Out of the Box with Jonathan Russo

Jonathan is joined by Zayd Ayers Dohrn to discuss his new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground, which details his early childhood spent with parents Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, radical activists and leaders in the Weather Underground.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground and raised in New York City. He is the author of the acclaimed national bestselling memoir Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young; creator of the Crooked Media podcast Mother Country Radicals, and writer (with Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Tom Morello) of the punk rock protest musical Revolution(s). He is also currently the Daniel Hale Williams Professor and Director of the MFA in Writing for Screen + Stage at Northwestern University.

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On today’s podcast, Jonathan is joined by Eric Schwartzman, SaaS founder, author, strategic advisor and pioneer in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), to discuss how AI is transforming search, reputation, and online visibility. They explore bot farms, AI fears, narrative control, and what organizations need to do to become the sources AI platforms trust and cite. Learn more about Eric's work at https://americaninsightops.com.

Transcript of episode:

our outrage stops being about real human suffering and starts being about what the bot form amplified.

 My guest today has spent his career on one question, how information gets interpreted,

 amplified and believed. That's because algorithms now sit in the middle of everything we read.

 He found that IPR Software, the first online newsroom and earned media platform and sold it

 in 2025 after nearly two decades. He's a journalist covering technology, science,

 markets and climate for outlets like Fast Company and TechCrunch. He's the author of two best-selling

 books on how authority gets built and contested in digital media. His work sits upstream of

 visibility. He helps boards and founders at the moment search engines, recommendation systems and

 AI start deciding what gets seen and what gets remembered and what gets believed.

 Eric, let me just start off by telling you something that really struck me. I was watching

 Wizard of the Kremlin a couple of months ago and there was one scene in the Wizard of the Kremlin

 where he says, explains the goal of modern cyber warfare is not to convince the enemy

 of a specific truth, but to cause chaos, doubt and division and thus paralysis.

 Wow. So it's no longer about trying to convince somebody of a fact. It's now just to demoralize

 them and the way to do that at scale is with chatbots. You're the expert. Let's delve into

 this. Explain to us what that means when he says the goal is paralysis. Well, I guess

 it's kind of a shell game. You've got politicians, you've got CEOs, they're spinning

 these apocalyptic narratives. Online influencers chime in and the algorithm decides to spread

 outrageous versions of those stories and the result of that is public sentiment hardens

 and really I think violence gains legitimacy. It becomes okay to take matters into your own

 hands. It used to be a manual process. When Facebook and social media first arose,

 we would see notes and shares from people who were our friends and that changed because

 what we started to see instead is we started to see the most outrageous posts from strangers

 and instead of showing us what our friends are saying and what our friends are doing,

 it switched to the most emotionally engaging content as a way of extending session time.

 So before that, Al-Qaeda was still recruiting online. They were still looking for isolated

 disillusioned young men one by one, but then this opaque algorithm comes in and replaces

 man-to-man proselytizing with engaging by enraging and that's the strategy now,

 enrage to engage. How can we get people angry? That's a business now and you look at guys like

 Tucker Carlson. I mean, that's his business model. His business model is how do I get the

 most viewers by pissing people off? The FBI actually calls this nihilistic violent extremism

 and it's basically violence or rage driven less by ideology than by alienation,

 performative rage, and the quest for social status.

 Wasn't there an end point to this? When you received all these outrageous bits of information

 not from your friends anymore, but from strangers with performative, as you said,

 performative outrage, why didn't people say, gee, this is like shit or this is horrible or

 I don't want to be subjected to this endless commercials. When you're bombarded with 50

 commercials or something in a break, you turn it off. You don't sit there like a fool

 and watch 50 commercials. You walk out of the room.

 They're engineered to be addictive.

Full transcript available at https://shows.acast.com/ootb.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.