The Numlock Podcast

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Chris Dalla Riva, author of the new book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves.

Chris is a fixture here at Numlock, we’re big fans of his newsletter Can't Get Much Higher and have been eagerly waiting for this book, which tracks the history of music by coasting along the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

The book can be found at Amazon and wherever books are sold, grab a copy!

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Chris Dalla Riva, it is great to have you back on. Especially great this week, because you are finally out with a book that I know you’ve been working on for a very long time, Uncharted Territory. Thanks for coming back on.

Yeah, thrilled to be back, but also thrilled to have the book come out. The book publishing world is one of the only worlds left in the world that moves slow enough where you’re waiting for so long for something to happen.

You have guest-written for Numlock before; you have been a staple of the Sunday editions in the past. You are definitely familiar to the audience at this point because you are doing some of the best music data journalism out there. You’ve been working on this thing for, I feel like, as long as I’ve known you, and it is just great to have it come out finally, man.

Yeah, actually, I met you because I was working on this project. I was trying to track down some data that you’d used at FiveThirtyEight, and you responded to my email with your phone number. You were like, “This is easier to explain over the phone.”

Yeah, I remember I had scraped the radio for months at FiveThirtyEight just to see where it went, and you hit me up with that. I think that you focused some of your energies on the newsletter, and that’s been so fun to follow, but this is truly what you’ve been working at. It is great to get you on finally to talk all about it.

What would you describe this book as? How would you describe it, either to folks who might be familiar with your newsletter or unfamiliar with your newsletter, about what you’re setting out to do with this particular project?

The subtitle, I think, is helpful. It’s What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. My typical pitch is that it’s a data-driven history of popular music that I wrote as I spent years listening to every number one hit song in history. You get a balance of music history, data analysis, just random music chart shenanigans. I wrote it over such a very long period of time that you get a little bit of how my life was intersecting with this book over the years as I tried to get it published.

I love the angle on the No.1s being a place to go with, because it gives you a pulse on what’s popular at the time and not necessarily what’s the most influential at the time. You can see there’s a lot of stuff that hit number one at one point or another that have no musical legacy whatsoever, but nevertheless are still interesting. It’s dipping your toe in the stream, right? You can see that a lot of things that we assume about how the music industry works weren’t always the case.

You wrote a little bit about the early transition from big bands to singers as the front-facing people in their operation. That was informed in no small part by what was performing on the charts, but also, I think, labor action, right?

An under-discussed part of music history in the last 100 years is that when thinking of any band now or any musical artist, you almost certainly think of the front person being the singer. But if you go look back at big bands of the 1930s and 1940s, anyone whose name was attached to the band was often not a singer. Some that come to mind are Glenn Miller, the Glenn Miller band. Glenn Miller was a trombone player. Artie Shaw was a clarinet player. If none of these names are familiar to you, that’s okay. But you can ask your grandparents.

Why does this transition happen: suddenly, the lead singer is always getting top billing in a band? There are a bunch of things that contributed to this. One thing I talk about pretty extensively is just the advent of better microphones. If a voice cannot be heard over the roar of an orchestra or a big band, you need a choir of people to sing. It makes the singer less identifiable. As we get better amplification, better microphones, you can get a wider range of vocal styles. Those vocalists can now compete with the sound of a ton of instruments.

At the same time, something you mentioned that I think is a fun bit of history is how music used to be much better organized. They had better labor organization, the same way that Hollywood has much better labor organization than music these days. There still exists a group called the American Federation of Musicians. For two years, they had a strike for a work stoppage, when no new music was being recorded. This was during World War II. You weren’t allowed to strike during World War II.

They were frowned upon very much, it seems, yes.

Yes, even if you were a musician. People were like, “Come on, why are the musicians striking?” There’s a lot of interesting history there. One of the weird loopholes was that singers could not join the American Federation of Musicians. Because of that, some labels would get around the strike by just recording acapella songs or songs with instruments that were not eligible to be membership because they weren’t “serious” enough, like the harmonica. There were weird harmonica songs that were popular at this time. By the time the strike ended, by the time World War II ended, suddenly, singers had a much more prominent role because they were the only ones allowed to perform.

There is tons of weird stuff about this strike. Like, labels backlogged tons of recordings because they knew the strike was coming. “White Christmas,” maybe the best-selling record of all time, was one of those backlogged recordings — recorded in July of 1942 and put out however many months later.

That’s fun. That’s basically why Tom Cruise is in a union but Bad Bunny isn’t?

I guess so. Music and labor have a history that I’m not an expert on. For some reason, musicians have had a much more difficult time organizing. It seemed to be a little bit easier back when there were these big bands that needed to be rolled out to perform in movie theaters or local clubs. You needed a tuba player and a trombone player and a sax player. I guess it was easier for those musicians to organize. Whereas now, things are so scattered and productions can be super small, and you could record something in your bedroom. They never got that level of organization. I think it’s actually hurt artists to some degree because they don’t have the protections that the film industry does.

Because you’re able to just coast along at the top of the charts throughout basically the century, you’re able to get lots of different interweaving stories of labor and also legal disputes/legal outcomes, as well as this technological evolution. What are some of the ways that technology has informed how the music that we listen to changes or evolves over time? Or even some of the litigation that we have seen over the course of the century of musical creation. It just seems like it’s a really fun way to track some of these bigger trends that we don’t even know are really trends.

Yeah, totally. I think one of the key themes of the book is that musical evolution is often downstream from technological innovation, which has a nice little ring to it. But in general, there’s this idea that creativity is being struck by the muse, and you create something. Whereas in reality, there are usually physical constraints or technological constraints that shape the art that we make. One of the most basic examples is the length of songs. From the ’40s up till the early, mid-60s, the pop song sits around 2.5 to three minutes. The reason for this is that vinyl singles could literally not hold more sound without degrading, which is completely backwards from the idea that there was an artist who chose to write a 2.5-minute song.

I was like, “Well, you had to work within the constraint.” Then technology gets better, singles start to get longer. During the disco era, they actually made bigger discs to put out these long dance mixes. The single sat around like 3.5 to 4.5 minutes for decades until about 10 years ago, when it started to shorten again. People typically point to music streaming for this reason, because artists are paid if a song is listened to for more than 30 seconds, so it’s really just a volume game. If you have a 14 minute song that someone listens to one time, they get paid once. But if I listen to a two-minute song seven times (which is again, the same amount of time spent listening), I will be paid out seven times. There is this financial incentive to shorten songs.

I don’t think artists are sitting in the studio thinking about this constantly. But what I see, what I saw again and again, is that artists were rational beings to some degree and would work within the constraints that they were given. They would usually push against those constraints. That’s where a lot of great art comes out of.

Even new mediums are offering new opportunities. You wrote a little bit about MTV and how that really changed a lot of what was able to be successful at the time. You had new types of acts that were able to really start competing there, and other acts that just weren’t. Do you wanna speak a little bit about like what video did?

Yeah, video certainly changed the game. There were artists who had visual presences earlier. The Beatles had a very visual presence. I think part of their success is tied to the fact that television was becoming a thing, and mass media was really becoming a thing. However, we associate musicians with visuals so much these days. That really emerged in the 1980s, where you needed your visual concepts to be as strong, if not stronger than, your musical concepts. I think because of that, you start seeing some artists break through who I don’t think are considered great musicians.

I always sadly point to the song, “Hey Mickey” by Tony Basil. If it’s your favorite song, sorry. I don’t think it’s a masterful musical creation, but it had this fun music video where she’s dressed up as a cheerleader. A lot of that song’s success was just the fact that MTV was willing to put that in heavy rotation because it was a fun video to watch. We live in the shadow of that era where visuals matter just as much as anything else.

When you think about the most popular artists, outside of maybe a handful, you think of their visual concepts. You think of what Beyoncé looks like, what her videos are like, same with Taylor Swift, as much as you think about their music. That really reshaped our relationship with popular music. We expect to know what artists look like. It’s odd to think about that; it really wasn’t a thing decades before. You could be a fan of an artist and not really know what they look like. How would you know? Maybe you saw them in a magazine. Maybe you caught them on one television show. The idea that we have access to what everyone looks like is a pretty new phenomenon.

That’s fun. It’s just so interesting to see how a simple change, whether it’s today an algorithm or then a medium of distribution, can just have material impacts on the popularity of British synth music in America.

Yeah, that’s the perfect example. There’s a great book called I Want My MTV, and it’s an oral history of MTV. They talked to one of the founders. Early MTV would play, as you’re saying, all these British new wave acts. Think A Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran or even someone like U2. They asked the founder, “Why were you playing so many British artists on early MTV?” He was like, “For some reason, British artists happened to make music videos. And there were about 200 music videos in existence. We had to fill 24 hours of programming.” A Flock of Seagulls was gonna get played a bunch of times just because they happened to make music videos.

It is a weird thing. Why would anyone make a music video if there was nowhere to really play them? I don’t know why specifically the British had more videos, but there were occasional times where television shows might show a video.

They do love that over there, like Top of the Pops. I can see why.

Music and television have always been connected. You even think Saturday Night Live still has musical acts. Back then, say your label didn’t wanna send you out to Britain to go on Top of the Pops. Maybe they would send a video of you instead. There were videos that would float around on these variety shows, and some early videos were just concert footage. It was like, it was a chicken or the egg thing. Once some people had success on MTV, everyone started producing videos. MTV somehow pulled off the miracle of convincing labels that they needed to make videos and that they needed to front the cost for that. Then they had to give MTV the video for free. I don’t know how MTV managed to do that.

Well, all of Gen X can’t be wrong. If you do wanna get it out there, you do have to get it out there. One really fun recurring thing in the book — which again, like I really enjoyed. I think it’s a phenomenal work. I think it’s a great history. I’m telling stories that I learned in your book to everybody. It is a really fun read in that regard, I wanna say.

I do love how you occasionally clock a genre that really only exists briefly. There’s one that always goes around for like the strangest things to hit number one, like the Ballad of the Green Berets. I think like there’s a Star Wars disco track that I definitely have on vinyl at home about that. You wrote a lot about like teen tragedy songs. What are some of the fascinating like brief trends that only made a small splash and that all of us have forgotten ever existed, but nevertheless achieve some measure of immortality?

Yeah, the teen tragedy song is a good one. That actually inspired the writing of this whole book because I got 50 No. 1s, and I was like, “Why are there so many number ones about teenagers dying? That’s a little weird.” And then I did a little digging and tried to piece together why that was. The teenage tragedy song, late ’50s, early ’60s, there are all of these songs about two teenagers in love, usually high schoolers. One tragically dies often in a car crash, and the other is very sad and maybe says that they’ll reunite again one day in the afterlife. Some of the big ones are “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las and “Teen Angel” by Mark Dinning.

It’s a very weird blip in popular music history. I won’t say it has cast a long shadow, but there are some occasional people who pull from that tradition. The craziest teen tragedy song ever was “Bat Outta Hell” by Meatloaf, in which Jim Steinman tried to write a nine-minute motorcycle crash song. I think that’s a really interesting one.

Disco: bizarre in the amount of people that made disco songs. I really came to like disco and the best disco music, I’m like, “These are the greatest sounds that have ever been recorded.” But it got so big and so popular that everyone felt the need to record disco songs.

Not everything is “I Feel Love,” right?

No, most things are not. It strikes me that this happened with disco, but has not happened with other genres. Frank Sinatra recorded disco songs. Basically, every television theme song got a disco remix. I Love Lucy had a disco remix. The Rocky theme song had a disco remix.

What? I’m sorry, Frank Sinatra did a disco song? Is it good?

It’s not good. It’s “Night and Day” over a disco beat. And it’s not clear to me if they just remixed it or if he actually recut the vocal because I just cannot imagine him doing that. In the mid-60s, there was a nun who topped the charts, The Singing Nun with a song called “Dominique.” Of course, during the disco era, it was remixed as a disco song. There are examples of this where people went sort of disco. The Rolling Stones record “Miss You” and it has the disco beat, or Pink Floyd does “Another Brick in the Wall” or Queen does “Another One Bites the Dust.”

Everyone was gonna give it a try. There was so much money being made in the disco world at the time. You can always find some artists you would never think would do a disco song probably tried. They probably gave it their best.

That’s great. It’s just fun because the things that hit number one for a week don’t necessarily have to be good. They just have to be popular for like a week. Even the construction of the Top 40 chart, which you get into in the book, isn’t exactly science. A lot of times, it’s a little bit of intuition. It’s a lot of what’s selling and what’s selling where specifically. It is a little bit woo woo, right?

Yeah, definitely. The goal of this chart is “What’s the most popular song in America in a given week?” Back in the day, that meant what were people buying? What were people listening to on the radio? What were people spinning in jukeboxes? Today, most music is done on streaming. It’s consumption-based, rather than sales-based. So the chart’s the same in name only, but it’s really measuring very different things. The equivalent would be if we knew after you purchased your copy of “I Feel Love,” how many times did you actually play it at home? You could have purchased it, went home and never played it again. Something like that would not register on the charts these days.

I respect the people at Billboard because they have an impossible task. It’s like “We’re gonna take all the information and we’re going to boil it down into choosing or measuring what the most popular song is.” It’s an impossible task to some degree.

I have watched the evolution of the chart, and I go back and forth on whether they have given up on actually trying to rank stuff or if they are just ranking things in a different way. I think that the apples-to-apples between the era stuff is just so hard to do.

One thing I really enjoyed about your book, in particular, is that it’s not a story of why these songs are the best. It’s a story of why these songs were popular at the time, just dipping the toe into the river of human sound. One thing that I’ll ask as you wrap: as you were going through these eras, who did you hear a lot more of than you thought? Who did you hear a lot less than you expected?

I joked with some people that if you just looked at the top of the charts, the greatest rock band of the 1970s is either Grand Funk Railroad or Three Dog Night because they both had three number one hits, and many other bands in the classic rock canon have none. Led Zeppelin does not really exist on the pop chart, the singles chart. Led Zeppelin really only put out albums. The Eagles were also big during the ’70s on the music charts. But Three Dog Night, they’re the legends.

There are tons of people that I didn’t realize how much I would see of them. Someone like Lionel Richie and Phil Collins, of course, they’re tremendously popular, but they were so popular. Phil Collins was popular at the height of the bald pop star era, which I think is a thing of the past. You had multiple bald men who were regularly topping the charts in the mid-80s. You see a ton of Phil Collins, more than I was expecting, even though I know he’s very popular.

Who don’t you see a ton of? Sometimes you don’t see people until a bit later in their careers. This is actually an interesting phenomenon. Artists do not score a number one hit during their most critically acclaimed period, and then a decade later, they do. For example, Cheap Trick. They have a number one hit, but it’s at the end of the ’80s song called “The Flame.” Whereas if you hear Cheap Trick on the radio, it’s probably their live album from the 1970s. This is a phenomenon you see again and again. Some old timer will get their number one much later in their career. Tina Turner gets her number one when she’s probably in her 40s. It’s always interesting to see that.

There are also some artists where I feel like there’s a divergence between what their most popular songs are these days and what was topping the charts. Elton John is a good example there. “Benny and the Jets” was a number one hit, still a tremendously popular song. But he’s got a lot of weird No. 1s that I don’t think have as much street cred these days. He has a song called “Island Girl.” Did not age like fine wine. I don’t even think he plays it live anymore because it’s considered somewhat racially insensitive. But it was a No. 1 hit at the time. “Philadelphia Freedom” is another one by Elton John. I feel like when people think of the Elton John catalog, it’s probably not the first song that comes to mind. But it was a No. 1 hit, huge smash. His cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was a No. 1. Elton John has been very popular throughout the decades, but I feel like the reasons he’s been popular have changed.

People have just gravitated towards different songs as time has gone on. You get distortions at the top of the charts. But I think, as you mentioned, it provides a good sample of what was actually popular. You have the good, the bad, and the ugly. Whereas if you look at some other sources, people are just gonna be like, “Oh, listen to these records. These are the best records.” In reality, the bad records are important, too.

Yeah, bad records are great. They’re at least interesting. I imagine also some of this process must have been missing out on a lot of interesting music because one song was just dominating the charts. Were there any songs in particular that come to mind that wooled the roost for potentially a little bit too long?

Yeah, the quintessential example is the “Macarena” in the ‘90s.

Oh, no!

I think it was No. 1 for 13 weeks.

Christ!

There’s a great clip of people at the Democratic National Convention and ’96 dancing the “Macarena.” It’s so bad. Yeah, so a very popular song. There are tons of stuff that gets stuck behind it. There’s a great No.1 hit in the ’90s called “I Love You Always Forever.” It’s a very nice song by Donna Lewis. It’s stuck at No. 2 because it just happened to be popular during the “Macarena’s” very long run. Y

Your life’s work, your greatest accomplishment, being stymied by the “Macarena” feels like a level of creative hell that I have never envisioned before.

Yeah, there are other artists who got unlucky. Bruce Springsteen never performed a No. 1 hit. He wrote a No.1 hit for another artist. His closest was “Dancing in the Dark” got to No. 2, but that was also when Prince released “When Doves Cry,” so it’s a tough, tough week. Bob Dylan, similar thing. He wrote a No. 1 hit, but he only ever got to No. 2. I think he got to No. 2 twice. Once, he got stuck behind “Help” by the Beatles, and another time he got stuck behind “Monday Monday” by the Mamas and the Papas.

This is another thing when I talk about the charts. There could be many fewer units sold in a given week, or there could be many more units sold. There’s a lot of luck involved if you’re gonna go all the way to No. 1. You could be Bruce Springsteen: you release the biggest record of your life, and Prince also releases the biggest record of his life at the exact same time.

Incredible. So again, I have read the book. I really, really like it. People are doubtlessly familiar with the newsletter at this point, but I am also a big fan and booster of that. But I guess I’ll just throw it to you. Where can folks find the book, and where can folks find you?

Yeah, you can find me, Chris Dalla Riva, basically on every social media platform under cdallarivamusic. I’m most active on TikTok and Instagram. The book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves, should be available from every major retailer online. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Booklist, all that good stuff. Not available physically in stores, so definitely order it online.

Like I said, I spent years listening to every No. 1 hit in history, built a giant data set about all those songs and used that to write a data-driven history of popular music from 1958 to basically 2025. So go pick up a copy, buy one for your mother for Christmas. Or your father, I don’t discriminate. Yeah, check it out. I’m hoping people enjoy it, and I’m really excited to finally get it out in the world. It’s been a long, circuitous journey to get it published.

It’s a really fun read, and I wish it nothing but the best. And yeah, congrats, thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Edited by Crystal Wang

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at [email protected].

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Alyssa Rosenberg, Sunny Bunch and Peter Suderman, the three panelists of the outstanding film podcast Across the Movie Aisle. I really enjoy the show and have been a longtime fan of their individual work.

I think that they’re a group with genuinely diverse opinions but who have a lot of love for cinema and as a result have some of the most deeply interesting conversations about the art form of any show I listen to.

The show just split off from The Bulwark’s network and is striking it out independently. Do check them out!

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Hey, Across the Movie Aisle. Thank you so much for coming on Numlock. I really appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Thank you for having us.

Yes, this is the first three-on-one conversation that I’ve ever done here, so we’re gonna have to juggle a bit. Either way, I am just such a fan of the show. I really, really enjoyed it, subscribed to the Bulwark for it when I heard that you guys were going independent. I was really excited to see what was motivating that, what opportunities you were seeing out there. It’s just such a really fun program, and I think it’s so unique in the space.

Before we get into talking about the movies, do you wanna talk a little bit about where this show came from, where it started, then what you would say your perspective on the film industry is?

Sonny: Sure.

Alyssa: Who wants to tell the story?

Sonny: The origin of the show was back in 2019. I started working for an independent film studio that’s based in Dallas, where I live now. I moved here for the job. The pitch was, “it’s like Fangoria,” but for action movies and thrillers and heist movies, that sort of thing. And one of the things I wanted to do when we came over was a little podcast network. We were gonna have some shows, some storytelling things, et cetera. And one of the things I had wanted to do for a while (and hadn’t really had an outlet for) was a show I had envisioned as like Crossfire or McLaughlin Group or something like that, but by way of movies.

So Across the Movie Aisle — I’ve always shorthanded it as Siskel and Ebert meets Left Right Center. And the idea here is that I am a conservative. I don’t know how other people would describe me, but I still think of myself as a center-right person. Alyssa is the center-left person.

Peter: Would you even say that you are a neoconservative?

Sonny: Well, I’m a neoconservative with libertarian tendencies, which is a funny thing.

Peter: “You work at the Weekly Standard,” is a good way to think about your politics? And they basically haven’t changed since you worked at The Weekly Standard. Is that fair? That’s the long and the short of it.

Sonny: Then Peter is whatever Peter is. I’ll let him define himself. But the idea here was you have three people with differing political views talking about movies and other stories about movies. The show has two segments. The first is called Controversies and Nontroversies. The second is a review. And the Controversies and Nontroversies segment was initially thought of as we tackle some dumb internet outrage of the day and decide if it’s really worth being mad about.

And that evolved into something slightly different, right? Right, guys? I feel like it’s now more about the business of Hollywood.

Alyssa: Yes, exactly. But I think it’s worth noting that our story actually starts way before 2019. The three of us were all critics in some respect or other. I was over at ThinkProgress running their culture and sports verticals. Sonny, were you at the Weekly Standard when we started or were you at the Free Beacon then?

Sonny: I think I was at the Washington Free Beacon when we met. So it must’ve been 2012 or 13.

Alyssa: The three of us were going to screenings every week and somehow just gravitated towards each other. We would sit together. We were the people who were hanging out and hashing things out together after the screening ended. When I moved to the Washington Post, I ended up bringing Sonny over as a contributor to the blog that I was working on there. They were invited to my wedding. We were authentically contentiously friends years before we started the podcast.

I think that’s been a little bit of the special sauce for us, right? We are capable of having conversations that are somewhat harder to have elsewhere because (even before we started working together) there were five, six years of trust built up in in-person conversations and discussions over beers at the really terrible bar near the former AMC in Friendship Heights. Nobody is here on this podcast to blow each other up. But it’s also not like “We’re friends for the camera!”

I think the show has always been like both a reflection of our dynamic. It’s also the way that we hang out every week, even though Sonny lives in Dallas, and Peter lives in Boston some of the time. So for me, it’s like my night out.

I mean, as a listener, I really find the appeal to be exactly that. I think that having different perspectives on something as universal as film makes the show super compelling to listen to, even if I don’t always necessarily agree with the perspective on it. What makes movies just so good to view from multiple different angles? There are lowercase “c” conservative films, there are lowercase “l” liberal films, that stuff. How do you guys find approaching the current state of the film industry from these different points of view?

Peter: Alyssa talked about how our story goes back even before 2019, when the podcast started. And just for people who may not be familiar with the dynamic of Washington that all of us came up in in our 20s, Alyssa was working for ThinkProgress, which was the journalism arm of the Center for American Progress, which is this leading democratic or democratic affiliated think tank. Sonny was working for the Weekly Standard and then for the Washington Free Beacon, these feisty, conservative journalistic outlets.

I actually started writing movie reviews for National Review for a couple of years. When I moved over full-time to Reason Magazine, which is where I’ve been for more than 15 years now, and also to the Washington Times, which is someplace that both Sonny and I wrote for. It’s a conservative-leaning paper that has undergone many transformations. If you live in Washington, your social circle and your conversations and your life are so frequently segmented by politics.

What we liked about being friends with each other and seeing movies with each other was that we saw that it didn’t have to be the case. Movies and art and pop culture, even disagreements about them, were ways that we could come together and maybe not even agree, but like learn about each other. We’re really good friends, but we also like each other’s minds. This is something that is really important and drew us all together. I have learned a lot about movies from Sonny. I have learned about culture from Alyssa. I don’t know if they’ve learned anything from me. Maybe they’ve been annoyed about how I’m fine with A.I.

Having those perspectives, it’s not just that it’s like, “Oh, that’s nice that you’re a little different.” This is a learning opportunity for all of us. It also makes the act of watching movies together much richer. When you’re watching the movie, if you’re watching it next to Alyssa, I know what she’s thinking. Maybe not what I’m thinking, but it’s like having another set of eyes. If you’re a critic, if you’re somebody who likes movies, if you are somebody who likes movies for the social aspect of them, seeing them with somebody else and talking about them afterwards just makes it so much more enjoyable. The fact that we then get to have that conversation in public for an audience that seems to enjoy this is really rewarding.

Alyssa: I have a very hard time with certain kinds of violence in movies. But I can sit in a theater with Peter, and he can tell me when I need to cover my eyes, but also when I’m gonna be okay when it’s over. And he’s always right, right? And that’s the thing that we get.

Peter: But also when we see the Taylor Swift movie, I show up, and Alyssa has friendship bracelets for us. Everybody’s bringing something to the party here.

Alyssa: Peter, you joked about whether or not we’ve gotten anything from you. And I actually think that in some ways, I’m the one of us whose politics and aesthetics have changed most as a result of doing the show with both of you. I came up in an era of lefty cultural criticism when there were real incentives for tearing things apart. And I think I, in some ways early in my career, helped advance a fairly doctrinaire vision of what political conversations about art should be. And I have some regrets about some of the things that I wrote and some non-regrets too. I did a lot of work at that point in my career that I liked a lot.

But one of the things I’ve come to believe in my conversation with these guys is that art is at its most politically powerful not when it affirms an agenda or a worldview that is defined by a political movement, but it is at its most powerful and interesting when it creates space for conversations that are not possible in conventional political formats and political venues. I think the unpredictability of movies and the inability to shove movies neatly into a partisan schema is where their power comes from.

It is not in being subordinate to an agenda, but in opening the space for new possibilities. And I think that having a space to come to that conclusion made me a better critic and a better person. Maybe less employable as someone who writes about this stuff full-time in a predictable way. But I really enjoy seeing the world through the lenses that Peter and Sonny helped me apply to all of this.

Peter: And just to underline that really quickly, a little bit more. One of the things that brings all of us together is that we are all three people who moved to Washington to work in political journalism, to work in discourse about politics. We have very strongly held beliefs. At the same time, I think all three of us come to movies, to art and to culture thinking, “You know what, you can make good art. You can make a great movie that maybe I find doesn’t in any way align with my beliefs, right?” It has nothing to do with my political world or is even critical of my political worldview, but it’s still a great movie.

And this is a thing that you see very rarely in Washington and political discussions of art and film, but also in criticism. You have so much criticism that is out there, especially in the movie criticism world, that is just straightforwardly, politically determined. I don’t think that that is the best way to approach art and to live a life that is about art because. Of course, it engages with politics. And of course you have to talk about that. And of course, you have to deal with that, but it’s not just politics. If what you want from a movie is for it to be an op-ed, then what you want isn’t a movie, it’s an op-ed.

I think that’s really interesting. And actually, let’s dive into that real quick. We’ll go around the horn, perhaps. Peter, you brought it up. What is an example of a film or a piece of media that maybe either subverts or goes upstream compared to your personal politics that you nevertheless enjoyed? Or you, nevertheless, in spite of where you were coming from on that, really tended to like?

Peter: So we all had mixed reactions to Paul Anderson’s, P.T. Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which is quite a political film, just came out. All of us thought that on a micro level, scene by scene, as a piece of filmmaking, it’s genius. But on a macro level, its big ideas are kind of a mess. I go back to another Paul Anderson film from the aughts, There Will Be Blood, which is fairly critical of capitalism and of the capitalist tendencies that are deeply rooted in America. And it’s not just a polemic, just an op-ed. It’s not something that you can sum up in a tweet. It is quite a complex film in so many ways. And I’m a capitalist. I am a libertarian. I am a markets guy. And it is, I love that movie.

Sonny and I frequently have arguments over whether There Will Be Blood is the first or second best movie of the last 25 years or so. Sonny thinks it’s maybe the best. I think it’s the second best. This is a movie that I think offers a deep critique of my ideology and my political worldview. But it is so profound on an artistic character narrative, just deep engagement level. I could talk about it for a long time. It’s a movie I really love that doesn’t support what I believe about politics in the world.

Yeah, Sonny, how about you?

Sonny: Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor is commie agitprop, but it’s also very good. It’s one of those movies where the lesson of the movie is literally “The elite overclass needs to be taught how to pee correctly in a bucket, so as not to annoy the normals.” But it’s a beautiful movie, including the bucket. You don’t have to agree with a film’s politics to recognize that it is a great movie. It certainly doesn’t hurt. I flipped through my rankings, and a lot of it does line up.

But another one is JFK. Oliver Stone’s JFK is a movie that is nonsense as history. If you look at it as a history text, you are reading the film wrong. What it excels at and the way that it is great is that it’s the absolute perfect distillation of sitting next to an insane conspiracy theorist and hearing them ramble. The way that Oliver Stone edits together all of these disparate ideas — the way he edits is like hearing a conspiracy theorist talk.

The way a conspiracy theorist talks is that they overwhelm you with information. They will just throw out random things and be like, “And this is connected to this, and this is connected to this.” And you are not able to actually judge these things because you have no idea really what they’re talking about. You’re not steeped in this stuff like they are, but it all sounds right. And all of a sudden, yeah, I believe that the military industrial complex murdered JFK at the behest of a fascist homosexual conspiracy, which is just another amusing little element to JFK by Oliver Stone.

Those would be two examples, I would say.

I love that. Alyssa, how about you?

Alyssa: I would say Dirty Harry. I did a huge project about 10 years ago on depictions of the police in pop culture. And the ways in which law enforcement, as an industry, has actually really shaped their depictions on film. And look, I don’t think the police always get everything right. And I think that shooting people is not a viable solution to a crime, especially without a trial. But God damn, does Clint Eastwood make like a sweater and a blazer and a real big gun look awesome, right?

Sonny: Those are things that look awesome. Of course, they look awesome on Clint Eastwood.

Alyssa: Of course, they look awesome, but they look especially awesome on Clint Eastwood. And they look even more awesome when he’s shooting a crazed hippie who has commandeered a bus

Sonny: Full of children.

Alyssa: Yes, a bus full of children. The evil hippie deserves to get shot, and Clint Eastwood is the man to set things right. The thing about aesthetics is that they can get you to set aside your politics momentarily in a theoretical way. But I also think that good movies can get you access to spaces and mindsets that you might not have access to otherwise.

When you asked that question, the movie that I immediately thought of, not necessarily of challenging my politics, but like bringing me a place I can’t go, is Alex Garland’s Warfare from earlier this year. It is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. And also a movie about (both as a social and cultural environment) an all-male combat unit in the US military and a situation (the war in Iraq) that I have no access to. I cannot go there. My being in the space would fundamentally transform the space. And that opening sequence with this platoon watching this music video in a weird, sexualized group bonding ritual, I just found fascinating and oddly touching in a way that I think is interesting to watch, especially if you’re steeped in left-leaning critiques of traditional masculinity in all-male spaces.

And I found that movie, despite how harrowing it was, kind of beautiful and tender to watch in a way. And I just felt very grateful for it.

Awesome. Yeah, again, I really appreciate how much thought goes into viewing not only movies as cultural entities, but also their space in politics, but also how the culture can overwhelm that. I really think that you guys have such fun takes on this. I wanna back out a little bit and talk a little bit about this year and this moment. I think one thing I really enjoy about your show is that it’s obvious how much you guys really enjoy going to the movies, enjoy consuming this stuff. I know that there’s a lot of fairly understandable doom and gloom sometimes around the movie industry, around the exhibition industry. A lot of that, I think, comes from some of the more industry side of things and infects the viewing public’s view.

I’ll just throw it to you. What is a trend or something going on these days within movies or Hollywood that you actually think is a good thing, that you’re actually enjoying? Or a transitional moment that you think could be fun? I guess, Sunny, I’ll start off with you. I don’t know.

Sonny: That’s a hard question to answer because everything is bad right now.

Alyssa: To be clear, this is Sonny’s default position about all eras and all things. All things.

Peter: He’s a cheerful man.

Sonny: All things, really. No, everything is bad. But if I were looking at a few green shoots, I like the rise of the draft house style theater, a combination of dining, bar, movie space. I know some people have issues with the waiters scurrying back and forth. And it’s not my real cup of tea either, but that’s all right. You mentioned this question right before we started taping. I was trying to sketch something out, so I didn’t have nothing.

But I do think the rise of the boutique Blu-ray and 4K UHD retailers has been a good thing. I don’t know that it’s enough to save physical media in the film context, but the rise of your Vinegar Syndromes. Criterion, of course, is the longest player in this space, and they’ve been doing it since the days of Laserdisc. They’re very good at what they do, and they have a great catalog.

But even smaller places, like your Vinegar Syndromes or your Shout Factory and your Scream Factory. The studios themselves are getting into it. Lionsgate has their Lionsgate limited thing that they do, which is just sucking money out of my pockets. A24 has also been good in this space. I like the idea that there is a small but committed cadre of collectors out there. And it’s not just ownership for the sake of ownership. It’s not the high fidelity, “the things you own matter. So you should show them off so everybody can see them and see how cool you are” kind of thing. There are actual quality differences to having a disc as opposed to a streaming service, which always come in at lower bit rates, and they look and sound worse.

But this is so niche. Very few people who collect this stuff (Blu-rays, 4Ks, et cetera) really understand how niche they are.

If you look at the monthly pie chart of sales of discs every month, it’s still 50 percent DVD, 20 percent to 25 percent Blu-ray, and then 25 percent to 30 percent 4K, depending on what’s out at any given time. But 50 percent of discs are still being bought by people browsing Walmart shelves, like “Ooh, I’ll watch this new movie for $5. Sure, why not?”

Yeah, having something for the sickos is always something viable, right? Peter, I’ll throw it to you.

Peter: So, on this podcast, I have probably been the biggest MCU, Marvel Movie Universe booster. What I think is a good thing that is happening right now is that the MCU is in a decline, or at least a reset period. It’s not overwhelming Hollywood in the way that it was throughout the 2010s. It’s hurting theaters and exhibition because those movies are not performing the way they used to, and that’s a downside for real.

But what it is doing is creating a space for young filmmakers and for young acting talent to rise up without having to immediately be sucked into the MCU or something comparable, like the DC movies that were trying to start up and never really got going. Now they’ve rebooted the DC universe with the James Gunn Superman film. But, it really felt like in the 2010s, anyone who was in their 20s or 30s and was a really promising actor or a really promising director was gonna make one or two movies. And then they were gonna get sucked into the Marvel or maybe the Star Wars machine, one of these big franchise things.

It wasn’t like even 25 years ago when Sam Raimi was making Spider-Man films, and they were very distinctly Sam Raimi films. I mean, you watch the Dr. Octopus POV sequence in Spider-Man 2, and it’s the same thing he was doing in Evil Dead, except he had $150 million to make that movie, right?

These weren’t even altruistic superhero films. They were just being brought in to lend their names a small amount of flavor to whatever it was they were doing. And now, in an era in which the MCU is not gone, but is diminished, a lot of acting talent and a lot of directing talent are going to be free to spend that formative period of third, fourth, fifth, sixth movies to make the things that they wanna make and to experiment.

Like I said, this does have downsides. This is not great for theatrical exhibitors who are suffering right now because there are fewer movies and because the big movies are not as big. But in that space, you get the opportunity to try new things. And I love seeing new things, and I love watching new talent develop.

That is cool. I like that. Alyssa?

Alyssa: I’m glad you said that, Peter, because what I was gonna say is I am delighted to see some of the directors who did time in the MCU or other franchises coming back and making original movies. Obviously, Sinners is one of the big success stories of the year. It’s also a success story because Ryan Coogler is not only making franchise movies.

I saw Seeing Fruitvale, which turned Fruitvale Station, at the Sundance Film Festival. It was like a seminal moment for me early in my career as a critic. I was like, “Holy God, this guy is great.” Even though I like what he did with the Rocky movies and I like the first Black Panther, I just felt this sense of profound regret for him getting diverted from telling these original stories. I’m really excited for Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. I expect to be emotionally incapacitated by that movie. Honestly, it is great for people who love movies that Immortals was just such a disaster.

Peter: Eternals.

Sonny: Eternals, that’s how good it is we can’t even remember the title.

Alyssa: Yes, Destin Daniel Cretton is working on a Shang-Chi sequel, but he is also collaborating with Ryan Coogler on a project that I think is drawn from their childhoods.

Sonny: He’s directing a new Spider-Man movie right now.

Alyssa: But there’s other stuff coming. There’s the possibility of life outside franchises. And, I’m excited to see what some of these folks do when they’re not in front of a green screen and when they’re telling stories about actual human beings. I am excited to just see more movies like Weapons, like Materialists, coming from younger directors who are still figuring things out, but have interesting things to say. And this year, at least, appears to be able to do okay at the box office.

I love that. People are recovering from their exile in Atlanta and have a chance to make some cool movies. You guys have been so generous with your time. I do want to just finish on one last note: where do you assess Hollywood’s position within the world to be?

Obviously, in the States, they’ve had a lot of pressure from things like TikTok coming from below, things like the federal government coming from above. But even internationally and geopolitically, you’ve seen international players start to compete with Hollywood at the Oscars. For instance, in Best Animated Film last year, as well as some big markets shutting down for them, like China is not really doing anything. From a political perspective, where do you assess the state of Hollywood right now?

Peter: From a political perspective, I think Hollywood is going to start producing movies that read less overtly liberal, less conventionally left-leaning. I think we’re already seeing some of that. I don’t mean that Hollywood is suddenly going to be MAGA, that it’s suddenly gonna be like reading Buckley’s National Review or anything like that. I just mean that at the margins, you’re gonna see more movies that don’t toe the line in the way that you saw movies before. There was a moment, especially right before and right after the pandemic, where it really felt like too many movies were towing a very predictable left-of-center political line. And it was obvious and there was no nuance to it.

Again, I do not oppose movies that may have a different worldview than mine, but it felt like they were running scared in a lot of cases. I mean, in sports, if your team is behind, that’s the time when you try new stuff. You don’t use the same strategy if you are losing. Hollywood’s losing right now. They’re losing economically and they’re losing as a cultural force. While that’s in some ways not great for the art form, that is going to be good for experimentation. And that’s gonna be formal and craft experimentation. That’s going to be talent. We’re going to see new and interesting people. And that’s also going to be ideas both for stories and for politics and ideology.

Sonny: A big question is what happens with the retrenchment of the global box office? Because I do think, for a long time, you could count on basically two-thirds of the box office of a major Hollywood release coming overseas and one-third coming domestically. And those numbers have, in some cases, inverted. It’s closer to 50/50 for more of them. It’s not universally true. F1 did more business overseas than domestically, which you might expect for something that’s based on F1 racing. But the big question is what happens if the rest of the world is like, “We’re not that interested in the big Hollywood blockbuster stuff that we have been eating up for the last 15 or 20 years”?

This goes hand in hand with Alyssa’s point about originals. That’s probably a good thing, honestly. It’s probably a good thing to get away from the theory of the movie industry being like, “We need to make things that appeal despite language barriers.” Language matters; words matter. And tailoring your words to the correct audience matters. American movie studio should tailor their stuff to American audiences.

Alyssa: And also getting away from the idea of appealing to the Chinese censors who controlled which American movies got access to Chinese markets, which was not the same thing as appealing to Chinese audiences. But yeah, I totally agree.

My father-in-law works in the foreign exchange industry, and he said something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. They’re just seeing real declines in people who want to come here or feel comfortable coming here. Until July, I was the letters editor at The Washington Post, and it was astonishing to me just how much rage Canadians were feeling towards the United States. I don’t know that these will translate into a rejection of American movies. American culture exports have been unbelievably strong for a long time.

But I do see an opening for Korean pop culture, which has already been very popular abroad. I think there’s a real chance that we will see a rejection of American culture in some ways. And, it will take Hollywood a while to respond to that. It always lags a little bit. But I do think it would be very interesting to see what more aggressively American movies look like. And I think that could take many forms.

But scale is in many ways the enemy of interestingness. If there is not and opportunity to turn everything into a two billion dollar movie because you sell it overseas, what stories do you tell? What actors do you put on screen? What voices do you elevate? And I think the answers to those questions could be really interesting.

Peter: I agree with all of this in the sense that I think it will be good for the art form, like I have been saying. But there’s a cost to this that all of us should recognize. When budgets get smaller and the market shrinks, that is going to be bad for people who work in the industry. And in particular, it’s going to be rough for the below-the-line talent, the people whose names you see at the end credits — when these credits now scroll for 10 minutes after a Marvel movie because they have employed hundreds, maybe even a thousand people.

And there was a story in The Wall Street Journal just this summer. You mentioned the time in Atlanta about how Marvel has moved most of its production out of Atlanta. There are people there who had built lives, bought houses, had earned pretty good middle-class incomes, but weren’t superstars by any means. Now they don’t know what to do because they thought they were living in Hollywood East, and suddenly, Hollywood East doesn’t exist anymore.

We may be in a position where Hollywood West, as we have long know it, L.A., the film center, also doesn’t exist anymore, at least or at least as much smaller, much less important and much less central to filmmaking than it has been for the last nearly 100 years. And again, as a critic, I like the new stuff. I often like the smaller stuff. I’m an American; I want movies made for me. But also, these are people with jobs and livelihoods, and it is going to be hard for them in many cases.

Sonny: Oh, I’m glad to see the A.I. King over here take the side of the little guy who’s losing out on his on his livelihood.

Peter: I think A.I. is going to help the little guy. Small creators are going to have a leg up because of it.

Sonny: Sure.

All right. Well, I love some of those thoughts, love some of those lessons. Publicly traded companies are famously risk-taking, so we’re going to be fine, definitely. Either way, I really do love the show. I really, really enjoy it. I think it’s one of the best discussion shows, chat shows about any movie podcast out there. It is really, really fun. It is very cool to see you guys go independent.

I just want to throw it to you a little bit. What is your pitch? What is the show? Where can they find it? What’s the best way to support it? And where can they find you all?

Sonny: The show’s a lot like this, like what you just listened to.

Alyssa: Peter has developed this catchphrase when Sonny asked him how he’s doing to kick off the show, and he always says that he’s excited to be talking about movies with friends. We want to be your movie friends. You should come hang out with us. Hopefully, we will be going live a little bit more, maybe meeting up in person some. I will hopefully be doing some writing for our sub stack, if you have missed my blatherings about movies and movie trends.

But yeah, come hang out with us every week. We’re fun.

Sonny: Movieaisle.substack.com. That’s where you should go. You should I’m I’m I’m sure I’m sure there will be a link to it or something. Movieaisle.substack.com is where it lives now. We’ll have a proper URL at some point.

Terrific. And wherever you get your podcasts?

Sonny: And wherever you get your podcasts!

That’s great. Peter, Alyssa, Sonny, thank you so much. This is really, really fun. Again, I really dig the show so much. I’m very, very happy for you guys being able to spring out independent. So really, thanks for coming on.

Edited by Crystal Wang

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at [email protected].

By Walt Hickey

Double feature today!

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Alissa Wilkinson who is out with the brand new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine.

I’m a huge fan of Alissa, she’s a phenomenal critic and I thought this topic — what happens when one of the most important American literary figures heads out to Hollywood to work on the most important American medium — is super fascinating. It’s a really wonderful book and if you’re a longtime Joan Didion fan or simply a future Joan Didion fan, it’s a look at a really transformative era of Hollywood and should be a fun read regardless.

Alissa can be found at the New York Times, and the book is available wherever books are sold.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

All right, Alissa, thank you so much for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s good to be back, wherever we are.

Yes, you are the author of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. It’s a really exciting book. It’s a really exciting approach, for a Joan Didion biography and placing her in the current of American mainstream culture for a few years. I guess just backing out, what got you interested in Joan Didion to begin with? When did you first get into her work?

Joan Didion and I did not become acquainted, metaphorically, until after I got out of college. I studied Tech and IT in college, and thus didn’t read any books, because they don’t make you read books in school, or they didn’t when I was there. I moved to New York right afterward. I was riding the subway. There were all these ads for this book called The Year of Magical Thinking. It was the year 2005, the book had just come out. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion’s National Book Award-winning memoir about the year after her husband died, suddenly of a heart attack in ’03. It’s sort of a meditation on grief, but it’s not really what that sounds like. If people haven’t read it’s very Didion. You know, it’s not sentimental, it’s constantly examining the narratives that she’s telling herself about grief.

So I just saw these ads on the walls. I was like, what is this book that everybody seems to be reading? I just bought it and read it. And it just so happened that it was right after my father, who was 46 at the time, was diagnosed with a very aggressive leukemia, and then died shortly thereafter, which was shocking, obviously. The closer I get to that age, it feels even more shocking that he was so young. I didn’t have any idea how to process that emotion or experience. The book was unexpectedly helpful. But it also introduced me to a writer who I’d never read before, who felt like she was looking at things from a different angle than everyone else.

Of course, she had a couple more books come out after that. But I don’t remember this distinctly, but probably what happened is I went to some bookstore, The Strand or something, and bought The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem off the front table as everyone does because those books have just been there for decades.

From that, I learned more, starting to understand how writing could work. I didn’t realize how form and content could interact that way. Over the years, I would review a book by her or about her for one publication or another. Then when I was in graduate school, getting my MFA in nonfiction, I wrote a bit about her because I was going through a moment of not being sure if my husband and I were going to stay in New York or we were going to move to California. They sort of obligate you to go through a goodbye to all that phase if you are contemplating that — her famous essay about leaving New York. And then, we did stay in New York City. But ultimately, that’s 20 years of history.

Then in 2020, I was having a conversation (that was quite-early pandemic) with my agent about possible books I might write. I had outlined a bunch of books to her. Then she was like, “These all sound like great ideas. But I’ve always wanted to rep a book on Joan Didion. So I just wanted to put that bug in your ear.” I was like, “Oh, okay. That seems like something I should probably do.”

It took a while to find an angle, which wound up being Didion in Hollywood. This is mostly because I realized that a lot of people don’t really know her as a Hollywood figure, even though she’s a pretty major Hollywood figure for a period of time. The more of her work I read, the more I realized that her work is fruitfully understood as the work of a woman who was profoundly influenced by (and later thinking in terms of Hollywood metaphors) whether she was writing about California or American politics or even grief.

So that’s the long-winded way of saying I wasn’t, you know, acquainted with her work until adulthood, but then it became something that became a guiding light for me as a writer.

That’s really fascinating. I love it. Because again I think a lot of attention on Didion has been paid since her passing. But this book is really exciting because you came at it from looking at the work as it relates to Hollywood. What was Didion’s experience in Hollywood? What would people have seen from it, but also, what is her place there?

The directly Hollywood parts of her life start when she’s in her 30s. She and her husband — John Gregory Dunn, also a writer and her screenwriting partner — moved from New York City, where they had met and gotten married, to Los Angeles. John’s brother, Nick Dunn later became one of the most important early true crime writers at Vanity Fair, believe it or not. But at the time, he was working as a TV producer. He and his wife were there. So they moved to Los Angeles. It was sort of a moment where, you know, it’s all well and good to be a journalist and a novelist. If you want to support yourself, Hollywood is where it’s at.

So they get there at a moment when the business is shifting from these big-budget movies — the Golden Age — to the new Hollywood, where everything is sort of gritty and small and countercultural. That’s the moment they arrive. They worked in Hollywood. I mean, they worked literally in Hollywood for many years after that. And then in Hollywood even when they moved back to New York in the ’80s as screenwriters still.

People sometimes don’t realize that they wrote a bunch of produced screenplays. The earliest was The Panic in Needle Park. Obviously, they adapted Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays. There are several others, but one that a lot of people don’t realize they wrote was the version of A Star is Born that stars Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. It was their idea to shift the Star is Born template from Hollywood entities to rock stars. That was their idea. Of course, when Bradley Cooper made his version, he iterated on that. So their work was as screenwriters but also as figures in the Hollywood scene because they were literary people at the same time that they were screenwriters. They knew all the actors, and they knew all the producers and the executives.

John actually wrote, I think, two of the best books ever written on Hollywood decades apart. One called The Studio, where he just roamed around on the Fox backlot. For a year for reasons he couldn’t understand, he got access. That was right when the catastrophe that was Dr. Doolittle was coming out. So you get to hear the inside of the studio. Then later, he wrote a book called Monster, which is about their like eight-year long attempt to get their film Up Close and Personal made, which eventually they did. It’s a really good look at what the normal Hollywood experience was at the time: which is like: you come up with an idea, but it will only vaguely resemble the final product once all the studios get done with it.

So it’s, it’s really, that’s all very interesting. They’re threaded through the history of Hollywood in that period. On top of it for the book (I realized as I was working on it) that a lot of Didion’s early life is influenced by especially her obsession with John Wayne and also with the bigger mythology of California and the West, a lot of which she sees as framed through Hollywood Westerns.

Then in the ’80s, she pivoted to political reporting for a long while. If you read her political writing, it is very, very, very much about Hollywood logic seeping into American political culture. There’s an essay called “Inside Baseball” about the Dukakis campaign that appears in Political Fictions, her book that was published on September 11, 2001. In that book, she writes about how these political campaigns are directed and set up like a production for the cameras and how that was becoming not just the campaign, but the presidency itself. Of course, she had no use for Ronald Reagan, and everything she writes about him is very damning. But a lot of it was because she saw him as the embodiment of Hollywood logic entering the political sphere and felt like these are two separate things and they need to not be going together.

So all of that appeared to me as I was reading. You know, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It just made sense for me to write about it. On top of it, she was still alive when I was writing the proposal and shopping it around. So she actually died two months after we sold the book to my publisher. It meant I was extra grateful for this angle because I knew there’d be a lot more books on her, but I wanted to come at it from an angle that I hadn’t seen before. So many people have written about her in Hollywood before, but not quite through this lens.

Yeah. What were some things that you discovered in the course of your research? Obviously, she’s such an interesting figure, but she’s also lived so very publicly that I’m just super interested to find out what are some of the things that you learned? It can be about her, but it can also be the Hollywood system as a whole.

Yeah. I mean, I didn’t interview her for obvious reasons.

Understandable, entirely understandable.

Pretty much everyone in her life also is gone with the exception really of Griffin Dunn, who is her nephew, John’s nephew, the actor. But other than that, it felt like I needed to look at it through a critical lens. So it meant examining a lot of texts. A lot of Didion’s magazine work (which was a huge part of her life) is published in the books that people read like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album and all the other books. What was interesting to me was discovering (I mean, not “discovering” because other people have read it) that there is some work that’s not published and it’s mostly her criticism.

Most of that criticism was published in the late ’50s and the early ’60s when she was living in New York City, working at Vogue and trying to make it in the literary scene that was New York at that time, which was a very unique place. I mean, she was writing criticism and essays for both, you know, like National Review and The Nation at the same time, which was just hard to conceive of today. It was something you’d do back then. Yeah, wild stuff.

A lot of that criticism was never collected into books. The most interesting is that she’d been working at Vogue for a long time in various positions, but she wound up getting added to the film critic column at Vogue in, ’62, I want to say, although I might have that date slightly off. She basically alternated weeks with another critic for a few years, writing that until she started writing in movies proper. It’s never a great idea to be a critic and a screenwriter at the same time.

Her criticism is fascinating. So briefly, for instance, she shared that column with Pauline Kael. Pauline Kael became well known after she wrote about Bonnie and Clyde. This was prior to that. This is several years prior to that. They also hated each other for a long time afterward, which is funny, because, in some ways, their style is very different but their persona is actually very similar. So I wonder about that.

But in any case, even when she wasn’t sharing the column with Pauline Kael, it was a literal column in a magazine. So it’s like one column of text, she can say barely anything. She was always a bit of a contrarian, but she was actively not interested in the things that were occupying New York critics at the time. Things like the Auteur Theory, what was happening in France, the downtown scene and the Shirley Clark’s of the world. She had no use for it. At some point, she accuses Billy Wilder of having really no sense of humor, which is very funny.

When you read her criticism, you see a person who is very invested in a classical notion of Hollywood as a place that shows us fantasies that we can indulge in for a while. She talks in her very first column about how she doesn’t really need movies to be masterpieces, she just wants them to have moments. When she says moments, she means big swelling things that happen in a movie that make her feel things.

It’s so opposite, I think, to most people’s view of Didion. Most people associate her with this snobbish elitism or something, which I don’t think is untrue when we’re talking about literature. But for her, the movies were like entertainment, and entering that business was a choice to enter that world. She wasn’t attempting to elevate the discourse or something.

I just think that’s fascinating. She also has some great insights there. But as a film critic, I find myself disagreeing with most of her reviews. But I think that doesn’t matter. It was more interesting to see how she conceived of the movies. There is a moment later on, in another piece that I don’t think has been republished anywhere from the New York Review of Books, where she writes about the movies of Woody Allen. She hates them. It’s right at the point where he’s making like Manhattan and Annie Hall, like the good stuff. She just has no use for them. It’s one of the funniest pieces. I won’t spoil the ending because it’s hilarious, and it’s in the book.

That writing was of huge interest to me and hasn’t been republished in books. I was very grateful to get access to it, in part because it is in the archives — the electronic archives of the New York Public Library. But at the time, the library was closed. So I had to call the library and have a librarian get on Zoom with me for like an hour and a half to figure out how I could get in the proverbial back door of the library to get access while the library wasn’t open.

That’s magnificent. That’s such a cool way to go to the archives because some stuff just hasn’t been published. If it wasn’t digitized, then it’s not digitized. That’s incredible.

Yeah, it’s there, but you can barely print them off because they’re in PDFs. They’re like scanned images that are super high res, so the printer just dies when you try to print them. It’s all very fascinating. I hope it gets republished at some point because I think there’s enough interest in her work that it’s fascinating to see this other aspect of her taste and her persona.

It’s really interesting that she seems to have wanted to meet the medium where it is, right? She wasn’t trying to literary-up Hollywood. I mean, LA can be a bit of a friction. It’s not exactly a literary town in the way that some East Coast metropolises can be. It is interesting that she was enamored by the movies. Do you want to speak about what things were like for her when she moved out?

Yeah, it is funny because, at the same time, the first two movies that they wrote and produced are The Panic in Needle Park, which is probably the most new Hollywood movie you can imagine. It's about addicts at Needle Park, which is actually right where the 72nd Street subway stop is on the Upper West Side. If people have been there, it’s hard to imagine. But that was apparently where they all sat around, and there were a lot of needles. It's apparently the first movie supposedly where someone shoots up live on camera.

So it was the ’70s. That’s amazing.

Yes, and it launched Al Pacino’s film career! Yeah, it’s wild. You watch it and you’re just like, “How is this coming from the woman who’s about all this arty farty stuff in the movies.” And Play It As It Lays has a very similar, almost avant-garde vibe to it. It’s very, very interesting. You see it later on in the work that they made.

A key thing to remember about them (and something I didn’t realize before I started researching the book)was that Didion and Dunn were novelists who worked in journalism because everybody did. They wrote movies, according to them (you can only go off of what they said. A lot of it is John writing these jaunty articles. He's a very funny writer) because “we had tuition and a mortgage. This is how you pay for it.”

This comes up later on, they needed to keep their WGA insurance because John had heart trouble. The best way to have health insurance was to remain in the Writers Guild. Remaining in the Writers Guild means you had to have a certain amount of work produced through union means. They were big union supporters. For them this was not, this was very strictly not an auteurist undertaking. This was not like, “Oh, I’m gonna go write these amazing screenplays that give my concept of the world to the audience.” It’s not like Bonnie and Clyding going on here. It’s very like, “We wrote these based on some stories that we thought would be cool.”

I like that a lot. Like the idea that A Star is Born was like a pot boiler. That’s really delightful.

Completely. It was totally taken away from them by Streisand and John Peters at some point. But they were like, “Yeah, I mean, you know, it happens. We still got paid.”

Yeah, if it can happen to Superman, it can happen to you.

It happens to everybody, you know, don’t get too precious about it. The important thing is did your novel come out and was it supported by its publisher?

So just tracing some of their arcs in Hollywood. Obviously, Didion’s one of the most influential writers of her generation, there’s a very rich literary tradition. Where do we see her footprint, her imprint in Hollywood? What are some of the ways that we can see her register in Hollywood, or reverberate outside of it?

In the business itself, I don’t know that she was influential directly. What we see is on the outside of it. So a lot of people were friends. She was like a famous hostess, famous hostess. The New York Public Library archives are set to open at the end of March, of Didion and Dunn’s work, which was like completely incidental to my publication date. I just got lucky. There’s a bunch of screenplays in there that they worked on that weren’t produced. There’s also her cookbooks, and I’m very excited to go through those and see that. So you might meet somebody there.

Her account of what the vibe was when the Manson murders occurred, which is published in her essay The White Album, is still the one people talk about, even though there are a lot of different ways to come at it. That’s how we think about the Manson murders: through her lens. Later on, when she’s not writing directly about Hollywood anymore (and not really writing in Hollywood as much) but instead is writing about the headlines, about news events, about sensationalism in the news, she becomes a great media critic. We start to see her taking the things that she learned (having been around Hollywood people, having been on movie sets, having seen how the sausage is made) and she starts writing about politics. In that age, it is Hollywood’s logic that you perform for the TV. We have the debates suddenly becoming televised, the conventions becoming televised, we start to see candidates who seem specifically groomed to win because they look good on TV. They’re starting to win and rule the day.

She writes about Newt Gingrich. Of course, Gingrich was the first politician to figure out how to harness C-SPAN to his own ends — the fact that there were TV cameras on the congressional floor. So she’s writing about all of this stuff at a time when you can see other people writing about it. I mean, Neil Postman famously writes about it. But the way Didion does it is always very pegged to reviewing somebody’s book, or she’s thinking about a particular event, or she’s been on the campaign plane or something like that. Like she’s been on the inside, but with an outsider’s eye.

That also crops up in, for instance, her essays. “Sentimental Journeys” is one of her most famous ones. That one’s about the case of the Central Park Five, and the jogger who was murdered. Of course, now, we’re many decades out from that, and the convictions were vacated. We know about coerced confessions. Also Donald Trump arrives in the middle of that whole thing.

But she’s actually not interested in the guilt or innocence question, because a lot of people were writing about that. She’s interested in how the city of New York and the nation perform themselves for themselves, seeing themselves through the long lens of a movie and telling themselves stories about themselves. You see this over and over in her writing, no matter what she’s writing about. I think once she moved away from writing about the business so much, she became very interested in how Hollywood logic had taken over American public life writ large.

That’s fascinating. Like, again, she spends time in the industry, then basically she can only see it through that lens. Of course, Michael Dukakis in a tank is trying to be a set piece, of course in front of the Berlin Wall, you’re finally doing set decoration rather than doing it outside of a brick wall somewhere. You mentioned the New York thing in Performing New York. I have lived in the city for over a decade now. The dumbest thing is when the mayor gets to wear the silly jacket whenever there’s a snowstorm that says “Mr. Mayor.” It’s all an act in so many ways. I guess that political choreography had to come from somewhere, and it seems like she was documenting a lot of that initial rise.

Yeah, I think she really saw it. The question I would ask her, if I could, is how cognizant she was that she kept doing that. As someone who’s written for a long time, you don’t always recognize that you have the one thing you write about all the time. Other people then bring it up to you and you’re like, “Oh, I guess you’re right.” Even when you move into her grief memoir phase, which is how I think about the last few original works that she published, she uses movie logic constantly in those.

I mean, The Year of Magical Thinking is a cyclical book, she goes over the same events over and over. But if you actually look at the language she’s using, she talks about running the tape back, she talks about the edit, she talks about all these things as if she’s running her own life through how a movie would tell a story. Maybe she knew very deliberately. She’s not a person who does things just haphazardly, but it has the feeling of being so baked into her psyche at this point that she would never even think of trying to escape it.

Fascinating.

Yeah, that idea that you don’t know what you are potentially doing, I’ve thought about that. I don’t know what mine is. But either way. It’s such a cool way to look at it. On a certain level, she pretty much succeeded at that, though, right? I think that when people think about Joan Didion, they think about a life that freshens up a movie, right? Like, it worked

Very much, yeah. I’m gonna be really curious to see what happens over the next 10 years or so. I’ve been thinking about figures like Sylvia Plath or women with larger-than-life iconography and reputation and how there’s a constant need to relook at their legacies and reinvent and rethink and reimagine them. There's a lot in the life of Didion that I think remains to be explored. I’m really curious to see where people go with it, especially with the opening of these archives and new personal information making its way into the world.

Yeah, even just your ability to break some of those stories that have been locked away in archives out sounds like a really exciting addition to the scholarship. Just backing out a little bit, we live in a moment in which the relationship between pop culture and political life is fairly directly intertwined. Setting aside the steel-plated elephant in the room, you and I are friendly because we bonded over this idea that movies really are consequential. Coming out of this book and coming out of reporting on it, what are some of the relevances for today in particular?

Yeah, I mean, a lot more than I thought, I guess, five years ago. I started work on the book at the end of Trump One, and it’s coming out at the beginning of Trump Two, and there was this period in the middle of a slightly different vibe. But even then I watch TikTok or whatever. You see people talk about “main character energy” or the “vibe shift” or all of romanticizing your life. I would have loved to read a Didion essay on the way that young people sort of view themselves through the logic of the screens they have lived on and the way that has shaped America for a long time.

I should confirm this, I don’t think she wrote about Obama, or if she did, it was only a little bit. So her political writing ends in George W. Bush’s era. I think there’s one piece on Obama, and then she’s writing about other things. It’s just interesting to think about how her ideas of what has happened to political culture in America have seeped into the present day.

I think the Hollywood logic, the cinematic logic has given way to reality TV logic. That's very much the logic of the Trump world, right? Still performing for cameras, but the cameras have shifted. The way that we want things from the cameras has shifted, too. Reality TV is a lot about creating moments of drama where they may or may not actually exist and bombarding you with them. I think that’s a lot of what we see and what we feel now. I have to imagine she would think about it that way.

There is one interesting essay that I feel has only recently been talked about. It’s at the beginning of my book, too. It was in a documentary, and Gia Tolentino wrote about it recently. It's this essay she wrote in 2000 about Martha Stewart and about Martha Stewart’s website. It feels like the 2000s was like, “What is this website thing? Why are people so into it?” But really, it’s an essay about parasocial relationships that people develop (with women in particular) who they invent stories around and how those stories correspond to greater American archetypes. It’s a really interesting essay, not least because I think it’s an essay also about people’s parasocial relationships with Joan Didion.

So the rise of her celebrity in the 21st century, where people know who she is and carry around a tote bag, but don’t really know what they’re getting themselves into is very interesting to me. I think it is also something she thought about quite a bit, while also consciously courting it.

Yeah, I mean, that makes a ton of sense. For someone who was so adept at using cinematic language to describe her own life with every living being having a camera directly next to them at all times. It seems like we are very much living in a world that she had at least put a lot of thought into, even if the technology wasn’t around for her to specifically address it.

Yes, completely.

On that note, where can folks find the book? Where can folks find you? What’s the elevator pitch for why they ought to check this out? Joan Didion superfan or just rather novice?

Exactly! I think this book is not just for the fans, let me put it that way. Certainly, I think anyone who considers themselves a Didion fan will have a lot to enjoy here. The stuff you didn’t know, hadn’t read or just a new way to think through her cultural impact. But also, this is really a book that’s as much for people who are just interested in thinking about the world we live in today a little critically. It’s certainly a biography of American political culture as much as it is of Didion. There’s a great deal of Hollywood history in there as well. Thinking about that sweep of the American century and change is what the book is doing. It’s very, very, very informed by what I do in my day job as a movie critic at The New York Times. Thinking about what movies mean, what do they tell us about ourselves? I think this is what this book does. I have been told it’s very fun to read. So I’m happy about that. It’s not ponderous at all, which is good. It’s also not that long.

It comes out March 11th from Live Right, which is a Norton imprint. There will be an audiobook at the end of May that I am reading, which I’m excited about. And I’ll be on tour for a large amount of March on the East Coast. Then in California, there’s a virtual date, and there’s a good chance I’ll be popping up elsewhere all year, too. Those updates will be on my social feeds, which are all @alissawilkinson on whatever platform except X, which is fine because I don’t really post there anymore.

Alyssa, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you so much.

Edited by Crystal Wang.

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at [email protected].

By Walt Hickey

Double feature today!

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Olga Khazan who wrote the brand new book, Me, But Better. Olga appears all the time in Numlock because I really like her work, she’s a staff writer at The Atlantic and previously wrote a delightful book that I really enjoyed called Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World.

The book dives into the science of personality, where it comes from, and the real ways that we can change our own personalities in one direction or another. In it, Olga becomes a guinea pig for all kinds of radical experiences to change her personality.

Olga can be found at The Atlantic, and the book is available wherever books are sold.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Olga Khazan, thank you so much for coming on.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

You are the author of the brand new book Me But Better. I loved your book Weird which was out just a few years ago. This book is all about how to change your personality. It is a really exciting journey. I know that it started with an article that you published in The Atlantic, but what drew you to the art and science of changing one’s personality?

Really it’s because personality is at the root of so much self-improvement and personal growth. I noticed that I tended to see things really negatively a lot of the time, and I was also really socially isolated. it was keeping me from enjoying life and appreciating what I had and just getting the most out of what life had to offer me. I really saw personality change as a way to fix all or improve that in one fell swoop.

Great. You talk a lot from the framework of the Big Five. I really enjoyed how grounded in the scientific literature it was. The Big Five is potentially somewhat different from the Myers-Briggs structure that a lot of people know. Before we dive into how you went about doing a gut renovation on your personality, I would love to hear a little bit about what the Big Five are, where you came in on some of it, and what you wanted to see if you could change.

Yeah, so generally the accepted scientific view today is that there are five traits that make up personality. You can remember them with the acronym OCEAN. The first is Openness to experiences, which is like imaginativeness and creativity. The next is Conscientiousness, which is being super organized, being on time. The next is Extroversion, which is being friendly and cheerful and sociable. Then there’s Agreeableness, which is being warm, empathetic and also trusting of others. Then there’s Neuroticism, which is a bad thing; it is depression and anxiety. The opposite of that, which is the one that you want, is emotional stability.

When I started taking these scientific personality tests at the start of the project, I scored very low on Extroversion, very high on Neuroticism and I scored about average on Agreeableness. Those were the ones that I wanted to change.

That’s fascinating. I want to actually follow up with that. I did not hear you put a good, bad valence on any of the other ones besides neuroticism. It seems like most of these…people can have a full and fulfilling life with one or the other. What made Neuroticism pop out?

You can have a full and fulfilling life without being on the outer extreme on any of these, but I would say it’s generally better to be higher on all of them other than Neuroticism. You don’t want to be all the way to the extreme. You don’t want to be so agreeable that you’re just like a doormat. It’s generally better for your mental health and well-being and stuff to be pretty agreeable, pretty extroverted, pretty conscientious.

Neuroticism popped out to me because that is one that I was super high on. It’s very bad for your mental health. The definition is pretty much having bad mental health. It was keeping me from having a fun life, having a good life. Your happiness is determined by how you feel moment to moment and not by how many goodies you have. Even when I had a lot of goodies, I was sort of still miserable.

Fascinating. Just to get into some of the literature on that, there was this amazing study that you cited in the book that says knocking down your Neuroticism by a few points was worth the equivalent of getting a $300,000 annual income increase. It seems like this is a really significant reverberation on just how people assess themselves.

Yeah, even a really minor decrease in neuroticism can have a really big benefit for your life and have a lot of benefits for your mental health. This is why people spend so much time in therapy and get on SSRIs and things like that. Both of those have been shown to decrease neuroticism. So it really is a very popular personality trait that people like to work on.

So how’d you go about it?

For Neuroticism, the technique is really a lot of meditation. It’s really hard to get away from that. People keep wanting me to say something else, but it’s a lot of mindfulness meditation. The other component that I did was gratitude journaling. You can do this exercise where you write a letter to someone in your life that you’re really grateful for, which will inevitably make you just weep hot tears because you’re like “I’m so thankful.” So you can do exercises like that.

But really the day-to-day practice that I did and that people recommend is mindfulness meditation. In particular, a lot of the Buddhist teachings in the mindfulness class that I took were really helpful to me. I think often in the day-to-day of life, I get really wrapped up in these negative thought spirals, and it really helped me have a more realistic way of looking at things that were less negative.

Fascinating. I always love it when you ask “What’s the one simple trick to solving your problem?” It’s always just “Oh, you just have to exercise every day. Oh, you just have to meditate”

I know! Just completely change your life in every way and spend all your time on self-care.

Let’s go through some of the other ones. Definitely Extroversion I think is a really interesting one. Again, you have happy introverts in life. You have happy extroverts in life. You wanted to get more extroverted.

I think I would still identify as an introvert. It’s not like you have to abandon that identity if that’s important to you, but really it’s about: am I getting enough social connection to fill up that bucket in my life? I really was not. I almost reflexively (even before the pandemic) if people would invite me out for a happy hour or something, I would just reflexively say no. Now as a new parent, I’m kicking myself because I’m never going to get to go to happy hour again. I would kill for a happy hour with people. Please come have happy hour with me.

I would just kind of say no because I was like, “Well, I don’t know if it’s going to be that fun. Who all is going to be there?” I was doing these cost-benefit analyses. I found that once I actually forced myself and I was like “Okay, I’m actually going to go out a lot. I’m actually going to socialize. I’m going to do improv. I’m going to go to Sailing Club.” Once I go to these things and do them, I actually do feel happier. I felt better afterward, even if I wasn’t in the mood to go beforehand.

Again, you took some incredibly extreme steps over the course of this. People should consult a doctor before joining an improv group. But you went ahead and did that.

Yeah. Improv was probably the scariest thing for me to try. But it was also the most efficacious, I would say.

Really?

Yeah, because it is such good practice with so many things that bother neurotic, introverted control freaks. It’s basically shattering the pretty little world that you live in, if you’re like me. It’s a completely uncontrolled environment. You don’t get a say over what is said or what happens in improv because it’s all up to other people. It’s a performative thing, which makes me very uncomfortable. I have stage fright. It’s silly, and I have issues being silly. It’s spontaneous. It is very whimsical. It involves really reading other people very closely, moment to moment, which can also be really challenging if you don’t get out much and you are super introverted. So I would say improv just plunges you into figuring out other people all in one go.

Amazing. I want to back out a little bit and talk about this book in the context of your previous book. Can we talk a little bit about the distinction between personality and identity? Your previous book, Weird, really honed in on some of the advantages of being weird, being somewhat different than those around you had. It was interesting in this book because you were pursuing qualities that not necessarily made you less weird necessarily, but also made it easier to plug in with other people at times, right? Obviously, these are different things, but you’re still a very unique person. You still have a fascinating background. I don’t think any part of this book really comes across as you losing anything. It’s interesting to just have this book and it just in perspective of your previous one, just because it seems like it’s an interesting way to perceive working on yourself without changing yourself too fundamentally.

Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I think, honestly, what this helped me to do is to embrace the positive things about being weird or my unusual identity. For people who haven’t read my previous book or don’t know who I am, I am a Russian immigrant and I grew up in West Texas. That element of me was like in this book, Weird, where wrote about other people and how being different from other people around you can be both a source of pain and a source of strength.

I think now I am better able to focus on the source of strength element of this because I am less sensitive by virtue of being less neurotic to the slight microaggressions that you sometimes get if you don’t totally belong in your milieu. A lot of the other people who were “weird” that I interviewed, picked up on.

There’s a scene in the book where I describe going to a bar and the bartender weirdly asked me if I’m always alone. It sent me on this spiral of like, what’s wrong with me? Like why would someone ask me if I’m always alone. That’s so weird. I was like, was my outfit really bad? Do I look like I’m homeless? I just sort of started spiraling, you know, but that kind of thing honestly happens a lot less since I started doing this. I feel like, now, I would respond to that with “Nope, just for the moment” and not think much of it. I don’t know. So it gave me some perspective on my weirdness, I guess.

That’s fascinating. Again, I really enjoyed the book because it talks about a lot of effective ways to change elements of people’s personalities that they might want to adjust. In personality, it just seems like there’s a lot of pseudoscience. There’s a lot of rumors. There are a lot of things that don’t work. What are some of the things that you looked into that never really panned out, or things that aren’t as effective as people might think at changing their personality?

Oh, good question. So for me, for Openness to experiences, a big suggestion is traveling. A lot of the studies on increasing openness suggest that you travel. I definitely have had travel experiences where they’ve totally opened up my mind and I’ve been like “Whoa, man,” and had all these ideas and felt more creative afterward.

But for this book, I went to Lisbon, Portugal, which has completely exploded as a travel destination recently. I really am not kidding when I say that if you walk around the streets of Lisbon, it’s pretty rare to actually hear Portuguese. Mostly, I heard Australians, British people and people from other Western European countries who were like tourists. I was obviously also a tourist, so I’m not saying that it’s wrong to be a tourist or that it’s bad. But there’s something about it that didn’t work on me. I just felt like I was at Disneyland or something. I was like, “Okay, now we’re all going to this church. Now we’re all looking at this thing.” It didn’t feel, I don’t know, I guess very genuine. Whatever the sojourner effect is supposed to be didn’t work on me.

That’s interesting. With the openness to experience element, you wrote a little bit about how there are some people for whom this is just a bolt from the blue. They have an experience, and it permanently changes their personality forever. They’ve been studied a little bit, but that is the exception to the rule in many ways.

Yeah. So there's this guy who wrote this book, Quantum Change, which is a very weird book. He interviewed people who said their personalities did change after some epiphany or something happened. And these epiphanies were really weird. They happened in all sorts of circumstances. Some of them were cleaning their toilets. Some of them were smoking pot or doing whatever. A lot of it was rock bottom type stuff, like “I was an alcoholic” type thing. But that, I would say, is the exception. For the people who I interviewed for this book (who changed their personalities), it was more of a methodical pursuit of something over time. They had to build and build and build towards something rather than just snap, I’m different now.

Interesting. One of the ones that you wrote about, Conscientiousness, You approached somewhat with trepidation because you scored very high on Conscientiousness already, right?

Yes. Yeah.

So it also seems that Conscientiousness is (based on what you just said) one of the harder ones to change. If you have to be conscientious about changing your personality, it’s tough to become more Conscientious, you know?

Yeah, and one thing that really seemed to make the difference for people…I interviewed one woman who really wanted to start a business, but she was not very self-directed, I guess is the best way to put it. She just wasn’t really a natural self-starter, so she didn’t know how to get up and go and do something like that. Then I interviewed another guy who really wanted to go to grad school for psychology, but he got to college without ever having written a paper before, and he never studied. He actually bought a book called How to Make A’s because he did not know how to make A’s. One thing that really made the difference for folks like that who are like “I don’t know what I’m doing” is having a big goal that was really, really important to them. It was like the big project that they were working toward.

What research tells us is that having these personal projects that are really important to you can really inspire personality change when it gets really challenging. Having a good career in academia was just so important to this guy that it didn’t matter to him that he wasn’t really the typical candidate for that thing. For the woman who wanted to start a business, she had ended up in a dead-end job and she really did not want to return to that. So they both had these fires under them. They were like, “I’m going to achieve this thing and it is going to require conscientiousness.” So that is what kept them going.

Yeah, I really identified with that chapter just because (not to talk down a previous version of myself too much) I was occasionally living the dissolute drunken journalist lifestyle. Then, I started writing a daily newsletter and at a certain point, that really does give you a long-term daily obligation that was fairly instrumental to my own Conscientiousness. I really identified with that chapter and those folks who managed to get a specific goal to change them up, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. There was actually another dissolute drunken journalist in that chapter who was actually one of the most remarkable transformations of all the people I talked to. He did, he was drinking so much, like a case of beer a day, basically. Then the pandemic started and he actually didn’t have an obligation. It was a lack of an obligation. He got laid off when the pandemic started and he was like, “Oh, am I just going to drink the pandemic away? I need to have some sort of structure or something that I’m doing that isn’t this.” So that was, weirdly, what clicked for him. It doesn’t always have to be work, but it often is.

I feel like there was this trend for a while: there was a lot of work coming out that was very, very clearly heavily influenced by the pandemic. I do not describe this work as heavily influenced by the pandemic because it’s very clearly very resident beyond simply that era. That being said, the pandemic has come up a lot.

People sometimes just needed a big break, a bolt from the blue, something that shook them out of their daily lives to change up one or more of their personality traits. How much is that a factor in this? I know in your own experience, it came up to some extent. Big life changes come around all the time, it doesn’t have to just be a pandemic, but how do those give us opportunities to change who we are?

Yeah, there’s a lot of interesting research on this actually about how turning points or breaking points can be like a good time to start something new. I know that a lot of people don’t keep their New Year’s resolutions, but it’s actually a good thing to make them. The reason why we pick the first of the year is because it's turning over a new leaf. It’s nice to have those clean breaks sometimes.

I’m not saying that the pandemic was a good thing because it was a nice reset moment for us. But it did play a resetting role for me. It really gave me time to think about what it is that I want and like what’s standing in my way. You do get trapped in your routine — commuting to work, at the office all day, commuting back, now I’m too tired and I don’t want to go back out, I’m just going to sit here and have my wine and watch my TV.

I think just having a break in that routine is what shifted it for me.

Fascinating. There’s one last one that we haven’t really talked too much about: Agreeableness. What did you find with this? Again, this was a category that you didn’t score particularly low on, but you still had a few opportunities to try to shake up your numbers a bit.

Yeah. I think one thing with Agreeableness that I learned is that there’s a lot of room for deepening the connections that you already have. It’s true that I didn’t get out and meet a ton of people, but I also was getting in a lot of fights with my friends. I sometimes found that when I was having conversations, they weren’t very deep or they were surface-y. That would annoy me, then it would make me not want to have any more conversations. One thing that I did that was really helpful for that was go to this conversation workshop in London. This woman, Georgie Nightingale taught us strategies for having deeper and more interesting conversations.

One tip that I will share here is to ask someone what something meant to them. Instead of collecting facts (when you’re asking someone how was your day, how did this go, how did that go, what airline did you take to get here) ask why was that important to you. Or why was that meaningful to you? That will generally lead you into a more interesting tangent. Though, it can be initially a little bit awkward than this is where you’re from, this is what airline you took, this is how many pieces of luggage you packed, the typical third degree we give people.

Got it. All right. I will take that advice — specifically, what did making this book mean to you?

This book made me really happy. I felt like it gave me a reason to break out of some of my habits that I didn’t love. There are some habits that I have kept up. I’m just really glad that I did it before I had a baby.

Yeah. I really enjoyed reading it because it felt very intentional. It was a chance to do work on oneself, but also getting into the data of why this is the way it is. What have you held onto from this process? I know that when you wrote the article in The Atlantic a few years ago, you mentioned that you dropped a few of the habits but what have you still stuck with?

One thing I have stuck with is that I’ve realized that when I am feeling down or depressed or out of sorts, what I should do is actually connect with people and not disconnect. I often thought that I needed more alone time because I’m feeling sad. But actually, what I often need in those moments is more time with other people. That has flipped my approach to a lot of things now where I actually seek out more socializing and more interaction whenever I’m feeling a little bit withdrawn if that makes sense.

That’s really interesting. Is there anything that you tried that you were like, “Oh, this is nice, but I don’t need to be this open to experience.” Is there anything that you dropped off from?

Yeah, there was this thing I did in the Neuroticism chapter that involved noting and noting is very weird. It’s like where you make note of what you’re doing, like thinking, seeing. For example, I’m seeing a red bird or I’m thinking that this is strange or I’m hearing yelling or whatever. I have not kept up with noting. I always found it really weird and hard and I have not been doing it.

That’s interesting. Yeah. I don’t, I don’t think building some dissociation into my day is a good thing for Walter. So I can understand that. Yeah. Again Olga, thank you so much for coming on. I guess I’ll give you just the floor here a little bit. Why don’t you tell folks a little bit about the book, where they can find it and where they can find you?

Yeah. Um, the book is Me, But Better. You can find it wherever books are sold March 11th. I’m Olga Khazan and I have a sub stack under my same name, olgakhazan.substack.com. I also write for The Atlantic and you can find a lot of my writing there.

Yeah. I will just personally say, I really dig the substack. I like your work there a lot. It was really fun to follow some of the work that you were doing on the book from there and definitely strongly endorse it. Also, The Atlantic. Pretty good too. Very good.

Yeah. And The Atlantic is also good!

All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you so much for the kind words and thanks for having me.

Edited by Crystal Wang.

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at [email protected].

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Olivia Walch, author of the brand-new book Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It.

Olivia’s a good friend of mine and I’ve been hearing about her research and her work for years, and now she’s finally got a whole book diving into why ideal sleep is more than just the eight hours number we hear so much about. It’s a delightful book with all sorts of cool insights that can have major impacts on your life and health.

We spoke about the human body's numerous circadian rhythms, why sleep regularity is more important than sleep duration, and why permanent daylight saving time is a bad idea.

Walch can be found at oliviawalch.com and the book can be found wherever books are sold.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Olivia, thank you so much for coming on.

I'm so delighted to be here.

You are the author of the brand-new book Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It. It's a really, really fun book. It covers a lot of the science behind sleep and actually has some pretty surprising stuff in there for folks who are interested in their own sleep health.

You have a really interesting story about how you even fell into being interested in the science behind sleep. You did a sleep study at some point in grad school that changed your life, it sounds like.

Well, you knew me before then. We were in college together.

Each diabolically bad at sleeping.

I would give each of us a failing grade — you maybe a lower grade than me. I was bad, but you were exploring new horizons of bad, like with polyphasic sleep.

I tried it once. It was such a bad idea.

Maybe a D, D-minus. I knew when I went to grad school something had to change. I was not sleeping; I was not making new memories; I was getting sick. I got MRSA in college and I wonder all the time, was it because my immune system was like a frail Cheeto trying to hold the door closed to the germs? But at the time, I thought at college, you have to do everything. You have to be in every club and miss no opportunity for an experience. And I now remember no experiences from that time period.

In grad school, I decided I was going to sleep more. I did, but I didn't actually notice that huge of a difference with fewer things filling my schedule, even though I was sleeping more. It was better, but it wasn't that much better. It took a sleep study in which I had to keep a really regular bedtime and researchers were spying on me. They would know if I didn't, because I was wearing a device, ye olde Jawbone, which is not even a thing anymore. For months, I went to bed at 11:30 every single night.

The changes were so profound. I didn't just instantly fall asleep at 11:30, though that did happen. I got faster, I lost weight, skin conditions cleared up. In every dimension, my life was better. And the thing that had shifted was not really sleep duration, but sleep regularity.

You get at this idea early in the book. There's this very common number that everybody associates with the right thing to do about sleep, which is that you should sleep for eight hours. The book goes the next level deeper, looks at some of the other dimensions of sleep, and it turns out that eight hours is good, that's a good thought to keep in your mind, but it's really the rhythm. What is the conceit here? Why are rhythms important when it comes to this stuff?

Our understanding of sleep health is so fixated on duration that there's a creepypasta on Reddit that goes, "Oh, these Russians were kept awake and they went crazy." The creepypasta has always been funny to me because it's like, "Yeah, and after five days of no sleep, they started eating their own organs." (Spoilers for the Russian sleep experiment creepypasta.) Yet we've kept lots of people up for five days and they don't start eating their organs. We have this conception in our minds that losing sleep duration is going to be really bad. It's not good, but it also doesn't make you self-cannibalize after five days of no sleep.

That definition of sleep health is woefully inadequate. The movement in the sleep field is higher dimensional. There are more things that matter to sleep health. There's this big, long list of things. People say you should think about how many times you wake up in the middle of the night, and you should think about how alert you feel during the day.

All of those are great, but they're not memorable. People don't keep two things in their head, let alone five. I'm trying to get people to keep two, which is duration and regularity, as the latitude and longitude of sleep health. You don't say Madrid and New York are close together just because they have the same latitude; longitude also matters. You shouldn't say somebody who sleeps eight hours a night is healthy if they have horrible regularity. That's a case where they are probably pretty far from health, just like New York and Madrid are pretty far from each other.

A lot of this comes down to circadian rhythms. What are they in your view? What kind of bodily processes are governed by them?

The whole shebang. The problem with circadian rhythms is that their UI is terrible. People talk about the circadian rhythm, but that's not really right because circadian rhythms are plural. Sleep is under the subhead of circadian rhythms, but so is everything else in your body: when you're strongest, when you metabolize food, when your immune system peaks, when you repair DNA. There's this real problem. I think that because circadian rhythms are kind of everything, people just say, "You know, the rhythms." This leads to everyone who doesn't study this all day, every day, walking around having no idea what they are and just thinking it's probably the same thing as sleep.

Your body has an internal clock, and it schedules things according to when it thinks you need to do more or less of them. That clock is set by your light exposure, and in modern life, we get light whenever we want it, which is not particularly traditional or natural.

Circadian rhythms developed as a process because we live on Earth, right? We know there's a certain amount of daylight and when certain things should happen, and we evolved specifically to have a circadian rhythm.

Yes. The circadian rhythm is so tuned to Earth that if you put us on a planet with 28-hour days, we probably wouldn't be able to adjust. We would basically continue to have close to a 24-hour period in our rhythms that would continue, even though the sun on this planet would be up and down at different times. It's baked into us, and it's the case that there's just stuff in your body at some times that isn't there at other times. The hormone melatonin, for example. If I made you spit into a tube right now, you would not have melatonin in your spit.

We're speaking in the middle of the afternoon. It's very, very bright outside.

No melatonin. But 10 hours from now? Different story. The thing to imagine is just a bunch of switches in your body getting flipped on and off depending on the time of day, which has massive implications for health, drug efficacy, how you feel, and people have lost their connection to that. Number one, we can have light whenever we want it, so our rhythms are squished relative to where they otherwise would be. But number two, I think we don't have a great way of talking about rhythmic health, which my book tries to address. I'm sure there's much better I can do and other people can do in the future, but this is my first stab at it.

You get at this inflection point where so much of these functions are the result of, if not tens of thousands, then millions of years of evolutionary processes really locking us into a day/night process. Then you have the emergence of electricity, and a lot of your book reflects on how that's actually changed the way our bodies work, in ways we wouldn't ordinarily expect. What are some of those ways?

I would say signs of rhythms having different effects on your body in the winter versus summer. Any study that reports on those, I'm always very cautious about, because I was involved in a study where we looked at Twitter patterns over the course of the year. We wanted to know if people tweeted differently at different times of the year in a way that reflected the sun and circadian rhythms, and we saw this pretty incredible trend where things seemed to really shift around the spring. Daylight saving time is happening then, the sun is changing, so you think, okay, maybe it's related to the sun.

Then we dug a little more closely into the data and saw that the entire effect was just driven by people going on spring break. You would see that people tweeted later when they were on break because they were sleeping in. The fact that we have light available to us whenever we want it and we're not just sitting around in the dark at 6 p.m. in December with nothing to do means that we're in a sort of perpetual summer. We have light as late as we want, as long as we want, and that's stepping on these natural rhythms that would be emerging in the absence of that light.

The title of the book is Sleep Groove, and sleep groove is actually a thing you talk about quite a bit in the book. It's getting locked into a really strong, robust, resilient rhythm, and there are lots of advantages to having that. What are some of the advantages that you have by having that rhythm, and what are some things that can go wrong if you don't?

I would say you die sooner. This is a brand-new result, that sleep regularity predicts dying better than sleep duration, but it does. Again, this definition of sleep health being how long you sleep would say, okay, shoot for eight hours on average, it doesn't matter when, and you're good.

But if you actually look to see what predicts whether you die, the people who have the worst sleep regularity are highly correlated with dying younger, and it keeps coming out. This is in the last 18 months that connections are coming out between sleep regularity and hypertension, diabetes, mood disorders. The data was all there, but people weren't really looking at sleep regularity. We also didn't have as textured tools for defining sleep regularity as we do now, so that's another reason why it's coming out. But things that can go wrong without sleep regularity are all those bad things I listed.

I should say that those are all correlations. You could say, well, maybe stressed people die earlier, and they're also sleeping irregularly as a sign of their stress. Except we also have studies where you put people on weird light schedules and you can watch a melatonin rhythm that's really robust just go away. They go 24 hours without making melatonin, which is weird. You've basically flattened their rhythm altogether.

The mental image I always have in my mind for modern life is that we've taken rhythms that would be really high and pronounced — like, hey, now's the time to fix your DNA so you don't get cancer. Let's fix all our DNA right now. It's really clear period for fixing DNA — and you've stepped on it. Now it's like, well, I don't know. I guess it's the time to fix DNA? Maybe I'll do a little bit of that.

The science is emerging. I don't want to overstate it, but I think there's a strong theoretical case for why the quashing of circadian amplitude is tied to a lot of bad things. The good thing is that more melatonin means you sleep better, feel better — basically my life after doing that one study.

What's a situation where you have a strong circadian amplitude? A lot of light during the day? How do you get there?

You do the same exact thing every day. I should say, I'm going to speak from a theoretical perspective because a lot of the experiments haven't been run yet. It's my collaborators and me who are calling for amplitude to be the new thing we go after, because sleep regularity is just circadian amplitude wearing glasses and a mustache. They pick up the same thing.

What the theory says will get you the maximum circadian amplitude is to have a super bright day and get tons of daylight during the day, and then have a really, really dark night, and copy and paste that over and over again. That's basically it. I'm always think I should add other things for people to do, but it boils down to that.

One of the challenges why people haven't discovered this on their own is that that's actually really hard to do in practice. Light at night is super fun, and we also have to work, and often work is indoors where there's just not as much sunlight.

It really does seem like a problem of modernity. We've always had a way to illuminate the night, for all intents and purposes, but there's a vast gulf of difference between a candle and an incandescent light bulb, and then there's an even bigger difference between an incandescent light bulb and a full room of fluorescent light. There's been this subtle shift that we didn't notice over time, but our bodies did.

You're speaking my language. This is exactly it: the creeping of light into every aspect of our life. Also, because it literally doesn't have mass, it feels immaterial, right? What, the photons are going to get you?

And I don't think they will on a short time span. You can absolutely have a bad night of sleep. You can absolutely have disrupted sleep. People cross time zones. But it does add up over a lifespan, which is why we see sleep regularity being a better predictor of mortality than sleep duration. If you're highly irregular over your whole life, all these rhythms that would otherwise have been high metabolism, high DNA repair, robust ability to sleep, become flat and crappy and you get an accumulation of risk.

So, a lot of what we've talked about is that there are lots of negative things when you're out of that appropriately phased kind of sleep. There are actually some really good things about being very attuned to that, too. You write in the book about athletics, about medicine. What are some of the ways we can actually gain quite a bit through knowing about this?

By having a better sense of what our circadian time is. Conflict of interest disclosure, I do have a startup that tries to do this, but we'll be able to time drugs so that they're maximally effective and as least toxic as they can be.

People sometimes go, okay, timing drugs as in you take sleep medication before you go to sleep. Sure, okay. But what if there were a drug that sometimes made your tumor shrink and at other times made it grow faster? That's a paper that came out in the last year. People aren't thinking about this. They're thinking about a 10% variation over the course of the day. They're not thinking about how this person's glioblastoma treatment didn't work because they took dexamethasone at the wrong time, and they died months earlier.

I think the simplicity of the idea has started to act as a reason for people to not do it. They think, well, if timing actually mattered, somebody would have figured it out already. I won't be the one who wastes a bunch of time rediscovering what everyone else has. My stance is that we're just beginning to scratch the surface of all the things that can be controlled by timing, and the magnitude of the effects we can see.

Imagine the drug I mentioned that accelerated tumor growth sometimes and squished it at others is standard of care. Everybody gets it with this particular type of brain tumor that it was studied in. Imagine you're testing a new drug and oh, it seems to work in these patients but it doesn't work in these other patients. Must not be a very good drug, so it gets ditched. It could be that that entire efficacy difference was driven by when they were taking this standard-of-care drug that everybody takes according to the clock, according to their body's clock. If you could just control for that, you could get more drugs making it through clinical trials.

You even made a point that there's a good shift happening between notes saying you should take this pill in the morning, you should take the pill at night, and changing that to say you should take this pill after waking up or take this pill before you go to sleep. It's getting better at adequately describing the bodily conditions you should take pharmaceuticals under.

Right. If you're a shift worker, you could be waking up at 3 p.m., for instance, and morning could be the worst time for you. You should take it when you wake up. Then again, if you're a shift worker, your rhythms are so funky that — I might be biased here — you should be using Olivia's cool app to track your circadian rhythms and know when to take all these different things.

But yes, circadian medicine is all about timing your pills before you go to bed or after you wake up. It's also this idea of introducing grooves where we've removed the groove. An example would be that you have a sick kid and you can't feed them, so you put them on total parenteral nutrition, or TPN. They're getting fed through an IV, and the standard for that is to either do it overnight or do it just continuously, 24 hours a day. But if you think about it, if our whole bodies are rhythmic and we expect some things at some times and not at other times, and you're feeding them constantly, that's like being in the light all the time, which we would consider to be torture. If you put somebody in constant light, they are miserable.

These researchers just changed it so they gave TPN only during the day, when the kids are awake and their metabolism is up and running. They were able to leave the hospital on average four days earlier because they weren't being force fed like a foie gras goose overnight. So, it's not just sleep grooves: it's food grooves, it's activity grooves, it's mood grooves, it's all these things. Acknowledging that they're rhythmic will lead to people being healthier.

The medical stuff can get a bit in the weeds, but I thought it was really informative when you talked about U.S. Olympians going to Japan. You reflected on when folks went to Japan and how they trained there. There's actually a lot of performance that was hypothetically not being unlocked because people weren't being attuned to their circadian peaks. Do you want to talk a little about that?

I was reading what people who are Olympians posted on their Instagram, imagining that we were friends. I saw somebody in the weight lifting category be like, "Can't wait to go to Tokyo in two days to compete!" They were fully adjusted or entrained to U.S. time, and they were going to do this trip to Tokyo that was going to massively disrupt their circadian rhythms. Then they were going to compete shortly after landing.

Probably the reason for that is because it's really expensive to go and leave your life for a long period of time, and weight lifting isn't the moneybags, the dollar sign, of Olympic sports. But that probably wasn't the best for optimizing performance, to wait until right before you're supposed to go on and then try and lift something really hugely heavy — though it could have been.

The thing is, when you travel, you get tired and you undergo jet lag because your light exposure is changing, but you also have a circadian rhythm in performance where people tend to do best in the evening. Around 5 or 6 p.m., you're strong and fast and can run far and lift heavy things. If in Japan, you were supposed to compete at 10 a.m., maybe what you want to do is not adjust and be really careful about staying on your old time zone for the first day you're there, so that your body is at 6 p.m. during Japan's local time of 10 a.m.

When it's most suited to compete.

Exactly, to lift a big, heavy thing.

Exciting. You wrote a little about how there are two big peaks for performance over the course of a given day. What are those?

People tend to be alert in the morning, and then they have a second wave of alertness as the day winds down. The way we think about that is that there are two forces that combine to make you feel sleepy: There's how much hunger for sleep you've built up, and then there's your circadian clock basically shaping the gravity. How heavy is gravity for you right now?

In the morning, after you get over this initial wave of grogginess, you have the first wave of alertness and that's because you don't have any hunger for sleep. Imagine you're biking, and you just started biking so you're feeling fresh, you're okay. You haven't accumulated feeling tired from biking. In the middle of the day, though, you have accumulated some fatigue. You've been doing stuff with your brain and the circadian clock is not saying it's a great time to be alert. People often get sleepy in the middle of the day, like you would be sleepy if you'd been biking for four hours.

Then later in the day, the circadian clock comes in and says it's time for you to be awake. You need to get your act together before the sun goes down or you might die. That's like the road you're biking on sloping downward. It becomes easier. It doesn't take as much effort to stay awake; it doesn't take as much effort to pedal. Your circadian clock is like, great, be alert. Do stuff in the latter part of your day up until close to your habitual bedtime, when the road starts to swoop up again.

Then you basically hit the wall of, it's 3 a.m. I want to die. Why am I staying up super late in the year 2009 next to my good friend Walter? What are we doing? You push through that and you get on the other side, and the road starts to slant down again.

It was really cool to see, because this speaks to my experience of being sleep deprived and going over the swing set. It's really cool that circadian rhythm still holds, and that's why you get that second wind in the morning and sleep deprivation madness or whatever you want to call it. You do still see that swing hold even if you get more and more sleep weight accumulating.

Exactly.

I want to talk about some of the studies that you covered, because they're very, very interesting, but I also want to talk about some policy implications. Two things stuck out to me. One was the conversation about daylight saving time and potentially going either permanent DST or permanent standard time. The other one that was super interesting was basically how teenagers react to light and how we set school schedules. What are your insights on those two potential policy questions?

Let's do DST first. This also has horrible UI. Nobody can figure out what they're saying when they talk about DST. So, standard time is brighter mornings, darker evenings. Standard time is what we're on in the winter when everyone's depressed and they're like, "It's 5 p.m. and it's dark. Stupid, stupid DST." That's actually standard time that's causing that. DST is darker mornings, lighter at night. DST is what we're on in the summer when we have lots of light even at 9 p.m. It's really bright at night.

The thing most circadian scientists are going to tell you is that permanent standard time is best, then the current system where we switch, and then the last and least preferable is permanent DST. You might think, okay, but why isn't it just better to not switch? There's this penalty of everyone jet lagging themselves when we wake up an hour earlier or have to stay up an hour later when we do these transitions in the spring and the fall. The reason is because having the light late into the day in the summer, and especially having light in the afternoons and evenings in the winter and really, really dark mornings in the winter, is worse than the jet lag from transitioning. If we did permanent DST, where we have really dark mornings in the winter, it wouldn't just be a couple days of us all feeling jet lagged. It would be this chronic buildup of a messed up groove.

One of the reasons why it's hard for people to concisely say why permanent DST is bad is because it's about rhythmic health. It's been argued, hey, if you want to maximize the amount of hours that we have really bright light during the daytime periods where people are normally awake, DST is really good for that, because you have light until super late. Think about the summer.

But do we want to maximize that?

Exactly, because imagine the case that I alluded to when we were talking about the meal timing thing. If you're in bright light 20 hours a day like people are up in the Arctic, you have bad sleep. It's not because you don't know about blackout curtains; it's because you're not able to adjust to a rhythm that's all bright light, little bit of darkness. What permanent DST does is basically, in the wintertime, it forces a bunch of people to wake up in darkness, or dim light. They then stay in the dark for a really long time, and they get their bright light weighted way on the latter half of their day.

I'm going to go into a long analogy, but I promise I'll bring it back down. Imagine a sidewalk with alternating yellow and black squares, and I give you a yellow shoe and a black shoe. I say, yellow shoe steps on the yellow square, black shoe steps on the black square. If it's well sized to your legs, you could just do that. You're like, awesome, this is great. But then I do something where I basically take the yellow squares and scoot them up into the black squares. Then I have this brownish, crappy blurring of light and dark: yellow, black, and the blur. If I go, "Okay, walk on this," what you have to do is take one big step with one foot and a little step with your other, and you have to repeat that over and over again.

That's basically what DST is doing to you in the winter. If we were to go to that in the winter, you'd wake up in the darkness, but then you'd get light later in the day. It makes it so that your rhythms are thrown off. You wake up with a bunch of melatonin in your body. It's like everybody's popping melatonin pills first thing, if you were to do permanent DST.

If you're sitting here thinking, "I'm not convinced by her arguments around stepping on yellow tiles with yellow shoes and black tiles with black shoes," the most compelling reason is the fact that we literally tried this. We tried DST in the winter. We didn't even make a year. Russia tried it in the last decade — they made it three years and they bailed. People have tried DST in the winter and we all think it sucks. Meanwhile, Arizona has been on standard time all year since the 1960s and they're going strong.

They seem really thrilled with their situation in Arizona.

They're pretty happy. So, moral of the story, the current system would be better than having super dark mornings in the winter, which is what permanent DST would be. But I don't really care that much because I'm so convinced that if we try this again, we'll be like Russia in 2014 and bail. We'll be like us in the '70s and bail. We just need to, as a generation, collectively experience it and realize, oh yeah, this is why DST sucks.

The old knowledge has been lost. We must relearn it.

We'll relearn it and we'll say, no, we're never going to make this mistake again. And then in 50 years, we'll make it again.

People always want the optimization of, I want more sleep. I want eight hours of sleep. I want the most sleep I can possibly get, or I want the most light I can possibly get. It seems like that's a trap. I completely understand why people get into that position, because I like light and I like sleep, but just realistically, if you're seeing how much of this governs the rhythm of lots of different processes that are more sophisticated than just enjoying seeing bright things, it's a real shock to the system.

Human brains are just not wired to think rhythmically. It's like if you're in a math class and you're learning about Fourier series, to go extremely niche, really fast. It's not intuitive. People are wired to think, "More of thing good," and we're just less wired to think, well, it's good at some times and bad at other times.

Very briefly, then, should kids be going to school as early as they currently go to school?

No. At the same time, we also shouldn't make it so late, because what would happen if we made it really late is kids would just stay up later. There are diminishing returns, but now you have kids who are waking up at 5:30. That's absolutely what it would feel like for me to wake up at 3:30. It's cruel to them. There's this idea that, oh, we'll do DST. We'll do permanent DST so we don't have to switch, and then we'll also make school times an hour later.

You've basically just got us back to where we started. You've made it so that they're going to be functionally popping a melatonin pill in the morning, just based on how much more melatonin is in their body when they wake up, and then you're letting them sleep in another hour. You cannot make both of those changes and act like you've changed anything. You at best maintain the status quo. My personal vote is we should do permanent standard time or keep the current system and make it so that schools for kids start later.

The book is full of really, really interesting studies. Some of them are fascinating, recent, breaking studies that, like you mentioned earlier, reveal incredible things about the link between these biorhythms as well as pharmaceuticals and things like that. Some of them, however, are from a more swashbuckling age of discovery, and you cover a lot of really interesting sleep studies from the earliest days of sleep research. Do you have any favorites?

In the book it probably comes across that I am so enamored with these old sleep studies, in part because they really underscore this point that if our definition of sleep health is only duration, it's insufficient. There are a bunch of peer-reviewed papers that went, yeah, this guy said he didn't want to sleep anymore, so he just didn't sleep for a week and we watched him. Actually, that's maybe my favorite. There's this guy who comes into a lab and is like, humans don't need to sleep and I can prove it. And then he just doesn't.

They went, whoa, let him cook?

Yeah, he might be on to something. In the paper, they're like, we tried to stop him but he said he was going to do it anyway, so we gave him a typewriter to see how bad he got at typing. The answer is, he got so bad at typing so fast that he just went, I can't do this. They didn't make him type anymore because it was too hard for his eyes. He got really snippy. People tend to hallucinate when you keep them up all night. They get paranoid for days and days. But at the same time, he was functioning. He was able to, on the last day of the study, write a vaguely sexist acrostic poem. I have tried to understand this thing. It's confusing, but you get the sense that it's not positive toward women.

The original no-sleep creepypasta.

Seriously. Obviously, I'm glad we don't do studies like this now. We have human subject protections. Why would you need to run the study? They did that in the '30s and '60s, and it was weird. But the data's been out there for so long. The creepypasta levels of sleep deprivation, people can survive. You should not do it. You should absolutely not do it. It's a bad idea. But it's not an instantly fatal thing, like you pulled an all-nighter so watch out.

The punchline is, unfortunately for human brains, which want very rapid feedback and instant gratification, the way to have sleep health is not something acute, like the absence of these all-nighters that are terrible for you, but rather the constant maintenance of healthy rhythms that are on the time scale of weeks, months and years, as opposed to hacks that you can do in one hour of your day.

The book is called Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It. There are so many fascinating things in here, Olivia. Why don't you tell readers a little about where they can find the book and you.

Sleep Groove is a book about the emerging science of sleep regularity and how it matters so much to your overall health, well-being, and how you feel at 3 a.m. in the morning. You probably feel pretty bad; my book will explain why. You can find it where books are sold, including Amazon and your local independent bookseller. There's also an audiobook coming out next month.

Oh, fun. That's great. Thanks so much for coming on, Olivia.

Thanks for having me.

Edited by Susie Stark.

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at [email protected].

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Stephen Follows, author of The Horror Movie Report.

Stephen and I go back a ways, he’s a pop culture data journalist I really respect and you’ve seen him in the newsletter lately based on his great work on stuff like Hallmark movies. He’s out with a really fun new book diving into horror movies, one of the more exciting genres in the film industry these days.

We spoke about the rise of horror as a genre, its unique relationship with audiences, and how certain trends have evolved over time.

Follows can be found at his website, and the book can be found at HorrorMovieReport.com.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Stephen, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for inviting me. It's always a joy to have a chat with a fellow nerd who likes to go as deep as we do on this stuff.

You have this really interesting new book out called The Horror Movie Report: The Ultimate Data Analysis of Horror Films. This thing's amazing. We're going to get into it. But before we dive in, I'd love to start off by hearing about how you'd describe the work you do. Can you tell folks a little about your history as a writer, blogger and analyst?

Definitely. I kind of came to this in a strange way. I always knew I wanted to do film and thinking, but I didn't know what that meant. I was a teenager, and everyone told me to go and study thinking, study science and do film on the side. So I did the opposite, because I'm a contrarian. I went to film school and went down a path of writer/producer, and I set up a production company. It still runs, but is now doing more advertising for the charity sector in the UK.

I'm still involved with that, but it meant that as my stuff moved away from film, I missed being connected to the film industry. I started to use my thinking principles and maybe 15 years ago I started studying film through the lens of data. I have no training in data. I stopped studying math at about 15, but I have an aptitude for it, and I enjoy it. Not many people do in film. I thought, oh, this is fun. This is a place for me. I started blogging about that, and some in the film industry like it. Not many people run away to do the accounts for the circus. It's nice to have a place.

Then that evolved. I've done stuff within gender and other forms of inequality, and things within business to help filmmakers' profitability — but also crazy things, like looking at which Bond film mentions its own title most frequently in the dialogue. Which I don't think you're going to guess.

GoldenEye is my only guess.

It's a good guess, and you're on the right path, but it's the wrong answer. The answer is Moonraker. You were right to think object instead of character.

But that led me on, and I now work for Guinness World Records as a side gig, finding out movie records. That's the sum total of 20 years of numbers and film fun.

I love your work. I've always enjoyed your work quite a bit, and I've done a lot of work myself in the pop culture data space and there's not a lot of folks in here. Particularly back in the day, there weren't many folks at all, so it was always really cool to see your stuff. It definitely always got me thinking and is really one-of-a-kind.

That's nice to say. And I agree; I would often think of an idea, or someone would ask me about an idea, and I'd be like, I wonder if anyone's done that. Then I'd Google it and it would either be you, me and I'd forgotten, or no one's done it. That's great. What a privilege to have a space to actually make some progress in.

It's good. Again, I admire your stuff so much, and this is why when you hit me up and mentioned you were working on this project, I was so excited. Horror movies have been one of the biggest success stories of the past couple of years, particularly in the postpandemic box office. They tend to overperform; they tend to get good ROI. We've seen a surge in horror film production and we've seen the market share increase.

Can you talk a little bit about why this is historically anomalous? We've always had horror movies, since the beginning of the invention of the medium, but why are we now seeing a bit of an uptick?

You're absolutely right. It's way more than an uptick. If we were looking at how many horror films were made last year worldwide, it was over 1,500, whereas around 2000, it was 500-something, and in the 1980s it was below 200. It's really transformed. As you said, not only have the raw numbers gone up, but also has the market share. Now about 12 percent of movies are horror films. That's a large percentage.

It's a number of factors. Certainly all genres have grown in raw numbers, because it's easier and cheaper to make a film than ever before. Every device I own has some sort of HD camera on it — you can do it on a doorbell. It's possible to do that. You also have the ubiquity of information. I went to film school in 2001 and there was education from tutors, there were a few hardback books, but that was how you learned how to do stuff. Now there's so much content online telling you amazing stuff from awesome people for free. That has an effect.

But that's across all films. With horror itself, the market share growth is, as you said, the more interesting part of it. There are a few factors. One, we're more accepting that a film is a horror film. A film that we might think of as horror now, if it had been made in the '80s, it might've been pitched as a psychological thriller. There's more acceptance; there's no shame in it. People are like, yeah, it's a horror film, whereas in the past they might not have done.

There's also that generation that grew up with VHS horror films, The Evil Dead generation — and maybe even the generation after that, when it comes to executives — where people have grown up loving horror, but also knowing that it does well. Therefore, if there's no business shame and there's no art shame and there's no personal shame, why not say, yeah, I'm making a horror.

There's still a bit of way to go. The awards are pretty poor for horror, and the trade press doesn't cover it properly. It's still not as fully accepted as other genres, but production-wise and audience-wise, it's really evolved and grown and, in the last 20 years, really matured.

It's so funny that you mentioned the award stuff. I remember when Jamie Lee Curtis won her Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, I thought it was actually really special that she took a moment and shouted out the horror fans. That's a constituency in movies that does not get a lot of shout-outs from award stages, but nevertheless really did keep her in business for a few years.

And it was keeping her in business because it was delivering to audiences. There's no hiding from that. It's the most audience-connected genre, in my opinion.

All my stuff is from raw data and from doing my own research, but sometimes I'll do a bit of Googling around to get a context before or after I do the work. With the awards, I found a few blog articles about how horror does at the Oscars, and all the numbers were wrong. They were all different, and they were different from mine. I was like, what is going on?

It turns out there is a very, very small number of horror films that do well at the Oscars. Most of them are quite questionable horrors, as in, is it a horror or not? Silence of the Lambs. Jaws. Those are two films that IMDB says are not horror films. You can argue either way, and it doesn't matter what my opinion is, but there are a few like that. Or Black Swan, which is very much a horror film, but because it's female led and about a female perspective, people often go, “Ah, it's a psychological thriller,” in a very misogynistic way.

A small number of films that have outperformed have really changed that data. You end up almost immediately talking about existential questions of what horror is. I love that. That's what the data immediately suggests we should chat about.

I want to talk a little more about that audience for horror. You had a stat in here that was really interesting to me about how horror is the only genre where the audiences that actually go to the cinema to watch it are direct reflections of the actual national audience. I know you write about the UK in there, but also in general, one really interesting thing about the cinema is that you do have quote-unquote “four quadrants” for movies. For the most part, you're going to see a gender skew or an age skew in terms of who attends a film. But I'd love to hear you speak to how horror is really one of the most universal genres.

It really is. It's interesting, because as you've mentioned, there are a few different ways we can cut up the data. The one way that horror is not like the population is age. It has the largest percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds. If you split them into the different buckets, as they often do, horror has the lowest percentage of people under 18 and the lowest percentage of people over 45, which is fascinating. It's really condensed within your 20s. However, it's a good gender split, and also crucially, in the UK, they do just the most British thing ever and do stats around social status.

Interesting.

It's a rabbit hole. If ever you're looking for a rabbit hole, Google social status. Everyone's classed into different groups, usually based on the job they do or that their parents did, or whether they went to university — things that are sort of falling apart. But it does mean they put people in different brackets. They do that for all the different audiences because it's part of the cinema business' advertising: They want to know whether to sell Rolex watches or lager. And when you compare it to the UK population, every other genre is posher. To a large degree, things like biographies are unbelievably posher than the average population.

Horror is the one that just reflects the public. Also, almost every genre has a very strong correlation between what critics think of the movie and whether it makes money or not. In almost all genres, it makes sense; if you can make the film better, according to critics, you'll make more money. Horror has little to no correlation — functionally irrelevant correlation. Critics are irrelevant. Horror always gets poor scores from audiences, even, but I think that's because it delivers something different. It still is a film and it still is in the film genre space, but it's the weird cousin that's there delivering because it doesn't have the snootiness. It doesn't have the credibility. It only has the fact that it delivers, so when it does deliver, it does stunningly well. And the audience has a different criteria for what they'll put up with, whether they'll tolerate junkie effects or a bad idea or bad acting. I love that. It has its own identity.

I love it, too. I'm glad that you mentioned that, because when I was doing my book, I was really interested in horror. I'm not good at horror movies; I am very easily scared and I don't have fun during them. I'll see them if I'm dragged to by my husband, but nevertheless, I am a gigantic weenie. There's no personal affection for this genre, but I was obsessed with it because, to your point, the first thing that people start messing around with when a new medium is invented is spooky stuff, right?

When the novel was invented, you were very quickly after that getting stuff like Dracula, or Frankenstein. Once the medium has ossified, you start getting people experimenting with scares. Some of the earliest films that we have, whether it's Nosferatu or things like that, are people trying to spook one another. It's almost like the stuff that came before the dinosaurs.

You're absolutely right. What's fascinating about it is that as soon as there's a new medium, people use it to scare other people, but then they take a long time to acknowledge that. The idea of a horror film as a nomenclature, as a name for it, didn't emerge until the early '30s, when you started to have universal monsters. We had horror films before that, but they didn't call them that. They might be called Gothic. So, there is a very quick move to scare ourselves, but then there's a very slow realization of acceptance, of publicly going, yeah, I don't mind being scared. Which is fascinating, isn't it?

It is. It's so cool, and it's cool seeing it replicate itself. Online, you used to have jump-scare videos as some of the first stuff. Some of the earliest viral videos were that. Even with podcasts, a lot of true crime podcasts are horror podcasts.

One hundred percent.

There's another thing you write about in here that I genuinely just love, which is that there's no link between a filmmaker's experience and the actual profitability of the horror film. This is one of the things that makes this genre so cool, and I'd love to hear your perspective on it and some of the data from it. It's a really approve-yourself kind of genre. A lot of the time, you can show up with a little bit of money and some corn syrup and red food coloring, and they've been really special.

Totally. It is the most accessible genre, partly because it has the lowest cost but also because it doesn't need gatekeepers. It doesn't need stars. It doesn't need visual effects. So it's immediately open to more people, but then on the other end, the audience is also willing to go with something great. They're not going to go, “Well, who made it?” They'll just go, “Ah, that was great.” You're right.

I looked at the correlation between the number of films that someone had made before and the profitability of their films. I looked at it for writers, producers, directors, and exec producers. What we found, when we were looking through this, is that with writers, producers and directors, there's little to no correlation. Really. That's staggering when you think about it, because most horror films do nothing — that's what films do — and if you have a lot of microbudget films, that's 1,500 a year and not all of them making money. But the ones that do make money can do staggeringly well. You would imagine that experience is a factor, but it's not.

Except for the exec producer. There was a correlation, though it's not the strongest. It's not make-or-break. I don't know which way around that is, whether it's exec producers being very good at spotting the right projects, so they become an identifier, or whether they transform the project and therefore become the transformation.

Functionally, it doesn't matter. It's a bit of both: a bit of column A, a bit of column B. The horror producers I've spoken to often say it's a mix of those things, that they're not going to come aboard a bad project. But at the same time, it is about having the right relationships to know how to get distribution or how to retitle it or basically how not to eff up one contract that could ruin everything. Sometimes it is just a steady hand.

If you're making a horror film and you've never done it before, I don't see that as any kind of problem, but maybe have at least one voice who's experienced that you can go to — infrequently, so they don't have to do a huge amount. The exec producer is not on set picking up trash.

It's almost reminiscent of the Roger Corman film school stuff.

Totally. The things that the really experienced person will do are basically, here's the big picture, here are some connections, but the bits the audience is actually going to love if they're given the chance to watch the film — the story, the acting, the moments, the editing, the sound — that's all going to be done by the creatives. And that doesn't matter about your experience.

I remember an interview with Wes Craven a long time ago where they said to him, why are there so many bad horror films? And he said, because they're made by people who don't love horror. I've got to say, that's probably true. You can't make it cynically, but if you make it with your passion and heart, you have a good chance. Make a Western or a sports movie with your heart and you're not getting the money back. But if you make a horror film with your heart, there's a chance. I'm not saying there's a big one, but there's a route to success and establishment and franchise and all that.

Sam Raimi very notoriously tread that path. Even folks like James Cameron. It's interesting to look at filmmakers who really did make their bones by being very passionate about a horror film and getting it done and learning something very cool.

The Terminator might be a horror film. I don't know. It certainly doesn't have the money to be what Terminator 2 is, which is solid action.

Absolutely.

It's not really sci-fi; there's a bit of sci-fi in it, but it's just a man. It's too cheap to have any of the expensive things you'd expect. It's a torment film, or maybe even a slasher, almost. There is an infamous killer.

There's another element on this that I wanted to bring up, which is that you have this really cool stat about horror films and shot length. You were able to compare them to other mediums, and horror films just have so much more room to breathe. Can you speak to that?

Before I study something, I tend to have a preconception of what it's going to be, which you can't help because you're around. But what I love is that I'm sometimes completely thrown off-kilter. Then I'm forced to go back and be like, what happened there? Why was I wrong? Is my data wrong? Because, as you know, sometimes when you find that anomalous result, you have to double check or even triple check it.

This was one of those things. What I found when I was looking at this was that, unsurprisingly, action and sci-fi films had the shortest shot lengths of about four seconds on average, or something like that. That's short, and that's the whole movie. That was across all films. Drama had the second highest, and it was something like 12, 13, 14 seconds — I can't remember, I don't have it in front of me. But horror was 16 seconds on average per shot.

That's a long time. And that's an average. First of all, I thought it was an error and I went through it, but no, this is true. Then I thought about it, and of course it makes perfect sense, because horror is about what you can't see. It's about the lack of control. Action is about sound and fury and it's a firework show. You don't really need to know what's going on; you're just excited to be involved. Whereas horror is like, no, you're going to sit there and you can't see what's behind that thing. Or the reverse, which is that you can see it's approaching whoever's on screen, and they're getting closer. No, you can't look away. No, you can't warn them. It's about the control of the image.

It might be one of the quintessential genres for film. You watch some films and go, eh, I should have read the book. But with horror, it's not on the page. You have to have the required elements, but it's made on the screen and it's made in the moment of the interaction between the screen and the audience. That's what shot length does. It's control. It's awesome.

It is. You also think about Hitchcock movies, where there's an absolute control of the camera. That got boiled out of a lot of dramatic filmmaking and a lot of action-thriller filmmaking, but it's still there in horror because it still does something to us. That's an amazing stat. I like it a lot.

It speaks to the medium. It's not a play that's been filmed, which is what drama can be sometimes. It's used entirely differently than in drama, where the camera's just rolling so you capture it. In horror, and in a good horror especially, it's being used by a craftsperson to paint a picture, to force you to feel. That's the bit that horror fans like: the strapping into the rollercoaster. Make me think I'm going to die, you know? That's it.

I want to talk a little about content. You're able to do some really awesome content analysis on this stuff, and there are a couple different angles that you've tackled in the book. Some are about the kinds of monsters we see on screen. There was a cool stat in here about aquatic-based monsters and the rise of water as a medium of fear, which I'd love for you to speak to, but what are some of the monster stats that popped out at you? What are some of the things hunting us now that have evolved over time?

Well, let's be clear. They're not actually hunting us; this is movies. It's so funny, because sometimes I have reflected and thought, oh my god, the world is — oh, no, these are the stories we're telling ourselves about ourselves.

I did see a parallel between serial killers on screen and serial killers in the real world. That was one of the things I found. I was looking at serial killers in the graph over time, and there's a big peak in the '80s, and then I showed it to one of my colleagues at Guinness World Records. They nerd-sniped me and went, “I wonder if that correlates with the real world.” And I was like, well now I have to go and have a look, don't I? Thanks. I thought I was done with this topic.

Going back to your monsters, it's interesting. Monster horror movies are two subgenres: There are horror movies, and then there are ones that have to do with monsters. Within that, I classified the monsters where they were flying, aquatic or land-based mammals. There are other bits around the edges, but this has to do with monsters rather than little creatures. I found that the land-based category is the biggest, but has been declining quite quickly over the last two or three decades. Shooting up almost out of nowhere — well, out of the ocean — are aquatic monsters. It's such a clear trend. It's definitely happening. Because I'm looking at decades, and the whole report looks over 27,000 films — not all monster films, but still, monsters is a big genre. So, this isn't an anomaly of the data of just two films.

I've got two theories, but they are only theories. This is what I love about this data stuff: I'll do the data stuff, I'll present it to you objectively, and then we'll all sit around over a drink or some food and disagree about the why. My current two thoughts are, one, that environmentalism has changed what we think of as villains and what's unknown. It's changing our understanding of monsters and nature, and the ocean is more unknown. But two, a more practical answer came from a producer friend of mine. I was talking to her about this and she said it was quite expensive to make an aquatic monster without visual effects.

What were the monsters you could have in, say, the 20th century? For most of the 20th century, it was a bloke in a suit, or it was ants on a small model. That's it, right? It looks cool, but it is a certain kind of thing, and water doesn't scale. You can't have a miniature because it just looks different. Water is incredibly complex from a visual effects point of view, as well as the way the beings move. If you put a guy in a suit and put him underwater, he's going to drown, because that suit's heavy. But you're freed up in the 21st century to use more visual effects. More are freely available, so now we can live out our aquatic dreams — and nightmares. And, because we haven't for most of history, there's loads more space. There are plenty of more dangerous fish in the sea.

Those are my two working theories, but I have no idea. I would happily talk with people about it for hours, because it doesn't matter. That's what I like about this. This isn't instructive. It's not like we must figure this out because it's going to change what people invest in or anything. No, let's just have some fun and talk about movies.

There's that scene in Ed Wood where they're like, all right, Bill, just get in there and flail.

Exactly.

The tech has got to be a part of it. I also thought it was really fun to dive into some of the stuff you had about clowns, because we are in the week where Terrifier is a box office champion. Unforeseeable, unless you potentially foresaw it.

Well, it's at least the third in the series, so there's a certain amount of success that's gone on before. But I don't think anyone expected Terrifier 3 to do the kind of business it's done and Joker 2 not to. Those two coming out a few weeks apart have had such different journeys that it's quite dramatic.

Terrifier 3 has done exactly what good horror films do. They've got a very clear idea that's been tested before and gone big on it. They know what they're delivering to their audience, which is shock. They've also got a great advertising campaign. From what I understand, from what I've read around, they did test screenings in some cinemas where they didn't tell the audience what they were going to watch. They were like, “It's a holiday film!” and then showed this grotesque film. Lots of people walked out. Some people threw up, apparently. Then, with the remaining people that stayed, they did the piece to camera afterward. Like, “What did you think of the movie?” But loads of people walked out. The viral marketing is spot-on.

Clowns weren't a big feature of horror films until about the 2010s, when we started to see them creep up to 1 percent of films, which is quite a lot. I'm not that bothered either way by clowns. I certainly don't think they're fun, but I'm not terrified of them. In reading around, I found a study — I don't have it in front of me, so I can't quote it exactly — that they did on the fear of clowns. It was across many, many people across multiple countries, and they found that over half of people reported some fear of clowns. So I think clowns are inherently scary, and most people, like me, are ambivalent. Someone will get a clown for a kid's birthday party, and I'll go, oh, okay. Whereas some people are actually like, why?

That's also what horror is supposed to do, right? Horror is supposed to take something that you feel is safe and make it unsafe, but then in playing out the unsafe, you'll have exorcised the demon that worried you. Therefore you now feel safe, perhaps, because your body thinks you've played with that demon. You've played with that thought.

I don't know. It'll die down, it'll get tired and something else will come along. I can't even think what the next thing is. Probably an IT engineer, or something that doesn't feel scary. Though, mind you, you'd have to call that “IT,” and they've already done that with clowns.

The SEO on that is quite bad.

We'll work on that together off-pod so we can keep the copyright.

Terrifier is great, though. It's not my kind of film, but they've done such a good job. Everything they've done, they've delivered to their audience, and they've also created a franchise and a character, so they will be making a lot of money. They've earned it, as far as I'm concerned. Not mine, though; not my money.

I thought some of the stuff you wrote in here about survival as an increasing theme in these films was really interesting, which also goes well with what you had about body horror films and infection as a prominent way we deal with that. When the pandemic hit, a lot of films that saw quite a bit of pop were the ones that pertained to this idea of survival during infection and things like that. You had some really interesting, decade-long data.

Before we wrap it up, what are some emerging trends? What are some of the charts that have been going up? As we think about the evolution of this really durable genre, where do you see this stuff going?

You're absolutely right. The pinnacle of infection movies wasn't actually postpandemic, though we'll see what it will be for the rest of the current decade. 28 Days Later might be patient zero for that kind of movie. But you're right. What we saw during the lockdown was that we wanted to find meaning and structure to the narrative that was playing out in our lives. It wasn't coming from the media, and it wasn't coming from the scientists, because we didn't know. So there were films like Contagion that did such a great job.

It's kind of spooky when someone predicts the future. We forget all the ones where they failed to predict the future, or they did a terrible job. Out of however many it was at that point, 20,000 horror films, one of them nailed the future. Mathematicians are rolling their eyes, but at the same time, we're in this emotional experience saying, oh my god. Gwyneth Paltrow went through that, so I can.

But it was interesting, actually. There was a film that was shot before the pandemic called The Pink Cloud, a Brazilian film. It was shot in 2019, but it was then edited and ready just as the pandemic was happening. It was relatively low budget, and it's about a big pink cloud that comes over cities and forces everyone to live in lockdown. It's a film about being in lockdown and it was just coincidence. It's great art, but it was just coincidence. It played at Sundance the year it was not physical — either 2020 or 2021, I can't remember. But it was amazing. The timing was sort of weird, and I think that adds an extra spookiness to it.

Speaking to your point, obviously there are loads of films that talk about lockdown and infection, but not nearly as much as you'd think. We're done with it. “I get enough of that at home,” if you see what I mean. What is interesting in the trends is that, you're right, survival has gone up, but one of the biggest things that's gone down — which I think is really interesting. This is over almost 100 years of content — is how people are thinking about the brain or the mind.

We're seeing fewer films where the brain is being attacked or madness is the cause of the psycho, and we're seeing far more understanding, like maybe they had a bad childhood. I think it's a strong story of mental health moving on from being the thing that you're scared of. You could read Foucault, you could look at 12 monkeys — there are lots of films that have played with this idea of madness and what sanity is. But largely we've moved away from, “He's mad, run away,” to, “He's mad. Let's listen to what he's got to say and try to understand him as a real human being.” That's really interesting. I don't know where that goes, but that's been a very clear trend over almost 100 years of horror films.

That is fascinating. Again, so much of horror is interior-looking. A lot of the things that we're scared of and that are played up are more reflections of our own state of mind and our own fears. If we're not worried about madness being contagious in a Lovecraftian way, that is super interesting.

Exactly. Throughout all of literature and all of art, madness has been fascinating. Up until a certain point, maybe 500 years ago, it was seen as a root to the divine or harmless. Then at some point, when you start having authority figures in certain ways, you need to shut down the anti-voices. It started to become something terrifying that you lock away, like it might be infectious and a problem.

Then, more recently, we start to think about how actually we're all a bit effed up. There are reasons behind this. We can do something about this. It's not mad to go and see a therapist, or a psychotherapist, or whatever it might be. That then speaks to, well, you can't have the motivation of a slasher be that he's mad. It doesn't work; it's just not credible.

You need to have a different origin, and you go one of two ways: You either give a lot more context, like he went through this horrific thing as a kid, or you say it's unknown. It's just unknown. It's a man in a mask. What's terrifying is the lack of knowledge, or it's too much information. Each film takes a different route on that.

All right. This book is really good. It's called The Horror Movie Report, and it looks at all those different ways these movies take and the history of this stuff, which I think is one of the most fascinating things. Horror in general is just such a cool genre.

Stephen, I would love to hear you pitch where folks can find you and where things are going. Tell folks a little about the book and where they can get ahold of it.

Thank you. That's high praise indeed, because you're someone whose work I respect a huge amount. That's really cool. You're someone who actually can find the holes in it.

If you go to HorrorMovieReport.com, you can get there. It's all digital at the moment; I'd love to do a coffee-table book of it, but that will take a bit of time. I've put it out in two editions. One is for film fans, and it's much cheaper, like 20 bucks. That'll give you the 400 pages and all the charts and graphs. If you love horror films, that's enough. If you're a filmmaker or a data geek, you'll want the film professional version, which is only a little bit more. That gives you all the data as spreadsheets, as well as some bonus reports.

I've got different constituencies. Some people just want a pretty graph and then argue about aquatic monsters; others are like, give me the data. So here you go! And by all means, reach out to me if you've read something you want more detail on. I love this stuff, and if you love it, too, we're going to get on. Grab a report, and if you want to reach out, I'm not hard to get hold of.

Terrific. Again, your stuff is always so good. People will know it from the newsletter if they've read it long enough. It's great stuff. Thanks again for coming on, I really appreciate it.

My pleasure. I'm always here. And if anyone listening has a question about the film industry, if you think there's some data out there somewhere but can't bother to do it, someone else will do it — contact me. The best stuff I do comes from readers, the 4 o'clock in the morning ideas, the shower thoughts. Reach out, I promise I'll give it a go.

Amazing. Stephen, have a spooktacular day.

Nice.

Edited by Susie Stark.

If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at [email protected]. 

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzales, coauthors of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, out in paperback this week.

I really loved the book, it dives into what is the main flywheel of mainstream entertainment, for better or for worse, and dives into the fascinating history of the MCU. Whether you're a fan of Marvel movies or just someone living in a world dominated by them, the book is a really interesting look into contemporary filmmaking and the pressures and economics and just simply human scale of these massive operations.

We spoke about Marvel’s journey from underdog to cultural icon, how its moviemaking process has changed over time, and what it was like covering a narrative that was developing in real time.

Robinson and Gonzales can both be found on the podcast Trial by Content, and the book can be found wherever books are sold.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Dave and Joanna, thank you so much for coming on.

GONZALES: Absolutely.

ROBINSON: Thanks for having us.

I really, really love this book. So happy to see it out in paperback. I guess I'll just kick it off with an easy one: What were each of your first experiences with Marvel? How'd you get into this?

ROBINSON: As in the comic books or the films?

Anything.

ROBINSON: Anything at all. Gosh, I think X-Men: The Animated Series was my introduction, back in my infancy. It really got into the world they created, the various characters, their character sets, the trading cards, and then everything spirals out from there. That was my introduction.

GONZALES: Mine was probably with the comics. I might have had some X-Men: The Animated Series in there, but I got much more into the comics around late 1993, early '94, when I happened to buy a Spider-Man issue that was part of “The Trial of Peter Parker.” Suddenly I had questions: Why was Peter Parker on trial? How many different Spider-Man books were there? Because I bought an issue of The Spectacular Spider-Man, but the next part of “The Trial of Peter Parker” was The Amazing Spider-Man.

That led me to get a cubby at my local comic book shop in Louisville, Colorado, which was Time Warp Comics at the time. That was my way in, just being a comic book fan. I also jumped in on one of the longest and mostly considered worst Spider-Man arcs, but loved it. So imagine how good “good” Spider-Man was to me as a child, because I got weaned in on “bad” Spider-Man.

Amazing. One reason I really dug the book is that it's about the MCU, but it's also about Marvel, the history of this entire company, and its very different evolution over time, from the '60s to the period of the '90s. What was it like trying to cover not just a film series, but a big franchise with a lot of moving parts as part of an even bigger company with even more moving parts?

ROBINSON: A good question we asked ourselves was both where to start and where to end, and where to end was a constant, ongoing question mark. I'll let Dave address that. But in terms of where to start, there were certain things we felt we had to backdate, because there were players involved in the major “How did Marvel Studios come to be?” question and you had to know who they were, why they were important, how did we get here and what were the stakes? Being able to loosely explain who's Stan Lee, who's Perlmutter, who's Avi Arad, who are all these people, helped us tell that story without losing the audience entirely by throwing a bunch of new names at them. Dave, what about ending the book?

GONZALES: Oh, ending the book. That was super fun. We started right as Avengers: Endgame was in theaters. I remember seeing Endgame and knowing that Joanna and I were going to work on this, so we started off thinking, what a fantastic hill that Marvel climbed, this interconnected universe with three phases. Everything surely was planned out from the beginning and could only go up from here. The book was originally “The Rise of Marvel Studios,” because we thought surely this was just up and up and up.

Then the pandemic hit — which was very good for us, having to write the book and just sit down and figure out what it was. It also gave us and a lot of sources a pause to regain our footing. As Marvel started rolling out, we tried to peg an end date. I wanted it to be Blade to Blade when we started, but Mahershala Ali's project has still not come out, so that became an impossibility. Then WandaVision premiered and suddenly there was this whole other aspect to the story we were trying to tell. So we wanted to do that and just tried to report things as they went along.

We were blessed and cursed by the year that we published the hardcover, October 2023. As we were turning in the final part of the book in January and February, a whole bunch of Marvel news started breaking. Ike Perlmutter left Disney; Victoria Alonso, who was a big mover and shaker in Marvel Studios, was let go, so we had to report that out; Jonathan Majors went on trial.

It was only in a panic over all those things that I really ended up appreciating what we had done just by thinking of all these topics so thoroughly for several years. Even though we were tacking new endings on, it wasn't that hard to make it feel like it was a whole arc because we were kind of working there anyway. I wouldn't say I'd've enjoyed releasing the first version of this book in one of Marvel's worst financial years and most critical years ever, but I do think it provided an interesting little tie-off or a fascinating ellipses that allowed us to be relevant and, more importantly, in the year 2024, look like we knew exactly what we were talking about in Marvel's rebounds.

That's a really good point. When I met you on tour, a key thing you were getting at was that the idea that Marvel has not had a slump before is naive, and also ahistorical. A fun thing about the book is that you go through all these different eras, and sure, there's an easier story and probably a more polished, corporate story that's ever upward, toward Excelsior, all that crap.

But you really do cover the pits and troughs of this. There was Iron Man 2; there was Thor: The Dark World; there was that period of time between the assorted Spider-Mans. What was that perspective like, particularly as it was coming out and as you were able to talk about the issues in 2023?

ROBINSON: It was important for us, just on a basic journalistic level, to try to tell as much of the story as possible. We're fans of Marvel, of the movies, but as long as I've known Dave, both of us have been people who don't like to feel like we're not being told the whole story. We don't want the PR version of something — we want to know all the messy details as well. And it's not to knock Marvel or have any kind of “gotcha” moment. It's to say, “Okay, they had these various pitfalls, these various problematic people that they were working with, X, Y and Z. Look what they accomplished anyway.” That's the story in broad strokes. It was important for us to be able to acknowledge the stumbles along the way.

When we found ourselves in a 2023 space where everyone was saying Marvel is cooked, or Marvel used to know exactly what it was doing from the beginning and now they're just making it up — no, they were always making it up. They just did it so well, you didn't notice. That gave us a better perspective to be able to say, let's just slow down. We were looking ahead to 2024, saying they're only putting out one movie and two shows next year. If those hit, then you'll start to hear that Marvel's back, baby. Then Deadpool & Wolverine makes a gajillion dollars and Agatha All Along is a pretty solid hit for them.

So I think that “Marvel is over” narrative that was so prevalent a year ago is now the question, “Is Marvel back?” Looking even further forward at the next couple of big projects coming, I think Captain America: Brave New World is going to be a tough one for them. I don't know if that's going to hit the way a lot of people want it to. I think Thunderbolts is going to be hit for them, and I think The Fantastic Four: First Steps is going to be hit for them. They're still getting their bearings, but to your point, it was a bit naive to say they've been nothing but successful and now they've run off a cliff. Dave, what do you think?

GONZALES: It was just a less interesting narrative, ultimately. I actually found myself getting less adversarial the more we learned, especially being a fan when all this started around 2008. There was this idea that Joanna was talking about, which is even a fan perspective today, that if something doesn't work out it's because we've been denied something at some creative step. Like, you know what, screw those guys; we want to do Harrison Ford as Red Hulk instead, or something like that.

But it's not that at all. There are a whole bunch of different drama and production and business problems, and all these things come together to make these gigantic machines of a movie work. It was really important for us to drill down on Marvel Studios and get into those ups and downs, because a lot of times you can try to compare Marvel Studios to something through contrast, through Warner Brothers trying to do it with DC back in the early 2010s. Everybody started trying to launch an interconnected universe from the first movie, but all you could really say is that Marvel's worked and these others didn't. The details of the alchemy are in the tiny stories and little conflicts. That's why I think they were so important to track, be they how movie stars look or how we use CGI to make movie stars look. Tracking that over at Marvel Studios was just as important as how many movies Tony Stark was going to be in.

Can you speak more to how much of this was on the fly? One of my big takeaways from your book was just how much things aren't necessarily set in stone during the production of a movie, and how sometimes one person's smart idea, regardless of where it comes from, can drastically alter what a lot of folks think was written in stone in 2007.

ROBINSON: That idea of “best idea wins” — without ego; best idea from whomsoever — was a prevailing concept at Marvel. Kevin Feige was also this really interesting figure that has no comparison at any other studio. He's head of the studio, a creative producer, a storyteller in his own right and someone who wanted to make movies as a kid and thought he would be a director. He wound up an executive, but he has that storytelling sense. When Marvel was putting out fewer films and TV shows — or no TV shows at all and just a few films a year — the process was, “Go shoot your movie. Bring me, Kevin Feige, back the pieces and I'll tell you what you're missing.” They had this built-in reshoot window where you could go and add scenes where he felt like you hadn't really nailed this character, or cut this action out to bump up the action over here a bit more. They had this rough-drafting process with the master editor being Kevin Feige himself. There's no system like that at any other studio.

That works so well for them, and in doing so, they're able to cement over the cracks and make it all feel like one smooth story that they're telling, because that refining process is built into their filmmaking process. Once the mandate comes from Disney, from Iger on his way out the door, from Chapek in his seat for a while, that they need to compete with Netflix and all these other streaming services, that they need more and more content — then the pace becomes untenable for that revision process that made them so solid in the first place.

You talk about Feige not having an analog. I was really shocked reading the book because there's not even anything recent. You have to go back to Cecil B. DeMille for someone who has that producer, authorial presence. He's really a fascinating figure, and it's a key takeaway from the book that I loved. It really highlights the people who make these movies, not just the corporation. It's actual human beings who do this kind of stuff, often with long continuities. Do you want to speak about some of that?

GONZALES: Definitely. Actually, while you were talking, I was wondering if part of the chip on Zack Snyder's shoulder was because someone at some point told him he was going to be a Kevin Feige and he's been chasing that ever since.

A lot of the Marvel continuity that's been going on is still going on, even after our new chapter. It's been interesting to see how it's developed. It could be that the best idea wins, but then they also have that old school, in-house process where the starting team is very often the same people and has been since phase one. You put together a bullpen of concept artists, so you're constantly using concept art. Not only is that smart from a design standpoint for making a movie, but then you can have those things scanned and it goes directly into making toys. So at the beginning, there's no fight about bringing on these design creatives super early on.

Where we start to see the wear and tear is, as Joanna was saying, with this output increase. All of the pressure starts being put on post-production, which is the place where you can't make more time. The solution is to hire more people, and because of that, the job of keeping things consistent falls to Victoria Alonso.

She does a pretty good job considering that she's working a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week work schedule because the industry is so messed up. It was never built to do stuff like this. In a lot of ways, the way the VFX industry is structured is still from the '90s turn of the century, when you would bid on a number of shots to do and get money for that number of shots. You'd have to work those shots until they get approved by the director. There isn't an extra budget, and there isn't an overtime, which was a fine way to do it when there were three or four VFX shots in every movie. But now that we're in the 200s or some such, there's a natural strain put on that, and it's impossible to budget on the VFX side. They have to underbid because there's a limited amount of work. If Marvel decides they don't like you, as much as a third of your entire year's work can just not come to your company.

As Marvel ages into it, we get a lot of people who are able to make their careers there, from Kevin Feige to Mary Livanos, who's doing great things on Agatha and seems really close to being ascendant. We have Brad Winderbaum, who's been made head of streaming now to take some of that pressure off Kevin. You have all these great continuities. You're less likely to see continuities in visual effects artists, just because of how they're going recently. When Joanna and I were interviewing people like ILM for Hulk, occasionally we'd do a person that was in three or four movies. Now, like for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, there was a team of about 12 people at Framestore who make animals look good. They just come in for that movie to make animals look incredibly good. They did it the whole time, but they're not as legacy as other parts of the Marvel development studios — which I hope will change, because there are some people who are really good at making Hulks. And if you've made Hulks for 20 years, shouldn't those be the people that are making Hulks in Brave New World? We'll have to see.

ROBINSON: I love that you mentioned Cecil B. DeMille. As we were putting this whole story together and realizing that they bring all these teams in-house, Dave and our coauthor Gavin and I, we are to varying degrees students of old Hollywood history, and we had this realization that it's just the old Hollywood studio system. You're putting actors under contract for nine movies, all this other stuff, and we felt so smart. Then I was talking to someone who worked at Marvel and they were like, “Oh yeah, Kevin says that all the time.” I was like, oh, I thought we really put something together. But at least we were right! We were consciously doing this.

I think that industrial element of it is really interesting. A key thing that changed the way I see the film industry was realizing that every movie is basically a corporation that briefly exists. Every movie is an entire apparatus, with a CEO operation and departments and all that. Then it folds and you move on to the next one.

With Marvel, though, the circus never closes; it's just onto the next city. It was really interesting to see its place in the industry. Like Dave was saying, the limiting reactant for some of this is just the number of animators on the earth who are capable of making this kind of stuff. It's so cool to get a look inside this apparatus through the book.

ROBINSON: Thank you.

GONZALES: What an apparatus. It's really interesting to me, even now, as we are pending the return of the Russo brothers, who are just able to find this and also find the emotion in it.

In Endgame, the Tony Stark “I am Iron Man” moment was the last insert. They had to go to dinner with Robert Downey Jr. and Joel Silver and have Silver be like, “You'd be dumb not to do it, Robert,” because Downey didn't want to go back there. He's a weird dude, but for him, it felt like in order to get to what he needed to do, he had to take off a scab that had formed and get back into the character. Whereas the Russo brothers are like, we built a workout system and we have our smoothies and every day is trying to make the machine work. Somehow, through the alchemy of those two things, the machine works, and occasionally we get these story moments that feel like they were created individually for that movie.

That, I think, is the mystery that the book is trying to unravel. At the beginning, it's untapped storytelling potential. Everyone's like, if you don't have the X-Men, if you don't have Spider-Man, what do you have? There's so much in just proving that you have good stories. Now that you're the biggest game in town, that idea of, “Are you going to make me feel anything?” is so much different than what the initial promise was, that they're going to bring Thanos to the screen and you're going to understand who he is and what he wants. That was the big lift. Now there's a whole simultaneous saving of the industry, and bestowing status on different actors. There's just so much more mixed up in it now. It's amazing we got where we did.

The book is also a really interesting look at the transition from being a super underdog. As you describe in the earliest chapters of the book, Marvel was bankrupt, and all the executives were folks who fell out of the toy industry or Revlon. The folks who were in charge came to it in the manner of somebody accidentally having to join a carnival, and then eventually it becomes the hegemonic juggernaut of everything, in many ways the thing that people stand against. In the book, watching the perception around it change and then internally having to adapt to that change in perception was a really cool tension.

ROBINSON: My favorite indicator of that underdog status versus top-of-the-world status versus wherever we are now is the making of the first Iron Man movie. Marvel Entertainment in New York — who was, to your point, chiefly concerned with merchandising and toys — had the attitude, “Okay, go make your cute little movie. If it doesn't cost us any money, you can go do your little cinematic experiment in Hollywood and we don't really care that much. Just make sure you don't spend any of our money. Other than that, go have fun.”

And they make Iron Man, and Iron Man is a massive, smash hit, and all of a sudden the people in New York are like, we're forming something called the Creative Committee. We would like a lot of intake. We want to be part of this. This is the big shiny thing, and everyone wants to weigh in on it. So it's really interesting to track this going from a weird little project they were doing out in Los Angeles to The Thing for Marvel. You can track it by who needs to have an opinion about what and when they start to care.

GONZALES: One of my favorite moments — it's after the book chapter “Marvel vs. the Creative Committee” — is when Kevin Feige gets on stage himself to unveil the entirety of phase three, which includes Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War and everything. That is such a telling moment for me. He had just won his battles with these behind the scenes. He's fully in full control. Black Panther is coming. Joss Whedon is in the edits for Avengers: Age of Ultron, in the audience, but they already know he's not coming back.

There was a version of a chapter in the book that was just me going through that and being like, here's why each one of these announcements is like Kevin Feige spiking a football in the face of someone that told him he couldn't do it. That's still the purest creative energy I've seen. “We could finally do it!” burst out of Marvel. I think they've been more reserved since, even with some big announcements, but I like to go back and look at that just to see the pivot point when Marvel was the underdog. It was like, we want Black Panther, we want Captain Marvel, but the studio won't let us do it. Then Kevin Feige gets up and goes, “Here are the next 10 years of your life.” It's just such a joyous moment.

ROBINSON: We love that moment. We talked to people behind the scenes who were working at Marvel at the time about it, and there's a reason that whole presentation wasn't at a Comic-Con. It wasn't at D23. It was its own thing at the El Capitan Theater in Los Angeles, and internally, they jokingly called it Kevin-Con. It was this whole thing, and part of it was that they weren't ready to announce certain things at Comic-Con.

But part of it was this moment for Feige who fought various personalities across the various companies to get control of the narrative. And I agree, Endgame is of course in all of history going to be looked at as the pinnacle of achievement at Marvel. But I actually think it might be Kevin-Con at the El Capitan Theater, when Chadwick Boseman comes out and Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans are there to anoint him as the future of the franchise. That, of course, comes with its own terrible poignancy. We were really lucky to talk to Chadwick Boseman for the book before he passed away. These were things that happened while we were writing the book. History was constantly happening as we were trying to frame this entire narrative.

If there's a protagonist in the book, it feels like it's Kevin, even in the earliest days when he was advising on the Fox products. Having read the book and then seen Deadpool & Wolverine — which, as you mentioned, went on to become a phenomenal financial success — it was really cool to come away with a little more admiration for the role that Kevin had in some of the Fox properties. Seeing that manifest in the MCU was just really nice.

ROBINSON: I love that he got to have his Wolverine story, given that it all starts with him in a trailer with Hugh Jackman saying it needs to be bigger, it needs to be bigger, it needs to be bigger. I love that.

GONZALES: I don't even know if it's still called that, but Joanna used to call that the “Feige fix-it.” Instead of developing these things by always going forward and introducing younger Avengers, he's actually much more interested in reaching back. There were good things there. Or, I guess the generous way to think about it is rewarding the fans that were around before it was the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like, “You didn't waste your time with X-Men: The Last Stand. I know it might have felt like that occasionally, but here's this. Or Andrew Garfield. Yeah, maybe we treated him badly, but don't worry. You didn't waste your time with that because boom, here it is paying off in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

Initially there was some hesitancy about Marvel homework. Do I need to have seen these things to do these things? But ultimately, if we're just talking dollars and cents, the nostalgia play has made them a billion dollars so many times that it doesn't surprise me that Deadpool & Wolverine is a huge hit just by being a swan song for the Fox movies.

ROBINSON: I was personally incredibly gratified to finally get Channing Tatum as Gambit. That was a very important moment for me.

My favorite version of the Feige fix-it was putting the storyline from Thor: The Dark World into Endgame and making Thor: The Dark World, the most universally mocked and reviled MCU film, an integral part of their biggest triumph. All of a sudden that's wrapped into the larger tapestry in a way so you can't just toss it in the garbage and say, oh, don't bother watching Thor: The Dark World — now you have to watch it to understand everything you're seeing in Endgame, which is certainly not a movie you're ever going to skip.

It's a magic trick that really works and almost shouldn't work as well as it does. But even how they were able to get the Infinity Stones, almost taking elements of the first couple films that were dropped or introduced somewhat randomly and then doing that. It's a trick that they keep on pulling.

GONZALES: Kevin Feige will say this, but we're coming up on 80 years of comic book history, and if there's one thing that comic books do more than any other medium, it's just use the same story. How could you have another angle on this story? They have so much A/B testing on what we like about this character, or what we'll buy about a certain character, it's interesting to see Marvel adapt that along with what sort of story you like on the Hollywood side of it.

But yeah, we're going to see Captain America: Brave New World and finally see that Celestial that came out of the ocean in Eternals. Every Marvel property contributes something, we're told. Except the Inhumans; that never happens.

The book is MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, and it's a fascinating look at the intersection of the humanity behind these movies and the technology of these movies. And if there's one figure that reminds me of that in particular, obviously, one of the most central people in the Marvel universe is Green Steve. Let's talk a little about him before we wrap this one up.

ROBINSON: He's my favorite! Green Steve, a Chippendales dancer that was painted green in order to make sure they understood how the green light on skin would be captured accurately for the Hulk. Green Steve was one of my favorite anecdotes we got, and it was out of the book for a while before we worked it back in. Dave, what do you want to say about Green Steve?

GONZALES: I love Green Steve. I love that this bodybuilder from Long Island can technically say he played the Hulk in a sort of way. In theory, because it's a whole CGI character, he might have played the Hulk close to how much Mark Ruffalo played the Hulk in that first movie. I love that story.

Pretty early on, we brought in Gavin Edwards, our third author, to help us do a book, since Joanna and I had never done a book before. We were starting to put together the notes and I was like, can we please have a mid-credits scene? Can we just have a chapter in the middle of the notes?

ROBINSON: That was Dave.

GONZALES: I held onto that for as long as possible. I remember in one of the final meetings after we turned in the draft, we pitched it up to the editor and they were like, “That's really fun,” and I thought, oh thank god. That was a really early idea, and Green Steve fits that perfectly; it's a super interesting story that doesn't really belong anywhere else, but will stick in your mind as, Marvel literally tried everything to make the best Hulk. So I'm very happy that it's the mid-credits chapter — and remains the mid-credits chapter! Even when we added another chapter in, we were like, where does this go? Not before Green Steve.

ROBINSON: He's got the final word for sure.

Amazing. The book's out of paperback now. Where can folks find it? Where can they find you? And what's next?

ROBINSON: “All good and evil news agents.” That's what the Empire Magazine folks say. All good and evil bookstores or any online book purveyor is where you can find our book. Dave does a tremendous podcast called Fighting in the War Room, which I love to listen to, so you should listen to that. And together we do a podcast called Trial by Content that y'all should listen to.

GONZALES: Joanna's on a fantastic podcast called the House of R with Mallory Rubin over on The Ringer, where she covers lots of cool pop culture things. If you want to go to a bookstore and don't know exactly which one to go to, you could head to theMCUbook.com. That will forward you to our publisher's website, which has links to your Barnes and Nobles, your Amazons, your Bookshops.org, and will help you track down the book near you. And look for us in a couple more years with something similar.

Thanks for coming on.

ROBINSON: Thanks, Walt.

GONZALES: Thank you.

Edited by Susie Stark.

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at [email protected]. 

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Julia Alexander, digital strategy consultant and author of the new blog Posting Nexus.

Julia’s brilliant, she’s been one of the most insightful and compelling minds on attention — where we allocate it, how we measure that, and what becomes of that — for several years now, and when I learned about this new project I was incredibly excited to get her on a Sunday edition to hear more about what’s got her, well, attention.

We spoke about the incentive structures of the internet, attention as digital currency, and how online trends redefine culture.

Alexander can be found on X and Threads, and the project is Posting Nexus

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Julia Alexander, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you for having me. What an honor.

It’s always great to talk to you. I've been a fan of your work for a long time, and whether it was your independent newsletter or this new thing, it is always really, really fun to talk to you about what people are consuming and watching and reading and seeing.

Thank you, I appreciate it.

I wanted to talk about Posting Nexus. It’s a new project that you are launching and it is a really fascinating dive into attention and essentially how it has become commoditized, how we use it on the internet, and where it goes. Just to back out a bit, can you tell me a little about why you wanted to go in this direction and start this thing up?

Posting Nexus came out of this obsession I have with understanding why people do what they do on the internet and how that affects what they do or don't do off the internet. I now work at Disney, and we won’t get into any of that, unfortunately, but a large part of my career was spent looking at the development of the streaming industry and the reality that people's attention was moving away from these closed-circuit traditional distributors to more open-circuit digital distributors who were operating at a pace that was almost relentless, and that was in large part because the attention we gave to digital services was relentless. When I moved into Disney, it didn't stop me thinking a lot about why people do things, where they give attention, and what they want out of attention.

So, I decided to launch Posting Nexus, which is me and a few friends who are doing this, edited by the brilliant Allegra Frank until someone very smartly hires her full time. As I say in the intro, it's not a newsletter, it's not a blog, it's kind of just a harbor for thoughts about a lot of this stuff. It really came out of this idea that you can boil down a lot of what people want and where they decide to give their attention into a matrix that I call the IPA matrix, which has nothing to do with beer. It has everything to do with identity, platforms and attention, and when you take those three circles and you put them into a Venn diagram, you get incentive structures and quite often hidden incentive structures. These exist for both the bottom up, so that's us doing things on the internet, and the top down, which are these massive conglomerates who build things on the internet.

A great example would be when we look at something like Barbenheimer, which was effectively just an offline manifestation of online attention. Part of the reason that movie did as well as it did is because it leaned into the idea that my identity, which is formed by my interests and the platforms where I socialize, where I'm getting my social capital, and the attention that I receive for participating in this culture then create an incentive structure for me to go out and participate in something in order to post.

My general theory on a lot of the tension now is that you give attention in order to receive attention, and through the democratization of a lot of the stuff that we do, we've made it much easier to receive attention by giving attention. I think that constant focus on receiving attention by giving attention leads to this kind of posting nexus.

I am very interested in this, just as you are, and our jobs touch on this a bit. You saw it with the technology of film. Charlie Chaplin used to be able to do three shows a night and hit three audiences, and the technology of film made it so that he could be in every cinema in North America, if not further. It seems like what we've had recently is the next advance of that, so now all those audiences within those audiences can entertain each other as well.

It's fundamentally inverted a lot of where we gather our attention from and how we disperse it, to the extent that I think it does terrify some people. I would love your thoughts on how this very unique moment we find ourselves in makes this such a fun topic to go into.

What's really fascinating is that what's underlying this entire structure is the idea that growth is the end state, that growth is the final destination, and if that is the final destination then there’s no real final point. If we think about that in terms of your own life, if you're listening to this, maybe you're a writer and your end point is a book, or you want to write a novel. If you're working within a large company, maybe your end point is CEO or vice president. There actually is an end point.

When we think about the way our lives are constructed, which are intrinsically more digital than they are physical at this point, there is no end point. The numbers on your follower count continue to go up and your value, you as a person, is intrinsically tied to making those numbers go up, which means you create labor for companies effectively for free, right? There's this idea that if you do it enough, some offline benefits will occur. If you're an influencer, maybe you'll get a free trip to Rome; if you’re a poet, maybe you'll get a book deal out of it. There’s this incentive to continue creating free labor for these conglomerates.

But if you're the conglomerate — and this is what I like to spend a lot of time on in Posting Nexus. It's not just why we do what we do, it’s how are we incentivized by companies that are then incentivized by their own ambitions. If you look at what they've started to realize, it’s that they've run out of space to grow, and by space I mean they've literally run out of people. They cannot reach any more people than they're going to reach. If the planet is the best example of finiteness, that's where they are, but they’re designed to incentivize growth, so what do they do?

If you're on Instagram, all of a sudden you're posting photos, but have you thought about posting a video on this new form of entertainment called Reels? If you’re on YouTube, it's Shorts, and if you are an Uber customer because you love taking cars somewhere, have you considered getting your food via Uber? It's finding different ways to capture more slices of pie within someone's attention based on the necessities of their life.

Getting into the mixture of business strategy and cognitive behavioral reasoning really starts to help us illustrate why we do what we do on the internet. What I want to do with Posting Nexus quite a bit, and maybe this is going to sound a little naive or a little childish, but I want to figure out a way for us to build a better internet that we understand.

If we know that we do this for Facebook, that might not stop us from posting because we like to connect with our friends. Or on Twitter, I like to post to get likes because I am also addicted to the dopamine rush from when we do those things. But if we intrinsically understand that what we're doing is operating within this growth state and we want to get to a steady state where actually just the right level of attention and just the right level of input is going to provide a much happier and a much more mentally healthy lifestyle, how do we get there by working on what we can do and what we can control versus what we can't do?

I want to dive into so much from there, just because you hit on something really interesting that got me thinking. There are basically 330 million Americans and there are 24 hours in a day, so that’s essentially 8 billion hours that you can have from America. That is the total addressable American time.

I think what you’re getting at is that we are brushing up on that; there’s a point at which growth really can maximize. Let’s say you’ve got 2 billion hours for sleep in the aggregate, and another 4 billion hours for work.

We are getting to the total addressable market of American time if we really think that growth is the only way to go about it. I would love for you to speak more to that element of it, because that was really interesting.

I think about this joke from a few years ago that you'll remember. The prompt for the joke is that at one point, Netflix's former CEO, Reed Hastings, said “Our only competition is sleep,” and then a few years later, the Pokémon company came out with Pokémon Sleep. All of a sudden it was like, well, Pokémon figured out how to beat sleep. The eight hours a day you actually don't have my attention, finally they figured out a way to get into it.

It almost feels matrix-y, right? It feels very dystopian.

The thing about growth is that we don't talk a lot about cost. A great example of this comes from this great economist, Herman Daly, who died in 2022. He pointed out that GDP is a really weird factor of just looking at the economic value of a country. It’s the growth of product, and when we look at the growth of product, it's been 50 times what it was 50, 60 years ago — in large part because of private companies, because of Reagan economics, you can get into a whole economic debate about it. We don't talk about the cost, both of resources and of time and health that go into creating that product. And if we look at the cost, actually, is it a net benefit or is it a net consequence?

Attention by nature plays on two core strings: It plays on how I view myself and my value, which is then the attention I want, and it plays into where I know I can get that attention, and right now that's platforms. It used to be that your growth was in a very limited base. Your growth was in a group of friends, at a company, maybe on your soccer team. There was a very limited group where you had tangible benefit or tangible consequence. Both are good, depending on the attention you sought out.

When we add in platforms and the ability to go and seek that out, tie what you know works to your identity, and take in all of this dopamine as well as all of this increased anxiety, when we have that playing out the same time you see third-party spaces disappear so people are not spending as much time with each other in real life, what you get is this growth that’s going to end in total, not just disruption, but total destruction for a lot of people. You cannot keep going this way. It used to be, to your point exactly, Walt, that you would stop for eight hours to sleep, and now you stop for six hours to sleep. Or you would go to bed with a book and now instead you go to bed with your Twitter feed.

We haven't given ourselves a chance to recover from the trauma of the last decade, especially the last five years. We've been running nonstop ever since basically the invention of the internet, but really the launch of the app store. We’ve been in this moment for the last 15, 16 years, and at some point, the speed we’re running at — the necessity for growth, which is just finding ways to take more of your attention, more of your free labor, and create something out of that and ask you to keep sticking with companies — is going to run out.

What I really want to try and figure out with Posting Nexus is where is the health, the net benefit? The net benefit is socialization, it's communication, it's connectivity. That is a net benefit. It’s entertainment — entertainment is a net connectivity. We have more democratization of creators, which means we have more voices, which means we have more points of view. That's a net positive.

It was a net positive for publishing back in 2010. You were getting stories on maybe Gawker or HuffPost or BuzzFeed that you were not going to get in The New York Times. It didn't mean that one was less valuable; it just meant there was a different POV that the democratization of publishing allowed for. But at some point when everyone had an opinion, when everybody was publishing and Google didn't know how to rank it, you lost authority and you got more disinformation. That became a really bad thing.

With Posting Nexus, the underlying point is that we have such finite attention to give, even though it's sold to us as an infinite level of attention. We have a finite level of attention we can receive, even though we’re told it's an infinite level of attention, and if we keep striving for growth, growth, growth, eventually you create a world that is unsustainable. With Posting Nexus, it's effectively an equation: How much can you do for net positive before you do too much and tip over into net consequence?

That's such a good point, that from the perspective of the companies, they're arguing that growth could continue indefinitely. We can always make more money, but time is definitionally the one thing that you can't make more of.

That’s the thing with Posting Nexus that’s really fun. For people who might not know my background, I started as a blogger for Vox Media, Polygon, The Verge, and then I went into being a strategy consultant, which was great.

Recently, I wrote for a publication called Puck and there was a column dedicated to streaming, what was happening with streaming, and trends that were happening with streaming, which was, to your point, effectively an attention story. It was “YouTube is taking attention away,” that kind of story.

What I've missed is this idea of being able to have thoughts longer than a tweet and put them somewhere. For example, we've got a bunch of really interesting stories coming out with Posting Nexus. We're looking at the value of The New York Times in 2024, kind of tied around a lot of the Biden coverage before he stepped down. We've got things on decreases in posting and how social media platforms turn into entertainment platforms and what does that mean for how we approach them.

We also have really funny things, like a piece on how J.D. Vance as the first main character candidate was always going to happen because he’s the first VP candidate ever who has an online history, like in terms of actually posting when he was 20. That's something we've only really seen with influencers over the last decade, and seeing how they've gone through it gets us to this moment where we can inevitably see where Vance goes.

So we've got a lot of really fun stuff, but it all plays into this idea that we give our attention to things and our attention rewards through monetary incentives. Both Walt and I have worked in digital media, and when you give the attention to people, it then gives them a monetization pathway, and that’s the number one incentive structure. If we think about how we give attention, how we then better focus that attention on something where we know the end result actually is a fiscal reward for a lot of companies or creators, how does that change the way we operate on the internet? And how does it change the way we want to receive some of those benefits, if that's something we want to do?

We're getting into a world where your level of posting is the only growth that people have left to chase. This is all these companies have: that you're spending your time consuming Instagram stories. We need you to post in DMs because we know that's where you're spending time because the future of the internet is much smaller. We need you to create a post in a DM that steals from a post that's in your feed in order for us to then serve your data. There's all of that. People intrinsically know this.

The New York Times? Our mutual friend, Ryan Broderick. Casey Newton, who writes Platformer. They are very good at writing about this. What I want to get at is the underlying incentive structures that we don't always talk about that are inherently tied to everything you do. If we break that apart, both from a strategic standpoint and a psychological standpoint, how do we better understand the internet that we are helping to create?

This has reminded me of genuinely one of the first conversations that we had, which was us talking about Wattpad. A few weeks ago they IPO'd, and I think they still remain an incredibly interesting company. It just grounds some of these headier ideas we're talking about. Wattpad is a good example of a company that became a very wealthy company and a very valuable company because of the broad, dispersed labor of a lot of other people.

Wattpad is a great example. I will say in full transparency, I do own shares in Wattpad. I went in when they were public, and this is not financial advice. I think those are the two disclaimers I have to have.

Wattpad’s very interesting. Wattpad — which is now Webtoon. They merged with a South Korean online comic company a few years ago — existed as a place where people could go and upload their fiction, often a lot of fan fiction. You had 14-year-olds writing stories for other people on the internet. What was interesting about Wattpad was that when it started around 2010, it was one of the first mobile app success stories. It worked because of the iPhone and Androids.

You had people who'd go on and they would read their little stories and they would follow creators, but there was no actual financial incentive because you weren't paying the creators. The incentive was building a follower base. You had a lot of people at 14 who tended to be the audience for Wattpad, especially 14-year-old girls who were dealing with a lot of self-negativity in their real life, because they're teenagers coming of age in the time of Tumblr and Instagram and there's a lot of self-negativity on those platforms for young teenage girls.

This was an opportunity where they could share their very specific, niche interests. They could write fan fiction about One Direction, or they could write fan fiction about their favorite anime, and they can write their short stories and have a really solid community of people — like LiveJournal for us — come out and say, “This is really great. You're talented, we'd love to continue reading.” And you could see your success and that attention you're receiving grow literally in the number of followers you had. It became this wholesome space away from the internet in a different way.

I can't remember exactly the year they did this, but then Wattpad starts introducing financial incentives. There's this idea that you can charge for chapters as you're releasing them and people can subscribe to you for early access. As Wattpad continues to develop and they realize there's this really strong audience of content creators who are creating pretty well-thought-out content that would make for really good movies and TV series, Wattpad then launches its film division and says, we want to work with creators on this platform and bring their work to Sony Pictures, to Netflix, to Disney. We want to get them books.

So you have movies like To All the Boys I Loved Before and that genre, which did not start on Wattpad, or you had After, which did start on Wattpad, and you had all these movies coming out that were gaining a larger audience. These authors then create a cycle of further posting, right? Because now people are saying, I can do that. I have access to Wattpad. I think I'm a good writer. And you see, which we've seen over and over again, how it goes from 1,000 subscribers to 10,000 to 10 million to 100 million users who are all posting in an effort to get attention.

What's really interesting is how we define the value of that attention, because it used to be that the value of attention on the platform when people first started was from other 14- or 15-year-olds. It was a very peer-to-peer situation. It was, you are writing for someone like me.

Now that value is defined by a Netflix executive in their 50s who says, I really think there are 14-year-old girls who would like this type of movie. That's really popular on the site, so we're going to work with Wattpad. The value has now become entirely backed by a financial reward. And if it's not backed by a financial reward, it’s still within the follower count. What you get now is this company who — again, I bought shares in it — I think has a really strong business operation, because you have an endless supply of content coming in. You only need to pick a handful of titles that you think will appeal to these larger companies, and then you work with the author on getting them into this three-picture deal with Netflix.

All of a sudden you’re in between a very traditional world of moviemaking and television series, and you have this constant supply of free ideas and free content coming in that you technically can own the rights to if you work with a creator. No 17-year-old writer at this point is going to say no to having a movie on Netflix. So you get into a really interesting constant flow of supply with very high levels of demand that you can then cherry-pick.

The other version of this — which is another company I have shares in, and this is not financial advice, for transparency — is Reddit. Once Google aligned and said, hey, people want more familiar answers when they're searching for “do I have cancer,” Google said, we can just pull from Reddit. It's going to help us with our AI and we can just serve that instead of having to pay The New York Times to have this.

All of a sudden you’re in this world where Reddit becomes the future of the internet because Google is the still the main pathway to the internet. And if you're pulling from Reddit, what does that do to authority? What does that do to the incentive structure to be popular on Reddit? Which for a while was just, did you show authority and knowledge within your own subreddit community? Now it takes on a whole new world.

The business applications of controlling the supply of attention, putting it through a very narrow passage by cherry-picking demand, and how you can sell that demand, is kind of where we're at right now with a lot of these user-generated-content platforms.

I love that. They found a way to sell, or at least monetize, like in Reddit's case, respect and reputation in the form of karma. And with Webtoon, I was shocked to see that they're like a $2.8 billion company now. There have always been web comics on the internet, but they were the first to really roll them up into Webtoon. There has always been fan fiction on the internet, but they were among the first to roll them up into this package.

AO3, Fanfiction.net, they’re not trying to develop a flywheel to give you more attention. They're excellent communities and they retain a lot of that original character. But the thing that Webtoon was really interested in is that they realized the currency of their realm is attention and followers, and now they are a multibillion-dollar company.

That, I think, was one of the more compelling stories from this summer. When I saw that you were coming out with Posting Nexus, I was like, oh man, there could not have been a better moment for this. There could not be a better moment to really think about how attention works online.

Yeah. And I know you'll appreciate the underlying part of this, because I know you are, and I mean this with all the love, a giant nerd.

Gigantic.

But one of the best stories I wrote when I was at The Verge — not in terms of it being a good story, but in terms of me liking it — was when I talked to the Wattpad team, the Webtoon team, and said, how do you incorporate data? You have huge numbers of chapters being uploaded every single day from all these authors that come on.

They developed a tool, which will sound very familiar to anyone who's ever worked in SEO, where they look at every single word and they look at very specific trend words and try to figure out if it's reaching an audience cluster or cohort that is in demand from other studios. For example: Latino werewolf. Is there an audience for Latino werewolf romances? They can track it, and they do track it. Then they play around with the recommendation algorithms and some of the product placement, and as that grows, they then say, okay, we want to hyperfocus on this in order to sell.

That, to me, is the other underlying part of the attention story. There was a really great article by John Herrman, who works at New York Mag, and he talked about whether Twitter is back or not back. He ends his article by saying it doesn't really matter, because according to Twitter’s CEO, it is back. According to Elon, it's thriving. It was this idea that Twitter inherently feels very small because communities have gotten smaller. What you think is important is what's appearing on your feed, right? This is how something could be super viral on TikTok for you and no one else has ever heard of it.

That idea started with companies like Wattpad and Reddit. They started with this idea that has a really strong impact on this audience and the equation they do. And I worked with companies — not Wattpad, not Reddit — as a consultant on this exact equation, which was: How monetizable is this small audience compared to that small audience? If you're going to look at your cost, where are you going to get the strongest return on your investment?

We do that now across a million different cohorts every single day. It’s just, where do we think the attention that we're receiving, because they are getting attention from the small group, actually transfers into an action that we can better monetize versus what’s the attention that we’re seeing that is not going to transfer into a monetizable action. You do that equation, and what that ends up doing is restructuring culture.

Imagine Twilight today. Someone would’ve been like, queer vampire? We think that audience translates into highly monetizable. Now you have Simon and Schuster, Netflix, YouTube — you have all these companies saying, okay, there's a trend here. So we're going to see a new volume of content support that trend. Then a year later, all of a sudden, The New York Times writes a story about how everyone's into queer vampires.

It's like, well, that started because someone looked at a cohort of strong attention and said, that's monetizable. It just blew up into redefining what culture is. That's pure attention online that transfers offline.

That idea of “this niche is monetizable; this one's not” feels like that's been every success story on the internet for the past decade.

When you were describing that, I was reminded of my favorite genre collision, which created something that could not have existed before the internet: the success of D&D podcasts and D&D content, whether it’s Critical Role, or you see all this stuff on Dropout doing phenomenally well right now. That only happened because there was a group of niche fans that really, really clicked with something. They realized that this stuff is easier to produce than scripted content sometimes, and you could just see the value proposition make sense to people in real time. Now they’re selling out Madison Square Garden.

Seeing this very market-based thing, as you were describing, was like, oh man. We’ve seen this happen. That’s really cool.

I'm so happy you said this, because it's kind of the end point of what Posting Nexus wants to get at. The fact that things happen in one area and then move somewhere else happens all the time. You watch your favorite football team and then you go watch them play at the stadium. You discover your favorite singer via an album and then you go watch them play a concert. That's super traditional.

What we're seeing now is a continuation of that, but it's fascinating to me. I think about this with Critical Role; I think about this with the Pod Save America guys. Effectively what they're doing is taking this attention that you've given them and monetizing it in a new way that feels weird to us because it's different from a superstar musician or a team sport that has always existed in the offline. This is a group of talent, a group of people that we associate solely with being online. And we have that really strong parasocial relationship with creators, because we literally watch them in our bed, even more so than TV. They're in our bed and we listen to them on their podcasts, because they can't just have a YouTube, right? Now they’re podcasting, and they’re finding different ways to capture more attention.

It says a lot about how much we cling to human connectivity. This is my general barbell thesis, is that the world going forward, online or offline, is implausibly big — implausibly big like Christianity, or Taylor Swift — and addressably small. Which is still good; it just means monetizable, like Pod Save America or Critical Role.

The whole goal of the first one is that you don't actually have to do 90,000 different things. People will come to you because that's what they crave. They crave that connection. And the second one, the more opportunity you give people to come and see you physically and have that connectivity, have that connection, the more you're going to be able to split how you want your attention eight different ways. Now that they've seen you, maybe they'll buy the book you're selling as opposed to if you just had the podcast.

When we give attention and when people demand our attention in different forums, how does that then create these trends within business, within culture, the way we look at religion, the way we look at physical spaces? How does that impact our life offline? So again, it's that general thesis of why people do anything they do online, and how does that translate to what happens offline? That’s the obsessive point for me.

You've been so generous with your time, I want to make sure we bring this one home. You and I have both worked for the biggest entertainment company on the planet, you and I have both had independent newsletters that were profitable, and it is comforting to realize that it’s not simply everything gets eaten or nothing survives. There is a vibrant version of the internet that has all of this.

My favorite topic, which I annoy everyone in my life with, is history. I realize that makes me the most boring person on the internet, or just the most average person on the internet, but the thing I really like about history — whether that’s ancient, modern, whatever it is — is that nothing is new. Everything happens again and again, so the internet and the fight for attention is like forms of religion battling it out during the Crusades. I mean, it was far more violent, and I’m glad we’re not in those times, but it’s this idea of what you're choosing to give attention and therefore power to, how we then take that power and tie it to our identity, and our way of communicating and the incentive that we have at the basis of all this is the same.

What the internet has done is create unprecedented scale and rapidity that we can't even comprehend. We don't even have time to sit and think, oh, that's crazy that that thing happened. The publishing industry was wiped out, but we don’t even have to do that because there's this new thing that's happening and it’s newsletters. Which by the way are just pamphlets, which by the way are what people used to print the 1600s, right?

It's not new, and yet for us because of the abundance of information that we have coming in, the abundance of content, of entertainment, of distraction that is demanding our attention, we don't have time to sit back and think, what was then five minutes ago and what will be five minutes from now? As we look at some of the biggest power players that build out a lot of these demands — whether it's user-generated social media, whether it's entertainment, whatever it is — bring it back down and really sit and think: What have I given my attention to today and why did I do that? What did it bring to me? And actually, what if I didn’t want to do this?

You kind of see this with Gen Z, by the way, who are like, I want a phone that's not connected to the internet. Them realizing this is not actually good for me, but what do I need in order to stay connected and feel that really strong presence of humanity?

Big question. To your point, it's a super heady topic. What I try to do with the blog is bring it down into a topic that makes sense, that we can actually, tangibly grasp, while asking that question, which is why do you do anything and how has it affected you offline today?

In your intro post you had a line saying it's a humongous topic, and there are a million tendrils to pull on. I am very excited to read those million tendrils. It is called Posting Nexus. I’ll be sure to link it out.

Julia, where can folks find you? Where can they follow you? Where can they see what you’re up to?

Wow, this is the first time I’m not in a publication. This is crazy. I’m still on X and Threads at @loudmouthjulia, and Posting Nexus is being hosted on Ghost. I’m trying that one out.

Hey, a million flowers blooming. It's a fun time.

This sounds like such a fun project, and I’m very eager to keep following where you’re going. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure talking to you.

Edited by Susie Stark.

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at [email protected]. 

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Glenn McDonald, author of the new book You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music.

I’ve followed Glenn’s work for years now, and this book is the result of decades of work in the field, and comes from a perspective not only of technology’s bleeding edge but also a sincere, personal love of music.

We spoke about the mechanics of tracking genre data, how streaming has impacted listening trends, and how the model’s economics are holding up.

The book can be found everywhere books are sold.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Glenn McDonald. Thank you so much for coming on. You are the author of You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song, which is a really compelling title all about the streaming revolution, but more importantly about this really fascinating moment in music data that for much of the past decade, you have been at the front seat for, or even in the driver's seat for. Your work goes back to a really interesting company called The Echo Nest.

For new listeners and folks who maybe are unfamiliar with your story, can you just tell me a little bit of the history of this field and your place in it? The Echo Nest was a really fascinating company and I think more people ought to know about it.

I had been doing software design for a long time and had worked on a bunch of different things that all had to do with making sense of data for people. None of them had been specific to music data, but I would always use my work tools on my record database or my other various music-related projects. Those were the things that I was really interested in.

At some point I ended up tabulating the Village Voice critics music poll every year. This was what big data was for music in the era before streaming: It was like 800 music critics typing 10 album votes into blanks, with typos and everything. The companies I worked for kept getting acquired and my projects would get shut down or something, so every few years I’d need a new job.

When this happened in about 2011, I just knew through contacts that there was this company in Somerville a couple of media lab people had started called The Echo Nest, which was trying to do something with music data because there suddenly was a lot more music data. The Echo Nest was trying to do recommendations and categorization stuff for streaming services. This was pre-Spotify launching in the U.S., so 7Digital and Rdio at the time were some of the existing players. And I had done enough music data things to convince them that I was a worthwhile person to add to this effort.

I remember my first task at The Echo Nest. I showed up for my first day and they were like, “Oh, Glenn, you're here. Good. We're doing these radio stations for Spotify, this company we're trying to entice into using our services, and we're putting cartoon noises on the Franz Liszt classical station. Can you please figure out why we're doing that and make it stop?”

So that was the beginning of the journey. We did not succeed initially at getting Spotify as a customer, because Spotify recognized, correctly, that to do a really good job we had to have listening data, and there was no way they were going to give us listening data when we were also powering their competitors, even though their competitors were small. I remember we tried really hard to convince them. We were like, “We'll keep your data on a server on the totally other side of the closet where we have our servers.” That obviously didn't fly. After a couple of years of doing a lot of other things along the way, it was a race to see whether Spotify would develop their own recommendations and not need us or whether they would just get enough money to buy us first.

The money happened faster. We got acquired in 2014 and basically officially became the personalization team at Spotify. A bunch of the things we did had to do with understanding music and understanding taste so that you could do personalization, but it wasn't all directly involved with personalization.

That's about when you got on my radar, because I was at the time doing pop culture stuff at 538. I think music was always a bit of an enigma to me, just because there was so much of it, and obviously all the challenges that you were facing at an industrial scale, I was facing on a journalistic scale.

When I saw what you were doing — I don't think people really appreciate enough the moment when The Echo Nest got bought by Spotify. Very soon after, that's when you started seeing the level of personalization on the platform skyrocket. Do you want to speak a little bit about that?

It was a combination of things, because some of that stuff was stuff that we brought, The Echo Nest, but that acquisition was also Spotify's moment where they bought into the idea that personalization was going to be a big part of this Spotify experience. Discover Weekly, for example, which came along shortly after that, was not an Echo Nest thing. That was done by people who had already been at Spotify, and some of them were annoyed that that feature was described as if it somehow came from the Echo Nest work.

But basically everything that came about was because Spotify decided, “All right, personalization is going to be a thing.” At the same time, they acquired another company called Tunigo that was a playlist-making editorial company. And that was the beginning of, “All right, we're really going to have an editorial effort, too.” That was the beginning of both of those areas at once in Spotify's existence.

A lot of the interesting stuff in your book comes out of the complications of using algorithms as opposed to taste, and just the serendipity of some of it. I want to play something, because I think it shows the moment that completely shattered something about how I thought about music and how I thought about what the tech was that y’all were building.

I have a lot of Spotify playlists, just as anyone else does, and I was on a kick and I added a few songs in a row. The following week, all 10 recommended songs had this kick to start it. It’s the “Be My Baby” kick. There’s no way you could ask a DJ or even an expert, “Hey, can you find me 10 songs that all have this kick that I’m apparently into right now?”

But lo and behold, I would go down this recommended songs list and it would all be that. And that showed me that, man, there's a level of depth here that not only could we never accomplish before, but that is going to change the way we really consume a lot of this stuff. I always found it really fascinating how you were really on the front of that for so much of the time at Spotify.

One of the most interesting things to realize for me in this journey was that finding those patterns often comes about not the way you think.

How did that happen?

You imagine that the computer knows there are those drumbeats, it's found that you like them, and knows these songs contain them and lines them up. In fact, in this feature, that's not happening at all. It's just patterns of playlist making.

That recommended feature at the bottom, it uses the playlist title when you don't have anything, but then as soon as you've got stuff in your playlist, it's really just doing a complicated search of songs and playlists from other people that overlap with what you put. Here's what else they did. I found over and over that it was more effective to basically mine listening for the implicit signal that people have created by listening in nonrandom ways than it was to try to find the thing you're actually looking for.

If you try to find bands from Estonia, you get screwed up by metadata mistakes and missing data all the time. But if you can find a few bands that you know are from Estonia and use them to find an audience and use that audience to find what's different about those people's listening, then you find all the rest of the bands from Estonia without having to rely on metadata. Even the system doesn't know what it's doing. People have encoded that knowledge implicitly by listening.

So I did find someone who’d been on a kick of listening to all the “Be My Baby” hooks in a row. It's fascinating stuff.

I want to take it to the book now, because that speaks to a chapter specifically all about how you talk about genres and how genres don't really exist; they're just words that people use to talk about things. You describe them as “distributed communities of interest.” Do you want to speak a little bit about what genres are?

We got into this genre thing at The Echo Nest because we promised somebody that we had genre radio. It was the era of Pandora. Algorithmic radio was mostly track and artists seated. That was how people mostly thought about it.

We had some customer — I've long since forgotten who they were — who was like, that's too complicated. I just want like 16 buttons. It should just say rock and you hit it and it plays some rock music. And we were like, “Oh yeah, totally. We totally have that.” And then we went back to the office and we were like, we don't actually have that. But we better make it really quick.

What we did have was this vast database of word frequencies. We knew what artists were written about in what vocabulary, so we were like, this will be fine. We'll just line up the artists for whom rock is a disproportionately occurring term and we'll sort them by popularity and hit play.

We did that and then Rihanna came out and we were like, ah crap. People do say rock about Rihanna. I mean, she has a song called “Rockstar.” It's not crazy, but it was definitely not what these people wanted to have happen.

So we had a few days, and I'm like, all right, there's cultural knowledge here. It's not complicated what rock is. We just have to mine this very basic cultural knowledge. We had a table full of interns from Tufts, so I'm like, “Here's what we're going to do. Interns, go for each of these 17 or however many genres we want to demo, and just go find a list of the most obvious artists. Look it up on Wikipedia or Google — don't do anything sophisticated. When someone says rock, what are they probably thinking of? Then we'll take five or 10 of those artists, and because we have this good graph of artist similarity, we'll say, what are the other artists that are collectively similar to those five or 10 seed artists for each genre? That'll probably get us close.”

And that was right. That basically worked. If you feed in that what we mean by rock is The Who and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zeppelin, you get a set of artists out. If you say, no, what I meant was The Black Keys and the Foo Fighters and Coldplay, then you get a different set of artists out. So that was where we began. I didn't have a theoretical framework for what I was doing; I just had a thing that we needed to produce really quickly.

But as I got into it and tried to extend this from 16 to 300 and then to 1,000, what I realized I was doing was scouring the planet to find communities, literal communities. Sometimes of artists, sometimes of listeners, usually of both but not always, and usually with some element of practice to them, but not like a list of criteria in the classic musical logical sense. You can describe the difference between Baroque music and ragtime in informal music theory terms, but that's not really helpful because people's interest is much more specific than that. You can't just say this is definitely formally a hip-hop song, and therefore you as a hip-hop fan are going to like it, because if it's in Turkish and you only speak Bulgarian, it's probably useless to you.

Once I understood that, then it became easier to think about how we proceeded: that we're trying to find communities and show them back to themselves. And they usually have names for themselves. Sometimes we would find communities that didn't yet have a self-identification and we would have to make up names for them, but the goal of doing that was to be able to show those people, here you are, here's your taste. You're an audience, you have a taste. If you think of a name for it, tell me and I'll replace it. But I gave it a name so that we can at least talk about it.

It also gets at a big issue with music in general. Even going back to radio times, there are a lot of genres that truly don't exist, that are entirely manufactured. Things like classic rock or oldies are referendums on not just what you played, but how long ago you played it. And even things like indie rock says more about the economics of the people who distributed your record than perhaps you yourself. But nevertheless, these communities are constituencies that have an expectation that if they press an indie rock button, they want to hear some indie rock.

Indie rock is a great example where there are 12 good answers to that depending on who you are, and we couldn't call them all indie rock. Some of the exercise in making up names was like, all right, how am I going to differentiate between 12 historical, regional, philosophical variations that each think of themselves as indie rock? I have to tell the story a little differently.

Yeah, I dig that. That's a really exciting challenge.

I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that make streaming unique as a distribution format and a distribution medium. Whenever you have a new medium emerge, you have new intersections of how people work with that and consume it. You see it time and time again that technology can inform what's done.

You have a whole chapter in your book about this: “Chill is the new music.” It talks about essentially background and foreground sounds, whether that's lo-fi hip-hop radio, which is fairly well known, or things like a peaceful piano playlist. Things that would not exist in any previous iteration of the music industry are now dominant forms of consumption for lots of people. Do you want to speak to how this emerged and how you assess the space?

My favorite example of this is nature sounds. I had a CD of rainforest noises, and I would play it sometimes, but I was never going to buy another one. I think this is true of most people. I think most people had zero or one background noise CD in the CD era. The worldwide market of rainforest noises was probably a dozen, and you could compete between those dozen which was going to be the one that an individual user bought, but you couldn't go much further than that.

Streaming has made it possible to have that for no additional costs. It's like, it's not that I was against hearing a different rainforest. Costa Rica was superior to Indonesia.

Borneo is lovely this time of year.

One of the finest rainforests to listen to. But we unlocked that because now I can just put on a playlist of rainforest noises and I can hear new rainforest noises.

Does it really matter in rainforest noises? No, but it matters more in lo-fi hip-hop, where it is sort of a substance and you may prefer to hear new examples of the same form. That suddenly became totally viable. Peaceful piano is another one of those. I think a lot of people owned one classical CD and they would it put on when they needed something in the background. “I'll put on the classical music I own.”

Not only did streaming unlock the rest of the classical catalog, but then suddenly people were like, not all classical music works that well. I can just make stuff that's perfect for this mode. It's the perfect size and it's exactly as soothing, and it's not going to do some interesting thing that Chopin did because Chopin was interesting. Let's make it all fit this need. And I think there are a lot of needs that you wouldn’t have spent a lot of money to satisfy, but they’re needs you will spend a little bit of time to satisfy if it's free and it's easy to find them.

Fascinating. The rise of that has just been such an interesting side effect of the business model, in some way, but also a side effect in terms of how people want to listen to something pleasant in the background but not necessarily shell out for it. It just seems like it's a novelty of the distribution format that I enjoy, but can really only exist at this time in history.

Yeah. And it's not just streaming, too, because it's a synergy of streaming and having phones with you and earbuds and the expectation of music in all parts of your day. The idea that not only do you have earbuds, but everybody has earbuds, so it's normal for you to have your music in a public environment without bothering other people.

I want to talk a little bit about another side effect of the streaming model. This is one of the first times I've seen someone who was actually inside the house recount what this looks like, but streaming fraud has a lot of folks in the industry on edge or concerned —folks who are trying to manipulate the eventual rankings of things or the eventual performances of artists, whether it's for financial reasons, they want their artists to get more money, or they just want more people to see the person for whom they belong to the Army.

I thought this was just a really interesting look inside a company that has to deal with this and how obvious it can look at you. You had a story about Beyoncé in there that was fascinating, but I would love to hear about what streaming fraud and Army-style tactics look like from the inside.

I never intended to be involved in fighting streaming fraud at all. But as I explain in the book, I fell into it just because I was looking for patterns and sometimes the patterns that I'd find would make no sense. I'd be like, what? In one of the earliest examples, I was starting to try to look at what was different about listening in each city, and a lot of cities made sense. I could say, all right, I know what people in that region like and I can see it in the city.

And then Buffalo, New York, was all church music. I've realized in this process that I don't know that much about the world, and I've been surprised many times by things that turn out to be real features of how people move around the planet. So I tried not to jump to conclusions. I was like, okay, maybe Buffalo's a really religious place and it's a really common usage to have organ music that you play off Spotify. That theory didn't hold up very long. It was obviously not what was actually happening. I found that a lot of times, whenever I would go looking for interesting patterns in small subsets of people, whether they be geographic or by age or demographic or whatever, some of them would be weird. I realized that I'd found a subset of accounts, but not a subset of people.

Having spent 10 or 12 years at this, depending on how you look at it, if I wanted to live a life of crime, this is definitely the life of crime I am best prepared to enter into, and I would not do it. That's my message to aspiring fraudsters: shoplift, go do something else. Anything is better than this. This is a really bad way to try to earn money, because anything that you do that earns enough money forms obvious patterns and it's just trivially easy to detect. Sometimes it took me half an hour to figure out the exact pattern that some new cluster of bots was using to manipulate things in slightly different ways, but it never took long. It was always trivial to block them. It depended on the magnitude, whether Spotify would care and go after them in any punitive sense, but blocking whatever they were trying to do was never hard once it reached any magnitude where it would matter.

I always knew, and have been saying for years, that Buffalo Bills-based organ music was an industry plant. Thank you for confirming that for me.

That is actually a fun segue, because one of the most interesting chapters in here, I think, was about how the streaming model has winners and it has losers, and it has genres that are in fact losers. I know we’ve already agreed that genres are mere communities of sound, but for all intents and purposes, but let's go back to the more traditional sense here.

You write a lot about how genres like jazz, classical, experimental music, these aren't really being well served by the streaming model. And you actually write a little about whether streaming actually makes discovery of this stuff easier or harder. What got you aware of this potential side effect of the model and how do you assess where it's at?

This was always interesting to me because although I like Taylor Swift and I have some Ed Sheeran songs that I love, my taste includes a lot of obscure things. I'm very attached to those things existing and the people who make those things managing to somehow live in such a way that they get to keep making, you know, extremely florid gothic symphonic metal albums, or weird wedding music from Limpopo, or Filipino pop punk.

As a human, I want all these things to be viable whether they are super popular or not. The genre project could have stopped at 300 if it only cared about the popular genres. It kept going to 6,000 because I think everything deserves to have the same chance to find its audience, whether that audience is small or not.

As I say in the book, I think the way royalties work now in streaming is, in economic terms, actually slightly progressive. It's hard to guess this, but I didn't have to guess. I could run the numbers on the whole Spotify. I could run alternate economic models on literally all the Spotify data. That doesn't always tell you how the future will be, because sometimes when you change things, people change behavior, but I could definitely evaluate other proposals for how the existing money should be divvied up. What I found was that the model we’re currently using is a slight subsidy of less popular artists by the most popular artists in practice, which is the opposite of what some people surmise, which was interesting in itself.

And really, the headline is that it's a small factor. It doesn't actually matter very much. But every medium, like you say, has winners and losers by the nature of the format. There was a sort of artist that would appeal to the people who bought the most CDs, and in the CD era, I spent thousands of dollars. I was one of those people that spent thousands of dollars a year in order to discover all the music I was curious about, because I had software jobs and I could afford it. Therefore, I had a lot of economic power in that model. People like me exerted a lot of economic power. As an artist, if you were the kind of artist that I bought, that was excellent.

Now I spend $10 or $11 a month on streaming like everybody else, so that power has been distributed a lot more broadly. It's a lot less concentrated now, which I think is good on the whole. I think that's good for society. But it does mean there were people who thrived very specifically in the CD era, and they could put out limited editions and CD singles. This seems crazy to me in retrospect. I would spend $12 on an imported UK CD single to get one B-side that I hadn't heard, and now that's a whole month of my listening. The crazy part of that was the former state, paying $12 to hear one B-side. That's crazier than the current model.

But it's true that with a lot of things, when individual artists tell a sad story of how they used to have a career and now they don't, sometimes it's for this reason. They had found a niche and that niche went away and there are new niches. The system overall is producing as much money and it supports obscure things in general just as readily, but they're not necessarily the same obscure things to the same level.

Interesting. And that $12 single, you can't be alone. They released it for a reason. There must've been a critical mass that in the aggregate means now they have to spend another day on the road, or rely on superfans. The main way you can reach them these days, if everybody's only tithing $15 or so a month through their streaming, is through appearances or tours or other kinds of onerous things.

It's true, but also availability is totally different now. I think people sometimes fall into the trap of trying to compare the money as if the behavior is the same. They’re like, a person would have bought my CD for $10 at my show, and now they're going to stream my song once and I only get a third of a cent. Not very many people are going to come to your show, and of them, only a few are going to buy your CD, and the number of people who are going to buy that $12 CD single to hear that B-side is really small.

That B-side now could be on a playlist and a million people who've never heard of you could come across it. The dynamics are now completely different, and not everybody adapts to them immediately, but you now have a very, very broad potential casual audience that is only going to spend a third of a cent on you, but there are a lot of them. Maybe 10% of them will spend 12 cents on you by listening to a whole album a couple times, and a few of them will listen to your whole catalog and they'll buy tickets to see you when you come.

Overall it's about the same money. The music industry is, in absolute terms, now past the CD peak. Adjusted for inflation, it's not quite there, so we're not quite as far into the streaming era as the CD peak was in the CD era. It seems possible still that the CD peak will be surpassed by the streaming peak in overall money, which is good, I think.

That's neat. To back out a little bit, the book is excellent. People can find it wherever books are sold, and it's called You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song.

You are also known for another project, Every Noise at Once. You’ve since departed Spotify, and as a result of that departure, the availability of Every Noise was in jeopardy for a little bit there. You mentioned that you have a lot of physical media and I would love your view on this: How do we preserve our understanding of how music works at this point in time? Down the line, things are going to be fundamentally shifted, as the industry inherently does. You've been involved in a number of projects that have relied on some of these big players to fuel their data.

Where do you come down on how we can preserve a lot of this discovery and a lot of this understanding moving forward, even if we are losing the data through our fingers as it comes in?

Part of it is understanding what the data is and what we've accomplished. I got laid off from Spotify, and I'd been there for a good long time, so for me I could be like, that's fine. Twelve years is longer than I had at any other job. I can do something else now and that's all right.

But it definitely hurt because I built this thing and my attachment to it was very heavily tied up in its ability to constantly change. We were still adding genres to it and one of my, and a lot of people's, favorite features of it was a thing that took every week's new release list and organized it by genre. That immediately stopped working, for no good reason. It's not confidential information that the Spotify API is not arranged in such a way that you can get the information out, even though it would be in Spotify's interest to have people better able to find new releases. When I worked at Spotify, I could route around the structural problem and just ship a CSV file to my website and then everybody could see those things.

I lost that ability and initially I was like, oh, the website is dead, but then with 30 seconds more thought I realized that this is what happens to most things. They build for a while, and then they reach a state and that's the end of building them, but now they're real. That map of 6,200 genres remains a map of world listening up until 2023, and there's more music in that than you'll ever be able to listen to or discover; for practical purposes, if what you care about is exploring the world, it's still a very interesting map that will help you do that.

If what you care about is organizing what happened last week, then for now I don't have the tools to help do that in public in a way that I wish I did. But I'm still hopeful that we'll get that back. We only need one music service to say, “All right, you can get a list of this week's new releases from our API now, and it's not limited to 1,000,” and then I'll be able to revive that.

Amazing. Glenn, I really love the book. Why don't you tell folks where they can find it, where they can find you, and why they should check it out.

It's on Bookshop.org and Amazon. The original publisher is British, so if you are in the U.K. you might be able to find it in stores. If you are somewhere else you might have to order it, but that's how most things get out now. There's a Kindle version if you don’t care about paper, and if you do, it's got a blue cover. It's nice.

It's a good-looking cover. Hey, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Again, I've been such a fan of yours for so long, and just to see this finally come out is really cool.

Thanks for reading.

Edited by Susie Stark.

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at [email protected]. 

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Zach Weinersmith, who with his wife Kelly Weinersmith wrote the brand new book A City On Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?, which is out this week.

I loved this book. I’ve been looking forward to it for years since they announced it, and I loved their previous book, Soonish. It’s an in-depth look at what exactly it’s going to take to get a permanent human settlement on another world. Zach and Kelly investigate not just the physics problem of getting people and material there, but also the long-term social, legal and biological issues inherent in this kind of venture. It’s an amazing read, and it’s available wherever books are sold.

Beyond A City on Mars, Zach can be found at his iconic webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and you should check out his other books, which include Soonish and Bea Wolf, his children’s book adaptation of Beowulf.

Remember, you can subscribe to the Numlock Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. This interview has been condensed and edited.

Zach, thank you so much for coming on.

I'm excited to talk about space nerd stuff.

Boy, are you. You have written a book called A City on Mars. You ask all sorts of really exciting questions throughout the book. It is not just a book about the physics of getting to Mars, which I think a lot of people fixate on. It is a book about sociology. It is a book about how communities work. It is a book about all sorts of different exciting things. Your research process was incredibly thorough. I guess just before we dive in, what was it like to write this thing? What was it like to report it out and dive into the science?

Oh man, it was kind of awful. And you know what it was? I think when you do pop science, there's this fantasy you have of, "What if I got a topic and I was out ahead of other people and it was really controversial and awesome." And you'd think that would be romantic and be like a montage. But we were so anxious, because we felt like we were really going against a lot of strongly held views by smart people. And when you do that, you feel like you really have to know what you're talking about so that you can stand your own when they are going to come at you.

And so the result of that, and our just general dorkwad-ery, was that there was just a ton of primary and technical source reading, which is awesome. Actually, it's like what I do in my free time, as a boring person. But when at some point I was reading a hundred-something pages a day of hard stuff and like you roll out of bed and you're like, "What? I have to read 50 pages of seabed international law to understand that!" It was brutal. I mean absolutely wonderful kitchen table conversations during this time, but it was tough.

Yeah, a lot of it is very compelling because again, you've had some of the finest minds that our society's produced consider what it would take to get us into space and stay there. And that I imagine has got to be a lot of fun. But then you also, you really consider all sides of this, man. You’ve got sociology, but you just mentioned you have the law.

There's a lot of legal precedent when it comes to these interesting spaces that are not owned land but nevertheless are important. Do you want to walk people through the structure of the book and what angles you take and how you dive in?

So we ended up artificially separating it into six sections, which hopefully I can actually remember, because we fussed a lot with the structure; this is a book that, as you say, goes from lots of angles. There were lots of options for how to structure it and we actually originally had it as we'll go through orders of magnitude from one person to 10 people, then 100 people. And it just turns out, I learned that sociologists don't believe there are actual meaningful, emergent obvious things different between a hundred and a thousand people where you can be like, "Okay, here's what happens now."

We ended up instead saying, "We're going to start off with what it does to your body." So that's like sex and reproduction, that's physiology, what space does to your body, and then also psychiatry stuff which was nontrivial. Then we move on to the place you might actually put that body. Ideal spaces are probably the moon or Mars, and especially Mars is probably best, which we could get into.

Then we move to how you might keep that body in that place from dying. That is to say, habitat construction. How do you build a facility in one of these places? Where might you go and what are the future goals there and the problems you need to solve. But mostly having to do with energy and shielding and also making food and oxygen and consumables.

And then at that point, we dive into the law and sociology. So then we go to a brief rundown on the "cynical history," we call it, of outer space. And the basic point of that is to position you to understand that human spacefaring is almost always purely political. It's about making declarations as a superpower and showing up other countries.

That prepares you to think about how the space law as we have it is. So we go into how the law actually works, which a lot of geeks think doesn't matter, they don't think international law exists, but it does. We know it constrains the behavior of countries and people. From there we get into some sociological questions. We'll talk about this a little more later; the sociology was at one point quite extensive, and the editor was like, "You just can't do this to readers. This is just too much," so we cut it down to looking at company towns as a potential model, and a couple other things.

Then we close out with some questions having to do with the future, in the sense of what numbers are we talking about to avoid too much inbreeding, to have economic autarchy — that is to say, being able to survive the death of Earth.

Then finally what would happen in the case of space war and how to think about the idea of space war. Yeah, so we're really trying for every angle. I could tell you, we did still leave out stuff. There was stuff we had to cut, but we tried to be as thorough as possible.

I'm so glad that you brought up the "cynical history of space," because I thought that that was just such a very thorough look. Space is one of the most romanticized things. I think that's one reason that again, this topic is so compelling, is that we just have so many stories that we tell each other about space and its role and there's a fundamental yearning to it. There's a fundamental ambition to it. You could tell a lot of stories set in space, and we have.

Whereas the cynical history of space was really just bringing things down to as brass tacks as possible. It was turning this romance into the physics and politics that it truly is, and I really appreciated it. Do you want to dive in a little bit on that, a brief cynical history of space?

Yeah, I'd love to. So it's funny. There's a power law, I can say this for your audience. There's a power law for what space stuff is about. So it's like 90 percent of all space books are about Apollo 11, in particular, where we landed on the moon. And then 90 percent of what's left is either Apollo 8, where we first went around the moon, or Apollo 13, where everything went wrong and there was a movie about it. And then down from that, it's everything else.

There's a subgenre in all this that is the political history. There are only a couple books about this, and they're mostly more scholarly because I guess regular people just don't want to read about the sort of geopolitical theory about why countries do this sort of thing. What's funny is that in those fields, and people who study the law and history, if you said, "Hey, Kennedy went to space as a purely political act," it would be like saying, "I know how to tie my shoes." It's just the most obvious thing in the world.

But if you say that to a space geek, it's like you're poking something beautiful. But we have the evidence! I mean you never know what's in a person's heart, but we know, there's evidence that after Sputnik Kennedy thought space was stupid. We really only did that big speech to Congress, which sometimes gets conflated with the one at Rice. He only did his big speech to Congress basically saying, "Give me a huge pile of money," after Bay of Pigs.

And then very shortly after, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space and he was of course, a Soviet. So Kennedy looked like garbage and he knew it, and he was a smart PR operator. So we have private transcripts of stuff he said basically saying, "There's no reason to do this." He uses the phrase, "I'm not that into space." He just says it very explicitly, "We need to show them that we won." And that's it.

And his own science advisor, I don't think we put this in the book, but my recollection is, Jerome Wiesner, his science advisor, refused to go along with the idea that this was about science. He was not cool with it. So there's just very robust evidence that this was politics all the way down on both the American and the Soviet side. That unfortunately the great mass of the public around the world overestimates the importance of rocketry to the dominance of nations and their technological capacity. Whereas, I think you could easily argue that the U.S. was ahead the whole time in everything that mattered, but people are just beguiled by rocket technology.

Again, part of this is some stuff that I've read, but it seems like a lot of people's mentality about space is derived from Disneyland and a lot of sci-fi aesthetic stuff.

Yeah, it's that. I have an older brother as a poli-sci professor and he said when he gets students and he says, "Who's the best president ever?" They still to this day often say, "Kennedy." And when you ask them why, they cite a speech or something, which is not afforded to any other president! Any other president, it's like, what did they do? But with Kennedy for some reason — probably because he was assassinated while young and handsome, and there's this sort of legend about it — people are like, "Well..." Here's the history of space: Kennedy said, "We go to space because we're amazing and we need new frontiers." And so we went and that's it. And you want to come in and say it was about politics, how dare you.

Readers might recognize you from your book Soonish. A City on Mars you wrote with your wife, Kelly, as you did with Soonish. One carryover from Soonish that I really dig in this book is that you kept the Nota Benes, which are chances to dive in on perhaps things that are a little offbeat, but fun elements. I really love all of them.

The one that I really enjoyed the most that felt very relevant to the next step of this conversation is Antarctica and violence around it. We have a place that is very inhospitable to human life that we send people to occasionally, where sometimes people do crimes, and it is called Antarctica. And that is the best indication of what might be the situation in space.

So there's a little bit of a nuance to this. Sometimes when people work in space psychiatry, space psychology, they'll say one of the things that's important is, "Did you know one time a guy got stabbed in Antarctica for spoiling novels?" And then there's another famous story where, as the story goes, there were two Russians at Vostok station having a chess match and one killed the other or attacked him with an axe or something. So they banned chess.

And so both of those stories, actually, they're not really true. They got passed around the internet all day and all night. I think the one about the chess thing is just not true. Or at least, we couldn't find evidence. We talked to a guy who had been at Vostok station for a long time, he's a Russian guy. And he was like, "I'd never heard of this or about the chess ban." And it also just utterly smacks of Russian stereotyping.

A hundred percent, yeah.

Right. There's no dancing bear or whatever, but it's pretty close. The story about the spoiling novels, the novel thing was just a weird detail it was fixated on. It was more like the guy was just hazing him and bullying him for a long time and finally went too far and the other guy stabbed him. And it's sort of a bit more of a conventional stabbing story.

Our perspective, and there's reasonably robust data on this, is actually that in Antarctica where it is dark and cramped and awful and somewhat space-like, you actually don't get a higher rate of psychiatric problems. Maybe even there's some evidence it's lower. That's probably to do with the fact that people are screened before they come and they're probably somewhat self-selected.

But that doesn't mean you get to just be like, "Don't worry about it." Right? Because it has been the case in Antarctica that we've had to handle murders. There have actually been murders. There's one that’s well-documented where a guy accidentally shot another guy during an altercation having to do with raisin wine. Which, I hadn't by the way heard about raisin wine, but it's I guess a sort of low-quality homemade wine.

It'll bring a new meaning to the phrase “moonshine” if we pull that off in space.

This is a whole funny thing that we would joke about, and we talk about making food in space. We found a quote by Andy Weir of The Martian who wrote the foreword to a book called Alcohol in Space, which is actually a quite wonderful book, what you would think. And he says, "Mark Watney, the star of The Martian, would not have made vodka because why would you waste all those potatoes?"

But we actually, if you look into the history of biosphere, the place where people stayed for two years in confinement to see if you could do this? They were starving, and they still made alcohol. I love that story. It's like they're literally losing 10 percent body mass, but they still made the worst quality wine out of bananas or raisins. Humans are a problem.

Is that the case for a lot of this? Humans are the problem with space travel?

I think the way I would say it is, humans are the problem, but in that they're humans. Because people tend to think like, "Oh, you'll go mad in space." Or whatever. And there's just no evidence of that extreme thing. It is just that they're going to be humans. So on Earth, when you're a human, you expect all sorts of basic services. Some humans, from time to time, have acute psychiatric problems or whatever, and they need to be taken care of. And this is just usually not imagined when people talk about sending a thousand people to Mars.

Let's talk about where to, right? You have an entire chapter where you talk about Mars, you talk about the moon, you talk about a rotating space station, which is not the worst option. Then you talk about some other options, too. Why don't you walk us through, give us a little tour of the buffet here and where you come down as the angle?

The deal is, the solar system is really, really big. Space is really, really big. But the places you might maybe sort of survive on are eeny, weeny weeny.

Mercury is basically a nonstarter. It's way too hot and it's actually fairly hard to get to because you have to drop toward the sun and then carefully get into orbit.

Then you've got Venus, which is incredibly hot, high pressure, and has sulfuric acid clouds. There are weirdly a couple people who still think it would be good. Their argument is, and this is true, it's a very thick atmosphere, so you should almost think of it as something like a fluid. There's a place in the atmosphere that does have Earth-like temperature and pressure and carbon dioxide. When you're in this mode of like, "Well, does it literally have the elements of existence and maybe sounds compelling?" I think it's crazy, but it does have its people.

Then you have Mars, which is the place. Basically, it has Earth-like elemental composition. It has an atmosphere, although it's quite thin. But it's an atmosphere with carbon dioxide, and carbon and oxygen are both nice things to have.

Then beyond that, of course, there's Earth and there's Earth's moon. The moon is great, but it's very low in water, it's carbon-poor, and humans are made of carbon as there are things we like to eat. So the moon is good as a place to launch from, but not for building a permanent settlement unless you're really going to ameliorate it.

Then beyond that, you've got the asteroid belt. A lot of people think it'd be great to live in asteroids, but actually asteroids are typically rubble piles. They're dusty rocks that are kind of drawn together. They're actually quite distant from each other. It's not like in Star Wars where you're dodging big potatoes, and you actually usually can't see one from another. They're quite sparse and beyond that—

Wow.

It's extremely sparse. Then going further out, you just have the gas giants where there's not even a surface to land on, and the icy planets. And then there are a couple moons, there have been here and there proposals for landing on Titan, but you're talking about extraordinary distance and all sorts of other problems.

So really, it's the moon or Mars, which have a combined surface area smaller than Earth, and they're both just awful. The reason we say the moon is cool is because it's always the same distance, and the distance is not too far. It's about two days by rocket, but there's almost no water on it, contrary to what you might've heard in articles in Bloomberg about this trans-lunar economy we're supposedly going to build. The surface is made of this really nasty stuff called regolith that probably damages equipment, and may cause health problems.

The main appeal of Mars is basically that it has Earth-like days, it has access to water, and it has some atmosphere. So all the stuff is there to not die, which is really not true anywhere else.

So it's the best option that we’ve got. But it doesn't sound like it's necessarily a great option.

No, and it's also, unless some exotic technology comes along, it's six months in, about a year stay, six months back. There's a long period where you're there and you cannot go home because Earth has raced ahead of you around the sun.

Oh wow. There are a lot of fascinating problems that present themselves. And again, one thing that I love about your and Kelly's work is that you really just talk to a lot of really smart people. You do a lot of the in-depth research.

One thing I have to ask you about is that you actually published an article in space policy: To Each According to Their Space-Need: Communes in Outer Space. I just love that this is the depth to which you did it, where you did get a scientific paper out of this one, too.

We did! Yeah. And I should say that that scientific paper had many more jokes and illustrations in it when it was in the book. It was originally a chapter.

We worked with two other guys. One was Ran Abramitzky, who's a big deal sociologist, who is the kibbutz and commune studies guy, and then John Lehr, who's the absolute expert on how to write communes. We did this paper together. The reason it got cut from an earlier version of this book is, we were like, "Let's look at tons of sociological models." All that's left from that is company towns. The basic feeling from our editor, which I think was correct, was, "Each one of these models is starting your audience over in a completely new topic. It's just too much to ask for a pop science audience."

But communes are really interesting. People often want to talk about stuff in space society, but usually you can't do science on it. So you can't be like, how should we form society? That's hard. But if you start with, well, what if it is a company town, then you can say stuff, because we know stuff about that structure.

One structure — and a lot of this is due to Ran Abramitzky — we know a lot about is communes. He did this book called The Mystery of the Kibbutz, and the mystery is how did you actually get humans to behave communally for about a hundred years? He actually does a standard, delightful neoclassical economic analysis of how they manage human incentive structures to get people to behave in a basically communal way.

What's absolutely fascinating is when you look throughout history going back hundreds of years throughout communes, they converge on the exact same sets of problems and the exact same sets of solutions. Hutterites, who are this very— certainly by my standards — very sort of patriarchal, old world Anabaptist religion, they will shun you and shame you if you fail to do certain communal things.

But if you go to the surviving hippie communes? Amazingly, they do the exact same stuff. They do it in a hippie way, but they still do it. And so it's just astonishing. So if you say, "Oh, space is going to be like a commune," you can really do some cool stuff. I mean, I don't know if it will be, but you can at least say we can do some deep analysis and we can read primary literature. It's just really cool.

It is cool because again, finding experiments is hard because everything that would involve an experiment here is either drastically immoral or extremely expensive. It is cool that for company towns, there's a huge economic record of that. You have an amazing chapter in the book about that. And I dig this article because it's just cool how much terrestrially really we do have to work with here.

It's amazing. One of my absolute favorite things. For a numbers audience like yours, this is really cool. A lot of people are into space stuff. Would it be better to have a religious community, because they're going to need to be sort of cohesive? It's set in a hand-wavy way, but you can actually compare secular versus religious kibbutzim. You actually find that the religious ones have a measurable – like quantifiable with shekels, like with money – difference in retention ability.

You can actually kind put a number on religion as a retention, at least in this context. I don't know, maybe Anabaptists are better than Jews at retaining people, or maybe worse. But it's amazing and it's not trivial, but it's also not huge. It's not like an order of magnitude, but it is a real difference. People are more willing to stay. This is less true for Jews, but in Anabaptism, like if you leave the commune, you go to hell in Hutterite Anabaptism. So that's probably quite motivating. But yeah, just amazing that you can put a number on something like that.

I mean that's the thing, man; if you leave the commune on Mars, you do go to Mars.

That's right. You die. You do die very quickly. Yeah, but that's interesting because that adds to the analysis, because a classic commune problem is when people can get opportunity elsewhere, they do. But if you die, if you go outside, that's probably different.

I would be in total violation of all journalistic principles if I did not ask you about the possibility of space war. What did you find on this matter?

We try really hard not to be too speculative. The way we did it is, we talked about short-term, medium, long-term, right? Short-term, people talk about space war. It probably won't happen, basically because there's no reason to do it. Without getting too in-depth, there is some cool analysis about space weapons you can look up. Space weapons sound awesome and they are awesome. I will say, guiltily, there are some zany designs from the Reagan era for these pumped X-ray lasers that were going to blast the Soviets. Crazy s**t.

I'm a simple guy. If you call it a "Rod from God," you have my attention.

Totally. But the basic problem: All of us already have nuclear weapons. Insanely, if Russia decided they wanted to nuke Washington, I don't know, we do have defenses and stuff. But do they get the advantage from setting the nuke in the space before firing it? I think the answer is probably no. It does get there faster, but it's also totally exposed while it's up there. It's probably in low Earth orbit. It's constantly pissing off everyone on Earth while it's up there. And at the end of the day it saves you some number of minutes. It might be as much as 20 or 30 minutes. I'd have to look at it. But we're talking about just a slightly accelerated doomsday situation. There's only a really narrow set of circumstances for you to actually want this stuff, and it's really expensive and hard to maintain.

So short-term, probably not going to happen.

For space settlements, a space settlement would probably never want to make war on another space settlement or on Earth because it would be so easy to destroy. I mean, you're talking about survival bubbles in the doom void. One EMP and it's toast; one big hole and you all die. It's just, you're so vulnerable and also so dependent on Earth, it's unlikely. So in a Heinlein scenario where the moon is like, "We're going to mess you up,” it's like, "No." All Earth would have to do is hover some nukes over your base and blast the electric system and you're gone.

So the more interesting question we got into, I thought, was we talk about this as a long-term issue.

On Earth, there are different theories on this, but there's this question of, why don't we use gas weapons typically? Why don't we use bio weapons typically? And there are sort of cultural theories, but maybe we just decided not to. It depends on how cynical you want to be about humans, whether you believe that or not.

But part of why we don't use these weapons is that they're unpredictable. So there are like these horrific cases from World War I where people try gas weapons, and the wind blows, then it just goes right back at them. Of course, with bio stuff, it's even more obvious how that could go wrong. It’s also true, by the way, that part of why we don't test nukes anymore is because we started finding radioactive byproducts in babies’ teeth, which is pretty motivating for most humans.

But if you're down two separate gravity wells? If it's Mars versus Earth? You can drop this stuff and there is no risk of blowback.

So the only reason we bring that up is basically because a lot of space geeks say, "We need to colonize Mars to reduce existential risk." But we don't know that the equation adds up to a reduced risk! There are many ways it could add up to increased risk.

When we're not sharing the same atmosphere all of a sudden things go back on the table.

Right. Yeah, exactly.

The book is called A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? It is great. I really loved your book Soonish and when you announced it, I was really, really intrigued that this was your follow-up to Soonish. Because Soonish is all about technologies that are just on the horizon. And when you announced this, I was like, "Well, clearly there was something left over in the reporter's notebook going into that."

Exactly.

And so I guess I'll just ask, what was it like moving on to this next topic and how soon-ish would you say this stuff is?

Oh, man. Well, I would say I have set back my timeline a little, having researched it.

I mean, part of why we got into this in the first place is we did think it was coming relatively soon, and was awesome. And it was surprising the extent to which advocates were not dealing with the details. So the project ended up becoming like, we're going to actually get into the primary literature about all these questions.

My view is, I doubt we have a settlement, meaning people are having children and families on Mars; certainly not in my lifetime. What I would add is that it's almost certainly undesirable for it to happen that quickly because not enough of the science is in. It would be morally quite dubious to try to have children in these places with the lack of science we have.

But to be slightly uplifting, I have two directions on it. One uplifting direction would be, well, you never know. Maybe AI's going to take all our jobs in two weeks and we'll just tell it to take us to Mars and we'll be fine. I don't know. I mean there's some world in which 30 years from now there are fusion drives and advanced robotics and everything I'm saying sounds quaint. And then maybe it does happen.

The other thing to say, though, is a lot of the stuff we need to do to make this possible and safe is stuff that would be nice to do anyway. So without getting into it, it would be nice to have a legal framework on Earth where war wasn't a serious possibility, or a thing that's currently happening in many places at once. Because in space, there's lots of stuff going fast. And if you get a world where there are millions and millions of tons of spacecraft going at high speeds, that's a dangerous world with our current geopolitics. So we need to solve that if it can be solved.

Yeah. I loved how much of the book wasn't just the physics. It was really exciting to see that it's not just can we or how would we, it's should we and what will happen?

Yeah, the law to me, I mean we really tried to add some sugar to it because everybody does not want to read international law. We have all these great stories. There's this story about the times like Nazis showed up in Antarctica to heil a penguin. They actually heiled a penguin. I love this story.

Oh no.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The penguin apparently was not impressed, but—

Rock on, penguin.

It's a funny story, but it matters so much. I think a lot of people are reluctant to get into it. But for me, gosh, it's amazing. Most of the planet Earth is regulated under commons established in the middle of the 20th century. The whole world changed in a 30-year period under these new international law frameworks. And it's like nobody cares or knows. I want a T-shirt that says, "THE RULES-BASED INTERNATIONAL ORDER IS NOT PERFECT BUT IT'S PRETTY GOOD." And you really come to appreciate it. I hope people get that reading our book.

Amazing. Zach, you write Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, one of my favorite things. You've been at it for so long, and it's such an admirable project. You've written the book Soonish, which if people have not already gotten, they should get. The new book is A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. I could not love it any more. Where can folks find the book?

They can find it at fine bookstores everywhere. Or if you go to acityonmars.com, there are a bunch of purchasing options listed.

All right, thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It was fun.

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