter and Nick Lutsko, weird guy in his basement singing about Spirit Halloween?Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question that I feel like the lines become a little more blurry all the time. Especially as we're planning live shows and it's like it's a smaller set of people, but there are definitely people who were into my stuff before I started doing these sweaty frantic songs on Twitter. And there's a subset of people who are going to come to the show expecting to hear that. And there's going to be people who are coming essentially only expecting a comedy show. And then there's a lot of people who've reached out a bit similar to you that said, "I really enjoyed your comedy stuff and I dove deeper into your other albums and I really enjoy that as well." So it's like trying to figure out how to frame both of these things and I wish I had a better answer. I think once we start playing shows, I'll get a better feel for how those two worlds can kind of coexist.I did this Vulture article. They did the premier of the Spirit 3 song and I said something like, "The shiny sheen of sweat on my face is like my Spiderman suit to my Peter Parker." And it's obviously just a dumb joke, but it's interesting in that, like even though I've done albums that are not comedic whatsoever. And even this goes for my Super Deluxe stuff as well, I think it all kind of comes from the same place. And it always comes from my frustrations with the absurdity of the world. And especially the last album I did Swords before I started doing these Songs on the Computer. All of those songs were just a direct, almost involuntary response to the Trump administration and the Trump campaign.And it was all written 2015 to 2019. And the whole album just kind of has a sense of like, "Am I the only person that is seeing what is happening? And is this a weird fever dream nightmare, or is this reality?" And I finished doing that album and I really was anxious to create something that was fun and happy. And I just wanted to do a 180. It's like, "Okay, I've spent the last few years just really hyper-focusing on all these things that just really distressed me and bummed me out." And it's like, I want to write some fun music. And then 2020 happened, we went into a global pandemic and George Floyd happened. And it was just all, it was like all these gut punches over and over.And it became abundantly clear that I wasn't capable of sitting down and writing fun, happy, quirky music. And the one song I did that was non-comedic was called Spineless. And it was just even darker and than all the stuff from Swords. And it's funny because it wasn't until I retroactively looked back and realized that through the Songs on the Computer project, I was able to do what I wanted to do, but it's not like I sat down and I'm like, "I'm going to take all these dark, angry feelings and just do the most absurd, silly version of these things." It was just something that I just instinctively started doing, and I never really analyzed too much whatever I'm doing in the moment, it's usually other people telling me what they like about it.And then I'm like, "Oh yeah, that's what I did there." There's not a lot of, I don't know, analyzation happening as I'm... Because I moved so quickly when I do them, which initially just started out of necessity between juggling multiple jobs, it would be like, "Okay, I have a free day this week so I know I need to put something out on this day." And yeah, that essentially became like waking up, seeing what was driving me crazy in that moment or what was going on in the news of that day and writing a song as quickly as I could, recording it as quickly as I could, shooting a video as quickly as I could, and trying to get a video out that evening. So that was sort of how this whole thing started and it's something that I've tried to keep in the spirit of the project as I've moved forward because the Swords album was like, I would spend months and some of them even years on rewriting lyrics and re-tracking different instrumentals and mixing things differently. And I'm really happy with how that album came out but I do think there's been a real benefit to realizing that I can kind of go with my first instinct and still elicit a response from people.Yeah, definitely. The interesting thing about like, for instance, because you've made some really cool videos for some of the, I hate to say serious songs, but the non-comedies because-Yeah, that's kind of-But not necessarily serious-Yeah.... but it's just like-Right.It's not making a joke, you know?For sure. Yeah.But the music video for the song, I think it's Sometimes where it's like, it's just this gigantic production of, it's like a concert and you have and your band is wearing all sorts of costumes.Yeah.It's an experience in itself. And it's like, I'd love to see that live. There's a band here in Chicago. Oh God… Ah! Mucca Pazza, that's their name.Cool.They're a marching band.Oh, wow.They're a marching band that plays regular concerts.Cool.And it's just weird and over the top.Yeah.And that music video reminds me of their live shows, which were always so fun and everything like that. So I'm a fan.Awesome. Yeah. Thank you.Yeah. It's cool. It's kind of funny because yeah, we did that album Swords and we had the big album release party in Chattanooga in 2019, October of 2019. That's where we shot all of that video for some time. That basically was just like a highlight from the album release party, like a highlight reel. And the plan was to get that video, get our EPK, and then 2020 really try to get a booking agent and try to tour and obviously, 2020 happened and then none of that happened.Yeah.And then Songs on the Computers stuff happened and now it's in this weird place of like, as you mentioned my band before, when they were called the Gimmix and it started as like... I feel like anytime I try to explain one thing, I have to explain 10 other things. Basically, when I first started making albums under my name, I didn't have a band but I did have these hand puppets. So I used the hand puppets as the backing band for my music video Predator. And then when I finally did get a band, it was like, "Hey, what if we tried to recreate that vibe of having a puppet band?"So then we started making puppet costumes for the bandmates and those kind of just evolved into creatures over time. But anyway, when we started talking about doing Songs on the Computer live, I've kind of built this world and this mythology, and it was like having my band in these weird puppet costumes on top of all the Songs on the Computer stuff kind of felt like wearing a hat on top of a hat. So we're kind of resetting and approaching the shows from a totally different place, which is just cosmically hilarious, because we spent years and years and years trying to build to this place where we were ready to go off into the world and see what we could do with it. And then all of it just kind of got knocked down on and now we're kind of starting this new thing. So-Yeah. Well, I mean that's kind of the general idea behind this newsletter that, because in June I quit my job and I was like, "I'm going to go start doing a newsletter." And that was, I don't know if that'll be a good decision in the long run we'll see. And then decided, "Oh, I should turn this into a podcast because..." One of the things I've been thinking a lot about has just been the way that people had to adapt because of the pandemic and everything that changed, that all their plans had to shift. And the first interview I did for my newsletter, was with Will Butler from the band Arcade Fire.Oh, wow.And he was telling me about how he had all these plans because he was releasing a solo album in 2020 and so he was planning on touring in swing states right before the election. It was a whole idea for him and then he just couldn't do any of it because COVID and other bands have tried to figure out different ways to communicate with their audiences or approach things from a different sort of direction and that's why I'm just really interested in just how people are communicating with each other. I mean, because as it is, I mean the music industry's kind of chaos as it is. I mean, I went to school for, well at first I went to school music performance, classical and jazz guitar.Oh wow.But that lasted a semester before I switched to commercial music, but then I switched to music business.Oh, right.So the business side, talent management, and then after college, I was like, "Okay, cool. Now to get into the music industry." It was like 2009 and suddenly it's like, "Oh, everything is just streaming now and everything has changed."I had a teacher who was convinced that the future of the music industry was ring tones and I'm just like, "I don't know, man. I really, really do not know."Right. That's hilarious. Where did you go to school?So at first, I went to Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois. Which is just kind of a small school with a decent acting program, which has nothing to do with music. And then I dropped out and then went to Columbia College here in Chicago and finished my degree, so it was interesting. And I still like making weird little songs and I've got Logic Pro and a bunch of weird plugins that do all sorts of crazy things.Nice.It's like that stuff is a fun hobby for me. But the more I think about it, the more I'm like, "Oh man, I should have gotten a degree in something, anything else."Oh my gosh. Well, it's really funny because just by... I have a degree in commercial songwriting from Middle Tennessee State University and it's really funny because a lot of people, I just see people in the comments, and this is really kind, I'm not saying that this is true, but people will be like, "Man, you can tell that this guy went to school for songwriting." And it's like, I learned nothing. And not to knock the school that much, it was the first year of the program when I went there and my major was recording industry and they had three emphases, music business, which it sounds like you ended up getting yours in.And then audio fundamentals, which is engineering and producing and all that. And then commercial songwriting. Commercial songwriting was a new one and it just had songwriting in the name so I'm like, "Oh cool. I want to write songs, I'll do that." But it really was a very underdeveloped program at the time and it basically was how to make it as a songwriter in Nashville.So how to write for pop country, which I had no interest in. And basically what they taught was like, "Listen to the radio, find what's hot and repeat. And repeat enough without getting sued."And they teach you how not to get sued and how to still take those. It seemed like they just like juiced all the creativity out of songwriting and it really made me very bitter. And I really, I had to take a lot of secondary classes in music, business and audio fundamentals. And I gained a ton more from those than I did from the songwriting aspect and I wish I would've explored more of those things because I think that those, the songwriting part always kind of came naturally to me.But I do think just learning how to use social media as a way to connect with your fans was huge. And the few classes I took on Pro Tools opened a lot of doors for... I do everything in my home studio. So I knock my degree a little bit just because it's not something that I can hold up this piece of paper and be like, "Hey, hire me for my songwriting degree."Yeah.It's like, "No, people want to hear your songs and they'll judge whether they should hire you based on the work you've done." It's a whole lot of complaining for nothing because things worked out pretty well. I'm pretty happy where I'm at, but I don't know how much of it attributes to my education.Yeah. Well, I mean, same.Yeah, yeah.It's like all things considered, I think I'm okay. But in hindsight, it's like, "Man, maybe I should have taken more writing classes because that's what I'm going to end up doing and..." Here I am like, I don't know, does a comma belong there?Yeah.My writing mistakes are just really stupid, fundamental things that I should have learned in eighth grade.Right. Yeah.But yeah, with guitar performance, the first major I had, it was like, "Cool, all right. What do I do with this when I graduate?" It's like, "You can work on a cruise ship. That's a job." And I'm like, "Wait, wait, no, no, no. That?"That's funny. I actually explored that for a minute. And I was like, I looked up what you needed to be able to do that. And they were like, "You need to be able to play 500 songs." And I was like trying to count all the songs I knew and it's like, "Damn!"Yeah. Yeah.In another world, I could have been sweating on a cruise ship somewhere singing my heart out day after day.Yeah. My brother has a degree in musical theater and he had a job for a while on a Disney cruise ship where he played Peter Pan and Aladdin and all of that. It sounds cool but then he's like, “Yeah, and then they put us in these like tiny rooms with a bunch of us together. I was like, "Oh good. So it's like Titanic." You're in like the boiler room. No windows. Oh, great. Sweet.Yeah. The more you think about it, the less fun it seems.Yeah. I'm like, "Wait, this is the best-case scenario for this degree? I don't think so." So, I'd rather just not.Right.My first pivot away from doing music business stuff to doing more writing stuff was an internship at Pitchfork, which was kind of hilarious because it was transcribing interviews with bands that sometimes just… they were bad interviews.Yeah.One thing wanted to ask you about is just the thing that sort of holds, I think Songs on the Computer altogether is just the lore of it all that kind of all connects. You have your cast of characters that all, they all kind of work together. Where did some of this stuff come from? So it's like, you're like grandma, Mel, Dan Bongino, Jeff Bezos, man in the stairs, you know?Yeah. It's funny. I was thinking about this the other day and I think the RNC song, it was kind of the big bang of all of this. It's the first mention of grandma and her basement and man in the stairs. And I think back to writing that song, and it was one of the first times, I remember very specifically, I had one day to make it, I started that morning, I posted it that night and it was like, okay, the RNC is starting today, I got to do something. I remember, my studio's here in my basement and behind this wall is an unfinished nightmare world of a basement and it has a toilet with the messed up American flag hanging behind it. It has the creepy stairs. I remember thinking like, "Here's what I have to work with. Okay. I can work in that." You know what I mean?It's like almost using my surroundings as characters in this song. And as far as working Dan Bongino in, it could have been anybody, but his name just was the funniest to sing.And it was really funny too because I remember my buddy and bandmate, John, who, I kind of bounce all my ideas off of, I pitched him the idea and he was like, "I have no idea who Dan Bongino is." And I was like, "I think the only reason I know who he is because Vic Berger was fighting with him at some point. And maybe a lot of people won't know who he is, but it obviously was the right choice because it's by far the most popular thing I've done. And he just continues sadly to be a rising star in the GOP.Yeah. Well, and on the topic of Dan Bongino, I mean, so I was working at Media Matters, which is this progressive media watchdog group, so we had people there who would do nothing except watch NRA TV all day. Which, awful. I mean, and Dan Bongino came from NRA TV before he went to Fox News and the whole... We just mocked him mercilessly and he blocked a bunch of us on Twitter but then he would be like, "Oh, so and so blocked me." It's like no, you blocked us.Yeah.But yeah, there's always been something that's funny about his character because he's kind of dumb. There was one time where he was talking about making lemonade, but he had these lemons-Whole lemons, yeah.... weren't peeled.Yeah.He put it in a blender. It's like, "What the f*ck are you doing, man?”Yeah. Yeah.But yeah. So I thought that was a hilarious sort of addition. Yeah. It's kind of a very sort of niche reference, which kind of makes it better, you know?Right. Yeah. I think that's how it was received. And sadly, it's becoming less niche just because he's climbing the ranks at Fox News now it seems, but yeah. So I kind of started with that and I think the next, I don't know if it was the next one, but one of the next popular ones I did was the Spirit Halloween theme and again, that was just something like I had noticed Spirit Halloween was opening up as everything else was shutting down. And it was just something that was kind of stuck in my brain. And I made that theme really quickly again. And I did that turn towards the end with Jeff Bezos and it wasn't until I was editing it, I realized like, "Oh, I have this picture of this bald, creepy mannequin that kind of looks like Jeff Bezos."And oh, the man in the stairs also kind of looks like Jeff Bezos. And it's like, I'm connecting all these dots on the fly and I'm not thinking it through whatsoever. And luckily it's kind of unfolded in a way that's captivated people up until this point and I just continue to build on it. The really tricky part is not writing something that becomes so convoluted that it's just total nonsense to anyone who's listening for the first time. I really try to find something that is like... I think Joe Biden's inauguration was a good example of like, "Okay, if you've been following me on Twitter, you know why I look like I've been badly beaten, but you don't need to know that to enjoy this song."Right.Like that and I'll squeeze in a couple of lines to keep the story going, but I don't want to make it a full song about how Mel beat my ass and I'm running from a mobster called Big Pizza and whatever else. I like to just kind of sneak those things in when I can. But yeah, it becomes challenging as the story gets deeper and more complicated.Have to start mapping it out.Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.So what are you working on these days? Any projects or anything?Well, I am actually, I don't know how long this will last, but my wife just went back to work, we have a four-month-old daughter and three days a week, I am staying at home with her and I'm having to squeeze all productivity into Tuesday-Thursday while my mom and her mom watch the baby. And so far, it's kind of worked out. I had three weeks in a row where I was able to write a full song and post it on Thursday. I think I did the School Board Meeting song and then the Brendan Fraser song and then the Ernest P. Worrell song. I had a three-week run, I think. And it's funny because I think having these consolidated amounts of time forces me to be super productive. Whereas, over the span of a week, I just kind of twiddle my thumbs and wait for inspiration. But I work so much better under pressure and under deadlines and all of those things.But anyways, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'm trying to keep developing the Songs on the Computer saga. I think I'll have another collection of songs I'm going to release in a couple of months. I have some freelance work that I've been doing for Netflix that should be coming out pretty soon for their socials, like promotional work. My producer at Super Deluxe, when they shut down, he moved to Netflix and that's kind of how I formed that relationship there which was... Yeah, it's been awesome. Which by the way, I just wanted to say this quickly, since you mentioned it, my producer, Jason, who is also @Seinfeld2000 on Twitter.Oh, okay. Yeah.Yeah. He was my producer at Super Deluxe. I've told this story in pretty much every interview I've done, so not to bore you if you've heard it, but basically, I did an unsolicited theme song for Tim Heidecker and Vic Berger's election specials that Super Deluxe was producing and then that kind of got the relationship started at Super Deluxe. And I basically told them like, "Hey, I'm attempting to make some kind of a career in music and if you guys ever need music, let me know." And that got a conversation going with me and Jason and he eventually pitched the emo Trump concept.So I do got to give him credit in that department and that he was like, "Hey, Trump's tweets have been, especially emo this afternoon. Do you think you could make it like an early 2000s emo pop-punk song?" And I had a Tom Delonge Fender Stratocaster, that was like one of my first guitars and like-Same.Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I hadn't touched it in like 15 years probably and I dusted it off and recorded that song so fast. I remember it just felt like this is my calling. Like everything has been building to this moment and that's what set off that whole path in Super Deluxe.Yeah. It's like, "Bring me the seafoam green guitar-”Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.“... with one pickup."Yeah. Yeah. No, it's so funny. I thought that was so punk rock at the time and now it's like-Really it's just like, "Oh man, you can't do a lot with this, can you?"You can't do anything! Yeah.But cool. Yeah. Is there anything I've missed? Anything you'd like to make sure I put here or tell people? Or-Yeah, I don't know. I'm sure there are things that I'm forgetting about. Obviously I'll be in Chicago and April.We're going to be in there October 8th and 9th, which is this weekend. I don't know when this comes out, but yeah, we had to reschedule due to COVID for the 22nd and 23rd, the 23rd I believe is sold out. But the 22nd has a lot of tickets left.I mean, that's pretty... Because it's at Lincoln Hall now, right?Yeah, yeah. It is. Yeah.I mean, that's like a decent-sized venue too, if you're selling out that's good.It's really exciting. Yeah. I mean, we had two nights at Schubas and we sold out both, which was just amazing because before the pandemic we couldn't even sell out our hometown.Yeah.And it's like to go to another city and sell out two nights in a row was just mind-blowing and then they move us to the bigger venue and we sell out there and then they want to add a second show and it's like, we kind of feel like we could be flying a little too close to the sun here, but we're definitely down to give it a try. And we've definitely, we've sold a decent amount of tickets for that Friday night and we have months until it's-Yeah.We haven't even really promoted it that much. The first two shows sold out within hours of announcing them. So we're hoping to do more shows next year. I did just launch a Patreon, which has been fun. It's just a place for me to dump all the stuff where people are interested in not just the character of sweaty Nick Lutsko and they want to know how I do what I do. And so that's been a cool little community I started growing. I think I posted it or yeah, like less than a week ago and it's had a pretty good start. I'm enjoying that.Yeah. That's how I really like seeing Patreon being used. Like, "Oh, here's this, you want cool behind the scenes? You want cool, raw? This is just me and my process kind of thing.'.Yeah.Or, "Just writing things, straightforward." Tim Kasher, who's in the band Cursive and The Good Life — he has a Patreon where he's just like, "Here's an alternate take of a song I recorded 15 years ago." And it's just like-Oh, cool. Yeah. I love that stuff.... this is the best.Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like there's a lot of different ways to use Patreon, some people just use it as a virtual tip jar for people that appreciate the work that they do continuously and then other people turn it into an enterprise where it's like, "Okay, if you want to see anything I do, you got to come in both." I'm trying to figure out like where this thing is going to to live. But I think it's going to be more behind-the-scenes stuff and we're actually doing... I hope I'm technologically competent enough to pull this off, but we're just going to do a Zoom hangout where I play some songs because the, like I said, the Chicago songs shows would've been this weekend. So it's just a way to, I don't know, give those fans who were looking forward to come to see us this weekend to hang out and hear some songs.Cool. Well, that's great. Thanks so much for coming by, Nick.Yeah, definitely. It was a lot of fun. Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Present Age podcast [and transcript]. I’m your host Parker Molloy. Joining me today on the show is Aaron Rupar, the author of the new Public Notice Substack. Let’s get started.Parker Molloy: Hey, Aaron. How's it going?Aaron Rupar: I'm good. Thanks for having me on the podcast.Yeah, of course. As soon as I heard that you were starting your own thing, I wanted to get you on here to talk about it, so that anyone who's listening to this can go read your new Substack. Can you tell me about it?I appreciate that. Yeah, I'm viewing my Substack, which I'm going to call Public Notice, as basically an extension of the sort of coverage I've been doing for four or five years now, I guess maybe six. Boy, I started, well, early 2016, so five and a half, going on six. Which is basically coverage of Trumpism, right-wing media, and where they fit into the broader sphere of American politics. As with any of these Substacks, I think things have a tendency to evolve as you go, and you get a sense of what works with your audience, what doesn't work, what sort of things people are interested to read more about. And so I'm viewing it, at least initially, as a more conversational and iterative version of the sort of writing I'd been doing at Vox, with at least three newsletters a week to begin with. Actually, to begin with, it'll be more. I think I'm going to be doing a daily one for the first couple weeks and then scaling it back to more of a normal schedule after that.But, yeah, I'm hoping that it'll be a place that people can go to get up to speed on what the big media stories of the week are, how right-wing media in particular is covering the broader picture of American politics. And a lot of good stuff that you're familiar with too, from your background at Media Matters. So that's how I'm viewing it going in. Like I said, I'm sure things will evolve. And it's always daunting when you're at the beginning stages of something like this. But I'm hopeful that a lot of the audience that I've developed over the years will come with me and check out the newsletter, and hopefully enjoy it. So we'll see how it goes.Yeah, definitely. Most people, if they're not familiar with your writing at Vox, they're probably at least familiar with the videos you post. You post constantly. Videos from all sorts of political events, Trump rallies, et cetera, et cetera. One question I had about that was, are you still going to be posting videos, and is your Twitter feed going to change at all?I don't think it's going to change at all. It took a lot of outlay, in terms of money, to get some of the services that previously I had organizations paying for, whether that's SnapStream or TVEyes, things that I rely on to be able to do live posting and media monitoring. Again, all stuff that I'm sure you're familiar with from Media Matters, which also is very active in that space. But that's the idea, is to keep Twitter pretty constant. And so for people who just enjoy the video tweets and the video threads, not too much should be changing on that front. But then for people who do enjoy my writing, I'll be doing at least a couple of free newsletters a week, and then one paid one that I'm imagining at this point will be a summation of the most buzzworthy segments and news stories from media. More of a media-focused newsletter than the other two, which I'm thinking will be more focused on politics.But I know that that's been a huge thing for me in terms of developing an audience, has been Twitter. And so it's expensive. And that was kind of a thing as I was leaving Vox and planning this next stage of my career. I felt kind of exhausted from all of the negotiations that I had to do just to try and strike deals with SnapStream, TVEyes, places like that. But I think I'm pretty geared up at this point to have all the same services that I've come to be used to, and to come to rely on to some extent, to do the type of media coverage that I do. So, for people who are just interested in my tweets, I think people, even if they have that level of interest in my work, and that much shouldn't be changing too much.Cool. And also anyone who's a fan of your tweets should probably subscribe to the newsletter, which I'm not sure if you mentioned, it's called Public Notice, right?Yeah. I thought Public Notice, it works for the type of stuff I'm going to be doing, trying to surface stories that are in the broad public interest, kind of in the sense that a public notice, as we historically think of it, is like a broadsheet that you'd see in a town square or something like that. I thought that dovetailed nicely with the idea that I have for this newsletter being a broadsheet summarizing, again, the things that I'm paying attention to in the sphere of media and politics.It's like trying to name a band. I've played in enough bands where the band name can always be kind of a fraught item to agree on, to come up with. And so for a while, I was just going to go with the Rupar Report, and I still may incorporate that as the name of the paid newsletter that I do, or I might use that as a section of the newsletter. But yeah, I like the ring of Public Notice. I think it works for the type of work that I'm going to be doing, and so, yeah. That's going to be the name of it.Oh, yeah. Whenever I hear one of these really good names, I'm just kind of like, "Dammit, why didn't I think of that?" You know?Yeah.I like mine. I like The Present Age, but also-Yeah. I like it too.I kind of wish it was something that felt... Because in my mind, I pictured it like, "This would be a great title for a magazine," or something like that. But then as time goes on, I'm just like, "Man, I wish it was just something that was like, boom, here's what you're getting," that sort of thing, instead of having to be like, "So if you read some philosophy, blah, blah," having to go into detail on that sort of stuff. But, yeah, Public Notice is just a great name.Thought so.And is that going to be at publicnotice.substack.com? [ed. note: the address is aaronrupar.substack.com]Yes, that is what it's going to be. So, for many, many years I owned aaronrupar.com. I was just paying for it in case. And then I ended up just earlier this year letting that lapse. And of course it was snapped up. I no longer own it. And so that is still actually, as we record this here, that is still a little bit unclear exactly what the URL is going to be. But I believe it will be aaronrupar.substack.com to begin with. I'm still debating if I want to pay for the aaronrupar.info, or something like that. Yeah. One of those things where, for many, many years for GoDaddy, I just had money going out the door to hold this URL. And then, I don't know if I was trying to cut costs or something, but I let it lapse about a year ago, and here I am. I went back to see if I could purchase it and it's been snapped up, it's no longer available.So, yeah. It'll probably have Substack in the title to begin with, but from what I understand those are things that are pretty easy to change down the line. The main place to find me will just be check out my Twitter account, I'll have a link there. But I'm guessing that for people who are listening to this who maybe aren't on Twitter or something like that, aaronrupar.substack.com should be the place to go to find that.Absolutely. Yeah. God, that sort of reminds me of, a while back I was looking for an email address or something like that. And I was just like, "I am going to sign up for a Gmail address that's just my name, Parker Molloy." And it was taken, and I'm like, "Who the hell took this?" I kind of want to send an email to it and just be like, "Who are you? Why'd you take my name?"Yeah. Well, there might be another Parker Molloy out there.It's possible. I-Yeah. There's an Aaron Rupar in Wisconsin. My last name is fairly... There's a few of us, but... I mean, with all of the people out there, odds are there might be another Parker Molloy.Yeah. Yeah. One thing kept coming up on searches, something like an 18th century Irish immigrant or something was named Parker Molloy. I'm like, "That sounds about right. That's perfect."I don't think that person would've opened a Gmail, but-No, probably not.Unless they did some time travel or something like that.Who knows? Who's to say? So you were recently in Chicago. Right?I was, yes.I saw on your Twitter.Yeah. It was amazing. Right now, I've been spending a lot of time during the pandemic here, I'm in Minnesota, presently. And so we, my two younger brothers and myself, decided to go to Chicago for... The main thing we were going for was the AEW All Out show, which was amazing, and actually worked out quite well for us because it was in Hoffman Estates. Which, for people who aren't familiar with Chicago, was way in the northwest of the metro. But if you're coming from Minnesota, it lopped an hour off of the drive, so it made it actually even an easier drive. When you're in Minnesota, a five hour drive is actually... seems like not that of a deal, because we're so isolated here in terms of other metros.But yeah, we ended up making a really fun weekend out of it. We did a Cubs game and we hit up the barcade in Wicker Park and all that fun stuff. And my family, we've been quite diligent about COVID stuff, so we were kind of worried about that. But when we got back we did the rapid test just to make sure that everything was on the up and up. And now at this point it was weeks ago, so I think we're in the clear. But one of those things that we had planned, in the very bright and sunny days of June, when it seemed like we were kind of pulling out of this pandemic. And then of course by the time the trip actually happened, COVID was much more of a concern. But it was actually, given how much time we've all spent at home over the past year and a half, it was really fun to get out there.I'd never really done a trip like that with my brothers either. So to do a brothers road trip, and we saw some really fun wrestling, and of course Wrigley is always a joy as well. So, it's always fun to get to Chicago. I've done that trip from Minnesota when I was living here permanently through college and then a little bit beyond, I used to travel to Chicago quite regularly. But it had been a bit since I had been there. So, kind of reminded me how vibrant and fun the city is. And it was a great time.Yeah. Because I saw this, I saw that you came to Chicago. First, well, it was on your Twitter. But besides that, the Washington Free Beacon decided to write about you. Did you see that?Oh, God. Yeah. Well, what happened was... And I don't know if people follow @RedSteeze, but he and I... he was kind of needling me over... I posted a photo from one of the wrestling... We went to two wrestling events, but the first one that I was at. And we had gone to the wrestling show and we were back at the hotel and I had had a couple of drinks. So I was feeling just feisty enough to engage. And so it was sort of good-natured, at least on my end. But it's kind of that pipeline of people, right-wing media figures, where it went from @RedSteeze to the Washington Free Beacon, and it became kind of this... Again where people on the right love to own the libs for being hypocritical or not practicing what they preach.And so the idea was that I was a huge hypocrite because I was in this indoor setting. And granted, the mask compliance at AW was actually pretty good. It seemed like people generally, with exceptions of course, but when they were sitting down in their seats were masked up. But yeah, it kind of just became one of those things where whenever you're kind of a prominent liberal online and right-wingers have a chance to shame you for being a hypocrite, or not following the rules that you profess to find important for people in society to follow, it's kind of a fun thing for them to do, I guess.So. Yeah. I'm sure you've experienced that sort of thing too, where you kind of become the story. And at this point I've been enough times where I can just shrug it off and it's not a big deal. But yeah, that whole weekend I was kind of... My Twitter notifications, I was getting notifications that, oh, this or that right-wing figure was teasing me or trying to shame me for the fact that I was out and enjoying life, at least for that weekend.Yeah. Every time that happens with me it's usually one of those sites, Free Beacon. Or Twitchy, that's another one.Ah, Twitchy, oh my goodness.witchy, when they put me in headlines, they don't qualify it or say who it is. And I'm just like, guys, no one knows who I am. If you're going to write an article about a movie star, you can just say their name and people will know who you're talking about. But if you're just like, "Parker Molloy said this on Twitter," it's like, who the f**k is Parker Molloy?Right. Because your title, I think, at Media Matters was editor at large. Is that right? So yeah. I mean that... Oh, Media Matters editor, people kind of understand what Media Matters is. But that's kind of the case now for me too, where it's like... When I was at Vox that was always... People love to own Vox, so it was like, oh, this Vox person. And now, it's so new that I'm independent that I'm not quite sure how that's going to work, if I have enough... If my brand is strong enough where people will still care or not. But yeah, when you're just doing a newsletter, it's kind of like, newsletter writer so and so. It doesn't quite have the same kick that, oh, Vox person or Media Matters person has.Yeah. Sometimes I miss being part of the target that is Media Matters on Twitter. Like when Lara Logan had like-Oh my God.Last week, where she was like, "They're like the Taliban," or something like that. And I was like, I've been gone for like two months, and if they turned into a paramilitary organization, I don't know. That seems a little out of character, but okay.Well, that's kind of... Because, yeah, Media Matters is interesting in that respect because a lot of it, including yourself when you were there, but Bobby Lewis or Andrew Lawrence, people who have such voice on Twitter, but then you read the posts on the Media Matters site and they're so straightforward. They're very factual and quotes. And that's like for me at Vox, Media Matters stuff on your site, and on Twitter too but especially on the site, was such a great resource because it was very factual. And so yeah, whenever you see people portraying Media Matters as this rogue... like a paramilitary organization or something like that, it's so over the top that you just kind of roll your eyes at it, but I don't know.Some people, I guess, are kind of ashamed of things that they say on TV or they don't want people... That was kind of always the thing that I felt with the long-running feud that I've had over many years now with Glenn Greenwald, which kind of the origins was me just calling him out for being on Tucker and posting video clips. And obviously, other people at Media Matters have been targets of him as well, where he kind of... I think the term that he's used is we're hall monitors or something like that. Like we're narcing on him or something. But oftentimes you're just conveying things that he's saying on Tucker Carlson's show, and if that's enough to set someone off, then I think the problem is probably more with them than anything else. So it's a little bit of people like Lara Logan telling on themselves with stuff like that.Yeah. See, now that could be one way to get your Substack off the ground. You could just start a big fight with Greenwald.Oh man, I'm kind of drained.That might be the path. Just be like-Yeah, I mean, I've tried to rise above, I guess. Yeah. Over the years you mellow out a little bit. And I don't know, there was a time where Twitter fights were a lot more appealing than they seem to be to me now. I think maybe part of that was just being at Vox, which obviously doesn't really want their staffers engaging in bare-knuckle combat on Twitter. But I still think it's worth calling these people out at times. But with someone like Greenwald, I think it's become so normal for him to go on Fox News, it's not really newsworthy anymore. There was a time where he was getting a lot of grief because he would proclaim that the idea was that he was going on Fox and telling viewers, sharing perspectives that they wouldn't see normally.But any pretense of that is so far... it's become so absurd to even claim that something like that is going on that I just don't see a lot of news value in highlighting that stuff. And that's sort of the thing, more broadly, with Tucker Carlson's show, which I still try and keep an eye on most nights. But I find myself grappling with just the extent to which it becomes kind of self-perpetuating, where if you make a big event out of every one of his shows, does that help create this perception that they're big events? Because a lot of what he says is so predictable at this point. Obviously he has millions of viewers. And so you can't discount that nor can you really understand what's going on on the right if you ignore people like Tucker Carlson, or if you ignore the Trump rallies.I don't think that's really a hugely constructive way to approach them, but... And obviously people at Media Matters, that's their job is to document. But for someone like me who is kind of dipping in and out to try and get a sense of what people are talking about on the right, if you're live clipping every one of his monologues there is a sense in which you're kind of promoting him or validating him to your audience as well. And I don't have any great answers for that, but it's something, as I'm kind of immersed in right wing media, that I find myself almost on a daily basis wondering what the correct way to handle situations like that is.Yeah. I totally agree. I find myself grappling with that same sort of, okay, is this really important to focus on? Is it not? But when it comes to someone like Tucker Carlson, for example, he is essentially setting the platform for the Republican party moving forward. On his show he pushes Great Replacement theory kind of stuff. And then you'll see a member of Congress on Fox and Friends talking about that. That's the same thing that the Charlottesville Nazis chanting that they won't be replaced. That's the same thing. We've come that far to where now that's mainstream.Or the El Paso shooter. And there's a dynamic where you get kind of numb through the sheer repetition of it, where the first time you hear Tucker Carlson invoke Great Replacement theory, it's this big news event, because it's like, wow, this is a far-right talking point that's made its way onto Fox News. But then after like 10 broadcasts of that, it becomes kind of numbing where it's like, okay, this is just another bit on his show. And you're right. There was a congressman from Texas who was on Newsmax, pretty much word for word saying a lot of the same things that Tucker Carlson says on his show about how the Dem immigration policy is to bring immigrants in who vote for Dems. And this idea that it's this conspiracy to change the electorate in a way that dilutes the power of traditional, with air quotes, American voters sort of thing.And yeah, it's a tricky thing to know how to handle that, because again there's kind of a novelty the first few times you hear something like that. I think back, the El Paso shooting, which happened, I believe that was in 2018. And at that time, Trump was really hammering the caravan talking points and this notion that immigration was tantamount to an invasion of the country. And that came out in the manifesto that the shooter released at the time of the shooting. And now that we've fast-forwarded three years and it's just kind of a normal Republican talking point. And so there are consequences to things like that, but it also is just a difficult thing to cover on a day in and day out basis because it's kind of exhausting.And again, it loses some news value. So that is where I think that it's the type of work that Media Matters does is so vital in terms of just shedding light, to a largely progressive audience, of what people are talking about on the right and raising awareness in those ways. But you hear, and I noticed this recently with Chip Roy, who is on Tucker Carlson's program. And I clipped this because it, to me, kind of rose to the level where he was saying that Democrats are sick and twisted individuals, and this sort of dehumanizing and incendiary rhetoric. And that's kind of like a nightly thing on Fox. And so you try and imagine if you're someone who's earnestly watching this stuff, what your views about politics would be.And it's not a pretty picture. But it's part of the complication of being a journalist covering media at this point. Political media is just knowing how to handle these very difficult subjects in a responsible way that doesn't perpetuate problems. And so, Trump had a rally just this past weekend in Georgia that I live clipped and added some commentary on Twitter. And I got a number of DMs from people who were like, you're part of the problem, you're promoting them. And I try to be sensitive to that. I think there is news value in knowing what Trump is talking about, because he's the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee at this point and obviously he's setting the agenda for the Republican party.So I don't really think ignoring is the way to go. And again, I don't have any perfect... You could probably teach classes on this stuff, but it's difficult. And these are kind of new problems because we live in such a media-saturated environment now that it's just inescapable. And you have to find a way to cover this stuff if you're going to cover politics, and it's dicey. So I don't pretend to be perfect, but these are things that I am going to try to continue to grapple with in the newsletter as well.Great. Yeah. I think for me, one of the points that pushed me into trying to do this newsletter and doing a Substack thing, just like you are, is the fact that when I was at Media Matters there were several times where I watched something happen and then I was like, I'm going to write about that. And then I'd write about that. And then I'd watch the same thing happen six months later. And I'm like, I'm going to write about that. I've already written about that, but I'm going to write about it again. And then the same thing would keep happening and nothing was changing. And I'm just like, okay, maybe I'm not writing this correctly. Or maybe I'm not getting through to the people I need to get through to. Or maybe I just need a change of scenery.And I think that that's been helpful for me. I still think political media is kind of a disaster at the moment. But you also have all of these new sorts of outlets to go to, and to try to... One thing I like about Substack, or email lists generally, is the fact that you don't have to worry about what some algorithm is going to do or what some... Like if Twitter shut down tomorrow, they could do that, and then I would lose everything. I wouldn't have anyone in my contact list. With this, people sign up, and they get emails directly from me.And Substack can fall apart and I would still have those email addresses to be able to continue to communicate with people. And I think that as time goes on it's going to be more important to be able to reach people directly. And so that's one reason that I thought, yes, this is the path to go for me. This is the chance to get out of that. And also, a chance to just write about whatever I wanted. Sometimes it's on point. Sometimes it's just, here's something I've been thinking a lot about. The most recent piece that I wrote had to do with just kind of this general feeling of dread that's going on. And that's not something that Media Matters would've published, because they'd be like, this is nothing to do with our mission. I'd be like, I know. But it's a chance to express myself in a more personal way without having to... There's a level of not necessarily bad self-censorship, but just staying on topic at a job.Yeah. And you still do some media analysis on your Substack. So it's not like that's completely gone away. But I totally hear you with the sort of banging your head against the wall aspect of covering these recurring issues in right wing media that never seem to improve. And that can be very frustrating because it's like, well, why am I even bothering? And obviously it's important that people do that sort of reporting, because not everyone, like myself, people can't spend hours each day immersing themselves in right wing media. And so it's important that there are trusted sources who can report on what's going on there. But I think you're also right, because one of the things that I was debating, whether or not to do this newsletter that I was thinking about is, oh maybe I should just go the route of doing the Twitter super follow thing. But, as you were just touching upon, ultimately I concluded that putting that many eggs in the Twitter basket might be a bad idea.We've seen this with Facebook and the whole pivot to video thing that it's good to not become too reliant on one platform for your professional livelihood. And so obviously Substack is a way to diversify and to also leave space to do more writing than threads, or 280 character tweets, that sort of thing. So yeah, there were a couple different considerations with that, but I do think having a home for your work off of Twitter is probably a good and healthy thing overall.Oh, absolutely. Anything that gets you a little bit further away from Twitter? Probably healthy.Probably healthy. I have kind of a hard time with that because Twitter has become... I have it broken up into lists now where I have a news tab and a sports tab and a friends tab. But it really has become kind of my pipeline. Back in the day, 15 years ago, it was like, okay, I'm going to go read the newspaper to get up to speed in the morning with what's going on. And now Twitter has become my entire gateway. And that might change a little bit as I get more immersed in Substack, or as I spend more time on Substack. Because there's a lot of stuff across a wide range of topics going on, on Substack.So I'm sure I will incorporate that more into my information consumption routine. But it is kind of amazing how all of us as working journalists have, for the most part, been sucked into this vortex of Twitter, for better or worse. And I do think there are a lot of good things about Twitter, but just how ubiquitous it's come and kind of inescapable, when you take a step back, it's like, wow, I do spend a lot of time on it. So, for better or worse. Probably for worse.It's one of those things where I look at the usage stats on my phone and it's just sad. It's like, hey, your screen time for this week. And I'm like, don't tell me. I don't want to know.I'll get the ones where it's like your screen time, your average per day, is seven hours per day, down 40% from last week. And it's like, I guess that's progress. But yeah, I've even gotten bad enough in recent years, now I read books on my phone or my computer. Even at night I'm trying to unwind with my family and I've got the multi-viewer to see what's on Fox News and Fox Business and Newsmax. Definitely I'm overstimulated constantly, and I'm sure that does have... it affects you. But again, I view that as part of my coverage area as well as just sort of being aware of what's happening, not just on TV but on the Hill.And so I'm watching C-SPAN all the time too. But yeah, it does kind of lead to... Even when I'm reading a book on my computer, I usually have a multi-viewer in the other half of the screen where I'm paying attention to everything on cable news. So, 50 years ago that would've been kind of unheard of, I guess, but there are upsides to that too. But yeah, I definitely feel very overstimulated all the time.Yeah. That's the general theme of my newsletters, just we're hyper connected and at the same time, so I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I just can't relate to any other human being. But I'm like, it's so weird that at this moment I can send out something to 200,000 people, but still not be able to actually feel like I'm communicating with anyone.It's interesting to think about if we would've lived through a comparable pandemic 50 years ago, before there was the internet. To me, I feel like it would've been a lot more isolating, just in the sense that we use... Like you and I can do this video call and talk, and granted we could have talked on the phone back in the day too or something like that. But even though we basically spent like a year of our lives holed up at home, I never really felt starved for interaction, although it's a little bit more of a shallow interaction than actually hanging out with people or getting together with friends, that sort of thing. But so I don't know, I guess I kind of view that as a upside to this hyper online world that we live in, that I do feel like... I have relationships with people... You and I have never before today, even though I feel like I know you, we've never really talked ever.We've DM'd and stuff like that, but we've never hopped on a call together or anything like that. So, it does lead to these kind of strange relationships or sort of different sorts of relationships with people. So, I think in some ways to me, I feel like I would've had a harder time enduring the sort of social conditions that in some ways we still are enduring, but this kind of like... the separation that we've all had from each other. Although just before we got in this call, I was talking with Casey Michel. I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work, but he's a political journalist who just sort of book on kleptocracy. And I was doing a Q&A with him for the newsletter, and he was kind of like... I was just congratulating him on finishing his book and stuff. And he was like, oh yeah, my wife likes to say that's how I spent the pandemic was writing this book. And I was like, man, that's so much more constructive than getting into drinking whiskey and daily fantasy sports that I did.I was going to say, I started collecting baseball cards. That's what I did during this. That's how I spent my pandemic, just picking up random hobbies here and there. I was like, yeah, baseball cards again. I did that when I was like 12. Let's bring that back. That's a thing now.I have a mutual friend who's really... I don't know Phil Hughes, the former major league baseball player at all, but I have a friend who's really good friends with him. And Phil has become on Instagram, kind of a baseball card celebrity. He does this thing on Instagram where he opens packs of cards. And so I've kind of vicariously... Because at my parents' house, we still to this day have boxes and boxes and boxes of cards from when we were kids, myself and my brothers. And actually one of my brothers recently went through them. And I guess there really weren't that many cards that are worth anything, because even back in the day you needed to buy the premium packs or whatever. And that was totally lost on me. I thought all cards were kind of the same or you could get good cards in any pack.But you know, everything is so digital now that I guess it kind of... Baseball cards have kind of become this transgressive analog physical item. And so I think it's kind of cool that they're back in vogue now. So I guess, I don't know. We'll see, if this pandemic goes on for another six months, I guess the next variant wave that we have, maybe I'll cave in and buy a box of cards too, but I haven't quite gotten there yet.Yeah. I'm definitely going the baseball cards and video games route to pandemic survival.Oh, I love your tweets. Yeah. I absolutely love your MLB The Show tweets. I have friends who are into that game, as well.It's fun!Yeah. It's cool that you're savvy enough to post little videos and stuff.Yeah. So when I was working at Media Matters, I had a separate Twitter account set up that was just following all of the right-wing accounts, just so I can keep up with whatever nonsense they're up to. And so that's the one I connected to my PlayStation. So the feed, the only thing in it is just... Because I never tweet from it, but that's where I have all the photos and videos sent to, to pull from. So yeah, the feed over there is just all of my PlayStation things and nothing else. So it's pretty great. But yeah. You know what, thank you so much for stopping by to talk about your newsletter. Is there anything else that people should know if they're on the edge about whether or not to... Well, first off, if you're on the edge about whether or not to subscribe for sign up for free, you should totally do that. That's without a question. Worst case scenario, you just ignore the emails.I'm guessing if you made it this far into this podcast, you're probably willing to sign up for free. And so I encourage people to check it out. I've got a couple... As we sit here, I'm a week out from launch, as Parker and I are talking, and I already have a couple posts that I'm excited about that are ready to go. And so I'm hoping that ultimately the content will speak for itself. So yeah. Check it out. Like I said, aaronrupar.substack.com, and check out my Twitter account. I'll certainly be tweeting things out from there as we go. And appreciate you having me on. And at some point we'll have to return the favor. I'd be interested to talk with you about your personal immersion in right-wing media and coming out of that. And perhaps the scars that that left.Oh, and there are many.You were at Media Matters maybe three years, right? So you were there a pretty good chunk of time.Yeah. About, about two and a half years, I guess. Because it was right before the 2018 midterms was when I started over there. And then was there for the midterms, there for the 2020 election. And I was under the impression that after the election there might be a couple weeks of chill-out time. No, of course not.No. God, no.It just went right on, right on being crazy.I've been kind of thinking because yeah, it did kind of calm down there. After Biden's inauguration, there was a brief moment, I guess. Then there was the impeachment though, but I felt like I was breathing easy about how things were going for a couple months, I guess, as the vaccination rollout was kind of successful and things economically seem to be going pretty well and stuff. But now that we're approaching the midterms and there's been Biden's approval numbers are kind of shaky where it seems... And his agenda is somewhat imperiled at this point. I feel some of the old anxiety creeping back here a little bit. So I guess you probably got out at kind of the right time. I'm still planning on covering the same old stuff for the newsletter.But I guess I do at this point... I've been doing it long enough where I feel a sense of almost duty to cover this stuff. I'm sure it's leaving some scars on me too, but I guess I'm willing endure it a little bit longer to... Because I feel like the story of Trumpism and the struggle to protect the integrity of elections here in the States, it's still an ongoing and very active story. So at least for now I kind of feel obligated to continue to see it through.Absolutely. And people should 100% follow your newsletter for more on that. Thanks. Thanks again for stopping by. Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

On this week’s podcast, I interview my friend and former co-worker Eddie Geller. Eddie is running for Congress in Florida’s 15th district. If elected, he would have the best taste in music of anyone to ever hold office. Just throwing that out there. Let’s get started!Parker Molloy: Hey Eddie, how's it going?Eddie Geller: Hey, thank you for having me. It's going pretty well.Well, that's good, it's always good to hear. So you're running for Congress?I am running for Congress in the 15th district of Florida. I don't know, when you say it, it sounds so serious.I'd like to just add a question mark at the very end. Congress?Congress? Yes. I mean, I'm a big believer that good people got to run for office. So it's something I've been thinking about for a while and it really is January 6th, it's just was so appalling and just felt like, all right, I've been thinking about doing this and Republicans don't seem to be able to find the bottom and so I wanted to throw my hat in the ring.All right. Well that, I mean, seems like as good a reason as any.Thank you.It would've been a little strange if you were like, well, January 6th settled it because I really want to know what it's like to be under siege.“That will just look like a lot of fun. And I just-”“That looks so fun!”“... thought if I could get in there. No, I wanted to send people endless fundraising emails, that was truly the impetus.”Yeah. That's one thing I think that you and I have in common, I mean, you ask people for money for your campaign, I ask people for money for my newsletter, it all works out and both of us do not have as much money as we would like to have. So.Yes, fair enough to say. My campaign account is very different than my bank account.Yeah. So one thing I'm curious about, how did Chuck E. Cheese prepare you to be a member of Congress?That sounds like a silly question but to me, it is very real. So when I first started working at Chuck E. Cheese I was a 15-year-old young man looking for guidance, looking for a life, and of course, the big mouse came calling. The thing about Chuck E. Cheese and I talk about this with some folks is, my boss at Chuck E. Cheese, this guy named Jeff I'm still good friends with today, Jeff sort of took me under his wing and he introduced me to punk rock because I was playing a lot of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and was very into Papa Roach at the time. Don't laugh, it hurts when you laugh.Right there that disqualifies you.That's the part you can't use, that is the true oppo. Now, he heard me listening to Papa Roach and he's like, "Eddie, we got to fix this," and he made me a mix CD. I remember Alkaline Trio, Saves the Day, Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil were on it. And so, I mean, punk rock and music is such a huge part of my life but I think what I really still hold on to, I mean, I still love those bands, but is that there is a world outside the mainstream that you can absorb and take in and there are ideas and thoughts that you won't hear on cable TV. And that blew my mind because this was before the internet, the internet was there and it was there awhile but hadn't really blown up. And then it was like, oh, there's so many cool and interesting perspectives so then it was actually hugely influential. And I also learned how to make a pizza, I mean, that didn't hurt either.Yeah. Those are life skills.Life skills. And now there's arguably too many perspectives out there.Yeah. Now it's like, “Oh no, we went too far. Now literally anyone can just pop up on the internet and claim that their cousins, brothers, friends, uncles, testicles have exploded or something.”Yeah. Or that there's a conspiracy that so-and-so stole an election or whatever, I mean, did not see that one coming.Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that is I think the most predictable thing ever.Yes. Well, I mean I guess I just mean back in the days of AOL and, I'm in a chat room, isn't the internet fun? And I'm meeting new people and here's these bands and then a little bit of everything all the time.So tell me a bit about yourself. I mean, we know each other but for the listeners at home or wherever.Sure. Let's see. So the funny thing is, I'm trying not to go into candidate pitch which is so front of mind and just give the real stuff. I feel like, Parker, we're friends and you deserve the real deal. Who am I? I did grow up in Florida and went to the University of Florida. And when I was in high school I was the class clown and got in a lot of trouble for it and I was a fat kid, which there's nothing wrong with that, everyone should love their body or if they want to change their body also wonderful. But in any case, I was a fat kid that was very effecting and made me very depressed as a child and so being a class clown was sort of the manifestation of trying to navigate that. And so when I was around 17 or 18, like I said, I'd make jokes in class and my friends would encourage me and be like, oh, you should do stand up. And for whatever crazy reason after enough prodding I was like, okay, this is a good idea, again, question mark.But I actually think that when I decided to do that, again, I don't remember if it was 17 or 18, I think that was a defining moment of my life to step on that stage and tell some jokes just because it was like, oh, you can face your fears and you can overcome them. And then I think everything since then it's just been like, well, I'm not stepping on stage to do stand up for the first time in my life, so sure I can run for Congress. But anyway, so yeah. So I started doing comedy in high school and I think I found this identity and then I went to the University of Florida and I did improv with this group theater strike force, changed my life because I really found my people.But I remember sort of my friends would give me s**t because I was the person who was always like, I care about politics and I care about this thing, and folks were like, I just want to do improv, and I'm like, but we should pay attention to the war in Iraq and all that stuff. And so I feel like I had these dual sides of me, it saw like, oh, I'm a performer and I love doing that but also I really care about what's happening in Washington or whatever, and feeling so frustrated, I mean, I feel the Iraq war was the defining political event of my life. I remember in 2003 just seeing us go to war and just feeling this can't be happening, how can we be doing something so terrible and there's so much energy behind stopping it and yet we can't stop it and it still just happened. And I think that took a toll on me in the sense that, we have to be able to do something.So anyway, so I'm still doing my comedy thing, I go to Los Angeles, I started doing improv and comedy out there. I do not hit it big but I enjoyed performing on a regular basis, I was in a few commercials, I had a line in a movie and it was really fun. And I think anyone who has the opportunity to get paid to act or paid to do their art form is really gratifying and I loved it, but still, I felt that I wanted to do more or wanted to do something with my creativity that wasn't selling Dr. Pepper. Not that there's anything wrong with Dr. Pepper, I just feel like that's a problem we've solved in our society is how to get people to drink Dr. Pepper. So I fell into the world of-You're going to lose the coveted Dr. Pepper drinker vote which is a large lobby.I don't know, they're going to come after me, the Dr. Pepper folks. I mean, I haven't had a Dr. Pepper in a long time, third grade.I had one yesterday.Oh, really?And they are great.They are great.There are two things I drink all day, Diet Coke and Diet Dr. Pepper.I was just going to ask if you were a regular Dr. Pepper or Diet Dr. Pepper.Diet.Yeah. No, I've rocked a number of Diet Dr. Peppers in my life. Okay. So, okay, I've realized I'm monologuing a bit and you're so gracious to let me do it. But in any case, I found this merger of creativity and politics and activism and so I've been running with that ever since. And you and I were together when we were at Upworthy but also I spent time at the Democratic National Committee, I worked with MoveOn. And so anyway, so then we get to me now who's like, I'm going to run for office because I think ultimately again, I've been on the outside doing my best to make a difference and this is me saying, I want to take a shot of being on the inside and represent folks and do some good from Washington.All right. And your announcement video took the form of a jingle?Yes.Yeah. How did that happen?I launched with a jingle video. Well, once I decided to run I knew being a former comedian and being a video producer I had to do something interesting. And so I had been thinking about it and then I was watching this show, I don't know if you've ever seen it, Somebody Feed Phil, and if you haven't seen, it doesn't matter, but it's this traveling eating show hosted by the guy who started Everybody Loves Raymond, his name is Phil. And anyway, the intro to the show is, a happy hungry man, and it's kind of a vibe, it's like a Full House type vibe, and it just dawned on me like, oh, that would be a fun way to introduce myself.[Clip of Eddie Geller’s announcement jingle plays]And then as soon as I thought of that, I was like, well, it should be a full-on pair, let's just go there, let's just do the pair.Go full Full House.Go full Full House. And I listened to all those, the Family Matters, Full House, Step By Step, you name it, I was listening to it and trying to figure this thing out. But in any case, so then I had this idea and I reached out to a mutual friend of ours, Eric March, who also worked at Upworthy, just a brilliant writer and comedian and he helped me write the jingle because I'm not a musician. And so yeah, so we worked on it, came up with the music and the lyrics and then we reached out to a producer named Alison, she did a great job taking it from a piano piece with lyrics into the full-blown jingle and then filmed all these funny bits around Brandon where I live, Brandon, Florida and I was so nervous.I mean, this is not how you're supposed to launch a political campaign, you're supposed to launch a campaign with, my father when I was four years old took me out to the pond and we went fishing and I knew when I caught that salmon that that salmon was America, and I couldn't do that. I mean, more power to folks who do but it wasn't me and so yeah, so the jingle happened. And also, even if I had done something that's like, I'm Eddie Geller and here's all the very earnest reasons why I'm running, which I have a number of earnest reasons why I'm running but it would get six views, right? I mean, so it's finding the balance.Yeah. Well, I mean, there have definitely been some people who've tried the creative video, hey, let me introduce myself kind of thing, and sometimes they just kind of stick around. I mean, there's one that I was thinking of, oh, there was a candidate that recreated the scene in Top Gun-Yes. I know exactly the video you're talking about.... yeah, except that it was an attack ad against Barbara Comstock I think, and they had someone who kind of looked like her sitting there. It was so weird but for the life of me I cannot remember the name of the candidate, which is probably bad.I don't want to take shots at any other Democrats and especially someone who's trying to do something different. So I remember who he is but I wish him all the best because he's fighting the good fight. But yeah, it's hard to do and that was definitely my fear, once I decided there were so many moments where I was like, oh my God, am I really doing this? And there were demos I listened to of it and I was like, is this good? And eventually folks I trusted told me, hey, this is fun, this is good, and so yes, I put it out there. And fortunately folks are pretty kind about it and enjoyed it and I appreciated your sending it out there into your world.And I also use the jingle as, I'm going to do more fun stuff like that, I think that is going to be my campaign as like, we can make this fun and then also talk about the real things. But it's an opportunity and a challenge, right? It's like, I think being able to do fun things and get attention is really helpful because that's a very hard thing in this world, but then people are like, hey, are you for real? And I've had those conversations, I've been in local democratic meetings and they're like, we want to meet you because are you just the guy who does the jingle or are you actually going to talk about the desalination plants that are being built in our county and what are we going to do about that? And so it's, you got to do both, but yeah, I'm happy to jingle and maybe there's another one down the road.Putting the “fun” into “funding our social safety net.”I love it.Another thing I wanted to ask you about was, back in 2015 you made a video for ClickHole explaining Bitcoin, it's you mumbling for a minute and 15 seconds and I love it because I still don't understand crypto stuff at all. But I did want to point out that if on the day that that video got posted on YouTube, if you had invested just $100 you would have $18,000 now, so it's just something out there.But also cryptocurrency is now a huge contributor to our climate crisis. So hopefully I didn't do any damage by doing that ClickHole video, but no, that was fun. And there was a good friend of mine, Leo Garcia, he worked at The Onion, I was visiting Chicago and he was just like, hey, do you want to do this video? I had no idea what it was going to be. And I came to the studio and they just put a teleprompter in front of me with the actual script and they were like, do your best to mumble this and so I did a few mumbly takes. And that might've been my peak, I mean, I think the work I'm doing now is more important but let's be honest, I mean, the Bitcoin mumble video.I just love it, it's great. But yeah-Oh, thank you.... I did want to point out how much richer we both would have been if instead of making that video we invested in Bitcoin. But alas, we did not so here you are trying to raise money for Congress and I'm trying to fund a newsletter, so that's our lives.That is our lives.So you're running in Florida's 15th district, right?Correct.Are you at all worried about redistricting?Yeah, redistricting is absolutely something that is top of mind. But it's going to either get a little bit harder, get a little bit easier, stay the same, I know that is super obvious to say. But in any case I still have to work really hard and I still have to convince people to vote for me no matter how the lines are drawn. Sort of who you're talking to and how you're getting to them changes a bit and donors and the media will perceive the election differently based on that cooked rating. But that all being said, I knew this was going to be really hard regardless so I don't want it to get much harder, I think that would be silly if I did.But I'm really excited because currently it's an R plus six district so it favors Republicans by six points. But I really like talking to Republicans, I mean, that's not to say people who have extreme conspiracy theories about elections, I entertain those, I don't, I think that's terrible for democracy. But I play on a hockey team that is almost all Republicans, a rec hockey league, and they know I'm running and we sit at the bar after games when we drink beer and we shoot the s**t and we talk a little bit of politics. But I think it is good to remember that, yes, there is a world out there where things are getting so tense and so heated but there is a place, at least I hope, that there's a place that we can maybe slowly but surely bring it back down.And I think to be someone who runs for office you have to be an optimist and you have to have hope and I think that describes me. And I think doing comedy is kind of part of that because I think to do comedy you have to be aware of where people's emotions are going to go and where they're at. So that's all just to say that I like the challenge of being in a place where there are a lot of Republicans because I think there's winning my race, which I'm in it to win it and there's also, how do we just untangle the knot that has been created, and it's really intimidating and really despairing and you worked in Media Matters, I mean, you know this stuff.Oh, absolutely. Just thinking about it, one of the challenges I think that you face that obviously I kind of witnessed when I was at Media Matters, especially is just the right wing media machine which is just pumping out a lot of either false info or conspiracy theories or just getting the right wing base really, really riled up which presents a challenge. Because the thing is that when policies are polled, the ones that the Democrats run on are way more popular, just generally. But you have to overcome the ads and the Fox News and the OAN and Newsmax and all of that stuff, which is its own challenge because I've watched as great pieces of legislation have just been shut down because of that.I mean, in Illinois here we had, I think it was, was it 2018? One of those, 2018 or in 2020 there was a referendum on the ballot that was, should we essentially adopt a more progressive tax system? Because right now Illinois has a flat tax for state taxes which is 5% which is kind of steep if you're not making a lot of money and not anywhere near steep enough if you are making a lot of money. So there was a really well-funded opposition to this bill which would have changed the entire state's tax structure.And the whole thing was based on this idea that, well, what if you one day become super successful? You may benefit now but what about 10 years from now? It's like, that's a great problem to have, oh, no, I moved up into a higher tax bracket, it's like, that's fine. But it failed because it just was blown out of the water with the ads that were everywhere and that I think is kind of a unique challenge. I mean, I don't know, you say that to run for office you have to be an optimist and that's one reason that I will never in my life run for office. It's my nature to be extremely pessimistic about everything because personally I would rather be pleasantly surprised than let down. When was it that you left Upworthy? Was that before the 2016 election?That was 2015 I think.2015. Okay. So throughout 2016 Adam Mordecai had a little room in a slack channel that was like, “I will reassure you about the state of the election.” And you go in there-Just hearing it makes me feel sad.... Yeah. You go in there and you would be like, “I don't know, man, I saw the story, the polling or the polling dropped,” and he would go, “Well, here's why you don't need to worry — because it's all going to be fine.” And so everyone kind of went into election day 2016 feeling optimistic, not me, I was like, “I'm 90% sure Trump is going to win this thing.” And when it happened I was devastated but not because I was surprised but because it was Trump, he was not the person I voted for, let's put it that way.That is so sad to hear.Oh, it's so sad. That is really bad.One thing I think a lot about is I feel like Republicans are better storytellers than we are and they don't think we give them enough credit for that because I think you can be a millionaire someday is a version of a story and I think they understand their audience really well of what is going to connect with the amygdala, is that the lizard brain? I don't know. We don't need to Google it. But in any case, I think they understand that storytelling really well and they bang that drum. And I think I am persuaded by be a better person, get in for your community, we're all in this together, we got to make a sacrifice for the fight, that resonates to me but there's a lot of people that it doesn't resonate with them.And I think we need to be more creative to find different ways to tell these stories about how we make a better America that have a broader appeal and understand that not everyone is persuaded by let's all pitch in together, which is a really important message. We do actually all need to pitch in together but that can't be the only way we're talking about taxing the rich or climate change or health care, we can just be more creative. And, I mean, that is certainly what I'm hoping to do, again, in my small corner of Florida 15, is thinking about messaging in that way and trying to get through to people in a way that is different than has previously been done.So one of the last things I wanted to ask about was policies. What issues are you passionate about? What issues do you think your district is passionate about?Well, I mean, I like many folks, I mean, it's not just necessarily our age group but definitely folks in our age group are just so distraught about is climate change. And we have passed the point of getting out of this thing without doing any damage and now it's like, we still have so much to do to mitigate and to avoid the worst of the worst, so that is absolutely top of mind for me. Another one is, finding a way to get to universal healthcare. My mom was a doctor and I remember when I was young and we talked about this issue, I was maybe 15 or 16, and there were other problems about I think reimbursements rates or something. I was talking to her about some specific thing and she's like, the way to fix this is just to get everyone covered, we just need a system that covers everyone.And so I'm not dictatorial about what that needs to look like, I think there's a number of ways of getting there but we have to do something about it, whether it is Medicare expansion, whether it is a public option. I think Medicare for all is great but if it's Medicare for all or nothing then we might be waiting a long f*****g time to get everyone covered. So yeah, so those are two. And I'm a member of a union and so good jobs is something I do think about and seeing stories about the gig economy and, I keep thinking about the DoorDash story about taking tips out of, I forget exactly what it was, but it's a way of screwing the workers out of their tips. And the bar just continues to lower in our economy of what a job looks like and what it should look like and so I want to be able to help push that back in the other direction.Yeah. I mean, that makes total sense. And the gig economy creates all sorts of issues when it comes to who's an employee, who's whatnot. Speaking of DoorDash I was thinking about when New York flooded recently and there was an image of someone trying to ride their bicycle through two and a half feet of sewage water-Yes. I saw that.... with the DoorDash thing. And someone reported out a story on that and it was afterward, they were like, “This was the worst night of my life and I made a $100” or something that, something ridiculous. And it's just, I don't know, there's always been this idea that the higher paying job, the more work you're doing, but I've found the exact opposite to be true. I mean, the hardest jobs I've ever had have been minimum wage jobs, the easiest jobs I've had are the ones that pay better. A lot of people like to feel like they're earning their living which is great and fine, but they look down upon people who do DoorDash and people who work at McDonald's or whatever, and it's just wrong. What we should do in my opinion, is to make sure that we're taking care of everyone no matter what their job is and make sure they have safe conditions. And here I am talking like a candidate, whoops.Well, anyway, we have this-Now just watch, I'm going to move down to Florida 15 and take you on.... we have this moment during the pandemic in which, I mean, we are obviously still in, but at the beginning of the pandemic where we were like, oh my God, essential workers, thank goodness for these folks who are out there whether it's delivering groceries or whatever, just realize like, oh, these folks are so important and then we just kind of forgot it. And then we're like, oh, we're going to take away your hazard pay and all these extra protections and bonuses we gave you we're going to start to roll them back, and it's so maddening.Yeah. I mean, it absolutely is. Just the same thing where we had all those commercials for a while that were, “In these unprecedented times, blah, blah,” basically this “we're all in it together” kind of messaging but then that sort of faded by last summer, yeah, summer 2020 and then after that it was just sort of like, “Screw you! buy a Lexus!”Actually, I tested that messaging and it failed but I was thinking about “Screw you, Geller! Buy a Lexus!”“Screw you, vote Geller,” I think it works. And on that note, thank you, Eddie Geller.Oh my gosh. Thank you for having me Parker, this was a delight. Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe