The Numlock Podcast

By Walt HickeyDouble feature today!Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Alissa Wilkinson who is out with the brand new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine.I'm a huge fan of Alissa, she's a phenomenal critic and I thought this topic — what happens when one of the most important American literary figures heads out to Hollywood to work on the most important American medium — is super fascinating. It's a really wonderful book and if you're a longtime Joan Didion fan or simply a future Joan Didion fan, it's a look at a really transformative era of Hollywood and should be a fun read regardless.Alissa can be found at the New York Times, and the book is available wherever books are sold.This interview has been condensed and edited. All right, Alissa, thank you so much for coming on.Yeah, thanks for having me. It's good to be back, wherever we are.Yes, you are the author of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. It's a really exciting book. It's a really exciting approach, for a Joan Didion biography and placing her in the current of American mainstream culture for a few years. I guess just backing out, what got you interested in Joan Didion to begin with? When did you first get into her work?Joan Didion and I did not become acquainted, metaphorically, until after I got out of college. I studied Tech and IT in college, and thus didn't read any books, because they don't make you read books in school, or they didn't when I was there. I moved to New York right afterward. I was riding the subway. There were all these ads for this book called The Year of Magical Thinking. It was the year 2005, the book had just come out. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's National Book Award-winning memoir about the year after her husband died, suddenly of a heart attack in '03. It's sort of a meditation on grief, but it's not really what that sounds like. If people haven't read it's very Didion. You know, it's not sentimental, it's constantly examining the narratives that she's telling herself about grief.So I just saw these ads on the walls. I was like, what is this book that everybody seems to be reading? I just bought it and read it. And it just so happened that it was right after my father, who was 46 at the time, was diagnosed with a very aggressive leukemia, and then died shortly thereafter, which was shocking, obviously. The closer I get to that age, it feels even more shocking that he was so young. I didn't have any idea how to process that emotion or experience. The book was unexpectedly helpful. But it also introduced me to a writer who I'd never read before, who felt like she was looking at things from a different angle than everyone else.Of course, she had a couple more books come out after that. But I don't remember this distinctly, but probably what happened is I went to some bookstore, The Strand or something, and bought The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem off the front table as everyone does because those books have just been there for decades.From that, I learned more, starting to understand how writing could work. I didn't realize how form and content could interact that way. Over the years, I would review a book by her or about her for one publication or another. Then when I was in graduate school, getting my MFA in nonfiction, I wrote a bit about her because I was going through a moment of not being sure if my husband and I were going to stay in New York or we were going to move to California. They sort of obligate you to go through a goodbye to all that phase if you are contemplating that — her famous essay about leaving New York. And then, we did stay in New York City. But ultimately, that's 20 years of history.Then in 2020, I was having a conversation (that was quite-early pandemic) with my agent about possible books I might write. I had outlined a bunch of books to her. Then she was like, “These all sound like great ideas. But I've always wanted to rep a book on Joan Didion. So I just wanted to put that bug in your ear.” I was like, “Oh, okay. That seems like something I should probably do.”It took a while to find an angle, which wound up being Didion in Hollywood. This is mostly because I realized that a lot of people don't really know her as a Hollywood figure, even though she's a pretty major Hollywood figure for a period of time. The more of her work I read, the more I realized that her work is fruitfully understood as the work of a woman who was profoundly influenced by (and later thinking in terms of Hollywood metaphors) whether she was writing about California or American politics or even grief.So that's the long-winded way of saying I wasn't, you know, acquainted with her work until adulthood, but then it became something that became a guiding light for me as a writer.That's really fascinating. I love it. Because again I think a lot of attention on Didion has been paid since her passing. But this book is really exciting because you came at it from looking at the work as it relates to Hollywood. What was Didion's experience in Hollywood? What would people have seen from it, but also, what is her place there?The directly Hollywood parts of her life start when she's in her 30s. She and her husband — John Gregory Dunn, also a writer and her screenwriting partner — moved from New York City, where they had met and gotten married, to Los Angeles. John's brother, Nick Dunn later became one of the most important early true crime writers at Vanity Fair, believe it or not. But at the time, he was working as a TV producer. He and his wife were there. So they moved to Los Angeles. It was sort of a moment where, you know, it's all well and good to be a journalist and a novelist. If you want to support yourself, Hollywood is where it's at.So they get there at a moment when the business is shifting from these big-budget movies — the Golden Age — to the new Hollywood, where everything is sort of gritty and small and countercultural. That's the moment they arrive. They worked in Hollywood. I mean, they worked literally in Hollywood for many years after that. And then in Hollywood even when they moved back to New York in the '80s as screenwriters still.People sometimes don't realize that they wrote a bunch of produced screenplays. The earliest was The Panic in Needle Park. Obviously, they adapted Didion's novel Play It As It Lays. There are several others, but one that a lot of people don't realize they wrote was the version of A Star is Born that stars Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. It was their idea to shift the Star is Born template from Hollywood entities to rock stars. That was their idea. Of course, when Bradley Cooper made his version, he iterated on that. So their work was as screenwriters but also as figures in the Hollywood scene because they were literary people at the same time that they were screenwriters. They knew all the actors, and they knew all the producers and the executives.John actually wrote, I think, two of the best books ever written on Hollywood decades apart. One called The Studio, where he just roamed around on the Fox backlot. For a year for reasons he couldn't understand, he got access. That was right when the catastrophe that was Dr. Doolittle was coming out. So you get to hear the inside of the studio. Then later, he wrote a book called Monster, which is about their like eight-year long attempt to get their film Up Close and Personal made, which eventually they did. It's a really good look at what the normal Hollywood experience was at the time: which is like: you come up with an idea, but it will only vaguely resemble the final product once all the studios get done with it.So it's, it's really, that's all very interesting. They're threaded through the history of Hollywood in that period. On top of it for the book (I realized as I was working on it) that a lot of Didion's early life is influenced by especially her obsession with John Wayne and also with the bigger mythology of California and the West, a lot of which she sees as framed through Hollywood Westerns.Then in the '80s, she pivoted to political reporting for a long while. If you read her political writing, it is very, very, very much about Hollywood logic seeping into American political culture. There's an essay called “Inside Baseball” about the Dukakis campaign that appears in Political Fictions, her book that was published on September 11, 2001. In that book, she writes about how these political campaigns are directed and set up like a production for the cameras and how that was becoming not just the campaign, but the presidency itself. Of course, she had no use for Ronald Reagan, and everything she writes about him is very damning. But a lot of it was because she saw him as the embodiment of Hollywood logic entering the political sphere and felt like these are two separate things and they need to not be going together.So all of that appeared to me as I was reading. You know, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It just made sense for me to write about it. On top of it, she was still alive when I was writing the proposal and shopping it around. So she actually died two months after we sold the book to my publisher. It meant I was extra grateful for this angle because I knew there'd be a lot more books on her, but I wanted to come at it from an angle that I hadn't seen before. So many people have written about her in Hollywood before, but not quite through this lens.Yeah. What were some things that you discovered in the course of your research? Obviously, she's such an interesting figure, but she's also lived so very publicly that I'm just super interested to find out what are some of the things that you learned? It can be about her, but it can also be the Hollywood system as a whole.Yeah. I mean, I didn't interview her for obvious reasons.Understandable, entirely understandable.Pretty much everyone in her life also is gone with the exception really of Griffin Dunn, who is her nephew, John's nephew, the actor. But other than that, it felt like I needed to look at it through a critical lens. So it meant examining a lot of texts. A lot of Didion's magazine work (which was a huge part of her life) is published in the books that people read like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album and all the other books. What was interesting to me was discovering (I mean, not “discovering” because other people have read it) that there is some work that's not published and it's mostly her criticism.Most of that criticism was published in the late '50s and the early '60s when she was living in New York City, working at Vogue and trying to make it in the literary scene that was New York at that time, which was a very unique place. I mean, she was writing criticism and essays for both, you know, like National Review and The Nation at the same time, which was just hard to conceive of today. It was something you'd do back then. Yeah, wild stuff.A lot of that criticism was never collected into books. The most interesting is that she'd been working at Vogue for a long time in various positions, but she wound up getting added to the film critic column at Vogue in, '62, I want to say, although I might have that date slightly off. She basically alternated weeks with another critic for a few years, writing that until she started writing in movies proper. It's never a great idea to be a critic and a screenwriter at the same time.Her criticism is fascinating. So briefly, for instance, she shared that column with Pauline Kael. Pauline Kael became well known after she wrote about Bonnie and Clyde. This was prior to that. This is several years prior to that. They also hated each other for a long time afterward, which is funny, because, in some ways, their style is very different but their persona is actually very similar. So I wonder about that.But in any case, even when she wasn't sharing the column with Pauline Kael, it was a literal column in a magazine. So it's like one column of text, she can say barely anything. She was always a bit of a contrarian, but she was actively not interested in the things that were occupying New York critics at the time. Things like the Auteur Theory, what was happening in France, the downtown scene and the Shirley Clark's of the world. She had no use for it. At some point, she accuses Billy Wilder of having really no sense of humor, which is very funny.When you read her criticism, you see a person who is very invested in a classical notion of Hollywood as a place that shows us fantasies that we can indulge in for a while. She talks in her very first column about how she doesn't really need movies to be masterpieces, she just wants them to have moments. When she says moments, she means big swelling things that happen in a movie that make her feel things.It's so opposite, I think, to most people's view of Didion. Most people associate her with this snobbish elitism or something, which I don't think is untrue when we're talking about literature. But for her, the movies were like entertainment, and entering that business was a choice to enter that world. She wasn't attempting to elevate the discourse or something.I just think that's fascinating. She also has some great insights there. But as a film critic, I find myself disagreeing with most of her reviews. But I think that doesn't matter. It was more interesting to see how she conceived of the movies. There is a moment later on, in another piece that I don't think has been republished anywhere from the New York Review of Books, where she writes about the movies of Woody Allen. She hates them. It's right at the point where he's making like Manhattan and Annie Hall, like the good stuff. She just has no use for them. It's one of the funniest pieces. I won't spoil the ending because it's hilarious, and it's in the book.That writing was of huge interest to me and hasn't been republished in books. I was very grateful to get access to it, in part because it is in the archives — the electronic archives of the New York Public Library. But at the time, the library was closed. So I had to call the library and have a librarian get on Zoom with me for like an hour and a half to figure out how I could get in the proverbial back door of the library to get access while the library wasn't open.That's magnificent. That's such a cool way to go to the archives because some stuff just hasn't been published. If it wasn't digitized, then it's not digitized. That's incredible.Yeah, it's there, but you can barely print them off because they're in PDFs. They're like scanned images that are super high res, so the printer just dies when you try to print them. It's all very fascinating. I hope it gets republished at some point because I think there's enough interest in her work that it's fascinating to see this other aspect of her taste and her persona.It's really interesting that she seems to have wanted to meet the medium where it is, right? She wasn't trying to literary-up Hollywood. I mean, LA can be a bit of a friction. It's not exactly a literary town in the way that some East Coast metropolises can be. It is interesting that she was enamored by the movies. Do you want to speak about what things were like for her when she moved out?Yeah, it is funny because, at the same time, the first two movies that they wrote and produced are The Panic in Needle Park, which is probably the most new Hollywood movie you can imagine. It's about addicts at Needle Park, which is actually right where the 72nd Street subway stop is on the Upper West Side. If people have been there, it's hard to imagine. But that was apparently where they all sat around, and there were a lot of needles. It's apparently the first movie supposedly where someone shoots up live on camera.So it was the '70s. That's amazing.Yes, and it launched Al Pacino's film career! Yeah, it's wild. You watch it and you're just like, “How is this coming from the woman who's about all this arty farty stuff in the movies.” And Play It As It Lays has a very similar, almost avant-garde vibe to it. It's very, very interesting. You see it later on in the work that they made.A key thing to remember about them (and something I didn't realize before I started researching the book)was that Didion and Dunn were novelists who worked in journalism because everybody did. They wrote movies, according to them (you can only go off of what they said. A lot of it is John writing these jaunty articles. He's a very funny writer) because “we had tuition and a mortgage. This is how you pay for it.”This comes up later on, they needed to keep their WGA insurance because John had heart trouble. The best way to have health insurance was to remain in the Writers Guild. Remaining in the Writers Guild means you had to have a certain amount of work produced through union means. They were big union supporters. For them this was not, this was very strictly not an auteurist undertaking. This was not like, “Oh, I'm gonna go write these amazing screenplays that give my concept of the world to the audience.” It's not like Bonnie and Clyding going on here. It's very like, “We wrote these based on some stories that we thought would be cool.”I like that a lot. Like the idea that A Star is Born was like a pot boiler. That's really delightful.Completely. It was totally taken away from them by Streisand and John Peters at some point. But they were like, “Yeah, I mean, you know, it happens. We still got paid.”Yeah, if it can happen to Superman, it can happen to you.It happens to everybody, you know, don't get too precious about it. The important thing is did your novel come out and was it supported by its publisher?So just tracing some of their arcs in Hollywood. Obviously, Didion's one of the most influential writers of her generation, there's a very rich literary tradition. Where do we see her footprint, her imprint in Hollywood? What are some of the ways that we can see her register in Hollywood, or reverberate outside of it?In the business itself, I don't know that she was influential directly. What we see is on the outside of it. So a lot of people were friends. She was like a famous hostess, famous hostess. The New York Public Library archives are set to open at the end of March, of Didion and Dunn's work, which was like completely incidental to my publication date. I just got lucky. There's a bunch of screenplays in there that they worked on that weren't produced. There's also her cookbooks, and I'm very excited to go through those and see that. So you might meet somebody there.Her account of what the vibe was when the Manson murders occurred, which is published in her essay The White Album, is still the one people talk about, even though there are a lot of different ways to come at it. That's how we think about the Manson murders: through her lens. Later on, when she's not writing directly about Hollywood anymore (and not really writing in Hollywood as much) but instead is writing about the headlines, about news events, about sensationalism in the news, she becomes a great media critic. We start to see her taking the things that she learned (having been around Hollywood people, having been on movie sets, having seen how the sausage is made) and she starts writing about politics. In that age, it is Hollywood's logic that you perform for the TV. We have the debates suddenly becoming televised, the conventions becoming televised, we start to see candidates who seem specifically groomed to win because they look good on TV. They're starting to win and rule the day.She writes about Newt Gingrich. Of course, Gingrich was the first politician to figure out how to harness C-SPAN to his own ends — the fact that there were TV cameras on the congressional floor. So she's writing about all of this stuff at a time when you can see other people writing about it. I mean, Neil Postman famously writes about it. But the way Didion does it is always very pegged to reviewing somebody's book, or she's thinking about a particular event, or she's been on the campaign plane or something like that. Like she's been on the inside, but with an outsider's eye.That also crops up in, for instance, her essays. “Sentimental Journeys” is one of her most famous ones. That one's about the case of the Central Park Five, and the jogger who was murdered. Of course, now, we're many decades out from that, and the convictions were vacated. We know about coerced confessions. Also Donald Trump arrives in the middle of that whole thing.But she's actually not interested in the guilt or innocence question, because a lot of people were writing about that. She's interested in how the city of New York and the nation perform themselves for themselves, seeing themselves through the long lens of a movie and telling themselves stories about themselves. You see this over and over in her writing, no matter what she's writing about. I think once she moved away from writing about the business so much, she became very interested in how Hollywood logic had taken over American public life writ large.That's fascinating. Like, again, she spends time in the industry, then basically she can only see it through that lens. Of course, Michael Dukakis in a tank is trying to be a set piece, of course in front of the Berlin Wall, you're finally doing set decoration rather than doing it outside of a brick wall somewhere. You mentioned the New York thing in Performing New York. I have lived in the city for over a decade now. The dumbest thing is when the mayor gets to wear the silly jacket whenever there's a snowstorm that says “Mr. Mayor.” It's all an act in so many ways. I guess that political choreography had to come from somewhere, and it seems like she was documenting a lot of that initial rise.Yeah, I think she really saw it. The question I would ask her, if I could, is how cognizant she was that she kept doing that. As someone who's written for a long time, you don't always recognize that you have the one thing you write about all the time. Other people then bring it up to you and you're like, “Oh, I guess you're right.” Even when you move into her grief memoir phase, which is how I think about the last few original works that she published, she uses movie logic constantly in those.I mean, The Year of Magical Thinking is a cyclical book, she goes over the same events over and over. But if you actually look at the language she's using, she talks about running the tape back, she talks about the edit, she talks about all these things as if she's running her own life through how a movie would tell a story. Maybe she knew very deliberately. She's not a person who does things just haphazardly, but it has the feeling of being so baked into her psyche at this point that she would never even think of trying to escape it.Fascinating.Yeah, that idea that you don't know what you are potentially doing, I've thought about that. I don't know what mine is. But either way. It's such a cool way to look at it. On a certain level, she pretty much succeeded at that, though, right? I think that when people think about Joan Didion, they think about a life that freshens up a movie, right? Like, it workedVery much, yeah. I'm gonna be really curious to see what happens over the next 10 years or so. I've been thinking about figures like Sylvia Plath or women with larger-than-life iconography and reputation and how there's a constant need to relook at their legacies and reinvent and rethink and reimagine them. There's a lot in the life of Didion that I think remains to be explored. I'm really curious to see where people go with it, especially with the opening of these archives and new personal information making its way into the world.Yeah, even just your ability to break some of those stories that have been locked away in archives out sounds like a really exciting addition to the scholarship. Just backing out a little bit, we live in a moment in which the relationship between pop culture and political life is fairly directly intertwined. Setting aside the steel-plated elephant in the room, you and I are friendly because we bonded over this idea that movies really are consequential. Coming out of this book and coming out of reporting on it, what are some of the relevances for today in particular?Yeah, I mean, a lot more than I thought, I guess, five years ago. I started work on the book at the end of Trump One, and it's coming out at the beginning of Trump Two, and there was this period in the middle of a slightly different vibe. But even then I watch TikTok or whatever. You see people talk about “main character energy” or the “vibe shift” or all of romanticizing your life. I would have loved to read a Didion essay on the way that young people sort of view themselves through the logic of the screens they have lived on and the way that has shaped America for a long time.I should confirm this, I don't think she wrote about Obama, or if she did, it was only a little bit. So her political writing ends in George W. Bush's era. I think there's one piece on Obama, and then she's writing about other things. It's just interesting to think about how her ideas of what has happened to political culture in America have seeped into the present day.I think the Hollywood logic, the cinematic logic has given way to reality TV logic. That's very much the logic of the Trump world, right? Still performing for cameras, but the cameras have shifted. The way that we want things from the cameras has shifted, too. Reality TV is a lot about creating moments of drama where they may or may not actually exist and bombarding you with them. I think that's a lot of what we see and what we feel now. I have to imagine she would think about it that way.There is one interesting essay that I feel has only recently been talked about. It's at the beginning of my book, too. It was in a documentary, and Gia Tolentino wrote about it recently. It's this essay she wrote in 2000 about Martha Stewart and about Martha Stewart's website. It feels like the 2000s was like, “What is this website thing? Why are people so into it?” But really, it's an essay about parasocial relationships that people develop (with women in particular) who they invent stories around and how those stories correspond to greater American archetypes. It's a really interesting essay, not least because I think it's an essay also about people's parasocial relationships with Joan Didion.So the rise of her celebrity in the 21st century, where people know who she is and carry around a tote bag, but don't really know what they're getting themselves into is very interesting to me. I think it is also something she thought about quite a bit, while also consciously courting it.Yeah, I mean, that makes a ton of sense. For someone who was so adept at using cinematic language to describe her own life with every living being having a camera directly next to them at all times. It seems like we are very much living in a world that she had at least put a lot of thought into, even if the technology wasn't around for her to specifically address it.Yes, completely.On that note, where can folks find the book? Where can folks find you? What's the elevator pitch for why they ought to check this out? Joan Didion superfan or just rather novice?Exactly! I think this book is not just for the fans, let me put it that way. Certainly, I think anyone who considers themselves a Didion fan will have a lot to enjoy here. The stuff you didn't know, hadn't read or just a new way to think through her cultural impact. But also, this is really a book that's as much for people who are just interested in thinking about the world we live in today a little critically. It's certainly a biography of American political culture as much as it is of Didion. There's a great deal of Hollywood history in there as well. Thinking about that sweep of the American century and change is what the book is doing. It's very, very, very informed by what I do in my day job as a movie critic at The New York Times. Thinking about what movies mean, what do they tell us about ourselves? I think this is what this book does. I have been told it's very fun to read. So I'm happy about that. It's not ponderous at all, which is good. It's also not that long.It comes out March 11th from Live Right, which is a Norton imprint. There will be an audiobook at the end of May that I am reading, which I'm excited about. And I'll be on tour for a large amount of March on the East Coast. Then in California, there's a virtual date, and there's a good chance I'll be popping up elsewhere all year, too. Those updates will be on my social feeds, which are all @alissawilkinson on whatever platform except X, which is fine because I don't really post there anymore.Alyssa, thank you so much for coming on.Thank you so much.Edited by Crystal Wang.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyDouble feature today!Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Olga Khazan who wrote the brand new book, Me, But Better. Olga appears all the time in Numlock because I really like her work, she's a staff writer at The Atlantic and previously wrote a delightful book that I really enjoyed called Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World.The book dives into the science of personality, where it comes from, and the real ways that we can change our own personalities in one direction or another. In it, Olga becomes a guinea pig for all kinds of radical experiences to change her personality. Olga can be found at The Atlantic, and the book is available wherever books are sold. This interview has been condensed and edited. Olga Khazan, thank you so much for coming on.Yeah, thanks so much for having me.You are the author of the brand new book Me But Better. I loved your book Weird which was out just a few years ago. This book is all about how to change your personality. It is a really exciting journey. I know that it started with an article that you published in The Atlantic, but what drew you to the art and science of changing one's personality?Really it's because personality is at the root of so much self-improvement and personal growth. I noticed that I tended to see things really negatively a lot of the time, and I was also really socially isolated. it was keeping me from enjoying life and appreciating what I had and just getting the most out of what life had to offer me. I really saw personality change as a way to fix all or improve that in one fell swoop.Great. You talk a lot from the framework of the Big Five. I really enjoyed how grounded in the scientific literature it was. The Big Five is potentially somewhat different from the Myers-Briggs structure that a lot of people know. Before we dive into how you went about doing a gut renovation on your personality, I would love to hear a little bit about what the Big Five are, where you came in on some of it, and what you wanted to see if you could change.Yeah, so generally the accepted scientific view today is that there are five traits that make up personality. You can remember them with the acronym OCEAN. The first is Openness to experiences, which is like imaginativeness and creativity. The next is Conscientiousness, which is being super organized, being on time. The next is Extroversion, which is being friendly and cheerful and sociable. Then there's Agreeableness, which is being warm, empathetic and also trusting of others. Then there's Neuroticism, which is a bad thing; it is depression and anxiety. The opposite of that, which is the one that you want, is emotional stability.When I started taking these scientific personality tests at the start of the project, I scored very low on Extroversion, very high on Neuroticism and I scored about average on Agreeableness. Those were the ones that I wanted to change.That's fascinating. I want to actually follow up with that. I did not hear you put a good, bad valence on any of the other ones besides neuroticism. It seems like most of these…people can have a full and fulfilling life with one or the other. What made Neuroticism pop out?You can have a full and fulfilling life without being on the outer extreme on any of these, but I would say it's generally better to be higher on all of them other than Neuroticism. You don't want to be all the way to the extreme. You don't want to be so agreeable that you're just like a doormat. It's generally better for your mental health and well-being and stuff to be pretty agreeable, pretty extroverted, pretty conscientious.Neuroticism popped out to me because that is one that I was super high on. It's very bad for your mental health. The definition is pretty much having bad mental health. It was keeping me from having a fun life, having a good life. Your happiness is determined by how you feel moment to moment and not by how many goodies you have. Even when I had a lot of goodies, I was sort of still miserable.Fascinating. Just to get into some of the literature on that, there was this amazing study that you cited in the book that says knocking down your Neuroticism by a few points was worth the equivalent of getting a $300,000 annual income increase. It seems like this is a really significant reverberation on just how people assess themselves.Yeah, even a really minor decrease in neuroticism can have a really big benefit for your life and have a lot of benefits for your mental health. This is why people spend so much time in therapy and get on SSRIs and things like that. Both of those have been shown to decrease neuroticism. So it really is a very popular personality trait that people like to work on.So how'd you go about it?For Neuroticism, the technique is really a lot of meditation. It's really hard to get away from that. People keep wanting me to say something else, but it's a lot of mindfulness meditation. The other component that I did was gratitude journaling. You can do this exercise where you write a letter to someone in your life that you're really grateful for, which will inevitably make you just weep hot tears because you're like “I'm so thankful.” So you can do exercises like that.But really the day-to-day practice that I did and that people recommend is mindfulness meditation. In particular, a lot of the Buddhist teachings in the mindfulness class that I took were really helpful to me. I think often in the day-to-day of life, I get really wrapped up in these negative thought spirals, and it really helped me have a more realistic way of looking at things that were less negative.Fascinating. I always love it when you ask “What's the one simple trick to solving your problem?” It's always just “Oh, you just have to exercise every day. Oh, you just have to meditate”I know! Just completely change your life in every way and spend all your time on self-care.Let's go through some of the other ones. Definitely Extroversion I think is a really interesting one. Again, you have happy introverts in life. You have happy extroverts in life. You wanted to get more extroverted.I think I would still identify as an introvert. It's not like you have to abandon that identity if that's important to you, but really it's about: am I getting enough social connection to fill up that bucket in my life? I really was not. I almost reflexively (even before the pandemic) if people would invite me out for a happy hour or something, I would just reflexively say no. Now as a new parent, I'm kicking myself because I'm never going to get to go to happy hour again. I would kill for a happy hour with people. Please come have happy hour with me.I would just kind of say no because I was like, “Well, I don't know if it's going to be that fun. Who all is going to be there?” I was doing these cost-benefit analyses. I found that once I actually forced myself and I was like “Okay, I'm actually going to go out a lot. I'm actually going to socialize. I'm going to do improv. I'm going to go to Sailing Club.” Once I go to these things and do them, I actually do feel happier. I felt better afterward, even if I wasn't in the mood to go beforehand.Again, you took some incredibly extreme steps over the course of this. People should consult a doctor before joining an improv group. But you went ahead and did that.Yeah. Improv was probably the scariest thing for me to try. But it was also the most efficacious, I would say.Really?Yeah, because it is such good practice with so many things that bother neurotic, introverted control freaks. It's basically shattering the pretty little world that you live in, if you're like me. It's a completely uncontrolled environment. You don't get a say over what is said or what happens in improv because it's all up to other people. It's a performative thing, which makes me very uncomfortable. I have stage fright. It's silly, and I have issues being silly. It's spontaneous. It is very whimsical. It involves really reading other people very closely, moment to moment, which can also be really challenging if you don't get out much and you are super introverted. So I would say improv just plunges you into figuring out other people all in one go.Amazing. I want to back out a little bit and talk about this book in the context of your previous book. Can we talk a little bit about the distinction between personality and identity? Your previous book, Weird, really honed in on some of the advantages of being weird, being somewhat different than those around you had. It was interesting in this book because you were pursuing qualities that not necessarily made you less weird necessarily, but also made it easier to plug in with other people at times, right? Obviously, these are different things, but you're still a very unique person. You still have a fascinating background. I don't think any part of this book really comes across as you losing anything. It's interesting to just have this book and it just in perspective of your previous one, just because it seems like it's an interesting way to perceive working on yourself without changing yourself too fundamentally.Yeah, that's an interesting point. I think, honestly, what this helped me to do is to embrace the positive things about being weird or my unusual identity. For people who haven't read my previous book or don't know who I am, I am a Russian immigrant and I grew up in West Texas. That element of me was like in this book, Weird, where wrote about other people and how being different from other people around you can be both a source of pain and a source of strength.I think now I am better able to focus on the source of strength element of this because I am less sensitive by virtue of being less neurotic to the slight microaggressions that you sometimes get if you don't totally belong in your milieu. A lot of the other people who were “weird” that I interviewed, picked up on.There's a scene in the book where I describe going to a bar and the bartender weirdly asked me if I'm always alone. It sent me on this spiral of like, what's wrong with me? Like why would someone ask me if I'm always alone. That's so weird. I was like, was my outfit really bad? Do I look like I'm homeless? I just sort of started spiraling, you know, but that kind of thing honestly happens a lot less since I started doing this. I feel like, now, I would respond to that with “Nope, just for the moment” and not think much of it. I don't know. So it gave me some perspective on my weirdness, I guess.That's fascinating. Again, I really enjoyed the book because it talks about a lot of effective ways to change elements of people's personalities that they might want to adjust. In personality, it just seems like there's a lot of pseudoscience. There's a lot of rumors. There are a lot of things that don't work. What are some of the things that you looked into that never really panned out, or things that aren't as effective as people might think at changing their personality?Oh, good question. So for me, for Openness to experiences, a big suggestion is traveling. A lot of the studies on increasing openness suggest that you travel. I definitely have had travel experiences where they've totally opened up my mind and I've been like “Whoa, man,” and had all these ideas and felt more creative afterward.But for this book, I went to Lisbon, Portugal, which has completely exploded as a travel destination recently. I really am not kidding when I say that if you walk around the streets of Lisbon, it's pretty rare to actually hear Portuguese. Mostly, I heard Australians, British people and people from other Western European countries who were like tourists. I was obviously also a tourist, so I'm not saying that it's wrong to be a tourist or that it's bad. But there's something about it that didn't work on me. I just felt like I was at Disneyland or something. I was like, “Okay, now we're all going to this church. Now we're all looking at this thing.” It didn't feel, I don't know, I guess very genuine. Whatever the sojourner effect is supposed to be didn't work on me.That's interesting. With the openness to experience element, you wrote a little bit about how there are some people for whom this is just a bolt from the blue. They have an experience, and it permanently changes their personality forever. They've been studied a little bit, but that is the exception to the rule in many ways.Yeah. So there's this guy who wrote this book, Quantum Change, which is a very weird book. He interviewed people who said their personalities did change after some epiphany or something happened. And these epiphanies were really weird. They happened in all sorts of circumstances. Some of them were cleaning their toilets. Some of them were smoking pot or doing whatever. A lot of it was rock bottom type stuff, like “I was an alcoholic” type thing. But that, I would say, is the exception. For the people who I interviewed for this book (who changed their personalities), it was more of a methodical pursuit of something over time. They had to build and build and build towards something rather than just snap, I'm different now.Interesting. One of the ones that you wrote about, Conscientiousness, You approached somewhat with trepidation because you scored very high on Conscientiousness already, right?Yes. Yeah.So it also seems that Conscientiousness is (based on what you just said) one of the harder ones to change. If you have to be conscientious about changing your personality, it's tough to become more Conscientious, you know?Yeah, and one thing that really seemed to make the difference for people…I interviewed one woman who really wanted to start a business, but she was not very self-directed, I guess is the best way to put it. She just wasn't really a natural self-starter, so she didn't know how to get up and go and do something like that. Then I interviewed another guy who really wanted to go to grad school for psychology, but he got to college without ever having written a paper before, and he never studied. He actually bought a book called How to Make A's because he did not know how to make A's. One thing that really made the difference for folks like that who are like “I don't know what I'm doing” is having a big goal that was really, really important to them. It was like the big project that they were working toward.What research tells us is that having these personal projects that are really important to you can really inspire personality change when it gets really challenging. Having a good career in academia was just so important to this guy that it didn't matter to him that he wasn't really the typical candidate for that thing. For the woman who wanted to start a business, she had ended up in a dead-end job and she really did not want to return to that. So they both had these fires under them. They were like, “I'm going to achieve this thing and it is going to require conscientiousness.” So that is what kept them going.Yeah, I really identified with that chapter just because (not to talk down a previous version of myself too much) I was occasionally living the dissolute drunken journalist lifestyle. Then, I started writing a daily newsletter and at a certain point, that really does give you a long-term daily obligation that was fairly instrumental to my own Conscientiousness. I really identified with that chapter and those folks who managed to get a specific goal to change them up, you know?Yeah. Yeah. There was actually another dissolute drunken journalist in that chapter who was actually one of the most remarkable transformations of all the people I talked to. He did, he was drinking so much, like a case of beer a day, basically. Then the pandemic started and he actually didn't have an obligation. It was a lack of an obligation. He got laid off when the pandemic started and he was like, “Oh, am I just going to drink the pandemic away? I need to have some sort of structure or something that I'm doing that isn't this.” So that was, weirdly, what clicked for him. It doesn't always have to be work, but it often is.I feel like there was this trend for a while: there was a lot of work coming out that was very, very clearly heavily influenced by the pandemic. I do not describe this work as heavily influenced by the pandemic because it's very clearly very resident beyond simply that era. That being said, the pandemic has come up a lot.People sometimes just needed a big break, a bolt from the blue, something that shook them out of their daily lives to change up one or more of their personality traits. How much is that a factor in this? I know in your own experience, it came up to some extent. Big life changes come around all the time, it doesn't have to just be a pandemic, but how do those give us opportunities to change who we are?Yeah, there's a lot of interesting research on this actually about how turning points or breaking points can be like a good time to start something new. I know that a lot of people don't keep their New Year's resolutions, but it's actually a good thing to make them. The reason why we pick the first of the year is because it's turning over a new leaf. It's nice to have those clean breaks sometimes.I'm not saying that the pandemic was a good thing because it was a nice reset moment for us. But it did play a resetting role for me. It really gave me time to think about what it is that I want and like what's standing in my way. You do get trapped in your routine — commuting to work, at the office all day, commuting back, now I'm too tired and I don't want to go back out, I'm just going to sit here and have my wine and watch my TV.I think just having a break in that routine is what shifted it for me.Fascinating. There's one last one that we haven't really talked too much about: Agreeableness. What did you find with this? Again, this was a category that you didn't score particularly low on, but you still had a few opportunities to try to shake up your numbers a bit.Yeah. I think one thing with Agreeableness that I learned is that there's a lot of room for deepening the connections that you already have. It's true that I didn't get out and meet a ton of people, but I also was getting in a lot of fights with my friends. I sometimes found that when I was having conversations, they weren't very deep or they were surface-y. That would annoy me, then it would make me not want to have any more conversations. One thing that I did that was really helpful for that was go to this conversation workshop in London. This woman, Georgie Nightingale taught us strategies for having deeper and more interesting conversations.One tip that I will share here is to ask someone what something meant to them. Instead of collecting facts (when you're asking someone how was your day, how did this go, how did that go, what airline did you take to get here) ask why was that important to you. Or why was that meaningful to you? That will generally lead you into a more interesting tangent. Though, it can be initially a little bit awkward than this is where you're from, this is what airline you took, this is how many pieces of luggage you packed, the typical third degree we give people.Got it. All right. I will take that advice — specifically, what did making this book mean to you?This book made me really happy. I felt like it gave me a reason to break out of some of my habits that I didn't love. There are some habits that I have kept up. I'm just really glad that I did it before I had a baby.Yeah. I really enjoyed reading it because it felt very intentional. It was a chance to do work on oneself, but also getting into the data of why this is the way it is. What have you held onto from this process? I know that when you wrote the article in The Atlantic a few years ago, you mentioned that you dropped a few of the habits but what have you still stuck with?One thing I have stuck with is that I've realized that when I am feeling down or depressed or out of sorts, what I should do is actually connect with people and not disconnect. I often thought that I needed more alone time because I'm feeling sad. But actually, what I often need in those moments is more time with other people. That has flipped my approach to a lot of things now where I actually seek out more socializing and more interaction whenever I'm feeling a little bit withdrawn if that makes sense.That's really interesting. Is there anything that you tried that you were like, “Oh, this is nice, but I don't need to be this open to experience.” Is there anything that you dropped off from?Yeah, there was this thing I did in the Neuroticism chapter that involved noting and noting is very weird. It's like where you make note of what you're doing, like thinking, seeing. For example, I'm seeing a red bird or I'm thinking that this is strange or I'm hearing yelling or whatever. I have not kept up with noting. I always found it really weird and hard and I have not been doing it.That's interesting. Yeah. I don't, I don't think building some dissociation into my day is a good thing for Walter. So I can understand that. Yeah. Again Olga, thank you so much for coming on. I guess I'll give you just the floor here a little bit. Why don't you tell folks a little bit about the book, where they can find it and where they can find you?Yeah. Um, the book is Me, But Better. You can find it wherever books are sold March 11th. I'm Olga Khazan and I have a sub stack under my same name, olgakhazan.substack.com. I also write for The Atlantic and you can find a lot of my writing there.Yeah. I will just personally say, I really dig the substack. I like your work there a lot. It was really fun to follow some of the work that you were doing on the book from there and definitely strongly endorse it. Also, The Atlantic. Pretty good too. Very good.Yeah. And The Atlantic is also good!All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on.Thank you so much for the kind words and thanks for having me.Edited by Crystal Wang.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Olivia Walch, author of the brand-new book Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It.Olivia's a good friend of mine and I've been hearing about her research and her work for years, and now she's finally got a whole book diving into why ideal sleep is more than just the eight hours number we hear so much about. It's a delightful book with all sorts of cool insights that can have major impacts on your life and health. We spoke about the human body's numerous circadian rhythms, why sleep regularity is more important than sleep duration, and why permanent daylight saving time is a bad idea. Walch can be found at oliviawalch.com and the book can be found wherever books are sold.This interview has been condensed and edited. Olivia, thank you so much for coming on.I'm so delighted to be here.You are the author of the brand-new book Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It. It's a really, really fun book. It covers a lot of the science behind sleep and actually has some pretty surprising stuff in there for folks who are interested in their own sleep health.You have a really interesting story about how you even fell into being interested in the science behind sleep. You did a sleep study at some point in grad school that changed your life, it sounds like.Well, you knew me before then. We were in college together.Each diabolically bad at sleeping.I would give each of us a failing grade — you maybe a lower grade than me. I was bad, but you were exploring new horizons of bad, like with polyphasic sleep.I tried it once. It was such a bad idea.Maybe a D, D-minus. I knew when I went to grad school something had to change. I was not sleeping; I was not making new memories; I was getting sick. I got MRSA in college and I wonder all the time, was it because my immune system was like a frail Cheeto trying to hold the door closed to the germs? But at the time, I thought at college, you have to do everything. You have to be in every club and miss no opportunity for an experience. And I now remember no experiences from that time period.In grad school, I decided I was going to sleep more. I did, but I didn't actually notice that huge of a difference with fewer things filling my schedule, even though I was sleeping more. It was better, but it wasn't that much better. It took a sleep study in which I had to keep a really regular bedtime and researchers were spying on me. They would know if I didn't, because I was wearing a device, ye olde Jawbone, which is not even a thing anymore. For months, I went to bed at 11:30 every single night.The changes were so profound. I didn't just instantly fall asleep at 11:30, though that did happen. I got faster, I lost weight, skin conditions cleared up. In every dimension, my life was better. And the thing that had shifted was not really sleep duration, but sleep regularity.You get at this idea early in the book. There's this very common number that everybody associates with the right thing to do about sleep, which is that you should sleep for eight hours. The book goes the next level deeper, looks at some of the other dimensions of sleep, and it turns out that eight hours is good, that's a good thought to keep in your mind, but it's really the rhythm. What is the conceit here? Why are rhythms important when it comes to this stuff?Our understanding of sleep health is so fixated on duration that there's a creepypasta on Reddit that goes, "Oh, these Russians were kept awake and they went crazy." The creepypasta has always been funny to me because it's like, "Yeah, and after five days of no sleep, they started eating their own organs." (Spoilers for the Russian sleep experiment creepypasta.) Yet we've kept lots of people up for five days and they don't start eating their organs. We have this conception in our minds that losing sleep duration is going to be really bad. It's not good, but it also doesn't make you self-cannibalize after five days of no sleep.That definition of sleep health is woefully inadequate. The movement in the sleep field is higher dimensional. There are more things that matter to sleep health. There's this big, long list of things. People say you should think about how many times you wake up in the middle of the night, and you should think about how alert you feel during the day.All of those are great, but they're not memorable. People don't keep two things in their head, let alone five. I'm trying to get people to keep two, which is duration and regularity, as the latitude and longitude of sleep health. You don't say Madrid and New York are close together just because they have the same latitude; longitude also matters. You shouldn't say somebody who sleeps eight hours a night is healthy if they have horrible regularity. That's a case where they are probably pretty far from health, just like New York and Madrid are pretty far from each other.A lot of this comes down to circadian rhythms. What are they in your view? What kind of bodily processes are governed by them?The whole shebang. The problem with circadian rhythms is that their UI is terrible. People talk about the circadian rhythm, but that's not really right because circadian rhythms are plural. Sleep is under the subhead of circadian rhythms, but so is everything else in your body: when you're strongest, when you metabolize food, when your immune system peaks, when you repair DNA. There's this real problem. I think that because circadian rhythms are kind of everything, people just say, "You know, the rhythms." This leads to everyone who doesn't study this all day, every day, walking around having no idea what they are and just thinking it's probably the same thing as sleep.Your body has an internal clock, and it schedules things according to when it thinks you need to do more or less of them. That clock is set by your light exposure, and in modern life, we get light whenever we want it, which is not particularly traditional or natural.Circadian rhythms developed as a process because we live on Earth, right? We know there's a certain amount of daylight and when certain things should happen, and we evolved specifically to have a circadian rhythm.Yes. The circadian rhythm is so tuned to Earth that if you put us on a planet with 28-hour days, we probably wouldn't be able to adjust. We would basically continue to have close to a 24-hour period in our rhythms that would continue, even though the sun on this planet would be up and down at different times. It's baked into us, and it's the case that there's just stuff in your body at some times that isn't there at other times. The hormone melatonin, for example. If I made you spit into a tube right now, you would not have melatonin in your spit.We're speaking in the middle of the afternoon. It's very, very bright outside.No melatonin. But 10 hours from now? Different story. The thing to imagine is just a bunch of switches in your body getting flipped on and off depending on the time of day, which has massive implications for health, drug efficacy, how you feel, and people have lost their connection to that. Number one, we can have light whenever we want it, so our rhythms are squished relative to where they otherwise would be. But number two, I think we don't have a great way of talking about rhythmic health, which my book tries to address. I'm sure there's much better I can do and other people can do in the future, but this is my first stab at it.You get at this inflection point where so much of these functions are the result of, if not tens of thousands, then millions of years of evolutionary processes really locking us into a day/night process. Then you have the emergence of electricity, and a lot of your book reflects on how that's actually changed the way our bodies work, in ways we wouldn't ordinarily expect. What are some of those ways?I would say signs of rhythms having different effects on your body in the winter versus summer. Any study that reports on those, I'm always very cautious about, because I was involved in a study where we looked at Twitter patterns over the course of the year. We wanted to know if people tweeted differently at different times of the year in a way that reflected the sun and circadian rhythms, and we saw this pretty incredible trend where things seemed to really shift around the spring. Daylight saving time is happening then, the sun is changing, so you think, okay, maybe it's related to the sun.Then we dug a little more closely into the data and saw that the entire effect was just driven by people going on spring break. You would see that people tweeted later when they were on break because they were sleeping in. The fact that we have light available to us whenever we want it and we're not just sitting around in the dark at 6 p.m. in December with nothing to do means that we're in a sort of perpetual summer. We have light as late as we want, as long as we want, and that's stepping on these natural rhythms that would be emerging in the absence of that light.The title of the book is Sleep Groove, and sleep groove is actually a thing you talk about quite a bit in the book. It's getting locked into a really strong, robust, resilient rhythm, and there are lots of advantages to having that. What are some of the advantages that you have by having that rhythm, and what are some things that can go wrong if you don't?I would say you die sooner. This is a brand-new result, that sleep regularity predicts dying better than sleep duration, but it does. Again, this definition of sleep health being how long you sleep would say, okay, shoot for eight hours on average, it doesn't matter when, and you're good.But if you actually look to see what predicts whether you die, the people who have the worst sleep regularity are highly correlated with dying younger, and it keeps coming out. This is in the last 18 months that connections are coming out between sleep regularity and hypertension, diabetes, mood disorders. The data was all there, but people weren't really looking at sleep regularity. We also didn't have as textured tools for defining sleep regularity as we do now, so that's another reason why it's coming out. But things that can go wrong without sleep regularity are all those bad things I listed.I should say that those are all correlations. You could say, well, maybe stressed people die earlier, and they're also sleeping irregularly as a sign of their stress. Except we also have studies where you put people on weird light schedules and you can watch a melatonin rhythm that's really robust just go away. They go 24 hours without making melatonin, which is weird. You've basically flattened their rhythm altogether.The mental image I always have in my mind for modern life is that we've taken rhythms that would be really high and pronounced — like, hey, now's the time to fix your DNA so you don't get cancer. Let's fix all our DNA right now. It's really clear period for fixing DNA — and you've stepped on it. Now it's like, well, I don't know. I guess it's the time to fix DNA? Maybe I'll do a little bit of that.The science is emerging. I don't want to overstate it, but I think there's a strong theoretical case for why the quashing of circadian amplitude is tied to a lot of bad things. The good thing is that more melatonin means you sleep better, feel better — basically my life after doing that one study.What's a situation where you have a strong circadian amplitude? A lot of light during the day? How do you get there?You do the same exact thing every day. I should say, I'm going to speak from a theoretical perspective because a lot of the experiments haven't been run yet. It's my collaborators and me who are calling for amplitude to be the new thing we go after, because sleep regularity is just circadian amplitude wearing glasses and a mustache. They pick up the same thing.What the theory says will get you the maximum circadian amplitude is to have a super bright day and get tons of daylight during the day, and then have a really, really dark night, and copy and paste that over and over again. That's basically it. I'm always think I should add other things for people to do, but it boils down to that.One of the challenges why people haven't discovered this on their own is that that's actually really hard to do in practice. Light at night is super fun, and we also have to work, and often work is indoors where there's just not as much sunlight.It really does seem like a problem of modernity. We've always had a way to illuminate the night, for all intents and purposes, but there's a vast gulf of difference between a candle and an incandescent light bulb, and then there's an even bigger difference between an incandescent light bulb and a full room of fluorescent light. There's been this subtle shift that we didn't notice over time, but our bodies did.You're speaking my language. This is exactly it: the creeping of light into every aspect of our life. Also, because it literally doesn't have mass, it feels immaterial, right? What, the photons are going to get you?And I don't think they will on a short time span. You can absolutely have a bad night of sleep. You can absolutely have disrupted sleep. People cross time zones. But it does add up over a lifespan, which is why we see sleep regularity being a better predictor of mortality than sleep duration. If you're highly irregular over your whole life, all these rhythms that would otherwise have been high metabolism, high DNA repair, robust ability to sleep, become flat and crappy and you get an accumulation of risk.So, a lot of what we've talked about is that there are lots of negative things when you're out of that appropriately phased kind of sleep. There are actually some really good things about being very attuned to that, too. You write in the book about athletics, about medicine. What are some of the ways we can actually gain quite a bit through knowing about this?By having a better sense of what our circadian time is. Conflict of interest disclosure, I do have a startup that tries to do this, but we'll be able to time drugs so that they're maximally effective and as least toxic as they can be.People sometimes go, okay, timing drugs as in you take sleep medication before you go to sleep. Sure, okay. But what if there were a drug that sometimes made your tumor shrink and at other times made it grow faster? That's a paper that came out in the last year. People aren't thinking about this. They're thinking about a 10% variation over the course of the day. They're not thinking about how this person's glioblastoma treatment didn't work because they took dexamethasone at the wrong time, and they died months earlier.I think the simplicity of the idea has started to act as a reason for people to not do it. They think, well, if timing actually mattered, somebody would have figured it out already. I won't be the one who wastes a bunch of time rediscovering what everyone else has. My stance is that we're just beginning to scratch the surface of all the things that can be controlled by timing, and the magnitude of the effects we can see.Imagine the drug I mentioned that accelerated tumor growth sometimes and squished it at others is standard of care. Everybody gets it with this particular type of brain tumor that it was studied in. Imagine you're testing a new drug and oh, it seems to work in these patients but it doesn't work in these other patients. Must not be a very good drug, so it gets ditched. It could be that that entire efficacy difference was driven by when they were taking this standard-of-care drug that everybody takes according to the clock, according to their body's clock. If you could just control for that, you could get more drugs making it through clinical trials.You even made a point that there's a good shift happening between notes saying you should take this pill in the morning, you should take the pill at night, and changing that to say you should take this pill after waking up or take this pill before you go to sleep. It's getting better at adequately describing the bodily conditions you should take pharmaceuticals under.Right. If you're a shift worker, you could be waking up at 3 p.m., for instance, and morning could be the worst time for you. You should take it when you wake up. Then again, if you're a shift worker, your rhythms are so funky that — I might be biased here — you should be using Olivia's cool app to track your circadian rhythms and know when to take all these different things.But yes, circadian medicine is all about timing your pills before you go to bed or after you wake up. It's also this idea of introducing grooves where we've removed the groove. An example would be that you have a sick kid and you can't feed them, so you put them on total parenteral nutrition, or TPN. They're getting fed through an IV, and the standard for that is to either do it overnight or do it just continuously, 24 hours a day. But if you think about it, if our whole bodies are rhythmic and we expect some things at some times and not at other times, and you're feeding them constantly, that's like being in the light all the time, which we would consider to be torture. If you put somebody in constant light, they are miserable.These researchers just changed it so they gave TPN only during the day, when the kids are awake and their metabolism is up and running. They were able to leave the hospital on average four days earlier because they weren't being force fed like a foie gras goose overnight. So, it's not just sleep grooves: it's food grooves, it's activity grooves, it's mood grooves, it's all these things. Acknowledging that they're rhythmic will lead to people being healthier.The medical stuff can get a bit in the weeds, but I thought it was really informative when you talked about U.S. Olympians going to Japan. You reflected on when folks went to Japan and how they trained there. There's actually a lot of performance that was hypothetically not being unlocked because people weren't being attuned to their circadian peaks. Do you want to talk a little about that?I was reading what people who are Olympians posted on their Instagram, imagining that we were friends. I saw somebody in the weight lifting category be like, "Can't wait to go to Tokyo in two days to compete!" They were fully adjusted or entrained to U.S. time, and they were going to do this trip to Tokyo that was going to massively disrupt their circadian rhythms. Then they were going to compete shortly after landing.Probably the reason for that is because it's really expensive to go and leave your life for a long period of time, and weight lifting isn't the moneybags, the dollar sign, of Olympic sports. But that probably wasn't the best for optimizing performance, to wait until right before you're supposed to go on and then try and lift something really hugely heavy — though it could have been.The thing is, when you travel, you get tired and you undergo jet lag because your light exposure is changing, but you also have a circadian rhythm in performance where people tend to do best in the evening. Around 5 or 6 p.m., you're strong and fast and can run far and lift heavy things. If in Japan, you were supposed to compete at 10 a.m., maybe what you want to do is not adjust and be really careful about staying on your old time zone for the first day you're there, so that your body is at 6 p.m. during Japan's local time of 10 a.m.When it's most suited to compete.Exactly, to lift a big, heavy thing.Exciting. You wrote a little about how there are two big peaks for performance over the course of a given day. What are those?People tend to be alert in the morning, and then they have a second wave of alertness as the day winds down. The way we think about that is that there are two forces that combine to make you feel sleepy: There's how much hunger for sleep you've built up, and then there's your circadian clock basically shaping the gravity. How heavy is gravity for you right now?In the morning, after you get over this initial wave of grogginess, you have the first wave of alertness and that's because you don't have any hunger for sleep. Imagine you're biking, and you just started biking so you're feeling fresh, you're okay. You haven't accumulated feeling tired from biking. In the middle of the day, though, you have accumulated some fatigue. You've been doing stuff with your brain and the circadian clock is not saying it's a great time to be alert. People often get sleepy in the middle of the day, like you would be sleepy if you'd been biking for four hours.Then later in the day, the circadian clock comes in and says it's time for you to be awake. You need to get your act together before the sun goes down or you might die. That's like the road you're biking on sloping downward. It becomes easier. It doesn't take as much effort to stay awake; it doesn't take as much effort to pedal. Your circadian clock is like, great, be alert. Do stuff in the latter part of your day up until close to your habitual bedtime, when the road starts to swoop up again.Then you basically hit the wall of, it's 3 a.m. I want to die. Why am I staying up super late in the year 2009 next to my good friend Walter? What are we doing? You push through that and you get on the other side, and the road starts to slant down again.It was really cool to see, because this speaks to my experience of being sleep deprived and going over the swing set. It's really cool that circadian rhythm still holds, and that's why you get that second wind in the morning and sleep deprivation madness or whatever you want to call it. You do still see that swing hold even if you get more and more sleep weight accumulating.Exactly.I want to talk about some of the studies that you covered, because they're very, very interesting, but I also want to talk about some policy implications. Two things stuck out to me. One was the conversation about daylight saving time and potentially going either permanent DST or permanent standard time. The other one that was super interesting was basically how teenagers react to light and how we set school schedules. What are your insights on those two potential policy questions?Let's do DST first. This also has horrible UI. Nobody can figure out what they're saying when they talk about DST. So, standard time is brighter mornings, darker evenings. Standard time is what we're on in the winter when everyone's depressed and they're like, "It's 5 p.m. and it's dark. Stupid, stupid DST." That's actually standard time that's causing that. DST is darker mornings, lighter at night. DST is what we're on in the summer when we have lots of light even at 9 p.m. It's really bright at night.The thing most circadian scientists are going to tell you is that permanent standard time is best, then the current system where we switch, and then the last and least preferable is permanent DST. You might think, okay, but why isn't it just better to not switch? There's this penalty of everyone jet lagging themselves when we wake up an hour earlier or have to stay up an hour later when we do these transitions in the spring and the fall. The reason is because having the light late into the day in the summer, and especially having light in the afternoons and evenings in the winter and really, really dark mornings in the winter, is worse than the jet lag from transitioning. If we did permanent DST, where we have really dark mornings in the winter, it wouldn't just be a couple days of us all feeling jet lagged. It would be this chronic buildup of a messed up groove.One of the reasons why it's hard for people to concisely say why permanent DST is bad is because it's about rhythmic health. It's been argued, hey, if you want to maximize the amount of hours that we have really bright light during the daytime periods where people are normally awake, DST is really good for that, because you have light until super late. Think about the summer.But do we want to maximize that?Exactly, because imagine the case that I alluded to when we were talking about the meal timing thing. If you're in bright light 20 hours a day like people are up in the Arctic, you have bad sleep. It's not because you don't know about blackout curtains; it's because you're not able to adjust to a rhythm that's all bright light, little bit of darkness. What permanent DST does is basically, in the wintertime, it forces a bunch of people to wake up in darkness, or dim light. They then stay in the dark for a really long time, and they get their bright light weighted way on the latter half of their day.I'm going to go into a long analogy, but I promise I'll bring it back down. Imagine a sidewalk with alternating yellow and black squares, and I give you a yellow shoe and a black shoe. I say, yellow shoe steps on the yellow square, black shoe steps on the black square. If it's well sized to your legs, you could just do that. You're like, awesome, this is great. But then I do something where I basically take the yellow squares and scoot them up into the black squares. Then I have this brownish, crappy blurring of light and dark: yellow, black, and the blur. If I go, "Okay, walk on this," what you have to do is take one big step with one foot and a little step with your other, and you have to repeat that over and over again.That's basically what DST is doing to you in the winter. If we were to go to that in the winter, you'd wake up in the darkness, but then you'd get light later in the day. It makes it so that your rhythms are thrown off. You wake up with a bunch of melatonin in your body. It's like everybody's popping melatonin pills first thing, if you were to do permanent DST.If you're sitting here thinking, "I'm not convinced by her arguments around stepping on yellow tiles with yellow shoes and black tiles with black shoes," the most compelling reason is the fact that we literally tried this. We tried DST in the winter. We didn't even make a year. Russia tried it in the last decade — they made it three years and they bailed. People have tried DST in the winter and we all think it sucks. Meanwhile, Arizona has been on standard time all year since the 1960s and they're going strong.They seem really thrilled with their situation in Arizona.They're pretty happy. So, moral of the story, the current system would be better than having super dark mornings in the winter, which is what permanent DST would be. But I don't really care that much because I'm so convinced that if we try this again, we'll be like Russia in 2014 and bail. We'll be like us in the '70s and bail. We just need to, as a generation, collectively experience it and realize, oh yeah, this is why DST sucks.The old knowledge has been lost. We must relearn it.We'll relearn it and we'll say, no, we're never going to make this mistake again. And then in 50 years, we'll make it again.People always want the optimization of, I want more sleep. I want eight hours of sleep. I want the most sleep I can possibly get, or I want the most light I can possibly get. It seems like that's a trap. I completely understand why people get into that position, because I like light and I like sleep, but just realistically, if you're seeing how much of this governs the rhythm of lots of different processes that are more sophisticated than just enjoying seeing bright things, it's a real shock to the system.Human brains are just not wired to think rhythmically. It's like if you're in a math class and you're learning about Fourier series, to go extremely niche, really fast. It's not intuitive. People are wired to think, "More of thing good," and we're just less wired to think, well, it's good at some times and bad at other times.Very briefly, then, should kids be going to school as early as they currently go to school?No. At the same time, we also shouldn't make it so late, because what would happen if we made it really late is kids would just stay up later. There are diminishing returns, but now you have kids who are waking up at 5:30. That's absolutely what it would feel like for me to wake up at 3:30. It's cruel to them. There's this idea that, oh, we'll do DST. We'll do permanent DST so we don't have to switch, and then we'll also make school times an hour later.You've basically just got us back to where we started. You've made it so that they're going to be functionally popping a melatonin pill in the morning, just based on how much more melatonin is in their body when they wake up, and then you're letting them sleep in another hour. You cannot make both of those changes and act like you've changed anything. You at best maintain the status quo. My personal vote is we should do permanent standard time or keep the current system and make it so that schools for kids start later.The book is full of really, really interesting studies. Some of them are fascinating, recent, breaking studies that, like you mentioned earlier, reveal incredible things about the link between these biorhythms as well as pharmaceuticals and things like that. Some of them, however, are from a more swashbuckling age of discovery, and you cover a lot of really interesting sleep studies from the earliest days of sleep research. Do you have any favorites?In the book it probably comes across that I am so enamored with these old sleep studies, in part because they really underscore this point that if our definition of sleep health is only duration, it's insufficient. There are a bunch of peer-reviewed papers that went, yeah, this guy said he didn't want to sleep anymore, so he just didn't sleep for a week and we watched him. Actually, that's maybe my favorite. There's this guy who comes into a lab and is like, humans don't need to sleep and I can prove it. And then he just doesn't.They went, whoa, let him cook?Yeah, he might be on to something. In the paper, they're like, we tried to stop him but he said he was going to do it anyway, so we gave him a typewriter to see how bad he got at typing. The answer is, he got so bad at typing so fast that he just went, I can't do this. They didn't make him type anymore because it was too hard for his eyes. He got really snippy. People tend to hallucinate when you keep them up all night. They get paranoid for days and days. But at the same time, he was functioning. He was able to, on the last day of the study, write a vaguely sexist acrostic poem. I have tried to understand this thing. It's confusing, but you get the sense that it's not positive toward women.The original no-sleep creepypasta.Seriously. Obviously, I'm glad we don't do studies like this now. We have human subject protections. Why would you need to run the study? They did that in the '30s and '60s, and it was weird. But the data's been out there for so long. The creepypasta levels of sleep deprivation, people can survive. You should not do it. You should absolutely not do it. It's a bad idea. But it's not an instantly fatal thing, like you pulled an all-nighter so watch out.The punchline is, unfortunately for human brains, which want very rapid feedback and instant gratification, the way to have sleep health is not something acute, like the absence of these all-nighters that are terrible for you, but rather the constant maintenance of healthy rhythms that are on the time scale of weeks, months and years, as opposed to hacks that you can do in one hour of your day.The book is called Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It. There are so many fascinating things in here, Olivia. Why don't you tell readers a little about where they can find the book and you.Sleep Groove is a book about the emerging science of sleep regularity and how it matters so much to your overall health, well-being, and how you feel at 3 a.m. in the morning. You probably feel pretty bad; my book will explain why. You can find it where books are sold, including Amazon and your local independent bookseller. There's also an audiobook coming out next month.Oh, fun. That's great. Thanks so much for coming on, Olivia.Thanks for having me.Edited by Susie Stark.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Stephen Follows, author of The Horror Movie Report.Stephen and I go back a ways, he's a pop culture data journalist I really respect and you've seen him in the newsletter lately based on his great work on stuff like Hallmark movies. He's out with a really fun new book diving into horror movies, one of the more exciting genres in the film industry these days. We spoke about the rise of horror as a genre, its unique relationship with audiences, and how certain trends have evolved over time.Follows can be found at his website, and the book can be found at HorrorMovieReport.com.This interview has been condensed and edited. Stephen, thank you so much for coming on.Thanks for inviting me. It's always a joy to have a chat with a fellow nerd who likes to go as deep as we do on this stuff.You have this really interesting new book out called The Horror Movie Report: The Ultimate Data Analysis of Horror Films. This thing's amazing. We're going to get into it. But before we dive in, I'd love to start off by hearing about how you'd describe the work you do. Can you tell folks a little about your history as a writer, blogger and analyst?Definitely. I kind of came to this in a strange way. I always knew I wanted to do film and thinking, but I didn't know what that meant. I was a teenager, and everyone told me to go and study thinking, study science and do film on the side. So I did the opposite, because I'm a contrarian. I went to film school and went down a path of writer/producer, and I set up a production company. It still runs, but is now doing more advertising for the charity sector in the UK.I'm still involved with that, but it meant that as my stuff moved away from film, I missed being connected to the film industry. I started to use my thinking principles and maybe 15 years ago I started studying film through the lens of data. I have no training in data. I stopped studying math at about 15, but I have an aptitude for it, and I enjoy it. Not many people do in film. I thought, oh, this is fun. This is a place for me. I started blogging about that, and some in the film industry like it. Not many people run away to do the accounts for the circus. It's nice to have a place.Then that evolved. I've done stuff within gender and other forms of inequality, and things within business to help filmmakers' profitability — but also crazy things, like looking at which Bond film mentions its own title most frequently in the dialogue. Which I don't think you're going to guess.GoldenEye is my only guess.It's a good guess, and you're on the right path, but it's the wrong answer. The answer is Moonraker. You were right to think object instead of character.But that led me on, and I now work for Guinness World Records as a side gig, finding out movie records. That's the sum total of 20 years of numbers and film fun.I love your work. I've always enjoyed your work quite a bit, and I've done a lot of work myself in the pop culture data space and there's not a lot of folks in here. Particularly back in the day, there weren't many folks at all, so it was always really cool to see your stuff. It definitely always got me thinking and is really one-of-a-kind.That's nice to say. And I agree; I would often think of an idea, or someone would ask me about an idea, and I'd be like, I wonder if anyone's done that. Then I'd Google it and it would either be you, me and I'd forgotten, or no one's done it. That's great. What a privilege to have a space to actually make some progress in.It's good. Again, I admire your stuff so much, and this is why when you hit me up and mentioned you were working on this project, I was so excited. Horror movies have been one of the biggest success stories of the past couple of years, particularly in the postpandemic box office. They tend to overperform; they tend to get good ROI. We've seen a surge in horror film production and we've seen the market share increase.Can you talk a little bit about why this is historically anomalous? We've always had horror movies, since the beginning of the invention of the medium, but why are we now seeing a bit of an uptick?You're absolutely right. It's way more than an uptick. If we were looking at how many horror films were made last year worldwide, it was over 1,500, whereas around 2000, it was 500-something, and in the 1980s it was below 200. It's really transformed. As you said, not only have the raw numbers gone up, but also has the market share. Now about 12 percent of movies are horror films. That's a large percentage.It's a number of factors. Certainly all genres have grown in raw numbers, because it's easier and cheaper to make a film than ever before. Every device I own has some sort of HD camera on it — you can do it on a doorbell. It's possible to do that. You also have the ubiquity of information. I went to film school in 2001 and there was education from tutors, there were a few hardback books, but that was how you learned how to do stuff. Now there's so much content online telling you amazing stuff from awesome people for free. That has an effect.But that's across all films. With horror itself, the market share growth is, as you said, the more interesting part of it. There are a few factors. One, we're more accepting that a film is a horror film. A film that we might think of as horror now, if it had been made in the '80s, it might've been pitched as a psychological thriller. There's more acceptance; there's no shame in it. People are like, yeah, it's a horror film, whereas in the past they might not have done.There's also that generation that grew up with VHS horror films, The Evil Dead generation — and maybe even the generation after that, when it comes to executives — where people have grown up loving horror, but also knowing that it does well. Therefore, if there's no business shame and there's no art shame and there's no personal shame, why not say, yeah, I'm making a horror.There's still a bit of way to go. The awards are pretty poor for horror, and the trade press doesn't cover it properly. It's still not as fully accepted as other genres, but production-wise and audience-wise, it's really evolved and grown and, in the last 20 years, really matured.It's so funny that you mentioned the award stuff. I remember when Jamie Lee Curtis won her Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, I thought it was actually really special that she took a moment and shouted out the horror fans. That's a constituency in movies that does not get a lot of shout-outs from award stages, but nevertheless really did keep her in business for a few years.And it was keeping her in business because it was delivering to audiences. There's no hiding from that. It's the most audience-connected genre, in my opinion.All my stuff is from raw data and from doing my own research, but sometimes I'll do a bit of Googling around to get a context before or after I do the work. With the awards, I found a few blog articles about how horror does at the Oscars, and all the numbers were wrong. They were all different, and they were different from mine. I was like, what is going on?It turns out there is a very, very small number of horror films that do well at the Oscars. Most of them are quite questionable horrors, as in, is it a horror or not? Silence of the Lambs. Jaws. Those are two films that IMDB says are not horror films. You can argue either way, and it doesn't matter what my opinion is, but there are a few like that. Or Black Swan, which is very much a horror film, but because it's female led and about a female perspective, people often go, “Ah, it's a psychological thriller,” in a very misogynistic way.A small number of films that have outperformed have really changed that data. You end up almost immediately talking about existential questions of what horror is. I love that. That's what the data immediately suggests we should chat about.I want to talk a little more about that audience for horror. You had a stat in here that was really interesting to me about how horror is the only genre where the audiences that actually go to the cinema to watch it are direct reflections of the actual national audience. I know you write about the UK in there, but also in general, one really interesting thing about the cinema is that you do have quote-unquote “four quadrants” for movies. For the most part, you're going to see a gender skew or an age skew in terms of who attends a film. But I'd love to hear you speak to how horror is really one of the most universal genres.It really is. It's interesting, because as you've mentioned, there are a few different ways we can cut up the data. The one way that horror is not like the population is age. It has the largest percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds. If you split them into the different buckets, as they often do, horror has the lowest percentage of people under 18 and the lowest percentage of people over 45, which is fascinating. It's really condensed within your 20s. However, it's a good gender split, and also crucially, in the UK, they do just the most British thing ever and do stats around social status.Interesting.It's a rabbit hole. If ever you're looking for a rabbit hole, Google social status. Everyone's classed into different groups, usually based on the job they do or that their parents did, or whether they went to university — things that are sort of falling apart. But it does mean they put people in different brackets. They do that for all the different audiences because it's part of the cinema business' advertising: They want to know whether to sell Rolex watches or lager. And when you compare it to the UK population, every other genre is posher. To a large degree, things like biographies are unbelievably posher than the average population.Horror is the one that just reflects the public. Also, almost every genre has a very strong correlation between what critics think of the movie and whether it makes money or not. In almost all genres, it makes sense; if you can make the film better, according to critics, you'll make more money. Horror has little to no correlation — functionally irrelevant correlation. Critics are irrelevant. Horror always gets poor scores from audiences, even, but I think that's because it delivers something different. It still is a film and it still is in the film genre space, but it's the weird cousin that's there delivering because it doesn't have the snootiness. It doesn't have the credibility. It only has the fact that it delivers, so when it does deliver, it does stunningly well. And the audience has a different criteria for what they'll put up with, whether they'll tolerate junkie effects or a bad idea or bad acting. I love that. It has its own identity.I love it, too. I'm glad that you mentioned that, because when I was doing my book, I was really interested in horror. I'm not good at horror movies; I am very easily scared and I don't have fun during them. I'll see them if I'm dragged to by my husband, but nevertheless, I am a gigantic weenie. There's no personal affection for this genre, but I was obsessed with it because, to your point, the first thing that people start messing around with when a new medium is invented is spooky stuff, right?When the novel was invented, you were very quickly after that getting stuff like Dracula, or Frankenstein. Once the medium has ossified, you start getting people experimenting with scares. Some of the earliest films that we have, whether it's Nosferatu or things like that, are people trying to spook one another. It's almost like the stuff that came before the dinosaurs.You're absolutely right. What's fascinating about it is that as soon as there's a new medium, people use it to scare other people, but then they take a long time to acknowledge that. The idea of a horror film as a nomenclature, as a name for it, didn't emerge until the early '30s, when you started to have universal monsters. We had horror films before that, but they didn't call them that. They might be called Gothic. So, there is a very quick move to scare ourselves, but then there's a very slow realization of acceptance, of publicly going, yeah, I don't mind being scared. Which is fascinating, isn't it?It is. It's so cool, and it's cool seeing it replicate itself. Online, you used to have jump-scare videos as some of the first stuff. Some of the earliest viral videos were that. Even with podcasts, a lot of true crime podcasts are horror podcasts.One hundred percent.There's another thing you write about in here that I genuinely just love, which is that there's no link between a filmmaker's experience and the actual profitability of the horror film. This is one of the things that makes this genre so cool, and I'd love to hear your perspective on it and some of the data from it. It's a really approve-yourself kind of genre. A lot of the time, you can show up with a little bit of money and some corn syrup and red food coloring, and they've been really special.Totally. It is the most accessible genre, partly because it has the lowest cost but also because it doesn't need gatekeepers. It doesn't need stars. It doesn't need visual effects. So it's immediately open to more people, but then on the other end, the audience is also willing to go with something great. They're not going to go, “Well, who made it?” They'll just go, “Ah, that was great.” You're right.I looked at the correlation between the number of films that someone had made before and the profitability of their films. I looked at it for writers, producers, directors, and exec producers. What we found, when we were looking through this, is that with writers, producers and directors, there's little to no correlation. Really. That's staggering when you think about it, because most horror films do nothing — that's what films do — and if you have a lot of microbudget films, that's 1,500 a year and not all of them making money. But the ones that do make money can do staggeringly well. You would imagine that experience is a factor, but it's not.Except for the exec producer. There was a correlation, though it's not the strongest. It's not make-or-break. I don't know which way around that is, whether it's exec producers being very good at spotting the right projects, so they become an identifier, or whether they transform the project and therefore become the transformation.Functionally, it doesn't matter. It's a bit of both: a bit of column A, a bit of column B. The horror producers I've spoken to often say it's a mix of those things, that they're not going to come aboard a bad project. But at the same time, it is about having the right relationships to know how to get distribution or how to retitle it or basically how not to eff up one contract that could ruin everything. Sometimes it is just a steady hand.If you're making a horror film and you've never done it before, I don't see that as any kind of problem, but maybe have at least one voice who's experienced that you can go to — infrequently, so they don't have to do a huge amount. The exec producer is not on set picking up trash.It's almost reminiscent of the Roger Corman film school stuff.Totally. The things that the really experienced person will do are basically, here's the big picture, here are some connections, but the bits the audience is actually going to love if they're given the chance to watch the film — the story, the acting, the moments, the editing, the sound — that's all going to be done by the creatives. And that doesn't matter about your experience.I remember an interview with Wes Craven a long time ago where they said to him, why are there so many bad horror films? And he said, because they're made by people who don't love horror. I've got to say, that's probably true. You can't make it cynically, but if you make it with your passion and heart, you have a good chance. Make a Western or a sports movie with your heart and you're not getting the money back. But if you make a horror film with your heart, there's a chance. I'm not saying there's a big one, but there's a route to success and establishment and franchise and all that.Sam Raimi very notoriously tread that path. Even folks like James Cameron. It's interesting to look at filmmakers who really did make their bones by being very passionate about a horror film and getting it done and learning something very cool.The Terminator might be a horror film. I don't know. It certainly doesn't have the money to be what Terminator 2 is, which is solid action.Absolutely.It's not really sci-fi; there's a bit of sci-fi in it, but it's just a man. It's too cheap to have any of the expensive things you'd expect. It's a torment film, or maybe even a slasher, almost. There is an infamous killer.There's another element on this that I wanted to bring up, which is that you have this really cool stat about horror films and shot length. You were able to compare them to other mediums, and horror films just have so much more room to breathe. Can you speak to that?Before I study something, I tend to have a preconception of what it's going to be, which you can't help because you're around. But what I love is that I'm sometimes completely thrown off-kilter. Then I'm forced to go back and be like, what happened there? Why was I wrong? Is my data wrong? Because, as you know, sometimes when you find that anomalous result, you have to double check or even triple check it.This was one of those things. What I found when I was looking at this was that, unsurprisingly, action and sci-fi films had the shortest shot lengths of about four seconds on average, or something like that. That's short, and that's the whole movie. That was across all films. Drama had the second highest, and it was something like 12, 13, 14 seconds — I can't remember, I don't have it in front of me. But horror was 16 seconds on average per shot.That's a long time. And that's an average. First of all, I thought it was an error and I went through it, but no, this is true. Then I thought about it, and of course it makes perfect sense, because horror is about what you can't see. It's about the lack of control. Action is about sound and fury and it's a firework show. You don't really need to know what's going on; you're just excited to be involved. Whereas horror is like, no, you're going to sit there and you can't see what's behind that thing. Or the reverse, which is that you can see it's approaching whoever's on screen, and they're getting closer. No, you can't look away. No, you can't warn them. It's about the control of the image.It might be one of the quintessential genres for film. You watch some films and go, eh, I should have read the book. But with horror, it's not on the page. You have to have the required elements, but it's made on the screen and it's made in the moment of the interaction between the screen and the audience. That's what shot length does. It's control. It's awesome.It is. You also think about Hitchcock movies, where there's an absolute control of the camera. That got boiled out of a lot of dramatic filmmaking and a lot of action-thriller filmmaking, but it's still there in horror because it still does something to us. That's an amazing stat. I like it a lot.It speaks to the medium. It's not a play that's been filmed, which is what drama can be sometimes. It's used entirely differently than in drama, where the camera's just rolling so you capture it. In horror, and in a good horror especially, it's being used by a craftsperson to paint a picture, to force you to feel. That's the bit that horror fans like: the strapping into the rollercoaster. Make me think I'm going to die, you know? That's it.I want to talk a little about content. You're able to do some really awesome content analysis on this stuff, and there are a couple different angles that you've tackled in the book. Some are about the kinds of monsters we see on screen. There was a cool stat in here about aquatic-based monsters and the rise of water as a medium of fear, which I'd love for you to speak to, but what are some of the monster stats that popped out at you? What are some of the things hunting us now that have evolved over time?Well, let's be clear. They're not actually hunting us; this is movies. It's so funny, because sometimes I have reflected and thought, oh my god, the world is — oh, no, these are the stories we're telling ourselves about ourselves.I did see a parallel between serial killers on screen and serial killers in the real world. That was one of the things I found. I was looking at serial killers in the graph over time, and there's a big peak in the '80s, and then I showed it to one of my colleagues at Guinness World Records. They nerd-sniped me and went, “I wonder if that correlates with the real world.” And I was like, well now I have to go and have a look, don't I? Thanks. I thought I was done with this topic.Going back to your monsters, it's interesting. Monster horror movies are two subgenres: There are horror movies, and then there are ones that have to do with monsters. Within that, I classified the monsters where they were flying, aquatic or land-based mammals. There are other bits around the edges, but this has to do with monsters rather than little creatures. I found that the land-based category is the biggest, but has been declining quite quickly over the last two or three decades. Shooting up almost out of nowhere — well, out of the ocean — are aquatic monsters. It's such a clear trend. It's definitely happening. Because I'm looking at decades, and the whole report looks over 27,000 films — not all monster films, but still, monsters is a big genre. So, this isn't an anomaly of the data of just two films.I've got two theories, but they are only theories. This is what I love about this data stuff: I'll do the data stuff, I'll present it to you objectively, and then we'll all sit around over a drink or some food and disagree about the why. My current two thoughts are, one, that environmentalism has changed what we think of as villains and what's unknown. It's changing our understanding of monsters and nature, and the ocean is more unknown. But two, a more practical answer came from a producer friend of mine. I was talking to her about this and she said it was quite expensive to make an aquatic monster without visual effects.What were the monsters you could have in, say, the 20th century? For most of the 20th century, it was a bloke in a suit, or it was ants on a small model. That's it, right? It looks cool, but it is a certain kind of thing, and water doesn't scale. You can't have a miniature because it just looks different. Water is incredibly complex from a visual effects point of view, as well as the way the beings move. If you put a guy in a suit and put him underwater, he's going to drown, because that suit's heavy. But you're freed up in the 21st century to use more visual effects. More are freely available, so now we can live out our aquatic dreams — and nightmares. And, because we haven't for most of history, there's loads more space. There are plenty of more dangerous fish in the sea.Those are my two working theories, but I have no idea. I would happily talk with people about it for hours, because it doesn't matter. That's what I like about this. This isn't instructive. It's not like we must figure this out because it's going to change what people invest in or anything. No, let's just have some fun and talk about movies.There's that scene in Ed Wood where they're like, all right, Bill, just get in there and flail.Exactly.The tech has got to be a part of it. I also thought it was really fun to dive into some of the stuff you had about clowns, because we are in the week where Terrifier is a box office champion. Unforeseeable, unless you potentially foresaw it.Well, it's at least the third in the series, so there's a certain amount of success that's gone on before. But I don't think anyone expected Terrifier 3 to do the kind of business it's done and Joker 2 not to. Those two coming out a few weeks apart have had such different journeys that it's quite dramatic.Terrifier 3 has done exactly what good horror films do. They've got a very clear idea that's been tested before and gone big on it. They know what they're delivering to their audience, which is shock. They've also got a great advertising campaign. From what I understand, from what I've read around, they did test screenings in some cinemas where they didn't tell the audience what they were going to watch. They were like, “It's a holiday film!” and then showed this grotesque film. Lots of people walked out. Some people threw up, apparently. Then, with the remaining people that stayed, they did the piece to camera afterward. Like, “What did you think of the movie?” But loads of people walked out. The viral marketing is spot-on.Clowns weren't a big feature of horror films until about the 2010s, when we started to see them creep up to 1 percent of films, which is quite a lot. I'm not that bothered either way by clowns. I certainly don't think they're fun, but I'm not terrified of them. In reading around, I found a study — I don't have it in front of me, so I can't quote it exactly — that they did on the fear of clowns. It was across many, many people across multiple countries, and they found that over half of people reported some fear of clowns. So I think clowns are inherently scary, and most people, like me, are ambivalent. Someone will get a clown for a kid's birthday party, and I'll go, oh, okay. Whereas some people are actually like, why?That's also what horror is supposed to do, right? Horror is supposed to take something that you feel is safe and make it unsafe, but then in playing out the unsafe, you'll have exorcised the demon that worried you. Therefore you now feel safe, perhaps, because your body thinks you've played with that demon. You've played with that thought.I don't know. It'll die down, it'll get tired and something else will come along. I can't even think what the next thing is. Probably an IT engineer, or something that doesn't feel scary. Though, mind you, you'd have to call that “IT,” and they've already done that with clowns.The SEO on that is quite bad.We'll work on that together off-pod so we can keep the copyright.Terrifier is great, though. It's not my kind of film, but they've done such a good job. Everything they've done, they've delivered to their audience, and they've also created a franchise and a character, so they will be making a lot of money. They've earned it, as far as I'm concerned. Not mine, though; not my money.I thought some of the stuff you wrote in here about survival as an increasing theme in these films was really interesting, which also goes well with what you had about body horror films and infection as a prominent way we deal with that. When the pandemic hit, a lot of films that saw quite a bit of pop were the ones that pertained to this idea of survival during infection and things like that. You had some really interesting, decade-long data.Before we wrap it up, what are some emerging trends? What are some of the charts that have been going up? As we think about the evolution of this really durable genre, where do you see this stuff going?You're absolutely right. The pinnacle of infection movies wasn't actually postpandemic, though we'll see what it will be for the rest of the current decade. 28 Days Later might be patient zero for that kind of movie. But you're right. What we saw during the lockdown was that we wanted to find meaning and structure to the narrative that was playing out in our lives. It wasn't coming from the media, and it wasn't coming from the scientists, because we didn't know. So there were films like Contagion that did such a great job.It's kind of spooky when someone predicts the future. We forget all the ones where they failed to predict the future, or they did a terrible job. Out of however many it was at that point, 20,000 horror films, one of them nailed the future. Mathematicians are rolling their eyes, but at the same time, we're in this emotional experience saying, oh my god. Gwyneth Paltrow went through that, so I can.But it was interesting, actually. There was a film that was shot before the pandemic called The Pink Cloud, a Brazilian film. It was shot in 2019, but it was then edited and ready just as the pandemic was happening. It was relatively low budget, and it's about a big pink cloud that comes over cities and forces everyone to live in lockdown. It's a film about being in lockdown and it was just coincidence. It's great art, but it was just coincidence. It played at Sundance the year it was not physical — either 2020 or 2021, I can't remember. But it was amazing. The timing was sort of weird, and I think that adds an extra spookiness to it.Speaking to your point, obviously there are loads of films that talk about lockdown and infection, but not nearly as much as you'd think. We're done with it. “I get enough of that at home,” if you see what I mean. What is interesting in the trends is that, you're right, survival has gone up, but one of the biggest things that's gone down — which I think is really interesting. This is over almost 100 years of content — is how people are thinking about the brain or the mind.We're seeing fewer films where the brain is being attacked or madness is the cause of the psycho, and we're seeing far more understanding, like maybe they had a bad childhood. I think it's a strong story of mental health moving on from being the thing that you're scared of. You could read Foucault, you could look at 12 monkeys — there are lots of films that have played with this idea of madness and what sanity is. But largely we've moved away from, “He's mad, run away,” to, “He's mad. Let's listen to what he's got to say and try to understand him as a real human being.” That's really interesting. I don't know where that goes, but that's been a very clear trend over almost 100 years of horror films.That is fascinating. Again, so much of horror is interior-looking. A lot of the things that we're scared of and that are played up are more reflections of our own state of mind and our own fears. If we're not worried about madness being contagious in a Lovecraftian way, that is super interesting.Exactly. Throughout all of literature and all of art, madness has been fascinating. Up until a certain point, maybe 500 years ago, it was seen as a root to the divine or harmless. Then at some point, when you start having authority figures in certain ways, you need to shut down the anti-voices. It started to become something terrifying that you lock away, like it might be infectious and a problem.Then, more recently, we start to think about how actually we're all a bit effed up. There are reasons behind this. We can do something about this. It's not mad to go and see a therapist, or a psychotherapist, or whatever it might be. That then speaks to, well, you can't have the motivation of a slasher be that he's mad. It doesn't work; it's just not credible.You need to have a different origin, and you go one of two ways: You either give a lot more context, like he went through this horrific thing as a kid, or you say it's unknown. It's just unknown. It's a man in a mask. What's terrifying is the lack of knowledge, or it's too much information. Each film takes a different route on that.All right. This book is really good. It's called The Horror Movie Report, and it looks at all those different ways these movies take and the history of this stuff, which I think is one of the most fascinating things. Horror in general is just such a cool genre.Stephen, I would love to hear you pitch where folks can find you and where things are going. Tell folks a little about the book and where they can get ahold of it.Thank you. That's high praise indeed, because you're someone whose work I respect a huge amount. That's really cool. You're someone who actually can find the holes in it.If you go to HorrorMovieReport.com, you can get there. It's all digital at the moment; I'd love to do a coffee-table book of it, but that will take a bit of time. I've put it out in two editions. One is for film fans, and it's much cheaper, like 20 bucks. That'll give you the 400 pages and all the charts and graphs. If you love horror films, that's enough. If you're a filmmaker or a data geek, you'll want the film professional version, which is only a little bit more. That gives you all the data as spreadsheets, as well as some bonus reports.I've got different constituencies. Some people just want a pretty graph and then argue about aquatic monsters; others are like, give me the data. So here you go! And by all means, reach out to me if you've read something you want more detail on. I love this stuff, and if you love it, too, we're going to get on. Grab a report, and if you want to reach out, I'm not hard to get hold of.Terrific. Again, your stuff is always so good. People will know it from the newsletter if they've read it long enough. It's great stuff. Thanks again for coming on, I really appreciate it.My pleasure. I'm always here. And if anyone listening has a question about the film industry, if you think there's some data out there somewhere but can't bother to do it, someone else will do it — contact me. The best stuff I do comes from readers, the 4 o'clock in the morning ideas, the shower thoughts. Reach out, I promise I'll give it a go.Amazing. Stephen, have a spooktacular day.Nice.Edited by Susie Stark.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzales, coauthors of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, out in paperback this week.I really loved the book, it dives into what is the main flywheel of mainstream entertainment, for better or for worse, and dives into the fascinating history of the MCU. Whether you're a fan of Marvel movies or just someone living in a world dominated by them, the book is a really interesting look into contemporary filmmaking and the pressures and economics and just simply human scale of these massive operations.We spoke about Marvel's journey from underdog to cultural icon, how its moviemaking process has changed over time, and what it was like covering a narrative that was developing in real time.Robinson and Gonzales can both be found on the podcast Trial by Content, and the book can be found wherever books are sold.This interview has been condensed and edited. Dave and Joanna, thank you so much for coming on.GONZALES: Absolutely.ROBINSON: Thanks for having us.I really, really love this book. So happy to see it out in paperback. I guess I'll just kick it off with an easy one: What were each of your first experiences with Marvel? How'd you get into this?ROBINSON: As in the comic books or the films?Anything.ROBINSON: Anything at all. Gosh, I think X-Men: The Animated Series was my introduction, back in my infancy. It really got into the world they created, the various characters, their character sets, the trading cards, and then everything spirals out from there. That was my introduction.GONZALES: Mine was probably with the comics. I might have had some X-Men: The Animated Series in there, but I got much more into the comics around late 1993, early '94, when I happened to buy a Spider-Man issue that was part of “The Trial of Peter Parker.” Suddenly I had questions: Why was Peter Parker on trial? How many different Spider-Man books were there? Because I bought an issue of The Spectacular Spider-Man, but the next part of “The Trial of Peter Parker” was The Amazing Spider-Man.That led me to get a cubby at my local comic book shop in Louisville, Colorado, which was Time Warp Comics at the time. That was my way in, just being a comic book fan. I also jumped in on one of the longest and mostly considered worst Spider-Man arcs, but loved it. So imagine how good “good” Spider-Man was to me as a child, because I got weaned in on “bad” Spider-Man.Amazing. One reason I really dug the book is that it's about the MCU, but it's also about Marvel, the history of this entire company, and its very different evolution over time, from the '60s to the period of the '90s. What was it like trying to cover not just a film series, but a big franchise with a lot of moving parts as part of an even bigger company with even more moving parts?ROBINSON: A good question we asked ourselves was both where to start and where to end, and where to end was a constant, ongoing question mark. I'll let Dave address that. But in terms of where to start, there were certain things we felt we had to backdate, because there were players involved in the major “How did Marvel Studios come to be?” question and you had to know who they were, why they were important, how did we get here and what were the stakes? Being able to loosely explain who's Stan Lee, who's Perlmutter, who's Avi Arad, who are all these people, helped us tell that story without losing the audience entirely by throwing a bunch of new names at them. Dave, what about ending the book?GONZALES: Oh, ending the book. That was super fun. We started right as Avengers: Endgame was in theaters. I remember seeing Endgame and knowing that Joanna and I were going to work on this, so we started off thinking, what a fantastic hill that Marvel climbed, this interconnected universe with three phases. Everything surely was planned out from the beginning and could only go up from here. The book was originally “The Rise of Marvel Studios,” because we thought surely this was just up and up and up.Then the pandemic hit — which was very good for us, having to write the book and just sit down and figure out what it was. It also gave us and a lot of sources a pause to regain our footing. As Marvel started rolling out, we tried to peg an end date. I wanted it to be Blade to Blade when we started, but Mahershala Ali's project has still not come out, so that became an impossibility. Then WandaVision premiered and suddenly there was this whole other aspect to the story we were trying to tell. So we wanted to do that and just tried to report things as they went along.We were blessed and cursed by the year that we published the hardcover, October 2023. As we were turning in the final part of the book in January and February, a whole bunch of Marvel news started breaking. Ike Perlmutter left Disney; Victoria Alonso, who was a big mover and shaker in Marvel Studios, was let go, so we had to report that out; Jonathan Majors went on trial.It was only in a panic over all those things that I really ended up appreciating what we had done just by thinking of all these topics so thoroughly for several years. Even though we were tacking new endings on, it wasn't that hard to make it feel like it was a whole arc because we were kind of working there anyway. I wouldn't say I'd've enjoyed releasing the first version of this book in one of Marvel's worst financial years and most critical years ever, but I do think it provided an interesting little tie-off or a fascinating ellipses that allowed us to be relevant and, more importantly, in the year 2024, look like we knew exactly what we were talking about in Marvel's rebounds.That's a really good point. When I met you on tour, a key thing you were getting at was that the idea that Marvel has not had a slump before is naive, and also ahistorical. A fun thing about the book is that you go through all these different eras, and sure, there's an easier story and probably a more polished, corporate story that's ever upward, toward Excelsior, all that crap.But you really do cover the pits and troughs of this. There was Iron Man 2; there was Thor: The Dark World; there was that period of time between the assorted Spider-Mans. What was that perspective like, particularly as it was coming out and as you were able to talk about the issues in 2023?ROBINSON: It was important for us, just on a basic journalistic level, to try to tell as much of the story as possible. We're fans of Marvel, of the movies, but as long as I've known Dave, both of us have been people who don't like to feel like we're not being told the whole story. We don't want the PR version of something — we want to know all the messy details as well. And it's not to knock Marvel or have any kind of “gotcha” moment. It's to say, “Okay, they had these various pitfalls, these various problematic people that they were working with, X, Y and Z. Look what they accomplished anyway.” That's the story in broad strokes. It was important for us to be able to acknowledge the stumbles along the way.When we found ourselves in a 2023 space where everyone was saying Marvel is cooked, or Marvel used to know exactly what it was doing from the beginning and now they're just making it up — no, they were always making it up. They just did it so well, you didn't notice. That gave us a better perspective to be able to say, let's just slow down. We were looking ahead to 2024, saying they're only putting out one movie and two shows next year. If those hit, then you'll start to hear that Marvel's back, baby. Then Deadpool & Wolverine makes a gajillion dollars and Agatha All Along is a pretty solid hit for them.So I think that “Marvel is over” narrative that was so prevalent a year ago is now the question, “Is Marvel back?” Looking even further forward at the next couple of big projects coming, I think Captain America: Brave New World is going to be a tough one for them. I don't know if that's going to hit the way a lot of people want it to. I think Thunderbolts is going to be hit for them, and I think The Fantastic Four: First Steps is going to be hit for them. They're still getting their bearings, but to your point, it was a bit naive to say they've been nothing but successful and now they've run off a cliff. Dave, what do you think?GONZALES: It was just a less interesting narrative, ultimately. I actually found myself getting less adversarial the more we learned, especially being a fan when all this started around 2008. There was this idea that Joanna was talking about, which is even a fan perspective today, that if something doesn't work out it's because we've been denied something at some creative step. Like, you know what, screw those guys; we want to do Harrison Ford as Red Hulk instead, or something like that.But it's not that at all. There are a whole bunch of different drama and production and business problems, and all these things come together to make these gigantic machines of a movie work. It was really important for us to drill down on Marvel Studios and get into those ups and downs, because a lot of times you can try to compare Marvel Studios to something through contrast, through Warner Brothers trying to do it with DC back in the early 2010s. Everybody started trying to launch an interconnected universe from the first movie, but all you could really say is that Marvel's worked and these others didn't. The details of the alchemy are in the tiny stories and little conflicts. That's why I think they were so important to track, be they how movie stars look or how we use CGI to make movie stars look. Tracking that over at Marvel Studios was just as important as how many movies Tony Stark was going to be in.Can you speak more to how much of this was on the fly? One of my big takeaways from your book was just how much things aren't necessarily set in stone during the production of a movie, and how sometimes one person's smart idea, regardless of where it comes from, can drastically alter what a lot of folks think was written in stone in 2007.ROBINSON: That idea of “best idea wins” — without ego; best idea from whomsoever — was a prevailing concept at Marvel. Kevin Feige was also this really interesting figure that has no comparison at any other studio. He's head of the studio, a creative producer, a storyteller in his own right and someone who wanted to make movies as a kid and thought he would be a director. He wound up an executive, but he has that storytelling sense. When Marvel was putting out fewer films and TV shows — or no TV shows at all and just a few films a year — the process was, “Go shoot your movie. Bring me, Kevin Feige, back the pieces and I'll tell you what you're missing.” They had this built-in reshoot window where you could go and add scenes where he felt like you hadn't really nailed this character, or cut this action out to bump up the action over here a bit more. They had this rough-drafting process with the master editor being Kevin Feige himself. There's no system like that at any other studio.That works so well for them, and in doing so, they're able to cement over the cracks and make it all feel like one smooth story that they're telling, because that refining process is built into their filmmaking process. Once the mandate comes from Disney, from Iger on his way out the door, from Chapek in his seat for a while, that they need to compete with Netflix and all these other streaming services, that they need more and more content — then the pace becomes untenable for that revision process that made them so solid in the first place.You talk about Feige not having an analog. I was really shocked reading the book because there's not even anything recent. You have to go back to Cecil B. DeMille for someone who has that producer, authorial presence. He's really a fascinating figure, and it's a key takeaway from the book that I loved. It really highlights the people who make these movies, not just the corporation. It's actual human beings who do this kind of stuff, often with long continuities. Do you want to speak about some of that?GONZALES: Definitely. Actually, while you were talking, I was wondering if part of the chip on Zack Snyder's shoulder was because someone at some point told him he was going to be a Kevin Feige and he's been chasing that ever since.A lot of the Marvel continuity that's been going on is still going on, even after our new chapter. It's been interesting to see how it's developed. It could be that the best idea wins, but then they also have that old school, in-house process where the starting team is very often the same people and has been since phase one. You put together a bullpen of concept artists, so you're constantly using concept art. Not only is that smart from a design standpoint for making a movie, but then you can have those things scanned and it goes directly into making toys. So at the beginning, there's no fight about bringing on these design creatives super early on.Where we start to see the wear and tear is, as Joanna was saying, with this output increase. All of the pressure starts being put on post-production, which is the place where you can't make more time. The solution is to hire more people, and because of that, the job of keeping things consistent falls to Victoria Alonso.She does a pretty good job considering that she's working a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week work schedule because the industry is so messed up. It was never built to do stuff like this. In a lot of ways, the way the VFX industry is structured is still from the '90s turn of the century, when you would bid on a number of shots to do and get money for that number of shots. You'd have to work those shots until they get approved by the director. There isn't an extra budget, and there isn't an overtime, which was a fine way to do it when there were three or four VFX shots in every movie. But now that we're in the 200s or some such, there's a natural strain put on that, and it's impossible to budget on the VFX side. They have to underbid because there's a limited amount of work. If Marvel decides they don't like you, as much as a third of your entire year's work can just not come to your company.As Marvel ages into it, we get a lot of people who are able to make their careers there, from Kevin Feige to Mary Livanos, who's doing great things on Agatha and seems really close to being ascendant. We have Brad Winderbaum, who's been made head of streaming now to take some of that pressure off Kevin. You have all these great continuities. You're less likely to see continuities in visual effects artists, just because of how they're going recently. When Joanna and I were interviewing people like ILM for Hulk, occasionally we'd do a person that was in three or four movies. Now, like for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, there was a team of about 12 people at Framestore who make animals look good. They just come in for that movie to make animals look incredibly good. They did it the whole time, but they're not as legacy as other parts of the Marvel development studios — which I hope will change, because there are some people who are really good at making Hulks. And if you've made Hulks for 20 years, shouldn't those be the people that are making Hulks in Brave New World? We'll have to see.ROBINSON: I love that you mentioned Cecil B. DeMille. As we were putting this whole story together and realizing that they bring all these teams in-house, Dave and our coauthor Gavin and I, we are to varying degrees students of old Hollywood history, and we had this realization that it's just the old Hollywood studio system. You're putting actors under contract for nine movies, all this other stuff, and we felt so smart. Then I was talking to someone who worked at Marvel and they were like, “Oh yeah, Kevin says that all the time.” I was like, oh, I thought we really put something together. But at least we were right! We were consciously doing this.I think that industrial element of it is really interesting. A key thing that changed the way I see the film industry was realizing that every movie is basically a corporation that briefly exists. Every movie is an entire apparatus, with a CEO operation and departments and all that. Then it folds and you move on to the next one.With Marvel, though, the circus never closes; it's just onto the next city. It was really interesting to see its place in the industry. Like Dave was saying, the limiting reactant for some of this is just the number of animators on the earth who are capable of making this kind of stuff. It's so cool to get a look inside this apparatus through the book.ROBINSON: Thank you.GONZALES: What an apparatus. It's really interesting to me, even now, as we are pending the return of the Russo brothers, who are just able to find this and also find the emotion in it.In Endgame, the Tony Stark “I am Iron Man” moment was the last insert. They had to go to dinner with Robert Downey Jr. and Joel Silver and have Silver be like, “You'd be dumb not to do it, Robert,” because Downey didn't want to go back there. He's a weird dude, but for him, it felt like in order to get to what he needed to do, he had to take off a scab that had formed and get back into the character. Whereas the Russo brothers are like, we built a workout system and we have our smoothies and every day is trying to make the machine work. Somehow, through the alchemy of those two things, the machine works, and occasionally we get these story moments that feel like they were created individually for that movie.That, I think, is the mystery that the book is trying to unravel. At the beginning, it's untapped storytelling potential. Everyone's like, if you don't have the X-Men, if you don't have Spider-Man, what do you have? There's so much in just proving that you have good stories. Now that you're the biggest game in town, that idea of, “Are you going to make me feel anything?” is so much different than what the initial promise was, that they're going to bring Thanos to the screen and you're going to understand who he is and what he wants. That was the big lift. Now there's a whole simultaneous saving of the industry, and bestowing status on different actors. There's just so much more mixed up in it now. It's amazing we got where we did.The book is also a really interesting look at the transition from being a super underdog. As you describe in the earliest chapters of the book, Marvel was bankrupt, and all the executives were folks who fell out of the toy industry or Revlon. The folks who were in charge came to it in the manner of somebody accidentally having to join a carnival, and then eventually it becomes the hegemonic juggernaut of everything, in many ways the thing that people stand against. In the book, watching the perception around it change and then internally having to adapt to that change in perception was a really cool tension.ROBINSON: My favorite indicator of that underdog status versus top-of-the-world status versus wherever we are now is the making of the first Iron Man movie. Marvel Entertainment in New York — who was, to your point, chiefly concerned with merchandising and toys — had the attitude, “Okay, go make your cute little movie. If it doesn't cost us any money, you can go do your little cinematic experiment in Hollywood and we don't really care that much. Just make sure you don't spend any of our money. Other than that, go have fun.”And they make Iron Man, and Iron Man is a massive, smash hit, and all of a sudden the people in New York are like, we're forming something called the Creative Committee. We would like a lot of intake. We want to be part of this. This is the big shiny thing, and everyone wants to weigh in on it. So it's really interesting to track this going from a weird little project they were doing out in Los Angeles to The Thing for Marvel. You can track it by who needs to have an opinion about what and when they start to care.GONZALES: One of my favorite moments — it's after the book chapter “Marvel vs. the Creative Committee” — is when Kevin Feige gets on stage himself to unveil the entirety of phase three, which includes Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War and everything. That is such a telling moment for me. He had just won his battles with these behind the scenes. He's fully in full control. Black Panther is coming. Joss Whedon is in the edits for Avengers: Age of Ultron, in the audience, but they already know he's not coming back.There was a version of a chapter in the book that was just me going through that and being like, here's why each one of these announcements is like Kevin Feige spiking a football in the face of someone that told him he couldn't do it. That's still the purest creative energy I've seen. “We could finally do it!” burst out of Marvel. I think they've been more reserved since, even with some big announcements, but I like to go back and look at that just to see the pivot point when Marvel was the underdog. It was like, we want Black Panther, we want Captain Marvel, but the studio won't let us do it. Then Kevin Feige gets up and goes, “Here are the next 10 years of your life.” It's just such a joyous moment.ROBINSON: We love that moment. We talked to people behind the scenes who were working at Marvel at the time about it, and there's a reason that whole presentation wasn't at a Comic-Con. It wasn't at D23. It was its own thing at the El Capitan Theater in Los Angeles, and internally, they jokingly called it Kevin-Con. It was this whole thing, and part of it was that they weren't ready to announce certain things at Comic-Con.But part of it was this moment for Feige who fought various personalities across the various companies to get control of the narrative. And I agree, Endgame is of course in all of history going to be looked at as the pinnacle of achievement at Marvel. But I actually think it might be Kevin-Con at the El Capitan Theater, when Chadwick Boseman comes out and Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans are there to anoint him as the future of the franchise. That, of course, comes with its own terrible poignancy. We were really lucky to talk to Chadwick Boseman for the book before he passed away. These were things that happened while we were writing the book. History was constantly happening as we were trying to frame this entire narrative.If there's a protagonist in the book, it feels like it's Kevin, even in the earliest days when he was advising on the Fox products. Having read the book and then seen Deadpool & Wolverine — which, as you mentioned, went on to become a phenomenal financial success — it was really cool to come away with a little more admiration for the role that Kevin had in some of the Fox properties. Seeing that manifest in the MCU was just really nice.ROBINSON: I love that he got to have his Wolverine story, given that it all starts with him in a trailer with Hugh Jackman saying it needs to be bigger, it needs to be bigger, it needs to be bigger. I love that.GONZALES: I don't even know if it's still called that, but Joanna used to call that the “Feige fix-it.” Instead of developing these things by always going forward and introducing younger Avengers, he's actually much more interested in reaching back. There were good things there. Or, I guess the generous way to think about it is rewarding the fans that were around before it was the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like, “You didn't waste your time with X-Men: The Last Stand. I know it might have felt like that occasionally, but here's this. Or Andrew Garfield. Yeah, maybe we treated him badly, but don't worry. You didn't waste your time with that because boom, here it is paying off in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”Initially there was some hesitancy about Marvel homework. Do I need to have seen these things to do these things? But ultimately, if we're just talking dollars and cents, the nostalgia play has made them a billion dollars so many times that it doesn't surprise me that Deadpool & Wolverine is a huge hit just by being a swan song for the Fox movies.ROBINSON: I was personally incredibly gratified to finally get Channing Tatum as Gambit. That was a very important moment for me.My favorite version of the Feige fix-it was putting the storyline from Thor: The Dark World into Endgame and making Thor: The Dark World, the most universally mocked and reviled MCU film, an integral part of their biggest triumph. All of a sudden that's wrapped into the larger tapestry in a way so you can't just toss it in the garbage and say, oh, don't bother watching Thor: The Dark World — now you have to watch it to understand everything you're seeing in Endgame, which is certainly not a movie you're ever going to skip.It's a magic trick that really works and almost shouldn't work as well as it does. But even how they were able to get the Infinity Stones, almost taking elements of the first couple films that were dropped or introduced somewhat randomly and then doing that. It's a trick that they keep on pulling.GONZALES: Kevin Feige will say this, but we're coming up on 80 years of comic book history, and if there's one thing that comic books do more than any other medium, it's just use the same story. How could you have another angle on this story? They have so much A/B testing on what we like about this character, or what we'll buy about a certain character, it's interesting to see Marvel adapt that along with what sort of story you like on the Hollywood side of it.But yeah, we're going to see Captain America: Brave New World and finally see that Celestial that came out of the ocean in Eternals. Every Marvel property contributes something, we're told. Except the Inhumans; that never happens.The book is MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, and it's a fascinating look at the intersection of the humanity behind these movies and the technology of these movies. And if there's one figure that reminds me of that in particular, obviously, one of the most central people in the Marvel universe is Green Steve. Let's talk a little about him before we wrap this one up.ROBINSON: He's my favorite! Green Steve, a Chippendales dancer that was painted green in order to make sure they understood how the green light on skin would be captured accurately for the Hulk. Green Steve was one of my favorite anecdotes we got, and it was out of the book for a while before we worked it back in. Dave, what do you want to say about Green Steve?GONZALES: I love Green Steve. I love that this bodybuilder from Long Island can technically say he played the Hulk in a sort of way. In theory, because it's a whole CGI character, he might have played the Hulk close to how much Mark Ruffalo played the Hulk in that first movie. I love that story.Pretty early on, we brought in Gavin Edwards, our third author, to help us do a book, since Joanna and I had never done a book before. We were starting to put together the notes and I was like, can we please have a mid-credits scene? Can we just have a chapter in the middle of the notes?ROBINSON: That was Dave.GONZALES: I held onto that for as long as possible. I remember in one of the final meetings after we turned in the draft, we pitched it up to the editor and they were like, “That's really fun,” and I thought, oh thank god. That was a really early idea, and Green Steve fits that perfectly; it's a super interesting story that doesn't really belong anywhere else, but will stick in your mind as, Marvel literally tried everything to make the best Hulk. So I'm very happy that it's the mid-credits chapter — and remains the mid-credits chapter! Even when we added another chapter in, we were like, where does this go? Not before Green Steve.ROBINSON: He's got the final word for sure.Amazing. The book's out of paperback now. Where can folks find it? Where can they find you? And what's next?ROBINSON: “All good and evil news agents.” That's what the Empire Magazine folks say. All good and evil bookstores or any online book purveyor is where you can find our book. Dave does a tremendous podcast called Fighting in the War Room, which I love to listen to, so you should listen to that. And together we do a podcast called Trial by Content that y'all should listen to.GONZALES: Joanna's on a fantastic podcast called the House of R with Mallory Rubin over on The Ringer, where she covers lots of cool pop culture things. If you want to go to a bookstore and don't know exactly which one to go to, you could head to theMCUbook.com. That will forward you to our publisher's website, which has links to your Barnes and Nobles, your Amazons, your Bookshops.org, and will help you track down the book near you. And look for us in a couple more years with something similar.Thanks for coming on.ROBINSON: Thanks, Walt.GONZALES: Thank you.Edited by Susie Stark.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Julia Alexander, digital strategy consultant and author of the new blog Posting Nexus.Julia's brilliant, she's been one of the most insightful and compelling minds on attention — where we allocate it, how we measure that, and what becomes of that — for several years now, and when I learned about this new project I was incredibly excited to get her on a Sunday edition to hear more about what's got her, well, attention. We spoke about the incentive structures of the internet, attention as digital currency, and how online trends redefine culture.Alexander can be found on X and Threads, and the project is Posting NexusThis interview has been condensed and edited. Julia Alexander, thank you so much for coming on.Thank you for having me. What an honor.It's always great to talk to you. I've been a fan of your work for a long time, and whether it was your independent newsletter or this new thing, it is always really, really fun to talk to you about what people are consuming and watching and reading and seeing.Thank you, I appreciate it.I wanted to talk about Posting Nexus. It's a new project that you are launching and it is a really fascinating dive into attention and essentially how it has become commoditized, how we use it on the internet, and where it goes. Just to back out a bit, can you tell me a little about why you wanted to go in this direction and start this thing up?Posting Nexus came out of this obsession I have with understanding why people do what they do on the internet and how that affects what they do or don't do off the internet. I now work at Disney, and we won't get into any of that, unfortunately, but a large part of my career was spent looking at the development of the streaming industry and the reality that people's attention was moving away from these closed-circuit traditional distributors to more open-circuit digital distributors who were operating at a pace that was almost relentless, and that was in large part because the attention we gave to digital services was relentless. When I moved into Disney, it didn't stop me thinking a lot about why people do things, where they give attention, and what they want out of attention.So, I decided to launch Posting Nexus, which is me and a few friends who are doing this, edited by the brilliant Allegra Frank until someone very smartly hires her full time. As I say in the intro, it's not a newsletter, it's not a blog, it's kind of just a harbor for thoughts about a lot of this stuff. It really came out of this idea that you can boil down a lot of what people want and where they decide to give their attention into a matrix that I call the IPA matrix, which has nothing to do with beer. It has everything to do with identity, platforms and attention, and when you take those three circles and you put them into a Venn diagram, you get incentive structures and quite often hidden incentive structures. These exist for both the bottom up, so that's us doing things on the internet, and the top down, which are these massive conglomerates who build things on the internet.A great example would be when we look at something like Barbenheimer, which was effectively just an offline manifestation of online attention. Part of the reason that movie did as well as it did is because it leaned into the idea that my identity, which is formed by my interests and the platforms where I socialize, where I'm getting my social capital, and the attention that I receive for participating in this culture then create an incentive structure for me to go out and participate in something in order to post.My general theory on a lot of the tension now is that you give attention in order to receive attention, and through the democratization of a lot of the stuff that we do, we've made it much easier to receive attention by giving attention. I think that constant focus on receiving attention by giving attention leads to this kind of posting nexus.I am very interested in this, just as you are, and our jobs touch on this a bit. You saw it with the technology of film. Charlie Chaplin used to be able to do three shows a night and hit three audiences, and the technology of film made it so that he could be in every cinema in North America, if not further. It seems like what we've had recently is the next advance of that, so now all those audiences within those audiences can entertain each other as well. It's fundamentally inverted a lot of where we gather our attention from and how we disperse it, to the extent that I think it does terrify some people. I would love your thoughts on how this very unique moment we find ourselves in makes this such a fun topic to go into.What's really fascinating is that what's underlying this entire structure is the idea that growth is the end state, that growth is the final destination, and if that is the final destination then there's no real final point. If we think about that in terms of your own life, if you're listening to this, maybe you're a writer and your end point is a book, or you want to write a novel. If you're working within a large company, maybe your end point is CEO or vice president. There actually is an end point.When we think about the way our lives are constructed, which are intrinsically more digital than they are physical at this point, there is no end point. The numbers on your follower count continue to go up and your value, you as a person, is intrinsically tied to making those numbers go up, which means you create labor for companies effectively for free, right? There's this idea that if you do it enough, some offline benefits will occur. If you're an influencer, maybe you'll get a free trip to Rome; if you're a poet, maybe you'll get a book deal out of it. There's this incentive to continue creating free labor for these conglomerates.But if you're the conglomerate — and this is what I like to spend a lot of time on in Posting Nexus. It's not just why we do what we do, it's how are we incentivized by companies that are then incentivized by their own ambitions. If you look at what they've started to realize, it's that they've run out of space to grow, and by space I mean they've literally run out of people. They cannot reach any more people than they're going to reach. If the planet is the best example of finiteness, that's where they are, but they're designed to incentivize growth, so what do they do?If you're on Instagram, all of a sudden you're posting photos, but have you thought about posting a video on this new form of entertainment called Reels? If you're on YouTube, it's Shorts, and if you are an Uber customer because you love taking cars somewhere, have you considered getting your food via Uber? It's finding different ways to capture more slices of pie within someone's attention based on the necessities of their life.Getting into the mixture of business strategy and cognitive behavioral reasoning really starts to help us illustrate why we do what we do on the internet. What I want to do with Posting Nexus quite a bit, and maybe this is going to sound a little naive or a little childish, but I want to figure out a way for us to build a better internet that we understand.If we know that we do this for Facebook, that might not stop us from posting because we like to connect with our friends. Or on Twitter, I like to post to get likes because I am also addicted to the dopamine rush from when we do those things. But if we intrinsically understand that what we're doing is operating within this growth state and we want to get to a steady state where actually just the right level of attention and just the right level of input is going to provide a much happier and a much more mentally healthy lifestyle, how do we get there by working on what we can do and what we can control versus what we can't do?I want to dive into so much from there, just because you hit on something really interesting that got me thinking. There are basically 330 million Americans and there are 24 hours in a day, so that's essentially 8 billion hours that you can have from America. That is the total addressable American time.I think what you're getting at is that we are brushing up on that; there's a point at which growth really can maximize. Let's say you've got 2 billion hours for sleep in the aggregate, and another 4 billion hours for work. We are getting to the total addressable market of American time if we really think that growth is the only way to go about it. I would love for you to speak more to that element of it, because that was really interesting.I think about this joke from a few years ago that you'll remember. The prompt for the joke is that at one point, Netflix's former CEO, Reed Hastings, said “Our only competition is sleep,” and then a few years later, the Pokémon company came out with Pokémon Sleep. All of a sudden it was like, well, Pokémon figured out how to beat sleep. The eight hours a day you actually don't have my attention, finally they figured out a way to get into it. It almost feels matrix-y, right? It feels very dystopian.The thing about growth is that we don't talk a lot about cost. A great example of this comes from this great economist, Herman Daly, who died in 2022. He pointed out that GDP is a really weird factor of just looking at the economic value of a country. It's the growth of product, and when we look at the growth of product, it's been 50 times what it was 50, 60 years ago — in large part because of private companies, because of Reagan economics, you can get into a whole economic debate about it. We don't talk about the cost, both of resources and of time and health that go into creating that product. And if we look at the cost, actually, is it a net benefit or is it a net consequence?Attention by nature plays on two core strings: It plays on how I view myself and my value, which is then the attention I want, and it plays into where I know I can get that attention, and right now that's platforms. It used to be that your growth was in a very limited base. Your growth was in a group of friends, at a company, maybe on your soccer team. There was a very limited group where you had tangible benefit or tangible consequence. Both are good, depending on the attention you sought out.When we add in platforms and the ability to go and seek that out, tie what you know works to your identity, and take in all of this dopamine as well as all of this increased anxiety, when we have that playing out the same time you see third-party spaces disappear so people are not spending as much time with each other in real life, what you get is this growth that's going to end in total, not just disruption, but total destruction for a lot of people. You cannot keep going this way. It used to be, to your point exactly, Walt, that you would stop for eight hours to sleep, and now you stop for six hours to sleep. Or you would go to bed with a book and now instead you go to bed with your Twitter feed.We haven't given ourselves a chance to recover from the trauma of the last decade, especially the last five years. We've been running nonstop ever since basically the invention of the internet, but really the launch of the app store. We've been in this moment for the last 15, 16 years, and at some point, the speed we're running at — the necessity for growth, which is just finding ways to take more of your attention, more of your free labor, and create something out of that and ask you to keep sticking with companies — is going to run out.What I really want to try and figure out with Posting Nexus is where is the health, the net benefit? The net benefit is socialization, it's communication, it's connectivity. That is a net benefit. It's entertainment — entertainment is a net connectivity. We have more democratization of creators, which means we have more voices, which means we have more points of view. That's a net positive.It was a net positive for publishing back in 2010. You were getting stories on maybe Gawker or HuffPost or BuzzFeed that you were not going to get in The New York Times. It didn't mean that one was less valuable; it just meant there was a different POV that the democratization of publishing allowed for. But at some point when everyone had an opinion, when everybody was publishing and Google didn't know how to rank it, you lost authority and you got more disinformation. That became a really bad thing.With Posting Nexus, the underlying point is that we have such finite attention to give, even though it's sold to us as an infinite level of attention. We have a finite level of attention we can receive, even though we're told it's an infinite level of attention, and if we keep striving for growth, growth, growth, eventually you create a world that is unsustainable. With Posting Nexus, it's effectively an equation: How much can you do for net positive before you do too much and tip over into net consequence?That's such a good point, that from the perspective of the companies, they're arguing that growth could continue indefinitely. We can always make more money, but time is definitionally the one thing that you can't make more of.That's the thing with Posting Nexus that's really fun. For people who might not know my background, I started as a blogger for Vox Media, Polygon, The Verge, and then I went into being a strategy consultant, which was great. Recently, I wrote for a publication called Puck and there was a column dedicated to streaming, what was happening with streaming, and trends that were happening with streaming, which was, to your point, effectively an attention story. It was “YouTube is taking attention away,” that kind of story.What I've missed is this idea of being able to have thoughts longer than a tweet and put them somewhere. For example, we've got a bunch of really interesting stories coming out with Posting Nexus. We're looking at the value of The New York Times in 2024, kind of tied around a lot of the Biden coverage before he stepped down. We've got things on decreases in posting and how social media platforms turn into entertainment platforms and what does that mean for how we approach them.We also have really funny things, like a piece on how J.D. Vance as the first main character candidate was always going to happen because he's the first VP candidate ever who has an online history, like in terms of actually posting when he was 20. That's something we've only really seen with influencers over the last decade, and seeing how they've gone through it gets us to this moment where we can inevitably see where Vance goes.So we've got a lot of really fun stuff, but it all plays into this idea that we give our attention to things and our attention rewards through monetary incentives. Both Walt and I have worked in digital media, and when you give the attention to people, it then gives them a monetization pathway, and that's the number one incentive structure. If we think about how we give attention, how we then better focus that attention on something where we know the end result actually is a fiscal reward for a lot of companies or creators, how does that change the way we operate on the internet? And how does it change the way we want to receive some of those benefits, if that's something we want to do?We're getting into a world where your level of posting is the only growth that people have left to chase. This is all these companies have: that you're spending your time consuming Instagram stories. We need you to post in DMs because we know that's where you're spending time because the future of the internet is much smaller. We need you to create a post in a DM that steals from a post that's in your feed in order for us to then serve your data. There's all of that. People intrinsically know this.The New York Times? Our mutual friend, Ryan Broderick. Casey Newton, who writes Platformer. They are very good at writing about this. What I want to get at is the underlying incentive structures that we don't always talk about that are inherently tied to everything you do. If we break that apart, both from a strategic standpoint and a psychological standpoint, how do we better understand the internet that we are helping to create?This has reminded me of genuinely one of the first conversations that we had, which was us talking about Wattpad. A few weeks ago they IPO'd, and I think they still remain an incredibly interesting company. It just grounds some of these headier ideas we're talking about. Wattpad is a good example of a company that became a very wealthy company and a very valuable company because of the broad, dispersed labor of a lot of other people.Wattpad is a great example. I will say in full transparency, I do own shares in Wattpad. I went in when they were public, and this is not financial advice. I think those are the two disclaimers I have to have.Wattpad's very interesting. Wattpad — which is now Webtoon. They merged with a South Korean online comic company a few years ago — existed as a place where people could go and upload their fiction, often a lot of fan fiction. You had 14-year-olds writing stories for other people on the internet. What was interesting about Wattpad was that when it started around 2010, it was one of the first mobile app success stories. It worked because of the iPhone and Androids.You had people who'd go on and they would read their little stories and they would follow creators, but there was no actual financial incentive because you weren't paying the creators. The incentive was building a follower base. You had a lot of people at 14 who tended to be the audience for Wattpad, especially 14-year-old girls who were dealing with a lot of self-negativity in their real life, because they're teenagers coming of age in the time of Tumblr and Instagram and there's a lot of self-negativity on those platforms for young teenage girls.This was an opportunity where they could share their very specific, niche interests. They could write fan fiction about One Direction, or they could write fan fiction about their favorite anime, and they can write their short stories and have a really solid community of people — like LiveJournal for us — come out and say, “This is really great. You're talented, we'd love to continue reading.” And you could see your success and that attention you're receiving grow literally in the number of followers you had. It became this wholesome space away from the internet in a different way.I can't remember exactly the year they did this, but then Wattpad starts introducing financial incentives. There's this idea that you can charge for chapters as you're releasing them and people can subscribe to you for early access. As Wattpad continues to develop and they realize there's this really strong audience of content creators who are creating pretty well-thought-out content that would make for really good movies and TV series, Wattpad then launches its film division and says, we want to work with creators on this platform and bring their work to Sony Pictures, to Netflix, to Disney. We want to get them books.So you have movies like To All the Boys I Loved Before and that genre, which did not start on Wattpad, or you had After, which did start on Wattpad, and you had all these movies coming out that were gaining a larger audience. These authors then create a cycle of further posting, right? Because now people are saying, I can do that. I have access to Wattpad. I think I'm a good writer. And you see, which we've seen over and over again, how it goes from 1,000 subscribers to 10,000 to 10 million to 100 million users who are all posting in an effort to get attention.What's really interesting is how we define the value of that attention, because it used to be that the value of attention on the platform when people first started was from other 14- or 15-year-olds. It was a very peer-to-peer situation. It was, you are writing for someone like me.Now that value is defined by a Netflix executive in their 50s who says, I really think there are 14-year-old girls who would like this type of movie. That's really popular on the site, so we're going to work with Wattpad. The value has now become entirely backed by a financial reward. And if it's not backed by a financial reward, it's still within the follower count. What you get now is this company who — again, I bought shares in it — I think has a really strong business operation, because you have an endless supply of content coming in. You only need to pick a handful of titles that you think will appeal to these larger companies, and then you work with the author on getting them into this three-picture deal with Netflix.All of a sudden you're in between a very traditional world of moviemaking and television series, and you have this constant supply of free ideas and free content coming in that you technically can own the rights to if you work with a creator. No 17-year-old writer at this point is going to say no to having a movie on Netflix. So you get into a really interesting constant flow of supply with very high levels of demand that you can then cherry-pick.The other version of this — which is another company I have shares in, and this is not financial advice, for transparency — is Reddit. Once Google aligned and said, hey, people want more familiar answers when they're searching for “do I have cancer,” Google said, we can just pull from Reddit. It's going to help us with our AI and we can just serve that instead of having to pay The New York Times to have this.All of a sudden you're in this world where Reddit becomes the future of the internet because Google is the still the main pathway to the internet. And if you're pulling from Reddit, what does that do to authority? What does that do to the incentive structure to be popular on Reddit? Which for a while was just, did you show authority and knowledge within your own subreddit community? Now it takes on a whole new world.The business applications of controlling the supply of attention, putting it through a very narrow passage by cherry-picking demand, and how you can sell that demand, is kind of where we're at right now with a lot of these user-generated-content platforms.I love that. They found a way to sell, or at least monetize, like in Reddit's case, respect and reputation in the form of karma. And with Webtoon, I was shocked to see that they're like a $2.8 billion company now. There have always been web comics on the internet, but they were the first to really roll them up into Webtoon. There has always been fan fiction on the internet, but they were among the first to roll them up into this package.AO3, Fanfiction.net, they're not trying to develop a flywheel to give you more attention. They're excellent communities and they retain a lot of that original character. But the thing that Webtoon was really interested in is that they realized the currency of their realm is attention and followers, and now they are a multibillion-dollar company.That, I think, was one of the more compelling stories from this summer. When I saw that you were coming out with Posting Nexus, I was like, oh man, there could not have been a better moment for this. There could not be a better moment to really think about how attention works online.Yeah. And I know you'll appreciate the underlying part of this, because I know you are, and I mean this with all the love, a giant nerd.Gigantic.But one of the best stories I wrote when I was at The Verge — not in terms of it being a good story, but in terms of me liking it — was when I talked to the Wattpad team, the Webtoon team, and said, how do you incorporate data? You have huge numbers of chapters being uploaded every single day from all these authors that come on.They developed a tool, which will sound very familiar to anyone who's ever worked in SEO, where they look at every single word and they look at very specific trend words and try to figure out if it's reaching an audience cluster or cohort that is in demand from other studios. For example: Latino werewolf. Is there an audience for Latino werewolf romances? They can track it, and they do track it. Then they play around with the recommendation algorithms and some of the product placement, and as that grows, they then say, okay, we want to hyperfocus on this in order to sell.That, to me, is the other underlying part of the attention story. There was a really great article by John Herrman, who works at New York Mag, and he talked about whether Twitter is back or not back. He ends his article by saying it doesn't really matter, because according to Twitter's CEO, it is back. According to Elon, it's thriving. It was this idea that Twitter inherently feels very small because communities have gotten smaller. What you think is important is what's appearing on your feed, right? This is how something could be super viral on TikTok for you and no one else has ever heard of it.That idea started with companies like Wattpad and Reddit. They started with this idea that has a really strong impact on this audience and the equation they do. And I worked with companies — not Wattpad, not Reddit — as a consultant on this exact equation, which was: How monetizable is this small audience compared to that small audience? If you're going to look at your cost, where are you going to get the strongest return on your investment?We do that now across a million different cohorts every single day. It's just, where do we think the attention that we're receiving, because they are getting attention from the small group, actually transfers into an action that we can better monetize versus what's the attention that we're seeing that is not going to transfer into a monetizable action. You do that equation, and what that ends up doing is restructuring culture.Imagine Twilight today. Someone would've been like, queer vampire? We think that audience translates into highly monetizable. Now you have Simon and Schuster, Netflix, YouTube — you have all these companies saying, okay, there's a trend here. So we're going to see a new volume of content support that trend. Then a year later, all of a sudden, The New York Times writes a story about how everyone's into queer vampires.It's like, well, that started because someone looked at a cohort of strong attention and said, that's monetizable. It just blew up into redefining what culture is. That's pure attention online that transfers offline.That idea of “this niche is monetizable; this one's not” feels like that's been every success story on the internet for the past decade.When you were describing that, I was reminded of my favorite genre collision, which created something that could not have existed before the internet: the success of D&D podcasts and D&D content, whether it's Critical Role, or you see all this stuff on Dropout doing phenomenally well right now. That only happened because there was a group of niche fans that really, really clicked with something. They realized that this stuff is easier to produce than scripted content sometimes, and you could just see the value proposition make sense to people in real time. Now they're selling out Madison Square Garden.Seeing this very market-based thing, as you were describing, was like, oh man. We've seen this happen. That's really cool.I'm so happy you said this, because it's kind of the end point of what Posting Nexus wants to get at. The fact that things happen in one area and then move somewhere else happens all the time. You watch your favorite football team and then you go watch them play at the stadium. You discover your favorite singer via an album and then you go watch them play a concert. That's super traditional.What we're seeing now is a continuation of that, but it's fascinating to me. I think about this with Critical Role; I think about this with the Pod Save America guys. Effectively what they're doing is taking this attention that you've given them and monetizing it in a new way that feels weird to us because it's different from a superstar musician or a team sport that has always existed in the offline. This is a group of talent, a group of people that we associate solely with being online. And we have that really strong parasocial relationship with creators, because we literally watch them in our bed, even more so than TV. They're in our bed and we listen to them on their podcasts, because they can't just have a YouTube, right? Now they're podcasting, and they're finding different ways to capture more attention.It says a lot about how much we cling to human connectivity. This is my general barbell thesis, is that the world going forward, online or offline, is implausibly big — implausibly big like Christianity, or Taylor Swift — and addressably small. Which is still good; it just means monetizable, like Pod Save America or Critical Role.The whole goal of the first one is that you don't actually have to do 90,000 different things. People will come to you because that's what they crave. They crave that connection. And the second one, the more opportunity you give people to come and see you physically and have that connectivity, have that connection, the more you're going to be able to split how you want your attention eight different ways. Now that they've seen you, maybe they'll buy the book you're selling as opposed to if you just had the podcast.When we give attention and when people demand our attention in different forums, how does that then create these trends within business, within culture, the way we look at religion, the way we look at physical spaces? How does that impact our life offline? So again, it's that general thesis of why people do anything they do online, and how does that translate to what happens offline? That's the obsessive point for me.You've been so generous with your time, I want to make sure we bring this one home. You and I have both worked for the biggest entertainment company on the planet, you and I have both had independent newsletters that were profitable, and it is comforting to realize that it's not simply everything gets eaten or nothing survives. There is a vibrant version of the internet that has all of this.My favorite topic, which I annoy everyone in my life with, is history. I realize that makes me the most boring person on the internet, or just the most average person on the internet, but the thing I really like about history — whether that's ancient, modern, whatever it is — is that nothing is new. Everything happens again and again, so the internet and the fight for attention is like forms of religion battling it out during the Crusades. I mean, it was far more violent, and I'm glad we're not in those times, but it's this idea of what you're choosing to give attention and therefore power to, how we then take that power and tie it to our identity, and our way of communicating and the incentive that we have at the basis of all this is the same.What the internet has done is create unprecedented scale and rapidity that we can't even comprehend. We don't even have time to sit and think, oh, that's crazy that that thing happened. The publishing industry was wiped out, but we don't even have to do that because there's this new thing that's happening and it's newsletters. Which by the way are just pamphlets, which by the way are what people used to print the 1600s, right?It's not new, and yet for us because of the abundance of information that we have coming in, the abundance of content, of entertainment, of distraction that is demanding our attention, we don't have time to sit back and think, what was then five minutes ago and what will be five minutes from now? As we look at some of the biggest power players that build out a lot of these demands — whether it's user-generated social media, whether it's entertainment, whatever it is — bring it back down and really sit and think: What have I given my attention to today and why did I do that? What did it bring to me? And actually, what if I didn't want to do this?You kind of see this with Gen Z, by the way, who are like, I want a phone that's not connected to the internet. Them realizing this is not actually good for me, but what do I need in order to stay connected and feel that really strong presence of humanity?Big question. To your point, it's a super heady topic. What I try to do with the blog is bring it down into a topic that makes sense, that we can actually, tangibly grasp, while asking that question, which is why do you do anything and how has it affected you offline today?In your intro post you had a line saying it's a humongous topic, and there are a million tendrils to pull on. I am very excited to read those million tendrils. It is called Posting Nexus. I'll be sure to link it out.Julia, where can folks find you? Where can they follow you? Where can they see what you're up to?Wow, this is the first time I'm not in a publication. This is crazy. I'm still on X and Threads at @loudmouthjulia, and Posting Nexus is being hosted on Ghost. I'm trying that one out.Hey, a million flowers blooming. It's a fun time.This sounds like such a fun project, and I'm very eager to keep following where you're going. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure talking to you.Edited by Susie Stark.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Glenn McDonald, author of the new book You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music.I've followed Glenn's work for years now, and this book is the result of decades of work in the field, and comes from a perspective not only of technology's bleeding edge but also a sincere, personal love of music. We spoke about the mechanics of tracking genre data, how streaming has impacted listening trends, and how the model's economics are holding up.The book can be found everywhere books are sold.This interview has been condensed and edited. Glenn McDonald. Thank you so much for coming on. You are the author of You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song, which is a really compelling title all about the streaming revolution, but more importantly about this really fascinating moment in music data that for much of the past decade, you have been at the front seat for, or even in the driver's seat for. Your work goes back to a really interesting company called The Echo Nest.For new listeners and folks who maybe are unfamiliar with your story, can you just tell me a little bit of the history of this field and your place in it? The Echo Nest was a really fascinating company and I think more people ought to know about it.I had been doing software design for a long time and had worked on a bunch of different things that all had to do with making sense of data for people. None of them had been specific to music data, but I would always use my work tools on my record database or my other various music-related projects. Those were the things that I was really interested in.At some point I ended up tabulating the Village Voice critics music poll every year. This was what big data was for music in the era before streaming: It was like 800 music critics typing 10 album votes into blanks, with typos and everything. The companies I worked for kept getting acquired and my projects would get shut down or something, so every few years I'd need a new job.When this happened in about 2011, I just knew through contacts that there was this company in Somerville a couple of media lab people had started called The Echo Nest, which was trying to do something with music data because there suddenly was a lot more music data. The Echo Nest was trying to do recommendations and categorization stuff for streaming services. This was pre-Spotify launching in the U.S., so 7Digital and Rdio at the time were some of the existing players. And I had done enough music data things to convince them that I was a worthwhile person to add to this effort.I remember my first task at The Echo Nest. I showed up for my first day and they were like, “Oh, Glenn, you're here. Good. We're doing these radio stations for Spotify, this company we're trying to entice into using our services, and we're putting cartoon noises on the Franz Liszt classical station. Can you please figure out why we're doing that and make it stop?”So that was the beginning of the journey. We did not succeed initially at getting Spotify as a customer, because Spotify recognized, correctly, that to do a really good job we had to have listening data, and there was no way they were going to give us listening data when we were also powering their competitors, even though their competitors were small. I remember we tried really hard to convince them. We were like, “We'll keep your data on a server on the totally other side of the closet where we have our servers.” That obviously didn't fly. After a couple of years of doing a lot of other things along the way, it was a race to see whether Spotify would develop their own recommendations and not need us or whether they would just get enough money to buy us first.The money happened faster. We got acquired in 2014 and basically officially became the personalization team at Spotify. A bunch of the things we did had to do with understanding music and understanding taste so that you could do personalization, but it wasn't all directly involved with personalization.That's about when you got on my radar, because I was at the time doing pop culture stuff at 538. I think music was always a bit of an enigma to me, just because there was so much of it, and obviously all the challenges that you were facing at an industrial scale, I was facing on a journalistic scale.When I saw what you were doing — I don't think people really appreciate enough the moment when The Echo Nest got bought by Spotify. Very soon after, that's when you started seeing the level of personalization on the platform skyrocket. Do you want to speak a little bit about that?It was a combination of things, because some of that stuff was stuff that we brought, The Echo Nest, but that acquisition was also Spotify's moment where they bought into the idea that personalization was going to be a big part of this Spotify experience. Discover Weekly, for example, which came along shortly after that, was not an Echo Nest thing. That was done by people who had already been at Spotify, and some of them were annoyed that that feature was described as if it somehow came from the Echo Nest work.But basically everything that came about was because Spotify decided, “All right, personalization is going to be a thing.” At the same time, they acquired another company called Tunigo that was a playlist-making editorial company. And that was the beginning of, “All right, we're really going to have an editorial effort, too.” That was the beginning of both of those areas at once in Spotify's existence.A lot of the interesting stuff in your book comes out of the complications of using algorithms as opposed to taste, and just the serendipity of some of it. I want to play something, because I think it shows the moment that completely shattered something about how I thought about music and how I thought about what the tech was that y'all were building.I have a lot of Spotify playlists, just as anyone else does, and I was on a kick and I added a few songs in a row. The following week, all 10 recommended songs had this kick to start it. It's the “Be My Baby” kick. There's no way you could ask a DJ or even an expert, “Hey, can you find me 10 songs that all have this kick that I'm apparently into right now?”But lo and behold, I would go down this recommended songs list and it would all be that. And that showed me that, man, there's a level of depth here that not only could we never accomplish before, but that is going to change the way we really consume a lot of this stuff. I always found it really fascinating how you were really on the front of that for so much of the time at Spotify.One of the most interesting things to realize for me in this journey was that finding those patterns often comes about not the way you think.How did that happen?You imagine that the computer knows there are those drumbeats, it's found that you like them, and knows these songs contain them and lines them up. In fact, in this feature, that's not happening at all. It's just patterns of playlist making.That recommended feature at the bottom, it uses the playlist title when you don't have anything, but then as soon as you've got stuff in your playlist, it's really just doing a complicated search of songs and playlists from other people that overlap with what you put. Here's what else they did. I found over and over that it was more effective to basically mine listening for the implicit signal that people have created by listening in nonrandom ways than it was to try to find the thing you're actually looking for.If you try to find bands from Estonia, you get screwed up by metadata mistakes and missing data all the time. But if you can find a few bands that you know are from Estonia and use them to find an audience and use that audience to find what's different about those people's listening, then you find all the rest of the bands from Estonia without having to rely on metadata. Even the system doesn't know what it's doing. People have encoded that knowledge implicitly by listening.So I did find someone who'd been on a kick of listening to all the “Be My Baby” hooks in a row. It's fascinating stuff.I want to take it to the book now, because that speaks to a chapter specifically all about how you talk about genres and how genres don't really exist; they're just words that people use to talk about things. You describe them as “distributed communities of interest.” Do you want to speak a little bit about what genres are?We got into this genre thing at The Echo Nest because we promised somebody that we had genre radio. It was the era of Pandora. Algorithmic radio was mostly track and artists seated. That was how people mostly thought about it.We had some customer — I've long since forgotten who they were — who was like, that's too complicated. I just want like 16 buttons. It should just say rock and you hit it and it plays some rock music. And we were like, “Oh yeah, totally. We totally have that.” And then we went back to the office and we were like, we don't actually have that. But we better make it really quick.What we did have was this vast database of word frequencies. We knew what artists were written about in what vocabulary, so we were like, this will be fine. We'll just line up the artists for whom rock is a disproportionately occurring term and we'll sort them by popularity and hit play.We did that and then Rihanna came out and we were like, ah crap. People do say rock about Rihanna. I mean, she has a song called “Rockstar.” It's not crazy, but it was definitely not what these people wanted to have happen.So we had a few days, and I'm like, all right, there's cultural knowledge here. It's not complicated what rock is. We just have to mine this very basic cultural knowledge. We had a table full of interns from Tufts, so I'm like, “Here's what we're going to do. Interns, go for each of these 17 or however many genres we want to demo, and just go find a list of the most obvious artists. Look it up on Wikipedia or Google — don't do anything sophisticated. When someone says rock, what are they probably thinking of? Then we'll take five or 10 of those artists, and because we have this good graph of artist similarity, we'll say, what are the other artists that are collectively similar to those five or 10 seed artists for each genre? That'll probably get us close.”And that was right. That basically worked. If you feed in that what we mean by rock is The Who and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zeppelin, you get a set of artists out. If you say, no, what I meant was The Black Keys and the Foo Fighters and Coldplay, then you get a different set of artists out. So that was where we began. I didn't have a theoretical framework for what I was doing; I just had a thing that we needed to produce really quickly.But as I got into it and tried to extend this from 16 to 300 and then to 1,000, what I realized I was doing was scouring the planet to find communities, literal communities. Sometimes of artists, sometimes of listeners, usually of both but not always, and usually with some element of practice to them, but not like a list of criteria in the classic musical logical sense. You can describe the difference between Baroque music and ragtime in informal music theory terms, but that's not really helpful because people's interest is much more specific than that. You can't just say this is definitely formally a hip-hop song, and therefore you as a hip-hop fan are going to like it, because if it's in Turkish and you only speak Bulgarian, it's probably useless to you.Once I understood that, then it became easier to think about how we proceeded: that we're trying to find communities and show them back to themselves. And they usually have names for themselves. Sometimes we would find communities that didn't yet have a self-identification and we would have to make up names for them, but the goal of doing that was to be able to show those people, here you are, here's your taste. You're an audience, you have a taste. If you think of a name for it, tell me and I'll replace it. But I gave it a name so that we can at least talk about it.It also gets at a big issue with music in general. Even going back to radio times, there are a lot of genres that truly don't exist, that are entirely manufactured. Things like classic rock or oldies are referendums on not just what you played, but how long ago you played it. And even things like indie rock says more about the economics of the people who distributed your record than perhaps you yourself. But nevertheless, these communities are constituencies that have an expectation that if they press an indie rock button, they want to hear some indie rock.Indie rock is a great example where there are 12 good answers to that depending on who you are, and we couldn't call them all indie rock. Some of the exercise in making up names was like, all right, how am I going to differentiate between 12 historical, regional, philosophical variations that each think of themselves as indie rock? I have to tell the story a little differently.Yeah, I dig that. That's a really exciting challenge.I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that make streaming unique as a distribution format and a distribution medium. Whenever you have a new medium emerge, you have new intersections of how people work with that and consume it. You see it time and time again that technology can inform what's done.You have a whole chapter in your book about this: “Chill is the new music.” It talks about essentially background and foreground sounds, whether that's lo-fi hip-hop radio, which is fairly well known, or things like a peaceful piano playlist. Things that would not exist in any previous iteration of the music industry are now dominant forms of consumption for lots of people. Do you want to speak to how this emerged and how you assess the space?My favorite example of this is nature sounds. I had a CD of rainforest noises, and I would play it sometimes, but I was never going to buy another one. I think this is true of most people. I think most people had zero or one background noise CD in the CD era. The worldwide market of rainforest noises was probably a dozen, and you could compete between those dozen which was going to be the one that an individual user bought, but you couldn't go much further than that.Streaming has made it possible to have that for no additional costs. It's like, it's not that I was against hearing a different rainforest. Costa Rica was superior to Indonesia.Borneo is lovely this time of year.One of the finest rainforests to listen to. But we unlocked that because now I can just put on a playlist of rainforest noises and I can hear new rainforest noises.Does it really matter in rainforest noises? No, but it matters more in lo-fi hip-hop, where it is sort of a substance and you may prefer to hear new examples of the same form. That suddenly became totally viable. Peaceful piano is another one of those. I think a lot of people owned one classical CD and they would it put on when they needed something in the background. “I'll put on the classical music I own.”Not only did streaming unlock the rest of the classical catalog, but then suddenly people were like, not all classical music works that well. I can just make stuff that's perfect for this mode. It's the perfect size and it's exactly as soothing, and it's not going to do some interesting thing that Chopin did because Chopin was interesting. Let's make it all fit this need. And I think there are a lot of needs that you wouldn't have spent a lot of money to satisfy, but they're needs you will spend a little bit of time to satisfy if it's free and it's easy to find them.Fascinating. The rise of that has just been such an interesting side effect of the business model, in some way, but also a side effect in terms of how people want to listen to something pleasant in the background but not necessarily shell out for it. It just seems like it's a novelty of the distribution format that I enjoy, but can really only exist at this time in history.Yeah. And it's not just streaming, too, because it's a synergy of streaming and having phones with you and earbuds and the expectation of music in all parts of your day. The idea that not only do you have earbuds, but everybody has earbuds, so it's normal for you to have your music in a public environment without bothering other people.I want to talk a little bit about another side effect of the streaming model. This is one of the first times I've seen someone who was actually inside the house recount what this looks like, but streaming fraud has a lot of folks in the industry on edge or concerned —folks who are trying to manipulate the eventual rankings of things or the eventual performances of artists, whether it's for financial reasons, they want their artists to get more money, or they just want more people to see the person for whom they belong to the Army.I thought this was just a really interesting look inside a company that has to deal with this and how obvious it can look at you. You had a story about Beyoncé in there that was fascinating, but I would love to hear about what streaming fraud and Army-style tactics look like from the inside.I never intended to be involved in fighting streaming fraud at all. But as I explain in the book, I fell into it just because I was looking for patterns and sometimes the patterns that I'd find would make no sense. I'd be like, what? In one of the earliest examples, I was starting to try to look at what was different about listening in each city, and a lot of cities made sense. I could say, all right, I know what people in that region like and I can see it in the city.And then Buffalo, New York, was all church music. I've realized in this process that I don't know that much about the world, and I've been surprised many times by things that turn out to be real features of how people move around the planet. So I tried not to jump to conclusions. I was like, okay, maybe Buffalo's a really religious place and it's a really common usage to have organ music that you play off Spotify. That theory didn't hold up very long. It was obviously not what was actually happening. I found that a lot of times, whenever I would go looking for interesting patterns in small subsets of people, whether they be geographic or by age or demographic or whatever, some of them would be weird. I realized that I'd found a subset of accounts, but not a subset of people.Having spent 10 or 12 years at this, depending on how you look at it, if I wanted to live a life of crime, this is definitely the life of crime I am best prepared to enter into, and I would not do it. That's my message to aspiring fraudsters: shoplift, go do something else. Anything is better than this. This is a really bad way to try to earn money, because anything that you do that earns enough money forms obvious patterns and it's just trivially easy to detect. Sometimes it took me half an hour to figure out the exact pattern that some new cluster of bots was using to manipulate things in slightly different ways, but it never took long. It was always trivial to block them. It depended on the magnitude, whether Spotify would care and go after them in any punitive sense, but blocking whatever they were trying to do was never hard once it reached any magnitude where it would matter.I always knew, and have been saying for years, that Buffalo Bills-based organ music was an industry plant. Thank you for confirming that for me.That is actually a fun segue, because one of the most interesting chapters in here, I think, was about how the streaming model has winners and it has losers, and it has genres that are in fact losers. I know we've already agreed that genres are mere communities of sound, but for all intents and purposes, but let's go back to the more traditional sense here.You write a lot about how genres like jazz, classical, experimental music, these aren't really being well served by the streaming model. And you actually write a little about whether streaming actually makes discovery of this stuff easier or harder. What got you aware of this potential side effect of the model and how do you assess where it's at?This was always interesting to me because although I like Taylor Swift and I have some Ed Sheeran songs that I love, my taste includes a lot of obscure things. I'm very attached to those things existing and the people who make those things managing to somehow live in such a way that they get to keep making, you know, extremely florid gothic symphonic metal albums, or weird wedding music from Limpopo, or Filipino pop punk.As a human, I want all these things to be viable whether they are super popular or not. The genre project could have stopped at 300 if it only cared about the popular genres. It kept going to 6,000 because I think everything deserves to have the same chance to find its audience, whether that audience is small or not.As I say in the book, I think the way royalties work now in streaming is, in economic terms, actually slightly progressive. It's hard to guess this, but I didn't have to guess. I could run the numbers on the whole Spotify. I could run alternate economic models on literally all the Spotify data. That doesn't always tell you how the future will be, because sometimes when you change things, people change behavior, but I could definitely evaluate other proposals for how the existing money should be divvied up. What I found was that the model we're currently using is a slight subsidy of less popular artists by the most popular artists in practice, which is the opposite of what some people surmise, which was interesting in itself.And really, the headline is that it's a small factor. It doesn't actually matter very much. But every medium, like you say, has winners and losers by the nature of the format. There was a sort of artist that would appeal to the people who bought the most CDs, and in the CD era, I spent thousands of dollars. I was one of those people that spent thousands of dollars a year in order to discover all the music I was curious about, because I had software jobs and I could afford it. Therefore, I had a lot of economic power in that model. People like me exerted a lot of economic power. As an artist, if you were the kind of artist that I bought, that was excellent.Now I spend $10 or $11 a month on streaming like everybody else, so that power has been distributed a lot more broadly. It's a lot less concentrated now, which I think is good on the whole. I think that's good for society. But it does mean there were people who thrived very specifically in the CD era, and they could put out limited editions and CD singles. This seems crazy to me in retrospect. I would spend $12 on an imported UK CD single to get one B-side that I hadn't heard, and now that's a whole month of my listening. The crazy part of that was the former state, paying $12 to hear one B-side. That's crazier than the current model.But it's true that with a lot of things, when individual artists tell a sad story of how they used to have a career and now they don't, sometimes it's for this reason. They had found a niche and that niche went away and there are new niches. The system overall is producing as much money and it supports obscure things in general just as readily, but they're not necessarily the same obscure things to the same level.Interesting. And that $12 single, you can't be alone. They released it for a reason. There must've been a critical mass that in the aggregate means now they have to spend another day on the road, or rely on superfans. The main way you can reach them these days, if everybody's only tithing $15 or so a month through their streaming, is through appearances or tours or other kinds of onerous things.It's true, but also availability is totally different now. I think people sometimes fall into the trap of trying to compare the money as if the behavior is the same. They're like, a person would have bought my CD for $10 at my show, and now they're going to stream my song once and I only get a third of a cent. Not very many people are going to come to your show, and of them, only a few are going to buy your CD, and the number of people who are going to buy that $12 CD single to hear that B-side is really small.That B-side now could be on a playlist and a million people who've never heard of you could come across it. The dynamics are now completely different, and not everybody adapts to them immediately, but you now have a very, very broad potential casual audience that is only going to spend a third of a cent on you, but there are a lot of them. Maybe 10% of them will spend 12 cents on you by listening to a whole album a couple times, and a few of them will listen to your whole catalog and they'll buy tickets to see you when you come.Overall it's about the same money. The music industry is, in absolute terms, now past the CD peak. Adjusted for inflation, it's not quite there, so we're not quite as far into the streaming era as the CD peak was in the CD era. It seems possible still that the CD peak will be surpassed by the streaming peak in overall money, which is good, I think.That's neat. To back out a little bit, the book is excellent. People can find it wherever books are sold, and it's called You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song.You are also known for another project, Every Noise at Once. You've since departed Spotify, and as a result of that departure, the availability of Every Noise was in jeopardy for a little bit there. You mentioned that you have a lot of physical media and I would love your view on this: How do we preserve our understanding of how music works at this point in time? Down the line, things are going to be fundamentally shifted, as the industry inherently does. You've been involved in a number of projects that have relied on some of these big players to fuel their data.Where do you come down on how we can preserve a lot of this discovery and a lot of this understanding moving forward, even if we are losing the data through our fingers as it comes in?Part of it is understanding what the data is and what we've accomplished. I got laid off from Spotify, and I'd been there for a good long time, so for me I could be like, that's fine. Twelve years is longer than I had at any other job. I can do something else now and that's all right.But it definitely hurt because I built this thing and my attachment to it was very heavily tied up in its ability to constantly change. We were still adding genres to it and one of my, and a lot of people's, favorite features of it was a thing that took every week's new release list and organized it by genre. That immediately stopped working, for no good reason. It's not confidential information that the Spotify API is not arranged in such a way that you can get the information out, even though it would be in Spotify's interest to have people better able to find new releases. When I worked at Spotify, I could route around the structural problem and just ship a CSV file to my website and then everybody could see those things.I lost that ability and initially I was like, oh, the website is dead, but then with 30 seconds more thought I realized that this is what happens to most things. They build for a while, and then they reach a state and that's the end of building them, but now they're real. That map of 6,200 genres remains a map of world listening up until 2023, and there's more music in that than you'll ever be able to listen to or discover; for practical purposes, if what you care about is exploring the world, it's still a very interesting map that will help you do that.If what you care about is organizing what happened last week, then for now I don't have the tools to help do that in public in a way that I wish I did. But I'm still hopeful that we'll get that back. We only need one music service to say, “All right, you can get a list of this week's new releases from our API now, and it's not limited to 1,000,” and then I'll be able to revive that.Amazing. Glenn, I really love the book. Why don't you tell folks where they can find it, where they can find you, and why they should check it out.It's on Bookshop.org and Amazon. The original publisher is British, so if you are in the U.K. you might be able to find it in stores. If you are somewhere else you might have to order it, but that's how most things get out now. There's a Kindle version if you don't care about paper, and if you do, it's got a blue cover. It's nice.It's a good-looking cover. Hey, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Again, I've been such a fan of yours for so long, and just to see this finally come out is really cool.Thanks for reading.Edited by Susie Stark.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Zach Weinersmith, who with his wife Kelly Weinersmith wrote the brand new book A City On Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?, which is out this week. I loved this book. I've been looking forward to it for years since they announced it, and I loved their previous book, Soonish. It's an in-depth look at what exactly it's going to take to get a permanent human settlement on another world. Zach and Kelly investigate not just the physics problem of getting people and material there, but also the long-term social, legal and biological issues inherent in this kind of venture. It's an amazing read, and it's available wherever books are sold. Beyond A City on Mars, Zach can be found at his iconic webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and you should check out his other books, which include Soonish and Bea Wolf, his children's book adaptation of Beowulf.Remember, you can subscribe to the Numlock Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. This interview has been condensed and edited. Zach, thank you so much for coming on.I'm excited to talk about space nerd stuff.Boy, are you. You have written a book called A City on Mars. You ask all sorts of really exciting questions throughout the book. It is not just a book about the physics of getting to Mars, which I think a lot of people fixate on. It is a book about sociology. It is a book about how communities work. It is a book about all sorts of different exciting things. Your research process was incredibly thorough. I guess just before we dive in, what was it like to write this thing? What was it like to report it out and dive into the science?Oh man, it was kind of awful. And you know what it was? I think when you do pop science, there's this fantasy you have of, "What if I got a topic and I was out ahead of other people and it was really controversial and awesome." And you'd think that would be romantic and be like a montage. But we were so anxious, because we felt like we were really going against a lot of strongly held views by smart people. And when you do that, you feel like you really have to know what you're talking about so that you can stand your own when they are going to come at you.And so the result of that, and our just general dorkwad-ery, was that there was just a ton of primary and technical source reading, which is awesome. Actually, it's like what I do in my free time, as a boring person. But when at some point I was reading a hundred-something pages a day of hard stuff and like you roll out of bed and you're like, "What? I have to read 50 pages of seabed international law to understand that!" It was brutal. I mean absolutely wonderful kitchen table conversations during this time, but it was tough.Yeah, a lot of it is very compelling because again, you've had some of the finest minds that our society's produced consider what it would take to get us into space and stay there. And that I imagine has got to be a lot of fun. But then you also, you really consider all sides of this, man. You've got sociology, but you just mentioned you have the law.There's a lot of legal precedent when it comes to these interesting spaces that are not owned land but nevertheless are important. Do you want to walk people through the structure of the book and what angles you take and how you dive in?So we ended up artificially separating it into six sections, which hopefully I can actually remember, because we fussed a lot with the structure; this is a book that, as you say, goes from lots of angles. There were lots of options for how to structure it and we actually originally had it as we'll go through orders of magnitude from one person to 10 people, then 100 people. And it just turns out, I learned that sociologists don't believe there are actual meaningful, emergent obvious things different between a hundred and a thousand people where you can be like, "Okay, here's what happens now."We ended up instead saying, "We're going to start off with what it does to your body." So that's like sex and reproduction, that's physiology, what space does to your body, and then also psychiatry stuff which was nontrivial. Then we move on to the place you might actually put that body. Ideal spaces are probably the moon or Mars, and especially Mars is probably best, which we could get into.Then we move to how you might keep that body in that place from dying. That is to say, habitat construction. How do you build a facility in one of these places? Where might you go and what are the future goals there and the problems you need to solve. But mostly having to do with energy and shielding and also making food and oxygen and consumables.And then at that point, we dive into the law and sociology. So then we go to a brief rundown on the "cynical history," we call it, of outer space. And the basic point of that is to position you to understand that human spacefaring is almost always purely political. It's about making declarations as a superpower and showing up other countries.That prepares you to think about how the space law as we have it is. So we go into how the law actually works, which a lot of geeks think doesn't matter, they don't think international law exists, but it does. We know it constrains the behavior of countries and people. From there we get into some sociological questions. We'll talk about this a little more later; the sociology was at one point quite extensive, and the editor was like, "You just can't do this to readers. This is just too much," so we cut it down to looking at company towns as a potential model, and a couple other things.Then we close out with some questions having to do with the future, in the sense of what numbers are we talking about to avoid too much inbreeding, to have economic autarchy — that is to say, being able to survive the death of Earth.Then finally what would happen in the case of space war and how to think about the idea of space war. Yeah, so we're really trying for every angle. I could tell you, we did still leave out stuff. There was stuff we had to cut, but we tried to be as thorough as possible.I'm so glad that you brought up the "cynical history of space," because I thought that that was just such a very thorough look. Space is one of the most romanticized things. I think that's one reason that again, this topic is so compelling, is that we just have so many stories that we tell each other about space and its role and there's a fundamental yearning to it. There's a fundamental ambition to it. You could tell a lot of stories set in space, and we have.Whereas the cynical history of space was really just bringing things down to as brass tacks as possible. It was turning this romance into the physics and politics that it truly is, and I really appreciated it. Do you want to dive in a little bit on that, a brief cynical history of space?Yeah, I'd love to. So it's funny. There's a power law, I can say this for your audience. There's a power law for what space stuff is about. So it's like 90 percent of all space books are about Apollo 11, in particular, where we landed on the moon. And then 90 percent of what's left is either Apollo 8, where we first went around the moon, or Apollo 13, where everything went wrong and there was a movie about it. And then down from that, it's everything else.There's a subgenre in all this that is the political history. There are only a couple books about this, and they're mostly more scholarly because I guess regular people just don't want to read about the sort of geopolitical theory about why countries do this sort of thing. What's funny is that in those fields, and people who study the law and history, if you said, "Hey, Kennedy went to space as a purely political act," it would be like saying, "I know how to tie my shoes." It's just the most obvious thing in the world.But if you say that to a space geek, it's like you're poking something beautiful. But we have the evidence! I mean you never know what's in a person's heart, but we know, there's evidence that after Sputnik Kennedy thought space was stupid. We really only did that big speech to Congress, which sometimes gets conflated with the one at Rice. He only did his big speech to Congress basically saying, "Give me a huge pile of money," after Bay of Pigs.And then very shortly after, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space and he was of course, a Soviet. So Kennedy looked like garbage and he knew it, and he was a smart PR operator. So we have private transcripts of stuff he said basically saying, "There's no reason to do this." He uses the phrase, "I'm not that into space." He just says it very explicitly, "We need to show them that we won." And that's it.And his own science advisor, I don't think we put this in the book, but my recollection is, Jerome Wiesner, his science advisor, refused to go along with the idea that this was about science. He was not cool with it. So there's just very robust evidence that this was politics all the way down on both the American and the Soviet side. That unfortunately the great mass of the public around the world overestimates the importance of rocketry to the dominance of nations and their technological capacity. Whereas, I think you could easily argue that the U.S. was ahead the whole time in everything that mattered, but people are just beguiled by rocket technology.Again, part of this is some stuff that I've read, but it seems like a lot of people's mentality about space is derived from Disneyland and a lot of sci-fi aesthetic stuff.Yeah, it's that. I have an older brother as a poli-sci professor and he said when he gets students and he says, "Who's the best president ever?" They still to this day often say, "Kennedy." And when you ask them why, they cite a speech or something, which is not afforded to any other president! Any other president, it's like, what did they do? But with Kennedy for some reason — probably because he was assassinated while young and handsome, and there's this sort of legend about it — people are like, "Well..." Here's the history of space: Kennedy said, "We go to space because we're amazing and we need new frontiers." And so we went and that's it. And you want to come in and say it was about politics, how dare you.Readers might recognize you from your book Soonish. A City on Mars you wrote with your wife, Kelly, as you did with Soonish. One carryover from Soonish that I really dig in this book is that you kept the Nota Benes, which are chances to dive in on perhaps things that are a little offbeat, but fun elements. I really love all of them.The one that I really enjoyed the most that felt very relevant to the next step of this conversation is Antarctica and violence around it. We have a place that is very inhospitable to human life that we send people to occasionally, where sometimes people do crimes, and it is called Antarctica. And that is the best indication of what might be the situation in space.So there's a little bit of a nuance to this. Sometimes when people work in space psychiatry, space psychology, they'll say one of the things that's important is, "Did you know one time a guy got stabbed in Antarctica for spoiling novels?" And then there's another famous story where, as the story goes, there were two Russians at Vostok station having a chess match and one killed the other or attacked him with an axe or something. So they banned chess.And so both of those stories, actually, they're not really true. They got passed around the internet all day and all night. I think the one about the chess thing is just not true. Or at least, we couldn't find evidence. We talked to a guy who had been at Vostok station for a long time, he's a Russian guy. And he was like, "I'd never heard of this or about the chess ban." And it also just utterly smacks of Russian stereotyping.A hundred percent, yeah.Right. There's no dancing bear or whatever, but it's pretty close. The story about the spoiling novels, the novel thing was just a weird detail it was fixated on. It was more like the guy was just hazing him and bullying him for a long time and finally went too far and the other guy stabbed him. And it's sort of a bit more of a conventional stabbing story.Our perspective, and there's reasonably robust data on this, is actually that in Antarctica where it is dark and cramped and awful and somewhat space-like, you actually don't get a higher rate of psychiatric problems. Maybe even there's some evidence it's lower. That's probably to do with the fact that people are screened before they come and they're probably somewhat self-selected.But that doesn't mean you get to just be like, "Don't worry about it." Right? Because it has been the case in Antarctica that we've had to handle murders. There have actually been murders. There's one that's well-documented where a guy accidentally shot another guy during an altercation having to do with raisin wine. Which, I hadn't by the way heard about raisin wine, but it's I guess a sort of low-quality homemade wine.It'll bring a new meaning to the phrase “moonshine” if we pull that off in space.This is a whole funny thing that we would joke about, and we talk about making food in space. We found a quote by Andy Weir of The Martian who wrote the foreword to a book called Alcohol in Space, which is actually a quite wonderful book, what you would think. And he says, "Mark Watney, the star of The Martian, would not have made vodka because why would you waste all those potatoes?"But we actually, if you look into the history of biosphere, the place where people stayed for two years in confinement to see if you could do this? They were starving, and they still made alcohol. I love that story. It's like they're literally losing 10 percent body mass, but they still made the worst quality wine out of bananas or raisins. Humans are a problem.Is that the case for a lot of this? Humans are the problem with space travel?I think the way I would say it is, humans are the problem, but in that they're humans. Because people tend to think like, "Oh, you'll go mad in space." Or whatever. And there's just no evidence of that extreme thing. It is just that they're going to be humans. So on Earth, when you're a human, you expect all sorts of basic services. Some humans, from time to time, have acute psychiatric problems or whatever, and they need to be taken care of. And this is just usually not imagined when people talk about sending a thousand people to Mars.Let's talk about where to, right? You have an entire chapter where you talk about Mars, you talk about the moon, you talk about a rotating space station, which is not the worst option. Then you talk about some other options, too. Why don't you walk us through, give us a little tour of the buffet here and where you come down as the angle?The deal is, the solar system is really, really big. Space is really, really big. But the places you might maybe sort of survive on are eeny, weeny weeny.Mercury is basically a nonstarter. It's way too hot and it's actually fairly hard to get to because you have to drop toward the sun and then carefully get into orbit.Then you've got Venus, which is incredibly hot, high pressure, and has sulfuric acid clouds. There are weirdly a couple people who still think it would be good. Their argument is, and this is true, it's a very thick atmosphere, so you should almost think of it as something like a fluid. There's a place in the atmosphere that does have Earth-like temperature and pressure and carbon dioxide. When you're in this mode of like, "Well, does it literally have the elements of existence and maybe sounds compelling?" I think it's crazy, but it does have its people.Then you have Mars, which is the place. Basically, it has Earth-like elemental composition. It has an atmosphere, although it's quite thin. But it's an atmosphere with carbon dioxide, and carbon and oxygen are both nice things to have.Then beyond that, of course, there's Earth and there's Earth's moon. The moon is great, but it's very low in water, it's carbon-poor, and humans are made of carbon as there are things we like to eat. So the moon is good as a place to launch from, but not for building a permanent settlement unless you're really going to ameliorate it.Then beyond that, you've got the asteroid belt. A lot of people think it'd be great to live in asteroids, but actually asteroids are typically rubble piles. They're dusty rocks that are kind of drawn together. They're actually quite distant from each other. It's not like in Star Wars where you're dodging big potatoes, and you actually usually can't see one from another. They're quite sparse and beyond that—Wow.It's extremely sparse. Then going further out, you just have the gas giants where there's not even a surface to land on, and the icy planets. And then there are a couple moons, there have been here and there proposals for landing on Titan, but you're talking about extraordinary distance and all sorts of other problems.So really, it's the moon or Mars, which have a combined surface area smaller than Earth, and they're both just awful. The reason we say the moon is cool is because it's always the same distance, and the distance is not too far. It's about two days by rocket, but there's almost no water on it, contrary to what you might've heard in articles in Bloomberg about this trans-lunar economy we're supposedly going to build. The surface is made of this really nasty stuff called regolith that probably damages equipment, and may cause health problems.The main appeal of Mars is basically that it has Earth-like days, it has access to water, and it has some atmosphere. So all the stuff is there to not die, which is really not true anywhere else.So it's the best option that we've got. But it doesn't sound like it's necessarily a great option.No, and it's also, unless some exotic technology comes along, it's six months in, about a year stay, six months back. There's a long period where you're there and you cannot go home because Earth has raced ahead of you around the sun.Oh wow. There are a lot of fascinating problems that present themselves. And again, one thing that I love about your and Kelly's work is that you really just talk to a lot of really smart people. You do a lot of the in-depth research.One thing I have to ask you about is that you actually published an article in space policy: To Each According to Their Space-Need: Communes in Outer Space. I just love that this is the depth to which you did it, where you did get a scientific paper out of this one, too.We did! Yeah. And I should say that that scientific paper had many more jokes and illustrations in it when it was in the book. It was originally a chapter.We worked with two other guys. One was Ran Abramitzky, who's a big deal sociologist, who is the kibbutz and commune studies guy, and then John Lehr, who's the absolute expert on how to write communes. We did this paper together. The reason it got cut from an earlier version of this book is, we were like, "Let's look at tons of sociological models." All that's left from that is company towns. The basic feeling from our editor, which I think was correct, was, "Each one of these models is starting your audience over in a completely new topic. It's just too much to ask for a pop science audience."But communes are really interesting. People often want to talk about stuff in space society, but usually you can't do science on it. So you can't be like, how should we form society? That's hard. But if you start with, well, what if it is a company town, then you can say stuff, because we know stuff about that structure.One structure — and a lot of this is due to Ran Abramitzky — we know a lot about is communes. He did this book called The Mystery of the Kibbutz, and the mystery is how did you actually get humans to behave communally for about a hundred years? He actually does a standard, delightful neoclassical economic analysis of how they manage human incentive structures to get people to behave in a basically communal way.What's absolutely fascinating is when you look throughout history going back hundreds of years throughout communes, they converge on the exact same sets of problems and the exact same sets of solutions. Hutterites, who are this very— certainly by my standards — very sort of patriarchal, old world Anabaptist religion, they will shun you and shame you if you fail to do certain communal things.But if you go to the surviving hippie communes? Amazingly, they do the exact same stuff. They do it in a hippie way, but they still do it. And so it's just astonishing. So if you say, "Oh, space is going to be like a commune," you can really do some cool stuff. I mean, I don't know if it will be, but you can at least say we can do some deep analysis and we can read primary literature. It's just really cool.It is cool because again, finding experiments is hard because everything that would involve an experiment here is either drastically immoral or extremely expensive. It is cool that for company towns, there's a huge economic record of that. You have an amazing chapter in the book about that. And I dig this article because it's just cool how much terrestrially really we do have to work with here.It's amazing. One of my absolute favorite things. For a numbers audience like yours, this is really cool. A lot of people are into space stuff. Would it be better to have a religious community, because they're going to need to be sort of cohesive? It's set in a hand-wavy way, but you can actually compare secular versus religious kibbutzim. You actually find that the religious ones have a measurable – like quantifiable with shekels, like with money – difference in retention ability.You can actually kind put a number on religion as a retention, at least in this context. I don't know, maybe Anabaptists are better than Jews at retaining people, or maybe worse. But it's amazing and it's not trivial, but it's also not huge. It's not like an order of magnitude, but it is a real difference. People are more willing to stay. This is less true for Jews, but in Anabaptism, like if you leave the commune, you go to hell in Hutterite Anabaptism. So that's probably quite motivating. But yeah, just amazing that you can put a number on something like that.I mean that's the thing, man; if you leave the commune on Mars, you do go to Mars.That's right. You die. You do die very quickly. Yeah, but that's interesting because that adds to the analysis, because a classic commune problem is when people can get opportunity elsewhere, they do. But if you die, if you go outside, that's probably different.I would be in total violation of all journalistic principles if I did not ask you about the possibility of space war. What did you find on this matter?We try really hard not to be too speculative. The way we did it is, we talked about short-term, medium, long-term, right? Short-term, people talk about space war. It probably won't happen, basically because there's no reason to do it. Without getting too in-depth, there is some cool analysis about space weapons you can look up. Space weapons sound awesome and they are awesome. I will say, guiltily, there are some zany designs from the Reagan era for these pumped X-ray lasers that were going to blast the Soviets. Crazy s**t.I'm a simple guy. If you call it a "Rod from God," you have my attention.Totally. But the basic problem: All of us already have nuclear weapons. Insanely, if Russia decided they wanted to nuke Washington, I don't know, we do have defenses and stuff. But do they get the advantage from setting the nuke in the space before firing it? I think the answer is probably no. It does get there faster, but it's also totally exposed while it's up there. It's probably in low Earth orbit. It's constantly pissing off everyone on Earth while it's up there. And at the end of the day it saves you some number of minutes. It might be as much as 20 or 30 minutes. I'd have to look at it. But we're talking about just a slightly accelerated doomsday situation. There's only a really narrow set of circumstances for you to actually want this stuff, and it's really expensive and hard to maintain.So short-term, probably not going to happen.For space settlements, a space settlement would probably never want to make war on another space settlement or on Earth because it would be so easy to destroy. I mean, you're talking about survival bubbles in the doom void. One EMP and it's toast; one big hole and you all die. It's just, you're so vulnerable and also so dependent on Earth, it's unlikely. So in a Heinlein scenario where the moon is like, "We're going to mess you up,” it's like, "No." All Earth would have to do is hover some nukes over your base and blast the electric system and you're gone.So the more interesting question we got into, I thought, was we talk about this as a long-term issue.On Earth, there are different theories on this, but there's this question of, why don't we use gas weapons typically? Why don't we use bio weapons typically? And there are sort of cultural theories, but maybe we just decided not to. It depends on how cynical you want to be about humans, whether you believe that or not.But part of why we don't use these weapons is that they're unpredictable. So there are like these horrific cases from World War I where people try gas weapons, and the wind blows, then it just goes right back at them. Of course, with bio stuff, it's even more obvious how that could go wrong. It's also true, by the way, that part of why we don't test nukes anymore is because we started finding radioactive byproducts in babies' teeth, which is pretty motivating for most humans.But if you're down two separate gravity wells? If it's Mars versus Earth? You can drop this stuff and there is no risk of blowback.So the only reason we bring that up is basically because a lot of space geeks say, "We need to colonize Mars to reduce existential risk." But we don't know that the equation adds up to a reduced risk! There are many ways it could add up to increased risk.When we're not sharing the same atmosphere all of a sudden things go back on the table.Right. Yeah, exactly.The book is called A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? It is great. I really loved your book Soonish and when you announced it, I was really, really intrigued that this was your follow-up to Soonish. Because Soonish is all about technologies that are just on the horizon. And when you announced this, I was like, "Well, clearly there was something left over in the reporter's notebook going into that."Exactly.And so I guess I'll just ask, what was it like moving on to this next topic and how soon-ish would you say this stuff is?Oh, man. Well, I would say I have set back my timeline a little, having researched it.I mean, part of why we got into this in the first place is we did think it was coming relatively soon, and was awesome. And it was surprising the extent to which advocates were not dealing with the details. So the project ended up becoming like, we're going to actually get into the primary literature about all these questions.My view is, I doubt we have a settlement, meaning people are having children and families on Mars; certainly not in my lifetime. What I would add is that it's almost certainly undesirable for it to happen that quickly because not enough of the science is in. It would be morally quite dubious to try to have children in these places with the lack of science we have.But to be slightly uplifting, I have two directions on it. One uplifting direction would be, well, you never know. Maybe AI's going to take all our jobs in two weeks and we'll just tell it to take us to Mars and we'll be fine. I don't know. I mean there's some world in which 30 years from now there are fusion drives and advanced robotics and everything I'm saying sounds quaint. And then maybe it does happen.The other thing to say, though, is a lot of the stuff we need to do to make this possible and safe is stuff that would be nice to do anyway. So without getting into it, it would be nice to have a legal framework on Earth where war wasn't a serious possibility, or a thing that's currently happening in many places at once. Because in space, there's lots of stuff going fast. And if you get a world where there are millions and millions of tons of spacecraft going at high speeds, that's a dangerous world with our current geopolitics. So we need to solve that if it can be solved.Yeah. I loved how much of the book wasn't just the physics. It was really exciting to see that it's not just can we or how would we, it's should we and what will happen?Yeah, the law to me, I mean we really tried to add some sugar to it because everybody does not want to read international law. We have all these great stories. There's this story about the times like Nazis showed up in Antarctica to heil a penguin. They actually heiled a penguin. I love this story.Oh no.Yeah, yeah, yeah. The penguin apparently was not impressed, but—Rock on, penguin.It's a funny story, but it matters so much. I think a lot of people are reluctant to get into it. But for me, gosh, it's amazing. Most of the planet Earth is regulated under commons established in the middle of the 20th century. The whole world changed in a 30-year period under these new international law frameworks. And it's like nobody cares or knows. I want a T-shirt that says, "THE RULES-BASED INTERNATIONAL ORDER IS NOT PERFECT BUT IT'S PRETTY GOOD." And you really come to appreciate it. I hope people get that reading our book.Amazing. Zach, you write Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, one of my favorite things. You've been at it for so long, and it's such an admirable project. You've written the book Soonish, which if people have not already gotten, they should get. The new book is A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. I could not love it any more. Where can folks find the book?They can find it at fine bookstores everywhere. Or if you go to acityonmars.com, there are a bunch of purchasing options listed.All right, thanks for coming on.Yeah, thanks for having me. It was fun.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.  Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Justin McElroy, who you might know from his work on the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me or The Adventure Zone.Wednesday will mark a shocking milestone: As of September 13, the Chicken Sandwich Wars will have gone on longer than the armed conflict of the American Civil War. Yes, the conflict between quick-service restaurants over who has produced a desirable chicken sandwich offering began in August 2019, what feels like a lifetime ago, and nobody has covered this more persistently than McElroy on his Munch Squad podcast within a podcast.I'm a big fan of his work, and in addition to this devastating conflict we also chatted about increasingly unhinged limited time offerings, his multiple bestselling comic books, and the current “Steeplechase” season of The Adventure Zone.All this can be found at TheMcElroy.family.This interview has been condensed and edited.Justin McElroy, thank you so much for coming on.Thank you for having me in this important journalistic endeavor.This is a critical moment. We find ourselves at the week the Chicken Sandwich Wars will have gone on longer than the American Civil War. You have been on the ground covering this day by day, hour after hour.At what point do we just recognize that this is the second American Civil War? I mean it's all the bad blood, brother versus brother versus colonel. It's got everything.Why don't you take us back to the beginning? Munch Squad, a podcast within a podcast on My Brother, My Brother and Me, has been dedicated to covering the latest and greatest in food offerings, as you'll go on to explain. Chicken Sandwich Wars have been dominating this for years now at this point. How did this start?I have always been, and I think I got this from my dad, I've always been sort of a sucker for— I mean, I don't know how to say it other than just marketing. I'm like an absolute sucker. A lot of that is me being willing to just sort of go with it, and finding that I'm happier if I'm not fighting the thousands of advertising messages that are being sent to me on a daily basis. I just kind of go with it. I love to try new consumer products, and I know that's goofy, but whenever you would go to Columbus, Ohio, it's a popular test market for new products so you'll see drinks you hadn't heard of before, whatever. Dad would always do that when we were kids. Any new drink, he would come home with a 12-pack like, "All right, guys, this is the new Crystal Pepsi, they're calling it, so you guys have got to try this."Yeah, anytime I see new stuff like this, it comes from a genuine place. I genuinely think it's fascinating. What I love, though, is when I find out that these companies have to put out press releases for these dumb products. No matter how dumb the thing is, they've got to let people know about it and someone is tasked with the job of writing the press release for something that is a sentence.I mean it's always a sentence, right? "We now have a chicken sandwich." "We are Dunkin' and we put beer in coffee, and you can buy it at the store. Please go buy it." I did one a few weeks ago that was like, "Extra gum has a new pink lemonade flavor. Here's the press release." It's like, how would anybody know that's even a new product? If I saw that, I'd assume they've sold it for 20 years. It's just wild and I think that that's really funny.The first one I did was Taco Bell doing the naked chicken taco, which is when they made a taco shell out of a chicken breast, and it's so vulgar.Everything about it is vulgar! It makes me want to be a vegetarian. It's a vulgar exercise, and I was like, "This is too great. I've got to share this with people." That was back, I don't know, 2016, around there or something like that, and we just kept going with it because the press releases just kept getting wilder.It slows down sometimes. But there's always new stuff to make fun of, and I just think that it's great. It feels like when you're somebody who cares about doing comedy that doesn't specifically target people, especially marginalized groups or just anybody specific, anybody individually; we really try to be upbeat. I feel like making fun of not just corporations, but marketing for specific consumer products is as near to a victimless crime as you can get. Even the people writing these things know like, "Yeah, this isn't going to get me my Pulitzer. It's all in good fun." But yeah, that is the Munch Squad.Yeah. Limited time offerings, they've always existed, right? There's always been the McRib, there have always been things like that. They are increasingly unhinged and I don't think anybody's been following that quite like you.Yeah, I do. I have exposed myself to a wide variety. Sometimes, the product will be wild, but there's just nothing. They don't have the press release. I've got to have the press release. I've got to have the news. I have to have someone reporting it journalistically who is also paid by Pepsi or Taco Bell or whatever, and it was the same company, but you know what I mean. Yeah, I have followed the space very closely.Yeah, it's been just genuinely a pleasure to listen to. Again, you've developed this form of taste, I think, among these sorts of products. You've been able to clock if they're only in one restaurant for one hour in Anchorage, Alaska.I'm glad you're bringing that up. Thank you. That does make me very angry and that is something that has happened in later Munch Squad and almost kind of put me off of it, is you start to see these companies that are just doing it for the bit. If they're doing it for the bit, it's a lot harder for me to do jokes about it because they already know that it's dumb. Pepsi did Peeps-flavored Pepsis and you had to get them from a contest or whatever, and it drives me crazy.Just have the strength of your convictions to make your dumb soda and let the market sort it out.I don't even think this is on Munch Squad; it's something we talked about on my cereal podcast, the Empty Bowl, but Carvel, the ice cream cake people, they made a "cereal" that was just the crunchy chocolate bits that go in the middle of the ice cream cake with the fudge sauce. You know what I mean? They made a cereal out of that, but they're in little tiny boxes and they only sold them for one day at their stores.It's like, just make it or don't. You know what I mean? Cowards, everybody. I don't like that stuff. Make a product, put it out there for everybody. Don't do like the CurderBurger where you only do it for one day. I did talk about the CurderBurger because it was a burger with a loaf of cheese curd on it in Wisconsin. That was pretty good. But by and large, wide release or nothing. That's what I say.You can't not talk about a CurderBurger.Yeah, and people could go buy that. You could go buy it in the store. It's usually my cutoff. I prefer a wide release, but still.You've been covering this for a while. Again, I can't imagine the amount of time that you spend on QSR magazine.A lot.A lot?Paper and digital.Oh, you get the print? You get the dead tree edition?Some fun-time jokesters signed my P.O. box up for a subscription to that. I get lots of them. Someone signed us up for horse magazines. Thank you. That's great for recycling. Someone signed us up for the gas station mag — they have a publication for new gas station convenience offerings — so I try to track the sources wherever they are.That's incredible. Again, your history is journalism. You founded Polygon. I've always enjoyed that element of Munch Squad where it's like, "Clearly, this is something that's going on." And I'm glad that you alluded to, again, your father has roots of journalism as well, that this is a trade that you've been applying for quite some time.Yes, that was my first job outside of retail. It was in my mid-20s. I got hired to be the news editor at a small paper in Ohio, and I was desperately underqualified, but I just sort of kept scamming my way up and pivoted over to video game coverage, mainly. I know enough journalism to know how to pretend I'm doing journalism in the Munch Squad, so that's about where my skillset is at this moment.Do you have any favorites that come to mind? Any specific limited time offerings or press releases that just really kind of made a dent in you?Let me think. Taco Bell did a naked egg taco. You know when they did the chicken, but this was a gigantic fried egg that they folded up into a taco shell and made a breakfast offering? That's unacceptable. That's simply not a product that anybody should be consuming.Burger King, the Nightmare Burger where it was black for Halloween, remember that? It gave everybody black poops. That was a fun time to be in the business. Yeah, Burger King will dye their buns sometimes and it ruins people's bowel movements.Man, Chris Angel had a restaurant. Do you remember? I had to look up the acronym. Chris Angel made or opened a restaurant, it's spelled C-A-B-L-P. It's Cablp, and that is short for, of course, Chris Angel Breakfast, Lunch, and Pizza. They call it Cablp. I don't even know if that's still open. That was back in 2021, but Cablp. Oh, God, that still hits. Cablp.The Chicken Sandwich Wars were obviously launched into devastating effect in August of 2019. Where do you see that going? For a while, there was quite a bit of activity and now it's been, kind of they're in the long haul, I've got to say.From your view, where are the Chicken Sandwich Wars at?At this point, I feel like a lot of us have moved on from the war part of it. I feel like what we're seeing now is we're entering a phase where we're all sort of culturally accepting that every place has a chicken sandwich. This is what's weird about the Chicken Sandwich Wars, if I may.You may.These places all had chicken sandwiches.That's the thing that people forget, right? They had chicken sandwiches. They were bad.The only one people liked was Chick-fil-A, and they turned out to be a little bit questionable on some of the donations of groups they're giving to, a lot of anti-LGBTQ places, so people stopped eating the chicken sandwich.For me, that's the beginning of the chicken sandwich. That was the only good one you could get. They turned out to be some nasty dogs over there, maybe, and so nobody's going to eat that chicken sandwich anymore. Somebody had to step in.As long ago as 2005, McDonald's came at the crown. They came for true at Kathy's Kreations, which, they still insist that they made the first chicken sandwich, and that just seems wild to me. It's a fried breast between a bun. Come on, nobody can invent that. It just is. It just exists as these two products are created. As soon as we had bread and chicken, somebody was like, "Wait, I got it. Hold on. Step back." So I don't grant that to Kathy or Popeye's, to be fair, that both of them claim to have the first chicken sandwich.Anyway, so McDonald's in 2005, they had a Southern-style Chicken Sandwich, and that was it. That was straight up. We got a potato bun, we got two pickles, we got pickle-brining, let's go. It had a good run. I think it was a decade that it continued. Even they were in the game.Then when Popeye's decided like, "Hey, why don't we try? Why don't all of us other restaurants try to make a good one instead of making a forgettable option for your cousin that doesn't like hamburgers? We'll actually try,” then you started having more and more people come out.Walter, do you know — this is true — between the beginning of 2019 and the end of 2020, do you know how much sales of chicken sandwiches increased?I do not.It's really easy to remember this statistic because it is 420 percent.That's a memorable statistic.It's a memorable statistic. It's how I remember that my daughter was born at 4 p.m. and 20 minutes. 4:20 is when my kid was born. 420 percent. That is how much chicken sandwich sales increased.Everybody's just like, "Hey, restaurants are selling good chicken sandwiches now. We should probably go get them." But the wars, I don't know why it had to be a war.Everybody in the war, by the way, always shouts out all the other people in the war, which is wild because that doesn't seem to be a good marketing strategy to just be like, "Here are some other places that have done this and now we're doing it too." But I think it's also the Chicken Sandwich Wars, I think what that is is directly connected to Munch Squad.Because I think it is someone that had to do a press release about a chicken sandwich, and they're like, "It's got to have some kind of angle. I don't know what the first line of this press release is going to be. Maybe wars; I keep talking about the wars that are going on that everybody seems to be so hot on," and that was just like the angle. It's solved. If you have a chicken sandwich and you're writing a press release about it, you've got to mention the wars.And the more belabored it gets, the better for a lot of these. It's like, "We're finally strapping on our chicken rifles and wading into the trenches to blow the other sandwiches straight to hell. We're going to make some chicken sandwich widows out here. Let's go," and it's gross. Just say it's a good sandwich or bad.For years, we've maintained neutrality, but today, that is enough.Right, and neutrality, I have to be clear, is a bad chicken sandwich! It's not like no chicken sandwich. It's just, let's try to make a good one.Yeah. It is really funny that you can draw a fairly direct line between the success of the gay rights movement and a 420 percent increase in chicken sandwich sales.It's beautiful. It's a story of love and acceptance. I mean really, war is such a misnomer. It should be a cultural shift of people unwilling to accept lesser treatment by buying evil cursed chicken sandwiches.To show you how seriously these places took it, in Huntington, West Virginia, where I live, they opened up a Bojangles — which is like lower-tier Popeye's, it's a mid-tier Popeye's — but it was huge in Huntington, so much so that they had to reroute traffic on Route 60 around the line for Bojangles.It got so bad, KFC, there's another KFC down the road about a mile, and they put up a sign that just had a big picture of the Colonel and it said, "We make chicken around here." Outside the Bojangles, the KFC put up like a, "Hey, not in our town. This is a KFC town," and hey, hand to God, that Bojangles closed. I don't know what the Colonel was working over there, but it worked. They're back to the only chicken on Route 60 as far as I know.Listen, you start a battle? Send in the Colonel.Yeah, if you're going to come for the Colonel's crown, you best come for the bow tie. You've got to come correct. No way. Is it the bolo? What would you call that? It doesn't matter.I would call it a bolo.You get the idea. Bolo? Yeah.I want to talk a little bit about this current season of The Adventure Zone. You have been the game master for it. I've really, really enjoyed it. I've dug it a lot.Thank you.I really mean that. Yeah, it's a phenomenal season. I think the setting is excellent and I want to talk a little bit about that because it is very theme park, Disney inspired, I would say. I think that that ties in decently well with Munch Squad in the sense that there is a commentary about commercialization, but nevertheless identity-bound to American pop culture. I guess I'd love to ask you a little bit about where some of that season came from and where that setting came from.Yeah. Everybody else in my family had run the game. Oh my gosh, my Arby's big cheddar bowling shirt just got delivered. What a delight. Remind me when we're done, I'll make sure to grab it so you can see, it's going to be a wonder.I hadn't done the game master thing yet. It always seemed kind of overwhelming and I waited, and I put it off as long as they would let me, because I didn't think I'd be very good at it. I finally was kind of forced into it and we found this game, Blades in the Dark, that's about theft and heists, and I liked that kind of thing. I think that that kind of thing is cool and a nice change of pace from murdering your way through caves or whatever happens in others.I am a huge theme park nut, I always have been. I think that they are fascinating. I think I even like reading and understanding and learning about them more than I like actually being there. It's more like a hobby. No, I'm the most annoying person to walk around Disney World with. You do not want to look every f*****g four steps at some other dumb thing I've got to point out. I love that kind of stuff.So I was like, "Well, okay, if I were going to make a world that could incorporate all this junk in my brain, then I would make a giant park like that on a grander scale." So the theme worlds, in this park I called Steeplechase, the theme worlds are layers stacked on top of each other, and each layer is a completely immersive sim. I love immersive stuff like that, too, like Sleep No More, things like that where it's bringing you into the experience, so I thought this would be amazing.I kind of made my dream place to go to, and then the show, as we've gone on, has really been about me wrestling with these ideas of a society obsessed with entertainment and obsessed with distraction. I'm not coming out as a cultural critic, because I'm very much lumping myself in with that, this idea that you lose yourself so deeply in distraction and entertainment that you lose contact with the world around you or forget what you would consider your actual or real life.That has been the thing that I've been sort of exploring with it, is what is the impact of that? What kind of obligation do you have to the real world and the people around you versus losing yourself in it in a fiction? Very aware, the whole time, that we are making an escapist fiction at the same time as I'm talking about this, so it is a little bit of an ouroboros, but yeah, that's what it's been.Also, that's a very highfalutin way of describing it, and I'm terrible at describing stuff in ways where people would actually want to listen to it, but I swear it's a lot more fun than that. There's a layer that's like a noir crime kind of deal, so I watched a bajillion, every noir movie I could get my hands on to really tap into that aesthetic. There's a fantasy layer where we've incorporated elements from previous Adventure Zone shows. There's a reality show dating kind of thing.But that's the idea. Every layer is people pursuing their fantasies while these three creeps try to rob them blind, so it's been a lot of fun. We're heading toward the end, I think. The next few episodes, probably, it's finally wrapping up, it'll be somebody else's problem, but I feel really good about what I've been able to do.When I started, it seemed so overwhelming until I realized it's just like eating an airplane. You start, you've got to take it into really small chunks, and then eventually, you're halfway through the wings.It's a really fun listen.Thanks.Again, you have some really exciting ideas in there.I read no internet feedback at all. No Reddit, Twitter, nothing about it, so when someone does tell me that they like it, it is a genuine delight because I'm basically in a vacuum, and my wife won't listen, so I don't know.It's very fun on the ground, like you were saying. It is three interesting people stealing interesting stuff from a cool place. There is just something that you were talking about when it comes to escapism where it's just, escapism as a genre is a reflection of the society from which you're trying to escape, right?Right.I think that you're pulling out some interesting strings in the show when it comes to how creative work is valued, how it's not, how people engage with it, how it's not how people engage with creators. I'd love to hear a little bit more on how you feel about that.What specifically?I can't help but notice that at the time that AI is attempting to replicate a lot of the creative efforts of people who really try at making art, you have an element of the show that's talking a little bit, I think, or at least reflecting a little bit of some of that subtle change.It's weird, right? That was not a conversation when it started. It's moving very rapidly. The idea that a computer could do a reasonable facsimile of me, Justin McElroy? I'm not exactly like a once-in-a-generation talent. I'm like a bunch of SNICK and Pee-wee's Playhouse, and then I had an acting major, and you stir all those together. I'm not one of the A-listers there. I feel like a computer could get me pretty quickly, honestly, but seeing that start to take place, that's been tough, right? Because I didn't ever think that would happen to me. I still don't for me, specifically, but there's definitely a future where this stuff is algorithmically generated. It's scary. It freaks me out.I have AI characters in the story and a lot of those AI characters, we call them “hard light,” and it's basically a hologram that has feeling, that can feel things, tactile, and they're very much having conversations about sentience and what it is to be alive. We have a few different characters and classes of people who are trying to break out of that idea, that if you have been created by someone else, are you devoid of creative energy? Can creative energy exist being created by a computer? Again, there's a nice thing about this: I don't have any answers. I'm just doing a role-playing podcast. You can think about it all you want in your own time. I've just got to fill 60 minutes and then I'm out.A computer doing a reasonable facsimile, like animatronics, are a fundamental element of the history of theme parks.Yeah, and those have continued to improve. When you look at it, Lincoln was the first one, and that was very much a Walt Disney passion project, wanting to create a Lincoln that could be entertaining on its own.There was so much work that went into that, and such a big valley between the real and the fake, and that valley obviously has continued to shrink. Animatronics were a big part of what I was thinking about with Steeplechase. Specifically, the Carousel of Progress is an attraction at Disney World, and it is the only attraction at Disney World, as far as I know, that was directly worked on by Walt Disney, because it was created for the '64 World's Fair and then it was adapted to the form it finds itself now in Walt Disney World.It is the stage show that has had the most performances of any show in America. It's about a family through the generations, and basically the stage is split into a four-quadrant pie and the audience is in a big ring that moves around to the different quadrants, which is the same family in different eras.I started thinking about how these animatronics have done this show more times than anybody on earth. If you start to let your imagination go a little bit, especially with the AI stuff happening, you're like, "Well, what if they realize that?"You know what I mean? What happens when they're like, "Wow, I'm tired of doing this show over and over again"? And I find that a really interesting thing to think about.That's really fun. Again, it's definitely worth checking out. It's a good entrance point, I think, if folks are interested in checking out the podcast.Yeah, all of our arcs are sort of self-contained. “Steeplechase” is a fine place to start if you can deal with me shaking off the jitters for the first three episodes.It's great stuff. Last thing I wanted to throw on the table is that you've been doing graphic novel adaptations of the first The Adventure Zone arc, Balance. How's that been? You just have a new one out this year. I think there's a new one coming out next year.Usually, about one a year.How's that experience been?It's amazing. Honestly, it's a weird project where so much of me is in it from where we did The Adventure Zone, but it's such a team project. Obviously, Carey Pietsch, she's the artist for the series, she's bringing so much to it and creating so much of the visual language of that world. My dad, Clint McElroy, has been a comic book writer for many, many, many years, so he's really taken the lead on it, and I'm mainly tweaking the dialogue from my characters, putting in more boner jokes and stuff.It's funny because they were so wildly successful. I think the first two or three were number one New York Times bestsellers on a specific chart, like a pretty specific chart, which no one ever puts on the book jacket, right? New York Times bestseller in self-help paperback trade version number eight. No, but this is a number one, I could say; yes, I'm a number one New York Times bestselling author, and what I did was I told my dad to make these few jokes better.That is why in my freaking obituary, it'll say number one New York Times bestselling author, because I told my dad that "Kenny Chesney might be a funnier reference here than Jimmy Buffett. Why don't we do Kenny Chesney?" Okay, great. Here's your bestseller plaque. No, but they don't send you bestseller plaques. My dad made one for me for Christmas. It was beautiful. I have it hanging up and I can tell people like, "Yeah, I punched up my dad's jokes. No problem."Wow. Justin McElroy, New York Times bestselling author.Number one. Sorry.Number one.Sorry. Thank you. You don't want to be that guy, but...I apologize. Justin McElroy, number one New York Times bestselling author on a specific chart.Several-time number one. No.Five-time.Five-time.Where can folks find you? Where can they enjoy more of your work?My manager gets mad at me because I always give people the wrong address, but it's themcelroy.family. If you go there, you'll find all of our stuff. Tours are there. We got a few more shows this year. Videos, podcasts, whatever you like, it's all there waiting for you.Well, hey, thanks for coming on.Hey, thanks for having me, Walter.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber!Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.  Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Bloomberg's Ashley Carman, who writes the Soundbite newsletter. Here's a recent thing what I wrote about it: The hottest thing in music touring right now is selling affluent 30-somethings their old eye shadow and tight pants back for a considerable markup, with alt-rock bands making a killing on the road. The forthcoming When We Were Young festival in Vegas has sold 160,000 tickets, Blink-182's North American tour just wrapped with $85.3 million gross on 564,000 tickets, which follows a 2021 outing by Weezer, Green Day and Fall Out Boy that grossed $67.3 million on 659,062 and an $88 million My Chemical Romance tour. Anyway, if any bookers want to take a look at my high school iPod Mini, I have absolutely categorically figured out exactly what the next three years of successful concert tours are going to be.Right now the podcast industry is in utter chaos, the music industry is beseiged by an enigmatic TikTok and the rise of AI, and the main things that appear to be working in the record business are unexpected niches, like country music and Mexican regional music. Ashley's covered it all, so I wanted to have her back on to chat about it, in audio no less!Carman can be found at Bloomberg.This interview has been condensed and edited. Ashley, thank you so much for coming back on, it's a pleasure to have you.Yeah, happy to be here.You cover audio; it's a big beat, it has a lot going on, and it's been a really dynamic couple of months it seems, in your field. What's been going on?Basically my beat, I started out covering the podcast industry over at The Verge for a number of years, then came over to Bloomberg, still with that intention to cover the podcast world, but also add in some of the music industry, really getting both sides. Obviously, audio can also include audiobooks, all the various genres of audio that exist in this world, but primarily focused on the podcast space and music industry. What's been going on? Podcasting has been having a little bit of a market correction reckoning. The music world is pushing for a whole new streaming model and wringing their hands over generative AI. So, busy dynamic moments on both sides of the industry.I recall reading a little while ago that the audio slice of the pie, so to speak, is increasing, but the individual groups within it are rising and falling pretty dynamically. I guess let's talk a little bit about what hasn't really been working super well lately. You've written a lot about the podcast industry and the consolidation that we've seen in that. What's been going on in the past six months; it seems like there's been a serious contraction?Yeah. So, essentially the very sped up version of the podcast world up until now is, starting around 2019, you had Spotify enter the space, spending a ton of money, which basically set off this huge gold rush around podcasts. Amazon entered the world with Wondery, adding it onto Amazon Music, Spotify obviously making its acquisitions, SiriusXM, iHeart, which of course has been in audio, and SiriusXM having been in audio, but really in earnest signing big lucrative podcast deals. And that goes on for a few years. You have the live audio craze of Clubhouse, and then this past year, really what's happened is this moment of, okay, we spent a lot of money on these podcast deals and locking up some of these big names in exclusive partnerships, but are we actually making our money back on those deals?I think that's what we're starting to see now is this correction of, hey, what were these deals really worth?Was this just a super frothy, hyped ecosystem that got us into some financial troubles? So, now, with that in the rearview mirror, some more awareness around the smart deals that could be made, you're seeing some consolidation in the space, even on the smaller network side, who were maybe benefiting from that frothy environment. Now they're like, okay, we need to figure out how we're going to survive in this ecosystem, especially when there's a broader ad pullback in the market. So, they're starting to consolidate, the bigger companies are laying folks off because they just got over their skis, as far as the investment, and yeah, it's just been a rough time, honestly, but I'm hoping that it turns a corner soon.Yeah, it seems like frothy is a good word. What companies, what kind of podcasts and what industrial organization structure has been the most durable? It seems like the big guys who put a ton of money into recruiting maybe a lot of talent from movie and television, those haven't necessarily done as well, because they were very ad sensitive, but that's not everything. There are still a lot of things that are working in podcasts, it seems.Yeah, and I guess the important caveat here is that podcasting is growing. Audio companies' revenue is growing in the podcast world. It's not the type of downturn we're seeing where all of a sudden it's like we lost 7 billion listeners this month. It's not like that. The space itself is actually growing, it's just when it's in relation to the deals themselves and how much was spent for the return, it was maybe just a little too early for that moment. So what's working is people do enjoy listening to podcasts. I personally, I see it in my friends, which granted, I have the bias of being a media reporter, and my friends are also media people, but they buy stuff from podcasts. They enjoy engaging with it.So from that perspective, I actually think podcasts have a lot of might, and there's been a lot of stuff written recently, not from me, but other great reporters, who have covered just how important podcasts are in the political landscape, as well. You can really see the impact and the amount of conversation they can drive and really bring people to make certain decisions. So I think that actually the spotlight is on them; it's just the business has been a little tricky.Yeah, it's weird, I've seen a lot of podcasts that had been very ad supported for a while often start pivoting toward live events and whatnot, which is what music acts do historically as well. You don't always need to make all your money off of the physical sales, it can also just be actual events.The podcast touring definitely still exists. I don't know if it's the biggest slice of the pie, but there's of course Patreon and subscriptions, which have been a success story for the podcasters that can make it work. So, there are alternate avenues for success.What else isn't really doing all that swell when it comes to audio right now? I know that podcasts have had a hiccup, but you've also run a couple of times about how Spotify is looking to raise prices, potentially, and you're looking at some of these larger companies that have tried to really control a lot of the audio pie that might not be doing as well.Yeah. So, I think what you're hinting at maybe is just the streaming environment for music. Really what we're seeing there is, it's really obviously reversed the trend of piracy, back in the day, and we're streaming now, companies are doing great, the music companies are growing, they're public, all of that. But what we're seeing in that world is a little bit of concern over the potential future, which is how do they continue growing? How do they maximize the dollar from the streaming services? You've seen price increases. And then also, even more somewhat forward facing, just how do you deal with generative AI when maybe that would lead to an influx of content out there?How do you actually allow artists who do this for a living and maybe aren't necessarily totally financially motivated by it to actually have their music be heard and make money off of it? And then of course, in the music world, you also have the struggle that TikTok runs so much of this now in the conversation, so what do you do? How do you break artists? How do you make superstars when a lot of this is at the whim of an algorithm?Yeah, I don't have it in front of me, but I feel like you wrote something a little while ago about how some of the major music companies are even starting to invest in some of these streams, whether they're the lo-fi or high-pitched streams, to capitalize on some of that social. Am I remembering that correctly?Yes, and I also need to put myself back in that story. The piece that I wrote was about sped up songs, which is a TikTok trend; it's like chipmunk singing, it's just sped up tracks. And what the major labels have covertly done is run Spotify accounts that have all those tracks on there. So, it kind of gives off this veneer of, oh, this is some low-key TikTok DJ who put this up here, and I stumbled upon this big secret, when actually it's totally blessed by the labels and ensures that when you're listening to that song, they get paid the proper royalties. Because obviously if some random person uploaded a song, I guess we would say illegally, without the proper rights, and they don't properly tag the rights holders, the rights holders don't get paid. So you could see the incentive to be like, here's your cool thing, but we're actually going to make our money off of it.How widespread is that? That's wild.I wrote about, I believe it was a Universal account that I wrote about, and I think I wrote about a Warner account as well. So, in those two cases, there were two different accounts. And then, gosh, I would need to check, but one of them actually put out an official compilation of sped up songs.There are ghost kitchens for music now, that's amazing.Yeah.So let's talk a little bit about what's hitting. A story that you wrote fairly recently, that I really enjoyed because it struck me directly on target, demographically and generationally, was about how one of the biggest hits on the road these days, and one of the biggest tours out there, and one of the biggest odd successes that we've seen in the live events industry, has been the late aughts revival of rock, whether it's Blink-182 or any of these other emo-related bands. I dug that because obviously everybody likes reading about themselves at times, but this seems like it was a little unexpected, that it really is hitting. Why is that?Yeah, so what I wrote about — you did a good job recapping, but just to cover even more so is that — yeah, you have tours like Blink-182, they got back together, their tour is massive. I have the exact number: The North American leg of their tour grossed $85.3 million and sold 564,000 tickets according to Billboard. Yeah. So they've just had this massive success, which has also translated to streaming, and then you also have tours like My Chemical Romance, who reunited, that did also amazingly well. They grossed $80 million on their tour last year. And then, additionally, there's just this When We Were Young festival, which maybe you've heard of, in Vegas, which is a who's who of that era and rock bands. And so, really what we're seeing is these bands command an audience, even though their heyday was 2004, or even the late ‘90s.And I don't know exactly what's causing it. Obviously, it could be that folks like us, we're older, we have jobs, we can afford to go to concerts, we have a disposable income, maybe we're going to see it. Maybe the torch is being passed from our parents' generation of rockers down to them, and they're going to become the big rock stadium X, that everybody goes to see in the summer, or whatever it is. Or, this is kind of the X factor, is maybe it's the Y2K interest from Gen Z, and this resurgence in that aesthetic and culture. It could be that, too; it could be all those things. But yeah, it's cool to see, and it's definitely a trend that people are banking on.Yeah. And again, the numbers here are wild. You mentioned Blink-182, I think they have the fifth- or sixth-highest three-month live grosses. They are genuinely one of the most competitive acts out there per that ranking in that post.And they're touring a ton. I mentioned the North American numbers, but they're going around the world. It's almost a year-long tour, so it's going to be massive.Great. Yeah, it's definitely a cool trend, because one thing that you've written a lot about is that what's hitting now is really inconsistent. We can talk about a couple of things; one thing I want to talk about is Mexican music, one thing I want to talk about is country music. Where do you want to go first with this? Because the things that are doing really, really well are fairly eclectic.Yeah, we can start with any of them. I think the story of country music is pretty interesting.Morgan Wallen has just been a force who, without getting into the full story, he was caught on camera using the N word — not great, a lot of issues around him. Also, there was some COVID stuff, back in the COVID days. So, really, he's just had this moment where his fans are committed, they love him, he's selling out stadiums, doing really, really well.His story of the country music is interesting, because you have these acts who are starting to be, I guess you would call them crossover? They're starting to reach into a pop audience, even. And also you have this sort of cultural shift that some people would like to see in country, which is maybe more voices from women, or Black artists, or LGBTQ artists, and the struggle between that and the reality that Morgan Wallen is the biggest country star in the world right now.So, that's the story of country, and it's an interesting one, because there's definitely some tension there.Wallen is interesting for a lot of reasons, but his album, One Thing at a Time, has been topping the rankings for quite some time. He did some interesting stuff with that. He clued in on a trend, on how to, not manipulate per se, but how to use streaming incentives to their advantage. Because a 36-song record that is almost two hours long, which you rarely see, but if you're thinking of a streaming thing, that could make sense, right?Yeah. If you want to give fans a lot to listen to, you definitely could. Although, I do think a lot of it is probably all going to his singles. I hear them everywhere I go, and that's even in New York.Yeah. Taking another step, Mexican music in particular, you had this really great story, I want to say beginning of June, end of May, that was all about that niche in general, and there's been a lot of regional music that has succeeded. That's riding a couple of different other trends, right?Yeah. Obviously, Mexican music is sung in Spanish most of the time, and so what we're seeing there is just a continuation of growth in the Latin music broader genre, which is Bad Bunny, obviously huge, Rosalía, lots of others. So, with Mexican music, we're seeing artists like Peso Pluma, who is 23 years old from Guadalajara, he's also just been this huge act, and really the sound is truly a regional sound.And there is controversy with that, as well, around this genre called narcocorridos, which are stories around drug cartels, just Wild West stories, almost. And obviously, there's been some pushback on that, but once again, this music is really reaching people regardless of whether they speak Spanish or not.And I think the story with Mexican music is going to be, can it become as big as Reggaeton or Dembow, or something that really translates across the world? Right now we're seeing it in Mexico, obviously, the U.S., but can it really go to Asia? We're starting to see hints of it. But that's the next turn of the screw for that genre.Really? So, it does make sense that it could succeed in America because there's a large Spanish-speaking audience here, but the next marker of success is, is it going to be played in Japan?Anywhere in the world. But yeah, obviously Asia would be amazing. I spoke to some people who were like, yeah, we have listeners in Japan, which is so cool, but yeah, you want to see it succeed in all sorts of different regions that maybe don't necessarily have that direct tie to Mexico or Spanish language.Yeah. I know that they've done phenomenally well in North American tours. Bad Bunny's tour was huge.Yeah. Bad Bunny was huge, and all these Mexican artists have also been touring for years. The U.S. has a huge Mexican population, or descendants of Mexican people, so it definitely does very, very well in North America.That's exciting. It's a really great newsletter, I enjoy it a lot. And I'm interested in the space, and it's just been very cool because this seems like a very transformative time, where finally the music industry has, as you mentioned, put piracy at bay, but at the same time, there are still some issues lurking.I remember you had a story a little while ago about how people are concerned about streaming fraud, and some of the numbers that are out there when it comes to possible streaming fraud are pretty remarkable. What do you make of that?So, streaming fraud is an interesting conversation because that's one that I feel like for years wasn't really widely acknowledged, it was just maybe discussed behind closed doors. But more and more now companies are discussing this. I believe Universal talked about it, or at least nodded to streaming fraud as an issue that they're trying to handle, on their earnings call.It's just a bigger conversation in the space now, and I think part of this does come from that urgency of, okay, again, assuming there will be a future where generative AI puts a lot more music on platforms, how do you know who is there authentically? Who's getting fake streams? How do you qualify that? And quantify that? I think there's just this motivation to really crack down and make sure everyone's getting paid their fair due, and obviously the labels don't want to lose market share to what they would consider either outright fraud or just not human artists, or I don't even know, not real artists, I guess.What do you mean by that? That's interesting.It's kind of talked around, sort of this idea of real artists who are artists, musicians that are like, “This is my career, this is what I want to do,” versus someone who might be financially motivated and goes to an app to generate a song, and is like, “This is a way for me to make money.”Or, UMG has talked a little bit about noise, like white noise, for example. Is that worth as much? Should that be worth the same amount as, I think Warner famously said, "An Ed Sheeran song?" Should those be counted the same and be worth the same amount of money? The labels would obviously say no, and I assume people who make white noise would say yes. So, this is the dynamic right now.And the entity that currently gets to decide that is Spotify.Yeah, the DSPs.That's an interesting one, I feel like I'm going to see more of that in the future. So the newsletter is Soundbite. It's a Bloomberg newsletter, and it's very, very cool. Before we wrap it up, anything else that's been on your mind lately? Any stories from this summer that you feel folks should maybe be paying more attention to, whether they're inside or outside of the music industry?I think the one that everyone's watching is the generative AI story. The thing I'm watching there is it's a lot of theoretical conversation, a lot of talk, and then you have some actors being like, okay, we're going to not allow any AI-generated songs on our platform. I'm curious what the policies look like around that; I'm curious about how they define an AI-generated song. I think that is going to be a big part of the conversation, definitely the legal side and then maybe even the government side. I just think that story is going to keep snowballing into something.Obviously this is not the only industry that is reckoning with the potential for AI. A lot of it comes down to just who gets to use it and when. Can an artist use AI during the creation of a song, versus can a label use an AI to make the song, versus can a DSP use it to flood their network with stuff? It's a weird peculiar question that, you're right, is entirely theoretical in so many ways.Yeah, exactly.Cool. Well, Ashley, thanks so much for coming on. Where can folks find you?I am on X aka Twitter, I guess, @AshleyRCarman. Honestly, I'm a nerd who's like, follow me on LinkedIn, to be honest. And then, please do subscribe to my newsletter. It is free.Yeah, it's great.So that's exciting.You got some really good data in there, I'm very fond of it. Anybody who listens to stuff should definitely check it out. Ashley Carman, thank you so much for coming on.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.  Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to my friend Neil Paine, a sportswriter at FiveThirtyEight who can also be found at . I've been following some recent spat going on in NASCAR between ownership and the different charters; here's a recent thing I covered about it: NASCAR team owners collectively boycotted a quarterly meeting with NASCAR leadership over a kerfuffle over the sport's business model, which they argue pays track owners considerably more than it pays the racing team owners. The $8.2 billion media rights deal inked prior to the 2015 season splits the money 65 percent to the racetracks, 25 percent to the teams, and 10 percent to NASCAR itself, though there are just two track operators: Speedway Motorsports and, well, NASCAR, which owns most of the tracks on the Cup Series. Team owners don't like this arrangement, and argue that they have to spend a great deal of time trying to recruit sponsors in order to make their money, saying that sponsorships are 60 percent to 80 percent of the budgets of the 16 chartered teams.Fascinating! It's a corporate battle with billions on the line! What's not to love here! I knew Neil was into NASCAR and I wanted to talk to him about how the sport got into this mess and what the heck happened to it.Neil can be found at FiveThirtyEight and . Incidentally we can also be found out our hockey-related friend podcast .This interview has been condensed and edited. All right. Hey Neil, how's it going?Hey, Walt. Good to be here.People know you from many different places, primarily FiveThirtyEight, where you're a sports writer. But I wanted to talk to you today about a thing that I think is going to be very off-topic for a lot of readers in my newsletter and maybe even some reviews in your work, which is some extremely fascinating stuff that's happening in NASCAR, a league that has long existed but has diminished in notoriety.You and I have been talking a little bit about this on the side and I am just endlessly fascinated by some of the machinations going on in it. I just wanted to have you on to talk all about it. Do you want to talk a little bit about your experience with NASCAR and what drew your attention to it?Yeah, so I'm from the South. I'm from Atlanta and grew up watching the races and following the sport as a child. I think that that was something that was a lot more common at that time. We're talking about the '90s and the early 2000s being the heyday of not just my fan interest but also a lot of people's fan interest in the sport.I've recently gotten back into it over the past couple seasons, I don't really know why. I've definitely gotten more into motor sports in general with Formula One also coming back on my radar. That has actually been very popular among American audiences, I think, since you saw the Netflix series Drive To Survive and just people getting into the dramatic aspects of that, not necessarily maybe the on-track drama, but the personalities and the soap opera between the drivers and the teams, and all of the different backstabbing. Machinations is a good word for it that you used earlier.You see that in pretty much every motor sport though. I think that people, if they wanted to expand their horizons to a sport like NASCAR, there are so many beefs between drivers in NASCAR. The great thing about NASCAR is in Formula One, you do see sometimes drivers, they will wreck each other in the sense that they won't give someone space around a turn or something and they might touch wheels, or they might run into someone. But when you run into someone, it's the end of their day because the open wheel cars are pretty fragile, comparatively speaking.Whereas in NASCAR, these are big freaking tanks of vehicles that can hit each other. Often, there's this term, "rubbing is racing," where basically if you're not bumping people while you're out on the track, you're not really fighting for position. You can hit someone and as long as you don't put them into the wall, you can keep going.I think that that is unique in the way that it feeds into the aspect of rivalry and aspect of animosity between drivers, because you can get back at someone later in a race if they did you dirty earlier in a race, in a way that in Formula One, if you hit and mess up your front wing or whatever, you're both done for the race.Neil, I'm exhausted at the fact that you found another sport that is basically just hockey.Yeah, I know the checking aspect, definitely, the full contact aspect bleeds over between the two, I think.That's cool. I didn't know that you followed it when you were a kid, that's nice. I guess you got on my radar recently because there's beef on the track obviously, but there's also lately a lot of beef between NASCAR itself and the people who own the franchises. It's got this really interesting structure. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?Yeah, so starting in 2016, they put into place what's called the charter system, which for people that don't know, basically there are like 40 cars on the track for every NASCAR race. And in the past, you showed up for the race weekend and it didn't matter if you were a low tier team or one of the best; you still had to qualify and make a certain lap time and be among the top 40 or so qualifying cars to make it into the race on Sunday and, therefore, to get paid for the weekend.At the peak of NASCAR, if you go back and watch some of the old broadcasts, you'll see they list out a dozen or more teams that didn't qualify. So, cars that tried, they made the effort, they came out to the track, they got everything ready and they just didn't go fast enough to make the cut and they didn't end up making any money from that.Starting in 2016, they put into place these charters, which guaranteed that 36 cars would at least be able to have entry into the race. So, it only left four chances for teams that weren't part of the charter system to scratch and claw their way into the field for any given race. For those 36 teams, it offered a lot of cost certainty and also income certainty and it made things a lot easier for their dealings with sponsors, which, we'll probably go into as well, is a huge deal for NASCAR teams, more so than maybe any other sport.And so this charter system, it was put into place to make it more attractive to invest in a NASCAR team. I think since you've seen those go in, you've seen that Michael Jordan owns a team now, or co-owns it, the 2311 racing team, and you're seeing people because they can now latch onto these franchises, it's essentially the same ideas like the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons. The teams that go into the charter is a car and the car number that goes with it. Sometimes the same owner can own multiple charters. So, Joe Gibbs Racing — Joe Gibbs is a former NFL coach who also runs a super successful NASCAR team — he has four charters, so he has four different cars on the track. But some teams only have one charter and these charters can be bought and sold between the different team owners as well. They can transfer the rights to the charter and that has allowed the value of those charters to go up.But the problem is that the charter system, when it was put into place, it has to be renewed. It's not like a permanent fixture in the way the sport is structured. So, there's some opposition at the top of the NASCAR food chain, because NASCAR itself is just the governing organization that oversees all of the races.It has said, "We're not really sure if we're going to renew the charters." And the teams are like, "You better renew the charters because this is the one thing that's driving our value in investing in your sport and making it more attractive for people to come in as owners and know that they can have that secured spot." That's a big part of this battleground, like you mentioned, between NASCAR, the organizing body, and the teams themselves.There are also the racetracks in the mix as well. The way that the money is split for a television contract, for instance, they have a big TV deal coming up I think after this season, maybe the NBC rights are up or whatever. They have to figure out a new TV contract and then figure out how that pie gets divided up among the teams, NASCAR itself, and the racetracks.The teams have complained that pretty much all of the money, or the overwhelming share of the money, goes to NASCAR itself and the tracks, and that they're not really getting that much, and it's much less equitable than you see in other sports, where in the NFL or Major League Baseball, you see roughly a 50/50 split between the teams and the players.In their mind, they're thinking of themselves as franchises that then supply the talent, the players, or in this case the drivers to the league, which would be NASCAR. NASCAR sees it differently. They see the drivers or the teams and drivers as independent contractors, and just part of this mix that also includes the racetracks that they have to coordinate with to stage the actual race events themselves.Combine that with the fact that advertising makes up a huge share of the revenue for any of the teams and teams are starting to lose really high profile advertisers. We're talking about the early to mid-2000s, the heyday of NASCAR, you had a lot of companies that just seemed like it made a ton of sense for them to be in NASCAR. Lowe's Home Improvement or the Home Depot, or just iconic brands being in the sport, that then you could associate with the driver. In a lot of cases the driver was in TV commercials — Tony Stewart was in Home Depot commercials — and it was really fed into a relationship where this sport, and by extension the driver in it, are the face of our brand and we have value in that.Those brands have left NASCAR over the past decade or so, and you're not seeing them really replaced with the same level of iconic brand. A lot of the cars that you see out on the track now are obscure, really more like niche motor racing, or car-related brands, and certainly not the sort of shiny big type of brands that you saw in NASCAR's heyday.That's trouble.That is big trouble, because advertising revenue from having these cars basically be rolling billboards for a particular brand, when the big brands leave, you get less advertising revenue. Since the teams are so dependent on that, that increases their desperation to leverage the charter system as an alternative means of getting revenue.This money bit's fascinating, and I want to get into sponsorship, so we'll get into that in a little bit.But first, I want to get into one other thing real quick, which is NASCAR itself. Most other leagues are large nonprofits, like maybe they're Major League Baseball and they have a century-old antitrust protection. They tend to be organizations that are either owned by the franchises or exist as a not-for-profit that basically serves as an intermediary between the franchises.But NASCAR is just a family business!Yeah, the France family, which goes back to this guy big Bill France who essentially created NASCAR. I mean, there were unaffiliated, loosely-run stock car races in the South before he came along, but he was the one that was able to wrangle together the support of all of those different factions and pull them into one system that then ran a series of circuits that became NASCAR. And it was all centered around things like the Daytona 500, which used to be literally run out on the beach of Daytona, Florida.And they built the Daytona Motor Speedway and they built Talladega, the other huge super speedway in Alabama. And you can see why the France family, and it's now run by his son, that they see it as being an extension of their father's legacy to continue running it. Bill France, he ran things, I don't want to say with an iron fist, but it was what he said went back in the day. A lot of what he chose to do with this sport was responsible for growing it. You couldn't really argue with his choices because the sport was making so much progress.Under the leadership of the rest of his family, though, you can take issue with that, and I think that's why maybe the France family and NASCAR itself as the central organizing body has lost some of their ability to have unchecked power over the sport, because a lot of the decisions that were put into place to try to make the sport more popular and capitalize on its moment of popularity in the 2000s have backfired and drove away the existing fans while not really adding new ones.Fascinating. The money split is wild, because now I want to talk about the tracks, which, I was reading up on it and the tracks get 65 percent of the money from the TV deal. They're a huge factor. And then I read a little more, and it was like there are two track operators. And one of them's NASCAR!I mean NASCAR, when they pay the tracks, they're actually also paying themselves. That goes back to the analogy to a sport like the NFL, where again the teams and drivers want it to be like, "Okay, Joe Gibbs Racing is the Patriots and yeah, Hendrick Motor Sports is the Eagles," or whatever. But NASCAR almost sees it as the tracks are the franchises, because the tracks are where they're actually holding the events, and the teams are just the players. The Eagles can cut some defensive back, but they're still the Eagles afterward.Whereas in the case of the teams, they're like, "Can you really have a sport without Denny Hamlin? Can you have a sport without Martin Truex Jr.?"That's probably the most similar aspect of this fight to the fights that you see in other sports, which are between the owners, who are represented by a Rob Manfred or a Roger Goodell type of commissioner, and the players; the players are making the argument that we are the sport, people come to see us, they don't come to see the laundry that the players are wearing in the form of uniforms.You see parallels of that in this NASCAR spat where it's like, are you really coming for the track or are you coming for the players or for the drivers? And you can see why they are coming for the track in a lot of ways. That's what makes this more complicated, is because the tracks are so ingrained into the culture of the sport. Could you have a NASCAR without a Daytona or a Talladega? The tracks themselves make up so much of the fabric of what we think of as NASCAR.Which is true, but you can have a race without Daytona and the answer is F1. F1 is in Vegas, now they're in Miami; they're eating their lunch domestically. It's interesting that you can watch this, if you look at it very closely, it's like, “Oh yeah, NASCAR totally has the advantage because people come for the tracks, not the drivers.” And then if you take two steps back you're like, "Oh wait, no, there's other racing in the world."Well, and there are other sports as well, and that's really interesting. NASCAR was in a position of real relative power in the mid-2000s. In 2005 I think they were the second-most watched sport in the country behind only the NFL. That was the peak moment of the sport, where all of the big advertisers were in on NASCAR as the fastest growing sport in America.Wow.The story of NASCAR since then has been a story of really steep decline, I think, in both viewership, money from some of those advertisers, and just general fan interest in a lot of ways. The sport is no longer at the peak of its space in the cultural zeitgeist, to say the least. And there are a lot of reasons for that that I think nobody can really fully agree on.Like what?Well, in my opinion, the biggest reason is that they put in trying to capitalize on the success and looking around at the other sports leagues and thinking, "Well, they have playoffs, so we need a playoff system as well. We can't have a situation where some guy is so far ahead in the standings in the last handful of races of the season that why would you watch? We need to manufacture some drama late in the season, the same way that every other sport does with its playoffs."So, they put in this thing called the “Chase for the Cup” starting, I want to say it was in 2004 or 2005, was the first year that they put it in.The problem has been that the rules around the chase keep changing. It's a very convoluted system. If you think about the playoffs in other sports, it's pretty straightforward, right?Yeah.At the end of the regular season, every team that doesn't qualify for the playoffs is eliminated, and then you have head-to-head competitions until you whittle it down to the Super Bowl and whoever wins is the champion.You can't really do that in auto racing because you can't really have a race with two drivers in it. That would be incredibly bizarre. And so, what they do is they still have the eliminated drivers be in the field, and they run the races the same way they would any other race, but the drivers that are qualified for the championship chase just are competing against each other as well. And they get a separate series of playoff points, and then they've added stages—Oh, screw that.Well yeah. They've added stage racing, which is where they put in these competition caution flags three times in the middle of a race, so that they pull the pack back together and you get points for winning the stages that are subpoints within a race. I think one of the valid complaints is that the system has become so convoluted that it's very difficult to keep track of the implications or the stakes.It's not like in football where you can just look at the score and realize, okay, this team is winning and these are the implications. And maybe if I need to, I'll look at the standings and try to come up with the little permutations that people do in week 18 of the NFL season. That's about as complicated as it gets for the other sports. But in NASCAR, it's like that all the time! And even more convoluted because of the points system.I think that has really backfired. It used to just be like you just went out and raced and whoever won the most races or had the most points, that's who won the championship. I do think NASCAR was also a victim of its own success in a certain way, in which you saw in the past the drivers used to be guys like Dale Earnhardt, who was the son of another NASCAR driver, but he grew up in relatively modest circumstances in North Carolina.He was a dyed-in-the-wool racer and he was a man's man and one of those types of guys and he didn't take any crap from anyone. And he wasn't really about the corporate scene. I mean, he was just about doing whatever made sense in the moment as a racer. A lot of guys were that way. It was a very Southern sport and they all came from that shared background.But as the sport became more popular, you saw drivers come from other parts of the country, like Jimmy Johnson and Jeff Gordon before him, but especially Jimmy Johnson, I think, is the poster child for this. He's from California. And when you hear Jimmy Johnson talk, he's kind of boring. He doesn't have that sort of same kind of colorful personality. He's very corporate. He's like, "Well, the Lowe's 48 Chevy did great. My guys put together a great race car for us today and we did the best we could." It's this very robotic type of talking, that I think a lot of the guys have, especially as NASCAR had a higher barrier to entry in terms of finances for a family trying to get their son or a daughter into driving. You had to be rich to be able to participate in this sport when you were young. And then that's the type of people that rise up to the highest level later on.So, a lot of the drivers now, I feel like fans complain that they can't connect with them in the same way because the fan base is fundamentally more of a blue-collar working class type of fan base, more concentrated in the South.They want John Wayne on wheels and they're instead getting the spokesperson for Walmart.Absolutely. I mean, that's a great comparison. I think that they found it more difficult to relate to the drivers. So, when you combine that with the super convoluted playoff system that feels very contrived, and the fact that the playoff system, it produced a lot of Jimmy Johnson titles, he won seven titles, which is tied for the most of all time, and he's arguably the greatest driver ever. But that came at the expense of somebody like Dale Earnhardt Jr. who never actually won a championship despite being the most popular driver and the son of the previous greatest driver of all time, and a guy who really embodied that spirit that has been lost.So, I think you had situations where there was a misalignment between who the champion was and the most popular driver, and just a lot of different changes. I think in a lot of ways, this doesn't get talked about a lot, or maybe as much as it should have, but I think the 2008 financial crisis also played a big role in the decline of NASCAR.Oh, now you have my attention. Go on, what?Well, so NASCAR's fan base was probably affected by that more, just in terms of the region that it's concentrated in and also just the more blue-collar type of fan base, that you saw them probably lose a lot of disposable income and just not have that same ability to attend races, or watch them on television, and they would be less attractive to sponsors as a result of that.You can go back and watch a race and see that it's sponsored by American Century Mortgage or something like that. It's a lot of the stuff that we saw in other sports for sure around that same period of time. But I think NASCAR in particular was in that sweet spot of demographics where the rise of NASCAR was fueled by a lot of the same things that drove the housing bubble and the various other aspects that were not sustainable about that economy. And then it was also taken down by the same things when those evaporated.So, those are my two cents. You'll hear a lot of culture war talk around it as well, where they'll complain that NASCAR has gone woke and all this stuff because they won't let them fly Confederate flags in the infield at races anymore, which was a thing as recently as maybe four or five years ago.Oh boy.I don't buy a lot of that. I think that mostly, it's just really difficult to get people to buy into a sport when they have trouble relating to the drivers, trouble following the standings and the playoff system. I forgot to mention also, the broadcasts have drawn a lot of complaints, especially this year, but I think in general about having commercials during green flag racing, about the fact that the races are really long.Baseball we're seeing as an example of a sport right now that's making a concerted effort to present a more viewer-friendly product that has less downtime and more action and doesn't drag on. And they've been pretty successful so far early in the season with the pitch clock and some of the other things that they've done.Whereas in a NASCAR race, man, you have to be committed to watching this thing for four hours on a Sunday. And that's a pretty big ask, I think! Especially given how many different options people have now for entertainment. I think that is also combined with the fact that maybe millennials are not as into car culture and they're not as into some of the things that maybe people that were drawn to NASCAR were in a previous generation.Off the top of my head, those are all I think probably the most valid reasons why NASCAR has lost its cachet. We're just seeing the effects of it because it's a sport that wants to feel like it's in that same conversation with the NFL and the NBA and the NHL and Major League Baseball. But the numbers don't really bear that out as much.Now, it's still relatively popular. I mean, that's an interesting place for it to be as well. Rumors of NASCAR's decline have in some ways been overstated and in some ways, they're also still trying to claw their way back to where they were in 2005 and not finding a way to move forward and think about 2023 instead.Talking a little bit about sponsors, because I did want to hit that before we wrapped it up, it's interesting because from the perspective of the France family, being a very successful popular regional sport that promotes the venues that you yourself own is a fine outcome for them! But I can understand why for the charters and the cars and the drivers, maybe regional popularity isn't what they want.They look across the ocean and they see F1 being one of those popular sports on the continent. I think you can see that there's a world in which NASCAR can be very lucrative while still not being nationally dominant. But that's not a world that the drivers want to see, and it's not a world that the sponsors would probably want to see. How do the sponsors factor into it?Yeah, the sponsors being a national brand I think is what drives every sports league and their ambitions. I don't think NASCAR, to their credit, they did not rest on those laurels of being a regional sport. In some ways I think the fan base complains that they're almost ignoring the Southern roots of the sport too much by expanding to places across the country and going on these cookie-cutter tracks that ignore the special historical tracks that there are in the South.They're trying to go back and re-appreciate the roots a little bit more. There was a track called North Wilkesboro in North Carolina that got shut down and they moved away from it in, I want to say the '90s. They've actually restored it. And Dale Jr. has actually been a big driving force behind that. And they're going to race there again and they do dirt track races in cup cars, which they used to really never do at Bristol.That was a couple weeks ago as well. So, they're trying to make an appeal to that core base and fan base. But I think there is always this tension in a sport like NASCAR between the original fan base and the Southern roots of the sport, and expanding it is almost your duty as a sports league, to have that ambition to be a bigger brand and capture more of the market share as a league, compared with some of the other leagues that they feel like they're on the same footing with.That tension is probably stronger in NASCAR than any other sport. Maybe you hear a little bit of this in hockey, where it's like, "Why are they expanding to the Sunbelt or the West Coast of the U.S. when they should be concentrating on Canada?" I think that's an interesting parallel for NASCAR because in NASCAR it's like, "Why are they focusing on the rest of the country when they should be focusing on the Southeast?" But you don't hear that in the NFL. There's no talk of, "You should be respecting Canton, Ohio, as the seat of NFL history." You just don't hear that. Or Green Bay, or something.Yeah, I do think that all of these historical factors and the different competing interests come to the fore in NASCAR more than other sports because it's the curse of being either the largest fish in a small pond of the leagues that are under the big, major pro sports leagues, or they're the smallest fish in that huge pond, and they can't really decide which of those they want to be.Fascinating. So now, I think what needs to happen is we need to trade one Canadian hockey team for a racetrack that will be located in Manitoba, just to maximally piss everyone off.I would love to see that. Yeah, I don't think they've raced in Canada. I could be wrong about this. There are street tracks in places like Toronto and Vancouver, where indie cars would race, but I don't think NASCAR has done that. But I wouldn't put it past them.I mean, they're doing a race on the streets of Chicago, which sounds like the execution of the prep for it has been a disaster, but it seems really cool also. And they did a version of it on iRacing, which is a video game, during COVID; they actually broadcast and had real drivers driving the cars virtually on the streets of Chicago, which was the brainchild of it.They're doing some of these gimmicky things that the fan base is pissed off about, but I still think could be cool. I'm of also both minds on it as well, because I love when sports do things that are outside the box and just weird, but hey man, it could be cool, throw something at the wall. That was the spirit of original sports leagues like a hundred years ago, and in some ways we've lost that spirit over time as they've stagnated and become more concentrated on not losing their spot in the pecking order.You could see a sport like NASCAR being more willing to take chances, but sometimes those chances work out well. Sometimes when you shake up your whole playoff system and nobody can keep track of it and it makes no sense and it seems super contrived, they work out poorly.When your playoff system is too heavily mathematical for a FiveThirtyEight sports writer to really engage with, you screwed up badly.Thanks again for coming on. Again, I think it's not a topic that crosses a lot of people's plates all the time, but I think it's a fascinating thing. So, thank you for coming on doing it. Neil, where can folks find you?Well, they can find me at FiveThirtyEight, of course. Some of my overflow ideas are at my Substack, which is neilpaine.substack.com. You can find some of my NASCAR thoughts on there.It's really fun. I like the whole things that are a little bit about messing around and having fun with it, both in sports and in your work, man. It's good stuff. I'm enjoying the Substack.Thank you.Sweet. Thanks for coming on.Thanks for having me.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.  Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Abraham Josephine Riesman who wrote the explosive new book out this week Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. I have been looking to this one for a while, I was a massive fan of her 2021 book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee.The subject matter of this one will be of interest not just to wrestling fans but among anyone who has felt the reverberations across pop culture, sports and politics of one extremely complicated family and their very influential “sports entertainment” business.The book is out this week and can be found wherever books are sold. Riesman can be found at her website and on Twitter. This interview has been condensed and edited.Josie, thank you so much for coming on.Hey, I'm so glad to be back. Fire away.You are out with the new book Ringmaster this week. I have been looking forward to this all year, honestly, since I heard you announced it. Folks might know you from your Stan Lee biography. Both of these stories are about complicated men who worked in the entertainment industry and how it kind of destroyed them, I guess. What drew you to Vince McMahon?I was a teenage wrestling fan from the ages of about 13 to 16. I was very obsessively involved in Vince McMahon's product, the World Wrestling Federation, as it was known then. And three years isn't all that long a period of time in adult human years, but in teenager years, those are a century each. It was a time when I was very impressionable, and wrestling made a big impression on me. And after I gave up on it around 2001, I stopped watching for like 20 years. And then when I was done with my biography of Stan Lee, True Believer, I had to come up with something else to write. And I was having a conversation with my wonderful spouse, who ended up being my frontline editor on this, but was not at the time, S.I. Rosenbaum, and we were just chatting about what could the next book be.And one of us said, what about a biography of Vince McMahon? Now, she'd reported on wrestling in the past as a local news reporter. Not on the WWF, but on the wrestling world, so she was familiar with him. And I obviously was familiar with him, had a lot of distinctive memories of him, had some knowledge of his real life. But it was, as is true of most people's knowledge of Vince McMahon's real life, ill-informed, because he's very good at deliberately altering your perception of him. So it just seemed like a natural idea. He is this amazing individual whose story had not really been told in the particular way that I wanted to tell it.It's a fascinating business story, it's a fascinating cultural story, and we'll kind of touch on each of those elements in a bit. I guess to give folks a little perspective who might not be totally familiar with wrestling, what role does Vince McMahon play in the evolution of it, and what it's become today versus what it was maybe 50 years ago?Sure, yeah. Vince is the singular man of professional wrestling right now. There's no one more powerful or influential than him, both in the present and also in the recent past. Of the living people in wrestling, no one has had more of an influence than Vince McMahon. He took over the company from his father, who was a wrestling promoter, like his father before him, in 1982 and 1983. He, over the course of that year, purchased the company from his father and some minority shareholders.And after that, Vince sort of went on a war of conquest. Up until then, wrestling had been this largely regional phenomenon. You had regional territories where local bosses, who operated not unlike mob bosses, would dictate what pro wrestling was in that geographic territory. And it was an oligarchy. It wasn't a democracy, but it was an oligarchy. It was not unlike the English nobility circa Magna Carta, where it's like it could have been the beginnings of democracy, but democracy it wasn't. But the fact was that power was more diffuse than it is now. Because Vince went on this little mission to take over wrestling in America and Canada, and he did entirely.It's not exactly a monopoly because there are small other promotions, there have been. Now there's a pretty big rival promotion AEW, but for about 20 years there, from 2001 until 2020 or so, Vince was essentially unopposed in the world of professional wrestling. And the whole art form has been changed by that fact, by the fact that this one person has so much outsized influence on how it has evolved in the past for decades.And it really was a conquest. Again, he cajoled and destroyed and won over and allied with—And bought, don't forget bought. The big thing was he would flood the zone with money and tell the top talent at any given territory, come over to my shop and you'll get paid more. And it's a very punishing industry financially, so unsurprisingly, a lot of people said yes. And similarly, he would just buy TV slots in rival territories and start broadcasting his show in syndication. One of the WWF's employees spoke to a reporter in the early ‘80s or mid-‘80s and said that Vince was executing manifest destiny. Used that actual phrase. It was an apt comparison, let's say that.Yeah, and I think that I would love to hear your view on how he changed wrestling to reflect him, because we're going to get in a second to how wrestling kind of changed a lot of the world around it; but whether it was the body building league that he backed for a bit, or whether it was the distinct styles in wrestling, I suppose I'd love your view on, what does the Vince McMahon wrestling world look like that's different than perhaps what came before?The Vince McMahon world of wrestling for one thing, this is perhaps the most important thing, it no longer claims to be a real sport. This was perhaps, I mean, there's a lot that Vince reshaped, but a lot of it's sort of technical. It'll be like, oh, well he started doing this kind of camera thing. It's a vast accumulation of little things that result in an altered tapestry. But the big historic, world historic break, was Vince in the mid-‘80s started pushing to get his business deregulated so he didn't have to have state athletic committees overlooking health and safety and levying taxes. And his big strategy for that was not in public, but behind the scenes in legislation sessions and in lawsuits. He and Linda, his wife, and their underlings would say, ‘Don't worry, this is all fake. You don't need to regulate this like a sport, because it ain't a sport. It's just like the Harlem Globe Trotters or the circus.' That was the comparison they always made.And it's unclear whether Vince ever intended to make that all that public. Perhaps it was inevitable that it would've been, but he was kind of caught off guard in 1989 when, after four or five years of this deregulation effort and after some lawsuits that he or Linda had testified in in which they'd said all that, it finally got reported.The New York Times ran a big story called, "Now It Can Be Told, All These Wrestlers Are All Just Having Fun." And it was about how the WWF's deregulation campaign, especially in New Jersey, had resulted in them going on the record and saying in legislation and in legal proceedings that wrestling was fake. And Vince was kind of caught off guard, because he was not intending that to be a big public New York Times story, but he'd already laid the groundwork, whether or not it was his intention. That effort also combined with something that was very public, which is that he started referring to his product in the mid-‘80s as sports entertainment, not wrestling. It was sports entertainment. And that change, that shift toward acknowledging wrestling's fakeness in a grand way, was just a sea change. It resulted in a lot of enormous upheaval.Yeah. I suppose I'm interested in, then, how that deregulation and that upheaval affected not just folks who worked for him, but the product as well as the human beings who worked for him. So much of your book is about the relationships between Vince and various different wrestlers. If he's the only game in town and if the state's not paying attention, that lead to some significant negative impacts for a lot of people, and a couple significant positive impacts for another group. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?Yeah. In the absence of anybody telling Vince what to do in a meaningful way, he was able to execute a lot of very abusive business tactics towards his workers. Wrestlers are not employees, they are independent contractors, they don't have health insurance provided by WWE, as it's known now, and they are in this very low-paying profession compared to other athletic events of similar spectacle and notability.Like, you have these people who are every bit the athletes that a basketball player or a football player might be, but they get paid vastly less, and have so few job protections and no voice, because again, there's no collective bargaining. And so that has manifested itself in a lot of death and destruction. Not to put it too bluntly, but I could go on all day about all the people who've been affected in that way.Just a few off the top of my head, Owen Hart, a wrestler himself, but also the younger brother of the very famous wrestler, Bret Hart, Owen Hart died in the ring. He was doing a zip line stunt — well, technically it was called a descender stunt, but that's getting technical. He was doing this stunt where he was flying in from the rafters at a pay-per-view event, and Vince had changed up who was managing that stunt, and the person who did it was allegedly somewhat incompetent, and the botched stunt led to him falling 70 feet and hitting the ropes and then falling into the ring, and he died mere minutes later, and the show went on. That was the thing about Vince, was it any other athletic event, if one of the players died, I can't imagine that the game would've continued. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's some sports example that I'm not aware of, but it would be completely obscene and impossible to imagine a sporting event continuing after one of the players died.But that's exactly what happened with Owen Hart. Vince told them to keep the show going, and the arena crowd — it was 1999, so we don't have as much internet penetration in a remote location — but you had all these people in the arena who therefore didn't know whether Owen was dead or not, thought maybe it was all part of the act, because they weren't told. And they cheered their heads off for the rest of the show thinking maybe that was all part of the show. That's just one example. There are countless people who've died young because of injuries or head trauma or steroid use, drug use, any number of things that just go completely unchecked or largely unchecked in wrestling, because it's just not a regulated or unionized industry.The steroid component was a huge part of it as well, too.Yeah, back in the ‘90s, it's actually kind of interesting. The steroid scandal that the WWF found itself in was arguably held up as a bigger deal than the concurrent scandals about rape. Vince was accused in that same period in the early ‘90s, and then especially in 1992 of raping a female employee in 1986. He was accused of actively knowing and looking the other way about child rape in the WWF among the so-called ring boys, these sort of underage boys who were hired to do odd jobs. And the steroid thing, and there were a bunch of other sexual misconduct allegations, but those were two of the big ones.The steroid thing was always held up as a bigger deal than any of the other stuff. It was the steroid allegations, and those were specifically about distributing and pushing steroids on the wrestlers, which was a bit of an abstraction because Vince didn't have to actively come tell any wrestlers to do steroids, they knew that that's what the boss expected of them.So trying to pin it on a specific like, oh, Vince said to this one wrestler, ‘You need to do steroids today, and here they are,' that was going to be very hard to do. So it's very odd to look back on the steroid trial — well, the steroid scandal is what led to the federal trial that Vince faced in 1994 — and yet you look back on it and the steroid allegations are easily the least interesting, or at least scandalous or least harmful in many ways; even though steroids are very harmful, they're nothing compared to rape.And it was, I wonder why the media attention went so much to the steroids. I think a lot of it just had to do with the war on drugs. There was just a general moral panic about about chemical substances, especially their use among young people. And I'm not saying young people should be doing anabolic steroids to bulk up, that's not what I'm saying at all. But I think it maybe got held up as a bigger deal than some of the allegations that may now seem more serious. Because it was part of this larger American phenomenon.It was also likely more obvious on its face, as well as more easy to report on?Yeah, you're absolutely right, but that doesn't necessarily preclude media from making hay out of something just because it's harder to prove, especially when it's something salacious and tabloidy like sexual misconduct. But I'm sure that was part of it, yes. With the steroid thing, you just have to turn on your TV and you see all the evidence you need by looking at the Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan, as opposed to some of the other stuff.I want to talk about some of the really cool reporting and new information that you broke in this, and just kind of things that I got out of your book that I have never seen or really kind of felt before.And I got to say, one theme that I think you keep coming back to is just that how Vince is able to do this is that he appears to be preternaturally charismatic. And you have a couple scenes in the book, I recall one where I think he's talking to Bret Hart, where he's just able to win somebody who is technically in conflict with him, fundamentally over to his position. There was also the excerpt this week that ran about a negotiation between him and one of those ring boys.Could you talk a little bit about, I guess, his character and his skills, and what his talents are?Vince is an enormously charismatic individual, which is interesting because he wasn't as a child, this was not necessarily a phenomenon for his entire life. I spoke to many people who knew him when he was young before he got involved in the wrestling industry, and they all said he was kind of unremarkable. They liked him, but he was not president of the class, and oftentimes he wasn't even doing any extracurriculars.So at some point, either it flowers or he learns it, and by the time he meets Bret Hart, Vince McMahon walks into a room and everybody looks at him. I've never been in a room other than an arena with Vince McMahon. I've never interviewed him. But everyone I know who has said they've been in the same room as him, they all say it's like gravity, you just can't escape the pole of wanting to be around this sort of uncanny dude.It's not just that he's charismatic, he's also just physically odd to look at, and that's appropriate because Vince and his father both really understood that the human mind is easily hackable in one very particular way, which is that humans don't know what to do with uncanny-looking other humans. If you see somebody who's really big, just enormous, you're going to pay attention to them.And if you can win them over after they started paying attention to that person, then you've got it made. And Vince is an enormous guy, not as much, he's older, but in his prime, and his prime lasted well into his 60s, he was just a bulked out dude. It's something that everyone remarked on, even before he started wrestling or doing anything as a real character, when he was just an announcer. I was talking to people who watched him in the ‘70s when he was an announcer starting out, and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, we would watch and we'd be like, “Why is the announcer so jacked? Is he going to wrestle at some point? What? Why is that happening?”'Whether that's intentional or not, it's effective. People are weirded out by Vince McMahon, and that leads them to pay more attention to Vince McMahon, and that's something he used to his advantage a lot.That's fascinating. I think that wrestling has lended itself rather well to memes; a lot of Vince's actual strategy with recruiting and retaining wrestlers was to find folks who had a very distinctive look. If you look at who has gone mainstream in Hollywood from wrestling, they're gents with a very specific aesthetic. Do you want to speak to some of that?Yeah, I mean the people who have broken out of wrestling and become people that your mom might recognize are John Cena, Hulk Hogan, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, these extremely charismatic, extremely large, chiseled, slightly odd-looking men, and very few of wrestlers have actually achieved that level of mainstream prominence.But the ones who have have been very successful. I mean, John Cena is probably the most popular wrestler who's still sort of on the roster. He occasionally wrestles for them still, but all these past stars who are still in Vince's fold, they all know where their bread is buttered, and they don't piss off Vince, they have had a lot of influence.Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson's star is falling at this moment thanks to Black Adam, but that doesn't mean he's not one of the more recognizable humans on the planet. He could still run for president, he keeps teasing that he might.Jesse Ventura, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, was not created by Vince initially, but he became a megastar thanks to Vince, and Jesse was the governor of Minnesota, and now is an influential conspiracy theorist. It's like these people come at the world from odd angles, and end up taking it in even odder angles.Yes. Can you think of any recent examples, perhaps from recent American politics, that could potentially back that point up as well?Yeah, right. Well, I don't know why I didn't talk about that, but yeah, there's a particular member of the WWE Hall of Fame who happens to have been the 45th president of the United States: Donald Trump. Vince and Trump are very close, they've known each other since the ‘80s.Trump was the host of two WrestleManias in the ‘80s, and then would appear at wrestling events and class the joint up. And then eventually, most notably, he had this whole storyline where he was a character as himself, and he was in a rivalry with Vince McMahon, and they had the Battle of the Billionaires at WrestleMania in 2007. And it was a real interesting spectacle, in retrospect. I mean at the time people ate it up just because it was a reality star and another reality star essentially being goofy on television, but it ended up having a lot of significance.I really think that experience of doing that storyline was transformative for Donald Trump, because Trump wasn't a guy who worked rallies as of 2007, really, that was not his milieu. And he's not somebody who likes watching politician speeches, it's not like he's learning how to work a rally from watching George H.W. Bush deliver the State of the Union or something; he learned from wrestling.I say he has known Vince since the ‘80s. He's been watching McMahon Family Wrestling since he was a child. We have people on the record talking about him watching. We have people on the record talking about watching Vince Sr.'s wrestling show, that's Vince's dad, in the ‘50s, in the ‘60s, and he was really influenced by that.Donald Trump loves wrestling, he has watched it for a very long time, and I think the experience of doing that storyline and watching all that wrestling, but especially doing the storyline, really taught him how to work a crowd into a fervor by tossing them little bits of unspeakable truth, and big chunks of completely outrageous lies, and delivering them all with the exact same level of commitment. And the crowd ate it up, and I think that was a taste of something that he then craved more of.Fascinating. So again, the book is called Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and The Unmaking of America.Josie, I want to kind of back out a little bit and talk about not only this book, but your previous book, because again, I mentioned in the beginning how there's a lot of connective tissue there, and how these are folks who have a chip on their shoulder, they're not in the mainstream, and they really lust for the mainstream, and then that fundamentally changes the way that they view the world, the people around them, and the folks who work for them.Just kind of take a step back, what kind of connective tissue do you see between Vince McMahon and Stan Lee, two men who are fundamentally instrumental for the current state of pop culture?For a huge cog of what happens in culture now and politics, as well.They were both men who created a character based on themselves but not themselves, and then lost themselves in that character. That's the most obvious comparison.Stan Lee, Stan Lee was born Stanley Martin Lieber and became this character named Stan Lee. And eventually that was all that was left, was the Stan Lee character, at least in most of his interactions with people outside of his inner circle. And it was a prison for him in many ways. It was, by the end, very different from how he acted with his intimates. And with Vince as well, Vince, when he became a character in the wrestling as a supreme super villain, he became Mr. McMahon, that was the official branded name for his character. And Mr. McMahon was seemingly at least an extrapolation of Vince, and I think in a lot of ways it was an extrapolation of Vince, but Vince has always maintained, ‘Oh, Mr. McMahon isn't me. Mr. McMahon is based on all the people I hated when I was growing up.'And we didn't really have time to get into it in this interview, but my whole big fat theory about that is, he's talking about his father, Vince Sr., who he never says anything mean about, but I can't imagine he doesn't have deeply conflicted feelings, even if he's not really in touch with them, about this man who abandoned him for the first 12 years of his life, and then was cold to him for the entire rest of the time they knew each other.We can go there. I mean again, he did kind of run off and join the circus, so to speak, when his father reentered his life.Yes. When he met his father at 12, he threw himself into wrestling. He became a huge wrestling mark. He was not into wrestling as a child up until then, but when he found out that his father had this whole other life doing that, he wanted it, and he threw himself into it. He became his own wrestling promoter in high school.Vince had never talked about this, but I uncovered it. In high school when he was at military school in Virginia for two years, he would stage wrestling shows in the school gymnasium. This was his beginning, and he's never talked about that because it interferes with the story he's tried to foster of himself as a juvenile delinquent, rather than somebody who was doing fights only for show.I guess to kind of add on to that, you had a hell of a time reporting this out. It was a lot of records; covering a guy as slippery as somebody who has a wrestling character can be difficult in its own right. What went into some of the reporting?A lot. I mean, it was a lot of going through documents and a lot of cold calling, not a lot of travel, because this was a pandemic book for the most part. I did go to North Carolina. That was my one priority: All the other travel was optional, but I had to go to North Carolina as soon as there was a vaccine. And lo and behold, once there, I went down there and I found a lot of stuff.It was very interesting. You found this total counternarrative to what Vince had told everybody about his youth. And yeah, it was a wide array of things, lots of interviews, I talked to more than 150 people, building off of other secondary sources. You know, how does anybody write a book?Well, so the book is called Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. Josie, do you want to tell folks where they can find it?Look for me at abrahamriesman.com, or you can look just at the book, at ringmasterthebook.com. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Megan Garber who wrote the new essay collection On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics from The Atlantic. Megan is a writer at The Atlantic, and the magazine has compiled a number of her essays into the new book. It's a great read, an exploration into the ways that American political actors have parlayed the techniques of entertainment to their own ends. Today, we talked about amusing ourselves to death, what happens to a country when politics becomes entertainment, and Dwight Schrute. Megan can be found at The Atlantic and the book, as well as several other new compilations of essays from the magazine, is available wherever books are sold. This interview has been condensed and edited. Megan Garber, thank you so much for joining us.Thanks for having me.You have a new book, it's a collection of a lot of your essays at The Atlantic, it's called On Misdirection. What prompted you to figure out this beat and tease out that you were covering misdirection over the past couple years?A lot of the things that have really interested me about politics and political discourse, let's say, over the past few years are the ways that we are trained to see each other and then also to not see each other. It seems like so many things, so many of the big political stories, particularly at the beginning of the presidency of Donald Trump, and then up till now, so much has come down to are we seeing what we should be seeing, or are we in fact looking away from what we should be seeing?Ideas about vision is actually one of the main drivers of all of these essays, which are very different other than that. I'm a political junkie, I love to follow politics and all of that, but I kept feeling for myself just as a news consumer, "Is this really the most important thing right now?" All these shiny distractions, daily outrages that come and go, and I know I myself, as a news consumer, often feel very addled, almost, and just in a constant state of distraction.So these essays really do try to figure out what happens to that form of distraction on a mass scale. If I'm not the only one feeling this, but if a lot of people are feeling this, what are the consequences of that?I loved how also you kept it in some of the more conventional forms of media as well, too. I know that a lot of our conversation about distraction has been related to social media and algorithms and kind of blamed on Silicon Valley ghosts that are destroying our brains.But a lot of what you talk about is just super day to day. It's the way people talk about other people, whether it's on television or radio or things like that. Do you want to expand on how it's not just necessarily what we're doing online?The first essay, actually, is a look-back at the scholar Neil Postman, who's one of my favorite thinkers, critics, et cetera. He wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985 that was looking at the impact of television, essentially, on American culture. And as you might guess from the title, making an argument that the entertainment has slipped the bonds of mere fun and mere escapism and distraction and has actually come into our lives and come to infiltrate lives in a lot of ways.Looking at him in retrospect is the first essay in the collection. We chose that specifically because I think one of the other arguments underlining a lot that's in the book is that entertainment, as much as I love it, and I am an inveterate lover of entertainment of all kinds, but it can, I think, also become fairly pernicious when it becomes our standard of judging things in the political realm.One example that's in another essay in there is the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The talking points, it seemed to me, among Trump's allies had nothing to do with the facts at hand. This was a legal proceeding, conducted by lawyers, by Meta lawyers, in fact, in Congress. Yet the arguments were nothing to do with the facts, but "this is boring." That was essentially what it came down to. "Ugh, snooze, ugh, no one's watching this." All that kind of stuff.When again, this was an impeachment trial of a president, there were facts at play, and yet the talking points completely elided that. What struck me as well, though, was it was not just partisan talking points. One news organization had an entire op-ed about the impeachment trial, sort of complaining that it lacked pizazz. Pizazz was literally the word that was used.I think there's this way that if we're not careful, the sort of logic of entertainment itself, this idea that everything has to be fun, that boring is its own kind of factual argument, that's what can happen. That was what Neil Postman was talking about.That, I think, is what's happening right now, too, where just entertainment becomes the only thing that matters at the end of the day. That can become, I think, pretty quickly dangerous and bad for us as a culture.That was a really remarkable argument in the book. Again, I'm a huge fan of pop culture. I like being entertained, but it just felt weird how so much of the language and the desire of pop culture was being adapted and weaved into politics. You mentioned obviously Trump, and rallies, and the impeachment, but you had an example in there about Pete Buttigieg after the Iowa Caucus that I thought was really potent where it's just, the question isn't like, "Did we win?" It's like, "Aren't we having so much fun?"Exactly right, and the Iowa Caucus is as famous and infamous for not having an immediate result. Very quickly, things went awry in a quite extreme manner there. Exactly what you said, Pete Buttigieg put out a talk saying, "We have shocked the nation," claiming victory even though no such victory had been claimed. Just like you said, this idea that shock is even part of the conversation, that shock is a value on its own, I think just speaks to the way that fun and high emotional stakes of everything are infiltrating, I think, our rhetoric and logic as a culture.I think also just we talk a lot about overheated rhetoric. Just everything is heated, and everything is ratcheting up at all times, and I think one of the extensions of the ratcheting is that we as news consumers and as citizens just become accustomed to evermore levels of drama, of outrage, of everything. We're sort of losing the ability, I think, to have a moderate anything in our conversations. Everything is just bigger, dramatic jazz hands.So, we may as well get to some of the heart of this. There's obviously a guy who comes up a couple times in your book who is very good at this, bit of a controversial figure, but you just keep on coming back to him, I think, for reasons that are clear.What draws you to Dwight Schrute?I will say, during the early days of the pandemic, I've always been a fan of the show The Office, and I went back to it as a comfort watch, a soothing watch in these really awful days. I was newly familiar with The Office.For anyone who might not be familiar, The Office is a U.S. sitcom, but it focuses on a very small office in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There is a boss, Michael Scott, who is kind of an oaf in a lot of ways. And then one of the other characters in the show is, yes, Dwight Schrute, who I've always been fascinated by, because he's this amazing contradiction, this walking category error.He is a beet farmer, but he has these authoritarian tendencies. I'm trying to think of how to describe Dwight. He's just a lot of things at once. I think one of the things that's so interesting about him is that he is this person who very much thinks that he knows better than everyone else what the rules are, that he can decide the rules for himself and then, importantly, inflict them on other people.So, Dwight thinks he is basically the ultimate agent of law enforcement, literally and otherwise, in the office. In fact, again and again is a physical danger to his colleagues. Just that tension in Dwight felt very resonant to me, as you say, for other political figures and power players as well. I wanted to look at Dwight as almost a character and a trope who conveys so much about the people in political power, often, who make up their own rules and then enforce them and inflict them on everyone else.This idea of, "We're doing it because I said so," and that's the only explanation you're going to get, and these lies that just, everyone just lies without any real sense of backlash or anything. And a lot of that, to me, seemed to be conveyed in Dwight.There's an appeal to him. You can understand, in a democracy where appeal is a key component of accessing power, that despite the obvious flaws in his leadership capabilities for a large duration, you can see how a guy like that just might appeal to a large group of people. I guess we can now broaden it out a bit, how do you think that applies to American society as a whole?A lot of the supporters of the fellow we've been talking about, poll after poll suggests that they feel a sense of encroachment. They feel like they used to be de facto at the top of American society and feel like now they are being pushed down a bit. I think there's a lot of indignation there and a lot of wanting to feel a little bit reassured that, "No, you still do have power. You still do. You can still say for everyone else, as you have throughout history."I think there's something about Dwight definitely that sort of conveys that idea. Donald Trump, very famously and infamously, promised, "I alone can fix it," with 'it' being fill in the blank. There's something in that message, there's something very reassuring to people who feel very caught in a tumult and who feel very unsettled and everything. So much is in flux right now and I think to just have that sort of authoritarian presence who can just say, "Trust me, I've got this. I can make the world make sense again," I think there's something very appealing just about that message.Then, of course, there's a question of how true that is, how politically problematic that is, et cetera. But in terms of rhetoric, I think that's very powerful. There's the adjunct to that message, which is if Donald Trump can say what's what, if he can look at an orange and say it's an apple, and just by force of will have the orange in some sense become an apple, I think there's also a silent message to people that they might have that same agency. They can still be the ones who decide. There's a very powerful message in that.You had a line toward the end of that essay, I think, that was just resolving Dwight's arc. You wrote this I think in October 2020, which was a fascinating time for a lot of people. You basically wrote that "his arc as an agent of chaos is simply not sustainable." Toward the end of it, he domesticates a little bit just because that's what folks want. I guess, how do you see that potentially applying beyond strictly the American television program The Office?One of the things that's so interesting to me about The Office itself is that you could see, or at least when I was rewatching it, what really struck me as a writer — not a writer of sitcoms, but a writer in general — I could see the type of arc that they were trying to give different characters. Just like you said, Dwight, after a while, a character like that can't simply stay an agent of chaos. There has to be some kind of evolution and some kind of arc to the character, or else it just gets too repetitive.Something about the arcs, I think, is very revealing because I think to the Neil Postman point, in the very broad sense, Americans are being conditioned to understand the world in roughly the same way as a sitcom understands the world, which is a character like Dwight needs, the arc needs, the evolution needs a bit of catharsis at the end.A lot of us are now coming to see the world itself in those terms, where we expect our political stories, we expect our real stories of everyday life to also have some tidy conclusions, to also mimic the flow of a TV show and a sitcom.That's one thing I would say, there is this logic of sitcom built into things, and I think that's what can make so many of the problems we have, which are so big and intractable — climate change would be one I would point to — that really resists a Schrutean narrative arc.It makes it sometimes hard for us to talk about. I would also say that The Office's writers recognized how deeply viewers — and I would also then say citizens and people and news consumers — how desperately we crave a catharsis at the end, in whatever form that might look like. Catharsis is a very important idea, both in sitcom writing and in the broader world.I like that idea. I do want to talk to you a little bit about the arc of your book, which was really, really great. It's a collection of essays, and I imagine that the order in which you present them, there was a lot of thought that went into that. You kick it off very much talking about irony and satire and how they're having a good moment, you talk a little bit about the Science March. I'll let you take it from there a little bit.But in the end, you also finish on the idea that "if you brand yourself an entertainer and not a journalist, you can spread falsehoods in the name of fun." You start off in a place where people are having fun for, one might think, deliberate and somewhat positive-facing means. And then in the end, that can get co-opted in a manner. Do you want to maybe talk about some of that?Sure, and thank you, that's such a good observation, totally.The book begins in this essay about Neil Postman looking at the March for Science, which it was put on in the same general time that the Women's March was happening, that people were trying to find ways to protest against the new presidency. This was a march that was very self-consciously designed to support science, facts, et cetera. I did not attend myself, but I was looking through Instagram afterward and looking at all the photos, and that's the way of the modern march, is to have your march, which happens in person, translate to Instagram, translate to memes.One of the things that you're supposed to do, really, as a good attender of these marches is to come up with a costume that will go viral, perhaps. I mean, there were some really good jokes, they were great, they were great costumes, great signs, all that stuff. But I just kept thinking, what now? Speaking of catharsis, is this enough catharsis for people? Is this going to feel like, okay, well we did this, so what else can we do? That's enough. We've had our catharsis, we've made our point?I don't mean to suggest that everyone involved just stopped at the march, but I do think that sometimes when this becomes our mode of political expression, there is a little bit of a, "Okay, but how are we going to actually defend science in real life? How are we going to defend women's rights in real life?" I worry sometimes that just the fun itself and the act of togetherness and all of that can be its own catharsis, and then not actually translate to additional action in the real world.That's a real, good point. I do want to stay here, because I know that we're on a roll, but it is interesting because the Science March, it seemed a very fun vibe. Everybody picked their favorite XKCD, it was a good time.Then if you were to compare that, as you just did, to the Women's March, which was not distinctly as much of a good time, one of those movements had a little bit more staying power, one might say.That's totally right. I want to also be clear that I think the fun elements of things can be great. Throughout American history, fun has been an important means of political expression. People sometimes forget the book Common Sense, the Thomas Paine track that at some level really did help to foment the revolution, not only was it passionately argued and this very compelling piece of rhetoric, it was also just really funny. It was a work of entertainment. People would read it aloud to each other around the fire, and it had that level of making politics fun.That is a really important element of politics, to make people feel engaged. But then I think for me the question is: To what extent does the fun encourage us? To what extent does it activate us? To what extent does it bring us together in community, or to what extent does it sort of alienate us from the reality of politics and condition us to see, again, everything as entertainment? In which case the fun isn't the means, but the fun is the end, essentially.Do you want to talk a little bit about how you close the book? I know you talk a little bit about Tucker, but you also talk a little bit about basically how everybody's having fun now.It's not just a technique used by those out of power to somewhat mock and undermine those in power, it's also used to enforce it a little bit, too.Speaking of Tucker Carlson, he famously in a legal case, his lawyer argued on his behalf that he is not a journalist, he is an entertainer and therefore can say anything he wants to say, and that argument won, that argument held sway.I think again and again, rhetoric that I would see as propaganda that really is designed to make certain Americans think that other Americans are less American and in some sense less human, that's a big part of the rhetoric going on in that show. It comes across, it is presented as entertainment. It's presented as, "Ah, we're just asking questions." Like, "Oh, it's not that big of a deal."There's a real minimization of rhetoric that I find to be very dangerous and frankly scary. We see that idea again and again. One of the subsidiary ideas that I tried to consider in these essays is, "What does propaganda actually look like?" Because at least for me, when I hear that word, I think of Soviet billboards and I think of the mid-century and very sort of overt, direct, "You should believe this."And now propaganda has taken on this much more insidious form where it's the same types of messages, it's the same attempt to win hearts and minds over to a cause, whatever the cause may be. But the propaganda itself is not overt; instead it is very buried in just messages that look like fun, that look like just entertainment. That is a really scary development because it means the propaganda can have even more power than it might otherwise to affect the way people see the world.Again, I really enjoy your work. I'm so happy that it's been compiled into this, On Misdirection.I have recently, and then for a little bit of a while, I have had increasingly complicated feelings toward The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I was a teenager during the Bush administration, and that was very much, I think, something that was formative for me.But I think it's impossible to look at what came after and what that flowed into, even Tucker directly, somewhat, through that somewhat fateful Crossfire interview. I think it's impossible to look back at the past 15 years and not see the fingerprints of that on a lot of different political movements that are not necessarily what it was originally going for.Yeah, that's such a good point. I would say, too, I mean, I think The Daily Show in my mind is a little bit of a piece of a broader collapse, almost. The Daily Show is very much a response to the rise of just reality TV in general. I would argue that the whole point of that genre is to collapse the real and the fake into one thing and be entirely unclear about where the reality ends and the fiction begins.The Daily Show is very much an extension of that. Around the same time, you've had just so many other cultural works in that space where the whole point is just to poke fun at the idea that you can even distinguish between fact and fiction. That, to be clear, that is not propaganda on its own, but I would also say that this idea that fact and fiction on some level can't be extricated from each other, that is a very foundational argument of any propaganda.I think we're starting in the '90s with reality TV, to some extent with social media as well. Where are the people on social media, are they people at all or are they characters in a show? It can be very hard to tell. We've been on this path since at least the '90s, possibly before, where just everything blurs together, and the fact looks like fiction, the serious stuff looks like entertainment, the entertainment looks like serious stuff, and everything is just in this blurry, chaotic mess.Again, you mentioned the Science March, but I went to the Rally to Restore Sanity when I was 20. The fun vibes of that, "We're all in this together." But, like, that was also the thing in D.C. from January 5th to 7th, 2021. I love in your book just how you went through all the different ways that this is manifesting.Thank you so much. Speaking of the order, we were going for that arc, so I appreciate that that was really clear, because it really does feel like one of those sort of paths that you can see in retrospect. And at the time, it's hard to know what's exactly happening, but now even just 10 years later, five years later, things become much more clear.  And then, too, at the end of the book, the final essay is about how endings themselves, the sense of things will come to a satisfying conclusion, that that alone, that logic — which is so much a product, I think, of movies and TV shows and all of that — how that logic alone can be really pernicious for people, because most things will not have an ending.Most things are fluid, news stories are fluid. Yes, there are some beginnings and some endings, but usually they're going to defy that in some way. I think as Americans, we are so conditioned to expect the catharsis, expect either the happy ending or the dramatic one. I think the arc of the past few decades really shows how connected everything is and how hard it is to distinguish the beginning of one thing and the end of the other.I've got to say, I almost wonder if it's systemic in the States. The thing that I envy the most about parliamentary systems is that inevitably, the country's leader, "the protagonist," will leave in shame. They will lose eventually. And you will have a conclusion to the end of the Winston Churchill arc of the United Kingdom. We don't have that. Barack Obama's still around, Donald Trump's still around. I wonder how much that's systemic.No, that's such a good point. I will admit this is a little bit extreme of me, but I actually do think it's true; you look in pop culture right now and what do we have but sequel, after sequel, after sequel? The highest grossing movies of 2022 were all sequels. We have this idea of the end of endings, essentially. And it's not just in politics, it's sort of everywhere.On the one hand, we crave the endings and expect the endings, but on the other hand, we live in a culture where nothing necessarily ends. The sitcom, however many years later, will get its almost inevitable reboot. Thanos will clap his hands, and that will all be undone. I won't say anything else for anyone who hasn't seen, but there is this sense, I think, that even the ending is not necessarily an ending. There can be resurrections and all of that stuff. Like you said, the presidency never ends, it just sort of takes its final form.Do you think that maybe that's going to get people a little bit more comfortable living in that ambiguity of things never necessarily ending?It might. It very much might, but then I also think that that desire for the ending is just so baked into our culture that I think it will be more of a tension becoming more comfortable with the flux.Well, you have teed this up perfectly because I would like to end this podcast. Megan, thank you so much for coming on.Thank you.This was such a great conversation. Why don't you tell folks where they can find the book, a little bit about it and where folks can find you?The book is called On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics. It's really just a look at ways of seeing in politics, and the ways that we have of not seeing in politics; how we look at each other, and then fail to look at each other; how our vision is often misdirected by the magicians in power in politics. You can buy the book, as far as I know, wherever books are sold. I know I have a big preference for IndieBound. I love that site, but everywhere books are sold.Great. I know some of your colleagues are coming out with other ones of these aggregations of essays.If I could share those, please, that would be great, too. We have Lenika Cruz, my colleague, writing on BTS. She is, I would say, one of the foremost experts on BTS and fandom and it's a lovely book, really. It actually made me very emotional reading it; it's wonderful.Past and future guest of this particular newsletter, Lenika Cruz.Oh, you're going to have so much fun. That's great. Then the other one is my friend and colleague, Sophie Gilbert, writing on womanhood and her experiences with womanhood, a feminist examination of pop culture and so much else, and that, too, is beautifully written. It's wonderful. So both of those books are excellent, excellent.Excellent. All right. Well, hey Megan, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.Oh, thank you. This is so nice to talk.Well, we'll see if we can reboot it next year.Yeah, inevitably, yes.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.  Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Eric Vilas-Boas who wrote If Rotoscoping Isn't Animation, Nothing Is for Vulture. Here's what I wrote about it:This year director Richard Linklater released the film Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, which is animated through rotoscoping. Essentially, live-action footage is painstakingly animated over using a technique that harkens back to the dawn of animation, a process that required a suite of about 200 2D animators for costs upwards of $20 million. The animated film, however, has been rejected by the animation committee of the Academy Awards, arguing it relies on live-action footage even though the film clearly surpasses the requirement 75 percent of running time must be animated. Linklater and company are ticked off, claiming that the branch has been captured by corporations and aimed at children, with 19 of the past 21 awards for Best Animated Feature going to CG-animated kids movies, and with just two independent studies winning.Eric is brilliant on the topic of animation, he was one of the founders of The Dot and Line animation blog and is one of the most plugged-in writers on the topic these days. We spoke about why the awards scene around animated film is chaotic, why it's a demoralizing moment to be in the field, and how streaming has upended the industry. Eric can be found at @e_vb_ and at Vulture.This interview has been condensed and edited. You wrote a really fascinating story about a new film that's coming out from director Richard Linklater. Before we dive into the whole concept of rotoscoping and whatnot, do you want to tell folks a little about your history with animation? You're currently at Vulture, you've got a long history of working in this space. What's been your journey in covering animation so far?I've been interested in this area of coverage for a long time. I always wanted to be an entertainment journalist. I always wanted to angle my career in that direction. A buddy of mine and I looked around at the space of magazine journalism a few years ago and we noticed, "Oh, there's no The New Yorker for animation coverage." No one covers cartoons with what we thought was a level of both consistency and seriousness.We started this website called The Dot and Line based off an iconic Chuck Jones short cartoon; that was in 2016. My friend and I, John Maher, started that site. That site was just our way of covering animation from a fan perspective and a magaziney perspective, a bloggy perspective, and also covering the business through the same lens.We never made any money. The Dot and Line shut down, we gave it a viking funeral in 2020, in the beginning of the pandemic, very lovingly.I always really loved cartoons and animation. I wanted to cover it more deeply and make sure that it had a place in the media ecosystem that I was working in. These days I've parleyed that experience into writing about animation for Vulture, for Thrillist in the past, for Hyperallergic, for The Observer. Now I'm currently in Vulture where I edit most of our streaming coverage, and then also work on the occasional animation and cartoons piece, which brings me to this topic today.I just wanted to make sure that we got that set up, because there's this idea that you've always been reporting on how there's tension in animation, how there aren't a lot of people who treat it seriously, that there's a tremendous amount of effort and art that goes into it but that mainstream sources oftentimes don't necessarily understand what some of the power and appeal of it is. That all really comes to a head in the story. Do you want to talk a little bit about Apollo 10 ½ and how it was made?It definitely hits a lot of points for me. Apollo 10 ½ is a rotoscoped movie directed by Richard Linklater, a very well-regarded indie filmmaker who has done both animated movies like A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life as well as live-action movies like the Before trilogy and Dazed and Confused, and a few other things that you might have seen before. Apollo 10 ½ is basically his latest animated effort. It was made by a large team of around 200 animators through a studio called Minnow Mountain, based in Austin, Texas, where Richard Linklater is also based. Apollo 10 ½ is essentially a coming-of-age fantasy story about a kid who gets to experience sitting in a NASA space mission.The opening hook of the movie is like, "Oh, we made the space capsule too small and now this preteen child must be signed up for a NASA mission." And it's a fantasy. It's meant to be fantastical in a way that live action can't be. Richard Linklater has talked about this, so that's all well and good. Apollo 10 ½ was released on Netflix earlier this year, over the summer. It was also submitted for Academy Award consideration for Best Animated Feature.Best Animated Feature is an interesting category and we can get into why. But long story short, the film was rejected from consideration over the summer on the grounds that it "did not meet the definition of animation" according to the Academy's feature animation committee.That's ticked a lot of folks off, because it is animated with a technique used called rotoscoping which as you wrote, goes back to some of the earliest days of not just animation but film, period. Do you want to talk about what the controversy is there?To give just a definition, rotoscoping is essentially you'll film something in live action. The tool that was invented was literally called the rotoscope, and it was invented by this animator Max Fleischer, who people might know from the Superman cartoons. These old 1940 Superman cartoons are some of the best cartoons of their kind even to this day; they're very well respected. He invented this thing in 1915 called the rotoscope. What the rotoscope is is essentially a multi-plane camera on steroids that allows you to film something in live action, and then to trace the images of what's been filmed into an animated form — to trace the outlines of something and create art out of it, essentially.The Fleischer brothers used this on a number of their animated cartoons. They had this series called Out of the Inkwell: They traced Cab Calloway, the jazz musician, dancing and doing some awesome moves in some of their cartoons. The upshot of all this is that it looks really good. It's an easy way to capture fluidity and a certain level of realism, without having to draw every single thing from nothing, essentially. It's a technique that's been used for decades upon decades by not just the Fleischers but also animators at Disney. Snow White heavily referenced a performer named Marge Belcher using similar techniques.It goes all the way to Ralph Bakshi's 1970s Lord of the Rings film, which famously uses rotoscoping. You can argue one way or another over whether Ralph Bakshi's rotoscoping looks good or not. I think a lot of it looks really good. Lord of the Rings is not a very good-looking movie, but it's interesting, I think.People feel a lot of different ways about rotoscoping. Part of the mystique of animation is that something is artistic and being delivered in front of you, in a moving way that literally tricks you to think that these images that are just layered on top of each other very, very fast are actually moving. That's the point. I think that it takes an element of the mystique out of it, or the artistry out of it, to hear later on, "Oh, that was traced," or something like that. But the reality is this is just a tool, it's just a technique that a lot of animators and a lot of your favorite movies have actually deployed over the years. A lot of movies that you might know.The crux here is that the animated film division of the Academy came to the determination that this wasn't an animated film, because it required rotoscoping as much as it did. And it's got a lot of people ticked off for a lot of different reasons.2D animators obviously have had a hell of a time just continuing their craft. Just in general, the category as you wrote has been really dominated by fairly colossal corporate interest for a while. Do you want to talk a little bit about what specifically this tempest is all about?I think it's really frustrating to anybody who knows about the history of animation to call a decades-old technique used in animation not animation. So that's one side of that argument.Another side of this argument is the corporate aspect of the specific animated feature award. It's not Best Picture, which has been around for forever. It's not as clear-cut as Best Actor or Best Actress or something like that. Best Animated Feature has been around since the year 2001, so it's newer. Ever since 2001, it's always been largely dominated by either 3D CGI movies and/or films that are owned or have been distributed by Disney-Pixar. To pull out some examples, I think Shrek won the first year, and last year Encanto won.I don't have the history in front of me, but every year it's an ongoing joke in the animation community like, "Oh, another CGI movie is going to win." And it's very rare that, number one, a 2D film wins, even more rare I think than that a film that's not owned by a large mega-conglomerate, either Disney or Dreamworks, wins.They've all been Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, with the exception of one Aardman picture, and then Spirited Away.Two independent studios have won over the past 20 years, which is like, I personally don't like those numbers. A lot of folks can say otherwise.And then there's this other side of the argument, and I think the animator Phil Lord got into this a little bit when he tweeted last year and a lot of people tweeted: The larger cultural understanding of the animated feature category is that it's made for children. That animation is just for kids, and that this is a juvenile pursuit. I think that the presenters at last year's Academy Awards leaned into that.It was really patronizing, if I recall.Yeah. The tone of that is very patronizing. You look at the animator Richard Williams who passed away a few years ago, this is a person who is known for a hyper-realistic, very, very fluid animated style. He's the reason that Who Framed Roger Rabbit looks as good as it does, because he impressed upon his animators, "You have to make sure the eyelines match up between the cartoon characters and the actors on stage."You look at artists on his level or on a Miyazaki level, or to go back even further a Chuck Jones level, and to say that they are making stuff that's only for kids is, if it were me, if I were in their shoes, I would find it very offensive. I would find it very patronizing.It's an interesting category for a lot of reasons. I looked at it last year because I'm obsessed with the Oscars, and Pixar usually gets a bid, Disney usually gets a bid, Dreamworks usually gets a bid, one of the other biggies gets a bid. And then they'll usually get an international feature or one of the Ghibli, Aardman worlds.It's weird that there's clearly a degree to which the animators within the division have enough clout to get those nominees for those international features and those smaller indie features, but it does seem that the branch is dominated by the kind of folks who just want to give it to Pixar, Disney or Dreamworks.That's the story the numbers seem to tell us. I think one of the frustrations, and I understand why it has to be this way, is that you do want to know how these voting bodies work, but it raises a wide variety of complications if we knew exactly how everybody voted, but a lot of the stuff happens in a very opaque way. Richard Linklater, in my story, when I interviewed him for this Apollo 10 ½ thing, his words I think were, "We really just don't know who's behind this decision making." The only way that he can conceive of it is that like, they must have something against rotoscoping, or, against us, "us" speaking for the independent animators that he works with.To him, to them, it feels like a David and Goliath situation where I'm sure a film like the latest Disney-Pixar thing that is made for $150 or $200 million or whatever it is, they would probably have no trouble getting nominated for anything, for clearing through any of the rules that are stipulated. This film, which is made for $20 million and there's definitely an outsider feeling there on the part of him and his animators, they're running into trouble.It's a challenging category because again, the work is really fairly incredible coming out of even the larger houses, not to diminish any of that. It is just weird.That's the thing too. No value judgment, it's not an artistic judgment on the artistry of a film like Encanto or Turning Red which are stunning, beautiful animated movies. I cried during Encanto not quite like I'd cried in any movie that year that it came out. But I think the tension is really like, "Oh, why is animation only this?" I think that's the question that is on some of these other animators' minds and on Linklater's mind.It's almost entirely 3D animated stuff. Again, I'm a LAIKA stan, and it's just shocking to me that they occasionally get the nominations, but it's a little evident that the body is just going to be predisposed toward 3D computer-animated graphic stuff instead of the 2D stuff, instead of the anime stuff, instead of the rotoscoping and stop-motion stuff.Yeah. LAIKA is a perfect example; just everything that they put out is amazing, it just looks stunning and it feels like if they get a nomination, it's a good year.You also cover a lot about just how the business of animation and streaming has really fundamentally changed; a lot of that, whether it's Crunchyroll merging with Funimation, whether it's all these streaming services jumping directly into the world of animation and then some of them getting cold feet and then getting the hell out. It's been an interesting couple of years for the business itself. Do you maybe want to talk a little bit about streaming and how that's changed some of the math for animated stuff?I'm glad you asked about that because we're in this moment right now, this sense in the animated world that this idea that animation and animators are playing second fiddle constantly to the world of live action. It shouldn't really be that way. These movies and shows take a lot of effort to produce and they do connect with kids and with adults in very, very profound ways. But we're in this moment where it's like, "Oh, you have this corner of the entertainment industry that is doing all this stuff but it feels like it's not getting recognized."Even within that side of the entertainment industry, you have these aspects of it that are, like anything else, it feels like the big dogs are running the show, like the indie animators are doing their own thing, doing something different but then maybe they're being shut out of awards consideration.The same is happening on a macro level. In terms of what I've been covering, to take the streaming wars for example, part of the larger capitalist world in which we operate — for example, Warner Brothers Discovery, the company removed I think 36 titles off of HBO Max without warning over the summer as they were trying to carve down on overhead and slash $3 billion worth of debt which the merged company had inherited.A big part of that was animated shows. A lot of animated shows were in that mix. A few of them, like Infinity Train for example, an amazing show, a brilliant genius show, very not of the same mold as other programming like it, Infinity Train was spiked from the service and all their social media accounts were eliminated. I think the music on Apple Music was removed. This all happened within a span of a few days to a week.I don't know the status of Infinity Train's physical media, but the sense of it was that this show had disappeared off the internet, completely disappeared. And as a fan, you're kind of like, "What the f**k?" As a fan, you're like, "What just happened here?" Offhandedly, I talked to people who worked on the show, and they were also just confused like, "What's going on?" I think that they were all blindsided. The creator of the show, Owen Dennis, wrote a very good Substack post on that exact thing, that feeling of blindsidedness.You've got all these things going on and it's not helping. Animators, or people who are fans of animation, it doesn't help them that some movies are being treated with seemingly a different set of rules as other movies, debatable on whether those rules should exist or not as they pertain to the Academy Awards. It feels like they're being devalued by some of these large companies that own some of the titles that they worked on, either to slash them to just offload debt or to eliminate them entirely for no reason. It seems like the reason is money, which to me doesn't really seem a good reason at all.Then at the same time, something like the Academy Awards, and the award is presented, are we then going to be treated to some hacky line from the last year's best supporting actress or whatever saying, "Oh, animation is so good for kids. It's so great to watch when you grow up, this is what you do when you're a child, and that sense of wonder" or whatever.I don't know, man. If all this stuff is happening to you and you're an animator and you're already baseline underpaid, because everybody's underpaid in Hollywood or anywhere in media, you learn that your work is being devalued by the company you work for. You learn that, an opportunity that I have to go on stage and accept this award is being seen as this purely juvenile pursuit that only appeals to children. Again, we're speaking hypotheticals for all of this, but the multinational company worth billions upon billions of dollars that happens to have billions upon billions of dollars in debt, essentially disappears your cartoon from the service that it was running on?I would be demoralized. I'd be very demoralized.Demoralized is a really good word. It's also fascinating because it's objectively wrong. Adult animation, it's really hit a stride recently; demand is only going up.I alluded to Crunchyroll earlier, but again we've seen demand for anime go through the roof. It seems like it's very much a dated mentality that animated programming is exclusively for kids. It is just a separate art form in a way.You've written a lot in particular about how creatively we've been in a bit of a renaissance when it comes to what one can do with animation and who animation can be for.Yes, absolutely. I don't know, some of the best action filmmaking that I have ever seen has come from Genndy Tartakovsky, director and creator of Primal and Samurai Jack and Dexter's Laboratory. I interviewed him a few years ago and I can't remember the exact quote, I've got to pull it up in my notes. I think I asked him something on the level of, "Would you want to direct a live-action film?" or something like that. And for him, it's not about that. It's not about "graduating" from animation into live action. I can't remember the exact quote, but he told me, basically, it's all about filmmaking. It's all about composing shots, creating storyboards, getting the timing, getting the action and putting a film together.I just saw a tweet today, it's Steven Spielberg getting interviewed about something 30 or 40 years ago. He talks about how animation is the father of live-action filmmaking. The quote is like, "They need to know how a chipmunk rolls into a bank of snow or whatever, because they need to paint every motion of that chipmunk rolling over and over and over across 12 cells per second." This is Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg gets it. Why can't anybody else get it?I talk to folks in the comics world who say very similar things, where it's just, they're not trying to storyboard Marvel movies 10 years from now. They're trying to do something in a format that you can uniquely only accomplish in that. You can do things in animation that you cannot do in live action and that's what makes it very cool.It's not for nothing, but the conversations that are happening in the film and TV animated world are probably also happening at the same time in the VFX animation world. We're hearing a lot about these video effects workers on these Marvel movies talking about their labor issues, everything from increased workload leading to overly demanding schedules, and so the product resulting in it looking bad, the product looking not what a movie should look like and not adhering to some of these basic rules of filmmaking, framing and making sure what the stakes are. I think we're just in an interesting period where a lot of these big productions are coming out, you've got Star Wars, you've got all these Marvel movies, you've got the DC Extended Universe. All those require intense special effects like animators. And these two practices are very closely linked, even if they're not going after the same goals.Where can folks find you, Eric? Where can folks find your work and what are you working on these days?Yeah, I'm at Vulture. My Twitter handle is @e_vb_, and anything I write these days typically winds up at vulture.com.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news.  Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week in another special podcast edition of the newsletter, I spoke to Max Fisher, author of the new book The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.It's a fascinating book that looks at the science — the neurology, the social science, the psychology — of what social media usage does to us. It's riveting and provocative and will definitely change the way you view social media apps. The book can be found wherever books are sold, online and IRL and at independent bookstores. Max is on Twitter at @max_fisherThis interview has been condensed and edited. You are the author of a new book called The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. I thought this was a really interesting topic for you, because normally you're a national security reporter. You cover a lot of different international events. I was really struck by why you were drawn to social media, but the more that I learned about it, the more it made sense. Do you want to talk about how you fell into this?Like you said, my background for years has been international reporting, so reporting on global politics and conflicts and wars. I did not think of social media as a story that was for me, or something that I frankly paid a lot of attention to. I thought these are just websites, it's just apps on your phone. How significant can it really be other than as a tech or business story? And that started to change for me, the way that I think it did for a lot of us, after the 2016 election, where there was kind of this sense that social media had something to do with Trump's election, but nobody was really quite sure what it was. It was with the platforms, they're very polarizing and there's a lot of misinformation on them. There are all of these weird, crazy groups and online subcultures on them that all seem to be converging on Trumpism.I, like most people, still thought, well, these platforms are just reflections of what's already happening in the world, or at most their experience, like any website that you would read or any publication you would read, and maybe there's just a little extra amount of misinformation or garbage in them than other places.That really started to more significantly change for me about a year after Trump's election when I went to Myanmar to report on the genocide there, which of course was this horrible and very sudden explosion of just complete societal violence between the majority Buddhist group and the Muslim minority.When I was there, I had the same experience that everyone who was reporting on the genocide there at the time had, which is that social media seemed to be just everywhere in the story. I don't just mean everywhere in that everyone you would talk to would be citing things back to social media, things they'd seen there, groups they organized there, social media being involved, although that was also a big part of it. But also in the sense that it was just very clear, although in this way that was really hard to define, that social media was playing a much more active role in what was happening.A lot of the hate speech and a lot of the incitement and this general sense of a societal movement to destroy an entire minority population was something that had emerged on the platforms, and in the way that people were using the platforms. They were experiencing on Facebook, especially, but also WhatsApp and Twitter, that it was pulling something out in them that had not been there just a few years before when social media had been completely absent from the country. Due to sanctions before like 2016, you couldn't get a cell phone, you couldn't get social media. And then all of a sudden social media was everywhere and then society took this huge shift.Shortly after I was there, even the United Nations had concluded that social media had played such an enormous role, that one of their officials said that Facebook had played a "determining role in causing the genocide," which was a crazy thing to hear, that just this website would be driving something so enormous and so wide-scale and something that felt like it was coming from up out of the ground, but maybe it was also coming from these platforms.It seems, just again, so much of what we've been talking about in just a general sense is social media as a business story. But I love how this happened accidentally, almost, because you just realized, no, they're just actually a social accelerant in different countries.Yeah, right. It's actually playing an active and really significant role in the way politics works and the way the society works. That was kind of the fuzzy sense that I, like a lot of people, were getting. Then I started to notice, because of my job, I would travel around to lots of different countries for different stories or just to report or get a feel for things. Everywhere I went, I would hear over and over again these stories that would link back to social media, that would be like a microcosm of the Trump phenomenon or the Myanmar phenomenon or usually kind of both.It would be smaller scale because obviously things of that scale only happen a few times in a century, but it would be a village that would suddenly combust into this crazy violence over rumors that had spread on social media. Or it would be a town that would get overtaken by this mass hysteria that would link back to YouTube. Or it would be this far-right figure or this far-right group who had always been on the fringes of society and then social media came in and all of a sudden that far-right group or figure was the most popular thing and completely running the culture and then would get elected to some local office.It started happening over and over again. That was when I thought, okay, there's enough of a pattern here that it's worth trying to understand, why does this keep happening? What is it about social media that seems to be at least potentially having this extreme of an effect on the way that societies and politics work? Why is it the same pattern over and over again?And that started for me in early 2018, and it became a series of stories for the paper. Then it became the book of trying to answer this question of, what is social media? How is it changing us? How does it change our behavior? How does it change the way that our minds work? How does it change our politics?I tried to pull in for that a lot of traditional on-the-ground reporting of finding a story of a place or people that had been affected by this and then retracing step by step how it had happened, what it had to do with social media.But also, and this is the part of the book that I'm really proud of because I feel like it's the first time it's been done on this scale, is to try to pull in every relevant field of scientific inquiry that was looking into this, because I wasn't the only one who was having this realization. There was also this whole constellation of neuroscientists and social psychologists and social scientists who were all having the same sense and were trying to empirically answer these same questions, pulling together a lot of their research. There's some original research of theirs that appears in the book. But to try to get a sense for how is this happening? Why is it happening? And what does it mean for us as a species?I've been reading your work a long time; one thing that I've always admired about it was you do really go to the mattresses when it comes to figuring out the research and actually what's being done in the academic world as well as the scientific world, as well as all that. And so I have been looking forward to that component of this. You want to talk a little bit about what the science is beginning to reveal about how social media gets its hooks in us?Oh, man. It's a big question.A book-length question, one might say.Right. Let me give you a couple of examples to give you a sense for how people are starting to understand it. These are just teeny tiny tips of the iceberg of understanding, because to understand something as huge as the effect of social media on society, there are like 18 different steps in the chain of you interacting with a post and then that happening on a scale of billions of people and then society changes. There are so many things that happen in that system that you can't understand all of them, but I couldn't possibly relay all of them in one anecdote, so I'll give you two.The first is, there was one study where these social scientists wanted to understand, okay, does social media actually change us? Is it just, we happen to be on the internet and other things are changing? Can we actually narrow this down?They took these two really big groups of people, an experimental group and a control group, and they had the experimental group deactivate Facebook for four weeks. So just four weeks, which relative to the amount of time that we all spend on these platforms — 10 to 15 years into the social media era — is very small. And just one platform, not even all of social media. You would expect the effects to be very small. Then over those four weeks, they monitored any possible thing they could think to measure. What's changing with these people? How are they changing the way that they think about the world, the way that they interact with the world? They found two really significant changes in the people who deactivated Facebook for those four weeks. The first was that they became just much happier. They had an increase in happiness and life satisfaction equivalent to about a third the effect of going to therapy, which blew my mind.Holy crap.I know. Because therapy has a huge effect on your happiness and it's also really expensive, but turning off Facebook is free. That was one of a lot of pieces of research that support this theory, that is now very widely accepted, which is that social media is addictive, physically addictive, and that it creates a chemical reaction in your brain that makes you feel compelled to go back to it. That is a piece of evidence that we don't use it because we like to use it or because it makes us happy, but rather we use it because we've been addicted, even if we hide that from ourselves and we tell ourselves that we just want to pull up Facebook or Twitter.The second thing that they found was that those people who had deactivated Facebook, their level of political and social polarization changed pretty dramatically. It was political and social issue polarization, which means the degree to which they were polarized on issues that were salient in society rather than overall how they kind of viewed the world. They found that that reduction in their polarization was equivalent to 50 percent of the overall increase in polarization in American life over the past 25 years, which is the entire cycle of the polarization of American politics. The researchers, if they were here, they would be grabbing at my shirt to emphasize that that doesn't mean social media drove 50 percent of overall polarization in American life. But it does mean that its role in the way that we as individuals experience that polarization is extremely dramatic.Of course, this is just a few thousand people for this study, but if you ask yourself, okay, what about if that's all of society, then the effect starts to become pretty dramatic. That's when it starts to change politics, overall. If everyone is 50 percent more polarized than they would be if they turned off just this one platform, God knows how much less polarized they would be if they turned off all the platforms and for a longer period of time. That was one piece of evidence that didn't measure how social media changes you, but was just really one of many very strong pieces of evidence that it does change you in these ways that we kind of have a fuzzy sense that they do, but okay, it really shows you that it does.Another study is one in the book that I cite the most, not because I think it's the most consequential, but because it hit really close to home for me personally. Everybody I know who's like you or me who's very engaged in media or in politics who spends a lot of time online, it's like, whoa, okay, that's a little scary, that did show how it changes you. For this study, a group of researchers took a group of people for this experiment, and before the experiment, they tested them all on their level of internal outrage. So how prone were they to outrage as people, and they gauge this.Then they had the experimental group of the people in this study send a fake tweet on this fake Twitter platform that was built to look like Twitter so that they could control the experience, that expressed outrage in it. Even if these are people who didn't really want to send an outrage tweet, they would say, “You have to send it.” For the group of these people who sent the outrage-filled tweet, they would show it back to them later and they would show it with a lot of engagements on it, a lot of retweets and likes.This is something that we know the platforms do, because there are these other experiments that show that if you have outrage words in your post its reach will be dramatically amplified. Sometimes you think, oh, outrage travels well because people respond to it. That's actually not why it travels well. The reason it travels well is because the platforms will deliberately pull it out and then shove it in front of a lot of people to engage them because it's this very charged emotion that gets a lot of participation.They've got a thumb on the scale.They've got their thumb way on the scale.So if you send an outrage tweet, it will get engagement almost certainly because the platform has ensured that it will, because it's a great way to keep you on the platform and keep your friends on the platform. What they did in this experiment is they would show people that their outrage tweet had done well, and they found that it made those people more inclined to send more outrage tweets in the future. If they went through this cycle a few times with people, had them send a few outrage tweets, the really stunning thing that they would find is that these subjects in the experiment, even if they had not been prone to outrage beforehand, even if they were not outrage-inclined people, that they would become that way. That they would become not just more inclined to send tweets with outrage in it, but even when they were away from the computer, even when they were away from social media, their internal nature had become much more outrage-prone.This training that they had received on the platform because they'd gotten this positive social reward, this is something that hits on this very deep school of social science and social psychology that says that our sense of morality, of right and wrong, is something that we derive heavily from social cues. If we think our community of people around us really want us to behave a certain way and will reward us if we do, we become internally more prone to chase and to seek out that behavior, not just because superficially we want the positive attention, but because our minds have tricked us into wanting to do that in order to get in good with our community because of the nature of the way that we evolved and just how we are as a species.That was something that really blew my mind, because it shows you that the platforms are deliberately inculcating a type of activity that doesn't just change how you behave with your own social media, but that changes your internal nature. It changes the way that your emotions are. It changes the way that you behave.And when you start to see these — because there are dozens of examples like this in the book, of these kinds of changes that it imbues in you — when you see all of these, and then you see that it's the overwhelming majority of Americans engaging with these systems dozens of times a day, American life today starts to make a little bit more sense. You start to see this kind of training effect and this change that really does feel like it's been society-wide, is something that is driven, I think, a lot more than we thought, or maybe wanted to admit to ourselves, by these incredibly powerful companies and their technology.It's so interesting that you call it a training effect, because as you were describing that experiment, I was like, yeah, I've seen that experiment before! If the monkey presses the button and then they receive apple juice, then all of a sudden they're going to really love pressing the button. It's weird that it's that simple, man.I know. I think this is one of the wild things about social media, is that it is that monkey with a lever button. But these companies figured out, not necessarily because they were so insightful about social psychology, although if you go back about 10 or 15 years, there would be very open discussions in Silicon Valley within the industry about exploiting our cognitive weak points, about training us, about changing our nature in order to —They hired people out of Vegas to do some of the engagement, is my understanding, too.They modeled the platforms specifically and deliberately on slot machines, because slot machines are physically addictive. If you look at your phone, it looks like a slot machine. You've got the colors, you've got the flashing lights. You get that haptic feedback when your phone vibrates.But even more than that, what they were trying to hook into was not just the kind of physically pleasing sense of pulling a slot machine, which is addictive and does make you want to go back to it. But they wanted to, and very successfully did, tap into social needs and social impulses, which is not something that we're used to having manipulated on a physical, chemical, personal level like that. I mean, we might be aware that it's happening with our politics, like, oh, politicians are appealing to our baser nature.But the platforms have learned how to do it in this, like you said, this kind of monkey-in-an-experiment way, that is both extraordinarily powerful because it bypasses all of the normal social checks and the social norms that we use to mediate our own behavior, mediate one another's behavior, by delivering it through these kind of electric bolts to the brain of these reward systems and punishment systems, but also because its influence is hidden.I think one of the most important things to understand about social media is that you log on and you think that you're having interactions with all your friends and all the people in your community, and that's where the feedback is coming from. That if you say something that they like and you get a lot of engagement, that means that your friends like it. And if you say something that gets no engagement, that means your friends didn't like it.But that's actually not what you're experiencing. What you're experiencing are the preferences and choices and desires of these very powerful algorithms and many other systems that are built into the technology, that are deliberately designed to encourage and train certain behaviors in you because those are going to be good for boosting your engagement and for boosting the engagement of people you interact with.It's interesting you mentioned politicians appealing to our baser natures, which has always been the case. For a long time I was wondering, what's the deal with social media? Is it additive or is it subtractive? Is it chipping away at the social mores that prevent us from being a******s to each other all the time, and is it subtractive? Or is it giving people new, fascinating ways to be cruel to one another and new ideas about how to do it, like additive?Over the past couple years, I've come more in line to the latter idea, and over the course of this conversation, I've really come around to that. Putting it to you, what do you think more of it is: Is it social media giving folks new ways to engage and new ways to kind of self-polarize? Or is it just revealing an inherent polarization underneath the hood, just kind of removing some of the guardrails?I mean, it's all of the above, I think. And when you're talking about something as complex, in the sense that there are many different inputs and outputs, as social polarization in American politics, there are going to be 30 different causes of that, and of course, none of them are going to be the sole cause and driver. The fact that there are 30 all at the same time means they're all kind of multiplying each other. You sometimes hear from the social media companies, they'll be like, "Well, how can you blame us for social polarization when there's a long history of racism in America and racism is playing a role in social polarization?" And it's like, sure, but if your product is worsening that by 10 percent, by 30 percent, by 70 percent, whatever the number is, then that's pretty significant even if there has to be something in there to multiply in the first place.I heard this quote from this one politician in a country that I went to called Sri Lanka to report on the way that social media had basically blown up the entire country over the course of a couple of months, where he said, "The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind."What he meant by that was that there had been racial animus in this country, there had been distrust, there had been weaknesses in the social system before social media got there, but it was the social media systems that amped in and multiplied this, not just in the passive sense that social media multiplies everything, which is another defense that you hear from the companies, but in the sense that these systems have learned, even if the people designing them didn't deliberately design this in, they have learned to hone in very specifically on very specific impulses — moral outrage, us-versus-them tribalism, more extreme forms of identity, narrower forms of identity, distrust of institutions — to really hone in on these things and to dial those just way the hell up. And to not do that for other forms of sentiment, not with other forms of engagement, like bringing everyone together, or a kind of shared sense of unity and purpose, or just information that is spread because it's true rather than because it's emotionally engaging or negatively engaging.They just mega amplify those because those are the things that keep us plugged into the platform. The people who run social media companies, they actually have more than enough data to know this by now, because they started running internal experiments over the last few years to try to understand what their systems are doing. They're doing the same version of what social scientists have been doing from the outside, except they're inside the company so they have a lot more data that they can work with.And all of their own internal researchers reach the exact same conclusions, that these platforms drive people toward very specific kinds of conspiracy theories, that they create very specific kinds of identity, the most extreme of which is QAnon, but you see things like QAnon over and over on the platforms because that's what gets people to engage more.Even like Harry Styles and Chris Pine, that got real QAnon really goddamn quick in the course of like a day and a half.That's actually a great example, because it's something where you pick a side: you're team Harry Styles, you're team Chris Pine, you're team Florence Pugh. And then that becomes a group identity on social media, that like, "Hey, we all agree that Florence Pugh is the best. And we all agree that the people who support these other celebrities are the absolute worst. And I'm going to make posting all day about how mad I am at people in this social out group, which is Chris Pine fans, which I didn't know I hated until 10 minutes ago, but now absolutely hate, my whole deal and my whole identity."You see, it's exactly the kind of thing that does really, really well at boosting engagement. Social media did not invent Chris Pine and Harry Styles getting in a fight, but it did invent turning the fandom wars over it into just a whole-ass identity for seemingly a really large number of people. I think that that's actually a useful way to separate out what's the difference between what social media does and what are the preexisting things that it pulls from.My hope is that the last chapter of this book is telling solutions for this possible problem. I would like that a lot because it seems like there's a lot of problem here.I guess, let's do this two ways. One, what would you recommend people personally do in their own lives and with their loved ones regarding social media? And then two, what are the big solutions that you're kind of looking at as a way to address some of these problems?Sure. So there's a stock list of tips that I give, but I think what's more important than the specific tips is what ties them all together. I'll tell you the tips and then I'll tell you why they're important and what they tie together.Limit your time. Obviously, limit your time on social media. Give yourself specific times to go on it. It would be easy to say, just delete all the platforms, never go online, throw your smartphone away and live in a cabin in the woods as a poet. But most of us can't do that. We have to be online. We have to be on social media because these platforms have completely conquered the way that we relate to one another and relate to the news.Turning your phone on grayscale is actually a really, really effective way to make social media less addictive.Wait, what?Yeah. On iPhones it's really easy. You have to go into settings and change the setting where you turn it onto grayscale, and then if you tap the power button three times, it goes between color and grayscale. And because they're designed to be visually addictive, if you turn it on grayscale, you will just find that the emotional effect from being on the platforms goes way, way down and the ease of turning it off goes way, way up. It's amazing how much of a change you will see from that, which is again, proof that you're opening it because you've been addicted, not because you want to open it.If you are using it, try — and this is a hard thing to sell to people, especially in a time of high stakes in politics and deep political polarization and where it feels like every election is maybe going to be the last election in American democracy — try not to outrage post. And if you do, quote tweeting, where you take someone else's post that you don't like, that you thought was dumb, and then quoting it, and then adding a comment about, "Look at this idiot, what they had to say," try to just never do that at all.The reason not to do it isn't because that person doesn't deserve it. I'm not someone who worries about like, "Oh no, the coarsening of our discourse. Why can't we all get along?" Because there are good reasons we cannot all get along and there are some stakes for our politics right now. The reason not to do it is because, first of all, you're not actually adding anything. Probably this person you're quote tweeting doesn't matter. But also that is one of the most powerful ways that the system trains you to be prone to outrage, to stop reading, to shut down the intellectual and rigorous part of your mind and just engage the monkey brain, dopamine-chasing part of your mind.If you just stop doing that for a month, I think you will find a really pronounced difference in social media. Try not to dogpile people.Again, these are things where it's not just like, “Oh, it's not nice to do,” but it's because when you do that, you are complicit in the way that these mega companies are training you to use their product more and more, so you're taking more and more pulls of the cigarette.You're the centrifuge that is really increasing the volatility of the environment.If you're on YouTube, open it in incognito mode, because if you were logged in, or even if you're not logged in, but you are using it on non-incognito mode in your browser, it will track your views very carefully and it will serve you up related content that is going to be as likely to hook you in as possible, which is just a great way to be shown stuff incrementally over time, even if it's not immediately obvious, that is not healthy for you.What all of these little tips have in common is they're all about learning to see social media as a drug, which it is. It's a drug in the sense that it changes your brain chemistry. It's a drug in the sense that it's addictive. And it's a drug in the sense that when you're using it, your behavior changes, parts of your brain shut down, your emotions change, which is true of any drug that we use.It's also a piece of advice I'd like to give because, while there are a lot of drugs we can't do, there are quite a few that we have all kind of decided are worth it for us to do a little bit of occasionally. I had a cup of coffee this morning. I'll probably have, it's Friday, one to two glasses of wine tonight, maybe even three. But I know, because I understand that these are drugs, that they change my behavior, that they're not always good for me. I know to take them in certain ways that I have come to learn are healthy for me. I know not to drive a car after I have a certain number of glasses of wine. I know not to read certain things if I've had a drink because they might make me upset, or get into certain kinds of social situations. I also know that if I start to feel a certain way after I've had a drink or two, like I start to get annoyed with a friend who I'm out with, I know internally, okay, that's not me, that's the alcohol that's making me feel that way, and it becomes easier to mentally separate yourself from that.I think when you use social media that way it becomes so much easier to use it responsibly because you come to see maybe there are certain kinds of activities that you try not to do on social media, just like you try not to do certain kinds of activities when you're on a drug or when you're on alcohol, because you know it's not healthy and it's not safe for you. And you also come to see the difference between, okay, I'm on Twitter, I'm on Facebook, and I'm feeling a certain way.But now I understand because I know Twitter and Facebook are drugs that they are making me feel that way. It's not actually something real that's happening in the world. It's not something real that is happening in this conversation that I'm having that's making me feel that way, so I want to disengage from it. That's my number one tip for using it safely. It's just understanding what it does to you makes it much easier to kind of take a step back from it, I think.That's great. The book is called The Chaos Machine. It is the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world. Why don't you tell folks a little bit about it, where they can find it, and where they can find you.It is, as you would expect, everywhere books are sold. It got some good placements at Barnes and Noble and especially in independent bookstores, which has been great. It's on the major online shopping website. I know surprisingly a really large number of people who've gotten the audiobook. I'm not really sure why that is or why people love going to the audiobook for this one.It's basically just a podcast that has a point.Isn't that all books, are podcasts with a point?Listen, we don't want to crack this one wide open too quick. Where can folks find the book?Everywhere you buy books. You can find me, unfortunately, on Twitter at @Max_Fisher. That's really the only public-facing platform I use. That's another piece of advice, limit yourself to one public-facing platform. And yeah, I hope that people read it and enjoy it. And if you do, I would love to hear from you.Yes. And if they do, they should quote tweet you dunking on it so that the tweet accelerates in the algorithm's reward.Exactly.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week I spoke to Kaitlyn Tiffany, the author of the new book Everything I Need I Get From You, out this week. The book is a deep dive into the nature of fandom, and how fangirls have been instrumental in the design, growth and evolution of the internet and social media. It's a great look that combines digital culture and pop culture. The book can be found wherever books are sold, and Tiffany can be found at The Atlantic and on Twitter. This interview has been condensed and edited. You are the author of the brand new book Everything I Need I Get From You. It is all about the intersection of fandom and internet culture, and how they each feed one another. What got you interested in this topic?I was part of fandom myself, which is very obvious in the book and not a secret. I spent a lot of time on Tumblr when I was 19 and 20 and 21. Then I moved to New York to start working in journalism, and I started working at a tech website that was getting into internet culture coverage. It was sort of the only thing I felt I could contribute; I didn't know anything about tech, and as soon as they were talking about expanding their cultural coverage, I was like, "well, I can do Tumblr, that's tech, right?" That was how I started reporting on fandom professionally.Later on, I knew that I wanted to do a book about fandom because there was a lot of academic work about fandom already, but there hadn't really been, I felt, a satisfying, non-academic popular press explanation of how fandom and internet culture were intertwined. It just made sense to do it through the lens of One Direction, because that was where my personal experience was, and it's really hard to parachute into a fandom that you aren't a part of at the length and level of detail that I wanted to do.I love that you took it from the point of One Direction because I feel like boy bands have this habit of really dominating an entire conversation on fandom for a while. You can almost follow different eras with them, and the era where One Direction was phenomenally popular was a super transformational one for the internet as a whole. Do you want to kind of talk about One Direction, their run, and their role in the internet's fandom history?One of the academics I talked to for the book, Allison McCracken, I actually asked her, "When did fandom start on Tumblr? How did Tumblr become the fandom platform?" And she said it's three things that happened all the same time: Harry Potter, Glee and One Direction. Those three fandoms were huge in the early days of Tumblr, and I think really Glee and One Direction in particular, really solidified the visual culture of fandom, the tradition of making really elaborate gif sets and also of shipping. Shipping was huge. Anybody who doesn't know what that is, it's fan fiction, imaginative relationship pairings between characters. I want to get into that a little bit later, too, cause that's a huge part of this, but yeah, go on.Totally. That was huge with Glee fandom and it was also big with One Direction fandom. Numerous famous pairings in One Direction fandom. Then with Twitter, I think One Direction just kind of coincidentally came along at the same moment when teenagers and younger than teenagers were joining Twitter. Those were really the first big years of Twitter having a youth culture. I think it was the combination of those two things, and then also sort of an underlooked part of the One Direction history, I think, is how much the YouTube algorithm was driving people to One Direction. I heard that from so many people that I interviewed who started out as just watching whatever pop music videos, and getting recommended the One Direction videos. Then, crucially with One Direction, there was just so much content that it was really easy to fall down a rabbit hole, if you will. Once you got done watching all their music videos, with another pop star, you'd be like, "Oh, well that was fun, but there's nothing else to look at right now. I guess I'll have to wait." But One Direction was constantly putting out behind-the-scenes stuff on YouTube in a way that was on a much quicker pace, I think, than other pop stars were up to that point. Part of their allure was that they were just really rambunctious and irreverent to the idea of marketing, and it felt really immediate and genuine and authentic, which was something people really craved, the ability to connect directly or feel like they were connecting directly with celebrities at that time.The book is just so phenomenal. I thought it was really interesting because one of the bigger ideas now is parasocial relationships where fans feel that they have a specific relationship to an artist of various different degrees of fame. It felt like they were just some of the first folks to really monetize that and capitalize on that and really engage with their fans to almost encourage that at times, at least at the pop star level.I think it's hard to know, too, how much of that was actually deliberate and how much of that was just the fact that they were also teenagers and also just kind of wanted to be on Twitter and on social media. I think it was genuinely fun for them — maybe not for their whole career, I think there's definitely a point where it became less fun for them — but at the beginning I think they were just so shocked to be famous that they were like, yeah, let's record to front-facing camera video diaries all the time. Why not? And respond to people's tweets. And tweet about what kind of cereal we're eating for breakfast and whatever. Why wouldn't we? Everyone loves it.I loved how you really tie the development and the creation of internet culture to dominant musical acts at the time. I love the part that you wrote about the Grateful Dead and the early, early internet. Do you want to talk a little bit about the old days so to speak and what role music played in forming how internet subcultures form?Obviously that part of the book was not from firsthand experience, it was from historical research because that was before I was allowed to use the internet or even knew what the internet was. I actually have the book right behind me, The Virtual Community, which is the history of the WELL, which is really fascinating and talks a lot about Grateful Dead fans in the early forums, the kind where you had to pay to use them because they had to pay for server space. The most enthusiastic participants in these early forums in California were Grateful Dead fans. One of the early operators of the WELL even said, "I think that they were kind of single-handedly keeping us afloat, keeping us in the black."I thought that was really interesting. Grateful Dead fans were huge in early online bulletin board culture and when I was doing the research for the book, it was really remarkable to see just how every step of the way, each time some new platform or some new use of the internet was created, the first people to really eagerly use it would be fans and often music fans in particular. I don't know exactly why that is, but it was pretty consistent. There was Nancy Baym, who is a researcher, an academic, and has a really great book called Playing To The Crowd that has a lot of that history in it, and I cite quite a bit in the book.I just like how the very structure of the internet at times is like you just mentioned, informed directly by the music nerds and obsessed fans that immediately rush to it and really bear out its potential.And platforms will create or kind of take shape around fandom and ultimately end up creating features or having to respond to fandom like Twitter. It's funny to go back and kind of read the news coverage of how Twitter was dealing with fans in its early years in 2009, 2010, because they were completely baffled by its energy. There's an odd tension there, because these are extremely enthusiastic and frequent users of their product. But they're also people who tend to be kind of breaking the rules or breaking the features. They're trying to game the trending topics. They're circulating content to which they do not own copyright. They are sometimes harassing people. I feel like Twitter was caught on its heels and had to really figure out how do we keep fans on the platform, but also make sure that it doesn't become completely unusable for anybody who doesn't want to participate in fandom.It definitely gets things very real for platforms very quickly. You can tell even with BTS and Army, and there was an early story with Twitter that Justin Bieber, an apocryphal story I should say, was responsible for 3 percent of their traffic for a good while there. It's just so interesting that fandom is so intense that even servers have trouble with it sometimes.Yeah, totally. I think the Justin Bieber story was funny to me because journalists who were writing about it kept saying there are specific servers in Twitter headquarters for Justin Bieber tweets. And I was like, how would that work? There's just one server that's got the song “Baby” on it. It's in charge of playing that for anybody who listens.Yeah, yeah, exactly.I do want to talk a little bit about how you mentioned that they played trending topics, they played the algorithm. You had some amazing stuff in there about how One Direction fans attempted to play the Billboard charts and attempted to do whatever was necessary to do that. Obviously Numlock is a newsletter that loves data and the stories that inform it. I love that part where it was all about the lengths that a fandom will go to to specifically exploit algorithms designed to rank what music is popular at the time. Can you talk about that?That was based on reporting that I did when I was at The Verge and I was just scrolling through my Tumblr feed being like, I've got to find something to write about. I came across fans who were posting about gifting iTunes singles, which was something that was really interesting to me. The purposes of it were several, but it was whenever there's a new One Direction song coming out — or at the time I think it was Harry Styles' first solo single — in order to boost the sales in hopes of getting him better chart performance, and also in order to engage in a spirit of community, people would sign up to gift the iTunes single to someone else because you can only buy it once yourself, but you can gift it and that also counts as a sale. But you can only gift to people who live in your country. So they made this elaborate system for pairing people up in a spreadsheet. Oh we got 30 people willing to give away iTunes singles in Brazil, do we have 30 people who will accept the gift? All of that stuff. That was very elaborate. I was really intrigued by that. Then once I was asking people about that, they started to tell me about the other things they were doing to boost the single, which I just thought were so interesting. There are the kind of obvious ones of getting everybody in the fandom to just blast radio requests on Twitter and whatever, or Shazam the song over and over so that's recommended in Shazam.Then the really interesting one was that in order to boost the song's positioning on American Billboard charts, people who did not live in the US would download VPNs and basically fake their Spotify streams so they would appear to be American Spotify streams. I think a couple of other reporters asked Spotify and Apple Music and other streaming platforms about their awareness of that kind of behavior. They definitely did not give straight answers on whether that would work. The Billboard charts similarly were kind of vague about how they determine inauthentic activity. I thought that was a fun story. I mean, obviously the number of fans who were participating was not high enough to really make a difference.Also just the basic math of how many times a person would even be able to stream the song in a day, it just didn't add up to the point where you were going to really make a dent, but it was really just funny and fun to see people trying. I thought it was really interesting that that became kind of a ritual of waiting for a single to come out, preparing to put this giant machine in action. In the final edits of the book when it was read by a lawyer at FSG, she asked me to rephrase that section a little bit, because it read too much like an instruction manual on how to do those things. And I was like, "I don't know if these things are illegal, but okay."For those who are interested, the book is called The Anarchist Cookbook For Fans. How to Blow Up A Spotify Code.Again, it's a really incredible book, folks should check it out. I would like to read my favorite two sentences from it. One Direction fans' relationship with the entertainment industry is adversarial, but mostly because they think they could run it better. Literally. In 2015, there were two separate fan efforts to buy One Direction out of their record label contract.What on earth is happening there?Yeah, I can't say that I was personally involved in that effort, but I think that's part of the fun thing about fandom, that there are things that people walk around their daily lives accepting as impossible and unrealistic. And then fans are so on the very edge between reality and fantasy that it would occur to them, well, there are millions of us, logically, and if each of us gave a few dollars, we would have many, many millions of dollars, and we could just intercede in One Direction's career. I mean, I don't have any understanding of how their contract works and I'm sure that these fans didn't either, but you can see how they got there.That's incredible. I love how you talk about some of the mechanics of fandom. You talk about how they grow fandom and how some of the platforms can encourage fandom. I also just really like how you really dive into some of the nature of obsession. We talk about conspiracy theories in fandom a lot, but in this specific case, there were a ton circling around this. It's not the first time. We're all familiar with Paul is Dead of the Beatles and whatnot, but why do you think fandom lends itself so inextricably to conspiracy theories and things like that?I think part of it is that if you are paying such close attention to something over such an extended period of time, you're going to start to notice things that seem to be important or seem to be overlooked, and pull them out. Especially in internet fandom, and especially on Tumblr, there is sort of an incentive to be the one to notice something that other fans didn't notice yet. You saw that a lot in the conspiracy theories around One Direction, which just to clarify, started with this theory that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, two members of the band, were secretly gay and secretly in love and secretly being forcibly closeted by their management. When it started out, a lot of people were really into it and it was fun and totally harmless.Then later it took a little bit of a darker turn, just because of the extent that people went to defend it, which involved a lot of misogynistic vitriol around the women that either one of them were dating at the time. Most darkly when Louis Tomlinson became a father, a lot of fans became convinced at first that the baby was a doll, and then later that it was either a hired actor or the child of the stepfather of the woman who Tomlinson had been dating and who was his co-parent. That obviously was over a line for some people. It didn't feel over a line for others. Once you cross that line, you can go down some interesting routes. But to return to the question of why fandom lends itself to that, I think fandom is also in opposition to mainstream media a lot of the time. The Larry Stylinson community was very defensive about any kind of media attention and with internet fandom in particular and with One Direction even more so. There is just so much to look at and to wade through and so much evidence and proof that you can find. This is something people bring up when they talk about all kinds of internet conspiracy theorizing, including QAnon or whatever else. Not that I think that there are really a lot of powerful similarities between Larry Stylinson and QAnon, but part of why people get involved in that is because it feels like anybody can participate. Anybody can find something. Anybody could be the one to have an important discovery and kind of get clout within the community. I think that's part of it, and, yeah, I mean maybe fandom also does tend to attract people who are missing some other forms of affirmation or stimulation in their life and they can dedicate a lot of time to thinking about that stuff.Even the title of the book, Everything I Need I Get From You, is a fairly direct articulation. I also want to talk a little bit about getting to the more innocuous side of some of that. The fan fiction component just really can't be ignored. Fan fiction obviously has a fairly long history, particularly obviously about fictional characters. It seems unique that particularly with One Direction, this was a situation where people and fans were writing fan fiction about actual human beings, to an extent that also now exists in other fandoms, but this felt like a kind of significant change in what fan fiction had been. Can you expand a little bit on that?Yeah. Real person fan fiction, or RPF, has always been a part of fandom, but it was a much more secretive part of fandom for a long time. There was a pretty powerful taboo against it, I would say, because a lot of fans were sort of rightfully concerned that outside eyes looking in on fandom are going to judge whatever they're doing as unhealthy and pathological. That writing about real people would attract a lot of negative attention. There was real person fan fiction, notably in the Beatles fandom, but a lot of that was disseminated only via letters. Later, real person fan fiction would've been disseminated mostly in private email list servs. It was pretty uncommon for it to just be published for broad consumption, especially in the early aughts, because platforms like fanfiction.net and then later LiveJournal put a lot of content moderation guidelines and limitations on that kind of writing and prohibited some of it.Part of the reason that One Direction was a turning point for real person fic was just that Tumblr was a turning point for real person fic. That was where a lot of fans went when they left other fan fiction writing platforms because of the limitations. They all arrived on Tumblr, and that's another reason why it became the fandom platform. I think that's another reason why the Larry Stylinson story is kind of sad, because people who were writing about Larry Stylinson in their fiction, I think a lot of them kind of felt you guys have ruined this by turning it into a conspiracy theory that embarrasses the whole fandom and makes it look like what we're doing is the same thing as what you're doing.It has also gone somewhat mainstream, in as much as fan fiction can be mainstream. Dream SMP, that's fairly large and it's about real people. If you looked at the AO3 top fan works from last year, you do see BTS show up on that, and those are real actual human beings. I don't know, it just seemed like it's gone rather mainstream, even if it was fairly taboo at one point.Yeah, totally. I, for a while, was following a lot of shipping blogs for women from the US Women's National Team soccer players. And that was really interesting to see. I didn't realize that people did RPF slash fic about sports stars.Just kind of backing out a little bit, what's something that you really learned about fandom that you didn't know going into reporting out the book?It was just really fun and interesting to talk to fans about what they got out of fandom. I found it really striking just how interesting and different they all were. Not that that was surprising in itself, but it was surprising how easy it was to get there. Part of what I talk about in the beginning of the book is this trope or this image that people have of a screaming fangirl, and that image is obviously based in reality. People do go to the concerts and scream.But it was really interesting to me and exciting that you can approach someone who ostensibly is that and ask them one question and they will tell you so many interesting things about like, what fandom means to them, their positive and negative experiences, how their relationship to fandom has changed as they've gotten older. And all that was super interesting. That part was really fun to hear about girls who, like me, cared about this thing a lot eight, nine years ago, but still are thinking through their relationship to it now as adults.What would you say your relationship is to it now?I mean, it's definitely different than it was when I was on Tumblr all the time. One Direction doesn't exist anymore, so it's different for that reason, too. But I still get really excited about whatever Harry Styles is doing, whatever Niall Horan is doing. He's actually my favorite member of One Direction. That's a way of kind of breaking up monotony of being an adult, or I guess, just a way of thinking about how my own identity has changed. I mean, I was working on the book during the pandemic, so I did a lot of just sitting in my apartment, kind of reliving being 19 and being on the internet all the time, looking at One Direction. That definitely got a little weird at times, but it was also really fun.That's amazing. The book is really fun. I enjoyed every word of it. It's called Everything I Need I Get From You. Kaitlyn, where can folks find you and where can folks find the book?I'm on Twitter @kait_tiffany. I'm also on The Atlantic under my author page, and the book you can find pretty much anywhere I think. I mean, I usually share the bookshop.org link because I think they're cool. And I have not used Amazon in five years. So don't use Amazon. Don't tell Amazon I said that.Or if you want maybe access it through a VPN and then just stream it constantly to get it up the charts.Yeah, exactly. That'd be great.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week I spoke to Alison Griswold, who just restarted one of my favorite newsletters, Oversharing, which is all about companies in the sharing economy. Since pausing the newsletter, Griswold went to grad school with a concentration on sustainable cities, and is coming back with a renewed interest in the ways that tech companies are interacting, improving and undermining different cities. We spoke all about what's changed, and how the sharing economy has an effect on the world.Griswold can be found at Oversharing.This interview has been condensed and edited. Thank you so much for coming on today. You have just relaunched Oversharing, one of my long favorite newsletters. Do you want to talk a little bit about you know, what drew you to the space to begin with? I know that the sharing economy has come to mean a lot of different things and that evolution has rolled with the times. What consistently fascinates you about this space?Well, first of all, thank you. I love having you as an Oversharing fan. It means a lot.I fell into the sharing economy because I had various jobs as a business reporter and through that wound up covering some startups. I like to tell people I'm not really a tech reporter, I'm a business reporter who writes about tech companies from a business perspective. Then the ones I just thought were most interesting was the sharing economy, because this was when it was the early 2010s and Uber was just starting and Airbnb was starting and it was kind of clear they were going to be really big, but they were also completely chaotic, and that was so fun.That's how I got into it, but it's just a really interesting space. I think we've talked about this before, but the sharing economy is this really fascinating intersection of what happens when you have a lot of money that's put into a particular area, and then you also have a fundamental rethinking of labor practices and employment practices. Then you also have disparities of wealth inequality and income inequality because more often than not, the consumers are sort of affluent educated individuals, and then the workers are often more working-class, trying to just top off their income for the week, so you have all these factors that go into the sharing economy and collide, and I think that's really interesting.Yeah, I love that note that you had about how you're not a tech reporter who covers business, you're a business reporter who covers these tech companies, because again, it is so interesting that oftentimes the innovation that these companies have is not necessarily a technological one, but rather some combination of cloud services and also just labor and interacting with their labor in unconventional ways. It's been a little bit since you went on hiatus, so what have you seen in the interim on that?Yeah, before I went on hiatus, I wrote a piece for Oversharing. It was something like, "What even is a tech company anymore?" Because it was that time when Casper was going public and everyone kept covering it as "Casper, this tech company," and I was just like, "They sell mattresses online. They're not a tech company. They're a mattress company that sells online. When did everything that has a website become a tech company?"That's funny. They're not even technologically-enabled mattresses, they're just a delivery company.Yeah, so I think at some point we started to conflate tech-enabled with tech company because a lot of things, especially now, right, we live in a digital economy, everyone is on their phones, everyone has the internet, most things that do well from a business perspective are tech-enabled in that they have a website, or an online ordering option, or there's some sort of software component, but that doesn't mean the product or the core business is tech.I imagine that one reason for that appeal is that it's probably a lot more intriguing to a future IPO to be a tech company, but the facts on the ground, again, you approach it from a business side and you look at the balance sheet and these are not tech companies.Well, and it's better for fundraising. I mean, this has been well discussed now, but part of the, I don't want to say "innovation," but part of what WeWork did so well was that it marketed itself as a tech company and that enabled it to raise a lot of money from venture capitalists and this sort of flush Silicon Valley ecosystem, which is where the money was, and fundamentally WeWork is property business, but I mean, we don't know, right; this is counterfactual, but probably WeWork would not have raised as much money if it had gone to traditional financial institutions and said, "We are raising money for a shared office startup." It went to Silicon Valley and it said, "Oh, we have this innovative new tech idea. Please give us billions of dollars."Yeah. It seems like it's a hustle. One thing I've enjoyed a lot about your coverage has been you went to graduate school and you studied sustainable cities. What do you bring in from that towards the new Oversharing relaunch?Yeah, it was a great program. I needed some time off from journalism to decompress during the pandemic and had been interested in going back to school for a while, and was thinking that a lot of the things I wrote about were fundamentally urban platforms and that they tend to work well in dense cities with a lot of people, and so I thought, "I know about business because I've covered it, but I don't know a ton about urban planning, and what an interesting thing to study and have this other lens on it," so yeah, it was great. There were a lot of classes on governing cities. A lot of it was sort of urban theory: "What is a city? How do we decide who has a right to it? Who has a voice? Who gets listened to?" Very sort of sociological framework, but I'm excited to bring that to Oversharing because I think Oversharing's always been interested in these cultural, social questions that are raised by tech, and it's nice to have more of an academic grounding in ways to approach it.I want to spend a little bit of time here because that's a really fascinating angle. I feel like I'm kind of reminded of one of your bigger stories about scooters breaking down and how they just weren't built for the wear and tear of an actual city. We've all been in an Uber before where it's a Toyota Corolla and it's seen some wear and tear. You always contrast that with the cabs in New York, which are specifically expensively designed, but built to be infrastructure for a city. A lot of these new tools and replacements for infrastructure are actually kind of cruddy at doing that. They're not made with enough care that infrastructure demands. From your experience, what are some ways that now we see cities and startups attempting to create new infrastructure where there might not be that much “there” there?Yeah. I have two points on this. One is a thing I used to think about a lot, but didn't write about that much, was like you say, with scooters and Uber, these are for-profit companies offering transit services. Part of the reason they're able to do that is because they rely on public infrastructure, right?Uber and scooters couldn't operate without roads and sidewalks and all these things, but historically, we haven't expected these companies to pay into maintaining and supporting that infrastructure. So I think that's an interesting urban question, right? Should companies that profit off of public infrastructure also have a duty to contribute to maintaining, supporting and potentially expanding that infrastructure? That's something I would like to look at more.The second thought I had when you asked that is I'm doing something for tomorrow about this urban intervention in Los Angeles. It was just a fun story that was on NPR recently about people going around and painting crosswalks where they felt they should be.I saw that!Yeah, so this was something I studied in my program. It's called DIY urbanism or tactical urbanism. It's defined as unsanctioned interventions into the urban landscape, usually by a group of concerned citizens in response to perceived neglect from authorities.Traditionally, DIY urbanism is thought of as sort of fun and creative, but also, there's obviously tension because it might not be legal, there could be repercussions. I was thinking when scooter companies started, they didn't get permission, they just put scooters everywhere. I mean, in a way, that was also a DIY urbanism move, but the difference is it was for profit. Why do we get concerned? Why is it that a group of citizens is potentially going to be punished for doing something not for profit that is intended to improve the community versus a company is able to get away with doing the same thing, but explicitly to make money?That's really insightful. Both of those points remind me of a lot of the early tension around Uber and Lyft being at airports. They wanted to be in the cab lines. They wanted to get good drop-off locations. The airports were like, "You got to pay for that, buddy." These municipal institutions were designed alongside cabs in mind where they do get to wet their beak by virtue of offering these services to pick up and whatnot. It was just so interesting to watch eventually, depending on the city, either they got a good deal, a bad deal, you have to slip all the way out to a whole different LaGuardia terminal or something like that. It's been interesting to watch the evolution of how these really go from being a tech company to like a government liaison company. I love watching your newsletter kind of cover that shift.Thank you. Yeah, and it's not to say that the existing models or way the government does things are always right. I mean, a lot of times, they're not, or they could be improved on, but I guess the point is that every time we do one of these things or a company does, that is a choice, and that says something about what we value as a society, and what we think is the way a city should run and be functioning. To answer your question, I'm excited to have done the program and be able to apply that lens to these companies because I just think it will lend itself to a richer discussion.Yeah, I like that a lot. Actually, you had a post just last week about how the taxis are now on Uber, which years ago, would've been completely, incalculably not in the realm of humanity possibility.Yeah, I think it's borne out of supply problems. It's been pretty well reported that Uber went through this fundamental transformation during the pandemic, which was that everyone was locked down, people were afraid of taking cabs, and also, drivers rightfully were worried about transporting around people who might be sick. So they just saw this massive shift in their business, from most of the business revenue being rides to most of it being delivery, which made a lot of sense because everyone was home, everyone needed food and groceries and essentials and Uber was able to provide that service. But then, of course, people got vaccinated, things started to open up, there's COVID fatigue, the world came back online, and suddenly, people wanted to take Ubers again. And there just weren't enough drivers, so classic supply and demand, prices go up, wait times go up, people are unhappy. Uber has been on a campaign for almost a year now to try to get more drivers on the road.They just struck this honestly hilarious deal in New York to bring taxis onto the app, which is arguably good for taxis, we'll have to see how it plays out, but if it gives them more choice, generally more choice is good. But yeah, just after years of denigrating the taxi industry, it's funny to see that in this moment of supply constraint and need, that is where Uber's turned.Yeah. It's like these companies, there's some more scrutiny under them now. You just have to turn on any streaming service to watch a lovely story about a founder of one of these companies one of these days. It is so interesting about how they took something that was very, very simple, which is like, "I need a ride somewhere and I'm going to pay a taxi $15 to accomplish this task," and then you had a post about the law in Washington state that was just, the jargon here is getting really out of hand. It took something that was very simple of just like, "I'm going to pay a taxi cab driver to drive me to a location," to, "I'm going to use a ride-sharing service that will offer compensation to a individual to take some passenger platform miles through a transportation network company." That is an innovation in some regard, no?Yeah, it's a fancy way of redefining the taxi meter.Washington state, like you said, recently passed this law that sets a pay floor for ride-hail drivers, which is good because there's been a tension for a while in the sharing economy where workers want better wages and better working conditions and the companies say they also want that. Whether you believe that is up to you to decide, but then they say, "Our hands are tied. We can't provide these benefits because if we were to do that, it would be interpreted by regulators as us being an employer, and we can't have an employer-employee relationship, so we are legally constrained from improving the situation," and so this bill is one of the ways that they're now doing that. They're creating laws that mandate benefits and higher standards without making them employers.But yeah, there was a section of the bill at the very beginning, which just defined a lot of terms, and it is quite jargony, but it's also, I think, it's very helpful because it's hard to have an informed conversation about something if you're not able to talk about it in common language. I mean, we see this in politics all the time, right?Yeah.While it's jargony, it's helpful to say, okay, when an Uber trip happens, what are the different parts of that, right? What time should a driver get paid for? Because there's the time the driver's on an app, but they don't actually have a passenger for all of that time. Sometimes they're just waiting for a job to come in. There's the time when they've accepted a job, but the passenger's not yet in the car, and then there's the time when they pick up the passenger, so you have those three distinct segments. Which of those should the company have to compensate the driver for?Got it. It definitely seems like, again, it's overcomplicated, but it also seems like that's been a broader shift in the overall economy. You've seen unionized workforces oftentimes dissolve into contractor-based systems where rather than having all of your suppliers be either in-house or through a dedicated network, the way to get into the middle or upper class in America is to become a contractor. Then it does seem like they took a lot of that mentality and they just tried to make it into like, "But what if we had that, but also you were still in the working class?" It feels like they're really trying to do some language shifts that are fascinating to watch in real-time, I would say.Yeah, also, I just think it highlights disparities in the labor system. Personally, I feel like a lot of worker classification is a class issue, but I don't mean that in the way class is often thought of.What I mean is when you're in a white-collar job, you get paid a salary, right? You're expected to show up to work. Maybe your contract says you work 9:00 to 5:00, or something like that, but often that's not enforced, often you can just go to lunch or take a break. No one's stopping the clock when you get a coffee, right?If you're an Uber driver, every minute is materially important to when you're getting paid and when you're not getting paid and that's just such a different way to relate to your work.Yeah. It also just seems like it's a step back in terms of worker relations in the country. But backing out from this topic a bit, I'm interested in how you spend a lot of time studying cities, you spend lots of time looking at these sharing economy firms. What is a city that's doing well at this? You always kind of see situations where cities will completely screw up. As a result, their downtowns are littered with abandoned scooters. But I guess, is there anybody or any municipality that you had a chance to look at that you think is doing all right, or at least going in the right direction?I think Paris is often talked about as being among the most ambitious in terms of getting rid of cars. Paris under Anne Hidalgo, the mayor, has very aggressively expanded cycling lanes, put money into bike repairs and helping people get bikes and all these sorts of things. They've been very creative with their initiatives.London has put up a lot of cycling lanes. Just in the past, I mean, in the three years I've been here, there used to not be any cycling lane on the main road outside my flat, and now there are, so that has happened while I've been living here. I've seen it go up.Then I wrote my dissertation for the master's program on the New York City Open Streets Program, which was really interesting because this was a program where New York fairly early into the pandemic decided they would cordon off some sections of streets and allow them to be open for dining and pedestrianized activity to sort of create more space for social distancing and outdoor activities. The thing I saw from, I looked at two of the open streets, and the thing that became very clear is it was just so scattershot. One was doing really well because it was totally community run in Jackson Height, Queens, and people were extremely engaged.I went to that one.Yeah, it's enormously successful, but it's not a testament to New York City, it's a testament to the people who've made it happen and are still making it happen.Then I looked at Park Slope 5th Ave., which is where I used to live, and that one's also successful, but for different reasons; it's being run by the local business improvement district, and it has a much more explicitly commercial focus, so it's been successful in terms of having a vibrant, commercial life, and a lot of dining, but people on 5th don't feel ownership of it the way that people in Jackson Heights feel that the street is really theirs and a product of community efforts.Then you have others that have completely fallen by the wayside because they don't have the business resources, or they don't have the engaged community to make it run, and the city really hasn't been engaged in providing that support, so it was just very interesting to look at this program and see that there was such a wide variety of outcomes because of lack of... Basically, the city said, "We've given you a stamp, you can do it," and that was it.Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I would say each borough is different. I live in Queens and I feel like, again, the Queens mobility stuff and new city stuff and new bike lanes and stuff, it feels like it's accelerating at a clip way quicker than any of the other boroughs, which has been of nice. I think there's a lot of community support for it.I guess just backing out a bit, where do you see the newsletter going in the next couple posts as you get it regoing again?Yeah, we're finishing up the launch period right now, which is a faster pace of production than it will be. Long-term, it's going to be three posts a week. The idea is that the core Oversharing, as people know it and have gotten it for a long time, a couple topics, maybe a short essay, links at the bottom — that will remain free to everyone because it's important to me that people be able to access Oversharing and people who've been subscribing for a long time don't feel cut out by it going behind a paywall; but also, we all have to make a living. Content can't be free, so some of it will be paid.There will be more of an urbanism focus. There will be new posts as they happen. I'm casting a wide net for interesting people to interview, to do Q&As with. If that's you, please get in touch, email me at oversharingstuff@gmail.com. I would love to talk to you. I'm also toying around with the idea of having some sort of book club element where we read books about urbanism or gig companies, or maybe once in a while, just a fun book, because we all need a fun book.Yeah, can't all be The Power Broker.I did read The Power Broker. It was great.Classic. There are two types of people in the pandemic: people who wanted to read The Power Broker, and people who did read The Power Broker.Actually, well, I'll tell you my secret because we're friends. I did complete the entire Power Broker, but I rented it from the library as an audiobook. It was three parts.Ah, there you go.Each part was about 24 hours. I listened to it on 1.8X while I went on six-mile walks around London when the only thing you could do was go on walks during the pandemic.It was basically like a very, very intensive podcast experience.Amazing. I love that. I love audiobooks because they have the like, "Here's a miniseries of podcasts, but it's going to stick the landing.”Exactly.We'll know if he's guilty or not. That's really funny. Yeah, again, it's a really outstanding newsletter. I've been a long-time fan. Folks can find that just at oversharing.substack.com. Where else can folks find your work?I am on Twitter, but not a lot, at @alisongriswold. Yeah, mostly at oversharing.substack.com.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Philip Bump of the Washington Post, who a few weeks ago launched his newsletter How To Read This Chart. I'm a longtime fan of Bump's work at the Post; he's a really compelling writer and an outstanding blogger and has been weaving data journalism throughout his work so organically for such a long time I wanted to have him on for a podcast version of the Sunday edition to talk about the state of the art and the newsletter. We spoke about how charts took over the internet, how companies have managed to use increasing interest in data to suit their own ends in pitching mediocre polls, where the distrust of polling is coming from and the simple pleasures of weird charts.Bump can be found at the Washington Post and on Twitter, and his newsletter How To Read This Chart can be found here. This interview has been condensed and edited. You have just started this newsletter called How To Read This Chart. It's probably, what, two months old at this point? It's already off to a really great start.I appreciate it. That was the goal. Try and have it be compelling, and get people engaged. But yeah, I think about two months, which is sort of crazy how time flies.In one of the early issues, you mentioned that you were looking for a combination of breeziness and topicality. Do you want to talk a little bit about what kind of motivated you to both start a newsletter in this space and also kind of what your angle is?I do a lot of charts for my day job at the Washington Post. And one of the things that I have found is that often I will create a graph which to me seems pretty intuitive, but requires a little more explanation than I would've expected. That is absolutely a failing on my part, right? My job should be to make presentations of data that are simply intuitive enough that I don't need to have a lot of explication, but I also think that complicated charts can be visually interesting, and provide a lot of information once you dig into them a little bit.What I wanted to do was create something, create a tool, in which I encouraged people to be more open to more complicated presentations of data. To offer up interesting, visually striking data visualizations that I could then walk through, and say, "Here's how this works. Here's why this is actually a smart way to present this, even if at first it may be somewhat intimidating." Over the long term, with the goal of having people just generally feel more comfortable with looking at data visualization, understanding how to pick out their own stories from it, and understanding how it can convey a lot of information in the way that words can't.Yeah. I've enjoyed the approach and vibe of it a lot. I think that there are places on the internet that look at and evaluate and talk about charts a lot, and I think a lot of them will sometimes overengineer it. They'll be like, "Oh, look at this chart." And there are a lot of colors, there are shapes, there's a lot of stuff going on. I think that what I've really enjoyed about yours is that you very much look at this as a process where there aren't really right answers. That there are just choices that are made. Do you want to kind of expand on how you view the process of creating a chart?One of the things that I do too for my job is I do a lot of charts, right? So that means that I'm not sitting down and workshopping, A/B testing, different versions of charts. I'm like, okay, I'm doing a story on something that just broke. I need to make a chart. I did one that I included in the newsletter, which I thought was pretty good, which showed the evolution of votes for Supreme Court justices since the end of the Civil War, essentially. And so you start off, and I had different representations. I took all nine currently sitting seats and I sort of had little lines that wound their way through them with little nodes for where a new justice was added.And so at the beginning, it's just, they're all by voice vote, and so that's just a little black dot. And then eventually you start to see actual votes for it, and first all the votes are overwhelming, like 90 to 10 or whatever. And then all of a sudden you start seeing them being pretty evenly divided. That was something that I didn't have a chance to workshop because I needed to get it up because this is when Breyer announced his retirement.But I could then come back — and I didn't actually do this with this, I just sort of dropped it in a newsletter because I thought it was cool — but that's a good example of where you can say, okay, so how might you have done this in a way that provided more information? I got feedback from readers, like, this would be great if it's an interactive where you could mouse over it and see someone's name. That's absolutely true. I couldn't do that, in part because of the time crunch, but also in part because I couldn't then put it in the newsletter. There are all these boundaries and constraints. And one of the things I'm trying to do is get the voices of people who read the newsletter injected into the newsletters; I want people have feedback and thoughts to include that as well. Because part of the point is that I don't have all the answers.Yeah, I like that a lot. I like it because you really are grounded in news. Your day-to-day job is all about kind of covering the news. That comes with different constraints than doing a long term; if you had spent a week making an interactive about that, it wouldn't have actually been as effective because sometimes just getting something out sooner is better. No, exactly, you're right. I think too that one of the lessons there is that it doesn't have to be great, right? I mean you and I have experience in writing for institutions that have editors. But it is not the case that we simply write things and then let the editors clean it up. We try and write well the first time, right? This is a space where you don't have an editor. I don't have a graphics editor, right? Or when I do an interactive online, I don't have a data editor. Although I have sort of pitched that in the past as something that would be kind of cool. I mean, wouldn't it be cool if you had a lot of people who could do really basic code and then you could pass it over to a data editor, who could clean it up and make it, I mean, wouldn't that be cool? You could really expand the number of interactives you could do.Yeah, FiveThirtyEight was a shop like that. That was a really good time.There you go. But one of the things is trying to encourage people to just sort of jump into it, right? You don't have to worry about it being perfect. In the same way that I've been doing this long enough now that I can do something fairly quickly that is effective and isn't necessarily buggy. But the way you get there is by just sort of jumping into it and doing as much as you can, and having fun with it and making it. And here's the other thing that I'll say, I will put out graphics that I think are cool that I recognize are going to be complicated to people. You know why? Because I do this whole day, and sometimes I want to just have fun with it. And I think that's okay too in a lot of circumstances.Yeah. And that reminds me, a few weeks ago you had a particularly neat visualization, I pulled it up, it's a keogram, right? There was a guy who put a camera on his roof. Do you want to talk about that one?It was really cool. A guy I follow on Twitter retweeted it, it's this astronomer who lives in the Netherlands. And literally exactly what you said. He put a camera on the roof of an outbuilding in his house, and just pointed straight up with a fish eye lens and took a picture every 15 seconds for the entire length of 2021. And what results from that is you get this really cool pattern, this sort of hourglass pattern of when night falls — obviously less night over the course of the summer, more night when it gets to be winter. You can see how the sky is different colored at different times of the day. So twilight and dawn are much more blue because the sun isn't reflecting off the clouds as much. You can see when the moon is moving through. The phases of the moon are depicted in it.There's all this information. It's just this little rectangle with this little black hourglass sitting on a blue field. But when you look at it, you can pick out so much stuff. And then he, of course, as an astronomer, he finds a lot of stuff that you don't necessarily see. He goes through it and he picks out the movement of the constellations through the skies. He has this giant version of it you can get as well. And just, it's fascinating. It's just such a good use of visualizing data. It's not visualizing data intuitively. It's just a picture of the sky. But all you have to do is orient it by time of day and by time of year, and then all of a sudden you have an infographic that really tells you a lot about literally how the world works.I really loved it. Again, even as just like an art piece, it's really cool. I feel like there's been more conversation about chart crimes than it has in the past. You've been in the game a while now, and have definitely kind of seen good visualization, bad visualization, malicious visualization at times. That also seems to be a theme at some points in your newsletter. How has the internet's interactions with charts kind of evolved over the past couple years?Good question. I mean obviously it is something that's been powered by the connective capabilities of social media to a large extent. I think also there is a sort of nerdiness that emerges on social media more than in other places, just by virtue of the fact that it's grounded in technology, and age groupings and so on. And of course, you and I probably operate in nerdier circles than most people. Like my sister who spends a lot of time on Instagram, I'm not sure she sees a lot of chart crime tweets, right? Which isn't meant as a disparagement to her, she's just got different, more normal interests than you or I do.Part of it is not only the fact that you have that connectivity, which obviously we're all familiar with by now with the internet, but you also have a lot more people who are trying to present information. One of the things that's been fascinating over the course of the past decade or so is the ways in which corporations have really latched onto the idea of using data presentations to sell stuff. And so they'll do like these shitty polls, of like, "We polled 14 Airbnb members, and seven of them found that Airbnb is awesome." And they'll pitch those to Forbes contributors who go on to money laundering crimes. Alleged money laundering crimes...I didn't name names! But there's this pattern wherein corporations have figured out that people are compelled by data visualizations, and by sort of weird esoteric data points. And so they gin these up, but what that also means is that there's this big influx of visualizations and attention being paid to these things. A lot of media outlets who are trying to move from being crusty old newspapers to doing more interesting things online, there is this new attention being paid to how you present data for a lot of different reasons. I think that provides a lot more people who are skilled in this to some extent, and a lot more people who are paying attention to it, which I think is probably part of it.I love this point and I actually want to spend more time here just because it's rare that I get to be like, "Hey, you also see this, right?" It is wild just at how regularly I will see press releases, I will see corporate blogs, I will see all this kind of stuff that will either be hinged on a poll that they ran because they would like to get into the press, and they realize that's a decent way to launder a talking point. It's almost interesting kind of watching some of the techniques of data journalism kind of get co-opted a little bit by some of these corporate actors. You cover politics, and I'm sure that you see this time and time again in that space in particular too. You pointed out a LinkedIn poll a few weeks ago, that was just like, why are we talking about this? And this made it into what?It's in New York Times for God's sake, right.Is that a local newspaper? Where is that based?I live outside of New York City, and yeah, a lot of my neighbors get it. Yeah, I hope you've noticed that I go out of my way to insult The New York Times whenever I can in the newsletter. Not out of any ill will, but just because it's funny.Of course.There's one coming up in the one that's dropping this Saturday. Anyway! No, you're right, and part of that, I mean, bear in mind, you are familiar with political polls as well, but for years it's been a problem that you'll have political journalists who'll pick up internal campaign polls and treat them as serious, when those are the same thing, they're just marketing pitches using this front of data. You have that exact same factor which comes into play in doing politics reporting.You have a lot of journalists who simply don't know how to spot b******t, right? They just don't know how to be like, "I'm going to treat this with some caution." Instead they're getting pitched on, "Hey man, we have this new insight into what's going on." It's the exact same thing, it's just corporations have figured out how to do this. And it costs very, very little money for them to do it. If they find a reporter who isn't particularly savvy in assessing the validity of data collection mechanisms, then they get a bite pretty easily. "Hey, I'm going to the exclusive. LinkedIn did this poll. And we found that X." And someone's like, "Whoa, that's cool. Thanks for the exclusive. Send me the data." And then you and I get it, and we're like LOL. What the hell is this?Again, I'm not trying to judge. In the same way that if someone asked me to be an opera critic for a day, I would totally embarrass myself! I just don't know it. I don't know that world. But there's a reason why, if someone's putting on a crappy opera, they might want to have me come and do the review, right? Because they know that I'm not going to understand what's going on. And so I think we see a lot of that with corporate pitching in particular.It's great that you point out again, this isn't to knock the folks who do it because maybe they're credulous of a poll, but they're also like they take no b******t elsewhere. It's just kind of almost an expertise thing where knowing what's a rough poll, knowing what is a specious source of collecting responses, knowing what is, oh, the sponsor of this is perhaps a little sus. That is a skill. I think that your beat at the Post has been really good at kind of calling some of that out in the past.Yeah. I mean, I think it's fun, right? I mean it's fun to have to catch Tucker Carlson, who I do not assign any good faith effort on his part. It's fun to say, "Hey, actually this graph that you used is nonsense," and to call that out. I mean obviously his nightly audience is slightly larger than my newsletter audience.A little bit.You don't know. You don't know. My newsletter audience could be two million. I will say this, it's definitely a percentage of two million!Rounded to the nearest two million, sure!That's right. We're even. I think there's value in it, but also in recognizing how, through intentionality or accidentally, the people can offer you information that you should be skeptical of.I felt like at the beginning of my career, maybe 10 years ago or so, the challenge was convincing people that there was value in writing about polls, that there was value in writing about this kind of data, that there was value in making all these kind of viz and putting this investment into it. Now I feel like, battle's won, congratulations, high five, victory lap, champagne. But now the challenge is like, oh, we've got to be smart about how we actually end up using it, because those tools have also been — whether it's through a profit pursuit, or whether it's through political pursuit — we won one battle and now, oh wait, there's actually a whole lot of cleanup that we've got to keep doing.No, you're right. I think that there are a lot of ways in which data presentation right now is sort of a risky endeavor. From the visualization standpoint, it is obviously the case that we get a lot of dubious, questionable presentations that make their ways in front of us. And I think we're calling it out.I think polling itself is something that we could spend a whole half hour talking about this separately. But I think polling itself is something, that the skepticism of polling has been weaponized in the same way that say skepticism of a coronavirus vaccine has been weaponized, right?That's interesting.That you can pick out particular ways in which you can cast out in order to try and undercut the whole thing. It is much more common that we see that with polling, in part because you're always going to find a poll that gives you information you don't want. One of the things I thought has been fascinating in the course of the past several months has been this spate of new polls showing that President Biden's approval is quite low, and just the number of people, including the president, who are saying, "Oh, you can't put any stock in that." And it's just like, come on, man. How are you — and I made this point in the newsletter — you are asking us to say, here is the best information we have on the vaccine. It's imperfect. There have been mistakes that have been made. But we understand generally what things look like and we need to have confidence in that. And then on the same side, you're saying I ignore these polls because they're bad for me. It's b******t. You can't do that. That's not how it works.I think that we're seeing, and we saw Trump obviously spend a lot of time trying to downplay and denigrate polls that showed him doing poorly, and I think that's damaging. I do. Because polls are, for all the complaints about going to a diner and talking to voters, and yada, yada, yada, polls are talking to 1,000 people at one time, asking them more narrowly tailored questions, and not having a lot of space for follow up, obviously, but that's what polls do. I think for people that reject them out of hand, I think just moves us more into this space of uncertainty where all sorts of bad things can happen.There are always good polls, there are always bad polls. I will just say, in your newsletter, How To Read This Chart, one pervasive idea that I like is that it almost comes off similar to like Wirecutter where it's like you're evaluating the different tools and trying to figure out what the best way to talk about it is, and how to use it and all that kind of stuff. It's not like saying that the tools are invalid, or the tools don't work, or the tools always work, or this is a bad tool. It's acknowledging we're all coming from the position that this is a cool tool to have and a cool tool to use. Here are the best ways to use it. And also every time you make a bar chart, I get a commission, echoing the Wirecutter model. I mean, the goal is to some extent — and part of this is informed by Edward Tufte, who we are invariably going to get to as part of this conversation. He does these data visualization things and is sort of like the godfather of all this stuff. When I worked at Adobe as a designer back 20 years ago, I went to one of his seminars. And the thing that always struck me about that is that you're sitting through the seminar, and it's like the morning— Have you been to one of his seminars?I've not, no.So the morning you go through it — at least in Silicon Valley 20 years ago — but you sit through this really interesting assessment of how data visualization works. The O-ring story from the Space Shuttle Challenger, and all these various ways in which presenting data is important. And then you have a break, and then you come back in the afternoon, and it's all about how to make cool charts and PowerPoint. And at the time, I skipped it. I was like, I don't give a s**t about making cool charts for PowerPoint. But I realized it's brilliant from a business model because that's how he gets all these companies to pay to send people to his seminar, right? They go to seminar, and they say, "Hey, this is going to help me make better PowerPoint charts." And they're like, "Okay, fine. We'll pay the $1,500," or whatever. It's genius. But it's also value, that's the value he's added to people.One of the things I want do with the newsletter as well is give people, to some extent, some familiarity with the tool sets that are out there so they can broaden their approach a little bit. I will also at times slide in little recommendations. There was this spiral chart that was in the Times that got a bad rap, and I found a link to how to recreate that thing using R, which, no one that reads the newsletter is using R to make data visualizations. But A, it's there in case they do and want to, but B, it also makes them feel like, okay, I'm part of this kind of cool insider club that knows how to make visualizations in a pretty advanced way now. Which then gives people the confidence to do so, to explore it, ideally, hopefully. I don't know how many more charts I've brought into the world through my newsletter. Hopefully one or two!That's so smart. Because again, you never want to be in a course where you know everything. You never want to be in a course where it's completely out of your bound. You want to be in a course where you get a little bit of exposure to things that are a little bit beyond your grasp at the point and things that you have well in hand. I like the confidence that you put in your audience. It's just really good stuff, man. Is there any particular thing that you've had a chance to write about that you feel proudest of in the past couple weeks?I mean, the keogram one was good, just because it was not specifically news-centered. I don't know, just one of the things I try to do with the newsletter, which hopefully I succeed at to some extent, is to make it actually fun to read. It's super easy to write about a chart in a way that no one is interested in it. I'm not going to say it's hard to do it in a way that's a little more compelling, but I try and make it like I want it to be something where someone who is not really familiar with charts picks it up and at least finds it funny, even if they don't really care about charts or even if they don't really necessarily get the charts at the end of the day. I feel like I've done a pretty decent job with that. I think that that's the thing which I am probably happiest about is that people who I know aren't nerds on charts will come back and be like, "Hey, at least it's fun to read," which I think is a step in the right direction anyway.Where can folks find it? Where can folks get a chance to subscribe? Where can folks find you?Yeah. I'm on Twitter @pbump. The chart, I mean, I think if you search How To Read This Chart, I would hope it comes up pretty high in the results by now. If you go to wapo.st/readthischart, that'll actually take you directly there and you can sign up. Obviously it's free. I'd be very happy if you subscribe to the Washington Post, of course. But it's a free newsletter, it teaches a little bit about charts. And if you stick around after the break, we'll teach you how to make the excellent PowerPoint presentations, so you can send me $1,500 for this seminar too. It would be great.Sign up for Numlock News and wake up to the best stories in data every day.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to another Numlock Sunday podcast edition!This week, I spoke to Surya Mattu and Aaron Sankin, who wrote Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them for The Markup. Here's what I wrote about it:An analysis of 5.9 million crime predictions from a company called PredPol — predictions that informed policing in multiple cities across the country, affecting something like one out of every 33 Americans from 2018 to 2021 — found that the recommendations appear to be lousy with racial bias, persistently recommending increased patrols in neighborhoods with higher percentages of Black and Latino residents, with some neighborhoods seeing multiple crime predictions per day. Even when crime predictions targeted a majority-White neighborhood in the Northridge area of Los Angeles, it clustered those forecasts on the Latino blocks. The most-targeted neighborhoods were 28 percent more Black, 16 percent more Latino, and 17 percent less White than the overall jurisdiction. The efficacy of these programs is suspect, as there's no vetting if the predictions actually bear out, or any report when a crime prediction software leads to charges. Critics allege the software is little more than “bias by proxy,” offering a justification to over-police certain areas with a vague algorithmic justification.This is an incredibly well-reported story, and shines a light on how software that attempts to predict crime can unintentionally come bundled with a bunch of racial biases. We talked about how exactly they managed to report this out and how The Markup is able to use data to bring accountability to new technology that hasn't been adequately vetted. Mattu and Sankin can each be found on Twitter, there's a bunch of data for this story they've uploaded to GitHub if you're interested in getting hands on with it, you can read more about how they pulled this off here, and the story is over at The Markup.This interview has been condensed and edited. You two wrote a really fantastic story over at The Markup, you're both data reporters over there so you were really in the weeds on this one. It's all about crime prediction software, and some of the issues inherent therein. Can y'all tell me a little bit about crime prediction in general? Are police offices really using software to try to predict crimes before they happen?Aaron Sankin: Our story was looking at a particular piece of crime prediction software called PredPol. And the way that PredPol works is that it ingests crime report data, which is information that comes from if someone calls an 911 saying, "My car was broken into." Or if a police officer is driving around and they see someone in the act of breaking into a car and arrest them. So all of that crime report data then gets fed into an algorithm that is inside of this system that was devised by PredPol. And from there, it points on a map the locations where and when they think that crime of this particular type is most likely to happen.And then from there, the idea is that you can direct an officer while on patrol to go to that area, and either by their sheer presence will dissuade criminals from offending in that area, or they will catch them in the act. And that is effectively how this system that we looked at works. There are other predictive policing systems that are more person-based, looking at who might either commit a crime or become a victim of a crime. But the things that we were looking at are very tightly focused on this kind of location-based type of prediction.Y'all obtained just a wild set of data, something like 5.9 million crime predictions. What was it like to work with that? And what format did they come in? Like, how'd you even embark on this?Surya Mattu: We had 5.9 million predictions that we used for this analysis. But actually the data that our colleague on the story, Dhruv Mehrotra, found on the internet was more than that. It was actually around 8 million predictions across 70 different jurisdictions, including some really interesting ones. Like I found some data from Venezuela and Bahrain, which didn't make it into the story, but that was what he found. All of that data, by the way, is on the GitHub repository that goes with this, there's a link in our methodology to the data if anyone wants to play with it. The raw data itself came to us in the form of HTML files, it was about, I forget how many gigabytes, but many, many gigabytes of just raw HTML that we then had to parse and write parsers to convert into spreadsheets that we could then use for analysis.Just kind of taking a step back to the final story in which you ended up finding, algorithms are oftentimes sold as impartial ways to understand the world, but your report really found that that's not the case at all. That the human biases of the people who design the algorithms kind of make it into the final data. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you found?Surya Mattu: What we basically found was that across 38 jurisdictions that we looked at, the software disproportionately targeted low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods. And we define proportionate here as compared to those jurisdictions overall. That obviously comes with caveats, such as crime isn't spread equally across a place. It happens at specific locations and all of that. But what we found was that this underlying trend did exist in the data we had.The reason it was important, we thought, to do this analysis and present it this way is because as you said, we wanted to just prove definitively that with real world data, people can't say that algorithms aren't racist because they're not looking at certain types of data such as demographics. The point we were trying to make is that that will be reflected in the outcome of software, even if you don't include it, because as you said earlier, the systemic bias is kind of embedded within the input data that's going into these algorithms.Aaron Sankin: I think that's a really important point that Surya makes about the issues around the input data. Because PredPol's algorithm, because the founders of the company are academics, they had disclosed previously just the core of their algorithm in an academic paper that they published a number of years ago. The inputs to this do not specifically mention race, they don't mention income. The inputs to the system are just the crime reports. And what they take away from a crime report is really just the type of crime, the time it happened and the location. And that's it. The issue here is essentially, what is creating this kind of disproportionate skew targeting these certain neighborhoods?It is based around, what is going in, what inputs are coming into those crime reports. We can talk a little bit about the issues of input data affecting an algorithm, but you have things like fundamentally different rates of crime victimization in different neighborhoods. You have issues around, as you know, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has found repeatedly that Black and Latino and low-income people tend to report crimes at higher rates than white and higher-income people. And also issues around feedback loops, where if there are officers in a particular area, they're more likely to see crimes in the areas where they patrol. And then because of that, they see those crimes, they identify the crimes and then the crime report data then comes back from that, comes back into the system. There's a lot of different things that are all working together here. But I think it's also important to say that, all of this stuff can happen in systems that are facially neutral about this.I think a big takeaway for this story for me is that this system, PredPol, is intended to take away the opportunity to have individual biases of a police officer affect where they patrol. You could say, yes, you're concerned about individual police officers saying, "I want to patrol the Black neighborhood or Latino neighborhood. And that's where I'm going to spend all my time." And this system is intended to kind of circumvent that in a lot of ways. But at the same time, because the input data is what it is, you're then going to get potentially very similar results to if you just had a police officer going on their own kind of biases and history and common sense and experience.That feedback loop seems like a big problem. Because again, if it's designed to subvert the desire to over-police different areas, but it's based on the fact that people are already over-policing specific areas, that seems like it's kind of a key issue here.Aaron Sankin: Yeah. A kind of caveat here, and Surya can go into this because he did a lot of this data work, is that fundamentally what we were looking at is the algorithm, right? We were looking at these inputs and outputs because it was really difficult for us to get a handle on how this was being used by individual police departments, right? That was a question that we asked to all of these departments that were in analysis, we're like, "How did you use it?" And we had a lot of variance. Some departments were like, "Yeah, we use it all the time." And other departments were like, "We hardly use this at all, even though we're paying for it."But at the same time, we had specifically asked all of the police departments, "Had this system directly led to arrests? Can you recall any specific time where PredPol said, there was going to be a crime here, and then you went to that area and then you made an arrest?" And none of them responded to that in the affirmative. And whether that's because it wasn't particularly useful for that or because that information never made it into their system, which I think is a big issue with the system where information about whether or not a stop and arrest was a direct result of a prediction, is generally, from what I can understand, not making its way into kind of the legal system.It's really hard for us to know exactly how this is being used. I think therefore, it also makes it a little fuzzier in terms of the feedback loop question. Because that was a concern that I think a lot of activists and critics and academics who have been studying and raising the alarm about place-based predictive policing systems, like PredPol, have worried about. And I think that was something that we wanted to be able to answer, but because we weren't able to get a lot of clarity on that, we can't say with any certainty exactly how big that feedback loop issue is, even though it's certainly there.Surya Mattu: Right. Just to add to that, in the data, that's why we went with this disparate impact analysis at the end. Because really what we're measuring is where these predictions took place and kind of who lives there, right? Because that's the one thing we could be really specific about and measured precisely. All of the stuff Aaron just said, I think, is a good explanation of why we chose this analysis in the first place.One thing I really enjoy about The Markup's coverage in general is that you do have the technical ability to look at these algorithms and understand what's going on here. It seems interesting that in this case, Aaron, to your point, that oftentimes algorithms will have a way to kind of train themselves for accuracy, that they would find results about how efficacious they actually are and try to get more like that. But it doesn't sound like that's happening here.Surya Mattu: Well, that gets to a really kind of interesting thing we've seen both in the academic literature and just kind of through our own research as we've been working on this stuff is, the way I kind of joke about it is that you either look at systemic inequality as a feature or a bug of society.Whoa.Surya Mattu: Right? And I think that that's basically the two views. We look at it as a feature of society, right? So when we're doing our analysis we're saying, "We know this exists. Is it being reflected in this new system?" So the analysis we're doing is kind of treating systemic inequality as a feature. What PredPol, the company and the software they made, is doing is kind of treating it like a bug. They're saying that, "Oh, this is a problem. If we don't look at it, it's probably not going to be there. It's not going to affect us because we're not looking at it. But it's not ours to fix. If it got fixed, the software would work, super perfect and super unbiased.” And then I think fundamentally, that's the different... Like that's the back and forth in this conversation. Does that make sense?Yeah. What you're getting at here is that, you view the systemic inequality component as a fundamentally central feature of what the inputs are in this, either implicitly or not. Whereas if you're operating a police prediction algorithm, that's just like, "Well, that's not really our department." And as a result, pretending it doesn't exist, which, does that cause the issues that you're kind of realizing in this?Surya Mattu: Yeah, exactly. Because, I mean, if you're PredPol, what do you do? Aaron can talk about this more, but he found a study in which they have looked into this issue themselves. They basically kind of came down to the fact that, "Yeah, it can perpetuate systemic biases, but we don't know what to do about that. We're just going to leave it because it also can make it ‘less accurate' if you start trying to be less precise in where you target. Or look into these other features to determine whether people are being exposed to these predictions."Aaron Sankin: I think something important here is, essentially, the way The Markup operates with these sorts of investigations is we'll do our analysis and we'll put together a whole methodology and then we'll send it out to the company or whoever we're investigating for an adversarial review. Just like, "Hey, what do you think about this whole method that we did?" And then we had a whole bunch of questions and stuff.I think we asked pretty point-blank of like, "What do you make of these differences?" And, "This is who's getting targeted across all these jurisdictions." And their argument was really like, "We don't really have a problem with this because it's based on crime reports. These are the neighborhoods that legitimately need more policing." Again, it's like, if this is what the algorithm says, it's good because it's based on this data, it's not based on human biases. I feel like that's a question a little above my pay grade, in terms of what's going on and what is an appropriate level of policing in each of these communities.Because in certain parts of these jurisdictions, I'm sure there are a lot of people who say, "Yes, I want more cops in my neighborhood." And then there are other people who are saying, "I think the policing levels here are too high." What I was really excited to do with this story is allow those conversations to happen locally, because they are not really ones that can happen at the national, 30,000-foot view. Even though there is research that shows there are problems that happen around over-policing and what happens to individuals and young people and communities when there are a lot of negative interactions with police.But those decisions need to be made at the individual and local level. I think at least in my conversations with a lot of activists and leaders in a lot of these cities, they didn't know this was being used. They hadn't heard about this stuff before. It really just needs to be part of that conversation, to decide if it's something that needs to be appropriate or not. Because at the same time, there is research that does suggest that crime does coalesce into hotspots, and even just having a cop on a corner for a little bit of time can often decrease the levels of reported crime in a community.There are lots of different trade-offs that are happening here. I just think in order for a community to really reckon with the levels and types of policing that it wants to have, they just need a certain degree of information. And I think that is what, in a lot of ways, what we're trying to do with this story.Again, I love this story. It's so in-depth and folks should definitely check it out if they haven't read it already. But the thing that is really interesting about it is, I almost got the sense that describing it as a crime prediction software is kind of undermining what it's trying to do, in the sense that it seems like it's less a weather forecast and more a climate forecast, and misleading these two things is just kind of leading to disproportionate coverage. Again, you guys were really involved with the data. I would love your thoughts on that.Aaron Sankin: I think I had heard it described as less about finding the location or the most likely location for future crimes, it's more about finding the location where someone will make a report about a crime in the future, if that makes sense. And those two things aren't necessarily the same. That's what's important to think about. What this is predicting is incidents of people or police officers reporting crime to authorities, which is different than people who are victimized by crime, if that makes sense.Yeah, I get that. That does make sense. The work that y'all do at The Markup is so great, you have also covered things not just involving predictive policing. You've covered Facebook, you've covered Google, YouTube, all this kind of thing. In the course of covering the algorithms that you've covered, have you noticed any reliable blind spots that folks who are designing these kind of keep on running into?Surya Mattu: One of the things we do in our analysis and our methodologies is we are always really explicit about the limitations of our analysis and what we can and can't say, and how we had to limit what we were looking at. And I think that is something that I wish I would see more in technology overall, is this more rigorous — the way I think about it is like, you know how you have penetration testing for security?Sure.Surya Mattu: Where people hire white hat hackers to come and test the security of their systems, because they can build it as well as they want but until someone is going to really find all the leaky pipes, you're not going to know. You need a similar kind of approach. The work we do really kind of comes down to a lot of data collection and cleaning. With this story, it's 5.9 million records, but we had to geocode each one of those lat-longs, connect it to census data, do over a hundred FOIA requests to join the data, to actually be able to even build the datasets we needed to do an analysis to answer a question.I think that's the kind of work I hope in the future companies start doing more and more of around the products they're putting out into the world. There could be a variety of ways in which that happens. You could talk to advocates and experts and people who work with vulnerable communities who are the most likely to be harmed by these tools to see what it looks like on the ground. I don't see that happening as much as I would like it to. I'm hoping that the work we do at The Markup raises that conversation around what it looks like to do internal adversarial testing of how your technology influences society.Aaron Sankin: That makes me think about a story that came out a few months ago. It was probably the thing this year that a tech company did that I just really appreciated the most. It was a report that came out of Twitter, and their report was basically that they had studied it and they found that basically everywhere that Twitter operates, it is amplifying right-wing content more than it is amplifying centrist or left-wing content. The key here is that they say, "We do not know why this is happening. We looked at this and this is a real thing. We have studied this. This is a systematic bias in our system, but we cannot figure out what is the core reason that this is happening across so many countries all over the world."I thought that was just such an important way to do that in a couple ways. I think, one, because they are admitting there's this big gap in their knowledge. They're admitting that this thing is a process. But also, there's a certain degree of transparency in saying, "We are studying this and looking into it and we think it's important. And we would like to know more, but we're not quite there yet."I think that is something that The Markup tries to embody as well in our work of saying, "These are the limits to our knowledge in terms of the research and analyses and reporting that we've done." I really like seeing that from a big tech company that deals in algorithms like that. It also made me think about how rare that sort of statement and sentiment is among kind of like Twitter's peers and big tech, algorithmic space.That's really insightful. I love that observation that again, just for whatever reason, whether it's just the Silicon Valley culture, or even just like how people understand and reconcile the things that they've built with the impacts of the things that they've built. But there really is a lack of technological humility from a lot of different circles on this, that you guys very well illustrate in your own work.Surya Mattu: I really like that term, technological humility. I'm definitely going to use it in the future.Steal it. All yours.Surya Mattu: That is what we're after here. One thing I always say at work is that, we're kind of like the Mr. Rogers of data, we want to be honest and treat you like the humans and who'll understand nuance and can understand a detailed, complicated thing. Where it's not like just finger pointing and saying, everything is bad. We're trying to show you that things are complicated. Here are the tradeoffs, here's what we can say, here's what we can't say.I think if you can do that with nuance and specificity and really precisely define the problem, even if you can't solve it, it gives people a little more agency on how they want to deal and interact with it. And I think that's a big part of what our job is here. Is to just shine a light and give you the nuance and details so you can understand how to think about the system.I love that. And again, so y'all at The Markup have been at this for a while. The reports that you come out with are really terrific. I suppose, like in this kind of specific case, there are a couple of stakeholders involved, right? There are these different municipalities in the cities. I guess, how has the reaction been and how do you kind of hope people use what you've found in their own municipal basis?Aaron Sankin: I think it's still a little early to get a sense of the reaction post-publication. But really, one of the things that I found really interesting is, once we had conducted and finished and locked down our analysis, we went to all of the departments that were included in it. Surya had made these really great data sheets, which are available in our GitHub, that break down the targeting for each city. We provided these things to each of the departments and we asked them a whole bunch of questions about their own use of this system.We got, I think, about like 15 or so departments to respond to us. Most of those were ones that had used this system at one point and then stopped. The thing that struck me was this kind of consistent refrain from a lot of departments that had used PredPol and then stopped, was that they were like, they felt that it wasn't telling them anything they didn't already know, which kind of makes a lot of sense. Because a lot of these are smaller or mid-size cities. You have not a huge jurisdiction and you have police officers often who have been working in these beats for years, if not decades. They're like, "Yes, I know where to go, where there are the car break-ins. I know generally where the muggings happen because they are there in these communities." I think that struck me as something that was really interesting. Because it suggests, is this a really great purchase or product for these departments to be making at all?But also at the same time, if we are finding that these predictions, which are based on the crime report data, are so closely lining up with the preconceived notions of the individual police officers, is this whole system just replicating or reinforcing the same sorts of biases that have already been in there that could end up being fairly problematic? I think that, to me, was something that I found particularly interesting in interfacing with all of these departments.It makes me think also of, there's some really excellent work by a University of Texas sociologist named Sarah Brayne, and she had done work at the LAPD, looking at their uses of technologies. One of the insights that she had seen is that to her, it kind of like, in a sense, functions as almost a de-skilling of police work, where it's like, you have police officers who feel like they have all of this knowledge and suddenly they're taking directions on where to go from a computer. And it's like, we already kind of know this. So I thought that's something that was really interesting and interfacing of how this stuff is working on the ground, in that it didn't seem to be telling — at least any of the departments I had seen — anything that was particularly surprising to them.One example is, there was a department. They were like, "Yes, we had a car break-in at an area where PredPol had made a car break-in location. But we already knew that there were a rash of cars that were getting broken into there. And the car that was broken into was a bait car that we had stuck there a while earlier. So, you can't credit it to that."Totally. I almost wonder, like, where is the demand for this kind of software? It doesn't sound like it's necessarily coming from the rank and file of the police departments. Who, I guess, is the customer here, really?Well. I think a lot of this kind of comes back to the whole kind of CompStat era, which started in the NYPD in the ‘90s. A lot of that is using a lot of data to map crime locations. I think a really important, and I think maybe underrated, element of that entire movement is accountability. It gives the police chiefs this ability to then take their captains and other leadership to say, "Hey, you're in charge of this division, or you're in charge of this area. How come there are so many muggings right here? What are you going to do about it to stop this from happening in the future?" From my conversations with people in the field, that was a pretty fundamental shift in how policing was conceived.This whole predictive policing model is taking that to the next step of saying, "What can we do to be proactive about preventing crime?" Yes, there are a lot of things you could do to be proactive about preventing crime. But a lot of those things are like giving people social services and getting people jobs and doing all of these gigantic social engineering and social services things. And you're a police chief in a small or medium-size city, you do not have the budget to do all of those things and it's probably not in your mission.But you can spend $20,000 to $30,000 a year on this system that will allow you to say, "Hey, I'm being proactive," which I think is at least part of the reason that this stuff is happening. At the same time, I don't know, like at least off the top, it's probably for the kind of techier people in law enforcement. It's probably kind of a cool thing to be like, "Hey, there's this computer system that can give me secret insight into how to do this better. Let's give it a shot."Got it. The story's at The Markup. It's called, "Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them." You guys also had a really wonderful post explaining exactly how you pulled this off and it is on GitHub. Just to wrap it up, where can folks find you and where can folks find the work?Surya Mattu: You can find us on Twitter. Mine is @suryamattu. TheMarkup.org is where we publish all our work. I'll plug one more thing, which is that, if you're interested in the data and want to see what it looked like for different cities, if you go to the bottom, we've actually published all those data sheets Aaron mentioned, with maps to show what these predictions actually look like for the 38 different jurisdictions. So definitely play around with that if you're interested in the data. Aaron Sankin: I also am published at TheMarkup.org. You can find me on Twitter @ASankin. I do want to plug that this story was published in partnership with the technology news site Gizmodo and you can also read it and additional materials on their site as well.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to the brilliant Alex Abad-Santos who wrote “The Open Secret of Looking Like A Superhero” for Vox. Here's what I wrote about it:Actors are increasingly turning to anabolic steroids in order to attain the figures necessary for movies today. While it's not legal in the United States to use steroids or performance-enhancing drugs without a prescription, in the movie business it's not considered cheating the same way it is in sports and obviously isn't tested for. It's part of a larger trend, too: testosterone prescribed to American men tripled from 2001 to 2011, and while it decreased from 2013 to 2016 following renewed warnings from the FDA about risks, it's impossible to study the underground market and HGH is one of the most common drugs to go missing between manufacture and shipping. The long-term health effects of steroids are still little understood, but they're not looking good: One recent long-term study of steroid-using weightlifters found that of 86 steroid users, three had a heart attack before 45, compared to none of the 54 comparison lifters.Alex is one of my favorite culture writers, and he wrote a really incisive story about the impacts that PED use in Hollywood and social media has on viewers. His story peels back the façade set up by the industry and speaks the truth all about how pervasive steroids and hormone usage is in the entertainment businessWe also talked about the pressures pushing actors towards this, from the demise of the mid-budget movie to the dominance of comic book movies, which bring hyper-masculine superheros from the page to the screen. Also, we talked about his favorite topic, the X-Men.Alex can be found at Vox, on Twitter and on Instagram. This interview has been condensed and edited. Alex, thank you so much for coming on.Oh my God. Thank you for having me. And oh my gosh, this is the first time that we're seeing each other IRL.I know. It's weird. Again, I've been a fan of your work for a really long time, so it's great to finally get a chance to hang out.Yeah. I am a fan of yours too. I remember when you were at, was it FiveThirtyEight?That's the number, yeah.FiveThirtyEight. I'm always really bad with the number, with remembering which one it is, but I remember being like, "Oh my gosh, this makes my job so much easier when I can link a study on something about comic books." Yeah, it's just very weird that we only are hanging out now.Yeah. I'm going to chalk it up to the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but—Yes. Blame the pandemic, please.We'll do that. You wrote a really, really fascinating story that talked about a topic that I think everybody kind of alludes to, but I hadn't really seen actual reporting behind and hard data behind. You talked about steroids, and HGH, and testosterone use among movie stars. What got you interested in the story?I think one of the first things that got me interested was, I was looking on my Instagram explore page and I was showing my friend at dinner and I was like, "Why am I having chicken nuggets? This guy looks like this." He was huge, his muscles were crazy, his abs were nuts. And then after that, my friend was just like, "Yo, he's on steroids."And I was like, "Oh." And they were just like, "You know, how everyone in Hollywood is."I'm like, "Oh, is everyone in Hollywood?"And he was just basically like, "Yes." I don't want to get sued, but there's a lot of people out there, if you're in an action movie or if you're with your shirt off, that might not be getting those results naturally. Just no matter how much you're at the weight room, no matter what you're eating, you're never going to look like that. And that was it. I was like, "Maybe I should write a story about this."I liked the story a lot, because particularly there was a part where you talked about, there may have been a time in history where you may have aspired to have the body of the movie stars, but they never were just like, "Oh yeah. No, it's just rest and exercise, I have a meal plan, I have this kind of workout," and they don't talk about them taking a ton of gear. Can you talk a little bit about the cultural place we're at now?I think one of the things that is super important, what the doctors and researchers say, is that everything's on social media now. It's so inundated with all these images, because it's not just a movie that comes out every three months or whatever. People on Instagram are using it, people around you are using it. I think that was the impetus behind it is, well, it's all around us. How is that messing with our own systems and messing with our own brains?If you look at Wolverine in 2000 versus Wolverine in 2014, and by that I mean Hugh Jackman — again, no speculation about what Hugh Jackman looks like or what he did or whatever — but if you look at those two, it's absolutely nuts. The difference of how jacked he is, how thick he is, how small his waist is. Every vein is rippling and you're just like, "Whoa, when did this happen?" And he's actually 14 years older in 2014, which makes no sense, because as doctors say and scientists say, the older you get the harder it should be for you to put muscle on. It's just like, how are you getting that muscle? How are you maintaining that muscle? How is everyone getting this superhuman aesthetic? It's just not possible without some help.And there's a health sacrifice that's made. You included some health studies in there. One of them that has stuck out was the risk of heart disease increased not inconsiderably for folks who were taking performance-enhancing substances.Yeah, I think the craziest thing is that when I was talking to people and I was talking to doctors, I was just like, "Oh, yeah. How do you study this?” And they're like, "We can't study it." I was like, “What do you mean?”And they were like, "Alex, think about it. You can't pump volunteers full of steroids. You can't pump them full of steroids to an unsafe level, which is what body builders, what some actors, what everyone basically is on. You can't sign up for the super soldier serum." They were just like, "It's actually medically unethical."A lot of the things that they're studying now actually happens all by volunteers, and they study on animals too. But with those human volunteers, you have people that were in the '80s and in the '90s who took it, and then now they're hitting middle age and up to their 60s, and the crazy part is that now they're finding out those people in their 60s actually might have heart disease or have these hardened arteries, and they also might be more susceptible to stroke. It's hard to get that across to someone who's young, who is like, "Well, if I can become an Instagram influencer and make a lot of money now, I don't care about heart disease when I'm 70. Who's to say there's even going to be a world when we're 70?" Or, "Who's going to say you might get a heart attack anyway?"It's hard to justify to young people and young men, especially, "Yes, be careful about this thing that will happen in X years, maybe," which is very, very difficult for scientists to get the point across.Yeah. We've been seeing a lot of that lately, I feel. Risk communication difficulties.I think the craziest stat, or the scariest thing that someone told me was, there's a leading doctor over in Harvard and he was just like, "Yeah, it's kind of reminds me of what happened with smoking and lung cancer.” There was some point where they were just like, “Oh yeah, they're connected,” and then it was too late, and then all this stuff started coming in. So he said, "Yeah, we're on the crest of that."It was also really interesting because legally, these things are illegal. People had mostly heard about them through athletics, where they're understandably and justifiably banned because they can diminish the competition. There is no World Anti-Doping Agency of acting, and you kind of allude to that's one reason that this has been so pervasive.Yeah. Acting is not professional baseball. No one is going to stop you. I doubt that there is a drug test that's happening and also, I think for the people whose livelihood depends on looking a certain way, it's a business decision, right?Yeah.Let's say you are an Instagram influencer and you're not even in a Marvel movie, but you're an Instagram influencer, and you're getting paid whatever, $40,000 a post to post, and basically you're selling your body and you want your body to look great, that is what you do. Or that is what some of them do. I do not want to get you sued. I don't want to get sued. Allegedly that is what some of them do. We're talking about a percentage that is not 100 percent but is also not 0 percent of people who are involved in the visual arts industry.It's an industry that is built on the way they look. So to maximize that and to look the part, that's what happens, in addition to diet, eating, exercise.It's also interesting because again, this isn't a vacuum. This is aspirational. You wrote a little bit in the piece about the increase in whether it's supplemental hormonal prescriptions, or whether it's actual performance-enhancing drugs that are legal, that have seen a little bit of a surge popularity as well, potentially pushed by this.Yeah. So I think you and I have probably seen Low T Centers.Totally, I am a man who is aged 30ish and therefore I have been advertised this relentlessly on every podcast I listened to for the past probably five years.Testosterone is monitored by the Olympics and whatever, and if it's too high, they will ban you from the Olympics. So yes, testosterone is a performance-enhancing drug. One of the things that I think is a little bit shady — and there probably needs to be a better investigation of this, I think CBS did a good one in 2019, I think COVID derailed it — but it was: who's getting these prescriptions? Because you go to these places and you get a prescription and it's just like, "Well, do you actually have low testosterone, or are you just a normal man who is aging?"From that investigation, they were just like, "Yes, I think there are a lot of people with normal levels who are getting these drugs, and that cannot be good for you," because with any of these drugs, it could just screw you up on the inside in so many ways.Overuse and misuse when it comes to the endocrine system isn't always a fun one.You don't want to be pumping yourself up with a lot of hormones. Compared to everything else we're putting in our bodies, do you really want to add all that stuff?And to be clear, hormonal therapy is a critical thing for a lot of folks, but they do it under the supervision of a doctor, not a pill mill.Right. That is where a lot of these drugs come from, is that they were used as part of hormone therapy under the supervision of doctors. The doses are scientific, they've gone through trials of these small doses and they use them. I think with human growth hormone, they started with children, and children who didn't grow up fast enough or aren't growing. Then if you talk to doctors, they're just like, "Yeah. No one with normal levels of hormones should be on these things because we don't know all that they can do to you."To your point, the difference in, think of an action star in 2001, maybe an X-Men movie of sorts, who can possibly say, and then think of an action star 14 to 15 years later, and it's a completely different type of look.Yeah. To be honest, and I feel like I am part of the problem, I will be like, "Yes, Chris Evans looks amazing."Because he does! But then it's also, how much of that is realistic? And nothing against Chris Evans. I'm sure he does the diet, the eating, the whatever, basically ruining his social life to look a certain way. I'm not accusing him of any PEDs or anything, just to be clear. But it's also, that is probably not attainable for the rest of us.Just the simple fact that we don't have chefs and trainers training us every day. But it's also just of course, if someone finds out that someone might be on a PED — and there have been actors who have been busted with PEDs before — they're going to look on the internet, you're probably going to find some information out there and then you're going to seek it out, and then you have the problem.I think when we talk about the community, it's also there's a lot of young boys out there who just see this and it's drilled in their heads that this is what men are supposed to look like, and that's led to this increase of what is called muscular dysmorphia and people feeling that they're too small, that they're not big enough. So yes, you will also see them resort to PEDs, and that also makes doctors and psychiatrists very, very nervous because you have 11-year-olds photoshopping their bodiesI think it goes without saying, I think the narrative around women and female celebrities has been the way we talk about beauty and diets and whatnot, it's been like almost to the opposite point that it's almost talked about too much right? With men, it's just like, "Oh, well then it's all just hard work," and it's left in the dark. Whereas women are like, "Okay, well this is the eating disorder. This is X, Y, Z. This is the surgeries." With men, it's always like, "Oh, well this is what men are supposed to look like," and that lack of transparency, I think hurts us.Yeah. The magazine that presents body dysmorphia for women is called Cosmopolitan, and the one for men is called Men's Health. There's an asymmetry in how it is being described there.Right. It's a very strange thing that what women achieve to look impossible is all artificial, all fake, whereas with men who look impossible or who have these impossible gains, it's all just “hard work.” It's all “hard work” and “chicken breast.”Just rice and chicken. I don't know what to tell you.I love rice, I love chicken. I do not look like that.I want to back out a little bit just because again, glad to have you on, and specifically it would be a crime to have you on and not talk about X-Men and comic book movies. I guess, one of the motivations potentially for this is that you've gone from action movies being like Con Air, and random shoot 'em ups, to being comic book movies which are pulled directly from a source material that has aspirational bodily forms. How much of that do you think plays into it?There's a whole bigger story of the movie business, You covered this and you probably know this. The whole idea of a mid-budget movie is gone.Nonexistent.And the only way studios make movies is just to mine IP, come out with action movies, make sequels to those action movies and just keep these cinematic universes spinning. The only movies that make a ton of money now are the action movies, and it's just, obviously every studio wants an action movie. I think one of the things is that the actors, and actresses too, who are the centers of these movies or who want to get big, you have to look the part, right?If you want to become a star in Hollywood, you have to be in a Marvel movie, like Chris Pratt. Look at Chris Pratt.Yeah. He went from a fluffy, fun comedian guy to he looks hard now. Yeah. This whole idea of this aesthetic, and it's not absolutely wed to this, but I'm sure it's influenced by this. Yes, action movies are everywhere now. They're the only movies that people go to the movie theaters for. Everyone wants to look bigger, bolder, badder, crazier. Did you see Vin Diesel, he sent out an olive branch to The Rock the other day?Is that what we're calling that? Yeah, I saw that.No, it was like, "Hey, let's quash the beef and come back for Fast and Furious 10," right?Yeah. There's something interesting about the photograph though. Would you like to get into that?Well, someone was like, "Yeah. Did Vin Diesel photoshop himself to look bigger than The Rock?" And people were like, "??? What is happening?" Again, nothing against Vin Diesel, we're not speculating here, but that is just a very funny thing that happens in this climate of everything is an action movie now, or the movie business is an action star business.Not to bring him up a third time, but I just think that his career is really interesting in this regard, where Hugh Jackman, the minute that he didn't have to keep making comic book movies, he made a musical and then he had fun. You can tell that there were just a lot of career pressures on folks within the industry, who are trying to remain in it, to just get huge.Yeah. I think with Hugh Jackman, he's the easiest example of what the aesthetic looked like, just because he was there at the very beginning.And at the very beginning it was like, "Oh, he's hot." They were like, "Oh, Wolverine's so hot. Look at Wolverine." And then 15 years later, Wolverine is 50 years old, still hot, hotter than he was, his body is better than he was. And it's a little nuts because that's not the way it's supposed to work, but yes.At least we didn't have to pump Sir Ian McKellen full of gas in order to get the Magneto of the comic books, right?Who knows what'll happen? If there's a reboot, if there's a House of X reboot, and Magneto is now daddy. Magneto now in comic books is always shirtless or in a robe and his pecs are crazy.It got interesting. Yeah.Who knows what'll happen when The X-Men finally make it, and if they make Magneto as big as he's supposed to be in the comic books?Yeah. Screw it, let's talk about this. You've been following The X-Men for a very long time. They are your favorite character; you are, if anything, the dean of X-Twitter and—No, no, no.No?The dean is Connor Goldsmith. I am just an assistant professor.An assistant professor of X-Men. Excellent.Yeah.So clearly there's been a lot of speculation about them and the MCU. Do you want to talk a little bit about the journey that they've had and what's been maybe drawing your eye in the books?Oh my gosh. Do we have 17 hours to talk about this?Yeah. Screw it, we'll go.You know how it is. It's just X-Men, because of the way the film rights were divided. X-Men went to Fox, Marvel kept Marvel, and then basically, X-Men movies made a ton of money for Fox. Fox kept mining that IP. Finally, they're all back together with the acquisition and everyone's just like, "Well, can we get the X-Men movie?" And to me, I think as someone who sees this from it's part of my job to figure out what the schedule looks like and what's happening, it just seems there's no space for The X-Men in the next five years.It seems like it's going to be a minute. It seems like we got an Eternals movie before we got an X-Men movie.Oh, the Eternals. Also, remember we got the Inhumans before The X-Men, and it was just like, "Ooh"?I've told this story once or twice before. I forget if you know it. So when I was at ABC, I was doing a show occasionally talking to people who worked with Marvel for the Marvel adaptations.Right.And one week, after we're doing this for two years, they pull me aside like, "Listen, hey, we might have an actual show here. You might be doing an aftershow. You might be the aftershow host for a new show that's coming out." And I'm like, "Wow, that's really amazing." They're like, "Yeah, it's called the Inhumans. It's coming out on Friday nights to ABC." And then I think that they got the pilot in and then they pulled me and said, "Actually, we're not doing this. We're not doing the show anymore." So that was my big break that did not materialize.I don't understand why you have an Inhumans — Okay. For anyone that's read the comic books, there is a central figure named Medusa, whose power is she has very strong hair that also is sentient and she can control it. And then in the very first episode or something, they shave her head.It's just like, "What are you doing?"Well in doing so, they removed the entire CGI budget that had been allocated for hair.But yeah, X-Men; I think what makes me want to see X-Men come to life is because in the last, I want to say three years, House of X came out with Hickman writing, and Hickman and a lot of writers and a lot of artists, and I don't want to forget any of their names — but yes, it was masterminded by Hickman, and he basically, I guess rebooted, rejiggered, just reestablished The X-Men in a way that I think was very, very smart.For folks who might not know about Hickman, he ran the Fantastic Four books for a while and did a really incredible job with those. Those are some of my favorite comics. Then he ran the Avengers for a while and completely overhauled the Marvel universe in a way that people actually kind of liked, which is usually not a thing that is said after somebody completely does that.And they toss him the keys to X, and this is the run that you're talking about.Yeah. So basically, he came off of Secret Wars, which basically just revamped the entire universe and was like, "Okay, well we're reestablishing that. So here, have a go at X-Men." And for those who don't know, the idea is the revamp is pegged to this woman and character, a beloved character named Moira MacTaggert. We find out that she is a mutant and every time she dies, she basically restarts the timeline and she's been doing this the entire time. And when she restarts the timeline, she also carries with her the knowledge of the previous timelines. So basically, she's just like, "Hey, Professor X, everything's going to go sideways. Everyone's going to get fucked up. This is what we got to do. We got to make a mutant utopia and we're going to create a community on a sentient island and it's going to be great, and this is how we advance the mutant race." Did I get that right?I would say that you did a fantastic job for about three minutes.But, it's X-Men, and they're messy and everything in between, of course, all the politics are crazy because it's just Magneto and Professor X have very different views about how mutants should be. Emma Frost has very different views about how mutants should conduct themselves with humans. But yeah, basically the mutants are like, "Well, we ascended to a higher plane. We are awesome. You can't f**k with us anymore." They basically buy off the entire world's governments with medicines and are just like, "Now you're dependent on us. We're the superior race. You're only here because we allow it. Please don't try and f**k with us because we will kill you." Basically they were just like, "Coexisting isn't an option because you guys always try and f**k us up and kill us. So we're just going to take that out of the equation now. Now that we know how everything's going to play out, we're going to take that out of the equation."There's been speculation, because Hickman's work lends itself well cinematically, that this could be the way that they take he X-Men next.It could be. Hopefully, I'm still alive and the earth is still here when this happens because like I said, the Disney Marvel schedule of everything that is coming out, it's every three years they do one of these conferences and they're always like, "This is coming out, and this is coming out, and this is coming out." They did one today and Agatha Harkness has her own show, and they're continuing the X-Men animated versions. There's just so much coming out at this point, and if anyone's doing math and there should be two or three movies a year, we're pretty stacked until like 2025. Right?Yeah.Between all the sequels that are coming out, we are very, very busy until 2025. But I do want to see the X-Men because I feel like those are the characters that... I don't know. I just love them. I grew up reading them, I watched the television show all the time, and it'd just be nice to have them get the same kind of treatment that the Avengers have gotten.Yeah. They're fun. They're heady. The thing that's, I think a little cursed about it at times, is when Marvel was going out of business in the early '90s, the things that they sold were the things that were the most culturally significant, namely the X-Men, Spider-Man and Hulk. Those are some of the best stories. There's a really deep reservoir there, which is one reason that it was so attractive for acquisition. But that's also the exact same thing that's kept them off the board potentially for the next couple years.Yeah. It's also, let's say hypothetically, if Marvel still had the X-Men, I don't think you would ever see an Avengers movie. You would never see a Scarlet Witch miniseries, because it would fall in that pattern of, "Let's just keep really releasing X-Men movies." It's just like, "We'll keep releasing these trilogies to go around in a circle because they make a ton of money," right?Yeah. If you did have a Scarlet Witch miniseries, it would be a spinoff of your Magneto miniseries.Yeah. But it's also what forced Marvel to do this entire cinematic universe. People don't know that the... Casual fans don't know that the Avengers were basically the B team. They were such a B team.I'm not going to get into spoilers for Eternals, but I was watching the movie with a few friends and then one of them was just like, "Oh, who is this character?" who is revealed. It's like, "Oh, that's an F-list character and a D-list movie." What they're dealing with is remarkable. What they're getting out of it is great because again, Chloé Zhao is a really great director, but it is just wild that the X-Men are the A-team and have been the A-team since the '80s, and then by a twist of intellectual property ownership fate, all of a sudden they're on the sidelines.Yeah. If you look at the comic book sales from the '80s and '90s, you could have come out with a title that was like X-Grandmas, and it would be a top-10 bestseller because people could not get enough of The X-Men, and it's just, now we're getting Eternals and probably an Eternals spinoff before we get to see Storm and Professor X, and Emma Frost, and all my favorite characters just be goofy in the MCU.Yeah. The Avengers weren't even the B team. The B team was X-Force.Yes. We are being very generous to the Avengers when I was calling them the JV or B team. There was Excalibur, X-Factor, X-Force. I forgot X-Tremes probably. There was an X-Men Blue team, an X-Men Gold team. It was literally every X-comic was a top-10 in the '90s.Yeah. Well, and then here we are now.Hey, thank you so much for coming on. This has been really great. I love the story. I love your work in general. It's great to talk about X-Men with you for a few minutes, and thank you.Oh, let's do you. I want to know who your favorite X-Men character is.Good question. So I was introduced to them through the movies and I was like, "Oh yeah, this Pyro guy and this Iceman guy, they must be the big rivals in the comic," and then they're not. The answer is obviously Magneto. I think that Magneto is the greatest character ever made, and I think he makes a lot of valid points a lot of the time, and I think that it is just a really cool character. I know that he's not an X-Man technically, but—I mean, he is. In the new world, there are basically no X-Men, everyone's just a mutant.They domesticated my boy. He's a Brotherhood of Evil Mutant.You? Emma Frost, is that right?Emma Frost. Emma Frost was always right. If you look at every comic, Emma Frost is always right. The world would be a better place if we just put Emma Frost in charge. She'd be like, "You know what? We could have just completely sidestepped the decimation of the mutant race if you'd just listened to me."I think that we're both right. I think that Emma Frost was always right, but Magneto did make some valid points.Magneto makes all the points. I think especially now, when you think about the political climate and what Magneto says, you're just like, "You know what? Yes." The way things are going and what we've seen so far, I think the older you get, you're like, "Yeah. You know what? He was probably right about this."All right. So Alex, where can folks find you?You can find me on Vox, you can find me on Twitter but I'm usually just making dumb jokes. I think Twitter is kind of a hellscape for everyone, I think you should just be making jokes on Twitter and that should be it. I'm also Instagram but, that's just like really weird shirtless content. Yes, so Vox.com, find me on Twitter, and if you want to see shirtless content and you're a homo come visit my Instagram it's it's free for everyone.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Sarah Frier, the author of No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram. The past two weeks has revealed a great deal of information about how Instagram and Facebook operate thanks for the most part to a trove of documents published by The Wall Street Journal. Sarah's covered the inner workings of Instagram and its tenuous relationship with Facebook for a long time, and with her book now coming out in paperback this week I wanted to talk to her about what we've just learned, how Facebook got more powerful in the pandemic, what we've always known about Facebook, and how deep into this company's culture this goes. Sarah can be found at Bloomberg where she runs the big tech team, she's on Twitter and the book No Filter is available wherever books are sold. This interview has been condensed and edited. Sarah you are the author of No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, that this week is coming out in paperback. Can you tell us a little bit about the book?No Filter is the first book to give the behind-the-scenes story of how Instagram came to be so powerful, have so much of a hold over our culture, over our economy, over our sense of self. I think that the paperback comes out at a time that the app has just become even more relevant. You would think that an app that was about measuring us socially and sharing our experiences would maybe dwindle during a deadly pandemic that forces us to stay inside, but in fact, when we remained at home, we scrolled more, and we shared more. Some of the in-person stuff we were doing became on Instagram and some of the small businesses that were trying to figure out how to sell stuff with their doors closed shifted to Instagram.It's just become an even more relevant story today. I know I'm biased, but with the book, what I try to do is I didn't want to just tell the corporate story. I wanted to tell the story of how those internal decisions affected us on the outside, changed our culture, changed our world. And hopefully people who read it will feel that way.I really enjoyed the cultural parts. I enjoyed the rise of influencer culture and how kind of cultivated that all was. To your point, that has only gotten more significant in the past year.There's been a couple of recent revelations about Facebook and Instagram in particular that echo some of the stuff that you wrote about. Do you want to talk a little bit about what the past two or three weeks have been for Facebook and Instagram?Oh, my goodness. They've had to reckon with some truths here from the Wall Street Journal. They had an incredible leak of documents. They called them the Facebook Files, and they just were probably very painful if you're a Facebook employee because these are the stories that they've tried to tamp down on. When Congressmen and women have asked Facebook, "Is Instagram harmful for teens?" Their response is always, "Oh, the research is mixed." Well, this shows definitively in their own internal research that, yes, they know that it's harmful for teen body image for girls and boys.The Journal had several parts of the investigation, some of them have to do with Facebook Inc. One really uncovered how the company does not have appropriate staff in countries where it's in languages where it just simply doesn't have people to moderate that content. This is a product used by more than 3 billion people around the world, and when you consider that fact, it's more than half of the world's internet connected population.These products have just enormous impact and they're all controlled by a single person who doesn't want us to think anything badly about them. And so, they consistently obfuscate the truth. They make sure that there's nothing out there that could be negative for Facebook or Instagram. And in doing so, are totally disingenuous because of course there's stuff that is real awful that is happening on their platforms.On that note, one thing I really liked about your book, was that it was kind of very personal, describing the relationship between Kevin Systrom and Mark Zuckerberg. And at the time, it can kind of be like, "Oh, is this just drama between two dudes who are very powerful?" But to your point, it is one person who controls this entire ecosystem. Do you want to get into that?Well, I think it's a huge challenge for Facebook, that they have all the voting power, all of the control, centered in this one person who has not surrounded himself with anyone that will critique him. He just simply isn't trusted anymore. If you're using Facebook, you've been lied to so many times or you've been misled so many times, that it's simply is not a product that you can trust, at least not under Mark Zuckerberg's leadership.I think that this company has only given him more power over time. I think that in the Instagram story, you'll see that he is working to consolidate power at Facebook, taking more control over the future of Instagram, more control over the future of WhatsApp, and Oculus and integrating that into the core product. And Facebook Inc is not as important as Facebook, the Social Network. I mean, that's really the core of it all. That's his brainchild that he wants to survive.It's just incredible how the company is attempting to pretend like it doesn't do anything wrong. I was talking with some colleagues the other day, and we were talking about the fact that Facebook doesn't just come out and say, "Listen, the reason we do it this way is because we're a business and we need to money. And if we did it the way you're saying we should do it, well, that might be better for our users, but we lose a ton of money."Right.That would be honest.The tobacco companies did that for years. And it's a viable, straightforward argument in the United States. There is something said for, "I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders to maximize profit, which is why I'm making the decisions that I'm making."Facebook has never said that, ever.It's always like, "No, it's good."They're saying, "Listen, we have the interests of our users, first and foremost. Privacy is at the foundation of our business. Wellbeing, we are making incredible investments." All of these things, over and over and over become these lines in PR. But ultimately, yeah, Facebook is a business and their main objective is to grow.Can you get into their growth because even in the past year, it's been substantial since we last chatted?With the pandemic, there were fewer things that you could do in person, whether that was shopping or going to a concert or hanging out with your friends. Facebook, and especially Instagram, took advantage of that shift and moved a lot of our offline activity online, especially in the case of small businesses. Now they're leaning hard into content creators. I think that they're trying to make this trend exist beyond the pandemic, whenever that may end. That's the case with all the tech companies. You saw Amazon get more powerful, you saw Google get more powerful, because these companies are now the infrastructure of our society. They're almost as crucial as any of the roads we use. It's just like, this is how we live, is through Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Google, especially in a mode where we've been forced, virtually.To that end, what you're kind of describing there is getting utility-esque. Right? And we've seen some stuff from the FTC this year. What's kind of been going on, on that end, because it seems like they've been playing a little bit of tennis with the courts?Yes. So, what you're referring to is a monopoly claim from the FTC that Facebook has just way too much power over our social interactions. And so much so, that it is considered a monopoly. And that monopoly has been enriched by the purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp, purchases that the FTC considers to be anti-competitive.Because if you look at what internal documents show, and if you read, No Filter, of course, you will see that the reason that mark Zuckerberg buys Instagram is to quash a competitor.Really? The entire reason?Well, absolutely. I mean, he would rather own it than have someone else own it. He would like for Facebook to be somewhere in mobile. At the time, they didn't have really, a mobile strategy. And one of the things that points to this, there's an anecdote in my book where Instagram comes and joins Facebook HQ. The acquisition was announced for a billion dollars, and was the most anyone ever paid for a mobile app.And in the first weeks that they're there, the growth team at Facebook says, "I'm sorry, but we really can't help you grow until we find out if you are a threat to sharing on Facebook."Huh?So, they ran a study to see if Instagram was threatening Facebook. They were willing to let it wither, this incredible investment, if it was going to be a problem for Facebook down the road. And then you see that later, when Zuckerberg sees Instagram becoming more popular, really on that ramp to a billion users.It coincides with this time that we're all scrutinizing Facebook a lot more, after Donald Trump is elected president, the spread of misinformation on Facebook is scrutinized, violent live video, et cetera, et cetera, privacy scandals come about. And Zuckerberg is thinking, "The reason people may not be using Facebook so much is because they have this alternative, that we've been pumping resources into. So, maybe the problem is that we should be directing more attention from Instagram to Facebook."It's at the root of a lot of personal difficulties between the founders.It was jealousy.Seems like a fascinating way to run a business.Yeah, because he owns Instagram. Right? He owns this product that's incredibly successful and he doesn't want it to cannibalize. That's the word they use internally. He doesn't want it to cannibalize Facebook.Again, that sounds a little like buying rival businesses, in order to guarantee that they don't undermine me. That sounds extremely anticompetitive. Oh, you mean, buying something so that they won't compete with you, is anti-competitive? Yeah.That's the definition. But, the law is a little squishy on this. If you and I look at this and say, "Okay, is Instagram a part of Facebook strategy to quash competitors?" Of course, it is. They have a version of every competing product. They have reels to compete with TikTok, they have IGTV to compete with YouTube. They have highlights to compete with all sorts of stuff. There's this infrastructure of things. If you break down every product in Instagram, it correlates with something else outside. And Instagram's purpose within Facebook is really to be the product that brings in that audience. And compared to other products at Facebook, they're doing a much better job. That's about that longevity, that's about the continued domination of Facebook around the world.If I may. some of my favorite things in your book were just how initially Facebook was worried about Twitter. And they used Instagram to really kind of poach stuff away from Twitter. And I'm almost kind of wondering is Facebook the quarterback in this situation and they're using Instagram kind of like a lineman? Really just the thing that hits the threats, in order to preserve home base of Facebook?Yeah, I would say that, that's a pretty good interpretation because when you look at something like reels, do we need reels? Do people need that on Instagram? When Instagram still had its founders and they copied Snapchat stories, Snapchat was a threat for sure, especially among that younger demographic. But there was also a real reason that they needed to do it for their user base because people were incredibly anxious about posting on Instagram. And that anxiety was actually bad for growth. Because if you don't think that your life is worth posting about, you are going to post less. And when you look at Instagram, it's not going to be full of content from your friends who were also all anxious, it's going to be content from celebrities. And then you'll think, "Nobody hangs out here anymore." And the app dies. That was the thesis of why they did Instagram stories, so there would be some lower pressure way to post on Instagram. But when you think about reels, the reason for reels was, "Oh my God, everybody loves TikTok. We need reels." And then, you are Mark Zuckerberg solving a business problem. You're not Instagram solving a user problem.It seems like TikTok is really giving them a real run for their money. I know that Snapchat took a ding from the adaptation of stories, but is actually kind of still doing decently to this day. But TikTok really seems like it's been the first thing that really has kind of stolen Instagram's thunder, particularly in the past year.Well, I would say that TikTok, yes, in part, because Facebook is so determined to move in the same direction that TikTok is moving. One of the things that's interesting about Snapchat is they're trying to do things in their own unique way. It's a little quirky and it doesn't necessarily fit with what you expect every social network to be doing.But Instagram is kind of just hitting back with the same play. And I think that in that sense, you get an app that strays a little bit from its purpose. And when you think about what Instagram's purpose is now, it used to be very clear. There's a place where you go to share the highlights of your life, and make your life appear more beautiful and perfect than it actually is. And discover corners of society that maybe you didn't know about before.Now, you have reels, you have IGTV, you have regular posts, you have Explore, you have all of these different components of Instagram. You have direct messaging, which is combined with Facebook messenger. You have text posts, you have memes. It's just like, it's everything to everyone.And I think that that becomes difficult.That's really interesting. There's one thing that I wanted to talk about from your book that has to do kind of with the recent news, and that has to do with kind of teens using Facebook. A lot of what you cover in the book is just how development happened on the platform for a while, that really came from its user base. Like, teens came up with the idea of making Finstas and they had to find out — why are Finstas a thing?And then, I guess, I'm kind of curious, as we kind of saw with some of the recent revelations, this isn't really a particularly healthy platform for its users. Can you just expand on some of the stuff that you wrote about in the book when it came to youth users, and then how that kind of reflects on some of the things that we've seen in the past two weeks?Yeah, I talked a little bit about this, about the intense anxiety for posting on Instagram and why that was bad. But Instagram didn't really look into this, in any formal way until around 2015. And when they did, they heard a lot from teens about how hard it was on them to keep up appearances on Instagram. And teens had all sorts of strategies. Some would just delete their entire grid of photos every month and post a new one, or they would try to find a way to, as you said, have a fake Instagram, which is really their real Instagram. And, of course, they use things like filters for their faces to make themselves appear more attractive, get rid of their acne, whiten their teeth, whatever the case may be.The way that Instagram learned a lot more about teens is they would have this Thursday teen observation, where they would have a bunch of product people, sometimes including Instagram's CEO, sitting at this table. And there was this one way mirror and the teens are on the other side discussing the new products that Instagram is building. And they often don't know that it's Instagram building them. But all the things that they're saying about it are being observed by this internal team drinking a bottle of wine on a Thursday night.That's wild.And that's how the product development works at Facebook. I mean, there's a lot of focus grouping, a lot of observation. The goal isn't like, "Let's make sure this is a product that's healthy for our users.", as much as it's, "Are people going to use this? Is it going to increase their time spent on the platform? Is it going to increase engagement with Instagram? Is it going to improve our retention?" All of those things.Remind me — I think that some of the things that came out — were there opportunities to install fixes, whether it was on Facebook or Instagram, I don't recall which. But that got shut down because engagement did not go up.Right. If there is a solution to some wellbeing problem that also dings at engagement, it's really just not going to work. I mean, look what they did, they were going to get rid of likes, and they'll say that they did, but the likes still exist. You can just hide them. And that's the way that they've done a lot of their wellbeing initiatives. For example, if you want to not see all of the comments that are calling you a slut, you just mute the word, slut. Right?Oh, God.But that doesn't mean that you're not getting those comments. And if you're being attacked, you kind of want to see it. I think that, that's the problem with likes too. If you're hiding your likes, but you're still getting that score every day on your photos it's like telling someone, "You can have a test, but we're not going to show you the grade, if you don't want to see it." Everyone wants to see what grade they got on the test. It's irresistible.And it's not just the likes. It's the followers, it's the comments, it's the views on your stories, the order of people who view your story, everything gets obsessive. You can turn your account into a business account and see, "Oh, I have an audience that is more heavily female and concentrated in Brazil. And they look at my profile in between the hours of 4:00 and 6:00 PM most." If you are a young person in the world, you can know that much about what people think about you. It's not a real measure of how relevant or popular or interesting or exciting your life is. It is a measure of how well you're playing the game.You're in charge of big tech coverage at Bloomberg. In the end of September, they had an editorial that basically said, "Instagram is no place for kids." But also, stop me if they canceled this, but Facebook is literally building an Instagram for kids. [Ed note: the day after we recorded this they did in fact delay it] At a certain point, are they going to have an obligation under any of the online protection acts that we have for children who use the internet? At what point does this become more of a liability for them than anything else?Well, that is certainly something that everyone in Washington is up in arms about, on both sides of the aisle. We've seen a lot of screaming matches, a lot of strongly worded emails. The question is can you stop them from doing it? I don't really think that you can.They did roll out Messenger Kids. And that, of course, had a lot of similar concerns and privacy issues. But the product has been relatively successful. We haven't gotten strong numbers, but it does exist and it is used. I think Instagram, it's hard to make an Instagram for kids that doesn't use tons of images of children in it. Right? Instagram is about images.So, I'm curious to see what that product looks like. The thesis is that kids use Instagram no matter what. So, we want to make a safe space for them. But Instagram hasn't made a very strong effort to root out the under-13 audience on Instagram. They've made a few steps towards better age verification, but it's really easy to find nine year olds hanging out on Instagram and just using it the way we all use it.It sounds a little bit like what the tobacco industry had to deal with. Again, underage smoking was not considered a very good thing. It happened, absolutely. And they got dinged for not doing enough to stop it. And it wasn't particularly healthy for anyone involved in it.That, though, is a very highly regulated industry now. And this social media industry, I mean, how do you even regulate it? It's speech by people. If you are the government and you say, "Well, we don't want Facebook to show anyone anti-vaccine misinformation." Well, then you have to define that. It just gets really complicated. In that category, of course, the science has changed over the course of many months.It's a tricky problem to solve. What I hope happens when people read the book is they understand the infrastructure of these products, the motivations of these executives, the grow-at-all-costs mentality at Facebook, and are able to make healthier decisions for themselves, informed decisions about how they want to use the products with some level of intention. And maybe that's a way to help it be healthier.All right. So, to make an informed decision, you have got to be informed and the book is No Filter. It won a bunch of best book awards last year, right? Like NPR, the Economist, I think McKinsey, rightIt was the Financial Times McKinsey Business Book of the Year, which was very exciting!Very cool! And it's out in paperback now, and folks can get it anywhere.Anywhere. Anywhere books are sold, eBooks, audio books, it's there,Sick. And then where can folks find you?I am on Twitter and Instagram and everywhere that people are on the internet these days.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Ben Casselman of the New York Times who wrote “The Pandemic Changed How We Spent Our Time” and “More phone calls, less shopping: how the pandemic changed American lives, down to the minute” with Ella Koeze. Here's what I wrote about it:The American Time Use Survey for 2020 dropped, and needless to say it turns out people may have altered their behavior somewhat. Parents with kids in school spent an additional 1.6 hours per day providing secondary child care, while layoffs meant the average time spent working was down 17 minutes per day. The biggest winners of time were telephone calls (up 61.5 percent), lawn and garden care (30.8 percent), and relaxing and leisure (up 17.6 percent); the biggest losers were travel related to work (down 33.1 percent), shopping (21.8 percent), and socializing and communicating (16.1 percent). Somewhat distressingly, the average amount of time spent grooming fell 10.7 percent, from 41 minutes to 36 minutes. The survey didn't break out the specific amount of time Americans spent saying, “You're muted, Kevin, your mic is off,” but Numlock's own preliminary estimates are forecasting a 200 percent increase. Ben's a favorite guest on the Sunday editions. We were colleagues at FiveThirtyEight and he's one of the smartest people covering business and economics out there. This week, we talked all about his coverage of the latest data from the American Time Use Survey, a wild annual data collection carried out by the Department of Labor that shows how Americans spend their days. This latest edition includes the pandemic year's data, so it's an intriguing look at how people spent their time in 2020. Ben can be found at The New York Times and on Twitter at @BenCasselmanThis interview has been condensed and edited. You wrote a bunch of really cool stories dissecting the latest from a very interesting American Time Use Survey. Can you tell us a little bit about what this survey is and what makes this year's particularly interesting?The time use survey is this crazy thing, it's kind of a goldmine for us data nerds. It's done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics every year. And they literally ask people, thousands of people to track one day of their daily life in extreme detail. Like, I woke up at this time, and I brush my teeth and wash my hair from 7:15 to 7:18, and then I eat breakfast until 7:23, or whatever. It's categorized in all sorts of different ways. It's a nationally representative survey, so you can break it down by sex, and race, and age, and all of these things. Normally we use it to understand the long, slow shifts in the economy, and in society, and in American life, right?We're spending more time on our screens than we used to, commutes have gotten longer, all of these sorts of things that we track over years and decades. And then of course, as with so many things, this year was an unusual one. The Time Use Survey actually stopped collecting data for a couple of months in the heart of the pandemic. You can kind of imagine why they maybe weren't so focused on that. But starting in May, they picked it back up again, and so we get this amazing picture of how life looked in the pandemic and the longer-running months of the pandemic and how that compares to normal. It's this amazing breakdown of all of the ways in which the pandemic disrupted our lives.Yeah. You had two really good stories with your colleague and my former colleague Ella Koeze basically going into how different events and hobbies and things may have surged or whatnot. You wrote among some of the biggest increases were telephone calls, lawn and garden care, relaxing and leisure. What else kind of took a hit and what else really surged in the pandemic year?Look, some of the things are pretty obvious, right? We spent a lot less time commuting last year. We spent a lot more time taking care of kids last year, although that one's a little complicated and maybe we can talk more about it.I want to get into that in a little bit, yeah.We spent a lot of time on Zoom calls, and telephone calls, and all of those kinds of communication. We spent a lot less time socializing, et cetera. There are some that are maybe a little bit less obvious. We spent less time working, but that's because a lot fewer people were working. Most of these numbers are just sort of total population wide averages, so if fewer people are working, that's less time on average. But actually among the people who worked, they worked about the same amount last year as they worked in 2019.And then there's sort of like smaller ones: we actually spent a little more time sleeping last year, which is interesting. We spent more time cooking. More time, as you mentioned, on lawn care, taking care of the house, taking care of ourselves, more time exercising. Less time grooming, no big surprise there, if you've noticed anybody's hair getting long on the Zoom calls. In some ways, it's those little things I think that are actually the more telling.Staying on work a little bit, I forget if this was in the first or the second story, but you wrote about when people were working, more were still going into work than I think a lot of folks, who have either a white collar job or transitioned to Zoom, may have gave credit.I mean, I think that this is something. There were a lot of ways in which this data and people's response to the data really kind of reveals the bubbles that we all live in. Most people who were working were still working in person last year. Now, remember, this is data from sort of mid-May through the end of the year. It may have looked a little bit different in that late March, April, early May period, when the lockdowns were at their most intense. But a lot of people were still going into work every day last year. You can really see that when you look at the breakdowns by education for example, or by race, or by industry, sort of how unequal this fundamentally was.If you had a graduate degree, you probably spent most of your time last year working from home. First of all, you were more likely to keep your job, right? Because you were more likely to work in an industry where you were able to keep working and then you were probably able to do it from home. If you look at the chart for people with a high school diploma or less, there's like very little increase in at-home work. Basically you either lost your job or you were going in person. There aren't a lot of jobs that require only a high school diploma where you have the luxury of being able to work from home.It is just like a really striking series of charts. Office versus home is really just unaffected for high school or less. And then among "some college", it's a little bit effected. Bachelor degree kind of went from being a little bit skewed to about half and half hours at home versus hours in a workplace. But grad degree it's a cross.Yeah. I mean, it just, it goes straight from people spend more time working in the office to people spending less time there. It's about a three hour swing. Again, these are averages. So in many cases, that's people going full-time into working from home. But yeah, it's a three hour swing on average of people working more at home versus in the office.You had really interesting findings around motherhood last year. It seemed like parenting absolutely shifted in some significant ways, but the way the asymmetries worked out really kind of seemed to be a discussion about either unmarried mothers or never-married mothers versus mothers in general, about how parents cared for their kids. What did you find?Childcare was one of the ones we sort of knew at the outset was just bound to be a really interesting question. Obviously anybody who had kids in the past year knows what an insane year this was for parents. Pretty much anybody who didn't have kids, I think, was aware as well, as they saw kids popping onto Zoom calls, and seeing parents suddenly disappear from the screen as they went to pursue some unseen crash off screen. The American Time Use Survey mostly tracks what would be called your primary activity, what you're mostly doing. Right now, my prime activity is recording a podcast. Even if I might occasionally be looking down at my phone or whatever in the middle of it, which I would never do to you, Walter. But, in theory, if one were to look at their phone…But they do track childcare slightly differently. If you think about childcare, right, there's all of this time where it is your primary activity, you're giving the kids a bath, you're helping kids with homework, whatever it might be. But then there's a ton of other time where you're responsible for the kids while doing something else. You're cooking dinner, but you're also keeping an eye on the kids. You're cleaning the house, but you're also keeping an eye on the kids. And last year, it is what's referred to as secondary childcare that saw this crazy explosion. And of course it saw a particular explosion in terms of the amount of time that people spent working while keeping an eye on the kids. Just a dramatic increase there.As you said, right, there was a really big difference here between men and women. And they're all sorts of ways that we can cut this. I mean, one of the things I thought was really striking is that women on average spend 48 more minutes a day working while watching the kids versus 16 minutes a day for men. So that's three times as much. And that actually really understates it in a lot of ways, because this is average time, regardless of whether you spend any time working, right?Oh whoa.If you're not working at all, you're a zero in here. Among women who worked at all in a given day, worked for pay -- I've had many people correct me here and point out that parenting is also work -- but worked-for-pay is more like two more hours a day for women. It's this really enormous impact, where women went from really not necessarily spending a lot of time in the day trying to do both of these things, work and childcare, to spending a ton of time doing it. And it's just much more for women than for men.It was interesting again, overall across the board, women spend more time caring for children than men, even in married households, by about three hours.It's sort of like eight hours versus five hours pre-pandemic.And then it seemed that married households did go up by roughly equivalent amounts, but still nevertheless, women were spending an additional three hours or so doing that compared to men. But again, it seems like a lot of the jump came from unmarried households, and that single mothers specifically seem to have had an extremely difficult pandemic.I mean, so this is super interesting. As you said, women spend more time on average responsible for the kids, taking care of the kids, spend more time on average than men, in every form of household. But for married couples, the marginal increase during the pandemic was actually split relatively evenly. They both spent around an hour and 45 minutes more a day taking care of the kids. In unmarried households, it's single women, single men. Single women spent two hours and 45 minutes more per day taking care of kids last year than in 2019. For single men, it was 15 more minutes. It shows a lot of things, but it shows how much more burden there is on women in these households. It also shows you what happened for the kids, right? On average it's a little tricky when you start combining these things, but at a first approximation you get three and a half more hours of childcare time in a married household, but only, two hours and 45 more minutes in a unmarried household.Oh. Interesting.The burden is less overwhelming on women in married households, but then also the kids themselves are actually getting more time with a parent in the married household. So really, inequality is abounding here.It was so interesting watching how you're able to crack these out by different cross tabs. I wanted to talk a little bit about some of these charts that you have about age groups. It was really, really interesting seeing how there are things that we know, like in general older folks tend to spend the most time doing house work at home and spend the most time watching TV or movies. But there were a few inversions that ended up taking place over the pandemic. The grooming one was especially interesting. I was wondering if you just wanted to go through some of what you found, looking at how different age demos reacted to the year.This stuff is so interesting. For most activities, the basic direction of the curves looked pretty similar across different demographics, even if the amount of time that they spent was different, but there are a few exceptions. I mentioned grooming earlier, how we all let our hair grow long and stopped showering, not speaking for either of us, of course.No, of course. Naturally.I am actually sporting a ponytail as we speak.Interesting.So, yeah that's new. For older people age 25 on up, all the different groups spent less time grooming themselves last year. But the great exception is young people, 15 to 24 year olds who actually spent more time grooming themselves. Meanwhile, exercise was exactly the opposite. Older people spent their time exercising more and young people were like, well, forget it. I only need to look good on TikTok. I don't actually need to look good in the real world.That's so funny. That's exactly what it is.I will say Ella wanted our headline to be something about more time grooming our lawns and less time grooming ourselves or something. But we worried we might get into a little bit of interpretational trouble there.Yeah, no, that would be a tough headline to live down. I found it really interesting that again, the watching TV movies and video stayed flat while the texting, phone calls, videos exploded. How often people watch things per day is endlessly interesting to me because I think that people think that teenagers are glued to their phones, but in actuality, it's older folks who watch the most screen time in general. Can we get into some of that?So this necessitated a whole bunch of time on the phone with BLS, trying to understand how they categorize these things. Because the survey categories, and they freely admit this, right, the survey categories don't keep up completely with our changing times. Although, they put out this amazing, your readers and listeners will find this interesting, maybe more so than the general public will, they put out what they call a lexicon where they have all the different categorizations of time, but then it includes examples. And I was very impressed that one of the examples was recording TikTok videos. They're doing it!Is that texting or is that using computers or smartphones?That one actually fell under creative, it was like arts and crafts or something.That's so wild.So the tracking of this stuff, I was like, okay, well, where does watching YouTube fall? Does Zoom count as video? Or does it count as phone calls? The watching TVs and movies includes at least in theory, YouTube videos, watching videos on your phone, watching videos on your tablet, your computer, whatever it is, as well as Netflix, or cable, or whatever, rabbit ears. And then there's this kind of catch all category of using computers, we label it using computers or smartphones. I think they categorize it as like computer use for leisure, not including gaming or something. And I was like, so what is that actually? And it's basically social media, as far as I can tell. Also "programming for fun," but somehow I'm guessing that's not a huge part of the average person's day.I can't imagine that that is eclipsing TikTok these days.Playing games, meanwhile, is another category which doesn't distinguish unfortunately, between computer games and board games. So we have no way of telling whether people were spending their time playing Fortnite or Monopoly.I surmise given the increase of about like 30 minutes in 18 to 24s playing games that they're not playing Monopoly for an extra half hour a day.It seems less likely that it's Monopoly. The time is interesting here. The scales get a little bit tricky, because the TV lines look pretty flat, but actually, people were spending 15 to 20 minutes more a day watching TV, which is not trivial. Whereas texting and phone calls and things were, for the youngest group, eight more minutes a day, but that's just a very big percentage increase, because people didn't use to talk on the phone at all before the pandemic.I mean, you do really see young people spending a ton more time on phone, and text, and whatnot. They spend a ton more time basically on social media, they spend a lot more time playing games. But like the TV watching to your point, is really much more concentrated in an older demographic.I know that you've been a fan of this survey for a very long time. It is a wild survey that the government does. I think it's just so interesting because time feels like one of those extremely zero-sum things where you can spend a minute doing one thing or you can spend it doing another. It's difficult to spend it doing both. I think it's just so interesting that the survey manages to really kind of clue into like what people care about. And the answer is increasingly screens, increasingly sleep and how those evolve over time. It was just a really interesting cross-section of stuff.No, it's an amazing survey. The fact that they do it is just sort of incredible. And the fact that we're able to do it last year is incredible. It's funny, it's a really tricky one in some ways to write about it from a journalistic standpoint, because there are all these sort of strange decisions around. Are we interested in population wide averages or are we interested among people who participated at all? How much time did people spend working last year? The average amount of time spent working last year was about three hours a day. But not very many people work three hours a day.It's very rare to work three hours a day. That's pretty rad if you get to do it.Its very rare to work three hours a day. The average time conditional on working at all was like seven and a half hours.Which makes far more sense.Which makes way more sense. But only 40% or something of the population works at all on a given day. So then you get this weird three hour thing. We're sort of being forced to think through like, well, do we care among parents, how much time they spent caring for kids? Do we care among parents who spent any time caring for kids, how much time they spent? Because hey, we might want the zeros among parents. It's this sort of complicated thought process of what it is that we're actually interested in measuring here that gets a little tricky. But no, it's an amazing data set that does to your point, really does show how life changed last year.Ben Casselman, you write about economics and business for the New York Times. You can be found, I believe in the business section of the New York Times.Business section, do we do still have sections? Yeah. And you can find me in print in the business section or we have a website.You frequently appear in the dead tree edition of the New York Times, which people should buy.Strongly encourage.Anywhere else folks can find you?Yeah, I'm on Twitter @BenCasselman.Excellent. Well, hey Ben, thank you so much.Thanks so much for having me. If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to frequent Numlock guest Joanna Piacenza of Morning Consult, who this week published a deep report about travel and trust in the wake of COVID-19. Here's what I wrote about it:Pre-pandemic, 51 percent of business travelers took at least four business trips per year, and a new survey from Morning Consult found that figure dropped to just 31 percent during the pandemic. A third of business travelers did not travel at all since the start of the pandemic, and that's been brutal for the hospitality industry because many airline and hotel balance sheets simply can't work in the absence of reliable business travelers. The good news is that 58 percent of business travelers said they planned to travel for business at some point this summer, which would bring a needed boost. The report is fascinating, and puts hard numbers to a whole suite of changing views about how Americans think about travel in the wake of the pandemic. We spoke about why the Herculean steps taken by airlines and hotels resulted in a net gain in trust over the course of the pandemic, why cruise companies are in such a difficult position and the eagerly-awaited return of business travel.Joanna leads industry intelligence at Morning Consult, she can be found at their website and on Twitter.This interview has been condensed and edited. Just this past week, you published a super deep look at the travel industry at a time that I think a lot of people are real interested in what's happening with the travel industry. Want to explain why you wanted to do this topic first and what drew you to the state of travel in the States?You kind of nailed it on the head there, it's a travel season like no other, right? This summer travel season, people are out, people are ready to vacation, but at the same time, I don't think that we've really paused and thought about the anxiety that encompasses a lot of consumers right now. Because of that, we wanted to go into the field and figure out consumer trust, because a lot of that anxiety is going to be in the hands of travel brands as people get on trains, rent their RVs, get on airplanes, and one small misstep from an airline or a travel brand could be pretty bad for their brand reputation. We wanted to figure out how consumer trust is built, how it's broken, what the current state of it is as we're in the midst of a global pandemic, so it's a continuation of a lot of the kind of trust work that we've been doing at the company.These results are really remarkable. You have the net trust for airlines, hotels, casinos and resorts going back to at least 2018. And over the course of 2018 and 2019, it was rather flat, people tended to trust things a little bit. At the start of the pandemic, back in March, we saw a decline in trust for these institutions, but then last summer, you saw something really remarkable happen, where they not only got it back, but they got it back even more. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you observed and kind of the broader contours of how people feel about travel?This is one of the datasets that I pulled and then checked it and double-checked it. You know what I mean? You're like, "This has to be wrong. There has to be something here." But if you look at this trend line on this report, you'll see that when the pandemic starts, it starts to tick down consumer trust for the airline industry, and the hotel industry just starts kind of this slippery slope. It doesn't really stop until summer of last year.Then it rebounds, and it rebounds pretty dramatically. The thing that I would kind of ascribe that to is all of the policies that a lot of airlines and hotels really started to embrace and implement last year, last summer. I'm talking about blocking out the middle seat. I'm talking about employees wearing masks and requiring customers to do the same, putting up signage about sanitizing high-touch areas. These policies became so much a part of our experience with these brands, and they really started to build back that trust in ways that didn't exist before the pandemic. So, it was very odd to see collectively, as a whole, this entire industry kind of exiting 15 months of this with higher trust. But that's what our data says.It's interesting to me because, again, it was a ton of work. It was a ton of money. It was a ton of stress. It was an effort, and it is just really interesting to see that on a level, it was really worth it. Even setting aside the positive public health benefits, it's almost like the old Tylenol story, right? Where there was an issue with Tylenol. They ripped it off the shelves. And then they exited the process even more trustworthy.Okay, I want a podcast on that. I want to listen to it, I've not heard that story before. This is just proof that a lot of travel brands were really mindful during this time, listening to their consumers, trying to be extra careful, taking it step-by-step, and it paid off. One of the things that I'm going to keep my eye on is now that things are returning to something that resembles close to normal, where does that consumer trust go, and how is it correlated with some of these policies being loosened? We all know that the middle seat being blocked off is no longer a thing, which I think we're all really upset about. But will hotels keep putting up signs kind of marketing that they regularly sanitize high-touch surfaces? I don't think that's going to go away anytime soon, and I don't think it should. I think it still really builds consumer trust.One thing that I really love about this is that you basically investigate what are the points of pain that cause people to lose trust in institutions. I really like this because it seems like in travel specifically, more so even than dining, there's just such an aversion to bad experiences. There's a reason that TripAdvisor is so popular, and that is that people really don't want to have a bad vacation, in a way that maybe sometimes people are willing to tolerate a rough meal. You have a chart in here that talks about the share of U.S. adults who say that they would stop purchasing from a travel and hospitality brand if it did one of the following things, and I would love to hear just kind of from your findings, what are some of the breaking points for people?Yeah, this is a category I called trust benders, which is actually a phrase I did not get okay-ed by anyone above me. So, we're just going to put a trademark after that.Yes. Official TrustBenders™ by Morning Consult.I need more supervision. So, trust benders™ and trust breakers. The trust benders are the things that would impact trust among consumers, but wouldn't necessarily cause a consumer to walk away and never come back. Among the biggest trust benders, this is the share of U.S. adults who said they would stop purchasing from a brand if it did the following, mistreating luggage or possessions, having surprise fees. We've all experienced that. Bad customer service, not following clear safety precautions, data breaches, not being reliable, and not regularly cleaning or sanitizing. I want to kind of pause on that last one because I think that it seems natural for us to have that policy be within the top ten, be within the top 5, but it really isn't. Cleaning and sanitizing, although an incredibly important policy that every consumer-facing brand should follow, was not necessarily as important pre-pandemic. The thing that I take away from this is that the pandemic is still very much top of mind for consumers. These travel and hospitality brands as they're welcoming folks into their hotel lobbies and into their airplanes, one of the things that they may not realize is that this is the first time these people are entering these spaces after months. What are the things that you can do to make them feel really, really safe? That is regular cleaning or sanitizing.The other thing that was really interesting about this trust benders list, and I think it's something you and I have talked about before, is that getting political or taking a political or social stance that a consumer disagrees with, that was pretty low on the list! There's been a lot of ink spilled about brands taking stances and what you should do and how you should navigate that. I am guilty of spilling some of that ink! I've written a lot about brands getting political, but I think it's a really good gut check to notice that this is at the bottom of the list. There are the normal keeping me safe, keeping my data safe, being a reliable brand that are hitting the top of the list that I think that these travel brands should really be paying attention to more.We've definitely talked about this a couple times, because it is just so interesting and there is so much consternation about it, people psych themselves out over, "Is my corporation saying or doing the right thing?" But realistically, at the end of the day, and this data really bears it out, there's a baseline expectation of the customer service, and a lot of the rest of it is just kind of aesthetic.I even thought it was remarkable that you asked about data breaches on here. I know that that's a little bit timely, I suppose, but people are vastly more ticked off if you have a data breach and their data is unaffected than they are if they take a particular stance on a social issue that you're not cool with, right?I'm really happy that that kind of different phrasing made the list, that "there was a data breach and your data was impacted," but we also asked the question "there was a data breach and your data was not impacted." The latter still bends trust at a higher rate. Thank goodness your data was not compromised, but what that does is it tells you that this brand that you had your trust in before might not be able to protect some of your most valuable assets.This is all very cool in the context of it, but what really hammers it home is that you actually asked another set of questions, which is basically like if a company goofs up, how do you then act? You found that 88 percent of people will either only use competitor services or use more competitor services moving forward. It seems like within travel and hospitality that there's just so much competition, that if United burned me once, I will never fly United again. If I had a rough time in a Marriott, then there are plenty of other options. It seems like these companies were really, really assiduous over the course of the pandemic, and I think it's because they're aware of the fact that if they lose a customer, they lose a customer real hard.I think that's a great data point for a lot of travel brands to just meditate on a bit. It's a very competitive space, especially the airline industry. If you lose a customer, especially if you lose a business traveler, which is just a whole other part of this report, you might not see them again. The one kind of caveat that I want to add to this, and this is also a piece that I did years ago, is that for the most part, consumers have pretty short memories. I did a piece a few years ago about a United scandal when they dragged a passenger off of their flight and that got injured.We ended up going into the field for a few weeks, I think maybe even a few months after the incident and consistently asked, "Okay, here's a United ticket. It's $200. Here's an American ticket. It's $300," some combination of that, United versus a competitor. Each week, what we saw is that at first, everyone was choosing the competitor, right? No one wanted to choose United. United was dominating the headlines in a very negative way. But as the weeks went on, as the months went on, suddenly those proportions shifted, and consumers were going for the cheaper flight. We also did something with direct and non-direct flights, where the ticket was actually cheaper on United, and it was direct.Anyway, it was such a cool polling project, but that's all to say that even if a brand gets negative buzz in the headlines, if you're seeing something negative written about that brand, consumers are going to react to it. But for the most part, they do have short memories. Six months after that incident, our data was essentially back to normal.I want to kind of caveat this again by saying this is something that people are reading about, right, rather than experiencing. If I'm at the front desk of a hotel and I have a negative experience with whoever's behind it, some concierge, that's going to stay with me in a way that reading about how United mishandled an incident, it just impacts folks differently.The cruise business to me is just super interesting, because you have these very loyal folks, you have these people who are absolutely not, and then you have these folks in the middle that kind of seem to be who the cruises are actually competing for. I'm really interested in hearing a little bit about how the math around cruises is different than hotels and resorts, which are fairly highly acclaimed, and airlines, which people come and go.Well, I think let's speak from a micro and a macro level, right? So think back to March 2020. I'm going to make you time travel back for the last 15, 16 months.Yes. March 2020. The biggest story that will happen in March 2020 is obviously the Super Tuesday. That is where my head's at.Always. Political editor. I mean, gosh, can you believe that? That was happening, too.But the cruises, I guess, are what you're getting at — I remember that was just like, "Oh, there's a new disease on cruise ships. That's not great."Yes. Cruise ships had a very, very early and public presence with the pandemic. I think it was Diamond Princess that was off the coast of Southeast Asia in which there was hundreds of cases. Remember?There was a boat that they just wouldn't let show up anywhere, right?Yes, exactly. I think we forget that, but maybe it's still kind of in our subconscious.It totally did.Because of that, because of that connection with this virus that has upended the entire world, cruises have a very, very long runway to recovery, much longer than airlines, much longer than hotels because of kind of that connection. The other thing to keep in mind is that cruises overall, similar to airlines, require a little bit more consumer trust, simply because of the nature of the business, right? You're in a vessel in the ocean for a long period of time. You have to put your trust in a specific brand, in a specific staff and team in a way that you don't necessarily have to if you're checking into a Best Western or taking a two-hour flight. Airlines, it's a little bit different as well. But cruises, there's a bigger commitment there personally, I think that that really impacts consumer trust. If you look at the report, throughout the report, cruises have a higher standard when it comes to consumers. I think that's largely because of the pandemic and just the nature of the business.It's like it's a hotel that you are unable to physically exit.You should do marketing for them. Yeah, that's a great."Come on a Disney cruise, it's a hotel that you're physically incapable of exiting."We'll sell out the first night.You did mention business travel a little bit earlier, you have some really good stuff on that in this report. You mentioned that about 51 percent of business travelers before the pandemic were traveling at least four times a year, and that is now down to 31 percent. 34 percent, about a third of business travelers have just been sidelined the entire pandemic. You can see it in any city urban core. I was in Midtown recently and some places are a bit of a ghost town, in large part because the business travel is just completely undercut. What's going on with that? You seem to have some signs of a positive development on that front?You already noted kind of the 20-point difference between people who said they had traveled at least four times a year. Business travel all but came to a halt, especially on airlines. I know that a lot of folks were still traveling via car for business. But looking ahead, 58 percent of business travelers said they plan to travel for business this summer, and then 62 percent said the same of fall and winter. Now, this is a really important demographic for the travel industry, and anyone listening in the travel industry knows this and is probably getting excited about that number, and they should be for a lot of reasons. Business travelers make up, depending on the mode of transportation, anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of travelers, but they make up a majority of revenue. They are not spending their own money. They are spending the money of corporations. They can buy that $25 burger at the airport. I never could.They got those per diems.Right, God, I love a good per diem. But they make up a majority of their revenue within the travel industry. They're so important and key, one of the things that's also sprinkled throughout the survey is the survey overall looks at US adults, but within it, we're able to cut out business travelers. How important is trust when business travelers are making decisions? It's more important among business travelers than compared to US adults. Are business travelers more likely to stray from a brand if that trust is broken? Yes. Everything is a little bit more capitalized and saturated with business travelers. They spend more, but if you break their trust, they're more willing to walk away. So it's wonderful that they're coming back, it's great news for the industry that a majority of them will be traveling this summer, fall, and winter, but it is also something that should keep hotels and airlines on their toes. You are welcoming back a demographic that is much more picky and fickle when it comes to their experience with your brand.That is just kind of really good news, because, again, the balance sheets for a lot of these companies just simply don't work unless you have business travel built in.This is one big recent report, but you guys have been very, very busy at Morning Consult. As I understand it, you're now a mythical creature known as a unicorn. Is that right?We are. Thank you very much. So, we're all going to go get unicorn tattoos.Amazing.I'm going to throw some time in people's Google Cal. We'll figure it out. Everyone's going to be so upset I said that. It's fine.Guaranteed, lock it in, unicorn tattoos. What have you got cooking this summer? I know that you guys have been able to have a lot of ongoing trackers of the pandemic and kind of attitudes toward it, and some of the most encouraging kind of news has been, I think, from y'all, because the nice thing about polling is you do kind of get a sense for where things are going. It's been really encouraging, in the back nine of the pandemic in the United States at least, it has been a good indication of comfort levels somewhat getting back to normal.We're going to have a busy summer, to be quite honest. No traveling, but yeah, we have a busy summer at our team and within our company. We've been tracking kind of this return to normal data since early 2020. I don't know the exact date, but I do know when we hit one year of tracking, I ended up sending our lead writer some flowers just to thank her, because every week, she had to look at consumer comfort, which in the middle of a pandemic can be a rough thing! But we have I think at least 15 months of data on consumer comfort levels in going to the movies, dining out, going to a shopping mall, going to a sporting event, Olympics, we update those every week.We're looking to this summer do some deeper dives into that share of people who are not yet comfortable doing stuff. That's kind of an interesting and exciting change for us, because we've just reached the point where a majority of people feel comfortable doing almost all of our leisure activities listed. Now we're left with this 25 to 32 percent who don't feel comfortable going to the movies, who don't yet feel comfortable going to a museum. Who are they? Why don't they feel comfortable? Are they vaccinated? We want to learn more about that group. We've got a lot of data to go through, so look for more stories on that.In addition, ahead of back to school season, we'll be releasing a report on commerce. So, I went a little crazy with my online shopping the last year. I'm not sure if you did, too.I have a lot of possessions that I didn't necessarily think I would be the kind of guy who has. A vegetable slicing mandolin! I emerged from this pandemic really into that. So, yeah, I did hit a little bit of the online shopping. I would agree.You love to see that sort of thing. I think I saw a TikTok where it's constant, constant depression, and then a package arrives and you're happy for 30 seconds. Then constant, constant depression, which should tell you a little bit about my TikTok conventions. What our commerce report will do is investigate consumer trust, again, trust is a big thing for Morning Consult. We keep putting out these deep dives into different industries, but consumer trust in terms of online shopping. So the pandemic forced a lot of us online to get the goods that we needed and maybe in your case, the goods that you didn't need.A lot of those!I think that there's a certain demographic that was always used to shopping online, but millions of others were not. They were forced to download grocery apps or order things that they normally would've picked up at a brick and mortar store. Now that those habits have been somewhat formed and now that things are opening back up again, what happens to those habits? Did they build enough trust with this online supplier that that's going to be the norm moving forward for them? Those are kind of the questions I want to answer, and I think it'll be really interesting with the back to school season. Do people want to head to Target and get in line and do their back to school shopping in person, or have those habits been formed to the extent that you're sitting on the couch, looking at your phone, boop, boop, boop, done, online school shopping done?I think that one thing that I've enjoyed a lot about your coverage is that it has been a big question about what is going to endure from this in a way. A lot of changes were made with regards to how people work, how people commute, how people travel, how people do all that. Some of them seemed extremely temporary and extremely desirable to remain temporary, but a lot of them just seem sticky, and it's going to be really interesting to see how this happens. I'm just very grateful that you guys have been kind of running these recurring trackers because I think that they are just such a cool little scientific component.Absolutely. Have to look to the past to look to the future.Where can people find the report? Where can folks find you?MorningConsult.com. You will find the trust report on our homepage, and you'll find our other kind of deep dives in financial services and see what else is to come the rest of the year and @morningconsult on Twitter, and got to pitch myself, @jpiacenza on Twitter. I tweet out lots of pictures of pasta.Lots of pictures of pasta.It's a lot. It's a lot of pasta.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Pat Garofalo who writes the wonderful newsletter Boondoggle. Pat appears in Numlock all the time, here's a recent thing of his I covered in February:Lawmakers in 11 states have introduced bills for the 2021-22 legislative session that would form an interstate compact to eliminate tax giveaways to corporations. Right now, companies play states off one another, goading them into bidding wars over who gets less money to host the corporation. For many states, who see new businesses as a way out of their problems, this has become an increasingly standard practice, but if every time a company wants a new HQ it's a 50-party bidding war, eventually we're going to not collect taxes from businesses anymore. To avert this, the states are eyeing a disarmament, not unlike what Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas worked out in 2019. If the compact enters law, states will agree not to use tax incentives to poach jobs from the other states in the compact. This isn't particularly new, as there are 200 ongoing interstate compacts and each state is in an average of 25. Pat's beat is one of my favorites, he covers one of the most pervasive ways the big and powerful fleece the government at the expense of the small and not as powerful. Today in another special podcast edition of the newsletter, we talk about the botched Foxconn deal, why everything is suddenly a “campus,” the Peace of Kansas City and whether or not the federal government accidentally screwed over every local corporate tax incentive project.Pat can be found at his newsletter, Boondoggle, and his book The Billionaire Boondoggle is really great.This interview has been condensed and edited. Pat, thank you so much for coming on. You have a bunch of really cool stories coming out through both your day job and your newsletter, Boondoggle, but just taking a step back, do you want to talk a little bit about what you generally cover when it comes to incentives and how different cities try to woo different companies to various successful and unsuccessful ends?The tagline that I use is "how corporations are ripping off your state and city," and I got interested in this actually way back during The Great Recession. I was an economic policy reporter covering this fallout from the recession and the austerity push that was happening across the country. You saw all these wacky situations where cities were literally turning off their streetlights, while at the same time paying to give some billionaire a sports stadium. Then the more I started digging into this, I realized it wasn't just sports stadiums.It was hotels, it was massive sporting goods stores. It was every corporate headquarters in the country. There's been this long, decades-long push amongst the corporate elite in this country to tell a story about how economic development happens in the U.S. and to reap rewards for doing things that way. And it's totally wrong. The way they're going about it and the way the politicians they have in their pockets go about it is just backwards. It's just the completely wrong way to build local economies. That's the sort of work I've been doing ever since.The Amazon HQ2 thing was a huge illustration of this, where, basically, it inverted the way that lots of local economics should work and turned cities into bidders for a headquarters that was going to happen nevertheless.Right, and that one was an interesting anomaly in this system that corporate America has built because it was so public. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, was so brazen about it and pitting all these states and cities against each other. The really problematic aspect of this to me is actually how much of it happens in the dark, how much of it we don't know about. These deals are often presented by local officials as a fait accompli. They come out and announce it before any other resident, any other local official can have a say, and say, "Hey, we're doing this. We're going to give this corporation a bunch of money. You're going to see all those benefits. You're welcome. Goodbye."The reason for that is that these things actually pay a lot of political capital. If you dig into the literature on incentives and corporate tax deals, they don't pay off on the economic side. They don't create jobs, they don't boost incomes, they don't boost local GDP, they often cost localities a whole lot of money, but what they do increase is incumbent politician vote totals. One of the most fascinating stats that I've seen in the academic literature about this stuff is that states' use of incentives goes up once every four years. Why is that? Because governors are running for re-election.Whoa. The secrecy component, you've written a lot about this lately. I like how you've really highlighted that there are towns and city councils that are voting on incentive packages where they don't even all necessarily know who the money is going towards in some cases with server farms and whatnot.Yeah, this is totally wild. This actually happened in Fort Wayne recently. Literally, the city council was voting on an incentive package, and most of the city council did not know who the recipient was going to be — it turned out to be Amazon — because the people who were involved in the deal making had signed non-disclosure agreements. This is public officials, spending public dollars, signing non-disclosure deals with the corporation to say that they can't divulge any information about the recipient, including, literally, its name. It's just so corrupt. This to me is just — there's the economic stuff, right, that these deals are not paying off for states and cities, and they're not bringing the economic benefits? But that also is just problematic democratically, right? How are you supposed to assess the job that your local officials are doing if they literally will not tell you who they are meeting with, who they are dealing with and who they're giving your money to?It's so huge. And I wanted to take everything back to a very big case that has gone down that has attracted a lot of attention and I think put a lot of these stories on the map, which is the situation with Foxconn and Wisconsin. It's got all the makings of things that you've been talking about: it came about during an election, the economics of it were suspect to begin with and only kind of got worse as it went along. The economic benefit has really folded and collapsed. I would love to hear what that story is and where we're at now because I know that we've actually had some recent news on it.To back up to this from the beginning, this was 2017, Donald Trump had just been elected President. Scott Walker was the Governor of Wisconsin. They announced this massive deal with Foxconn, which is a Taiwanese manufacturer, they make a lot of Apple products. And it was something on the order of $4.8 billion. They were going to create tens of thousands of blue collar jobs, and this is Wisconsin in the Midwest, so that was a big deal. It was going to be part of Trump's big move to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., make America great again.Then fast-forward a few years, and Foxconn literally did nothing. There was just nothing there. They changed their plans over and over and over. It went from tens of thousands of jobs in a manufacturing site to 1,000 white collar jobs in an office building. The whole thing unraveled and actually the promising thing about this deal in my mind was that there actually was a political price for it, as opposed to a political benefit. Governor Walker lost his re-election to current Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, in large part because of this deal, because Wisconsin residents looked at this thing and went, "This is not good. This is clearly not working out for us." So, Evers recently renegotiated the deal. The amount of money went from about $4.8 billion to about $80 million. So a huge, huge, huge decrease in the amount of money.One of those Bs became an M. That's not usually a good sign.Exactly. I think the nice thing about that deal was that there actually was a little democratic accountability. Someone lost office, the current governor had a mandate to re-negotiate and he did, and that's good. I still don't love the deal for two reasons. One, is that in a sense, you're sort of giving Foxconn another whack at something it doesn't deserve. It didn't even come close to fulfilling its side of the original deal, and so you're letting it rework it and try again and promise something new. There's no real reason to think that Foxconn is going to keep its promises this time either, but you're still putting the state on the hook for $80 million, which again, is a lot better than $4.8 billion. That's great. That's many billions of dollars that you're not liable for, but there's certainly a world in which just letting the original deal play out and having Foxconn just fall on its face and not meet any of its metrics and, therefore, not get most of its money would have actually saved the state money, if we assume that Foxconn is going to fulfill the second deal, which I don't really think it will, but that remains to be seen. But the second part of this is that — and then this is an important part, I think, of the overall incentive stories — localities in Wisconsin made investments on the premise that Foxconn was going to build the first thing, the massive manufacturing plant. Made infrastructure investments, seized homes through eminent domain. One town in Wisconsin is on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for eminent domain for seizing folks' homes. Those people had to move. And now the plant just isn't happening. And that's one of the things I tell people, I spend a lot of time in my day job at the American Economic Liberties Project, talking to folks around the country, both in office and activists and community members about these deals. One of the things I bring up all the time is these plans are not ironclad. The officials will tell you, "Oh, we are giving X million dollars and we are receiving Y benefits," as if Y benefits are certain and it's definitely going to happen, but they often don't and Foxconn is such a perfect example There are reasons that they don't that are both nefarious — like the corporation never intended to do the thing it was doing, it was just dragging people along to get some money—- but also legitimate, right? Sometimes a pandemic happens and lots of corporations have to suddenly change their spending plans, but the way these deals get treated in the public square, and in public debate, and the way that politicians talk about them as if they're done deals.Foxconn is just such a great example of the sort of things that folks need to look out for and why states and localities need to be really, really careful. Because again, these little Wisconsin towns spent money, but the one village in Wisconsin actually had its credit downgraded because its promised outlays for Foxconn were so high that even the credit rating agencies were like, "Whoa, there is no way that this is going to happen." But they did it! And now they're just out this money. No one's ever going to make them whole. Even if Foxconn fulfills the second smaller deal and does build this smaller plant, you're never going to get that back. For those folks who had their homes seized and had to move, you're not going to get your house back either. That's why states and localities need to be so, so, so, so careful when they enter into these massive mega-deals.The reason that these deals are struck and come up with is because for the point of view of the company, it's really privatizing a lot of the benefit and publicizing a lot of the risk. And it seems like this is just a really good illustration of what went down in Wisconsin. You have to look at who's holding the bag right now. What negative consequences Foxconn suffered as a result of backtracking on this deal versus what are the negative consequences that small towns have suffered?Absolutely. Foxconn's ding was to its reputation, right? But again, it got to come right back and renegotiate a new deal. The number of times you see these things fall apart, and then you turn around and the same company comes riding back in and says, "Oh no, we'll do it here. And we'll do it better." I mean, Tesla is a perfect example, it has ripped off city after city after city. Elon Musk is a sort of famous grifter in this state, not just with Tesla, but with some of his other companies. And yet, states and cities still will sit down at the table and will give him something and say, "Okay, this time it's different. Our community is different." It can get really distressing. But I think one of the reasons that happens, and you'll often see in this space, it is the big tech companies that tend to get some of the largest deals, some of the flashiest deals.Talking about Amazon HQ2, we can talk about a new Apple campus in North Carolina. We can talk about Tesla getting deals all over. Austin is throwing money at tech companies left and right. It's because there's this allure, right, of these shiny new tech jobs. Even though this is actually just a very old model of ride into town, promise the residents a lot of benefits in return for a lot of money. You can literally date this back to the beginning of the United States. Alexander Hamilton got the first corporate tax break in U.S. history for a manufacturing plant in Paterson, New Jersey that never was completed. We started off exactly where we wound up. And some of his associates went to jail.I think I missed that song in the musical.Somehow, Lin Manuel Miranda left that one out of the show. But it goes back to World War II, in the post-World War II period when Southern states were trying to diversify their economies coming out of the war. They were mostly agricultural. It was Mississippi that really started this shtick of going to Northern manufacturing plants and saying, "Hey, we'll give you a lot of money. Bring your plant down here." John F. Kennedy, when he was in the Senate, would go on the Senate floor and just rail about Southern states, poaching Northeastern manufacturing plants. Even though today's version of that is to pay some shiny tech company to do it like a Foxconn, like a Tesla, this is the same story that we've seen over and over and over again.Setting aside the municipal blow back, setting aside the fact that that's money that you can't spend on school textbooks, and when you don't collect property taxes, that does have ramifications for what you can offer kids in libraries and all that kind of stuff. Setting that aside, you have this really cool study that's come out that talks about how states give incentives and how that actually affects small businesses in the area. Do you want to go into what the research showed?This is a fascinating new study by a guy named Manav Raj at the Stern School of Business. He very kindly sent it to me and it shows two things. It shows, one, that political competitiveness in a state legislature is correlated with increased use of incentives. So, the tighter the governing majorities are, the smaller the governing majorities are in the state legislature and the likelier the legislature has to flip back and forth between the two parties, the more likely that legislature is to hand out incentives. And then the second thing is the more incentives the legislature hands out, the less likely it is that small businesses will succeed. This study is so fascinating because it ties together a lot of what both myself and all the other folks in this space have been talking about for so long, which is that these things are not about economics, they're about politics.They're about entrenching dominant incumbent firms and harming small businesses. It makes sense, right? The companies that get the bulk of these incentives are the large, big ones that can afford to pay to have lobbying shops. Amazon and other big companies will literally pay people, who are called site selection consultants — that's a job — to go out and to figure out how to get the most money out of these states and localities. Small businesses just can't afford to do that. The academic research is really clear: It's big companies that get the most of this stuff. So, states and cities are literally subsidizing the business model of large companies vis-à-vis their smaller competitors, right? It makes perfect sense that this is harmful to small folks who just don't get the same level of support from the state.The example that always comes to mind when I talk about this particular aspect is Amazon. Amazon is notorious. They've gotten some $3 billion-plus dollars in state and local incentives over the years. Most of that is actually not HQ2, even though that was a big one. Most of that is for its distribution network, it's for its warehouses and for its distribution houses. You can see if you're a small retailer how they really grind your gears, right? That Amazon is receiving money to build out its distribution network, that's not something you ever receive as a small business. If you're just selling stuff out of your garage, it's not like the mayor is going to come down and be like, "Here, have all this money to buy a delivery truck. Excellent. Keep up the good work." That doesn't happen.So, it's making the cost of building out distribution networks cheaper for Amazon versus other retailers, which Amazon then turns around and uses as leverage to pound other retailers into the dirt. Amazon is notorious for using its distribution network as a stick to beat other retailers with. They'll say, "Oh yeah, if you pay us to use our distribution network, we'll give you Prime access. We'll do all these other things." And they just ratchet up the fees year after year after year, so you sort of just become beholden to Amazon's taxpayer-funded network. The fact that it was great to put some numbers to this story and to have data showing that this feeling that we all had in this space, that this is bad for small businesses, actually does bear out when you look at the data.Then the second part was really interesting to me too. The fact that tighter, more competitive legislatures give out more incentives. It does make sense if you think about it, because in a tight legislature, where say, the majority has one or two votes and it can only lose one or two or their bills go down, that gives each individual lawmaker more leverage to get concessions during legislative debates. Since we know that incentives are good political capital, that seems to be what state legislatures go for. So, if you're like the Joe Manchin of the Missouri legislature, you're the critical key vote that can be lost, you go and say, "Hey, give my buddies down here some incentives, and then sure, I'm on your bill." I was just really fascinated with, again, Manav Raj at the Stern School of Business. I wrote it up in my Boondoggle newsletter. It just really tied together a lot of strands, circling back to the core point about all this, which is that it's a political problem. It's not an economic problem. The economics are unambiguous. This stuff is bad for states and localities. The reason it continues year after year, and folks like me are actually screaming about it all the time is because these giveaways make for really good politics.It's really interesting, that finding about how it negatively impacts small business, which very much makes sense to me because small business owners do tend to pay corporate taxes. Because they are individually held, they tend to do profit and then pass those profits on to shareholders, which are taxed. And you have the entire Amazon credo, like Bezos notoriously said, “your margin is my opportunity.” That seems very true here, where the local tax base is subsidizing a new contender, which to some notoriety, aggressively minimizes its tax obligation, right? Whereas your local retailer operating with QuickBooks is a little less adept at doing that.Yeah, Amazon was born out of a tax loophole, right? The whole reason that Jeff Bezos got into online book selling is because he realized that there was a hole in the law that said, if you didn't have a physical presence — and this hole has since been patched — but that if you didn't have a physical presence in a state, you didn't have to collect sales tax. From Washington, he was able to sell books in every other state without collecting sales tax. Obviously, that lets him undercut every local bookseller that has to pay sales tax because they're literally handing you the book and you're giving your money, and there are sales taxes involved in that transaction.Bezos took that out of the equation. He then used that, and the proceeds he made from that, to just pull the same trick in line after line after line after line. I mean, there are lots of reasons Amazon is what it is and not all of them are tax-related, but that is a really key part of its power, is its ability to both avoid paying taxes on the one hand and then to actually collect subsidies and government largesse and other regulatory favors on the other.You've also highlighted a number of other recent cases. There was this case in Nashville regarding Oracle and they managed to get a 50 percent property tax for 25 years. How does that shake out for Nashville?This is such a weird one. Tennessee is sort of notorious for these deals. Memphis has a horrific record of just handing out corporate tax giveaways willy nilly. I talk about Memphis a bunch in my books because it's just —There's a monument to it. A very large pyramid, I understand.Exactly. You come walking down the street, here you go, here's your corporate tax abatement. This deal with Oracle is strange. The way it's structured is that Oracle will come in, it's building a "campus." And this is the hot new thing now in taxes, it's call everything a 'campus.' Every time you're bringing a company, it's building a 'campus' because that's more than a headquarters and that's more than just new jobs. It's always a 'campus' now. An Apple campus is opening in North Carolina, a new Google campus in North Carolina.But, anyway, Oracle will pay $175 million in Nashville up front for some public infrastructure, a pedestrian bridge, a park, some other stuff. And then yes, will get a 50 percent rake off on its property taxes until that $175 million is repaid. This isn't actually new money going out the door and Oracle does have these upfront costs. It's just a very strange situation in which Nashville has decided to sort of outsource its infrastructure building to a private corporation and then recoup it through taxation. It's just a little weird. It's not the most egregious of these deals I've seen. I think the larger concern with that deal is that there are real displacement concerns, and that's part of the problem with a lot of these arrangements is that they don't do anything to sort of ameliorate the knock on effects of the people who are already there.This large corporation comes riding in and brings all these workers, contrary to what the corporation usually tell you. Those aren't local people getting hired. It's oftentimes just current employees moving in. There are gentrification and displacement concerns with this Oracle deal that the city says it has a handle on, but in my experience, it probably doesn't because cities don't ever really in these circumstances. It's just weird, the way to structure it, and that Nashville decided that the way to do this was to have Oracle pay for a bunch of stuff that taxpayers should just pay for, and then give it a giant tax break when you could just tax Oracle and build the public infrastructure like normal? But the reason I actually liked this Nashville situation is because there's a congressional candidate in Nashville— her name is Odessa Kelly, and she's the head of an organization called Stand Up Nashville — who is talking about these deals a lot and has been through a bunch of them in Nashville, a bunch that were much worse than this Oracle deal. She also was a key part of the city negotiating one of the better stadium subsidies arrangements in America. They made a really good deal actually with the new Nashville MLS team that's coming there, and in return for some public subsidies for a sports stadium, which I generally hate — cities should not do that — they did actually make a really good community benefits agreement. She is now running for Congress on this platform of stop letting corporations hose our city. It's a really interesting test of whether the politics of this can be flipped on their head, because I've been saying this whole time, this is a political problem.There's political capital to be built from doing these deals and if you're an incumbent politician, getting your face in the local paper and being able to send out a press release and to be able to tell about all this job creation is big. You send out tweets and Facebook posts and say, “look at all the good I'm doing." That's worth something politically, even if it actually turns out to be worth bupkis, economically. Odessa Kelly's campaign is going to be a really interesting case study, if you could flip that on its head and say, "No, actually, this isn't working for our city and this isn't appropriate, elect me to stop doing these things and we need more community input." Her line was just great, she said, "Oracle, isn't the prize. Nashville is the prize." And I just love that because it's exactly right.That's great.It's so perfect because the thing about these deals, right, is that we've been told, and this sort of gets back to what I said at the beginning of this story, the corporate elite and the politicians who love them have told us for 40, 50, 60 years that you should be thankful we are here. We are going to come in to town and rain down benefits upon you, and that's why we deserve these tax giveaways. When, actually, it should be the other way around. That should be the city saying, "No, it's a privilege for you to be here. And if you want to be here in our excellent community, where we have paid for lots of great things with our taxes, then we have certain expectations for you and you have to achieve certain benchmarks for the community."The way we talk about economic development is just backwards, the way to build a local economy isn't to dump a bunch of money on a corporation and hope something good happens. It's to have the best education system, have the best transportation system, have the highest quality of life for workers. Then corporations are going to want to come there, right? Places have incumbent advantages and they need to play them up and build on them. That was one of those maddening things about Amazon HQ2, was that why is Northern Virginia — for all intents and purposes, the greater DC Metro area — paying all this money for Amazon to be in the nation's capital?Are you kidding me? Amazon doesn't want to have a massive presence in Washington, DC where, oh, by the way, Jeff Bezos has a massive house and owns a newspaper? Of course he wants to be here! And yet we've been told that we need to grovel before these corporations in return for their investments that they were going to make anyway. So, that's why I just love the Odessa Kelly line to flip this on its head. I really hope it goes well for her.I mean, I live in Queens right near where the other HQ2 was going to go, and I was very frustrated by that because that place is really lighting up already. I don't know how much you need to write him a check to move into a neighborhood that is already blowing up. One of my favorite stories that you've ever covered was the Kansas City-Kansas City ending of the conflict between the Kansas Cities. And I guess what I'm wondering is, how has that been going? Are you seeing more of that? Is there moving forward any kind of hope for more of those disarmament campaigns? I know that you had kind of alluded to recently a number of state legislatures that were looking at a disarming compact, but I guess I'm wondering what's the status?This was — for listeners who are interested in the backstory — a so-called border war between Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri. It's so good.They were literally using incentives to have companies move a couple of miles because the Metro area straddles the state line. So, companies were literally just moving back and forth across the border. Nobody's job was changing, people's commute was just altered a little bit. And yet tons of money was going out the door to do this obviously ludicrous thing. And even though it did take forever, and much longer than it should have — because, again, this is obviously and patently stupid — the two states did agree to a ceasefire and said, "Okay, we're not doing this anymore. No more incentives to get companies to just hop the border within the Metro area. That's no good for anybody, obviously."So, it's holding. It's sort of tenuous. Every now and again, you'll see a company pop up and say that it's going to try and claim incentives to hop back and forth from one state or another. It looks like it's going to break, but it is holding so far. Assuming that keeps holding, and I think it will, then that is a model for a larger solution to this problem because that's always the next step, right? So, what are we actually going to do about it? And unless we think that the federal government is going to use its power to come in and put the kibosh on this, which is... Actually, we should maybe circle back to this. It accidentally may have recently. But I don't think —We'll circle back to that.I don't think it's going to do it affirmatively in any big way anytime soon. There is an effort amongst state lawmakers to form a compact that essentially is a sort of collective ceasefire where all the states will get together and say, "We're not doing this anymore. Every state that joins this compact agrees not to use state or local incentives to steal businesses from any other state in the compact." It's like multilateral disarmament, right? That's the problem, is that no one state wants to just say, "Okay, we're turning off the spigot," because there's going to be a political cost. Some governor next door is going to be a jerk about it, and start poaching all your businesses, and claiming that great things are happening. And you're going to look terrible and probably lose your re-election campaign. So, the great thing about the compact is everybody sort of puts the weaponry down together and says, "Okay, let's all do this at the same time."They also agree to a bunch of data sharing practices, which I think would be really helpful just because it's just that much harder to play states off against each other because they'll be able to literally ask, "Hey, what's this corporation telling you? Oh, well, here's what they're telling us." It would improve a lot of things. There are bills in 13 states at the moment to form this compact. I believe a 14th is coming, though I won't get ahead of them, in a state that is pretty exciting, but I'll let them announce it and we can talk again when they do. That's up from this coalition working on this effort two years ago, when there were bills in five states and it's up to 13 now. This isn't going to happen this week or next week or next year, but I do think it's really promising. I've seen a noticeable uptick in interest in it since the pandemic, because state lawmakers, for reasons good and bad, are looking around and realizing that this is a giant waste of money and are looking for ways to sort of collectively get out of handing out these incentives. I think it's promising and it's just such a good model. It doesn't depend on the federal government doing anything. It's just the states agreeing to do it together at the same time. So, we will see!That's cool. So, how did the federal government maybe accidentally stop corporate giveaways?There's a provision in the most recent COVID relief package that says that any state that enacts a net reduction in taxes needs to pay back to the federal government an equal amount of relief funds. Essentially, if you decide to cut taxes by $100 million, give back $100 million in your relief funds, because you clearly didn't need it if you were cutting taxes. If you look at the way the law is phrased, I think it doesn't take a deep reading to say that it applies to most definitely new state and local corporate tax incentive programs, but even because it talks about administrative analyses being part of the equation here, also new awards under existing programs. I think there's a world in which you can very, very credibly claim that this provision should apply to incentive programs.Most certainly any new incentive program that gets authorized, you should have to pay back the federal government by the same amount and maybe new awards under existing programs. This makes sense. This is the federal government trying to essentially ensure that members of other states didn't have to subsidize tax cuts in a particular state. I think it certainly applies, and the key is going to be what the Treasury says about it. Treasury will be issuing guidance on this provision about what counts and what doesn't and what you have to do to pay back. But if Treasury goes with what me and a lot of other folks are saying, and applies this to incentive packages, suddenly new incentive programs will be twice as expensive! So, if you authorize a $2 billion incentive program, it's not just those $2 billion out the door, it's also $2 billion in relief funds that need to go along with it.It could be very interesting to see how states react. States are throwing a fit about this provision in general, but so far, Treasury has been pretty adamant about wanting it policed the way it's written in the law. We're going to see, but if Treasury goes along with that interpretation, there could be just a window there where these things have to slow down for a couple of years and hopefully give the folks who are working on a compact a little time to try and get it implemented instead of just having to play constant whack-a-mole, because that's sort of how you feel like working on this.That every day, a new bad deal pops up somewhere and you're scrambling so hard to try and just address that, that there's no time to sit down and stop them systemically. The piece I did recently on that study about small businesses, I had sitting around for several weeks just because new bad deals kept popping up. I kept having to write newsletters about those and be like, "Oh, I have to push the study edition back another week." And that's sort of how it is on policy level all the time too.So Janet Yellen, please make Pat's job easier. That about wraps everything up. Where can folks find you?The newsletter is called Boondoggle, it's on Substack. I work at the American Economic Liberties Project and a lot of my work on not just taxes, but corporate power in general at the state and local level shows up there. And I am on Twitter @Pat_Garofalo, the underscore is really important because otherwise -The most important underscore.The most important underscore because otherwise, you're going to wind up following a conservative member of the Minnesota State House.Got it. And you and he, I understand, have distinctly different opinions on corporate tax incentives.On most things.All right. Well, thanks again. I will be sure when I open up the Numlock Campus to call it a campus.I hear you should move to Memphis. Move Numlock headquarters to Memphis and you're going to get a really sweet deal.Noted! If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Joshua Darr, professor of political communication at Louisiana State University and an author of the new book Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization. Here's what I wrote about it:The Desert Sun, a local newspaper serving Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, launched a fascinating project on their opinion page in June 2019 by dropping national politics from the opinion section and asking readers to contribute opinions about local issues. A new study comparing that paper to a similar paper, the Ventura County Star, which did not drop national politics, found reverberations across the community. While dropping national politics didn't stop polarization in the community, it did slow it. Further, in the month before the experiment less than a half of the op-eds and letters to the editor were about California issues, but in July that rose to 95 percent. Readers also really enjoyed it: online readership of op-eds doubled that July.The book is about a fascinating, once-in-a-lifetime natural experiment that has broad reverberations across the news industry and the world of American politics. Darr has spent his career exploring the impact that what we read in local news has on how we vote. In the summer of 2019, he and his colleagues heard about a fascinating experiment going on at The Desert Sun, and sprung into action to find out what happens when a local newspaper ignores national opinions. It's a very cool story that gets to the heart of what local news offers, and also why it's in danger.Darr can be found on Twitter and the book, Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization, can be found wherever books are sold. This interview has been condensed and edited. You wrote a really fun book all about how opinion journalism reflects the communities that it's happening in. Do you want to get into what the experiment that you tracked with The Desert Sun was?In June of 2019, my co-author Johanna Dunaway — I wrote this with her and Matt Hitt of Colorado State, she's at Texas A&M — got a Google alert that somebody mentioned our names. It turned out that it was the executive editor of The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, who was referencing a previous paper we'd written about when a local newspaper closes, polarization in that area goes up. We theorized that it was because people were reading more national news. She said, "Well, we have national stuff on our opinion page. So, why don't we just drop that?" So, they decided to drop all their national opinion content for a month. We were able to track that, and write this book, about not only how the content of that page changed and how local issues filled the void, but also how it changed the attitudes of people in that area. It was a really cool process.Let's actually just take a step back a little bit and talk about what you research. You mentioned an earlier study that you had done, focusing on what happens after local news dies out. Can you tell me a little bit about your research?I'm interested in local news, and what role that plays in people's political awareness and political opinions, particularly, because it's in such dire straits right now. It can't be overstated, the decline in local news that was already happening and then was accelerated by the COVID pandemic. That paper looked at areas where local newspapers closed and split-ticket voting, whether you were likely to vote for a Democrat at one level and a Republican at another. We found that in areas where a local newspaper closed, there were significantly less split-ticket voting, about 1.9 percent less. People were just voting straight party, up and down. That was, we thought, interesting. We weren't sure actually where to go next with the research agenda, but this experiment just sort of fell into our laps. We were very excited to be able to test what's basically the other side of that previous paper, which is, not just what happens when local news goes away, but what happens when it actually gets more local, when it actually strengthens in some ways, by providing more local stuff to people. Is that better?It's such a cool experiment design that, as you just kind of mentioned, seemed to fall into your lap. You guys really swept in quickly and managed to do some very cool stuff with it. Can you tell me a little bit about kind of how the experiment was carried out and what you were able to monitor?Sure. I have to give many thanks to the LSU Institutional Review Board for being very quick to approve this — you've got to get IRB approval before any sort of survey or experiment like this. Because we found out about it on June 8, 2019, and the experiment started on July 1. We had to get the surveys written and fielded with enough time to get the full 500 person sample before July began, and we just did get that done. That was very nice, we were very happy about that. As a political scientist, which we all are, you're trained to keep a very close eye out for natural experiments in the world, and this immediately struck us as one. It's the kind of thing where you just drop everything and get right to work on making sure you can measure something like this that's very cool.The basic design of the experiment was we surveyed people in Palm Springs in the zip codes where The Desert Sun circulated. Then we also surveyed people in Ventura, which is on the other side of LA, and is also served by a Gannett newspaper, the Ventura County Star. They didn't change at all in July. It's basically what we call a difference in differences model, where one area changed something, the other area didn't, and then we can compare how the attitudes in those areas changed over the course of July.That's really interesting. What precisely did this opinion page do?They dropped anything national politics, which meant dropping their national syndicated columnists, which were previously a pretty good chunk of their opinion page, one or two syndicated columns a day. Anything that mentioned President Trump, so that was quite a few letters, as you might imagine. People were writing in about Trump, and then those didn't get published in July. They warned people, but those didn't get published in July. And editorial cartoons, none of those either, about national politics. It was just California and the Coachella Valley around Palm Springs for the entire month. That meant more work for the opinion editor, quite frankly, because he had to be finding content to fill the pages, which meant soliciting the community. Whenever you have people that are writing in for the first time, that means you have to edit their work because they're not used to writing for newspapers. It was a good amount more work for the opinion editor at the time, but I think they were all glad they did it.You write about how there was a pretty considerable shift in the actual content, that something like 95 percent of it became California-focused.Before that we didn't really know what to expect in terms of either what the experiment would change or what they did before that. It turned out that, and I don't think this is unique to them, around half of the opinion page before that was focused on California state and local topics. There was quite a bit of other stuff and national politics. So, it went from 40 percent to right up around 95 percent, as you mentioned. It was at least a doubling of the amount of local content that was there. It was a very strong treatment as we would say, methodologically. Of course, the fact that Trump mentions dropped to zero was another part of that treatment, from about one third of all pieces to about zero.What moved into its place?This is, I think, where it gets to the uniqueness of Palm Springs, which is not your average community. It's got a large LGBTQ+ community. It's very interested in art and in architecture. Obviously in California, as a place where many people retire, they're very concerned with traffic and transportation. So, the letters to the editor about architectural preservation in particular went way through the roof. Over a quarter of all the letters to the editor in July were about preserving various architectural sites around the city. About another quarter was about the AHL minor league hockey affiliate of the Seattle Kraken, the new team that starting next year is going to be in Palm Springs. There were quite a few letters after that was announced saying, “is this going to increase our traffic because there's going to be a hockey arena downtown?” So, these were intensely local concerns. Not every community would experience a spike in arts and culture letters and in transportation, traffic letters, but that is what happened in Palm Springs.That's very cool. You also wrote about a little bit about how they also didn't see a drop off really in readership when it came to this shift.No, the opposite, actually. The online readership of opinion content that they tracked actually almost doubled in July. People were reading the stuff that came with the local opinion content. When you get local op-eds, they're not really from journalists, they're mostly from people writing in, whether it's business leaders or elected officials or people that are in charge of these local groups. For example, the architectural preservation groups that are around town, and so they're hearing from their neighbors. It de-professionalizes the newspaper and makes it more accessible, and readership went up. It's interesting as well, because it does make sense. Many, many folks are interested in national politics, but there's lots of folks in this country who are just kind of disengaged at the national level. I imagine in a state like California, which is fairly reliably one way or another during presidential elections, it's much the same way. But everybody's got an opinion about that new traffic light!I think it accentuates the value that local news provides in the marketplace, which is, you can get national opinion content literally anywhere all the time. You can't get those local perspectives on local issues. You get a sense of how complex some of these things are and the local ins and outs of it. The hockey arena is being built next to the Native American casino of the Agua Caliente tribe there in Palm Springs. So, you have just that one example of something that's like, oh it's Californians complaining about traffic. Well, really it gets into all of these community relationships with the Native American tribe and with ‘what does the downtown mean in an area that's kind of spread out, and around the whole Coachella Valley.' You get a real sense of the ins and outs and the complexities of a community by reading the letters to the editor and the op-eds for three months and coding them as I did.You weren't kidding, you were really into the Palm Springs community.Yeah, in a way I was. I've actually not been there.Really?Yeah! We were supposed to go in March 2020, which as you may have heard didn't work out for anybody to do anything. We had it all worked out. We were going to present our findings at a conference in San Diego and drive up to Palm Springs. So, now not only did I not get to take that trip, but I've written a book about a place I've never been. But I have read so much of their newspaper that I do feel like I've been there.You have a favorite columnist and everything?Yeah, I can talk about the newspaper like a local, no question.What was going on over in the control group?Over in Ventura? Well, that's the thing. They didn't change. So, whatever was going on there kept going on, which meant these national opinion columnists. It meant E.J. Dionne and Marc Thiessen and just people that are sort of either pro- or con- the administration. And you're just getting a lot of that national argumentation. And this was July 2019, so there was a lot of commentary about the very first Democratic presidential debates. There was a lot of talk about what are the Democrats doing, and can they beat Trump, and what's going on with immigration? And so it was very noticeable when that went away in Palm Springs. But in Ventura, it didn't. So, they just kept getting that same dosage of national conflict.You ran a second survey then, is that right?Yeah, we ran the first survey at the end of June, to try to end it before the treatment started in July. Then at the end of July into early August, we did the second wave and it was about 500 people in each city in each wave. So, I'll also thank LSU for helping to pay for that.That's a very large city-level survey. That's cool.It is, yeah. We worked with Qualtrics on that and they were very helpful in getting us the samples we needed. But, yeah, LSU, Texas A&M, University of Texas — we had a lot of help and we were very grateful for that. But you needed that size sample to detect these changes, and, like I said, when you see a natural experiment you drop everything and go for it.What were some of the changes that you noticed?We wanted to check into the effect of polarization here. We weren't really able to measure something that specific in the previous article, which was just split-ticket voting, but the effect of polarization is this idea that members of the two parties just don't like each other, and they rate the other side as more negative.In the content in previous months, it had been about 25 percent of pieces on the opinion page mentioned either the Democratic or the Republican party, in July that dropped to only one in 10. So, they just weren't talking about the parties as much, not even national politics, but just the parties at all. Maybe that's because California is kind of a one-party state, but either way there was just less of it. So did that affect the way people saw the other side? We were really interested in that. We were able to measure that before and after. And those are obviously pretty deeply held beliefs, how you feel about the other side. We measured it on what they call a feeling thermometer where you just say rate the other side from zero to 100. We found that there were differences between the communities after July.What happened?Among the kind of people that we might expect to be most attuned to this — the people who prefer to read the local newspaper, people who know more about politics, people who are more engaged in politics in Palm Springs — polarization slowed down for them. So, it didn't decrease, which we sort of expected. These are very, like I said, deeply held opinions and beliefs, but they did slow down relative to Ventura. Trump was holding rallies that were controversial, there was a Democratic primary going on, there was a lot happening in national politics. When Ventura kept getting that, polarization went up. It went up a little bit among those groups in Palm Springs, but not nearly as much, and so there was a statistically significant difference there. It slowed it down, and over the course of a month, when you only change two pages in a newspaper on a given day, we thought that was still a pretty powerful effect. It is interesting because you mentioned a lot of the issues moved to development. It is interesting to remind folks that there are polarizations in the world that are not simply left and right. Like NIMBY versus YIMBY and that kind of thing. And reminding that Democratic NIMBYs and Republican NIMBYs have things in common at times. It does seem interesting to kind of illustrate that you wouldn't necessarily change your entire worldview about that, but that might change exactly how strongly that is.No, I think so. And when you're talking about local news, you're emphasizing a different identity than if you're talking about party politics. If you lead with party politics, you're going to get people thinking like Democrats and Republicans. But if you lead with local news and local opinion and local concerns, like we found they did in July of 2019, you emphasize that local identity. We're both residents of the same area, we are both going to be affected by the traffic from this new arena, we both want to see this architectural landmark preserved. And it's a cross cutting identity in that parties, like you say Democrats and Republicans both, can both have that same identity. So, we draw on Lilliana Mason's work, she's a political scientist at the University of Maryland, for that concept. But when you emphasize local, you cut across party.Have they repeated the experiment since, or have you seen any interest in this kind of thing moving beyond this one wonderful summer in beautiful Palm Springs?The Trump-free July that Palm Springs had, no, they have not repeated it actually. Their experience is kind of a microcosm of what's happening in opinion journalism right now, which is that actually in late 2020 the opinion editor that ran this month-long experiment, took the buyout that was offered by Gannett, and so he's gone. Which was too bad because the fact that he'd been working for the newspaper for over 20 years, the fact that they had him was a major reason that they were able to do this thing. When you take a buyout, that position is gone. So, actually what the community did was start a nonprofit organization that allowed them to raise money to rehire a new opinion editor.The community decided, ‘we think this is a valuable thing that we need to have.' And the executive editor, Julie Makinen, led that charge and the community responded. They were able to just, I think in the last couple of weeks, hire a new opinion editor. You do need somebody on staff that can edit and solicit from the community and be in charge of something like this if you're going to do that. That's just sort of a luxury in most of these places now for local newspapers. If you can still have an opinion editor, you're doing all right, and so the strong get stronger here. If local newspapers invest in opinion journalism, they might be able to reap some of the rewards of doing something like this, but if they can't afford an opinion editor, which again, given the steep declines during the COVID era for local newspapers, they're just going to end up taking the cheaper content, which is national for the most part.Where do you see taking this kind of research moving forward? Clearly you have a really interesting result here, but what else interests you in the local news space or just the news space in general?Well, there's just so much happening. There's these bills in front of Congress right now about collective bargaining between local newspapers with Facebook and Google. There's just a lot of philanthropy in this space and these new nonprofit, local news organizations that are starting up, or state level news organizations. We actually found one of the important things in this study is California has a nonprofit service called CalMatters that produces state level columns and solicits op-eds about state politics and The Desert Sun really leaned on that organization's work in July. They took far more columns from CalMatters. In states that don't have that, it would be a lot harder to do something like this. So, we're interested in that nonprofit news space. We'd love to measure an area where philanthropists were investing in supporting nonprofit news, like starting a new newspaper or a newsletter in an area. Not just what happens if we change an existing source, but what happens if we start something new, do people latch onto that, is that something that could have similar effects? Because fundamentally local news is in a difficult spot right now, and if we're going to advocate for it, if we're going to think that it can have these kinds of good civic effects, we need some hard evidence to back that up. So, I think measuring experiments like this is part of that solution, and we'd like to be a part of that.Excellent. That's very, very cool. Where can folks find you and where can folks find your work?I'm on Twitter @JoshuaDarr, and joshuadarr.com is my website. And I'm here at LSU.Sweet. You got a local newspaper that you like?Oh yeah, The Advocate. It's actually sort of weird, they're now the dominant newspaper in the state. New Orleans is the bigger city, but The Advocate now is headquartered in Baton Rouge, but there's a New Orleans Advocate, they sort of took over that area. So, we actually have pretty good state politics coverage. And I will put in a plug for LSU, we send students to the capitol building to do real state capitol news reporting, and they often will get their stories placed in newspapers across the state. I think they placed something like 400 stories last year. So, we're doing our part here at LSU.That's great. That's good stuff. I like the Queens Daily Eagle. There's a lot of really great stuff out there.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, another podcast edition! This week, I spoke to MIT Technology Review editor Karen Hao, who frequently appears in Numlock and wrote the bombshell story “How Facebook Got Addicted to Spreading Misinformation.”The story was a fascinating look inside one of the most important companies on the planet and their struggles around the use of algorithms on their social network. Facebook uses algorithms for far more than just placing advertisements, but has come under scrutiny for the ways that misinformation and extremism have been amplified by the code that makes their website work. Karen's story goes inside Facebook's attempts to address that, and how their focus on rooting out algorithmic bias may ignore other, more important problems related to the algorithms that print them money.Karen can be found on Twitter, @_Karenhao at MIT Technology Review, and at her newsletter, The Algorithm, that goes out every week on Fridays. This interview has been condensed and edited. You wrote this really outstanding story quite recently called, “How Facebook Got Addicted to Spreading Misinformation.” It's a really cool profile of a team within Facebook that works on AI problems, and extensively was working towards an AI solution. But as you get into the piece, it's really complicated. We talk a lot about algorithms. Do you want to go into what algorithms are in the context of Facebook?What a question start with! In the public conversation when people say that Facebook uses AI, I think most people are thinking, oh, they use AI to target users with ads. And that is 100 percent true, but Facebook is also running thousands of AI algorithms concurrently, not just the ones that they use to target you with ads. They also have facial recognition algorithms that are recognizing your friends in your photos. They also have language translation algorithms, the ones when someone posts something in different language there's that little option to say, translate into English, or whatever language you speak. They also have Newsfeed ranking algorithms which are ordering what you see in Newsfeed. And other recommendation algorithms that are telling you, hey, you might like this page, or you might want to join this group. So, there's just a lot of algorithms that are being used on Facebook's platform in a variety of different ways. But essentially, every single thing that you do on Facebook is somehow supported in part by algorithms.You wrote they have thousands of models running concurrently, but the thing that you also highlighted, and one reason that this team was thrown together, was that almost none of them have been vetted for bias.Most of them have not been vetted for bias. In terms of what algorithmic bias is, it's this field of study that has recognized that when algorithms learn from historical data they will often perpetuate the inequities that are present in that historical data. Facebook is currently under a lawsuit from the Housing and Urban Development agency where HUD alleges that Facebook's ad targeting algorithms are showing different people different housing opportunities based on their race, which is illegal. White people more often see houses for sale, whereas minority users more often see houses for rent. And it's because the algorithms are learning from this historical data. Facebook has a team called Responsible AI, but there's also a field of research that's called responsible AI that's all about understanding how do algorithms impact society, and how can we redesign them from the beginning to make sure that they don't have harmful unintended consequences?And so this team, when they spun up, they were like "none of these algorithms have been audited for bias and that is an unintended consequence that can happen that can legitimately harm people, so we are going to create this team and study this issue." But what's interesting, and what my main critique is in the piece, is there are a lot of harms, unintended harms, that Facebook's algorithms have perpetuated over the years, not just bias. And it's very interesting why they specifically chose to just focus on bias and not other things like misinformation amplification, or polarization exacerbation. Or, the fact that their algorithms have been weaponized by foreign actors to disrupt our democracy. So, that's the main thrust of the piece, is that Facebook has all these algorithms and it's trying, supposedly, to fix them in ways that mitigate their unintended harmful consequences, but it's going about it in a rather narrow minded way.Yeah. It definitely seems to be a situation in which they're trying to address one problem and then alluding to a much larger problem in that. Can you talk a little bit about like, again, one of the issues that they have is that there's this metric that you write about called L6/7. How does their desire for engagement, or more specifically not ever undermining engagement, kneecap some of these efforts?Facebook used to have this metric called L6/7. I'm actually not sure if it's used anymore, but the same principle holds true, that it has all of these business metrics that are meant to measure engagement on the platform. And that is what it incentivizes its teams to work towards. Now I know for a fact that some of these engagement metrics are the number of likes that users are hitting on the platform, or the number of shares, or the number of comments. Those are all monitored. There was this former engineering manager at Facebook who had actually tweeted about his experience saying that his team was on call, every few days they would get an alert from the Facebook system saying like, comments are down or likes or down, and then his team would then be deployed to figure out what made it go down so that they could fix it. All of these teams are oriented around this particular engagement maximization, which is ultimately driven by Facebook's desire to grow as a company. What's interesting is I realized, through the course of my reporting, that this desire for growth is what dictates what Facebook is willing to do in terms of its efforts around social good. In the case of AI bias, the reason why it is useful for them to be working on AI bias is actually for two reasons.One is they're already under fire for this legally. They're already being sued by the government. But two, when this responsible AI team was created, it was in the context of big tech being under fire already from the Republican-led government about it allegedly having anti-conservative bias. This was a conversation that began in 2016 as the presidential campaign was ramping up, but then it really picked up its volume in 2018 in the lead up to the midterm elections. About a week after Trump had tweeted #stopthebias in reference to this particular allegation towards big tech, Mark Zuckerberg called a meeting with the head of the responsible AI team and was like, "I need to know what you know about AI bias. And I need to know how we're going to get rid of it in our content moderation algorithms."And I'm not sure if they explicitly talked about the #stopthebias stuff, but this is the context in which all of these efforts were ramping up. My understanding is Facebook wanted to invest in AI bias so that they could definitively say, "Okay, our algorithms do not have anti-conservative bias when they're moderating content on the platform." And, use that as a way to keep regulation at bay from a Republican-led government.On the flip side, they didn't pursue many of these other things that you would think would fall under the responsible AI jurisdiction. Like the fact that their algorithms have been shown to amplify misinformation. During a global pandemic, we now understand that that can be life and death. People are getting COVID misinformation, or people were getting election misinformation that then led to the US Capitol riots. They didn't focus on these things because that would require Facebook to fundamentally change the way that it recommends content on the platform, and it would fundamentally require them to move away from an engagement centric model. In other words, it would negatively impact its growth. It would hinder Facebook's growth. And that's what I think is the reason why they didn't do that.One part that's interesting is Facebook was not instantaneously drawn to AI. When The Facebook was made it didn't involve AI. AI is a solution to another suite of problems that it had in terms of how do you moderate a social network with billions of people, an order of magnitude larger than anyone has ever moderated before, I suppose.It's interesting. At the time that Facebook started, AI was not really a thing. AI is a very recent thing, it really started to show value for companies in 2014. It's actually really young as a technology, and obviously Facebook started way before 2014. At the time they adopted AI in late 2013, early 2014, because they had this sense that Facebook was scaling really rapidly. There was all of this content on the platform, images, videos, posts, ads, all this stuff. AI, as an academic research field, was just starting to see results in the way that AI could recognize images, and it could potentially one day recognize videos and recognize text and whatever.And the CTO of the company was like, "Hey, this technology seems like it would be useful for us in general, because we are an information rich company. And AI is on a trajectory to being really good at processing information." But then also what happened at the same time was there were people within the company as well that started realizing that AI was really great at targeting users, at learning users' preferences and then targeting them, whether it was targeting them with ads to or targeting them with groups that they like or pages that they like or targeting them with the posts from the friends that they liked the most.They very quickly started to realize that AI is great for maximizing engagement on the platform, which was a goal that Facebook had even before they adopted AI, but AI just became a powerful tool for achieving that goal. The fact that AI could help process all of this information on Facebook, and the fact that it could really ramp up user engagement on the platform, collided and Facebook decided we're going to heavily invest in this technology.There's another stat in your article that really just was fascinating to see laid out. You wrote about how there's 200 traits that Facebook knows about its users, give or take. And a lot of those are estimated. The thing that's interesting about that is I feel like I've told Facebook fairly limited amount of information about myself in the past couple of years. I unambiguously directly told them like, yes, this is my birthday. This is where I live now. This is where I went to college. And then from that, and from their algorithms, and from obviously their myriad cookie tech, they've built this out into a suite of 200 traits that you wrote about. How did AI factor in in that, and how does that lead into this idea of fairness that you get at in the piece?Yeah, totally. The 200 traits are all about, they're both estimated by AI models, and they're also used to feed AI models. It's dicey territory to ask for race data. Like when you go to a bank, that's part of the reason why they'll never ask you race data because they can't decide banking decisions based on your race. With Facebook that's the same, but they do have a capability to estimate your race by taking a lot of different factors that could highly correlate with certain races. They'll say like, if you are college educated, you like pages about traveling, and you engage a lot with videos of guys playing guitar, and you're male, and you're like within this age, and you live in this town, you are most likely white.I was about to say, you are a big fan of the band Phish. We're kind of barking up the same tree here, I suspect.They can do that because they have so much data on all the different things that we've interacted with on the platform. They can estimate things like your political affiliation, if you're engaging with friends' posts that are specifically pro-Bernie or whatever, you are most likely on the left of the political spectrum in the US. Or, they can estimate things like, I don't know, just random interests that you might have. Maybe they figure out that you really like healthy eating, and then they can use that to target you with ads about new vegan subscriptions, whatever it is. They use all of these AI models to figure out these traits. And then those traits are then used to measure how different demographics on Facebook, how different user groups engage with different types of content in aggregate.The way that this ties to fairness, and then ties to this broader conversation around misinformation? So this Responsible AI team was really working on building these tools to make sure that their algorithms were more fair, and make sure that they won't be accidentally discriminating against users, such as in the HUD lawsuit case, by creating these tools to allow engineers to measure once they've trained up this AI model. Okay, now let's like subdivide these users into different groups that we care about usually based on protected class, based off of these traits that we've estimated about them, and then see whether or not these algorithms impact one group more than another.So, it allows them a chance to stress test algorithms that are in development against what it hypothetically would do?Exactly.Sick.The issue is that even before this tool existed, the policy team, which sits separately from the Responsible AI team, they were already evoking this idea of anti-conservative bias, and this idea of fairness, to undermine misinformation efforts. So, they would say, "Oh, this AI model that's designed to detect anti-vax information and limit the distribution of anti-vax misinformation, that model, we shouldn't deploy it because we've run some tests and we see that it seems to impact conservative users more than liberal users, and that discriminates against conservatives, so unless you can create this model to make sure it doesn't impact conservative and liberal users differently, then you can't deploy it." And there was a former researcher that I spoke to who worked on this model, who had those conversations, who was then told to edit the model in a way that basically made the model completely meaningless. This was before the pandemic, but what he said to me was like, this is anti-vax misinformation. If we have been able to deploy that model at full efficacy, then it could be quickly repurposed to anti-vax COVID misinformation. But now we're seeing that there's a lot of vaccine hesitancy around getting these COVID vaccines. And there were things that basically the policy team actively just did in the past that led to this issue not being addressed with full effectiveness.You talk about this in the piece where instead of fairness being, “we shouldn't have misinformation on the platform, period," it's like, "well, if there's something that could happen that would disproportionately affect one side or the other, we can't do it." Even if one side — I'm making this up — but let's say that liberals were 80 percent of the people who believed in UFOs. And if we had a policy that would roll out a ban on UFO content and it would disproportionately affect liberals, then that would be stymied by this team?Yes and no. The responsible AI team, what's really interesting is they sent me some documentation of their work. The responsible AI team, they create these tools to help these engineers measure bias in their models. But they also create a lot of educational materials to teach people how to use them. And one of the challenges of doing AI bias work is that fairness can mean many, many different things. You can interpret it to me in many different things.They have this specific case study about misinformation and political bias, where they're like, if conservatives posted more misinformation than liberals, then fairness does not mean that this model should impact these two groups equally. And similarly, if liberals posted more misinformation than conservatives, fairness means that each piece of content is treated equally. And therefore the model would, by virtue of treating each piece of content equally, impact liberals more than conservatives. But all of these terms are really spongy. Like "fairness," you can interpret it in so many different ways. Then the policy team was like, “we think fairness means that conservatives and liberals cannot be treated differently." And that was what they were using to dismiss, weaken, completely stop a lot of different efforts to try and tamp down misinformation and extremism on the platform.Where are we at moving forward? It seems like you had alluded to AI being really central to Facebook's policy. And this team, even physically, was close to Mark Zuckerberg's desk. Where are we at moving forward now? Is there a chance that the policy team will lose sway here? Or is there a chance that this is just, it was what it was?I think what I learned from this piece is that there's just a huge incentive misalignment problem at Facebook. Where as much as they publicly tell us, "we're going to fix these problems, we're going to fix these problems," they don't actually change their business incentives in a way that would allow any of the efforts trying to fix these problems to succeed. So, AI fairness sounds great, but AI fairness in service of business growth can be perverted.And if the company is unwilling to change those incentive structures, such that truly responsible AI efforts can succeed, then the problems are just going to keep getting worse. The other thing that I realized is we should not be waiting around anymore for Facebook to be doing this stuff because they promised, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal three years ago, that they were going to fix all these things. And the responsible AI team was literally created a couple of weeks after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, as a response to a lot of the allegations that Facebook was facing then about their algorithms harming democracy, harming society.And in three years, they've just made the problem worse. We went from the Cambridge Analytica Scandal to the US Capitol riots. So, what I learned was, the way that the incentive structures change moving forward will have to come from the outside.Yeah. Because it is also bigger than just the United States. You alluded in your piece to the genocide in Myanmar. There are much bigger stakes than just elections in a developed democracy.That was one of the other things that I didn't really spend as much time talking in my piece about, but it is, I think, pretty awful that some of Facebook's misinformation efforts, which impact its global user population, are being filtered based off of US interests. And that's just not in the best interest of the world's population.Karen, where can people find your work? You write about this stuff all the time and you are the senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. So where can folks get ahold of you and find out more about this?They can follow me on Twitter, @_Karenhao. they can find me on LinkedIn. They could subscribe to MIT Technology Review and once they subscribe they would get access to my subscriber only AI newsletter, The Algorithm, that goes out every week on Fridays. If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Abraham Riesman, the author of the electric new book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, out last week. It's another podcast Sunday edition. Let me know what you think of these.I have been waiting for this book for ages, I'm a huge fan of Abe's and the topic could not be more prescient. We talk about the actual role Lee played in making the characters, how Stan Lee was ahead of his time when it came to making a living as a proto-influencer, and the undercovered, complex and unsavory period from the 1970s through his death. It's a complicated portrait of a complicated guy, and is deeply reported at every stage.True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee can be found wherever books are sold, and Riesman can be found on his website and on Twitter. This interview has been condensed and edited.The book is out, you've been working on this for quite a while at this point. It was delayed back in September. It's all about one of these people who have become a very central figure in modern American pop culture, Stan Lee. What got you interested in him as an individual?Oh, geez, what got me interested in him? I guess you have to go a long ways back for the beginnings of it in that I grew up reading comics and being interested in Marvel. I think I first became aware of Stan Lee when I was very young, watching the now mostly forgotten Marvel Action Hour cartoon show. He used to introduce the animated segments there. And basically he remained this figure in the background of my life, in the way that he's been in the background of the lives of countless people who have engaged with Marvel superhero products. And long story short in 2015, I started writing a profile of Stan for my then place of employment, New York Magazine, and it came out in 2016. Then in 2018, when Stan passed away, an editor at Penguin Random House who had read the 2016 profile approached me about writing a full biography, and that's where it began.He's interesting because he had a fairly seminal role at a company that has become incredibly central to American pop culture, but he himself has appeared in a lot of these entities. How did you get at the question of who is Stan Lee in terms of both the public and private and the individual person?Well, it's a big question, isn't it? I tried to base it on as much evidentiary stuff as I could, as opposed to surmise and opinion. So, I did more than 150 interviews. I went through thousands and thousands of pages of his personal and professional documents, which were mostly ones that I got from the University of Wyoming, their American Heritage Center, which is where Stan's papers and other archival materials are stored — long story about why it's in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming. But, yeah, in addition to reading through documents, I also watched a bunch of home movies. There was this Holy Grail moment of the last day I was at the archives — I only had five days there — I found this box among the almost 200 boxes of materials there that was just a bunch of unlabeled home movies.I started popping them in the little VCR they had at the reading room, and was just blown away by the fact that right under my nose there had been all this stuff that the Lee family either advertently or inadvertently had left behind for posterity. So, you take that, you take the documentation, you take the interviews, you take the comics, you just throw everything in a blender and try to sort it out in your brain and then put it on paper. There's no magic recipe to it. You just have to engage with the source material and then see if you can craft something from it.It's fascinating because this is an individual around whom a couple of major corporations have attempted to construct a mythology.A lot of your reporting, whether it was in that feature from a few years back or in the book itself, it's not poking holes, but really saying a lot of what we held up to be the myth of Stan Lee, is it necessarily as black and white as it might appear. Do you want to go into some of what you found?There's a lot that Stan was less than truthful about, a lot of things he just outright lied about and then other things where there were sins of omission or misdirection. And the big thing that matters when it comes to talking about Stan's dissembling — there's a lot of things that matter with that — but the big one, as you mentioned, is the corporate claim on Stan and the characters that Stan was credited with creating. What my research turned up was there's literally no evidence Stan created any of those characters.There's not?No, there's none. There's nothing. There's no presentation boards. There's no diary entries. There's no contemporaneous accounts from friends saying Stan was working on this and told me about it and then he created it. Nothing. It was a fly by night industry, so there wasn't a whole lot of documentation of anything to be fair, but there's significant evidence — it doesn't prove it, I don't have a smoking gun — but there's significant evidence or at least testimony that goes against Stan's word and says that one of his main collaborators, Jack Kirby, was the guy who came up with almost all of those characters.Jack was also an artist. So he, according to him and his defenders, created the characters from whole cloth, whereas Stan at best can only claim to have come up with the idea. He was not an artist, so he didn't come with the visual look of these characters. It's a sticky thing because, again, you're not going to find a smoking gun. There really was just terrible documentation and a large lack of professionalism at comics companies circa the 1960s.These were not the glossy corporate entities that they are now. Marvel was not a Disney subsidiary as it is now back in 1961. So, we don't really know who created those characters, but what I wanted to do in the book was just say the fact, which is we don't know that it was Stan. We've just taken it for granted that Stan was presented to us factually as the progenitor of these characters, usually at best you'll get people saying, “Jack was the co-creator, Jack did it with Stan.” Now that may be the case, but we don't know that. We can't say that with any certainty. It may well be that Jack was the only one who was actually coming up with these characters and that he was doing them from whole cloth. That's not even getting into the stuff that Stan more transparently lied about when it comes to crediting his collaborators for the actual comics they made. It's a long, complicated thing, but basically the process by which the classic Marvel stories were created was not "Stan sits down and writes a script, and then hands the script to the artists to draw." Stan was not writing scripts. He was having brief conversations with the artists who would then go home and write the story. So, really they were writer-artists.They would go home and just draw out the entirety of the narrative that they were working on in the comic, add in little notes sometimes in the margins about what dialogue should go in there, and then they would hand this completed story, or more or less completed story, to Stan who would then add in dialogue and narration. Now, the dialogue and narration were very important, I don't want to discount that, and he also wrote the letters columns in the back, which were enormously influential and helped create the Marvel phenomenon. But he wasn't crediting his artists as co-writers, which they were. You can even argue that they were the primary writers since they were the ones who were actually coming up with the structure of the narratives. Anyway, I could go on and on like this, but that's just one area in which I wanted to cast some light on the disputes and force people to live with the ambiguity, which no one likes, of not knowing who actually is responsible for these things that are so enormously popular and prominent.We always talk about people who were ahead of their time, and oftentimes that's indicated as a very unambiguously positive statement, but the idea of a person who is a brand creator, that seems fairly prescient for a couple of reasons. It's not the first time that, again, not necessarily negatively, not necessarily positively, somebody has been able to float to vast cultural influence through basically brand definition and steering.You're exactly right. Stan was, in a time when we didn't talk about branding the way we talk about it now or being an influencer or any number of pop-y terms that we use to describe the present day media landscape, he really was an influencer and a brand himself. His personal brand and the brand of Marvel were intimately intertwined, and he was so good at promotion. There are very few people in the history of American life who have sold better and at a higher profile than Stan Lee, and that's huge. Jack may have been the person coming up with the characters, but Jack was a terrible salesman in terms of public relations and advertising and slogans and all of that. That was not something he was good at or enjoyed, whereas Stan, that was what he lived for.He loved being a raconteur. He loved creating a fan base. He loved all of that. And without him, I don't think we would have the Marvel phenomenon, even if the creative material had been in there, it wouldn't have become this — again, to use a modern term to describe something not so modern — it wouldn't have gone viral in the way that it did. He was ahead of his time. I find myself, as I promote this book, often looking in the mirror and thinking, well, I've become my subject. There's so much in just the modern publishing landscape that requires you to be a Stan Lee if you want to succeed. It's all about individual hustle and getting your name out there. I wasn't alive in the ‘60s, but I don't presume these things were talked about in quite the same way that they are now, and they were skills that Stan had that, if anything, in the ‘60s were maligned.That was back when the biggest object of joking that you could put into a satirical pop culture thing was about ad men. That was one of the reasons that Mad Men was the show that it was, because it was set during a time when being in advertising was in a lot of ways like having a tech gig now in that there was good money to be made, it was very much a hotly discussed industry, it was all based on bluster, et cetera, et cetera. And at the time you could really make fun of somebody for being a big promoter and advertiser, but Stan was really good at it! Now it's something we look at with a great deal of admiration, or at least grudging admiration when people can pull that off. And Stan really did.Partially because they're both owned by Disney now, but you have a guy like Jim Henson who was very much in the trenches of making the art that he was promoting pretty consistently, and then Stan really was a little bit more hands-off than I think people tend to think when it comes to developing characters.For the most part. Again, we don't know because we can't go back in time and figure out exactly who said what inside a closed room. We'll never know for certain, but even when it comes to creating individual comics as opposed to just creating the characters, yeah, he was relatively hands-off when it came to an individual comic, because he wasn't writing a full script. He was not being the auteur of these comics. He was saying, “okay, here's some ideas,” and then people would go and run with them. And a lot of the time it wasn't even, "here's some ideas, go run with," it was the writer-artists would come to him and say, “we're going to do this.” Stan would maybe have some tweaks, but would largely just say, “okay.” Then the writer-artists would go home and do that. So, it's not exactly like you say. It's not like Jim Henson going and tinkering away with his characters, it's much more of an ambiguous and distant creative role that he had.Over the course of Marvel's history, obviously, the company had I think some of the most tumultuous possible business situations through the ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s. What of Stan Lee's later life and pops culture ascendance do you track in the book?All of it. There's nothing that was off-limits for this book. It's the full arc of his life to the best of my ability. I tried to keep it short, it's not a Robert Caro, but I talk a lot about what happened later because I think that that's the most interesting stuff to be honest. I think we're pretty well-covered — not as well as we should be — but prior to the release of my book, we were pretty well covered in terms of stories about Stan's life and work in the ‘60s. People have written about that stuff pretty extensively. Now, I have things to add to the ‘60s narrative that hadn't been there before, but comparatively, not that much, because it's been so heavily excavated. But when it comes to things that happened to Stan from 1971 and onward, basically no one had written in-depth about any of that.There've been some attempts at it. The comics journalist Tom Spurgeon and his collaborator Jordan Raphael, who's now a lawyer, wrote a book together, the first biography of Stan in the early aughts. It had a lot of really good stuff, but it too was heavy on the ‘60s and some of the ‘70s and then drops off. And I just felt, well, there's got to be something in there and turns out, I think that's where the whole story was. That's where you see the vast majority of what Stan's life was like, both in terms of just the numbers of years— he was alive for much longer than that one decade of the 1960s — but also because that's where you start to really see what fame and success and money did to Stan.What was it?Well, a lot of things, but one was he wanted more. He was never satisfied. He didn't like comics, particularly. He didn't like superheroes, particularly. He said that on the record — that's not me inferring — it's just people don't pay attention when he said that because he would also talk out of the other side of his mouth and say he loved the medium, and he loved the genre. But evidence points toward that not really being the case. Every time he tried to break out of comics, which was basically every day of his life since he got back from World War II and went back to his comics job he had left to go be in the service, every time he was trying to escape comics, it was never to make more comics. It was never, "I want to go do superhero stories in another medium either." It was, “I want to go make movies and I want to be taken seriously as a novelist or as any number of other things that are not comic book writer.”Later in life, once he had the taste of fame that he got from his work in the ‘60s, he just spent the rest of his life from 1971 until 2018 just trying to be something else. That led to a lot of disastrous incidents. I trace the history of his two post-Marvel companies. His first one was a Dot Com Bubble-era company called Stan Lee Media. The other one is one that still exists now as a subsidiary of this big Chinese conglomerate, but it's called POW! Entertainment, and both of them were accused of enormous criminal, or at least unlawful, malfeasance, of bilking investors and juicing a stock and all kinds of stuff. No one had talked about that, no one had looked at that. And yet that's where Stan's true colors — in a lot of ways, I don't want to say always — but where a lot of his professional true colors came through. He wanted to have money, he wanted to be famous. He wanted to break out of just being thought of as the Marvel guy. And it never happened.Around the end of his life, or by the end of his life I should say, he was world famous for being the Marvel guy, but he was not world famous for anything else. No one talks about the great triumph that was Stan Lee's Stripperella, or Stan Lee's The Mighty 7, or Stan Lee's Superhero Christmas. All of these silly tossed off things that didn't really go anywhere. No one talks about them. They just talk about the work he did in the ‘60s, and that's something that Stan found very frustrating. He wanted to be known for more.It's an incredibly powerful story and it's so deeply reported. It's gotten a lot of love from folks within the comics industry, many of whom have seen this, but have not had a chance to really see the real situation laid out. I suppose coming to the end, what do you think your main takeaways about this are? What do you think the main difficulties are? And where do you think this goes next?Well, I don't know. I'd love to see what people have to say about it. I've been very gratified to get some nice responses so far, but I want this to be something that opens up discussion, not just about — this is all highfalutin, I don't know if any of this will happen — but I would love for this to be the beginning of a discussion about the ‘great man' theory of business. I hate it. I hate this fixation we have on having singular geniuses who are responsible for the products that we like. We want there to be an intimate one-to-one relationship between us and the creator. If you want to get really heavy about it, you can talk about it in religious terms.Maybe we want to feel like we have a relationship with one who creates, with one who has this godlike ability to make something out of nothing. That leads us down dangerous paths because we start avoiding the truth. We're not looking for the actual ways in which something does get created. The other problem is we then throw under the bus all of the many people who are not the one great man, who are in some part, or sometimes in most part, responsible for creating the thing. So, I would hope that if there's a lesson to this book, it's question what you're told about people, and especially what people tell you about themselves. People have regurgitated Stan's version of events for more than a half a century now. We just have widely taken this one man's word as gospel.I would love for this to be something that prompts journalists and historians to think more carefully about who they believe, because oftentimes we just go with whoever the most charismatic and nicest seeming person is and say, well, their version of events is probably true, and then we print it uncritically. I get it. I'm a journalist. A lot of times you don't have enough information to be able to make a claim that you know something is one way or another, but that shouldn't be an excuse to do a shoddy job of describing what you know, or acting like you know something that you don't know for certain.So, I guess that's the last thing. I would like for this book to be something that encourages us to live with the awful agony of ambiguity. We're not necessarily going to know what happened in the past in order to influence things that we like in the present. You sometimes have to sit with the fact that these things are unknowable, and that's hard for people. It's hard for me, it's hard writing a piece to admit that you don't know, but it's also sometimes the only intellectually and morally honest way to approach a subject.So, there you have it, the definitive answer on Stan Lee. It is unknowable. And we must be content with ambiguity within the art that we like. Abraham, thank you so much for coming on. The book is True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, where can folks find it?Easiest way is to go to your one-stop shop for all Abraham Riesman needs, which is Abrahamriesman.com. I'm on Twitter, @abrahamjoseph.All right. Thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it. And we'll want to hear why all of Stan Lee's stuff is in Wyoming at a later time.Some other time. If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.This week, I spoke to Alex Davies, the author of the brand new book Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car. It's just out as of last week and is an enthralling read about the events that led us to the present-day state of the art of autonomous vehicles.I've been looking forward to this book since it was announced, and it doesn't disappoint: from the iconic if shambolic 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge to the legal battles that threatened to tear the industry apart, the creation of this tech could change the world. It's a great story.For the first time, I recorded one of these to be podcast-quality so you can actually listen to the interview up top. Let me know if you enjoy that, and maybe I'll do more of them!The book is Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car and can be found wherever books are sold, and Alex is on Twitter at @adavies47. This interview has been condensed and edited. Unless otherwise indicated, images are from DARPA. Podcast theme by J.T. Fales.Alex, you are the author of the brand new book, Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car. You cover all about transportation, you cover all about vehicles and you've also covered a lot about the technology that goes into them. There's been a lot of talk about driverless cars recently, you were talking about how this is a really long journey. How far back have we been working on driverless cars?I think the people first started talking about the driverless car right around the time people came up with the car itself. The car was a great invention for all sorts of reasons but one thing people noticed very quickly was that when you got rid of the horse, you got rid of the sentient being that would stop you from driving off a cliff or into a wall if you, the human driver, stopped paying attention. You see these stories from the ‘20s and ‘30s of people coming up with ways of remote-controlling cars using radio waves. And in the ‘50s, you start seeing programs from General Motors and RCA working on embedding electric strips into the road, which obviously didn't work for various reasons, that would help guide a car along the highway. You see examples from the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs in New York where GM is talking about, "oh, cars that will drive themselves and you'll have these things like air traffic controllers saying, okay, your car is clear to go into self-driving mode," or back then they would have used the word autonomous.Ford Pavilion, 1939 World's Fair, via Library of CongressSo, the idea itself is really old but technologically, I think you've got to date this work from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. That's when you first start seeing the technology that undergirds the way we think about building self-driving cars today, which is not by following any kind of radio path, nothing built into the infrastructure and the system, but the basic idea of giving the car the tools it needs to drive itself the way a human operates a car. You've got three basic buckets: one is you have to recreate a human's senses, so that's where you see things like cameras, radars, LiDAR sensors, giving the car the ability to see the world around it. You have to replace what a human's arms and legs do or hands and feet, really, and those are just kind of servo motors built into the car that give the car the ability to turn the steering wheel or pump the gas and brakes. And, actually, in today's cars, that's all done purely over software, it's not even really mechanical in there anymore. And then the last, the really tricky thing is how do you replace the human's brain? The step between the senses and actually carrying out the decisions you need to make.I start my story with the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. I give a little bit of the history of the robotics and artificial intelligence research that happened before it. But for me, the Grand Challenge is really the starting point. DARPA is that really kooky arm of the Pentagon that is basically charged with making sure the U.S. government is never surprised on the technological front. It came out of the Soviets launching Sputnik, which really shocked the Americans to hell, and they're like, “okay, we need an arm of the military that's just going to do the kooky kind of far out stuff.” So DARPA, a lot of big hits — the internet, GPS, stealth bombers. Some not so great moments — DARPA was instrumental to the creation of Agent Orange. Whoops.Oops, yeah no, don't want to do that one.That one, not so nice.Look, they're not all hits, they're not all hits and that's okay. We are friends, we have been friends for a while now. I feel like you have told me the story of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge many times, as this deeply formative event, not only for self-driving cars but also robotics and Silicon Valley and how government can work together on different things. Do you want to go into what went into creating this event and kind of what happened at it? Which I feel like is a very, very cool story that I imagine is a solid chunk of the book.It is a solid chunk of the book. It's also, personally, my favorite part of the book. To me, this is really the heart of the story. DARPA was tasked with helping the U.S. military develop autonomous vehicles and the basic thinking there was that vehicles were a way a lot of soldiers got hurt, especially in the early 2000s, as we were starting to get mired down in these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We wanted autonomous vehicles so soldiers didn't have to be in vehicles that were being hit by IEDs, so you could send cars by themselves on convoys and dangerous missions, and basically, it was to save the lives of the troops. DARPA had been funding all sorts of research into autonomous driving for decades by this point and the guy running it, DARPA director Tony Tether, was frustrated that he just wasn't seeing the kind of progress he wanted to see, it just felt like one internal research project after another.So, he said, “do you know what?” DARPA had, at the time, a relatively new power to give out prize money and he could give out up to a million dollars without needing congressional approval. So, he created a thing called the DARPA Grand Challenge with a $1 million first prize. It was a race for autonomous vehicles across the Mojave Desert in California. You would go from this real dusty little town called Barstow in the California Mojave Desert to just across the line to Primm, Nevada, which is a pretty sad town because it's the least driving you have to do from California to legally gamble in a casino. If you're like, “I don't have the energy to drive the extra 45 minutes to Las Vegas,” you go to Primm.Oh no.And so, Tether's original idea, very briefly, it was we're going to have the cars go from Los Angeles to the Las Vegas Strip and they'll go on the freeway. And the guy at DARPA who was actually in charge of putting on this race was like that is completely insane, you can't do any of that. These robots don't work, we don't even know what they're going to look like. So, they ended up doing it in the desert, which made more sense for the military application anyway when you think about what your driving in the Middle East would be like. But the key part of the challenge was that it was open to anybody, this was not just Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Carnegie Mellon University, the big contractors who had been doing this kind of work. Tony Tether just said, “anybody who can build a self-driving car, we'll bring them all to the desert and we'll do this big race.” And so, you see this wide range of characters who come into this.I think, foremost among them, interestingly, is Anthony Levandowski, who at the time is just about 23 years old. He's an graduate student at UC Berkeley and he decides he really wants to be in this because he loves robotics, even though he doesn't have a ton of robotics training. He's like, “I'm going to build a self-driving motorcycle.” So, that's his idea. You've got the big players like Carnegie Mellon and that's where Chris Urmson, who becomes Anthony Levandowski's great rival once they're both at Google years later, comes in. Chris Urmson is a big player, Carnegie Mellon is the robotics powerhouse in the world, probably the best roboticists in the world and have been doing tons and tons of self-driving research over the decades. They field this team as a powerhouse of a team and you've got this guy, Red Whittaker, who's the old roboticist there.This is amazing.I have been yelled at by Red Whittaker more times than I care to remember. Really!He's just very cantankerous, he's an ex Marine, he's now 70 years old, he's well over six feet, he's 250 pounds, the guy is built like a redwood and he's just always yelling. And he builds robots, someone pointed this out to me once, he builds robots that look like him, in a sense. They're always these enormous, hulking things and for the Grand Challenge, they built this Humvee. And Red Whittaker, someone told me, he has this penchant for saying really bombastic things that sound crazy and don't actually make any sense. So, he once told someone, this project, it's like a freight train, you've just got to grab on and it'll rip your arms off.It sounds terrible.When he told me this, it's like, what does that even mean? But he has this incredible talent for really developing young engineers. And Chris Urmson is among his many proteges who are now pushing this technology into the world.And so, you have this collection of wacky racers, gathering to win a million dollars from the Defense Department in the desert. And the first one is 2004, what happens at the first one?It is a disaster. The 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge is supposed to be a 142 mile race through the desert, 15 teams get out of a qualifying round and make it to the final round. If you looked at the qualifying round, vehicles were smoking and shaking or they couldn't even start at all or they were just driving into every last thing. And then the race in the desert itself, wasn't all that much better. It got off to a great start, Carnegie Mellon's Humvee, Sand Storm, was first off the line, it shoots off into the desert. So, it's doing okay, the first couple of vehicles get off the line okay. And then you get through the bottom half of the field and it becomes a comedy of errors. You've got one little bathtub shaped thing that goes up onto the tiny ridge just on the side of the trail where it's raised and flips over and lands upside down.You've got one that drives 50 yards out, does an inexplicable U-turn and drives back to the starting line. We've got one, one just veers off-road into barbed wire and then can't find it's way back. You've got this thing from OshKosh that's a 14 ton military truck, a six wheeled thing, it's lime green and it's got a tumbleweed, like a bush thing in front of it. And its detection system says, this is an unmovable obstacle, but then another tumbleweed shows up behind it and so, it just starts going forward and backward and forward and backward like Austin Powers, trying to turn around. And then, even Carnegie Mellon's vehicle, which is doing well and is seven miles into the race, it's going around a hairpin turn, it goes off the edge of the road a little bit and it gets hung up on this rock. It gets, basically, stranded like a whale on a beach. It's raised up to the point where its wheels can't get any traction anymore. The robot brain doesn't know this and it's just spinning its wheels, spinning its wheels at full speed until the rubber is on fire and smoke pouring off this thing. And DARPA has to show up from a helicopter. They hop out of the helicopter with the fire extinguishers, and it's a complete disaster.And the thing that DARPA had really hyped up, they're like, “this is the new innovation, we're going to save the lives of all these troops.” And so then, reporters come after Tony Tether and he meets them, he meets the reporters who are waiting at the end line, at the finish line, which is roughly — it's 142 mile race — 130 miles away from the closest car. The Outcome.Carnegie Mellon did the best, it went 7.4 miles. Anthony Levandowski's motorcycle makes it into the final round, mostly as a stunt. It did horribly in qualifying, but the DARPA guys are like, “this thing is so crazy, it really embodies the spirit of what we're trying to do, so let's just bring it to the race anyway.” It's not like it can win, its gas tank doesn't hold enough gas for it to go all the way to the finish line.So, Anthony brings it up to the starting line, hands it off to a DARPA guy who kind of holds his hand on it until it goes, motorcycles starts going, he takes his hand off and motorcycle instantly falls to the ground. Anthony had forgotten to turn on the stabilizing software system before it started.That will get you.And so, one of his lessons for the next year was make a checklist.The cool thing about this is that it's an utter fiasco, it's how you always tell it. But then everybody who was there for this fiasco, they stuck around and they went, in many ways, to kind of form the current self-driving industry. Do you want to talk about that seed, what it has turned into since?Yeah. So, very quickly, what's great about the Grand Challenge is that it brings all these people together, and it pits them against this problem that everyone had kind of dismissed as impossible. So, what happens is DARPA does the 2005 Grand Challenge 18 months later, and the 18 months really prove to be the difference in that teams that weren't ready at all for the Grand Challenge, for the original one, are ready 18 months later. They've learned much more about how this works. And so, the 2005 race is a huge success. Stanford, led by Sebastian Thrun, comes in first place, Carnegie Mellon second, five teams finish this big race through the desert. Then DARPA follows it up with the 2007 Urban Challenge, which pits the vehicles against a little mock city, where they have people driving around and all of a sudden they have to deal with traffic and stop signs and parking lots and all of this stuff.What you really get from the Urban Challenge is the sense that this technology seems, suddenly, very possible. And by 2007, this is a big media event, it's hosted by the guys who did MythBusters and Larry Page is there, and he shows up in his private plane full of Google execs, and it's like, look at this future of technology. About a year later, Larry Page wants to build self-driving cars. This is actually something he'd looked at as an undergraduate or a graduate student and then his thesis advisor said, “well, how about you focus on internet search instead?” And it worked out pretty well.It worked out okay, I think, right?I think he did fine, that's what I thought. He decided I want to get back to self-driving cars. He'd been at the Urban Challenge and been like, “I can see how far this technology has come,” so what he did was he went to Sebastian Thrun, who had led Stanford's team through the challenges and he was already working at Google, he was a big part of making Street View happen. Along with Anthony Levandowski, who Thrun had met through the challenges and he's like, “oh, this guy's nuts but he's really talented and he's a real go-getter.” So, he brings him on to help them do Street View and then Larry Page says, “okay, now build me a self-driving car.” Sebastian Thrun says, "okay, well I happen to know the 12 best people on the world at this technology, I met basically all of them through the DARPA challenges."He has this meeting at his chalet in Lake Tahoe, at the end of 2008. And he brings together a dozen people and it's Anthony Levandowski and it's Chris Urmson and then people like Bryan Salesky — names that are now really the top tier in self-driving cars. And he says, “Google is going to build a self-driving car, we're going to have something that looks a whole lot like a blank check and I want this team to be the one to do it.” And that becomes Project Chauffeur. They become this really secretive project within Google, they go forth over the next couple of years, and they make this incredible progress in self-driving cars. And this is the story of the second half of the book: how this team it comes together and then how they ultimately come apart because as soon as they have to start thinking about how to make a product, how to commercialize this technology and the reality of money and power within the team become real wedge issues.Within them, you see rivalries, especially between Urmson and Levandowski, who are fighting for control and fighting for the direction of the team. Ultimately, things kind of break apart and what you see over time is as people leave and as this technology starts to look a lot more real, everyone splinters off to do their own thing, and this was what I call Google self-driving diaspora. Chris Urmson leaves to start Aurora. Bryan Salesky leaves to start Argo. Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu leave to start Nuro, Don Burnette leaves to start Kodiak, and Anthony Levandowski, of course, leaves to start Otto, which is acquired by Uber, which is the genesis of the Uber-Waymo huge self-driving lawsuit.Considerable amount of litigation that I believe is ongoing to this day, yes.So, the litigation did end, fortunately for everyone but the lawyers, I think. Uber and Waymo ultimately settled and then, weirdly, about a year after that, the Department of Justice charged Levandowski with criminal trade secret theft to which he ultimately pled guilty, and a few months ago he was sentenced to 18 months in prison, but he will not start his sentence until the pandemic is over.So, it definitely seems that this is still very much seen as the start of something, and you have covered a lot of this industry. What's kind of the state of the art now and where are things kind of moving forward?Well, fortunately for the industry, all of these personal rivalries, I think, have largely cooled off. And I think the book is really a history of how this got started and how these people pulled this technology forward, and then kind of came apart at the seams. But now what you've got is something that looks a little bit like a mature industry. You have Waymo with its program in the Arizona suburbs of Phoenix, and it's starting to really take the safety drivers out of its cars in earnest. Cruise, which is also a focus of the book, which is part of GM and also backed by Honda, is moving to take the safety drivers out of its cars in San Francisco, a much more dynamic environment, as it moves to start a self-driving system there. Self-driving trucks are looking much more serious than ever before. Argo AI, which has partnered with Ford and Volkswagen, is moving towards starting a taxi service, a robo-taxi service in Miami.I talk about the Gartner hype cycle where, I think, from 2014 to 2017 or so, we were really at peak hype, totally inflated expectations where everyone said, “your kids will never have to learn how to drive.” Chris Urmson is saying, "my 12 year old son will never have to learn to drive a car," and I'm pretty sure the kid's got his learner's permit by now. Those inflated expectations burst a little bit as people realize just how hard this technology is. But I think where we are now, on that Gartner hype cycle, is on what's called the slope of enlightenment, where people are getting more serious. Even if they haven't cracked the problem yet, I think they have a really good sense of what it takes to crack the problem, which, it turns out, is a lot of time, an incredible amount of money and at least 1,000 very talented engineers.Whole lot of lasers, a very sympathetic governmental oversight structure in a suburb of Phoenix. We have the ingredients for the solution, right?We could make it work. And so, I'm still optimistic about it, I still think the technology can do a lot of good. I think what people are figuring out is how to right-size this technology. People are figuring out how to actually apply self-driving cars in a realistic way, and I think the cooler projects out there are companies that are working on making self-driving shuttle cars for senior living communities, these big areas in Arizona and Florida, they cover 1,000 acres and people need to get around but can't necessarily drive anymore. And where the driving environment is pretty calm, that's a great use case. The trick right now is to figure out where you can make the technology work, and then the next question will be where can you actually make money off of this? That one I'm less bullish on because the economics of this, I think, are going to be pretty tough to crack.I mean, we're closing in on the end of this one, but DARPA seeded a little bit of the initial funds, it seems, for a lot of this research. Is that still an application that people are looking into or getting folks off the road in places that are dangerous?The army is still working on that, and I think those projects are still ongoing. But the initial push for DARPA was a line in a congressional funding bill from the end of 2000, it was one of the last things Clinton signed into law. And it mandated that by 2015, one-third of all ground vehicles, I think it was military, be unmanned, which was completely insane.How did we do? What's the number?I mean, maybe we've got three vehicles. That stuff hasn't panned out so much. But my favorite thing, one of the first people I managed to track down for this book was the guy, the congressional staffer who got that line into the bill. And I told him, I was like, "oh, I'm researching this and I would just want to ask you about why you put that in there and what your thinking was." And he goes, "Oh, did something come of that?"That's amazing.I was like, “yeah, I don't know, an industry that's predicted to be worth $7 trillion.”And what also came of it is Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car by Alex Davies. Alex, where can people find the book? You can find this book, basically, anywhere online, it's available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your regular booksellers. It's out in hardcover January 5. You can also get the audiobook, you can get it on Kindle. Get it however you like, I just hope you enjoy it.My Twitter handle is @adavies47. You can find some of my work on Business Insider, where I'm the senior editor for our transportation desk.Ah, excellent website, very, very good website. If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe