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Today, for another edition of You Know, where I introduce you to someone who is starting a newsletter who you should know, I am joined by the insightful Maris Kreizman. Maris is the former host of the beloved podcast The Maris Review, the new head of the recently relaunched newsletter of the same name, and a celebrated cultural critic who bridges the worlds of literature and pop culture. With her extensive experience in book publishing and her sharp commentary on contemporary media, Maris brings a unique perspective to the world.

Can you share a bit about your journey from working in the book publishing industry to cultural criticism, podcasting, and now newslettering? What are some of the pivotal moments that sort of shaped your career?

Yeah, in my About Me section on my Substack, it starts, takes a long drag on a cigarette because I feel like I've really seen it all. I started out wanting to be a book editor and I did that through most of my twenties. And then I was laid off and had to find work that was more in and around books. So, I worked at barnesandnoble.com and Kickstarter and Book of the Month.

And while I was doing all of that stuff, I sort of realized, as we all did back then, that it's nice to have a personal brand. It really is. And it's nice to have one that is not attached to your profession or the way you earn money. And I began to realize that I loved writing as much as editing. So I do some book criticism and some TV criticism and I started freelancing. And I started my podcast for Lit Hub because I was getting frustrated that I couldn't pitch conversations or profiles with authors anymore at most publications now that aren't paying that much attention to books.

I figured that was a way to talk to the people I wanted to talk to on my own terms. And this will be kind of a continuation of that. It won't be audio to start, but I get to talk about what I want and when I want to, and that's so freeing.

You've been really vocal about the intersection of literature and the broader pop culture. How do you think that relationship has evolved with the advent of digital media and social platforms? You know, “BookTok” and such.

Yeah, I have to admit that I am a lurker on BookTok, [but] have not participated. I started out on Tumblr, and that was really my main platform. And since I started out on Tumblr, I think social media in general has gotten more toxic and digital media has gone from an industry that was booming to one that I hope is still around tomorrow. So it becomes really important to have a way to talk about books that doesn't rely all the time on those platforms. … There are so few platforms now to talk about books other than BookTok. BookTok has become so big that you might start thinking those kinds of books are the only books out there. And there is a vast world and it would be so wonderful if there were a platform for all of the kinds of books that I enjoy.

Yes. Which brings me to my next question. With so many new books being published every year, how do you decide which titles and authors you'll engage with? Are there any particular trends that excite you?

Parker, this one keeps me up at night and makes my apartment a wreck. It's really hard. There are some books that I know are coming and they're written by someone I already admire and that's really exciting. But getting a first novel from someone I haven't heard of is so exciting and I don't have time to read them all. And sometimes it's really just luck of the draw. I pick one and then I'm in it. And that's why book criticism is so important that we need as many people as we can to be picking out those debut novels and small press books and telling people about them. Because I'm not looking at trends.

I'm just looking at whatever looks interesting to me, which is specific.

Finally, tell me about the Maris Review, the newsletter and how does it differ from your podcast (RIP) of the same name and what can readers expect format wise, frequency, et cetera.

I think my main challenge with my Substack is going to be that I have become so disillusioned with the publishing industry and the digital media industry. And I just have to always try to keep my love of books and the excitement around books away from that.

And so the Maris Review will be a place where you can see what I'm reading, see what I'm going to read next, hear my thoughts on the latest scandal — scandal's a big word for the book world, but kerfuffle, perhaps. I hope to talk about adaptations because that's such a big way that people find their way into books. I hope to do author interviews and perhaps audio once again.I'm so excited to figure out what my own constraints are going to be. I have so much freedom now and I'm getting ready to kind of wheedle it down.

That’s it for me today. Thanks again for reading!

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to read a book called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt. The argument made in the book went like this: with the rise of smartphones and other internet-connected devices, there’s been a massive uptick in mental illness among Gen Z youth and adolescents. Haidt connects these two, arguing that these don’t merely correlate, but share a causal link. I saw a lot of really positive coverage of his book, a lot of really fawning praise for his work, but something about it didn’t sit quite right with me. It all fit too neatly.

There was a review of the book published in Nature that tore into his findings, which I recommend people check out. I’ll link that in the notes here. But for today’s newsletter, I’m sharing an audio interview I conducted a couple weeks ago with Siva Vaidhyanathan, the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, and one of Haidt’s more vocal critics.

In the interest of fairness, I’ll also be linking to the original book, some of the more positive praise it received, and some coverage of the controversy it’s caused. I hope you enjoy this special audio edition of the newsletter. Full transcript included, obviously.

Parker Molloy: All right, so it's so great to talk to you. And so I spent the past week reading Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation. And I really wanted to chat with you about it because I know this is a topic on which you've done a lot of study on, and I've seen your social media posts about it. And yeah, so the basic argument that he makes throughout the book

The book is very repetitive. He repeats his thesis over and over. He makes the argument essentially that the rise of what he calls phone-based childhood, which he refers to as all internet-connected devices, has replaced play-based childhood. And that is primarily to blame for the Gen Z mental health crisis. So I wanted to know what he got wrong here.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Sure, sure, sure. Well, let me start with what he got right. Right. First of all, it's indisputable that young Americans, especially girls and young women, are experiencing higher level of expressed mental distress and emotional distress than we have seen in some time. Right. So that that pretty much tells us that something is happening in this country and probably a few other countries that is creating some combination of suffering we have not seen before and an ability to express and a willingness to express that misery. Right. So, you know, it's a weird thing to look at historically and height doesn't tend to look at things historically, but, you know, life for most people in most of the planet is better than it has been ever in human history.

So in the long curve, you know, misery is down, but that shouldn't be a reason to not take seriously the stress, distress and suffering of so many millions of young people. Now, the other thing he gets right is at least in the American context, a steady change in tactics of parenting and the experience of childhood. That's well documented. You don't just need anecdotes to show you this. And it comes in many forms, of course, and it's largely class -informed. So we do see, and we've seen for decades, a sense of parents being both more protective of their children's loose time, right? And this can come from various sources. It can be influenced by the moral panic about drugs or the moral panic about kidnapping or exploitation or any of those things that has been circulating in our media for so many decades, convincing parents that they have to manage children's time precisely.

You know, along with the hyper competitive culture that we're seeing among the more privileged classes in the United States where everybody's struggling to get into the same 20 colleges and everybody is trying to sign up for the travel soccer team. You know, all of these things have definitely shifted the practice of parenthood and the experience of childhood. Now, for people who are not privileged,

Of course, we've seen the proliferation of demands on parents that take them out of their children's lives, right? So it's not like the free -range latchkey child phenomenon is gone. It's just alive among lower -income families and lower -wealth families, because of course, no one can afford childcare.

No one can afford a nanny. No one can afford for one parent to stay home and not work. All of those things that allowed, especially the one parent staying home and not working, which was a luxury long gone in this country, allowed for children to have that space and that security. And so all of these things are long-term changes over four or five decades we've seen. So what happens in the 2000s and what happens to crater mental health among young people? Well, I think it's important to remember that when you're talking about, first of all, as diverse a population as the United States and as complex a question as mental health is that

You should resist looking for one factor or even trying to isolate variables to find the main factor, the universal factor, the contributing factor. That is what leads us astray. Right. So this is what I think he does wrong. What I think he does wrong is he starts out with a very poor archaic theory of technology. And he starts out with an ahistorical approach to what has changed in American life in recent decades. But he still has this phenomenon that does speak to his thesis, which is that there is a demonstrable drop -off in well -being starting around 2010 or 2011, which is four years after the iPhone is introduced. And just as we start to see younger and younger people get smartphones or get mobile phones at all. And look, every child who has a mobile phone, everybody under 18 who has a mobile phone or has a smartphone has so for a particular reason. There was a conversation, they're expensive, there was a commitment, there were rules set down, there are reasons for it and there are often very good reasons for it. But collectively you do have this change.

So he sees a correlation here and it's irresistible to him because of course if he can spark panic about this, then he can create a tremendous amount of attention and then he can be the one stepping forward to try to, you know, prescribe a problem. But this isn't going to help, right? This isn't going to help because the problem is complex.

Let's concede that moving one's eyes from the park to the phone is not healthy. I think it would be hard to argue otherwise, right? We experience in our daily lives, it's just so obviously not as healthy as running and playing and playing kickball and softball and street hockey and all of those things, right? So at the same time, let's concede that people do engage with these screens and the apps on them for reasons that are important to them. It's not a default. People have particular uses and needs that they're satisfying by moving to these phones. So again, let's concede it's not great. But that leaves us a huge gap between not great or even bad on balance, and being the chief cause of this high level of distress. When a much more reasonable explanation, and I think a richer explanation, is that a number of factors work synergistically to affect not only an individual's mental health state, but collectively a population's mental health state. It's safe to say that there are people in our country in our communities who are better off because their screens, their phones, the apps on their phones allow them to build community, allow them to find people who have gone through similar experiences to whatever stress or distress they're experiencing, right? People who find mentors, people who find guides. This has been well documented among queer youth for many, many decades, right? That

that the ability to reach out beyond your immediate surroundings and find stories and role models and guides and peers could be crucial to surviving some of the most and thriving through some of the most stressful developmental moments that a person can go through. And so for someone in a hostile family or an uncaring or an unreasonable family, or an unreasonable community or church or whatever, these sorts of tools can be crucial. Now, who knows how many young Americans use these tools for that purpose, but we know it's not zero. We know it's significant and we know it's important to them. We also know that children whose families are dissolving or children whose families have lost wealth, houses, jobs, over the cascading economic crises, first the 2008 crisis and its long legacy wiping out American wealth, and then the COVID crisis, right? The sort of two convulsions happening in their lifetimes. How many found solace, community distraction, fun, joy through their screens when nothing else was available?

So going back to this question, remember, Haidt has a two-part diagnosis, but he and everyone reading him seems to be only focusing on the second part of the diagnosis. The first part of the diagnosis is that childhood has changed. We've gone from having a sense of free-range immersion in our immediate surroundings, our physical landscape, our communities, other people face to face, and shifted our behavior toward these screens and it has not been healthy, right? So you don't even have to go as far as height to say the problem is the phones. Maybe the problem is everything else in society, right? Maybe the problem is that everything else in society seems scary, unfriendly, unwelcoming, not permitted by certain parents, right? And the only reasonable escape is to go to one screen. Now Dana Boyd did tremendous qualitative research on these very questions about a decade ago before smartphones themselves were the screen of question and when there were plenty of other platforms accessible largely through computers that young people were starting to use.

And it was really clear from the deep interviews she did with hundreds of young people around the country that the strategies were worth paying attention to. That what the young people were saying is, yeah, there are things in my life that are suboptimal, that are stressful, that maybe my parents or my older siblings had ways of dealing with that are no longer available to me. There's no place to safely hang out, right? If I hang out in the community, the police are gonna mess with me or the mall security guards are gonna mess with me or the mall's closing down anyway after 2008, right? Pretty much all the malls in the country closed down, right? So all of these spaces, the parks, the malls, they're in disrepair or recession. And so the places where young people can learn to be themselves and be with others and figure themselves out.

They're disappearing from real space. So again, Dana Boyd documented all of this and that is a widespread analysis, right? It's not just one device. It's not just one technology. In fact, what we learn from that work and Dana Boyd was not the only one. There were a number of other people doing this sort of qualitative research on young people at this time of great change when social media was really booming even before people got phones, right? When the days of MySpace and early Facebook, what we see time and time again is that the problem is us, the problem is society, the problem is adults, and that young people are trying to cope, and they're coping by going toward an occasional endorphin rush, whatever else these devices offer them, everything from community and solidarity, and friendship to pornography and games and paranoia and conspiracies, right? You've got all of these potential temptations that can give one some sort of comfort, community or distraction in a society that is otherwise unfriendly and untrusting of many American young people.

So what I would say to John Haidt, if he cared to listen, is your data is too narrowly focused on big sweeping data sets. You're not actually listening to young people to ask them what are they experiencing and what are they deciding to do and why. Because they have autonomy in this. Young people don't have to pick up their phones. They don't have to install you know, Snapchat, that's their choice. They're doing it for a reason. Where are they getting out of it? You know, those are important questions that other researchers have gone through. Height had no interest in talking to the researchers who actually listen to young people about how they're living and why they do what they do.

Now, when I said he has a poor theory of technology, he has this idea that the presence of a technology in our lives has one necessary effect, right? That it's the technology that is the driver of social change, not ever considering the idea that the presence of the technology could actually be the response to the problem, not the problem. And so, of course, it correlates, right? And what we've seen in other people's studies, studies he tended to ignore or downplay, is that the young people who tend to suffer the most acute distress, mental illness, self-harm, other things like that, tend to be the ones who gravitate toward the use of phones and apps. And so if that's the case, if there's a correlation there, then it's just as likely, in fact, more likely that, first of all, people who are susceptible to suffering, let's say, self-harm or eating disorders are more likely to be affected by whatever content they're encountering that either encourages or triggers that behavior when they engage with their phones, with Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or whatever, right? So if there's a causal connection, it's gonna be more acute among those already susceptible to or perhaps suffering from these conditions and just as likely, and this is what we hear when we talk to young people, is that those suffering through that are more likely to seek out community advice, solace, solidarity. And maybe even some answers on how they can change their lives. And so we've seen that in the qualitative work. We've seen it in the quantitative work as the response and that wonderful review in nature that pretty much took down Height's book, you know, makes very clear that that's something showing up in the quantitative work. And I have to say, I've seen it anecdotally. You know, I have an 18 year old daughter who has many friends who have gone through various experiences and, you know, rather all too common conditions. And these are the conversations that those girls have about why they do what they do and how they're coping. And, you know, it's a deeply sensitive and complex thing. And so when I first encountered Haidt's position, I don't even want to call it work, but position, through his Atlantic articles, I was immediately struck by the lack of voices of girls and young women. You know, they're not hard to find. And the scholarship interviewing them is not hard to find. And yet he doesn't seem particularly interested in their actual experience or perspective. He's only interested in launching a tirade.

He doesn't seem to be interested in listening. He's only interested in talking, which means he's less of a teacher and more of a preacher. And I think that's basically unhealthy. Look, you know, a lot of us, people in my scholarly community and intersecting scholarly communities have been trying for two decades to get Americans to think in more complex and sophisticated ways about the communication technology in our lives and constantly entering our lives. We want people to understand that these systems are socio-technical.

They involve both the actions of autonomous humans and the tendencies of highly designed technologies. And it's in that interaction between what we humans want to do, tend to do, and do to each other and the way these systems are designed, that's where the action is. That's where it's interesting. And so to say it's the technology or it's the humans, is a mistake, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of how technology works in our lives. Technologies, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, are extensions of our capabilities. A bicycle is merely an extension of my legs. It makes me a more efficient user of my legs, but the purpose is the same. Get from point A to point B. It just means I get to do it with less energy expended at a quicker rate.

A computer, as Steve Jobs reminded us, is a bicycle of the mind, right? It's something that is designed, at least in its current form, to extend our mental capabilities beyond our rooms and beyond our immediate capacity. So my computer is filled with spreadsheets and lists of things that I can't hold in my memory with any reasonable expectation.

But it's also used to render the thoughts I have when I want to put them in word form or video form or audio form. And the computer is an extension of my voice and my fingers in the sense that it can send these expressions to many other people as well. When you understand that, that that's all technologies are, extensions of things we already want to do.

Then there's no point in trying to make an argument that it's the phones or it's the people. It's of course in the interaction and the conversation. And to fail to understand that synergistic effect is to get everything wrong and then miss the diagnosis, right? So, Haidt's diagnosis is something close to prohibition. And it reminds me of like, you know, the fact that in the first two decades of the 20th century, there were many people making sincere arguments that alcohol abuse was causing great harm in society, that it was ripping families apart, it was causing violence, it was causing people to lose jobs, and the harms were so widespread and well-documented that we would be remiss not to make alcohol illegal.

But in the absence of understanding the motivations for that kind of drug abuse, we of course made the absolute wrong policy decision, one that empowered criminals, one that did nothing to stem the abuse of alcohol. It just made the abuse of alcohol a much more dangerous phenomenon. And that's why Americans undid that decision within a decade. It was clearly documented as a mistake.

There wasn't just a mistake of intentions. The intentions of prohibitionists were pretty good, although there was a whole lot of anti-Catholicism attached to it and anti-immigrant sentiment attached to it. So the undercurrents were not so good. But the actual claim like, you know, wouldn't society work better if people were not drinking alcohol all the time? Well, of course. But if you're going to address the problem, let's identify the problem. And the problem was then as now, life sucks.

Life was rough and people were escaping into the technology of the moment, you know alcohol or phones or You know Oxycontin or whatever right people escape into it, for good reasons and bad mostly in those cases -- Escapism in the case of phones. There are good functional reasons to do it if you are a parent working two jobs with contingent hours, you're working at a gas station and a Starbucks, and you're a single parent, you better have a smartphone to be able to manage your hourly commitment to both jobs and your transportation and whatever childcare you can hack together. And you better give your child a phone too, so that you can be in constant contact with your child. It's a necessary survival strategy in a society that has no safety net and no decent commitment to making sure that children lead safe and secure lives. So you want to address the problem of alcohol abuse? Maybe you do things to strengthen unions. Maybe you do things to strengthen the social safety net. Maybe you give women more legal autonomy to get out of marriages that are abusive. Maybe you do a dozen other things that we ended up doing in the 20th century to a large degree and at least reducing the overall damage of alcohol abuse in society without outlying alcohol. You can still regulate it in reasonable ways. So you want to address the problems of misery among young Americans? Let's do that. Let's do it seriously, like grownups, looking at all the factors. Let's talk about the fact that it's really hard to be a parent if you don't have health benefits at your job.

And, or you, for that matter, you depend on your job for health benefits. You know, like, in the absence of government single payer health, a whole lot of Americans' lives are much worse off, I would say most of our lives are much worse off than they could be. Right? Let's have that conversation. Well, what would that do to lift the overall quality of life in America? And therefore, lift the quality of life of children growing up in households where parents might have to change jobs, might lose their jobs, might have to work two part-time jobs to make it all work, right? Those are really crucial questions that we dodge by saying it is the phones.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that it really does seem like a cop out when he points to the phones. A lot of his answers to this sound, some of them reasonable, you know: phones shouldn't be out during classes, obviously, you know, I mean, like that's fine. Others like passing the Kids Online Safety Act. That's less fine. That would have wide ranging implications for all of society. That would be very bad.

Right, exactly. That's a sledgehammer. Yeah. Right, right. Yeah, no, that's a sledgehammer. And look, even this idea of what the school's phone policy should be, my kid's high school has been wrestling with this for a decade. And during the last four years when my kid was in high school, we had monthly updates from the principal on tweaks to the cell phone policy and the state of the cell phone policy.

And my kid's school was slightly different in policy to some of the other public high schools in the area. And each one of them is dealing with pressures from parents, many, many parents, especially lower income parents, demand that their children have their phones with them and have them on at all times. Because that's the only way to cope with the turmoil of daily life for working class parents.

Many of the wealthier parents who are much more concerned about test scores and grades and peace and quiet were insisting on prohibition. And that's a vast generalization. Of course there were members of both communities taking the other position too. But my point is there were no simple answers that worked for every child. And the teachers and principals understood that and continue to understand it, which is why every school in America has not completely banned phone use, right? If the answer were that simple and everybody's quality of life would go up, then of course we would. But if you take seriously the testimony about people's real lives, you quickly see that it's not that simple. And there are issues that have to be considered, right? So,

And there have to be experiments and every school should have the money and patience and studies to support experimentation and report their results. Maybe having phones in a bag that allows no radio signals in during class is a good policy. That seems like a reasonable thing. And then when class changes go, people can pop out their phone and see if their parents texted them. You know, those seem like reasonable policies. Having a no camera policy in school seems like a reasonable way to deal with privacy violations and surveillance and bullying and other issues that happen to be accelerated by the presence of these technologies, although certainly not caused by because all of those things existed for centuries, right?

So that's how you have to look at these problems. And what really bugs me about Haidt is under the veneer of scholarly sober distance, he simplifies everything and fundamentally doesn't seem particularly concerned about the needs of young people in America.

Welcome to the Present Age podcast [and transcript]. I’m your host Parker Molloy. Joining me today on the show is Aaron Rupar, the author of the new Public Notice Substack. Let’s get started.

Parker Molloy: Hey, Aaron. How's it going?Aaron Rupar: I'm good. Thanks for having me on the podcast.

Yeah, of course. As soon as I heard that you were starting your own thing, I wanted to get you on here to talk about it, so that anyone who's listening to this can go read your new Substack. Can you tell me about it?

I appreciate that. Yeah, I'm viewing my Substack, which I'm going to call Public Notice, as basically an extension of the sort of coverage I've been doing for four or five years now, I guess maybe six. Boy, I started, well, early 2016, so five and a half, going on six. Which is basically coverage of Trumpism, right-wing media, and where they fit into the broader sphere of American politics. As with any of these Substacks, I think things have a tendency to evolve as you go, and you get a sense of what works with your audience, what doesn't work, what sort of things people are interested to read more about. And so I'm viewing it, at least initially, as a more conversational and iterative version of the sort of writing I'd been doing at Vox, with at least three newsletters a week to begin with. Actually, to begin with, it'll be more. I think I'm going to be doing a daily one for the first couple weeks and then scaling it back to more of a normal schedule after that.

But, yeah, I'm hoping that it'll be a place that people can go to get up to speed on what the big media stories of the week are, how right-wing media in particular is covering the broader picture of American politics. And a lot of good stuff that you're familiar with too, from your background at Media Matters. So that's how I'm viewing it going in. Like I said, I'm sure things will evolve. And it's always daunting when you're at the beginning stages of something like this. But I'm hopeful that a lot of the audience that I've developed over the years will come with me and check out the newsletter, and hopefully enjoy it. So we'll see how it goes.

Yeah, definitely. Most people, if they're not familiar with your writing at Vox, they're probably at least familiar with the videos you post. You post constantly. Videos from all sorts of political events, Trump rallies, et cetera, et cetera. One question I had about that was, are you still going to be posting videos, and is your Twitter feed going to change at all?

I don't think it's going to change at all. It took a lot of outlay, in terms of money, to get some of the services that previously I had organizations paying for, whether that's SnapStream or TVEyes, things that I rely on to be able to do live posting and media monitoring. Again, all stuff that I'm sure you're familiar with from Media Matters, which also is very active in that space. But that's the idea, is to keep Twitter pretty constant. And so for people who just enjoy the video tweets and the video threads, not too much should be changing on that front. But then for people who do enjoy my writing, I'll be doing at least a couple of free newsletters a week, and then one paid one that I'm imagining at this point will be a summation of the most buzzworthy segments and news stories from media. More of a media-focused newsletter than the other two, which I'm thinking will be more focused on politics.

But I know that that's been a huge thing for me in terms of developing an audience, has been Twitter. And so it's expensive. And that was kind of a thing as I was leaving Vox and planning this next stage of my career. I felt kind of exhausted from all of the negotiations that I had to do just to try and strike deals with SnapStream, TVEyes, places like that. But I think I'm pretty geared up at this point to have all the same services that I've come to be used to, and to come to rely on to some extent, to do the type of media coverage that I do. So, for people who are just interested in my tweets, I think people, even if they have that level of interest in my work, and that much shouldn't be changing too much.

Cool. And also anyone who's a fan of your tweets should probably subscribe to the newsletter, which I'm not sure if you mentioned, it's called Public Notice, right?

Yeah. I thought Public Notice, it works for the type of stuff I'm going to be doing, trying to surface stories that are in the broad public interest, kind of in the sense that a public notice, as we historically think of it, is like a broadsheet that you'd see in a town square or something like that. I thought that dovetailed nicely with the idea that I have for this newsletter being a broadsheet summarizing, again, the things that I'm paying attention to in the sphere of media and politics.

It's like trying to name a band. I've played in enough bands where the band name can always be kind of a fraught item to agree on, to come up with. And so for a while, I was just going to go with the Rupar Report, and I still may incorporate that as the name of the paid newsletter that I do, or I might use that as a section of the newsletter. But yeah, I like the ring of Public Notice. I think it works for the type of work that I'm going to be doing, and so, yeah. That's going to be the name of it.

Oh, yeah. Whenever I hear one of these really good names, I'm just kind of like, "Dammit, why didn't I think of that?" You know?

Yeah.

I like mine. I like The Present Age, but also-

Yeah. I like it too.

I kind of wish it was something that felt... Because in my mind, I pictured it like, "This would be a great title for a magazine," or something like that. But then as time goes on, I'm just like, "Man, I wish it was just something that was like, boom, here's what you're getting," that sort of thing, instead of having to be like, "So if you read some philosophy, blah, blah," having to go into detail on that sort of stuff. But, yeah, Public Notice is just a great name.

Thought so.

And is that going to be at publicnotice.substack.com? [ed. note: the address is aaronrupar.substack.com]

Yes, that is what it's going to be. So, for many, many years I owned aaronrupar.com. I was just paying for it in case. And then I ended up just earlier this year letting that lapse. And of course it was snapped up. I no longer own it. And so that is still actually, as we record this here, that is still a little bit unclear exactly what the URL is going to be. But I believe it will be aaronrupar.substack.com to begin with. I'm still debating if I want to pay for the aaronrupar.info, or something like that. Yeah. One of those things where, for many, many years for GoDaddy, I just had money going out the door to hold this URL. And then, I don't know if I was trying to cut costs or something, but I let it lapse about a year ago, and here I am. I went back to see if I could purchase it and it's been snapped up, it's no longer available.

So, yeah. It'll probably have Substack in the title to begin with, but from what I understand those are things that are pretty easy to change down the line. The main place to find me will just be check out my Twitter account, I'll have a link there. But I'm guessing that for people who are listening to this who maybe aren't on Twitter or something like that, aaronrupar.substack.com should be the place to go to find that.

Absolutely. Yeah. God, that sort of reminds me of, a while back I was looking for an email address or something like that. And I was just like, "I am going to sign up for a Gmail address that's just my name, Parker Molloy." And it was taken, and I'm like, "Who the hell took this?" I kind of want to send an email to it and just be like, "Who are you? Why'd you take my name?"

Yeah. Well, there might be another Parker Molloy out there.

It's possible. I-

Yeah. There's an Aaron Rupar in Wisconsin. My last name is fairly... There's a few of us, but... I mean, with all of the people out there, odds are there might be another Parker Molloy.

Yeah. Yeah. One thing kept coming up on searches, something like an 18th century Irish immigrant or something was named Parker Molloy. I'm like, "That sounds about right. That's perfect."

I don't think that person would've opened a Gmail, but-

No, probably not.

Unless they did some time travel or something like that.

Who knows? Who's to say? So you were recently in Chicago. Right?

I was, yes.

I saw on your Twitter.

Yeah. It was amazing. Right now, I've been spending a lot of time during the pandemic here, I'm in Minnesota, presently. And so we, my two younger brothers and myself, decided to go to Chicago for... The main thing we were going for was the AEW All Out show, which was amazing, and actually worked out quite well for us because it was in Hoffman Estates. Which, for people who aren't familiar with Chicago, was way in the northwest of the metro. But if you're coming from Minnesota, it lopped an hour off of the drive, so it made it actually even an easier drive. When you're in Minnesota, a five hour drive is actually... seems like not that of a deal, because we're so isolated here in terms of other metros.

But yeah, we ended up making a really fun weekend out of it. We did a Cubs game and we hit up the barcade in Wicker Park and all that fun stuff. And my family, we've been quite diligent about COVID stuff, so we were kind of worried about that. But when we got back we did the rapid test just to make sure that everything was on the up and up. And now at this point it was weeks ago, so I think we're in the clear. But one of those things that we had planned, in the very bright and sunny days of June, when it seemed like we were kind of pulling out of this pandemic. And then of course by the time the trip actually happened, COVID was much more of a concern. But it was actually, given how much time we've all spent at home over the past year and a half, it was really fun to get out there.

I'd never really done a trip like that with my brothers either. So to do a brothers road trip, and we saw some really fun wrestling, and of course Wrigley is always a joy as well. So, it's always fun to get to Chicago. I've done that trip from Minnesota when I was living here permanently through college and then a little bit beyond, I used to travel to Chicago quite regularly. But it had been a bit since I had been there. So, kind of reminded me how vibrant and fun the city is. And it was a great time.

Yeah. Because I saw this, I saw that you came to Chicago. First, well, it was on your Twitter. But besides that, the Washington Free Beacon decided to write about you. Did you see that?

Oh, God. Yeah. Well, what happened was... And I don't know if people follow @RedSteeze, but he and I... he was kind of needling me over... I posted a photo from one of the wrestling... We went to two wrestling events, but the first one that I was at. And we had gone to the wrestling show and we were back at the hotel and I had had a couple of drinks. So I was feeling just feisty enough to engage. And so it was sort of good-natured, at least on my end. But it's kind of that pipeline of people, right-wing media figures, where it went from @RedSteeze to the Washington Free Beacon, and it became kind of this... Again where people on the right love to own the libs for being hypocritical or not practicing what they preach.

And so the idea was that I was a huge hypocrite because I was in this indoor setting. And granted, the mask compliance at AW was actually pretty good. It seemed like people generally, with exceptions of course, but when they were sitting down in their seats were masked up. But yeah, it kind of just became one of those things where whenever you're kind of a prominent liberal online and right-wingers have a chance to shame you for being a hypocrite, or not following the rules that you profess to find important for people in society to follow, it's kind of a fun thing for them to do, I guess.

So. Yeah. I'm sure you've experienced that sort of thing too, where you kind of become the story. And at this point I've been enough times where I can just shrug it off and it's not a big deal. But yeah, that whole weekend I was kind of... My Twitter notifications, I was getting notifications that, oh, this or that right-wing figure was teasing me or trying to shame me for the fact that I was out and enjoying life, at least for that weekend.

Yeah. Every time that happens with me it's usually one of those sites, Free Beacon. Or Twitchy, that's another one.

Ah, Twitchy, oh my goodness.

witchy, when they put me in headlines, they don't qualify it or say who it is. And I'm just like, guys, no one knows who I am. If you're going to write an article about a movie star, you can just say their name and people will know who you're talking about. But if you're just like, "Parker Molloy said this on Twitter," it's like, who the f**k is Parker Molloy?

Right. Because your title, I think, at Media Matters was editor at large. Is that right? So yeah. I mean that... Oh, Media Matters editor, people kind of understand what Media Matters is. But that's kind of the case now for me too, where it's like... When I was at Vox that was always... People love to own Vox, so it was like, oh, this Vox person. And now, it's so new that I'm independent that I'm not quite sure how that's going to work, if I have enough... If my brand is strong enough where people will still care or not. But yeah, when you're just doing a newsletter, it's kind of like, newsletter writer so and so. It doesn't quite have the same kick that, oh, Vox person or Media Matters person has.

Yeah. Sometimes I miss being part of the target that is Media Matters on Twitter. Like when Lara Logan had like-

Oh my God.

Last week, where she was like, "They're like the Taliban," or something like that. And I was like, I've been gone for like two months, and if they turned into a paramilitary organization, I don't know. That seems a little out of character, but okay.

Well, that's kind of... Because, yeah, Media Matters is interesting in that respect because a lot of it, including yourself when you were there, but Bobby Lewis or Andrew Lawrence, people who have such voice on Twitter, but then you read the posts on the Media Matters site and they're so straightforward. They're very factual and quotes. And that's like for me at Vox, Media Matters stuff on your site, and on Twitter too but especially on the site, was such a great resource because it was very factual. And so yeah, whenever you see people portraying Media Matters as this rogue... like a paramilitary organization or something like that, it's so over the top that you just kind of roll your eyes at it, but I don't know.

Some people, I guess, are kind of ashamed of things that they say on TV or they don't want people... That was kind of always the thing that I felt with the long-running feud that I've had over many years now with Glenn Greenwald, which kind of the origins was me just calling him out for being on Tucker and posting video clips. And obviously, other people at Media Matters have been targets of him as well, where he kind of... I think the term that he's used is we're hall monitors or something like that. Like we're narcing on him or something. But oftentimes you're just conveying things that he's saying on Tucker Carlson's show, and if that's enough to set someone off, then I think the problem is probably more with them than anything else. So it's a little bit of people like Lara Logan telling on themselves with stuff like that.

Yeah. See, now that could be one way to get your Substack off the ground. You could just start a big fight with Greenwald.

Oh man, I'm kind of drained.

That might be the path. Just be like-

Yeah, I mean, I've tried to rise above, I guess. Yeah. Over the years you mellow out a little bit. And I don't know, there was a time where Twitter fights were a lot more appealing than they seem to be to me now. I think maybe part of that was just being at Vox, which obviously doesn't really want their staffers engaging in bare-knuckle combat on Twitter. But I still think it's worth calling these people out at times. But with someone like Greenwald, I think it's become so normal for him to go on Fox News, it's not really newsworthy anymore. There was a time where he was getting a lot of grief because he would proclaim that the idea was that he was going on Fox and telling viewers, sharing perspectives that they wouldn't see normally.

But any pretense of that is so far... it's become so absurd to even claim that something like that is going on that I just don't see a lot of news value in highlighting that stuff. And that's sort of the thing, more broadly, with Tucker Carlson's show, which I still try and keep an eye on most nights. But I find myself grappling with just the extent to which it becomes kind of self-perpetuating, where if you make a big event out of every one of his shows, does that help create this perception that they're big events? Because a lot of what he says is so predictable at this point. Obviously he has millions of viewers. And so you can't discount that nor can you really understand what's going on on the right if you ignore people like Tucker Carlson, or if you ignore the Trump rallies.

I don't think that's really a hugely constructive way to approach them, but... And obviously people at Media Matters, that's their job is to document. But for someone like me who is kind of dipping in and out to try and get a sense of what people are talking about on the right, if you're live clipping every one of his monologues there is a sense in which you're kind of promoting him or validating him to your audience as well. And I don't have any great answers for that, but it's something, as I'm kind of immersed in right wing media, that I find myself almost on a daily basis wondering what the correct way to handle situations like that is.

Yeah. I totally agree. I find myself grappling with that same sort of, okay, is this really important to focus on? Is it not? But when it comes to someone like Tucker Carlson, for example, he is essentially setting the platform for the Republican party moving forward. On his show he pushes Great Replacement theory kind of stuff. And then you'll see a member of Congress on Fox and Friends talking about that. That's the same thing that the Charlottesville Nazis chanting that they won't be replaced. That's the same thing. We've come that far to where now that's mainstream.

Or the El Paso shooter. And there's a dynamic where you get kind of numb through the sheer repetition of it, where the first time you hear Tucker Carlson invoke Great Replacement theory, it's this big news event, because it's like, wow, this is a far-right talking point that's made its way onto Fox News. But then after like 10 broadcasts of that, it becomes kind of numbing where it's like, okay, this is just another bit on his show. And you're right. There was a congressman from Texas who was on Newsmax, pretty much word for word saying a lot of the same things that Tucker Carlson says on his show about how the Dem immigration policy is to bring immigrants in who vote for Dems. And this idea that it's this conspiracy to change the electorate in a way that dilutes the power of traditional, with air quotes, American voters sort of thing.

And yeah, it's a tricky thing to know how to handle that, because again there's kind of a novelty the first few times you hear something like that. I think back, the El Paso shooting, which happened, I believe that was in 2018. And at that time, Trump was really hammering the caravan talking points and this notion that immigration was tantamount to an invasion of the country. And that came out in the manifesto that the shooter released at the time of the shooting. And now that we've fast-forwarded three years and it's just kind of a normal Republican talking point. And so there are consequences to things like that, but it also is just a difficult thing to cover on a day in and day out basis because it's kind of exhausting.

And again, it loses some news value. So that is where I think that it's the type of work that Media Matters does is so vital in terms of just shedding light, to a largely progressive audience, of what people are talking about on the right and raising awareness in those ways. But you hear, and I noticed this recently with Chip Roy, who is on Tucker Carlson's program. And I clipped this because it, to me, kind of rose to the level where he was saying that Democrats are sick and twisted individuals, and this sort of dehumanizing and incendiary rhetoric. And that's kind of like a nightly thing on Fox. And so you try and imagine if you're someone who's earnestly watching this stuff, what your views about politics would be.

And it's not a pretty picture. But it's part of the complication of being a journalist covering media at this point. Political media is just knowing how to handle these very difficult subjects in a responsible way that doesn't perpetuate problems. And so, Trump had a rally just this past weekend in Georgia that I live clipped and added some commentary on Twitter. And I got a number of DMs from people who were like, you're part of the problem, you're promoting them. And I try to be sensitive to that. I think there is news value in knowing what Trump is talking about, because he's the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee at this point and obviously he's setting the agenda for the Republican party.

So I don't really think ignoring is the way to go. And again, I don't have any perfect... You could probably teach classes on this stuff, but it's difficult. And these are kind of new problems because we live in such a media-saturated environment now that it's just inescapable. And you have to find a way to cover this stuff if you're going to cover politics, and it's dicey. So I don't pretend to be perfect, but these are things that I am going to try to continue to grapple with in the newsletter as well.

Great. Yeah. I think for me, one of the points that pushed me into trying to do this newsletter and doing a Substack thing, just like you are, is the fact that when I was at Media Matters there were several times where I watched something happen and then I was like, I'm going to write about that. And then I'd write about that. And then I'd watch the same thing happen six months later. And I'm like, I'm going to write about that. I've already written about that, but I'm going to write about it again. And then the same thing would keep happening and nothing was changing. And I'm just like, okay, maybe I'm not writing this correctly. Or maybe I'm not getting through to the people I need to get through to. Or maybe I just need a change of scenery.

And I think that that's been helpful for me. I still think political media is kind of a disaster at the moment. But you also have all of these new sorts of outlets to go to, and to try to... One thing I like about Substack, or email lists generally, is the fact that you don't have to worry about what some algorithm is going to do or what some... Like if Twitter shut down tomorrow, they could do that, and then I would lose everything. I wouldn't have anyone in my contact list. With this, people sign up, and they get emails directly from me.

And Substack can fall apart and I would still have those email addresses to be able to continue to communicate with people. And I think that as time goes on it's going to be more important to be able to reach people directly. And so that's one reason that I thought, yes, this is the path to go for me. This is the chance to get out of that. And also, a chance to just write about whatever I wanted. Sometimes it's on point. Sometimes it's just, here's something I've been thinking a lot about. The most recent piece that I wrote had to do with just kind of this general feeling of dread that's going on. And that's not something that Media Matters would've published, because they'd be like, this is nothing to do with our mission. I'd be like, I know. But it's a chance to express myself in a more personal way without having to... There's a level of not necessarily bad self-censorship, but just staying on topic at a job.

Yeah. And you still do some media analysis on your Substack. So it's not like that's completely gone away. But I totally hear you with the sort of banging your head against the wall aspect of covering these recurring issues in right wing media that never seem to improve. And that can be very frustrating because it's like, well, why am I even bothering? And obviously it's important that people do that sort of reporting, because not everyone, like myself, people can't spend hours each day immersing themselves in right wing media. And so it's important that there are trusted sources who can report on what's going on there. But I think you're also right, because one of the things that I was debating, whether or not to do this newsletter that I was thinking about is, oh maybe I should just go the route of doing the Twitter super follow thing. But, as you were just touching upon, ultimately I concluded that putting that many eggs in the Twitter basket might be a bad idea.

We've seen this with Facebook and the whole pivot to video thing that it's good to not become too reliant on one platform for your professional livelihood. And so obviously Substack is a way to diversify and to also leave space to do more writing than threads, or 280 character tweets, that sort of thing. So yeah, there were a couple different considerations with that, but I do think having a home for your work off of Twitter is probably a good and healthy thing overall.

Oh, absolutely. Anything that gets you a little bit further away from Twitter? Probably healthy.

Probably healthy. I have kind of a hard time with that because Twitter has become... I have it broken up into lists now where I have a news tab and a sports tab and a friends tab. But it really has become kind of my pipeline. Back in the day, 15 years ago, it was like, okay, I'm going to go read the newspaper to get up to speed in the morning with what's going on. And now Twitter has become my entire gateway. And that might change a little bit as I get more immersed in Substack, or as I spend more time on Substack. Because there's a lot of stuff across a wide range of topics going on, on Substack.

So I'm sure I will incorporate that more into my information consumption routine. But it is kind of amazing how all of us as working journalists have, for the most part, been sucked into this vortex of Twitter, for better or worse. And I do think there are a lot of good things about Twitter, but just how ubiquitous it's come and kind of inescapable, when you take a step back, it's like, wow, I do spend a lot of time on it. So, for better or worse. Probably for worse.

It's one of those things where I look at the usage stats on my phone and it's just sad. It's like, hey, your screen time for this week. And I'm like, don't tell me. I don't want to know.

I'll get the ones where it's like your screen time, your average per day, is seven hours per day, down 40% from last week. And it's like, I guess that's progress. But yeah, I've even gotten bad enough in recent years, now I read books on my phone or my computer. Even at night I'm trying to unwind with my family and I've got the multi-viewer to see what's on Fox News and Fox Business and Newsmax. Definitely I'm overstimulated constantly, and I'm sure that does have... it affects you. But again, I view that as part of my coverage area as well as just sort of being aware of what's happening, not just on TV but on the Hill.

And so I'm watching C-SPAN all the time too. But yeah, it does kind of lead to... Even when I'm reading a book on my computer, I usually have a multi-viewer in the other half of the screen where I'm paying attention to everything on cable news. So, 50 years ago that would've been kind of unheard of, I guess, but there are upsides to that too. But yeah, I definitely feel very overstimulated all the time.

Yeah. That's the general theme of my newsletters, just we're hyper connected and at the same time, so I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I just can't relate to any other human being. But I'm like, it's so weird that at this moment I can send out something to 200,000 people, but still not be able to actually feel like I'm communicating with anyone.

It's interesting to think about if we would've lived through a comparable pandemic 50 years ago, before there was the internet. To me, I feel like it would've been a lot more isolating, just in the sense that we use... Like you and I can do this video call and talk, and granted we could have talked on the phone back in the day too or something like that. But even though we basically spent like a year of our lives holed up at home, I never really felt starved for interaction, although it's a little bit more of a shallow interaction than actually hanging out with people or getting together with friends, that sort of thing. But so I don't know, I guess I kind of view that as a upside to this hyper online world that we live in, that I do feel like... I have relationships with people... You and I have never before today, even though I feel like I know you, we've never really talked ever.

We've DM'd and stuff like that, but we've never hopped on a call together or anything like that. So, it does lead to these kind of strange relationships or sort of different sorts of relationships with people. So, I think in some ways to me, I feel like I would've had a harder time enduring the sort of social conditions that in some ways we still are enduring, but this kind of like... the separation that we've all had from each other. Although just before we got in this call, I was talking with Casey Michel. I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work, but he's a political journalist who just sort of book on kleptocracy. And I was doing a Q&A with him for the newsletter, and he was kind of like... I was just congratulating him on finishing his book and stuff. And he was like, oh yeah, my wife likes to say that's how I spent the pandemic was writing this book. And I was like, man, that's so much more constructive than getting into drinking whiskey and daily fantasy sports that I did.

I was going to say, I started collecting baseball cards. That's what I did during this. That's how I spent my pandemic, just picking up random hobbies here and there. I was like, yeah, baseball cards again. I did that when I was like 12. Let's bring that back. That's a thing now.

I have a mutual friend who's really... I don't know Phil Hughes, the former major league baseball player at all, but I have a friend who's really good friends with him. And Phil has become on Instagram, kind of a baseball card celebrity. He does this thing on Instagram where he opens packs of cards. And so I've kind of vicariously... Because at my parents' house, we still to this day have boxes and boxes and boxes of cards from when we were kids, myself and my brothers. And actually one of my brothers recently went through them. And I guess there really weren't that many cards that are worth anything, because even back in the day you needed to buy the premium packs or whatever. And that was totally lost on me. I thought all cards were kind of the same or you could get good cards in any pack.

But you know, everything is so digital now that I guess it kind of... Baseball cards have kind of become this transgressive analog physical item. And so I think it's kind of cool that they're back in vogue now. So I guess, I don't know. We'll see, if this pandemic goes on for another six months, I guess the next variant wave that we have, maybe I'll cave in and buy a box of cards too, but I haven't quite gotten there yet.

Yeah. I'm definitely going the baseball cards and video games route to pandemic survival.

Oh, I love your tweets. Yeah. I absolutely love your MLB The Show tweets. I have friends who are into that game, as well.

It's fun!

Yeah. It's cool that you're savvy enough to post little videos and stuff.

Yeah. So when I was working at Media Matters, I had a separate Twitter account set up that was just following all of the right-wing accounts, just so I can keep up with whatever nonsense they're up to. And so that's the one I connected to my PlayStation. So the feed, the only thing in it is just... Because I never tweet from it, but that's where I have all the photos and videos sent to, to pull from. So yeah, the feed over there is just all of my PlayStation things and nothing else. So it's pretty great. But yeah. You know what, thank you so much for stopping by to talk about your newsletter. Is there anything else that people should know if they're on the edge about whether or not to... Well, first off, if you're on the edge about whether or not to subscribe for sign up for free, you should totally do that. That's without a question. Worst case scenario, you just ignore the emails.

I'm guessing if you made it this far into this podcast, you're probably willing to sign up for free. And so I encourage people to check it out. I've got a couple... As we sit here, I'm a week out from launch, as Parker and I are talking, and I already have a couple posts that I'm excited about that are ready to go. And so I'm hoping that ultimately the content will speak for itself. So yeah. Check it out. Like I said, aaronrupar.substack.com, and check out my Twitter account. I'll certainly be tweeting things out from there as we go. And appreciate you having me on. And at some point we'll have to return the favor. I'd be interested to talk with you about your personal immersion in right-wing media and coming out of that. And perhaps the scars that that left.

Oh, and there are many.

You were at Media Matters maybe three years, right? So you were there a pretty good chunk of time.

Yeah. About, about two and a half years, I guess. Because it was right before the 2018 midterms was when I started over there. And then was there for the midterms, there for the 2020 election. And I was under the impression that after the election there might be a couple weeks of chill-out time. No, of course not.

No. God, no.

It just went right on, right on being crazy.

I've been kind of thinking because yeah, it did kind of calm down there. After Biden's inauguration, there was a brief moment, I guess. Then there was the impeachment though, but I felt like I was breathing easy about how things were going for a couple months, I guess, as the vaccination rollout was kind of successful and things economically seem to be going pretty well and stuff. But now that we're approaching the midterms and there's been Biden's approval numbers are kind of shaky where it seems... And his agenda is somewhat imperiled at this point. I feel some of the old anxiety creeping back here a little bit. So I guess you probably got out at kind of the right time. I'm still planning on covering the same old stuff for the newsletter.

But I guess I do at this point... I've been doing it long enough where I feel a sense of almost duty to cover this stuff. I'm sure it's leaving some scars on me too, but I guess I'm willing endure it a little bit longer to... Because I feel like the story of Trumpism and the struggle to protect the integrity of elections here in the States, it's still an ongoing and very active story. So at least for now I kind of feel obligated to continue to see it through.

Absolutely. And people should 100% follow your newsletter for more on that. Thanks. Thanks again for stopping by.

On this week’s podcast, I interview my friend and former co-worker Eddie Geller. Eddie is running for Congress in Florida’s 15th district. If elected, he would have the best taste in music of anyone to ever hold office. Just throwing that out there. Let’s get started!

Parker Molloy: Hey Eddie, how's it going?

Eddie Geller: Hey, thank you for having me. It's going pretty well.

Well, that's good, it's always good to hear. So you're running for Congress?

I am running for Congress in the 15th district of Florida. I don't know, when you say it, it sounds so serious.

I'd like to just add a question mark at the very end. Congress?

Congress? Yes. I mean, I'm a big believer that good people got to run for office. So it's something I've been thinking about for a while and it really is January 6th, it's just was so appalling and just felt like, all right, I've been thinking about doing this and Republicans don't seem to be able to find the bottom and so I wanted to throw my hat in the ring.

All right. Well that, I mean, seems like as good a reason as any.

Thank you.

It would've been a little strange if you were like, well, January 6th settled it because I really want to know what it's like to be under siege.

“That will just look like a lot of fun. And I just-”

“That looks so fun!”

“... thought if I could get in there. No, I wanted to send people endless fundraising emails, that was truly the impetus.”

Yeah. That's one thing I think that you and I have in common, I mean, you ask people for money for your campaign, I ask people for money for my newsletter, it all works out and both of us do not have as much money as we would like to have. So.

Yes, fair enough to say. My campaign account is very different than my bank account.

Yeah. So one thing I'm curious about, how did Chuck E. Cheese prepare you to be a member of Congress?

That sounds like a silly question but to me, it is very real. So when I first started working at Chuck E. Cheese I was a 15-year-old young man looking for guidance, looking for a life, and of course, the big mouse came calling. The thing about Chuck E. Cheese and I talk about this with some folks is, my boss at Chuck E. Cheese, this guy named Jeff I'm still good friends with today, Jeff sort of took me under his wing and he introduced me to punk rock because I was playing a lot of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and was very into Papa Roach at the time. Don't laugh, it hurts when you laugh.

Right there that disqualifies you.

That's the part you can't use, that is the true oppo. Now, he heard me listening to Papa Roach and he's like, "Eddie, we got to fix this," and he made me a mix CD. I remember Alkaline Trio, Saves the Day, Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil were on it. And so, I mean, punk rock and music is such a huge part of my life but I think what I really still hold on to, I mean, I still love those bands, but is that there is a world outside the mainstream that you can absorb and take in and there are ideas and thoughts that you won't hear on cable TV. And that blew my mind because this was before the internet, the internet was there and it was there awhile but hadn't really blown up. And then it was like, oh, there's so many cool and interesting perspectives so then it was actually hugely influential. And I also learned how to make a pizza, I mean, that didn't hurt either.

Yeah. Those are life skills.

Life skills. And now there's arguably too many perspectives out there.

Yeah. Now it's like, “Oh no, we went too far. Now literally anyone can just pop up on the internet and claim that their cousins, brothers, friends, uncles, testicles have exploded or something.”

Yeah. Or that there's a conspiracy that so-and-so stole an election or whatever, I mean, did not see that one coming.

Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that is I think the most predictable thing ever.

Yes. Well, I mean I guess I just mean back in the days of AOL and, I'm in a chat room, isn't the internet fun? And I'm meeting new people and here's these bands and then a little bit of everything all the time.

So tell me a bit about yourself. I mean, we know each other but for the listeners at home or wherever.

Sure. Let's see. So the funny thing is, I'm trying not to go into candidate pitch which is so front of mind and just give the real stuff. I feel like, Parker, we're friends and you deserve the real deal. Who am I? I did grow up in Florida and went to the University of Florida. And when I was in high school I was the class clown and got in a lot of trouble for it and I was a fat kid, which there's nothing wrong with that, everyone should love their body or if they want to change their body also wonderful. But in any case, I was a fat kid that was very effecting and made me very depressed as a child and so being a class clown was sort of the manifestation of trying to navigate that. And so when I was around 17 or 18, like I said, I'd make jokes in class and my friends would encourage me and be like, oh, you should do stand up. And for whatever crazy reason after enough prodding I was like, okay, this is a good idea, again, question mark.

But I actually think that when I decided to do that, again, I don't remember if it was 17 or 18, I think that was a defining moment of my life to step on that stage and tell some jokes just because it was like, oh, you can face your fears and you can overcome them. And then I think everything since then it's just been like, well, I'm not stepping on stage to do stand up for the first time in my life, so sure I can run for Congress. But anyway, so yeah. So I started doing comedy in high school and I think I found this identity and then I went to the University of Florida and I did improv with this group theater strike force, changed my life because I really found my people.

But I remember sort of my friends would give me s**t because I was the person who was always like, I care about politics and I care about this thing, and folks were like, I just want to do improv, and I'm like, but we should pay attention to the war in Iraq and all that stuff. And so I feel like I had these dual sides of me, it saw like, oh, I'm a performer and I love doing that but also I really care about what's happening in Washington or whatever, and feeling so frustrated, I mean, I feel the Iraq war was the defining political event of my life. I remember in 2003 just seeing us go to war and just feeling this can't be happening, how can we be doing something so terrible and there's so much energy behind stopping it and yet we can't stop it and it still just happened. And I think that took a toll on me in the sense that, we have to be able to do something.

So anyway, so I'm still doing my comedy thing, I go to Los Angeles, I started doing improv and comedy out there. I do not hit it big but I enjoyed performing on a regular basis, I was in a few commercials, I had a line in a movie and it was really fun. And I think anyone who has the opportunity to get paid to act or paid to do their art form is really gratifying and I loved it, but still, I felt that I wanted to do more or wanted to do something with my creativity that wasn't selling Dr. Pepper. Not that there's anything wrong with Dr. Pepper, I just feel like that's a problem we've solved in our society is how to get people to drink Dr. Pepper. So I fell into the world of-

You're going to lose the coveted Dr. Pepper drinker vote which is a large lobby.

I don't know, they're going to come after me, the Dr. Pepper folks. I mean, I haven't had a Dr. Pepper in a long time, third grade.

I had one yesterday.

Oh, really?

And they are great.

They are great.

There are two things I drink all day, Diet Coke and Diet Dr. Pepper.

I was just going to ask if you were a regular Dr. Pepper or Diet Dr. Pepper.

Diet.

Yeah. No, I've rocked a number of Diet Dr. Peppers in my life. Okay. So, okay, I've realized I'm monologuing a bit and you're so gracious to let me do it. But in any case, I found this merger of creativity and politics and activism and so I've been running with that ever since. And you and I were together when we were at Upworthy but also I spent time at the Democratic National Committee, I worked with MoveOn. And so anyway, so then we get to me now who's like, I'm going to run for office because I think ultimately again, I've been on the outside doing my best to make a difference and this is me saying, I want to take a shot of being on the inside and represent folks and do some good from Washington.

All right. And your announcement video took the form of a jingle?

Yes.

Yeah. How did that happen?

I launched with a jingle video. Well, once I decided to run I knew being a former comedian and being a video producer I had to do something interesting. And so I had been thinking about it and then I was watching this show, I don't know if you've ever seen it, Somebody Feed Phil, and if you haven't seen, it doesn't matter, but it's this traveling eating show hosted by the guy who started Everybody Loves Raymond, his name is Phil. And anyway, the intro to the show is, a happy hungry man, and it's kind of a vibe, it's like a Full House type vibe, and it just dawned on me like, oh, that would be a fun way to introduce myself.

[Clip of Eddie Geller’s announcement jingle plays]

And then as soon as I thought of that, I was like, well, it should be a full-on pair, let's just go there, let's just do the pair.

Go full Full House.

Go full Full House. And I listened to all those, the Family Matters, Full House, Step By Step, you name it, I was listening to it and trying to figure this thing out. But in any case, so then I had this idea and I reached out to a mutual friend of ours, Eric March, who also worked at Upworthy, just a brilliant writer and comedian and he helped me write the jingle because I'm not a musician. And so yeah, so we worked on it, came up with the music and the lyrics and then we reached out to a producer named Alison, she did a great job taking it from a piano piece with lyrics into the full-blown jingle and then filmed all these funny bits around Brandon where I live, Brandon, Florida and I was so nervous.

I mean, this is not how you're supposed to launch a political campaign, you're supposed to launch a campaign with, my father when I was four years old took me out to the pond and we went fishing and I knew when I caught that salmon that that salmon was America, and I couldn't do that. I mean, more power to folks who do but it wasn't me and so yeah, so the jingle happened. And also, even if I had done something that's like, I'm Eddie Geller and here's all the very earnest reasons why I'm running, which I have a number of earnest reasons why I'm running but it would get six views, right? I mean, so it's finding the balance.

Yeah. Well, I mean, there have definitely been some people who've tried the creative video, hey, let me introduce myself kind of thing, and sometimes they just kind of stick around. I mean, there's one that I was thinking of, oh, there was a candidate that recreated the scene in Top Gun-

Yes. I know exactly the video you're talking about.

... yeah, except that it was an attack ad against Barbara Comstock I think, and they had someone who kind of looked like her sitting there. It was so weird but for the life of me I cannot remember the name of the candidate, which is probably bad.

I don't want to take shots at any other Democrats and especially someone who's trying to do something different. So I remember who he is but I wish him all the best because he's fighting the good fight. But yeah, it's hard to do and that was definitely my fear, once I decided there were so many moments where I was like, oh my God, am I really doing this? And there were demos I listened to of it and I was like, is this good? And eventually folks I trusted told me, hey, this is fun, this is good, and so yes, I put it out there. And fortunately folks are pretty kind about it and enjoyed it and I appreciated your sending it out there into your world.

And I also use the jingle as, I'm going to do more fun stuff like that, I think that is going to be my campaign as like, we can make this fun and then also talk about the real things. But it's an opportunity and a challenge, right? It's like, I think being able to do fun things and get attention is really helpful because that's a very hard thing in this world, but then people are like, hey, are you for real? And I've had those conversations, I've been in local democratic meetings and they're like, we want to meet you because are you just the guy who does the jingle or are you actually going to talk about the desalination plants that are being built in our county and what are we going to do about that? And so it's, you got to do both, but yeah, I'm happy to jingle and maybe there's another one down the road.

Putting the “fun” into “funding our social safety net.”

I love it.

Another thing I wanted to ask you about was, back in 2015 you made a video for ClickHole explaining Bitcoin, it's you mumbling for a minute and 15 seconds and I love it because I still don't understand crypto stuff at all. But I did want to point out that if on the day that that video got posted on YouTube, if you had invested just $100 you would have $18,000 now, so it's just something out there.

But also cryptocurrency is now a huge contributor to our climate crisis. So hopefully I didn't do any damage by doing that ClickHole video, but no, that was fun. And there was a good friend of mine, Leo Garcia, he worked at The Onion, I was visiting Chicago and he was just like, hey, do you want to do this video? I had no idea what it was going to be. And I came to the studio and they just put a teleprompter in front of me with the actual script and they were like, do your best to mumble this and so I did a few mumbly takes. And that might've been my peak, I mean, I think the work I'm doing now is more important but let's be honest, I mean, the Bitcoin mumble video.

I just love it, it's great. But yeah-

Oh, thank you.

... I did want to point out how much richer we both would have been if instead of making that video we invested in Bitcoin. But alas, we did not so here you are trying to raise money for Congress and I'm trying to fund a newsletter, so that's our lives.

That is our lives.

So you're running in Florida's 15th district, right?

Correct.

Are you at all worried about redistricting?

Yeah, redistricting is absolutely something that is top of mind. But it's going to either get a little bit harder, get a little bit easier, stay the same, I know that is super obvious to say. But in any case I still have to work really hard and I still have to convince people to vote for me no matter how the lines are drawn. Sort of who you're talking to and how you're getting to them changes a bit and donors and the media will perceive the election differently based on that cooked rating. But that all being said, I knew this was going to be really hard regardless so I don't want it to get much harder, I think that would be silly if I did.

But I'm really excited because currently it's an R plus six district so it favors Republicans by six points. But I really like talking to Republicans, I mean, that's not to say people who have extreme conspiracy theories about elections, I entertain those, I don't, I think that's terrible for democracy. But I play on a hockey team that is almost all Republicans, a rec hockey league, and they know I'm running and we sit at the bar after games when we drink beer and we shoot the s**t and we talk a little bit of politics. But I think it is good to remember that, yes, there is a world out there where things are getting so tense and so heated but there is a place, at least I hope, that there's a place that we can maybe slowly but surely bring it back down.

And I think to be someone who runs for office you have to be an optimist and you have to have hope and I think that describes me. And I think doing comedy is kind of part of that because I think to do comedy you have to be aware of where people's emotions are going to go and where they're at. So that's all just to say that I like the challenge of being in a place where there are a lot of Republicans because I think there's winning my race, which I'm in it to win it and there's also, how do we just untangle the knot that has been created, and it's really intimidating and really despairing and you worked in Media Matters, I mean, you know this stuff.

Oh, absolutely. Just thinking about it, one of the challenges I think that you face that obviously I kind of witnessed when I was at Media Matters, especially is just the right wing media machine which is just pumping out a lot of either false info or conspiracy theories or just getting the right wing base really, really riled up which presents a challenge. Because the thing is that when policies are polled, the ones that the Democrats run on are way more popular, just generally. But you have to overcome the ads and the Fox News and the OAN and Newsmax and all of that stuff, which is its own challenge because I've watched as great pieces of legislation have just been shut down because of that.

I mean, in Illinois here we had, I think it was, was it 2018? One of those, 2018 or in 2020 there was a referendum on the ballot that was, should we essentially adopt a more progressive tax system? Because right now Illinois has a flat tax for state taxes which is 5% which is kind of steep if you're not making a lot of money and not anywhere near steep enough if you are making a lot of money. So there was a really well-funded opposition to this bill which would have changed the entire state's tax structure.

And the whole thing was based on this idea that, well, what if you one day become super successful? You may benefit now but what about 10 years from now? It's like, that's a great problem to have, oh, no, I moved up into a higher tax bracket, it's like, that's fine. But it failed because it just was blown out of the water with the ads that were everywhere and that I think is kind of a unique challenge. I mean, I don't know, you say that to run for office you have to be an optimist and that's one reason that I will never in my life run for office. It's my nature to be extremely pessimistic about everything because personally I would rather be pleasantly surprised than let down. When was it that you left Upworthy? Was that before the 2016 election?

That was 2015 I think.

2015. Okay. So throughout 2016 Adam Mordecai had a little room in a slack channel that was like, “I will reassure you about the state of the election.” And you go in there-

Just hearing it makes me feel sad.

... Yeah. You go in there and you would be like, “I don't know, man, I saw the story, the polling or the polling dropped,” and he would go, “Well, here's why you don't need to worry — because it's all going to be fine.” And so everyone kind of went into election day 2016 feeling optimistic, not me, I was like, “I'm 90% sure Trump is going to win this thing.” And when it happened I was devastated but not because I was surprised but because it was Trump, he was not the person I voted for, let's put it that way.

That is so sad to hear.

Oh, it's so sad. That is really bad.

One thing I think a lot about is I feel like Republicans are better storytellers than we are and they don't think we give them enough credit for that because I think you can be a millionaire someday is a version of a story and I think they understand their audience really well of what is going to connect with the amygdala, is that the lizard brain? I don't know. We don't need to Google it. But in any case, I think they understand that storytelling really well and they bang that drum. And I think I am persuaded by be a better person, get in for your community, we're all in this together, we got to make a sacrifice for the fight, that resonates to me but there's a lot of people that it doesn't resonate with them.

And I think we need to be more creative to find different ways to tell these stories about how we make a better America that have a broader appeal and understand that not everyone is persuaded by let's all pitch in together, which is a really important message. We do actually all need to pitch in together but that can't be the only way we're talking about taxing the rich or climate change or health care, we can just be more creative. And, I mean, that is certainly what I'm hoping to do, again, in my small corner of Florida 15, is thinking about messaging in that way and trying to get through to people in a way that is different than has previously been done.

So one of the last things I wanted to ask about was policies. What issues are you passionate about? What issues do you think your district is passionate about?

Well, I mean, I like many folks, I mean, it's not just necessarily our age group but definitely folks in our age group are just so distraught about is climate change. And we have passed the point of getting out of this thing without doing any damage and now it's like, we still have so much to do to mitigate and to avoid the worst of the worst, so that is absolutely top of mind for me. Another one is, finding a way to get to universal healthcare. My mom was a doctor and I remember when I was young and we talked about this issue, I was maybe 15 or 16, and there were other problems about I think reimbursements rates or something. I was talking to her about some specific thing and she's like, the way to fix this is just to get everyone covered, we just need a system that covers everyone.

And so I'm not dictatorial about what that needs to look like, I think there's a number of ways of getting there but we have to do something about it, whether it is Medicare expansion, whether it is a public option. I think Medicare for all is great but if it's Medicare for all or nothing then we might be waiting a long f*****g time to get everyone covered. So yeah, so those are two. And I'm a member of a union and so good jobs is something I do think about and seeing stories about the gig economy and, I keep thinking about the DoorDash story about taking tips out of, I forget exactly what it was, but it's a way of screwing the workers out of their tips. And the bar just continues to lower in our economy of what a job looks like and what it should look like and so I want to be able to help push that back in the other direction.

Yeah. I mean, that makes total sense. And the gig economy creates all sorts of issues when it comes to who's an employee, who's whatnot. Speaking of DoorDash I was thinking about when New York flooded recently and there was an image of someone trying to ride their bicycle through two and a half feet of sewage water-

Yes. I saw that.

... with the DoorDash thing. And someone reported out a story on that and it was afterward, they were like, “This was the worst night of my life and I made a $100” or something that, something ridiculous. And it's just, I don't know, there's always been this idea that the higher paying job, the more work you're doing, but I've found the exact opposite to be true. I mean, the hardest jobs I've ever had have been minimum wage jobs, the easiest jobs I've had are the ones that pay better. A lot of people like to feel like they're earning their living which is great and fine, but they look down upon people who do DoorDash and people who work at McDonald's or whatever, and it's just wrong. What we should do in my opinion, is to make sure that we're taking care of everyone no matter what their job is and make sure they have safe conditions. And here I am talking like a candidate, whoops.

Well, anyway, we have this-

Now just watch, I'm going to move down to Florida 15 and take you on.

... we have this moment during the pandemic in which, I mean, we are obviously still in, but at the beginning of the pandemic where we were like, oh my God, essential workers, thank goodness for these folks who are out there whether it's delivering groceries or whatever, just realize like, oh, these folks are so important and then we just kind of forgot it. And then we're like, oh, we're going to take away your hazard pay and all these extra protections and bonuses we gave you we're going to start to roll them back, and it's so maddening.

Yeah. I mean, it absolutely is. Just the same thing where we had all those commercials for a while that were, “In these unprecedented times, blah, blah,” basically this “we're all in it together” kind of messaging but then that sort of faded by last summer, yeah, summer 2020 and then after that it was just sort of like, “Screw you! buy a Lexus!”

Actually, I tested that messaging and it failed but I was thinking about “Screw you, Geller! Buy a Lexus!”

“Screw you, vote Geller,” I think it works. And on that note, thank you, Eddie Geller.

Oh my gosh. Thank you for having me Parker, this was a delight.

This week on The Present Age Podcast, I chat with Franchesca Ramsey. You may know her from her YouTube videos, her time on Comedy Central’s Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, her web series MTV Decoded, the recent iCarly reboot, NBC’s Superstore, or even a Maroon 5 video.

Parker Molloy: Hey, Franchesca, how's it going?

Franchesca Ramsey: Hi Parker. I feel like the standard answer is it's going good, but the realistic answer is taking it day by day.

Yeah, it's a challenge.

It is a time. It's a time, but we're here we are doing the best that we can. I'm trying to hold on to the fact that I'm healthy and I'm working and I'm working on stuff that I'm excited about, so those are the things that are getting me through.

Yeah. And when did you move? Because you said you're out west now, right?

Yeah. I'm in L.A. I had such a strange journey here. I technically was here in September working on Superstore for three months, but I still had an apartment in New York, so I was subletting an apartment here for three months. Then I signed a lease, went back to New York, packed my apartment, and then physically moved everything here on December 1st. So technically I've been here a year, but I'm counting December as my full anniversary in Los Angeles.

Cool. Well, congratulations on the move.

Thank you.

And also, and so here's kind of the funny thing with Superstore, I watched Superstore since the first episode.

Oh wow.

And then I didn't see that you had posted online that you were, pardon me, I'm just at home watching, and I was like, okay, cool. And I'm like, wait, hold on. I know her. We worked together.

That's so funny. A number of people said that. I mean, social media is so strange because sometimes it feels like you're getting all the updates from someone, and then suddenly you get none and you realize like, oh, this person's just not in my feed anymore and I'm not sure why. I've been taking a lot of extended social media breaks and I took a big one right when I booked Superstore. So I wasn't even online for a while. I don't hold it against anyone if they're not up to date with what's happening in my life.

It was a pleasant surprise! You were great on that show!

Thank you.

One thing I like about the show is it really seemed to show...it was a very labor-focused, it shows from the worker's perspective talking about unions and stuff. That's not something you see on TV much.

I think a lot of times so many shows you can see the transition when the people making the show start making lots of money, become very out of touch, and you see it with celebrities too, where either their stand up or their Instagram posts or their interviews are really about normal people s**t. And then there's like this moment where they become celebrities and that happens in TV shows too. And with Superstore, it was very much the opposite. It really felt like, oh right, the people that are working on the show have worked in retail, they know what it's like to live paycheck to paycheck. They know what it's like dealing with customers. And that's why the show, I think really spoke to a lot of people because it just felt really real.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And that was one of the coolest aspects of it because you always have shows like Friends where people are working these kinds of low-wage jobs, but then are living in these fancy apartments.

Beautiful apartments while working at a coffee shop

Well then you'd have like on Superstore, it'd be oh, someone is sleeping in the tunnel under the stores, something like that where it's just, that's more realistic, I guess. But, yeah, that was cool. And I mean, you've done so much. You had a really big YouTube following for a long time, and then had your own MTV web series.

Yes, which Parker wrote for, yes!

Yes!

So many episodes, Parker.

Thank you.

You turn those around and it was so delightful that I got to work with you again.

That was so much fun. Yeah. It really was.

It was really great. I just had to hype you up because... I always showed up that you worked on that show, but I think people don't know, it really does take a village. It's not just me.

Yeah and I mean, and the thing I appreciated about that is I've wanted to write TV for a while, and that was a nice opportunity to really kind of get into that sort of quick writing scripts and stuff. So I really appreciated that opportunity when you offered it to me.

No, cool. So great to work with you!

But yeah. And then you worked on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, which got canceled far too soon.

Yeah.

You wrote a book, you made a pilot for Comedy Central. I already mentioned Superstore. You worked on iCarly reboot. And you were in a Maroon 5 music video with Ilhan Omar.

Oh my God. Yes. Before everybody knew who she was. I mean, it's just, yes. Well, I have done all of those things!

You're done a lot of stuff. So what are you up to now? Like, work-wise, what are you doing?

I'm writing on Yearly Departed again...

Oh great!

On Amazon, which is the end of the year comedy special. And it was so wild because it was the first thing, the first job that I had during the pandemic.

So it was a remote writers' room. There was no vaccine when we shot that. So it was stressful going to set and getting tested all the time. And this was a time when the rat rapid tests weren't really available. So you had to go get tested like five days before that. And then you had to come a day before and get there super early. And it was just like a whole process.

So this time around things are a lot different. We're actually going to have an audience this year. My mom is going to come and sit in the audience, which is going to be really fun. So I'm working on that.

And then I sold a pilot to a streaming service. I sold two pilots. So I won't say who they are because I hope they're listening and they're like, oh, she's talking about no week. She's talking about us. Yeah. Pit you all against each other. So I am like racking my brain right now. I'm trying to hit my deadlines, which is not fun, but I'm making it work. And yeah, that's it, that's it.

Your average person is doing like a little bit, a little bit of everything. You’re doing four, five people's worth of work, that sort of stuff.

I’m an overachiever, but here's the thing is I realized that I thrive when I'm busy and that I will complain the whole time, but if I'm not busy, I will complain because I'm bored. So I would rather be busy than bored is the thing that I've been saying to myself.

That's a good point. I think that I kind of have that, that same issue, but I ended up convincing myself that it's better to be bored.

There is power in taking time off, and I'm actually kind of juggling all of these projects and a big part of why I've taken on lots of things is especially in an industry like television, where so much is out of my control. I find that it's better to have multiple things in development so that when, and if one thing does not come through that my whole world doesn't fall apart.

So I'm right now looking at all the things I have in development, what's most important to me, what am I okay with if it falls apart and also what will I do in the event that nothing goes.

And so a part of me is kind of like, I hope these things happen, but if they don't, I'm kind of, because I had to take some time off. I might just take the end of the year and just not do anything, which I have not done in a long time.

Yeah. Yeah. And it is nice to take a break. And that was one thing that I, when I first started doing this the podcast and also the newsletter that I was with, I quit my job in June and was just, I'm just going to kind of dive into this and hope for the best. And it's scary, but I'm trying.

Yeah. But I think a lot of people did that this year. It either, they were forced to do it because their job ended or they needed to move back home or their living situation shifted in whatever way.

But I think also it's just been a huge time of reflection where people are saying like, I could die. Do I want to do this thing that I'm putting all this time and energy into? Isn't making me happy. Is it paying my bills? Is it contributing to the world? Or whatever your priorities are. And so it's really brave to say, well, this isn't working out for me and I'm just not going to do it. And if things need to change, you can go back and get another job.

Yeah. Well, exactly and hope for the best. It's not like working in media was, is particularly stable. Anyways. It's not I was leaving some super stable job that I know will be there 20 years from now. it's entirely possible. I could have gotten laid off two months later anyway. So I might as well be something that I like.

Yeah, It's true.

But one thing I kind of wanted to talk to you about is back when you were on YouTube a lot and also I do appreciate that, your, the most recent YouTube video you uploaded was from like a couple of years ago.

Yeah, I don't do YouTube videos anymore.

Yeah. And it's just you and Michelle Obama, here I am just me and Michelle just chilling here and then, “I'm not going to update anymore.” That is such a perfect flex.

Oh, that's so funny. I didn't think about it that way, but yes my last video is myself and Michelle Obama.

But one thing, one thing that sort of happened when you were really putting a lot of time into YouTube was you got a lot of...you kind of were one of like the early targets of those response videos, which for people who aren't really familiar, first off, you're lucky. But second, it's like, there's this whole genre of video where someone will just watch someone else's YouTube video and then offer their commentary or to debunk in argument or however they try to frame it. But I mean, in your case, it was just someone, it was kind of a lot of people just being really mean and racist and...

Oh, yes.

Which is awful.

Yeah. It was a perfect storm. I mean, the internet has changed so much since I started creating content. And it seems like it just gets faster and faster, but in many ways, Decoded, and what I was doing before Decoded was really new.

People were not talking about social justice, the way that we talk about it now, I kind of stumbled into it. And that's really what my book is about that I accidentally started these conversations about race and privilege and microaggressions truly without any knowledge beyond my own personal life experience. And I don't regret it. I'm glad that I did it. But at the time I really felt like I was on an island making this content and not getting support.

And so when my content started taking off, a number of people realized, oh, I can just react to this and piggyback off of the views and saying incendiary things will always get you views just saying something heinous, even if you don't believe it, because honestly, I'm not sure some of these people even really believe the stuff they're saying, not that that excuses it, but just say something wild or racist or sexist or transphobic or whatever, and you will rack up views.

So a lot of people did that. I paid a lot of people's rent for many years.

Yeah, you did.

I don't know what they're doing now. A lot of them are “pivoting” quote-unquote, and are now “liberal” quote-unquote, I clocked it. But, it's one of those things that if you haven't been through it, it's so hard to understand. And no one who hasn't been through it really knows how to support you when it's happening. But I got through it and a big part of my reasoning for leaving YouTube and just pivoting to other things was realizing I'm not happy doing this. The reward is not worth the risk to me. And I think there's a better use of my time and talents. And so that's what I've done.

I'm so sorry about that. One other thing I wanted to talk to you about and ask about was that you are really great at taking these social media breaks and I have tried and I have failed. And I just want to know is there anything specific that you do that, that helps you not check Twitter or whatnot, again?

Yeah. I have a whole strategy. I take all the apps off of my phone and I don't just log out of them. Like I delete the app off of my phone. I log out on my desktop. I enable my parental controls and I put on my parental controls, all of my social media of choice. So Instagram, Twitter, I even put some gossip sites that I, I love celebrity gossip. I don't indulge the way that I used to, but I just like to know what's going on. I put those on there and I just, I do that because even when I consciously decide I'm taking a social media break, it's just embedded into my daily routine that I wake up and I check Twitter.

I don't even think about it anymore. I'm just, oh yeah, I'll just check Twitter. And if it's not there, if my popup on my desktop says, this site is blocked. I can remember, oh right, I'm not doing that right now. And I usually set a time limit for myself. I don't just arbitrarily pick a date, I say, okay, I have a script that's due, or we're going into production or it's pilot season or something like that, I'm going to take off for two months. I'm just not going to do it. And I think I'm trying to prime myself to eventually quit social media full-time. I'm just not there yet, but oh, I want it so bad to taste it.

Well, one of the reasons that I personally struggled to take these breaks and keep these breaks and all of that is just the fact that I worry if I'm not on social media, that I'm missing out on an opportunity or that I am just missing out on anything. I mean, but especially when it comes to work-related stuff, I...

You need to know. You need to know what's happening in the world, especially if your job is to quote-unquote “report” on it or react to it or commenting on it or whatever. I totally get it. That has been a big part of the reason that I haven't been able to quit.

Social media does not pay my bills the way that it used to, but it pays a few. There's a few. And so, sometimes I'm like, Ooh, should I take this brand deal? Should I take this? Whatever it is. And a lot of it comes through social media. Yeah. So I get it. It is really hard, but that is one of the conscious choices that I've been moving towards is making sure that I don't rely on social media for income and just bring it full circle.

A number of people made their careers off of talking about me, right? And then when I wasn't there anymore, they were fucked. So I sometimes I check on people just I really wonder what that person is doing. And I realized that their channel is tanked. Why? Because they built a brand off of what somebody else is doing. So I looked at my career and I said, “If Twitter went away tomorrow, would I be fucked the same way that when Vine went away?” there were a lot of people that were, that they were in trouble, when there was talk about TikTok no longer existing there were people who were freaking out because they had put everything into TikTok.

And I told myself, I never want to be in that position. Social media has been really good to me. I love it and I hate it, but I don't want to be handcuffed to it. And so I've been weaning myself off. So I think if that's something that you want to work towards, it's really trying to find opportunities off social media so that you've got a little diversity in your streams of income, but also in your entertainment and how you connect with people. The internet has been fantastic, but it can't be for me, the be all end all is it's, it's just not healthy for me.

Right. And there's another level of challenge to it when everything is in this pandemic and you're kind of, everyone's kind of cooped up in their own little spaces.

And that's what Clubhouse was popping up. People were lonely, people on Clubhouse falling asleep because they were just like “I need to talk to people.”

Yeah. A social media network that's created … conference calls.

Oh my god.

People are sitting there willingly dialing into conferences.

So I didn't even think about that. We hated conference calls so much and then people were selling their access to Clubhouse on eBay. Will you spend a thousand dollars for a Clubhouse invite to be on a freaking conference call? That's so funny. Yeah.

Well, and then obviously, as it goes with social media, every other company was quick to create their own version, now Twitter has its own spaces. I think that...

Twitter has, I've never used it before, but.

I like it. I listened to someone in there and I like it better than clubhouse because it transcribes what's being said in like super fast, it's not perfectly accurate as those types of things are, but I was just reading a conversation as it was going. And it was cool. And I was this is cool. This is what was missing from Clubhouse.

Yes. Absolutely. Accessibility.

Yeah. And that's another thing I tried with this podcast is, I either find the time to transcribe the whole thing, or, which is 99% of the time, I send it to one of those transcription services. The charge is like a dollar a minute and I'm like, it's worth the 30 bucks to...Franchesca Ramsey:Yeah this is write-off too, I mean, it's for work.

But yeah, when doing that, I've talked to so many people who were like, I don't listen to podcasts, but I really appreciate that this is accessible. Not just, not even just for people who need to read things, but just people who don't want to listen. Which is fair.

Yeah or you're multitasking. I am a chronic multi-tasker. And so being able to read the captions on a video when I'm supposed to be doing something else. Is really, really helpful. So I get it. I can only assume that other people are doing that with podcasts.

Yeah. It's a lot easier to sneakily read something on your phone than to listen to the podcast or watch a video, but...

Absolutely.

Yeah. And so as you were kind of saying when, with trying to wean yourself off of social media and thinking about the question of how screwed am I if Twitter shut down today or something like that. It's, that's kind of what went through my head before I quit my job, because for some reason I succeed on Twitter and don't succeed out of it.

I know why you succeed, because you're a good writer. And because you're smart.

I'm not good on Facebook or...

They're all different skillsets, that's why, because it's so funny because you and I met through Upworthy...

I always tell people how weird that was of a fit, that was for me, if they're like “Upworthy? The place to post happy things?” I'm like, “Yes, I know. Right. Yeah.” It wasn't always happy.

Okay. But it wasn't always happy things and...

But It's what people associate it with.

Yes, but you and I specifically, I think we honed our voices at Upworthy and kind of like changed the culture of what Upworthy was doing because it was just fluffy. A son says something to his mother and you'll never believe dah, dah, dah, whatever. But like we started doing things that were kind of pushing people to think differently about race and gender issues and things that the platform wasn't doing before.

But to that point, the way that we had to learn how to shape our voices was very specific to Facebook. What was it called? the information gap or...

The curiosity gap.

The curiosity gap, right? Facebook really lends itself to these long personal inviting topics and conversations that you like want to engage in, where Twitter is more like a bullhorn. It was like, listen up, I have something to say.

Yeah. And that's fair, that's a fair point about like the differences between those two. And another thing on Upworthy, that sort of, that sticks with me to this day is the fact that Facebook give, if Facebook can take it away.

I mean, it's, listen, it's all connected. Look at what happened to Upworthy.

It’s not that the content changed.

No, it's definitely it's Facebook changed. Facebook changed.

And then they tried to change the content to match Facebook, which to match what they thought Facebook wanted, which...

You can't predict what Facebook is going to do. And that's why I think it's really smart, but so many people are pivoting to newsletters, right? Where they like...

It's your mailing list.

I want to have access to my fans or my audience. I want to connect with them directly. I want to go right to their inbox. I don't want to have to rely on, I mean, I've seen it too many times where people are like, I never see your Facebook post in my feed. And I'm well, I can't control that. I don't know why.

Yeah. That is one of the frustrating things to watch. And in the few years that, because after I left, after Upworthy, I went on to work at Media Matters, this progressive media watchdog, where basically it was like watching a lot of Fox News and stuff like that, where the whole time they would on Fox and on all these other right-wing kind of sites they would complain about tech bias. They would say it's against conservatives.

It's happening to everyone.

But they would do it so constantly that you could tell when Facebook would kind of start just artificially, like boosting some of these pages. And so now if you look at the top pages on Facebook, it's Ben Shapiro, Breitbart, all of these right-wing goodness.

It's the same thing that I was talking about on YouTube though. It is chasing rage clicks. Like Upworthy, we talked a lot about empathy and heartwarming and feel good, that's what's making people share.

Those outlets are relying on people sharing because they're mad and you can be mad on both sides of the issue, right? You can be, I agree with this and I'm pissed off about it or you're this is b******t and I don't like it now I'm going to share it to tell everybody how much b******t it is.

And both of those are very profitable for them. People don't share, we are more vocal about things that we hate and I'm guilty of this too. The things that we love, it goes on Yelp and it's, this salad was amazing. No, they're like the salad had a rat in it, burns places look great.

Yeah. I mean that's totally it. I remember when I was in college, someone was, one of my teachers was talking about that, just being something just expect a 10 to one negative to positive experience kind of what drives you to respond to something and l kind of think about that in shaping writing and stuff like that, because you want people to respond, but I don't want to make people angry.

And that's why I think that, I feel, I every once in a while, I think about the fact that if I wanted to, I could, because there's nothing that people, that the algorithms in, all of these, on all of these platforms love more than people who will advocate against their own rights. Or if I was a trans person who was saying, “Oh, I shouldn't be allowed to use any public restrooms. And here's why,” I would become, I would get to...

We had examples of that, right? People love, they're called a “pick me, pick me, pick me.” They love a pick me. They love a token. I mean, there is, I get people a lot of times I ask how do you go viral? how do you do it? And there's not really like a trick to it, but there is a recipe that the internet and the algorithm likes, it likes hot girls, it likes cute babies, it likes cute animals, it likes weird-looking animals.

As we both have our dogs.

So we both have terrier dogs.

Both cute and weird looking.

Very cute and weird looking, the internet loves them, but it also favors outrage, anger and things that are surprising. And again, the surprising element was what Upworthy was really good at. But if you are a marginalized person saying something that people don't expect, you're going to blow up because people are going to be mad that you said it, people are going to be like "finally someone said it." It's going to be a bunch of people that are just like so confused. Is this a bit, is this like that Christian Walker guy

Yeah.

Oh, been like, “Isn't this a performance? This gay black man is seeing, he doesn't like gay people and he doesn't like black people. This is real?”

Yeah. It's like, “What is this guy?” and at first I was, “Oh, he's probably, maybe he's just doing this making cash, making a lot of money.”

I think it's maybe a little of both.

I mean, but also his dad is a former professional football player who is now running for Senate in Georgia, so.

Yeah. I mean, again, I think it is a little bit of both. I think he, maybe he does believe some of it, but I also realize that he is embellishing a lot. Like he's always in a Starbucks drive-thru doing these rants and ordering, he's always, "hey, look, blah, blah, blah" and then he will stop and order his frappuccino. And I'm like, you're doing a bit, you're doing a bit, he knows that is ridiculous. And he knows that people are going to think it's cringy, but they're also going to think it's hilarious because, but he's doing that on purpose.

And people who agree with him will share it because they agree with him. And here is the, this is the thing I'm trying to dial back on is sharing content that I disagree with to say how bad it is and that is...

Look, I am guilty of it too. Like, it is a hard line because ultimately you are preaching to the choir. People who believe that terrible thing are not going to be swayed by you sharing it.

…And explaining why such and such thing is wrong. And then the algorithms, the social media platforms, they see that something's being shared and they're like, guess people like it, like to them a share as a share and it's all the same. And I try to think about that one.

It's totally true. It's totally true. I really have tried to kind of move away from like education forward. Like the types of stuff I was doing it to code it or Upworthy or even Nightly Show, which was still a lot of like infotainment and be more comedy forward, just because I think that it personally is less taxing for me.

I'd rather make people laugh than just straight-up lecture them. So that's kind of been my personal compromise and also picking my battles. Sometimes I have nothing to say that someone else hasn't already said, so I'd rather just share something someone else's said rather than add my voice to the chorus. That's just saying the same thing.

So if I have a fresh take, then I'm more likely to share it. Not because I think I'm going to change the perspective of the misogynist, but hopefully arm my audience with the information so that they're better prepared for these conversations or so that they can be better informed about the issues and really know what's on the line and what we're fighting for rather than I'm not going to, we're not going to change the minds of bigots, especially not on social media. It's just...It could happen, but it's highly unlikely.

I used to try to justify arguing with people online by going well, I'm not really arguing with this person. I'm arguing for the sake of others.

I believe that can be true.

Sometimes it can work, but...

Sometimes.

Sometimes it doesn't.

Yeah, but sometimes it doesn't and you know what? I have gotten to a place in my life where I am, I'm not going to dunk on myself because sometimes I've done shitty things, I'm human and yes, sometimes I'm having a bad day and somebody harms them and mention and says something racist and then like, you got to learn to think, motherfucker. I'm going to like clap back. I'm going to clap back and guess what? It's going to make me feel good in the moment and that's what I needed today.

There's a pandemic. I have enough s**t on my plate, If I get a little serotonin boost from this thing, to me I'm like, it's fine. Right? The internet moves so fast, this person, they're troll, they don't care, they're, we all win, right? They got my attention, I got to dunk on them, a few people got to laugh and then I move on. So, I do think that there is value in it too, because there are people who will reach out and say I was having a terrible day. And then you said this funny thing, and it really made me laugh. And I'm like, okay, cool, great.

Every time I get a nice email, it's always like, I'm sure you get a ton of emails saying that people like your stuff, no, I don't get anywhere near it. I remember every specific one that I get because, because I do get lots of emails from people, but they're usually from people who are very angry about some, it's so that's one thing that I try to do a little more of is reach out and tell someone, I really liked this article, or I really liked this video you did, or I'm your, I appreciate your work because it helped me do something.

Oh my gosh. I love that. I try to do that too. It's funny because strangely enough, when I'm having a bad day is when I like to do that, I'll randomly go on Twitter and just say like, if you're having a bad day or you need support tweet me and I'll sign up in your DMS and I'll just spend an hour going in people's DMS and being like, you're amazing. I know you're upset about losing your job, but f**k those guys, you can get another job. And then they're like, thank you, this helps me so much and I'm, you being appreciative that I did this for you is as great for me as it is for you.

I mean, and that's, that's I think maybe is the lesson Fitbit. If social media was just a little more, if the way our attention worked was that we could get more attention by saying positive things and not necessarily trying to be extreme or surprise people that, that maybe the world would be slightly better place, but that's not the world.

I also, I forgot who I saw say this, so I'm not taking credit for it. But I saw something that was just saying that as humans, we were never meant to be able to communicate with this many people at one time, it's completely unnatural to, from your phone, speak to hundreds of thousands, If not millions of people, it's just, it's not the way things are supposed to be done. And so of course there are going to be consequences. There's a lot of positive too, but there's a ton of consequences that come from it. And so yeah, these networks and platforms are just capitalizing off of it because they don't care about our wellbeing. They care about selling ads, keeping the lights on. So they're going to chase what works and what works is people being upset and mean and terrible.

Well, before we go, is there anything else you want to mention or you want to plug or...

No, all of my stuff is still like in that percolating stage, but I will say at like at the moment of warm, fuzzy, cause we've talked about this negative stuff. I do appreciate that the internet has brought some really great people into my life. And I count you as one of those people, even if we don't get to talk all the time, I appreciate your voice so much on Twitter and just the fact that we've been able to stay in contact and find different ways to work together. And I'm hoping that we'll continue to keep doing that and that kind of gives me hope that the internet can be a really positive place. It's not all doom and gloom.

Well, thank you. I mean, and that's, there are a lot of times when a project will end or something and I'll be, “Yeah, hopefully, we can work together again sometime. And maybe I mean it, it just kind of like I know we won't.”

A thing that people say.

Yeah. But when, I remember when you left Upworthy, because you, I think we both kind of had the same attitude about Upworthy, which wasn't that bad. It was like, it's a job. It is what it is. When you left, it was, I hope we can work together on something moving forward.

And we've been able to do that a few times. So I'm always happy when that is, that is the case. And I really appreciate your work. You are always the person I, you are someone I look up to immensely, so.

That's really sweet. I really appreciate you saying that, Parker!

Thanks!

Welcome to another episode of The Present Age podcast. I’m your host Parker Molloy.

Joining me on this week’s episode is writer and podcast host Molly Jong-Fast.

Parker Molloy: Oh, hello, Molly! Molly Jong-Fast: Hi, Parker. It's so fun to get to meet you!

Yeah, I know! We followed each other on Twitter for, what? Four or five years or something?

I don't know. It feels my entire life, but I know it's not.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just the past several years have been a lot. So, but yeah, this is the first time we're actually talking and seeing each other.

That's right.

The people listening cannot see us, but…

No, but we exist. Yeah.

So thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me for this, for my fledgling little podcast.

Oh, I'm honored.

It is nothing compared to yours, I'm sure.

I mean, I would say, the thing with podcasts is you just, you do it. And then people, I mean, unless you have the suspension of disbelief, then you can't do ... you know what I mean? So just, why won't it be fabulously successful?

Yeah. It'll be great. It'll be great. Well, so basically with this, so I started, I made the decision to leave my old job and start writing a newsletter, which we'll see how that works out. And then-

Bari Weiss is making $8 million a year.

I am not making $8 million a year.

Honestly, how is she making ... She's not. She's making ... supposedly what the reporting was $800,000, but I was like, "It's possible."

It's possible. I do not doubt for a second that there are people making millions of dollars a year with Substacks. But I am not at that point.

Me neither, but yeah.

But yeah. So when doing that, I was just like, "What else can I do?" And one of the people at Substack who they run my website or not run it, but power it, they were like, "Well, we just added podcasts." And I was like, "That's cool. That's an interesting idea." It's my way of doing podcasts without having to dive too far into it. So here I am trying a podcast, but one thing I always tried to do is I tried to get a transcript of every episode made in full, which is either extremely time-consuming or very expensive, but I think it's worth it.

I mean, transcription services are my nemesis and you will see why when you transcribe me, because I have one vocal cord. So I sound very weird. And then I have all sorts of weird affectations that are not necessarily fancy. Some of them are just saying “like” or verbal ticks. And so I come off ... You'll see.

Okay, we'll see. I'll send this through the service and we'll see how it goes. But yeah. So when I invited you on, I was just like, "I'm sure she'll write something amazing that I will then be able to be like, 'Yes, let's talk about that.'" So luckily for me, you did, you did recently write something amazing.

Oh, thank you.

So I want to talk about your new piece for Vogue that's titled, “What our new age of pandemic anxiety looks like and how to deal with it.” Is that okay with you?

Yes.

Awesome.

I am like, this is a topic that I am so well-versed on, I hate how well versed I am.

Oh, same, same, which is the thing. So I really related to it, especially in this idea of health anxiety, which isn't actually a term that I've heard before, which you described as the conviction that even though you don't have any symptoms you know deep down that you're sick, and that is just me to a freaking T. Can you talk a bit about your experiences with that?

Please. So I had an interesting, I had ... a very anxious, I was very anxious always in my life. And my aunt told me once that my grandmother had said, "I am not religious. I am just profoundly superstitious," which I feel points to a family that has long suffered from anxiety. And I always think you don't get to be the Jews who left Europe in the 1800s without being very stressed. Because not only were you ... you were like, "We're out of here. They're going to murder us." And a lot of my ... on my grandmother's side, I had great grandfathers who had died in the pogroms, and so I do feel like really, the anxious people got out early and because they were like, "We're all going to get murdered." So in some ways it was a good adaptation, right? Anxiety. It saved all our lives. I see a kid here.

The kids have no ... they come in and come out. Teenagers. But so in some ways it was good. My grandmother was like, she had worry bagels. She had worry fish. She had when you got on an airplane, you got on with your right foot, you knocked on the side of the plane three times and you got ... right? So I am coming from a very crazy bunch of people. And growing up I traveled a lot with my mother. She would always be crossing herself. I mean, we're Jews, but crossing herself, we get on an airplane, praying, rosary beads, was raised by a Catholic nanny who had lots of rosaries. I had rosary beads on my bed. The craziest stuff in the world.

So when I got to be about early thirties, so I had always been very neurotic and I went through a period where I didn't fly, which was complete ... people were like, "What are you in lunatic?" And I was like, "No way." I mean, yes and no. So, but then when I got to my early thirties, I had this best friend who, she was like all of us a complicated person, but she had ... and she had this terrible story where her mother had gotten murdered and then her husband had divorced her. And it just been this terrible story. And then she had gotten this brain tumor. And as soon as she got it, we sort of knew it was like ... I mean, brain tumors already, you don't want one. And this was like the worst one. And it just ... So for a year and a half, she fought and fought and fought and fought, and it was the worst thing I've ever seen.

She died right after she turned 40. She was on a walker. I mean, it just was, she couldn't talk. I mean, it was just awful. And basically, the minute she died, I was like, "I have one too." And it was because I just couldn't process that this could happen and that this is just the way life is sometimes, and so I became obsessed that I had one too. So I went down this road of health anxiety. It's funny because if you look at the statistics, it's 5% of all ... it's about half of all anxious people suffer from health anxiety. And if you think about it, so the statistics are 10% of the American public suffer from anxiety.

I can't imagine it's that low. I mean, if it is then everyone I know is in that 10%, you know what I mean? And so I went through a period of being convinced that I just needed one more scan. I just needed one more of this. I just needed one more of that. If we could just get through this. Also, during that time I got a melanoma on my back, and it was a zero stage. It was fine. They caught it very early, but that also triggered my ... I was in my mid-thirties, and I said to my dermatologist, I was like, "I can't believe this happened to me." And she was like, "You're totally pale. You grew up in that generation that never used sunblock. And you're 33. I can't believe you didn't have a 10 years ago."

But that was good for me because I get stuck in my own head in a very kind of ugly way, so to be able to get someone who says stuff, "Come on, man," to quote Joe Biden, is very helpful for me. So I got the melanoma taken out. I'm very careful about getting a check, but yeah. So it's interesting too, so that was how I got into it. I hope I answered the question.

Absolutely.

Okay, good.

Absolutely. It's just something that I really relate to. And just at the beginning of the pandemic, I used to joke around to myself that this was kind of my Bain in the Dark Knight Rises moment. By that point, I'd been working from home for several years. I was like, "Oh, you're worried about catching a deadly virus every single time you step outside? Welcome to the club." And part of why I kind of struggled so much with health anxiety is that deep down I know that there will come a day where my worries aren't unfounded, where I really am sick, where I really will get worse and where I really will die. And that sort of this idea that floats through my head constantly. You always get better until one time you don't.

But the thing that I learned a lot from a lot ... I stopped going to regular therapy and I got this behavioral as to really focuses just on anxiety. And most of his patients are either flying or health or agoraphobia or something. And the thing that he always says is, "With anxiety, it's the inability to live with uncertainty."

Ooh. Yeah. That's an interesting way to kind of think about it. And that is again, tragically relatable for me because it's this, I don't know. And I feel I have worked in the wrong industry to have this sort of feeling because I was ... a lot of that kind of carried over to fears of things like getting fired or being laid off and not being able to pay my bills. For instance, I used to sort of worry that I was constantly on the verge of losing my job and then I would convince myself, "Oh no, it's all just in my head. I need to overcome this, and watch, everything will be fine." And it usually is until one time it isn't fine. And one time I did get laid off at a job that was just downsizing.

And then I had another job where they laid off a bunch of people and I kept making the cut, and then finally one surge of layoffs I did not. And these things rather than see them as rare occurrences that we just sort of have to deal with and roll with, I kind of kept ... the negative things would reinforce all of my bad habits and all of my bad thoughts. And that was kind of something that sort of played into it with the pandemic, especially as a plays out.

Because when in early 2020, there was ... remember back when they were like, "Don't buy masks. You're fine. You don't need masks." And then I went in, decided, I was like, "Screw them. They're lying to us, I'm getting all the masks I can." Which I know that's not helpful. I know that only fuels the toilet paper shortage stuff that we had going on. But I also had a lot of toilet paper because I was "No, screw you guys. You're not telling us the truth." I'm very distrustful of the government generally.

Yeah. Well, the toilet paper was a good call because we couldn't get toilet paper. I mean, it was just ... but I would say the cycle ... so one of the things that was problematic for me was that I was in a cycle of reassurance seeking. So I wanted to know that everything was going to be okay and that we were going to be okay. And that you were going to ... that the turbulence didn't mean the plane would crash or ... and what I had to do for me, and I even got into it with my shrink and he was like, "Stop it. I'm not going to reassure you. I am not going to text you back," which is that I had to say it's not that ... even the question of, “Is it going to be okay?” is problematic.

I don't need to answer questions. I have thoughts that are going to come into my head that are going to be like, "Will I be laid off?" And I just say, "That is an anxious thought, this is part of my anxiety." You know what I mean? And just, but I don't fight it. I mean, because that's the problem is if you fight it, it gets worse. So I don't fight it. I just merely ... wait, hold on. I got a dog here. I just merely ... here we go. This is Leo.

Hello, Leo!

Let the record reflect that a very adorable rescue puppy has come into the chat. How is your guy?

Oh, he's great. He's currently at the dog park.

He's so cute.

Yeah. He's just the best. He's tiny and adorable. I feel like he'd be easy friends with Leo.

Oh yeah. No, they would love each other. But yeah. So yeah, so to not engage with the thoughts, but not to fight them, which is very hard because even now still a long time later, I want to fix my thoughts or I want to fight with them. I want to say, "That's not true." And the more I can just see the thought, not engage with it. Just be like, "This is the anxious thought." It's an unwinnable proposition because we don't know what the future is going to look like. We don't even know if they're going to be jobs. We could all be Substack millionaires.

Yeah. We could.

Yeah. Like Bari Weiss.

And maybe someday I will. Who knows.

Right. I mean, so yeah. So the idea that you can't win a thought.

Well, and that's a great point. I mean, because I ... so going into the ... right before the 2016 election I was working at Upworthy at the time, which was a very weird, weird fit for me, but it was fine. And there was someone, one of my coworkers was just, his whole thing was he set up a slack channel and was just like, "Go in here and I will reassure you about the election. I know everyone's worried that Trump's going to win, but let me reassure you. He won't, he won't. It's fine. It's fine. Don't worry. Look, here's what the odds show."

And he would even point at 538 or something, and then election night happened and it was like, "How could this happen? We've been reassured repeatedly." And that's the thing it's like we can't be sure of anything in the world. And I feel like this need to be reassured probably does contribute to it. And your piece really hit that point home in a way for me that I haven't been able to kind of ... I hadn't been able to kind of come up with on my own before reading it. So that's why I really enjoyed that.

Oh, thank you. And I spend a lot of time thinking about anxiety because it's such a root of my life and my mother's and my children. There's just a long ... So I really do find it ... I don't know. I relate to the struggle with it and I just think about it a lot. So the other thing I would say that I ... just about the 2016 election was I was at an election watching party and I was watching the needle go from blue to red. And I was like, it felt turbulence on an airplane. I had that same feeling of we're going through extreme turbulence, all flight attendants sit.

I was like, "Oh," I felt it in my chest. And I couldn't. And usually, I don't have that feeling unless I'm at a doctor's office and they're like, "We're going to want to biopsy this," or something. But and I couldn't ... it was the first time in my life where I thought, "Oh my God, this election." Because you know, Mitt Romney. I mean, no one likes Mitt Romney, but he wasn't going to arrest all Mexicans. And it was the first time in my life where I thought, "Oh, s**t."

Yeah. I mean, I had kind of the same sort of idea. I was never one of those people who was very like, "Oh, Trump can't win. He won't win." I always think the worst possible thing that can happen will happen. So going into election night, I was like, "He's so going to win. It's going to be terrible." I was not one of those overcome people. I was sitting there just shaking on edge waiting to see how it worked out, and after the 2020 election when everyone was celebrating and streets and stuff, I'm like, "He's still in office. Give it time. He might try to find a way to stay in there."

I wrote a piece that went up at Media Matters the morning after the election, and it was basically, "Now watch, he's going to try to do something." And then they tried-

And he did.

So I was like, "This thing isn't over as much as we all want it to be," but…

Yeah, he never ever, I mean, they got him out, but he never, ever was like, "Okay, I lost."

Yeah, no. To this day he still talks about how he won. And I think he's going to run in 2024 and I think he might win, and if he wins after the past, after the four years of being out of power, he's going to be mad and it's not going to be-

It's going to be terrible.

It's not going to be okay.

It's not going to be okay. That's right.

I'm trying to take it day by day. And step-by-step and hoping that I'm not ... because there's nothing I can say or do that will change these outcomes. I mean, I may have my tiny little sphere of influence, but anyone who's listening to me is not a Trump voter. I've talked to people who have voted for Trump had constructive conversations because I think those things are important, but I don't think that those are people who take advice from me, which is kind of the challenge here. It kind of brings me to the one other thing I wanted to kind of talk to you about was that for a while you wrote some stuff at, was that The Dispatch or The Bulwark, or?

The Bulwark!

The Bulwark. I constantly confuse those. Yeah.

You can't confuse the two, because The Bulwark is anti-Trump right. And The Dispatch is anti-Trump right. They're the same. Yeah.

But at the same time, one thing that I found so interesting about your work there, your writing tended to have this very like someone who is to the left of their usual reader base, trying to kind of get in there and kind of explain where you're coming from and where a lot of people are coming from. And I think that that's extremely helpful stuff. It resulted in a lot of backlash from the pro-Trump folks.

Oh, they were mad. I mean, I have never made anyone madder than when I tweeted about this. What's interesting is I come from such a bubble because remember I live in New York, I've always lived in New York, so when I went to CPAC and I heard this anti-choice thing, I was like, "These people are loony." I couldn't even believe. I was like, "This isn't pseudoscience. This is pseudo insane. These people are insane." And people were so mad at me. They were like, "How dare you be pro-choice." I was like, "You guys were ..." I didn't even know.

I mean, I sort of knew this, but I don't have any friends who are anti-choice. I mean, it's a basic ... most of the population is pro-choice. I mean, with some caveats, but so when they were so upset about that, I was like, "You guys." And even, and what's interesting is at The Bulwark, and I love them. I'm friends with all of them to this day. I love them. And they're very, some of them are some of the smartest writers and thinkers, but a lot of them are pro-life or anti-choice. I mean, and a lot of them grew up Catholic and that's very something they learned when they were young and they're very attached to it.

To me, it strikes me as just ... and it's funny because it's like, I never had an abortion and I never, but I never had strong ... but I did have this one kid who had this ... who we thought I was going to have to abort. And I wrote about this for The Journal, which got people crazy too. But before the Wall Street Journal opinion page lost his mind, which is about four years ago.

But I talked about how I had this chance of having a baby that was going to die of this degenerative disease. And it was not even a question to me I would have an abortion. It's like, I'm not going to bring into the world a child that's going to die of a degenerative disease. Life is f*****g hard enough. And they were like, "It's eugenics." And I mean, so it is you're dealing ... and I mean, I'm sure you have you think about this too. It's like you're dealing with a group of people who have no sense of how any of this works.

Yeah. I mean, that happens a lot, especially when it comes to trans issues, that's always fun when there are people who are like, "It should be illegal for trans people to get medication and stuff." And it's like, "Wait, why?"

Yeah. And I honestly think trans issues, they're so obsessed with it because they were just, they think they can get their people excited about it. Yeah.

Well, and that's ... I think it all kind of plays into that. And one of the things that ... I used to try to do more of this, which was just kind of be the like, "Hey, look, I'm the trans person, the big, scary trans person. I am not eagerly sneaking into locker rooms and whatever."

The locker room thing. It's so insane.

Yeah, well it's first off, locker rooms and bathrooms are disgusting. I mean, that is a problem in itself. But the obsession was always so weird and it's always so frustrating because there's nothing you can say that will change people's minds on a lot of this stuff, which is frustrating. And what always just gets me is that how the people who are weighing in often are the people who have no stakes, no skin in the game when it comes to, "Hey, should your trans kid be allowed to see a therapist, or should a trans adult be allowed to ... should Medicare cover surgeries?" And you know, stuff that.

And it's like the people who are very loud, inserting their opinions here, they don't have trans kids, they are not trans themselves. They are just like, "I don't this. It's icky to me. And so it should be illegal." And that's kind of the same sort of thing with abortion that comes up a lot where it's a lot of dudes or a lot of people who not only wouldn't want to have an abortion themselves, which is a very legitimate position. That's totally fine, but want to go out of their way to make it illegal for other people to access whatever.

Yeah. Well, the abortion issue is like, I am not radically and profoundly pro-choice for my daughter because I know that I can get her an abortion if she needs one. I am radically and profoundly pro-choice for the woman who lives in Leadville, Texas, or whatever. Wherever, Texas, who can't take a day off work and has to drive 48 miles to get an abortion. You know what I mean? Or really hundreds of miles to get an abortion. I mean, I'm pro-choice for her because those are the women who end up suffering. It's not the woman in the blue states. It's the women in the red states who are underrepresented, who can't ... and that I think is really the important thing. But just to get back to the debate for a second, I had someone come to me earnestly and say to me, "It's all about women's sports." And I was like, "What? When have you guys ever cared about women's sports?"

Yep. That happens so much. Well, so the funny thing is, so back in the 70s, there was a tennis player named Renée Richards, she was trans and she wanted to compete in the US Open. And she did, and she won a court case in New York and that was the whole thing. And so she competed in the US Open and the big concern was, "Oh, this person's going to dominate because blah blah blah. Grew up testosterone this, that whatever." And then she lost. And then she was a mediocre tennis player, which there are certain situations where sure, yeah. A trans athlete might have an advantage, but the response is always ... which is my response, which is always super unsatisfying to everyone, is it depends.

Oh, do trans athletes have an advantage? Sometimes. Depends on what the sport is, how long they've been on hormones, what their age is. All of these things factor in there, but the people who are arguing the other side of this pretend to care so much about women's sports. They're like, "No, no, we need to make sure that eight-year-old trans kids who haven't gone through puberty," so they very clearly do not have ... puberty is the moment when you start to see it [inaudible 00:27:50] one way or the other. And it's like, if someone hasn't gone through puberty and you're still blocking them, you don't care about fairness. You're just being a jerk. You just want to exclude these people or to force them into a gender box that doesn't quite work for them.

And I think that, I don't know, just again, it's something that, I mean, I love sports. I am not very good at sports, and I have no intention of trying to go on to the Olympics or whatever. But I care about this issue because I know a lot of people who do want to compete in sports, and especially when it comes to high school or even college, just people who want to find something that they can make friends, where they can make friends. That's what the point of school sports generally is. Most people don't go on to become pro athletes. And in this most recent Olympics, there was a-

Right, I was just thinking about that.

Yeah. There was a trans woman who from ... I think she was from New Zealand. She was a weightlifter, and I saw that she qualified. My initial thought, which I felt horrible about was, "Oh God, I hope she loses."

Yeah, and she did.

And she did, but I couldn't stop thinking about just sort of chaos it would be if she won a gold medal and instead she just didn't even finish. She was not ... but still it was something that there was this anxiety within me and I was like, "Oh God, am I rooting against this person?" And so then I just made a point of not watching her thing, because I didn't want to feel any attachment to the results in that. And then of course in the end, it didn't matter that she lost, they still said, "Well, it's still proof. She took a spot from someone who would have deserved it." And it's just like, "You can never win. They just move those goalposts right along."

Right, but the obsession is, I mean, it is proof that a lot of these conservatives are bad-faith actors.

Yeah, and it's so frustrating to try to have actual substantive conversations with people where it's, "Okay, let's find that middle ground." I'm always happy to talk with someone who's like, "I have concerns about trans issues. Can you kind of talk me through them?" And it's always like, when I do have conversations with people who maybe aren't on board with all everything in the world or whatever, but I will kind of have it and hopefully we will have a conversation [inaudible] come away thinking, "Okay, I may not agree, but I understand this a little bit better," which is all I asked for when I-

I still think you're asking for too little, I mean, f**k them. I mean, like you don't agree with what I want to do with my body? F**k you. I mean, it's like gay marriage. If it offends you, don't go to the wedding. I mean, I don't know. This is like, they're the party of personal responsibility and limited government, and yet they want to make sure that you use the bathroom they like.

Yeah, which is always interesting when it's like, "Okay, how would you enforce this?" And they're like, "Oh, we haven't thought that through." Right. Because the only way you can enforce that is if you're looking down people's pants as they're going into the bathrooms, which is extremely weird and definitely not small government.

Right. I mean, it's funny because it's the people who rail against the nanny state are the nanny state. I mean, great example is DeSantis fighting with the cruise ships and the schools because he doesn't want schools to be able to make a decision for themselves.

Yeah. I think that there's just something in politics that really ... there are so many blind spots there that I don't think are necessarily intentional, but they exist where people go, "Oh, cancel culture's gone too far." And then it'll be, "Oh, okay. Well also we are going to boycott to this channel for airing a show," or whatever. That's one of those issues that's kind of just made me just think, "What universe are some people living in, where they're like, 'Oh, the left cancels everything.'"

Well, I just read a story about some church Pastor who got fired for talking about the vaccines being safe, or Tomi Lahren got fired from her show on Glenn Beck's The Blaze channel because she went on The View and talked about how she was pro-choice and they were like, "That is inconsistent with our values. Goodbye." And so hypocrisy, just in the sort of, in terms of politics, it's everywhere. I mean, but I think, given the I'm on the left, I notice it on the right a lot more. But it's something that I don't know if it's intentional, but I also know that pointing out the hypocrisy doesn't seem to do much, which is frustrating, which is something that I want to try to ...

I don't know, but the general theme of this newsletter and podcast is communication, and I want to understand communication better. I want to understand how to come back to a single shared reality, at least. We don't have to agree on things, but can we at least agree on the facts of existence [inaudible]. Not tell ourselves these sort of stories that make our side look great and their side look bad. [crosstalk] exhausting.Molly Jong-Fast:I agree. I mean, that is really important. I mean, the idea of a shared reality, and we see because of the media is so siloed and there's this conservative media that is operating in its own, as you know, I mean, you have worked for the sort of pros of this. So you really know what this is about, but I agree. I mean, it's really, it's so ... it's just distressing, and you wonder ... I'm shocked at how bad it's gotten.

Yeah. It seems to be getting worse too, which is-

Yeah, I'm shocked. Yeah.

It's grim, and that's something that hopefully it gets better, but I don't know. I try not to let the anxiety that fuels every part of my life also fueled this part, but it's hard.

It's true. That's a good point. And I do think it's like we can only do ... I mean, that's the thing with my anxiety sometimes. I suffer from really bad anticipatory anxiety. So the night before a plane ride, I'll be checking the weather and feeling sick and not wanting to ... And one of the things I'll do is I'll be like, "Where am I right now? Am I in an airplane right now? No. I'm in my house. Am I okay? What number am I in anxiety right now?" I mean, I've literally had to do every basic anxiety trick in the book, which has helped me with the pandemic. I mean, I also think being sober has helped me because I can go to AA meetings and I can talk about my anxiety, but that is really helping. All the mental health stuff has really ... I've had to really use it.

Yeah. Same. It's the same way with me if I get ... back before the pandemic if I get a speaking gig scheduled. In the days leading up to, like my flight, I'm like, "Oh no, I think I'm getting the flu. Maybe I should cancel." Then I get there and I get on the plane the whole time I'm going there I feel sick to my stomach and all of the physical manifestations of anxiety just kind of build up, build up.

And then I go and do the thing. I give the speech and then it's fine. It's over. It's like, "Oh wait, no, I was fine. Oh, it turns out I wasn't sick. This was all in my head." But being in my head can become real, which is why I think a lot of the distinctions between, "Oh, this is just in your head," and, "Oh, this is just on the internet." Those sorts of things are kind of cop outs from acknowledging that things like your mental health affects your physical health. The internet is part of real life. It might not be all of real life, but it's still there.

The internet, there are two things that really get me agitated. The idea that the internet is not real life, and the idea that Twitter is bad. You are lucky. You get to interact with people. It is a privilege. If you don't Twitter, then don't go on it. But there is incredible ... you get to read a book and then find the author and tell them their book is great. It's amazing.

It's so cool.

Yeah. I mean, I'm 43 now. So when I was ... 20 years ago, you couldn't do stuff that. You'd write a letter to the New York Times and maybe someone would see it and probably they wouldn't. And so this is so cool. This is the coolest thing ever. So if you don't like it, don't go. That thing where people say how much they hate Twitter and also how the internet isn't real, like, "Okay, it doesn't have to be real for you."

Yeah. You can step back from it. And I think that part of what gets built into that, then they complain about, "Oh, the internet makes me sad and makes me angry." Which, I mean, that happens to me definitely a lot.

True. Yeah, yeah.

But they'll at the same time, don't want to log off because there's this sort of fear of being ... if you don't exist online, do you exist? That sort of thing where it's this hyper-realism of the internet that kind of sticks around. But, Molly, just thank you for doing this.

Thank you.

Please come back sometime. You were amazing.

Yes, are you kidding? Anytime. And I'm excited to get this out there too. I'm sure people will really enjoy this crossover.

Yeah. This'll be fun.

Yeah, and I'm glad, I love ... getting to talk about mental health stuff, especially right now is, I'm thrilled. Thank you.

Then I was excited to be able to chat with you about this, because it's just, you know, I think lot of the time people who tend to write about politics a lot, whether it's me or you, we both do that, that there's this feeling that our lives center around this and that there aren't other factors, but I mean, this is a nice, human, surreal conversation and things that we're all kind of dealing with. Maybe that is the key to getting people on the same page, is just to find these weird, little, tiny commonalities cling to, or not. I don't know. Anyway, thank you.

Well, have me back. Thank you.

Absolutely. All right.

Welcome to the Present Age podcast. I’m your host Parker Molloy.

Joining me on today’s show is animator and crypto art creator Bryan Brinkman. His work has appeared at places like The Tonight Show, Saturday Night Life, and even Sesame Street. Today, he’s going to teach me a bit about NFTs.

Parker Molloy: So, joining me today on the podcast is Bryan Brinkman. Hello.

Bryan Brinkman: Hello, Hey Parker.

How's it going?

It's going very well.

So, I wanted to have you on the podcast to talk to you about your art and your work, which I really like and enjoy. And also the one thing that I don't understand, but I want to understand, NFTs. Can you help me understand what an NFT is and how that applies to the art world, basically?

I can do my best to try.

All right.

Because it's an ever-growing description because every week there's something new happening in the space. But just to start out, I would say an NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. Kind of the idea behind it is that you can authenticate digital assets through the blockchain. And so, as a way of storing imagery or content. It's a way of saying, "Hey, I possess this digital asset," and that gives you the ability to trade it and resell it or do whatever you want with it. And so that's kind of the basic idea around what an NFT is, but then what that asset can be is exploding into a million possibilities.

Yeah, I was reading something the other day about how people have other applications of the same blockchain technologies. Someone was saying, "Oh yeah, one day we could have contracts and deeds to houses and stuff like that on there". And that's really interesting. And I think that part of the issue is that a lot of people just struggle to understand the concept, because for instance, like in NFT might be something like a video or a GIF, or just a still image. Right?

And people might think, okay, well, why would I buy this when I can just look at it anytime I want, I can make my own copy of it. I could just pull up a website that has this on it and look at it. For people who are thinking about trying to kind of explore that space as either a creator or someone who just wants to get involved and support artists. I guess that's another big thing, which I understand that that is definitely one of the reasons someone would want to pay for something as opposed to just looking at it on the internet.

I think that's a good question. The first thing that comes to people's minds, when they say it is, why would I pay for JPEG when I can just download it or screenshot it? And I think that same idea can be applied to a lot of art. Why does any art have value? It's because there's a group of people that all agree it has value, and that gives it value.

I think you can kind of look at the NFT collectible art market as being similar to what baseball cards were in the 90s. Those cards are printed for probably a penny on a piece of cardboard paper, but the value is whether a lot of people altogether go, "Hey, this Michael Jordan rookie card is worth more than this other card."

And so I think it kind of falls into the same thing as that the NFT is just a medium and a canvas for people to create on. And the idea of I could just screenshot that, well, you can't go and sell a screenshot, but you can authenticate that you own the original copy of an NFT and someone will want to buy that.

And that's really interesting. And that's a good point. I mean, the only real differences, the fact that there's a physical object to hold onto with, for instance, with baseball cards, which funnily enough, I was recently thinking about maybe getting back into collecting baseball cards because every once in a while, when the world gets too chaotic, I try to pick up a new hobby. So I don't just explode on Twitter or something like that.

And a few years back it was comic books. I was like, I'm going to just get really into comic books and that's been helpful. And then it was video games, and it's all these like going back to my childhood kind of things. And so I think baseball cards is the next kind of going down and just looking into the state of that industry right now is really interesting as well. I don't know, I remember growing up and it'd be like, here's this one card, this is the card for this player for this year.

And now it's like, “Well this one, if it has a blue border, it's worth more than if it has a multicolored.” And I'm just like, man, it's so complicated now.

Well, the sports card, yeah. The sports card industry's kind of changed a lot recently too. I've been looking at like, they have like column like penny cards. When you buy these boxes and they have pieces of jerseys and autographs and all these amazing hand drawn pieces of cards and stuff, they've really upped the trading card game to keep up with kind of the collector mentality in recent years. Which is something I wasn't very aware of until like the past year.

Yeah. And just the day I was looking at Topps, the trading card company. They have a section on their website that's now just Topps and NFTs. And it's kind of that same idea of trying to be like, yeah, you can own this rare whatever. And then there are some people who sell like a penguin or something. And I'm trying to understand that. And I don't know, I feel like I'm just like a million years old.

No, I think there's, in my mind there's kind of two worlds of NFT collecting right now. There's the art side. And then there's the kind of the collectible side and the collectible side falls into that kind of sports card mentality where there's high volume and there are big communities backing it. And with the penguins, there's 10,000 of those penguins. And so having a feature in the New York Times will give all these people excited and the prices fluctuate, and it falls into more of like kind of a stock market mentality where there's kind of this liquidity to these collectibles. Whereas the art side falls into a slightly different category where it's more of like artists building communities around their work and their style. And that falls into kind of like the auction house world and the New York gallery world versus kind of like the sports card collectors.

So there's all these different entry points. And I would say like a lot of the space grew because of a website called NBA Top Shot that came out about a year ago and kind of brought that sports card, collecting mentality into the space. And then all these people did it. They kind of got a sense and they started to wrap their minds around, "Hey, these digital assets hold value". And then they started looking elsewhere. And so that they kind of branch off into what else there is, because I think it was [inaudible] who's an artist in the space. He made a tweet the other day. That was like, "When you used to meet a celebrity, you'd ask for an autograph, but now you ask for a selfie," and that mentality of what has more value to people these days? Is it the digital experience or is it this physical thing you hold? I think that's changing rapidly, especially with video game skins, and how you manage your digital content and video game worlds. For instance, I think translates very one-to-one with NFT world.

That's yeah. That's a good point.

Kids, these days. They care more about digital assets than putting paintings on their wall. They, they want to show paintings on their phone that they can show their friends.

Yeah. And that's really interesting. And I mean, one way I have been trying to wrap my head around that over the past several months. And one thing that I've seen as a criticism of NFTs and just things that involve crypto generally is like the energy consumption of that. But it, everything seems so unclear when it comes to the environmental effect of any of this. Do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, I'm sure you have thoughts on that.

Yeah. I mean I think it was around January, after I'd been in the space for a year, that article kind of came out written by this guy named Memo and it was kind of this jarring account of how much energy could be consumed at a maximum amount, if everything travels all these places and burns all this energy. And there's certainly different blockchains that consume different types of energies. And there's these arguments of kind of proof of work versus proof of stake. Ethereum is not the best at it. And they are actively trying to move to this new Ethereum 2.0, that will reduce this all by like 99%, but it's a slow process. So in the meantime, there's a lot of these kinds of like, they call them side chains where people can kind of mint on these layers, two solutions that take up less energy.

But after that article came out, a lot of the NFT websites made commitments to offset their carbon emissions. So, I mean I've seen in the six months or so I guess it's been maybe eight months since that article came out, that has been a key point of almost every project is to offset that as artists. I did my calculations and offset it and I've done charities to raise money for that. And so there's a lot of ways you can kind of work towards that in the short term while they're kind of finding solutions in the long-term.

And then a lot of artists that really feel strongly about it have moved to other blockchains, like Tezos, there's a website called hic et nunc, which is a very silly name, but I consider it to be kind of like the Brooklyn indie comic NFT site. So there's a lot of really cool art there, that's a lot more affordable and they call it clean NFTs. And so there's a lot of different ways people are kind of working to get around that in the short term, but there is certainly a lot of criticisms that are, I think are valid about Bitcoin and other blockchains that aren't working towards solutions in the longterm.

Yeah, that's it, it's one of those things where I feel like the backlash to it was so swift where it was, if you buy an NFT, you're destroying the planet and you'd be like, whoa, I don't think that that is necessarily fair. Just saying that to people. I feel like that kind of scared a lot of people away from like really participating in this as either a consumer or an artist. And hopefully, that kind of over time will-

I think the math and the calculations were all based on worst-case scenarios. Looking at it, the idea that miners are only going to consume pure energy isn't necessarily true because they're going to want to be using renewable energy just for their own profits’ sake. And a lot of mining happens on kind of solar power and renewable energy consumption. So I think there was a swift backlash and then people started to kind of understand that minting one NFT isn't the equivalent of an entire day of London's energy consumption. Yeah. So I think people started to kind of look into it, figure out what the accurate amount was. I mean, I had places reaching out to me asking me to help them like figure out calculations. Like I'm not a math scientist, but I can do my best to help, but yeah-

“Please animate this and also do a bunch of very complicated math equations for it.”

But yeah, I think in the end, I think it's somewhere in between the two, it's not, it's not urgent issue and it's also not a non-issue it's somewhere in between and you have to kind of work towards doing your best to address it as you can.

Yeah, definitely. And so one of the things I wanted to kind of ask you about was just all of your other work that you've done over the years. I mean, just looking at your website, you have Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, Sesame Street, a music video for The Good Life, one of my favorite bands, which is-

We're both big Tim Kasher fans.

Yeah. That's very, very cool. Cause I totally forgot you did that one, which it's a good video it's for "The Troubadour's Green Room", right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that was such a fun one to do because they basically reached out to me and they were like, do you want to do this video? Here's three songs from the new album. And I just kind of sat and closed my eyes and listened to the songs until imagery came about. And they just let me kind of dream up visuals and kind of make something on my own. And so they were very hands-off and they just let me have fun with it. It was a blast cause I'm such a huge fan. I'm originally from Omaha, Nebraska, so I grew up a big Saddle Creek Records fan.

I mean, I'm from Illinois, so it's not too far away, but also grew up a big fan of Saddle Creek. Every band that was on there, I would go out and buy their albums as soon as it came out. Any of the bands that Tim Kasher would be in or Connor Oberst or any of the guys from The Faint, all of those bands are so good.

I love The Faint, that they were my entry point to Saddle Creek when I was young, seeing those concerts were such a blast. I mean, they still are, anytime they come around town, I try to see them. But yeah, I think that kind of career path I took, I kind of went to school for animation. And then I found work kind of working in advertising and TV. I worked on some animated series, like the Life and Times of Tim, which was this very small, HBO cartoon, but it was a lot of fun to work on. So I kind of did all these paths before eventually kind of working. I worked at The Tonight Show for like eight years, but in my free time, I would try to do music videos. I would try to do posters for concerts. I would do these pop culture, art gallery shows in LA.

And I was always trying to kind of like find ways to be creative because it was just like, that's my hobby. That's what I love doing. And then once kind of NFTs came around, it was like, oh, I no longer have to worry about turning my digital work into physical work to sell. This is a perfect platform for me to create animations. And I don't have to make short films for film festivals anymore. I can just make little short things that tell stories. And I found it to be just like the perfect amalgamation of all these things I've been trying to do for years. Cause I mean, I'm going to date myself, but when I was in high school, I was creating little flash cartoons for newgrounds.com, uploading them and then getting excited when people would be like, I like this one or I get upset when they say I hate this one, but it was that same concept where it's been years later I'm still doing the same thing where I'm just kind of making whatever I want to make and then I put it out there and I see what people think.

Yeah. And it's really cool. And I love your style just generally speaking. The colors that you use, the really weird-ass kind of... I mean, just on your website under on the crypto page, there's one of the animations is like a person being ripped in half, but it's weird because it's not in this really gruesome way. It's just sort of like, Hey... unzip, zip back up kind of thing. And I just really enjoy that. How would you describe your art style? Also, just anyone listening to this, you can go over to my website, readthepresentage.com and I'll be sure to include some of your Tweets that have your images and stuff in there, so they can see what on earth we're talking about.

Giselle Flores recently said I was a conceptual cartoonist, which I thought was very funny and kind of fitting, but I think the concept behind when I joined the NFTs was I had been doing these kinds of gallery shows and a lot of curators and people in the scene kept telling me "If you want to be a successful artist, you have to do the same style over and over because that's what galleries expect you to do when they put you in a show, they want you to do the work that you're famous for, because that's what sells". And I was kind of hated that mentality of like putting yourself into a corner, especially early on in your artistic career. I mean, I was living out in LA shortly after college and I just thought that's the worst way to get stuck in a style like so early.

And so when I started doing NFTs, I kind of wanted to break away from that. I saw it as an experimental area to do whatever in. And so my thesis behind my art was I'm just going to stick with a color scheme and then I can do whatever style I want. I can do 3D, I can do 2D cartoons, I can do paintings. As long as they have those colors in it, it all ties together into this overarching style that I can claim to have. And so that's been kind of my through-line, but then that allows me to do dark neon animations or colorful, bright poppy animations.

And that was kind of my way of breaking out of that trap of getting stuck, doing the same thing over and over. Even though a lot of artists do that and they make a great living off doing the same thing over and over, I just found it to be a little... I didn't want to get trapped in that too early. But now a year and a half into it, I'm starting to revisit the same themes and visuals and stuff, because now I've kind of developed a style through this experimental journey.

Yeah. The colors that you use are just some of my favorites basically, they all work so well together, it is a really neat throughline for so much of your work. And even though, as you were saying, the style kind of shifts around and whatnot. It's always so interesting to learn about something that I just am so totally clueless about. And that's what this is kind of been, which is great.

Yeah. And that's kind of the fun of like NFTs is like, I started doing it as just kind of making GIFs, because back when I started the NFT space, you couldn't even upload videos to the blockchain, the technology wasn't ready yet. And so everyone was kind of making these short looping GIFs, because that's how you could get a lot of mileage out of like a 50 megabyte file size limit. And so that's like kind of where I started. It was like, how can I make things? How can you make it loop nicely so that it keeps going, and it doesn't feel like you're only making three seconds of animation kind of stuff, but then over time, you start to get comfortable with that. And then you find new platforms, whether it's, I did a release on a website called art blocks, which is a generative art where you create art entirely with code.

And then when people create it, they get a randomly generated piece of art. And so I did that in January and now that's becoming one of the most sought after platforms and styles of art, because it allows an artist to make an unlimited supply of art, but each one's unique. And I think that's a really cool thing that NFTs can do that can't be replicated outside the space very easily. And then also I did a piece for a platform called like async music, which allows you to sell music in a way that the album art changes and the audio changes based on who owns different layers of the track. And so for instance, you could have a band and you, as an owner of the guitar stem, you could change how the guitar sounds in the song. And when people listen to it, they have to listen to the version you choose as the owner of that guitar track. And then that also changes the visuals of the album. And so there's so many cool ways that like, the technology is creating new mediums altogether for like how music and stuff is released.

Yeah. That last thing just sounds so interesting to me, it sounds like a total nightmare for artists to have to be like "Here you go, good luck. Let's be what happens with my work", like that sort of thing. But it's really just cool and different. And I don't know I'm always excited to just see new ways to... I hate saying consume, but enjoy, appreciate work and that's so, yeah. Is there, is there anything else that you want to make sure that people hear or anything you want to plug or talk about, or you know, whatnot.

Yeah, well, I think as much as I don't necessarily care to talk about the money of the space. There is a lot of pluses for artists and creators to join the space. And one of those is that with the blockchain technology, as a creator, you can use the smart contracts of NFTs to benefit yourself longterm. And by that, I mean, when I sell a piece of art, you sell it for X amount of money, but through the contract, when it resells down the road, you get 10% royalty in perpetuity. And so something I sold for $200 a year ago could resell for thousands and I'll make more on the secondary royalty than I did on the primary sale. And so that incentivizes this kind of ecosystem of collectors and artists to both want each other to succeed because if someone buys my stuff, I want to grow the value for them, and they want to grow the value for me on the secondary.

And so this is kind of symbiosis of support. And so the connection with artists and collectors is a lot deeper in this space than it was in the traditional art world where someone would buy my work. I would have no idea where it went. If they sold it on eBay or something, that's their thing and I've no part in that. But in this, I'm very hyper aware of every transaction, because a little bit will funnel back to me at some point. And I want to see the people that support me early on to succeed later on. And so it's a really a wonderful community of people that are kind of supporting each other.

Interesting. I had no clue that that was the thing, because that's how I was looking at it with anything art related or related to collecting things. Once it's out of the original artist's possession, it's kind of like "If I pay for this, I'm not supporting the artist, I'm supporting the person who bought this from the artist", but that's different. And that I did not know. So that's interesting.

Yeah. It creates a fun, passive income over time as you continue to grow. And it also incentivizes you to sell things at a cheaper rate early on and build up your community of people, because if it grows, then you benefit from that growing longterm. And so it's really kind of a wonderful solution that they figured out with the space. And a lot of the platforms are really good about including that, but it took years. I mean, I joined the space in January 2020, but space has been building for many, many years before that. And the efforts of all those artists pushing for those royalties and the collectors also that supported the artists early on, I've kind of like helped build this platform now that, in the past year has kind of exploded. And so it's been really awesome to see some of these artists that were making stuff three years ago, sold it for $5 seeing itself for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then they get tens of thousands of dollars on that.

Yeah, Absolutely. Now, if someone wants to, I guess I'm kind of both ends of this, if someone is like, okay, I listened to this and I'm interested in NFTs as a creator, how do you get started with like, if someone is a total beginner in this space, total novice, where do you go? Because there's so much out there that is just so I don't know. It's just seems it's very, if the crypto feels complicated and that's been kind of my experience in trying to like move things back and forth between wallets and stuff. And I'm just like, I don't even know what the hell I'm doing.

Yeah, no, it's definitely tricky. There's a lot more resources now than there was when I started, when I started, I kind of got intrigued because an artist I collected named Killer Acid was putting stuff out. And I was like, what is this? I don't understand what this etherium symbol is. And I kind of spent a couple of weeks kind of Googling and looking at Twitter and kind of figuring out what this all was. Now there's a lot more resources on YouTube and Google, School of Motion has some great articles on how to get started and set up a wallet. The thing I would say is, there is an entry fee barrier now that wasn't there when I started because of etherium and the currency of the space is worth a lot more than when I started. It cost me like $40 to like get started.

Now, I think it would cost a lot more. So I would say when I mentioned earlier, like hic et nunc, Tazos, that's a much cheaper way to get started, build a community before you then branch over to like etherium, which is more expensive right now. So I would recommend new artists kind of look at that. Join Discords, start following people on Twitter. Really spend some time looking at the space, seeing what people are buying, because I think the problem we see right now is everyone kind of sees these headlines about NFTs are worth so much money. And then they kind of dive in, they try to sell something that they haven't been able to sell elsewhere. And they're not really creating for the space necessarily. They're just kind of shoehorning in something they've been trying to sell in another form, whether it's like physical or something else. That is tough.

New artists, you have to build trust with collectors that you aren't going to just sell something to make a bunch of money and then leave. And that takes time, you have to continue to put out work. So if, if you're a new artist, I would say like create four or five pieces of art that you feel good about selling and then start to see if people like it, see if it's connecting with people, share it. And then you don't even have to mint and pay the money to make it first. You can just put it out there, see if people want to buy it. And then once you have people that are willing to kind of help fund your initial output or... is that the word? Your initial launch, it's a lot more helpful. And there's also some organizations that will help artists with their first mint. I think it's called Mint Pass. I'll send you the link later, but there's a bunch of these kinds of organizations that help artists that can't afford to get started kind of put out their first pieces of art, which are very wonderful resources.

Cool, Cool. This has been so interesting to me and just thank you so much for coming out. I'm so glad we were able to finally get this scheduled cause I reached out two weeks ago and then you said yes. And then my world became crazy for a little bit. So I'm glad we were able to make this work.

I really appreciate you having me on here. And yeah, if anybody has questions about NFTs or whatever, feel free to reach out to me. I'm pretty available and I'm happy to help some people understand the space because it is confusing.

Welcome to the Present Age podcast. I’m your host Parker Molloy. Joining me this week is meteorologist and climate scientist Eric Holthaus. Eric operates The Phoenix, a Substack about humanizing the climate emergency.

He’s the author of The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming, and he founded Currently, a free subscription weather service.

Parker Molloy: Joining me today is Eric Holthaus. So what I wanted to ask you was, after the IPCC released its most recent report, there were a lot of really downer headlines about it. And when you sent me a copy of your book last year, one thing I liked about it was the fact that it was hopeful and that's not something you really see or hear too much on this topic anymore. Yet it was realistic. Can you tell me a little bit about why it's important to not embrace climate nihilism, I guess?

Eric Holthaus: Thank you so much for inviting me. I think that we don't really have a choice anymore. Honestly, if we are going to do what we need to do in the time we have left, we have to change the narrative. We have to really unlearn that climate change is an inevitable disaster and that we're all going to die, and instead think about it as a justice issue, just like other justice issues, and get angry. And that comes with the realization that a better world is possible, that there are systemic changes that need to happen in every aspect of society anyway, and that's literally what the climate scientists said this week was we have to change every part of human society at a rapid scale in order to get down to the emissions goals that we need to do to preserve the habitability of our planet. What's more important than that, than being able to live on a planet, right? We don't have anywhere else to go. We have to do this.

One thing about that, which the past year has messed with my head a little bit on I guess, is the fact that we're in the middle of this pandemic where you have people who aren't taking these super simple, easy, mild inconveniences to their life, to go get vaccinated or to wear a mask or to stay six feet apart from someone. And I keep thinking to myself, if people won't do that stuff, which feels like the bare minimum, I just don't know how we can expect people to get on board with doing the big things necessary to tackle climate change or tackle any of these larger problems that are facing use, these existential problems, which is something that I've been thinking a lot about lately as it comes to just places that I know that I've lived that have changed for reasons not related to climate.

I just wrote a blog post about how my favorite baseball team is the Chicago Cubs and how Wrigleyville, the area right around the stadium, has changed so much in the past decade that it's just almost unrecognizable and there's this sadness that comes with that. In your book, you've written about how that sadness is applying on a global level. A sort of... I forgot. There was a word you used for it. It's escaping me right now, but it basically this idea that nostalgia for a loss...

Solastalgia.

That's it! That was it. Do you think that we can actually address this? I want to believe that humanity can come around and address these issues, but at the same time, I feel maybe I'm a bit cynical as far as the politics of any of this goes because a lot of my work has been in monitoring media and that has left me jaded.

Yeah. First off, there's no parallel or precedent for the kinds of change that we're seeing in the entire really existence of humanity. That's what another thing the report said this week was it's been 150,000 years since temperatures were this high. It's been two million years since we've had this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Human civilization is about 100,000 years old and modern humanity, our species is only about two million years old. So we are seeing changes that our species, humans, have never seen before at a rate that is not something that we're built to process. So it's normal for us to feel really weird and uncertain about this time. It's not something that we're built to process to have geological scale change happening in the span of one human lifetime.

So it's normal to feel those weird conflicted feelings because we're trying to make sense of it all in the base back part of our brain as well. It's not just wondering what are we going to do about it, how are we going to motivate people, but it's like we're trying to survive and thrive as animals at the same time. So I think that one way that I've been thinking about is that it takes a lot fewer people than you might expect to create that rapid large-scale change. It's not like... What's it called? The critical mask of vaccination or mask-wearing the herd immunity. We don't have to get 90% of people on board with any particular climate action for it to be effective. We just need really honestly to destroy the fossil fuel industry. That's just the largest, richest, most powerful, most profitable industry in human history.

Simple.

Yeah. So we need to do that, but we also need to embrace the anger and embrace the courage that comes with reading reports like this, knowing that climate change is not something that's just passively happening, it's something that's being done to us. It's an injustice. And right before COVID, we were hitting those critical social movement tipping points of national governments were starting to respond to people in the streets and saying, "Okay, we're going to get on a rapid climate change action trajectory because you're going to shut down the country if we don't." They were afraid, the leaders were afraid, I think for the first time on this issue. And I don't know what it's going to take to get that to happen again, but I know that it will happen again because that is the most effective way of creating rapid change is demanding it. Honestly, in a democracy, that's what we need to do.

Do you think that the answer is in government policy or is it in trying to just encourage companies to do better? That's where I'm always lost when, when it's okay, be angry, push for change, but how? Just your average everyday person, if they want to create change, what should we be pushing for? What sort of policies or actions or attitudes? I mean, because I understand that one thing we have going for is on the side of people who want to prolong humanity is the fact that fossil fuels, the profitability just keeps ticking down as compared to some of the renewables. But what should people like me or anyone listening to this do? What's the policy to argue for it?

That satisfying answer is that you just need to do whatever will get you up in the morning. Honestly, there are so many parts of building this new society that is not extractive, that is focused on regeneration and resilience. So care work, education, public safety, public health, anti-racism, all of those things have to happen in order to do the slow society-changing work, regardless of whatever, carbon tax or whatever is passed. I'm not personally very motivated by calling a senator or protesting or any of that kind of stuff, because it feels too abstract to me. For me, I enjoy teaching my kids about nature or I enjoy taking a break from the screen and going on a walk outside and just thinking for a little bit as what do I want my neighborhood to be like? What feels achievable?

And having conversations with friends, just keeping my motivation up, honestly, because as someone who works on climate change every day, that's a major challenge that I have. I'm in therapy. I couldn't do this without really knowing that there is some hopeful change that's possible. I know everyone needs their time to process and acknowledge what's happening, and there's a place for everyone in the climate movement, you don't have to consider yourself an activist to be someone who's creating effective climate action, but I feel like we have to demonstrate to each other that we can help each other through this time. Because I think for the last couple of 100 years, it's been this every person for themselves mentality in broader society.

And that is something that really doesn't match with a more ecological approach, which is the way we're going to have to restructure all parts of society. So the more that you can get yourself into the mindset I'm part of a network, I'm part of a system, I'm part of an organic thing that can respond and be flexible rather than it's just me on my own. Climate change is not your fault. Climate change is not something that you are personally liable for, but you do have a responsibility to show up, just like you have a responsibility to show up to be anti-racist or you have a responsibility to show up to be a part of broader society. You have to pay your taxes, you have to follow the rules of being a pedestrian. You still have a responsibility to each other. That's what happens in being a member of society, but you don't have to do it all yourself.

I think that one of the problems seems to be the sense of rugged individualism, that I can lift myself up by my bootstraps and if someone else can't, that's their problem. And that's something that we've seen over and over with the pandemic and why that approach has not been a good one because there are a lot of people who I don't quite understand how, but they just don't seem to care about anyone else. And there was an old Huffington Post blog that someone had that was...

I love that.

I don't know how to...

Explain to you that you should care about other people.

I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people. That was it. It's something that just sits in the back of my head. Just thinking about that and how true it is. And I think that that's why when you see people angry about the concept of intersectionality, for instance, which is just this understanding that there are all sorts of factors in life pushing in all sorts of different directions. And really the only way out of it is to care about things that don't directly impact you. I'm white obviously, and racism, it doesn't personally harm me in fact. Being white, there are many times in my life without even knowing it, I've probably benefited from racism. The structure of society and so on. But at the same time, I do feel a personal responsibility to push back on that and fight back against that because that's not the way the world should be just because that's the way the world is.

And that's the...

Basic human rights matters.

Yeah. So, that's my view on climate. And I think that that's hopefully a good one. It's hard to tell. It's hard to know what the problems are. Is it that we're living in a world where everyone wants a big yard and they want to spread out and take up as much land and use as much resources as possible or the existence of Exxon? And it's probably more the latter, but all of it plays in together, but sometimes I feel like there's just the sense of okay, I'm doing this to make myself feel better because I can't do anything else. This is the most I can personally do.

It feels like it goes with what you were saying about doing whatever helps you get up in the morning to move forward. And God, I don't know. It's so depressing, but I want to feel optimistic. And I know that it's just one of those topics, it's beyond frustrating, but on a totally... Not totally different topic, but a slightly different topic, I wanted to ask you about Currently. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What it is, how it came to be, what you do, et cetera.

Yeah. So Currently we're building as a weather service for the climate emergency. So a service in the broad sense of that world word in the sense that we're organizing around the weather, we are talking about the weather because the weather is something that's a least common denominator for people to talk about. But also, the weather is political now. The weather is something that connects us to each other in really important and tangible ways. And it's also a very practical thing in the sense that the weather is the main way that we interact with the climate emergency. If there's extreme weather happening, where we are, or if we hear about extreme weather on the news, that's happening somewhere else, we can directly aid each other. We can also help keep ourselves and our family safe if we are informed about the weather. So my idea is that we're partnering with Twitter on this to create conversation spaces and we're doing daily weather newsletters written by a real person that goes beyond what you can just get in your phone app.

It's a real person talking with you about the weather each day. We're also launching an SMS service where in many countries without super well advanced, well-developed weather service like we have in the West, SMS, and WhatsApp are the main ways that people communicate with each other about breaking news or about the weather. So we are in the process of rolling out an SMS weather service for anywhere in the world. You can sign up and we will send you automated messages about if there is an event, some weather alert that's happening where you are, and you can text back to us and we will have a meteorologist respond to you, that will answer your questions. And we're going to do all of this in the context of climate change. So we're partnering with Climate Central, which is a nonprofit that's focused on understanding the connections between weather and climate.

Climate science has advanced to the point where we can in real-time attribute climate and weather disasters to climate change to say, "This event was X percent more likely because of global warming." And also have that scientific understanding of how that connection happens and in this week's IPCC report, was the very first time that was traced back to fossil fuel burning activities. So we know that there's a direct causal link between fossil fuels and extreme weather now. We can literally blame hurricanes on Exxon. That's a scientific fact now, which wasn't necessarily the international consensus as of last week. So this is a major advance in terms of building political movements, building communities organizing around climate, but also just informing us of reality, that factual reality now is that the weather is something that can bring us all together and help us to imagine a better world.

That's my goal with Currently. You can sign up at currentlyhq.com. All the weather newsletters are free. To get access to the SMS service, as well as... We'll send you a gift basket of merch. You can join at $5 a month. And this is a completely independent thing. We're not funding by Twitter at all. We're trying to prove that independent climate journalism can re-imagine what a weather service could be. We're not going to try to compete with a weather channel or anything like that, we're going to add to it this climate service that currently doesn't exist.

It's really interesting to me because one thing I like about it, I guess, one way of saying it, is that places like the weather channel or your evening news telling you the weather, there always seems to be this hesitancy to tie events to climate change because that makes people feel like oh, it's injecting politics into this, but it's not politics. I think that's probably part of the problem, that there's been this reluctance to discuss these things openly in the news. Fox News is going to start its own weather channel now, I guess, that'll be interesting, I suppose.

So we'll be the opposite of the Fox News weather channel.

You will be the factual opposite there, but I really appreciate the work you do and I think that it matters. It's all depressing, but it matters. And I feel like we all have to fight these fights together. And that's why I'm always interested in hearing new ideas, hearing what I can do personally, what we can do collectively as a country or a planet. And I've found that following you on Twitter is a good way to stay up to date with that sort of stuff.

And that's one thing that we're going to try to do with Currently too. We did a couple of reader surveys and the number one thing that people wanted was calls to action, was saying if there's this weather thing that's happening, how can I help? How can I get involved? What can I do? What will actually really matter? What will really make a difference? So, that's going to be one of the main things that we're already doing actually is sending out little prompts to say here's how you can support the Pacific Northwest heatwave. We did a story about farmworkers and Eastern Oregon and how there was a unionization effort that was trying to get cooling centers for farmworkers in Eastern Oregon. So, that was one of the calls to action we had, was support these workers who are literally out there creating our food for us and dying on the job because there's no heat protection. So, that's the kind of stuff that we want to tie into the weather report, which I think is really relevant.

Sure. Several years back I worked at the website Upworthy, which is very odd. I was an awkward fit, but one of the things that would happen would be... And this was in the post you'll never guess what happens next phase of that site, it was when they were trying to do more tangible, original stuff but one thing we found when we were writing about tragedies was that people didn't just want to hear about tragedies. People want to go, "Okay, how can I help? What can I do?" And I think that that's a big part of it, that people want to help...

People care.

Yeah, that gives me hope. The fact that people want to help, but for the most part it's just trying to figure out what to do, where, where should I send money or what should I donate or where should we volunteer? Those are all questions that different people want to engage on different levels. And so that's why I really appreciate that that's what you guys are trying to do.

We have 25 cities right now and we have a mix of meteorologists and poets and artists that are writing about the weather every day in those cities. They live in the communities so they can tell us here's the mutual aid network that has just popped up because the guide on my block is the one that's running it. They have that insight, that local insight, which to me has been fascinating as a weather nerd. I'm learning about the weather all over, understanding how the heat index is different in Vancouver, BC, versus in New Orleans, for example. The thresholds that will impact someone who is unhoused in Vancouver is a very much lower threshold than what I am used to. Because there's no air conditioning in Canada because they don't need it. Historically it doesn't get hot there. So that's really been fascinating to learn the ties and to justice in terms of weather. It's really interesting to me.

Definitely. I'm really excited to see where Currently goes, because what you guys are working on is so cool and so different that I feel like different is what we need generally. But the last thing I just wanted to ask, is there anything else that you want to add that you want to make sure anyone who's listening to this will actually hear?

It's just that everyone has their place. I know it's all depressing and hard to understand and happening too fast, but it's just like COVID, I think, that we were faced with this really shocking, striking change to every aspect of our lives and then we just rolled with it as people were dying around us, we were grieving that, we were loving each other, we were doing all of that work that was necessary as well as learning how to buy the right kind of mask and learning all that stuff. Climate change is that, but for the rest of our lives. It's going to be very hard but it's also very important to understand that we're not doing this just for ourselves, we're doing it because it's the biggest justice issue of our time. It ties in together everything, food, housing, racism, all of that stuff.

This is one way that intersects all of it and supporting each other through that. If you're listening to this, you're probably that climate person in your friend group. You are asked these difficult questions and it's okay to not have the answer, and it's okay to struggle through all of this because I do and this is my job. The only thing I would say is that just ask for help when you need it. Send me a DM if you have to, I'll try to chat with you and encourage you. If you're on any path, then you're on the right path.

That's a good line. If you're on any path, yeah. I mean, unless you're planning to start an oil company, in which case you are on the wrong path.

Exactly.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Present Age podcast. I’m your host Parker Molloy.

Joining me on today’s show is the man behind what I’ve long referred to as “the only good government Twitter account.” His name is Joe Galbo, and he’s the social media specialist at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Parker Molloy: Joining me today is Joe Galbo. Joe, what is it that you do?

Joe Galbo: Sure. Well, I make memes for the government. No, so yeah, I am the Social Media Specialist at the Consumer Product Safety Commission. We're a small, federal agency, about 500 employees, with a budget of about $137 million dollars, and we regulate consumer products, so everything from ATVs to toaster ovens, to children's clothing, basically thousands and thousands of things people use every single day, and we're the agency that makes sure those things are safe.

It's not just product updates. It's not just recall updates, it's a lot of awesome memes. That is what drew me to the account, not my love of product recall.

Sure.

You have a bunch of characters in these memes. Can you tell me a little bit about how that got started? How did you pitch the idea of creating Quinn the Quarantine Fox, and your various other ...

Handsome Ron.

Handsome Ron, yeah.

Copernicus Jackson, yeah sure. Right from when I interviewed at the agency, back in, it was June 2016, which is basically a lifetime ago for everyone at this point. I explained to my supervisors at the time, "Hey, I want to join the agency. I want to do public education campaigns, but it's not going to look necessarily the way you all have been doing things." They were cool with that, to their credit. Right from the get go, there was an understanding that, "Hey, we're going to do something and it's going to look a little bit different."

I don't think they anticipated so many talking animals at the time, and to be fair, I don't think I anticipated that either, but as I explored the agency's messaging and the types of things we were trying to educate people about, it became very clear to me that our guidance to people, how people could live a little bit safer, all came across very standard, and a little bit boring, so again, wear a bike helmet, when your message is wear a bike helmet, or don't plug your space heater into a power strip, that's good advice, but it's not necessarily the most exciting advice.

When you're out there on the Internet, and you're up against celebrities and influencers, and every brand is trying to be funny, if you just go out there and start telling people to make sure they clean their dryer vent lint, the lint out of their dryer vent, you're not going to be very successful.

I think the strategy really came out of looking at what our messaging was, and then again, seeing how simplistic it was, and saying, "Okay, if this has any chance at all of making it out there online, we're going to have to go big and bold, and we're going to have to do things in a super fun way."

Now, as far as pitching characters individually, it's one of these situations where if I have a good idea for a new character, I'll go try to find a stock photo that supports that. With Copernicus Jackson, who's one of our cat characters, I knew I wanted a great cat character, and it really was just a matter of finding a good stock photo that represented a cat, that looked excited and interested in something, but not terrified of something. That was a lot of time searching through a stock site to find it, and then once I did, coming up with the name, again it's, a lot of times it's about, "Hey, have I heard this character name out there before," and if the answer is no, then okay, can we try it. It's a lot of Googling to make sure I'm not reusing character names that exist anywhere else.

Yeah, it is a little bit, I want to say ad hoc, because there's definitely strategy there, but it's very organic. Again, I'll try to leverage training topics a lot, so if there's an animal trending or something, I'll try to come up with a character in that moment. Yeah, it's a little bit a mix of method and then all over the place madness for sure.

One of the reasons that I really just love the account, generally, and this is a big part of what I'm trying to do with this newsletter, and this podcast. I'm really focused on the way that we communicate, and yours is one of the most interesting communication strategies I've seen, especially when it comes to something that comes from the government. You really expect, when you think government Twitter account, you think it's sterile, straightforward, just telling you what you need to know. Meanwhile, it's, "Hey, here's an ATV and a T Rex." All of that stuff that really just, it gets people drawn in, the response to your Tweets is just phenomenal.

It's always funny seeing people who are encountering it for the first time, going, "Did you get hacked?" Oh no.

We do get that one a lot, yeah. I think things have changed. Communication has changed, and I don't want to sound like a cliché, but the past decade, forget about it. Everything's different, and even the past five years it feels, to me, it feels like things are very different. The government, just the way it operates, where everything has to be by the book and by the law. By its nature, it is slower than the private sector. A functional government will be mostly slower than the private sector moves, and in communication, again where things move twice as fast in every other industry, yeah it can feel like, again, a lifetime.

I think one thing that we really struggle within government, and I've had a chance to speak to a lot of people in government at this point, who do communication, there is that constant tug of war between, "Hey, we have to be an authoritative voice, and people have to trust us, and we have to get the message out there in a really clear way." What you were just speaking to, which is it's also very boring when you just do that, straightforward. The Internet is not designed for boring content, which I guess is not a thing that people meditate on very often, but I think part of it too is at a small agency like CPSC, where our budget is, again, only about $137 million, which in government money is not a lot at all, compared to the FDA or the CDC, where you're talking billion-dollar budgets and more. You just can't do it the boring way online, you just can't.

I do think government helps itself when it’s very relatable to people, and I think that's one thing that we hear a lot about this strategy is that it's not preachy. It's not coming at you in a way where, from a place of high authority. Again, it is advising you on a better way to live your life a little more safely, but it's not doing it from a pulpit. It's not going it from an ivory tower. It's down here with the regular people, where regular people like talking dogs, and regular people like robots that go on picnics with their friends. Again, I don't know, at least those are the things I think regular people like.

Like you said, it seems to be working so far, and we're just very grateful for that, honestly.

Yeah, of course. I'd say for about a year or two I'd see your Tweets and just be like, "What is going on inside this person's head?" It's great to actually talk to you, and to be like, "Oh look, this is a human being, who seems to share the same sense of humor as me," and other people seem to be into it as well.

Yeah. I guess one thing about me, I love working in communication. Back in the day, I wanted to be a journalist, but I graduated from college in 2008, where being a journalist would have been very difficult at the time. I fell into this government communication thing through advertising. In my heart, I always fantasize about being a TV showrunner, like on an animated series. That, to me, is the most fun you could probably have in a job.

In some ways, what people are seeing here is the Joe Galbo version of what a TV show might look like.

Right.

A lot of these memes could easily be turned into PSAs or video products, and that's not an accident. My passion lies in visual storytelling, and I do try to inject a lot of narrative into these things, to a point where sometimes it's like my supervisors are like, "I don't know, is this one maybe too complicated for people?" I'm always like, "No, trust the audience, they're going to get it." More often than not, they let me go that route.

Again, it is a delicate balance, and I think one of the things I like about the, I guess you could call it a template we use now, is that at the top there, where we have the narrative or the crazy visual, you can almost do whatever you want at this point, and then as long as at the bottom you're delivering that safety message that's going to help save lives.

Yeah.

That's one thing that's been super fun, and now it's really just trying to push us in new and exciting ways. We just started doing LGBTQ graphics a short time ago, and that's been very exciting. It's one of these things where, again, not that we've pushed the envelope in government communication, how do we keep pushing it, and how to we keep making sure we're getting these messages in front of people, on an Internet that is constantly more fractured by the year.

Yeah, and everything is constantly changing, and what works today might not work next year, next month, or next week. I don't know, have you watched the Netflix show, I Think You Should Leave?

No, not yet. I haven't yet.

Okay, you should watch that, because it's like the TV show version of what you do, just weird, out there. What you do is a combination of that show and Portlandia, which I mean as a compliment.

Thank you. No, you're actually ... One of my very best friends told me to start watching that show, so you are totally in line there. Now I'm going to definitely have to watch it.

Yeah, I think you'll like it. I think it will be right up your alley.

That's awesome, thank you. I think, again, it is that fine line of being referential to things that are going on in pop culture, because you always, and this is just something everybody's online trying to do, you always want to see you're on top of what's going on. You want to see, again, of the world that people actually live in, and that in itself is a new idea for government.

I think a lot of government agencies are just, "Hey, we're important and here's our stuff, and you shall appreciate it because it's coming from us." That's not my, our approach at all. In a lot of ways, it's the exact opposite, where I very much feel like every day we have to prove our worth, and prove our value to the public, so every day people are going to get the best of what we got from a creative perspective.

Then yeah, again getting back to how different things are, just trying to keep up with it all. Looking out, I know we should be on TikToc right now.

Oh yeah.

I know we're going to need a really great video strategy like yesterday, but on a small team it's like, "Okay, what do we do?" There's one person at CPSU who's responsible for producing the social media, and we do have a video production specialist, thank God. They're going to, hopefully, play a big role in what our short-form video strategy is someday. Yeah, it's just, again, thinking about how government tends to move just a little bit slower than the private sector, keeping up is just a constant battle.

Well yeah, and with government generally, there's always this sort of worry that you're not getting through to people, that you come off as sterile.

Totally.

That you come off as preachy and telling people how they should live their life, what they should do, with the exception of, "Hey, maybe you shouldn't have this dresser that's not anchored to the wall," that's fair.

Yeah, exactly. Especially at a regulatory agency like us, so we are very similar to the EPA or the FDA, or the CDC in that there are things that we are responsible for making safe. Some agencies don't have that, like NASA doesn't regulate anything. The Interior Department and the National Park System, they don't regulate anything. When you look at the history of interesting government social media accounts, the grandfather of it all was the TSA account, who was run by ... TSA Instagram account, that was run by a gentleman by the name of Bob Burns, who has sadly passed away.

I remember reading Bob's captions on the TSA Instagram photos back in 2013, 2014, and at the time it was super innovative for government, because it was super fun and super ... Again, it was for people.

Oh yeah.

It wasn't a government agency being on social media because it was the thing to do. They were really trying to do something different there. I remember distinctly sitting, I was at the Liberty Stein Center in Jersey City, New Jersey at the time, doing social media there. I remember very distinctly sitting there and reading an article about their Instagram, and thinking, "Oh wow, you can do interesting work in government." Funny enough, just a few years later, I'd be at CPSC, walking into a room, pitching a unicorn, talking about fire alarm safety. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun.

There's a lot of other great government social happening now. I do hope, I see it sometimes where people will find our account, and then they'll say like, "Oh well this looks like the IRS Instagram," or "This kind of looks like ..." There's a lot of great local government, social media happening. You could do a whole podcast just on that.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Well that was one thing I wanted to ask, was what other agencies are doing social media in a good way, I guess?

There's interesting stuff happening all the time. You have agencies like NASA, where they are comparable to any of the giant brands you see out there. Their reach and their social media power is just as good as any ... Name any Fortune 500 company and NASA's right up there. Their stuff is very good, obviously. They have a ton of resources. They have a ton of great people who work there. I think the IRS, some of the lesser-known ones, so the IRS has a really fun Instagram account. Another lesser-known one, there's a COVID-19 response committee that was set up to make sure that money being spent through the COVID programs that the government is putting together is being spent wisely and legally. They have a very fun Twitter account, and I'll try to remember the name of that, or I'll send it to you, and maybe you can put it in the newsletter somewhere.

Oh yeah.

The Interior Department's been doing fun stuff for a long time. They do Fat Bear Week, which is like, again, some of the most fun you can have with government social, where they just have people rate very large grizzly bears. There's other great stuff out there. I think no one's really as absurdest as we are, and I think that's the thing that we brought. Again, when we talk about how we've moved things forward, a lot of people say this is like just a total, they call it a vaporwave, or shitposting, or that type of thing. I guess it does feel like that to people sometimes.

Talking about, just to go back to something you were talking about earlier, I'm a big proponent of doing what works, because things do change so quickly, so what I say to people all the time is, "We're doing this strategy now because it works now, but the day it stops working, we will just do something else," because that's how you stay effective in communication. Again, I do think that's the only way to approach it, because things change so quickly.

Yeah, absolutely. I have two final questions for you that I wanted to jam into one super question.

Sure.

That is one, if you could take over any government Twitter account, and implement your own kind of strategy, what would it be, and two, which of the characters that you've created is your favorite, if you have one?

Sure, so I'll start with the second question first. Favorite character is tough, because I love all of them, which is a weird thing to say. I think over time, the Pets United for Human Safety, which includes Potato the Dog and Copernicus Jackson, and I think Handsome Ron, over time those three have really emerged as my go-tos, and I guess my most, our most reliable partners in this communication strategy.

Some of our older characters, Barks McWoofins was a character we used a few years ago, that retired officially to Hawaii, and I'll always have a special place for Barks McWoofin. Quinn the Quarantine Fox, who again was really not meant to be around this long, but is about to have a rebirth, or have to come back in a bigger way, because of just what's going on these days with the Delta Variant, so yeah. I think those three, Copernicus Jackson, Potato the Dog, and Handsome Ron. If I had to pick three that I'd want on a team at all times, it would be them.

Yeah, it's a good choice.

Yeah, and then to your first question, CPSC has played a role in the pandemic in making sure consumers are aware of the issues and the things that could hurt them in their home, and obviously with people spending more time at home, that became a very important thing for us to focus on, and we're still very much focused on it. Again, nothing has really changed for us, as far as the pandemic goes. We're still operating in a pandemic first sort of mentality.

I think if I could pick any other account, it would be a government account and I probably would pick either the HHS account or some of the CDC accounts. I would like to see what this meme strategy could do with pandemic messaging in a more broader sense. I think that would be, that would be an interesting experiment to me. Again, the people over there are doing amazing work, and I know some of them. I've met a bunch of them at this point, and I have so much respect for everything they've done to date, and I think they're doing an incredible job, so again, it's not, that wouldn't be coming from a sense of like, "Well what they're doing hasn't been effective." I think it's been incredibly effective, but again, I would love to see, if we had some more talking animals around here, with the pandemic, would we win the conversation war in a more resounding way? I think that would be something I'd love to try.

“Quinn the Quarantine Fox is very disappointed in you for not getting vaccinated yet.”

Exactly, or hey, here's the wild animals united for human safety to tell you about how the vaccine is safe.

Yeah.

I think that's something that, again, I haven't even seen it at local health departments, but some of that old-fashioned stuff, some of that like, "Hey, here's a friendly animal spokesperson that's going to calmly ..."

Yeah, like Smokey the Bear and stuff.

Yeah, I think there's still a place for that, and it's funny because so many of our characters almost came out of me wanting to poke a little bit of fun at those traditional characters, like Smokey the Bear, who again is still around. The content they're creating is still very good, if you ever engage with it, but I do think people still have a soft spot for that, and they still like it on some level.

I guess it just goes to show you, the more things change, the more they stay the same sometimes. Yeah, so ...

Well yeah, I mean in the case of Smokey the Bear, for instance, you have this ... Smokey the Bear, that stands out. That has burned itself into all of our collective memories, everyone knows Smokey. I wonder if 10, 15 years from now people are going to be like, "Man, remember Handsome Ron?"

Yeah, oh man I could only hope so. It's one of those things, we have this collaboration with the Library of Congress now, where I send them our memes and the memes get archived in the Library of Congress with descriptions that I've written, that get into the strategy behind them.

I do hope, and every creative person hopes that their work has longevity, past their lifetime, and obviously if that were to happen for these characters, that would be incredible. I don't expect that, just to be clear, but I do think when you look, again, Smokey the Bear, that was a campaign created with the Ad Council, one of the best advertising groups in the world, all these years of funding, and especially with climate change affecting things. Smokey the Bear is prime to become much more important in the future than they ever were in the past, which is crazy to think about.

Yeah.

That's what government can do. It's the longevity of your characters. It's the longevity of commitment of an issue where government can really shine. I do hope that we have some of that. I do hope that, at some point, my time at CPSC will come to an end, and I do hope that people, at least appreciate these characters and keep learning from them after I'm no longer here.

Yeah, that's a ... I think that's probably a good way to wrap it up. Is there anything else that you'd like to add to this?

Oh, I guess I would just encourage everyone, if you haven't, to subscribe to get recall emails. You can do it right on our website. It's free. It's very easy. Again, if you're not following us on social media, please consider following us on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. We do have an Instagram account where we don't repost things as much. One of the complaints about our Twitter account is I don't constantly repost things. It's just because I'm one person folks. It's not because ... It's not laziness, it's just the ability of one person to come up with stuff on a daily basis.

I would definitely encourage you to follow us on Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook, and again, just hope everyone ... One thing we talk about all the time is that we do a very serious thing at CPSC, and on social media it's presented in a very fun way. I do hope folks just take a minute to think about their safety in their own lives. These are small things that you can do that could really, really be lifesaving. Having a fire extinguisher in your kitchen, making sure your carbon monoxide batteries are changed regularly. There's a lot of common sense stuff here that, when you're busy or you're stressed, which we all have been over the past year, if you just take an extra second to think about it, it could save your life down the road. I just really encourage everyone to take those things seriously, and revisit our messaging as much as you need.

Yeah, I'm going to be sure to ... I really want to encourage anyone who's listening to this, to go and check out the transcript that I'm going to have in the newsletter itself, because I'm going to be sure to include all sorts of links, all sorts of embedded Tweets in everything, just because this is really one of those things you have to see to understand what on earth we've been talking about today.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Parker, I do want to thank you for your support over the years. You've been, again, even in my darkest moments, I always thought, "Oh, well at least Parker's out there re Tweeting our stuff sometimes.”

Of course, it's always fun. I tried to make a habit of quote tweeting and just being like, "Only good government Twitter account," even though it's not the only good one.

Which I very much appreciate. Yeah, thank you, truly. Truly, thank you. Really, we're just so grateful, so thank you.

Yeah, thanks so much for joining me today, Joe.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Present Age podcast. I’m your host Parker Molloy.

Joining me on today’s show is baseball writer and all-around good dude Keith Law. Keith is the author of two books — Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, The New Ones that are Running it, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball and more recently, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves.

Parker Molloy: All right. Joining me this week is Keith Law. Hey, Keith.

Keith Law: Hey, how are you?

I'm doing all right. So one of the reasons I wanted to, to kind of have you on here was A, my love of baseball. B, we've been talking for what, like three, four years or something now.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. So, and you're just a great person to talk to on Twitter and everything like that. But C, a big part of this podcast and newsletter is, has to do with the odd times that we live in.

And on that front, there were few things as bizarre to me as baseball during the pandemic, which at first it seemed like the 2020 season might be canceled. And then it came back. It was a shortened season, but without fans. And then watching on TV, there were the cardboard cutouts of fans that was kind of weird. And the fake crowd noise that came with it. To me, it was a bit like watching a deleted scene from an Avengers movie where all the actors you have Mark Ruffalo in a mo-cap suit because it's like, he will be the Hulk here when we finish the CGI, but it's not done yet.

Right. “We haven't finished painting in the players yet.”

So that's kind of what it felt like. And it was so odd to me. And I can't even imagine what it was like for you, someone who you cover baseball for a living. So what has it been like writing about and covering baseball in such an odd time?

Yeah. Last year it sucked from a work perspective. It's the first year, since, before I got into the industry. So my first year doing anything baseball professionally full time was 2002, my first year in the Bluejays front office. And so 2020 was the first time since probably, well, before then, that I went a full calendar year without going to a baseball game. I think if you even just count the high school and college stuff I do, I went something like 380 days between going to games, which was, I mean one, just lousy because I like doing it. Right. It's the best part of job is going to the games evaluating players. But also it was just sort of wait, how do I do this? Right. There's so much of my job is so much of it is driven by the act of going to the game and either seeing the players or it's people I talk to when I'm at the games or afterwards, "Hey, I just saw your AA affiliate. This guy looked really good. What's going on with…, Hey, did this guy get a new pitch?"

That's just such a huge part of the rhythm of the job. And then to have basically no minor league, anything, in 2020 and very little college or high school stuff. And I don't really go to major league games much, if at all, because I can watch them on TV and often have better views on TV than I'm going to get at the ballpark. Especially last year where they were like, "Oh, you can come sit in the press box, but you can't go. You can't walk anywhere. We're going to actually physically nail you to your seat."

Oh, fun.

Yeah. So it was just sort of wait, I have to rethink how I do parts of my job. And I would just watch certain players on MLBTV and write pseudo scouting reports like, hey, this is what I saw so far.

It's not great. I don't love it, but this is what we got. At least this year, I did some high school stuff, a couple of college things. I flew once in the spring, once I got my second shot. And then once the minor league started, I could actually go to games. I have been doing that one or two a week, which is less than I would usually do but still at least I'm going out and seeing games. That's been easier. And it's like, "Oh yeah, I remember how to do this. I know what this is." First few were weird. Definitely. But then after a while you sort of get back into the rhythm. It's like, "Oh yeah, I've been doing this for a long time. I think I can do this."

When it comes to the actual Major League Baseball sort of experience, I keep thinking back to... There was that game in Baltimore, during the Freddie Gray protests where the White Sox were playing the Orioles. And it was just so surreal with no sounds. And I kind of wanted that to come back. I was kind of looking forward to this like chill, silent thing, but then they pumped in the fake crowd noise and...

Well, that game was such... Obviously circumstances were terrible, but just from a baseball perspective was so fascinating. It was like, oh, this is what baseball sounds like with nothing else. And it was like, this is kind of cool. I like this. Yeah, you could really hear the crack of the bat. You can hear the pitch hitting the catcher's mitt. To me it captured some of what I like of going to these low-level games whether it's high school or low minors. And I was at a game the other night. Where the heck was I on Tuesday? On my God, so bad. Wherever I went though... Aberdeen, I went to Aberdeen, which usually they draw pretty well. But for whatever reason, this Tuesday night, there was nobody there at all. I could have had a one-on-one conversation with the second baseman, and it would have been we had no problems hearing each other.

And, but there's part of that I absolutely love too, because then I can just hear what's on the field. It actually gets, I don't love all the shenanigans that are there, the music and stuff between. Oh wait, we have a five-second delay. We got to play song. We can't have anybody be bored ever, but whatever, I'm not the audience for them. Right. I'm not the target.

But then it was even more glaring to when they have to pipe in five seconds of Fall Out Boy, because they got to play the latest hits, obviously, that are 20 years old. And then it's no, no, no I was listening to the game. I was really into the sounds of the game. And I love that. That to me is a big part of it. And it's actually very comforting to me when I'm at a game, and it's now the real sound is what's on the field. All the other stuff is very, it's like static where it's very distracting to me, because I try to be very focused on. It's usually I'm focused on a player more than I'm focusing on the game itself, but still it's the same thing. It's the sound. The sound is part of the experience and part of what I love about going to games.

Yeah. Music playing constantly, constantly having different sort of ways to keep the crowd entertained.

Yeah. It's like, they think people are going to leave in the fourth inning if they're not sufficiently entertained. So no, no, no, no, they're here, and many of them have already started drinking, so they're not leaving right now.

Yeah. Well, exactly. And also a lot of the stadiums aren't exactly right in the middle of a city. If you drove out there to go to that game, you are there. But also it just strikes me as so odd that minor league baseball players are famously underpaid and can barely kind of scrape by. And it seems so weird that there's this fun house pushed around them as they're really just trying to get by. I mean, one thing I love about minor league baseball are the hats. I have a bunch of just various, I've got the Rocky Mountain Vibes, which it's a s'more that's on fire, and it's just chilling out with sunglasses, and it's just the best thing ever.

Sure, that's what I do when I'm on fire.

Yeah. No, totally. I mean, that's it. It's perfect. It makes sense. And the reason for so much of that is teams will rename themselves these kinds of goofier things.

Oh yeah, the Jumbo Shrimp. That's one I can't get past.

Jumbo Shrimp. Yeah.

Somebody had me on the radio. I think it was ESPN radio had me on to talk about Cleveland changing their name to the Guardians from an obviously racist team name. And I said, explained why it's a good name. It has a classic feel. It has a local tie-in, et cetera. It's not ridiculous. Right. I at least have this worry that anytime any team's going to have a new name that they're going to pick something that a bunch of people got in a room and they did marketing. And suddenly they're going to, oh yeah, let's... The Jumbo Shrimp is a great name for a minor league baseball team. It would be a horrendous name for a major league team. And that's if you just know baseball, you completely understand. If you don't follow baseball, you'd probably say what is the difference? I don't understand. It's hard to explain. It's just, we have such a dichotomy between what is big league and what is not big league.

Yeah. It would be odd if there was a Major League Team called the Cleveland Trash Pandas.

Trash Pandas. This is the other one I was going to say. Right. I had a choice, right. A friend of mine he's driving cross country because he's moving to Arizona. And he texted me from the Amarillo Sod Poodles stadium. Which another one, I don't even know what that is. Stadium looks nice though. I got to say. I have never been there, but…

See what I've got here. As you can see, I have a bobblehead of the SeaWolves. Nick Castellanos.

Yes. “And there's a drive to left field and that'll make it a four-nothing ballgame.”

Yeah, there it is.

Yes. When I worked for the Blue Jays, the New Haven Ravens I think were sold and the new owners moved them to Manchester, New Hampshire, which they played one year in a temporary field and got a great new stadium. Used to love going up there. And they were the Fisher Cats. What the hell is a Fisher Cat? And turns out it's local. Right. It absolutely makes perfect sense. But it's a weasel. And I would have to say the New Hampshire Weasels probably just wouldn't sell as well. So I mean, I think they made a good choice. That to me also is sort of the difference between it's the same thing. It's the difference between a good name and a bad name. Fisher cat, totally local. Apparently, they're really annoying too, but it's a very distinctly New Hampshire thing. If you're not from there, you don't know what this is. And I, of course, was not. What the hell is a Fisher cat? Oh, it's a screech weasel. But the New Hampshire Screech Weasels just doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Yeah. I mean, that's a... Imagine being paid poverty wages to play for a team and be like, "I played for some weasels." I don't know. The ownership has fun with our name, I guess, at least so yeah.

Yes. Oh yes. Well, I'm actually very glad to see there's been, I feel, an exponential growth in just among Twitters' baseball, baseball Twitter of acknowledgment that the way minor league players are treated is totally unacceptable in a multi multi-billion dollar industry. And I don't know why this year we hit the tipping point, but okay, good. I mean it's five, 10 years too late, but whatever. We're there. We're getting there. It's a bit of an optimist bias I guess, but it is that, this is progress. We are finally making progress. It's too late, but at least we're moving in the right direction.

Yeah. I think a lot of that sort of comes down to, or a lot of the resistance to some of that you see on Twitter where it's like, oh, well they're playing a game. They should be happy with whatever, blah, blah, blah. That sort of stuff is sort of based on this idea where people will think, oh, well, one person on that team may someday make a hundred million dollars. I mean, yes, one person on that team may do that. Most of them won't. Most of them probably, depending on what level you're talking about, probably won't make it to the major leagues at all. And that's the same discussion we keep having about college athletes as well. Where it's well, they got a free education, which sure, I guess. But at the same time, they're making so much money for their schools and for all the people who go pro, there are so many others too, in football, for instance, just get a bunch of head injuries and have to go about their life.

We see this. So baseball's problem in college is to me, it's twofold. It's different that the football and the basketball players, that's men's and women's basketball players now, they're generating so much revenue for their schools. The fact that the money doesn't trickle down to the players is its own, tragedy isn't the word. It's a crime. To me, it is a crime. I think the NCAA is essentially a cartel. And I would love to see an antitrust case around that. In baseball, most of the players, if not all, I mean, there are almost no players with full scholarships in baseball. So they're not getting a free education. They're getting a subsidized education. Okay, sure. But yeah, those players can get hurt, especially college pitchers. I'm sure you've seen me ranting about these high pitch counts. And if a college player blows out his elbow or his shoulder and has to have surgery and obviously a complication... There was a player at George Mason who had Tommy John surgery and then died.

I believe he got some kind of infection or something, something. He had a completely unusual complication from the surgery and ended up dying from it. Obviously, that is the worst of the worst-case scenarios, but still these are real people who are not paid, but can incur an actual injury as life-altering life-ending complications. And they get nothing. And there is just this group of mostly people whose Twitter avatars are them in their sunglasses taken while they're in their cars who will say things like, "Oh, it's just a game. Oh, they should suck it up." And you're not even having a conversation at that point. Right. And we see this on multiple issues. Obviously it goes way beyond sports, but it's people who just they're so intransigent that they can't even hear supporting argument for the other side, like saying, pointing out that. They're not playing a game.

This is work. They're probably at the ballpark nine to 10 hours a day. And then minor leaguers aren't even paid in the off season, but they have to continue to keep their bodies in shape and continue to at least do things to maintain arm strength or muscle tone or work on their swings on their own, just on their own time for no pay. Very little, no financial support from the team. They may get training support. It is a job. It's a real job, and it's a physically taxing job. And just because what you see... Somebody said this to me on Twitter the other day. "Well, they only work like three hours a day." I mean, that's the game. That's the actual first pitch to last pitch. Hell of a lot more than that. That's like saying an actor who made a movie, "Well, she only worked for two hours." Because the movie was two hours long. So obviously that's all it was. And she should make about 30 bucks, right? $15 an hour, two hours. There you go, that's fair.

Yeah. It's interesting to me because it takes this argument that we see all kind of all over the place where so many people are more concerned about someone getting what they deem is more than they should, for any one thing. It doesn't matter who it affects or what it affects. We hear this when it comes up in discussions about should student loan debt be forgiven. Well, yeah, but what about this one? If someone paid it down and then they're not getting something that's someone else is, or a job that pays really well or something along those lines. And really, I think it's just a great example of the way that as society, we kind of hold each other back in the sense that we're fighting the fight on behalf of billionaires to not pay people. And just the other day, Scarlett Johansson sued Disney over how they released Black Widow, because she took a deal that was really heavy on the box office numbers.

And Disney cut her out of the Disney plus stuff that they did when they released it. And so many people are rushing to defend Disney in this. Yeah, she's one of the highest-paid actresses on the planet, but she's still the little guy in this situation. If Disney can screw her over, they could screw anyone over. And that's kind of the thing that gets lost so much because so much of us would kill to be in Scarlet Johansson's place, fame and finances and all of that. But we end up defending billionaires and millionaires and all of that.

And we defend Corporations. That's the thing I can't understand. And trust me, I'm no socialist here. There is a weird, I can't even call it a capitalist. It's like this weird corporatist status that the people who jump into defend Disney. And I worked for Disney for a long time. Actually, as companies go to work for they're pretty good, actually. Benefits were always very good. And they were progressive on at least many issues. But this idea that first of all, Disney, they're not going to love you back. Right. That's definitely true. I don't know what the goal is of defending a multi-billion dollar conglomerate like that. But I feel like people see an individual who's already rich, Scarlett Johansson in this case already very rich. And they say, well, it's not fair that she gets money.

And they can't do the same thing with the company on the other side, the company just not being a person. Although I think Supreme Court said companies are people. So maybe I should rethink this, but that they can't understand that. So they immediately see person asking for "too much" money. I'm air quoting the too much here. And they get mad, "That's not fair." Which I have three kids, and they're all at different ages. And yet, "That's not fair," is just like the common vernacular of the household, right? Nothing is, they're so locked in on fairness. And there is a part of me that just wants to scream. "Hey, the world is not fair. We're just preparing you for this." And that's what I see when I see these people saying it's not fair that Scarlett Johansson wants more money.

No, she actually wants what she was contractually entitled to get. And Disney doing an end run around the contract is not legal and something we should all oppose. Right? If companies can just run rough shot over contracts they have signed, negotiated and signed in good faith, then we're all screwed. We absolutely should be reading for Scarlett Johansson. It's not even so much about, I don't care what dollar figure she gets.

I want the contract to be upheld because hey, I did sign contracts with Disney, as it turns out. And they upheld their terms of the contracts, and so did I. And we should absolutely want that to be in place. And that's why you should be supporting Scarlett Johansson in this particular lawsuit, but people don't see that. They just see, and probably worse because she's a woman, obviously a woman asking for more money. And that becomes a, that's not fair. I don't like that. And that's the end of it. And you can't argue against, you can't have a conversation. You just laid out the argument of why Disney is acting, probably acting in bad faith here. You can't get to that point because the sunglasses, Twitter, avatar crowd is they can't get past fair.

Yeah. They ended up running interference for these companies to avoid having to do that.

Yeah, they're like an unpaid social media SWAT Team.

Yeah. To me, it's even weirder when you see especially in the Twitter mentions of Elon Musk. His fan base, the dudes who love him, who would jump in front of a bullet for him, they are something else. For the life of me, I cannot figure out what the end game is here, because there are people who will be like, "Oh, I love Tesla. I got laid off, but I love Tesla still." And all of this, blah, blah, blah. It's like, "They laid you off, man. You don't have to be happy with them."

You get to be mad actually.

You can be kind of irritated. That's fine. But they'll do that. And they'll be like, "How dare you speak ill of Elon just because he wanted to put people back in the factories during the middle of a COVID surge." It's like, well, you're there because you just explained why." Yeah. I don't know if they think that someday, like Elon Musk is just going to be like, thanks for defending me, here's a million dollars. Because he could.

Yes he could and not miss it.

Yeah. I mean, if any billionaires want to just Venmo me a million dollars, I'm cool with it, but I'm not...

Elon would pay in dogecoin coin or something.

Yeah, “If you hang onto this, just wait 40 years,” yeah.

Twitter is toxic to begin with. I think you and I have even talked about this. Anyone who snitch tags, I just block it at this point, because if you tag an Elon Musk, for example, and it's not even specifically about him. You tag someone like that and his followers catch onto it. Forget it. You have to log off for a few days. The site becomes totally unusable at that.

Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. And that's kind of the sort of, I was trying to explain why people with larger followings have every responsibility to not be jerks on the internet. Because someone will say, "Well, why is it okay for this small account to be mean? But if Donald Trump picks a fight with someone." And it would be like, well, when Donald Trump would pick a fight with someone on Twitter, he was sending tens of millions of people to go and flood that person with all sorts of horrible stuff that could bleed over into their everyday lives.

And it's a responsibility. It's a look at how to respond to things proportionally based on your own position, the position of the other people that you're criticizing. And I tried to explain it once as it's like if you're at a baseball game, for instance, and you're standing there and suddenly a beer spills on your head. And you turn around, ready to fight the person who poured a beer on your head, and you see that it was a baby that knocked it out of their mom's hand or something. Are you going to punch the baby?

I mean, some of these people might.

They might. And that's where I maybe need to recalibrate that little analogy for a bit. But it's the idea stands up, I think, where don't punch the baby. That's my house.

This is where we've sunk as a society that we have to remind people not to punch the baby.

See, I'll do that, and someone will be like, well, because you told me not to punch the baby, I am going to punch the baby's so much harder.

Oh, yeah. I got that for pointing out that Anthony Rizzo is essentially, he's a vaccine refuser, called him an anti-vaxxer. To me, that is a distinction without a difference at this point. If you have to come out and publicly say, you're not getting the vaccine, you're an anti-vaxxer at this point. And somebody said it's because of people like you, that the rest of us will be defiant about not getting the vaccine. First of all, you're going to get COVID to own, who me? Okay, sure. But if that was all it took, I have many more questions.

We're doomed.

We are doomed. We are definitely doomed.

Well, and that was another thing I wanted to quickly ask you about with athletes. What they say matters and what they say can influence people, because people look up to athletes. I look up some athletes and if they say something I'll go, oh. If Sean Doolittle says something, I'll be like...

I was just going to say, he's our guy.

Sean is my favorite guy on the planet. And I was at the Cubs game. He did not pitch again. Never seen him pitch in person. I've been to games where he's been on one of the teams several times, which is just so weird. But, yeah, if Sean says something, if he says, check out this band or something or takes a political position or something on something, I'll think about that and I'll consider it. And I'm sure that there are people who look up to Anthony Rizzo or in the NFL, what's his name? The guy on the Buffalo Bills, the receiver...

Cole Beasley?

Beasley. Beasley, that's it.

Who won't stop talking and can't wear his mask properly.

Yeah. And then the Bills promoted that tweet that they put up.

I saw that.

It's just why? But so my question to you is what responsibility do you think that athletes have in these sorts of situations? Because I think if the messaging is the issue with getting people vaccinated, for instance, what moral or ethical responsibility, if any, do you think that athletes have to at very least not spread harmful information?

Right. To me, what they say and how they behave is separate from whether they get vaccinated themselves. And I hate even talking about it as a choice because I think there is a huge, personal and civic responsibility to get vaccinated that has been there the whole time. That's been there since April. I think it's even greater now. And now we are seeing, Kay Ivey and Asa Hutchinson, Brian Kemp, Republican governors of states that are now getting pounded by the Delta variant are all coming out and saying in various ways, get vaccinated. I thought, Kay Ivey, look, I'm not going to agree with Kay Ivey on basically anything. But I liked what she said, we got to blame the unvaccinated people here. Good for, yes. Good. You should've said this six months ago, but good.

Yeah. Better late than never.

Yes. Again, I believe in any progress is good even if it's late. I will take progress over because the alternative is regression. But I think that athletes or anyone with a platform has a responsibility to you would hope to say the right thing, but say the right thing, or just say nothing, just don't, but they're spreading misinformation. They are repeating anti-vax tropes. We're waiting for more data. That's my favorite one. You don't know how much data there is. You have no f****n idea how much data there is clearly, if you start saying stuff like that. You are just repeating something you saw on Facebook or a parlor or whatever. And so some of that could come down to the teams too. I think it would... Anthony Rizzo talked about he made a comment like that back in April. And he was saying his immune system was the strongest it's ever been as another implication of sort of, I don't need this vaccine. This great strong immune system.

Which struck me as odd, given that he's a cancer survivor.

He's a cancer survivor, 13 years ago. Yes.

He knows how this stuff goes.

You would think right? But I will also put a little bit on the Cubs in this. And maybe all teams were just unprepared for this, or didn't think about what could happen when you stick a bunch of microphones in front of a bunch of players and ask them what is kind of a science question. You can say, "Hey, you're going to get asked about this. We can't make you get vaccinated. We'd really like you to get vaccinated, but we can't make you. Here's how we would like you to answer questions about vaccinations if you're asked, especially if you are a vaccine refuser." There are way better ways to approach that.

Yeah, well absolutely.

And I just come down to, if you have a big platform, you have a responsibility. And that includes the responsibility to say less. That is something I've tried to practice myself in the last couple of years is to say less, to make sure I'm not inadvertently sending a swarm of my followers at somebody because I have enough followers. I don't have a huge following, but I have enough of a following that it could happen. Right. And also to not spread misinformation. I wouldn't do it deliberately. I think I try to be a critical thinker, but I'm subject to, I can make mistakes too. And so sometimes the best response is just saying less. And I don't want to misuse the platform. I think it's a privilege to have that many people following me and obviously interested in some things I have to say. And that means being judicious in what I do on the platform. And I would say the same thing to players. This is not actually about whether you're getting vaccinated. It's about what you say in public because it will affect how people think.

Yeah, exactly. And that's a great point. That's pretty much all I've got. I just wanted to pick your brain for a little bit before letting you get back to a trade deadline madness.

I don't think anybody's been traded since we started talking. So that's good. I couldn't get to sleep last night because every time I was like, "Oh, I finished up." Okay. "Wait, the Dodgers did what?" Yeah.

“They're getting who?”

Yeah, thank God I knew the prospects because there's always the chance in one of these deals where it's like, oh God, I got to find a scout who saw so-and-so because it's a player who... Players get traded now where they've got almost no pro experience. Guys are getting traded out of the Gulf coast league or whatever, I call it the Florida man league. I think they're calling it the Florida Complex League, which I understand it's at the complexes, but it makes it sound like the league itself is actually complex. And it's like, no, it's really not. It's pretty simple, actually. But the worst part of the trade deadline. I mean, my job is to know as many players that I can, but I can't know them all. And it's like, someone's going to get traded at 3:58 today, two minutes before the deadline and be like, "I don't know who that is." And then it's the mad dash to the phone. Right? Who can I text? Who can tell me they saw so-and-so play for the ACL Padres?

Yeah, you've got accountant's tax day and you on baseball trade deadline day.

Yes. This is my tax day. That's pretty good. My brother-in-law's an accountant so this analogy works.

You're like, "I know how you feel." But thanks so much for joining me again, Keith. Is there anything you want to plug?

Can I plug my book? Can I even mention my book?

Yes, of course. I already mentioned it in the intro but do it again.

Yes. So my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, came out in paperback this April from Harper Collins. You can buy it anywhere you buy books. And I would say, please find an independent bookstore near you. They are probably partially reopened at this point, but they absolutely need our business. So if you do buy it from the big company that shall not be named, I won't complain, but I try to do all my book buying through indie bookstores because they need us. And we are a better society if we have more bookstores. I strongly believe that.

That is a great policy. And what I'll do is I will be linking to some indie bookstores to buy that from.

Awesome.

I will make it as easy as possible for people to get that.

It's a full-service podcast.

Yeah, exactly. But yeah. Thanks a lot, Keith.

My pleasure.