The Numlock Podcast

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Justin McElroy, who you might know from his work on the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me or The Adventure Zone.

Wednesday will mark a shocking milestone: As of September 13, the Chicken Sandwich Wars will have gone on longer than the armed conflict of the American Civil War. Yes, the conflict between quick-service restaurants over who has produced a desirable chicken sandwich offering began in August 2019, what feels like a lifetime ago, and nobody has covered this more persistently than McElroy on his Munch Squad podcast within a podcast.

I’m a big fan of his work, and in addition to this devastating conflict we also chatted about increasingly unhinged limited time offerings, his multiple bestselling comic books, and the current “Steeplechase” season of The Adventure Zone.

All this can be found at TheMcElroy.family.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Justin McElroy, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you for having me in this important journalistic endeavor.

This is a critical moment. We find ourselves at the week the Chicken Sandwich Wars will have gone on longer than the American Civil War. You have been on the ground covering this day by day, hour after hour.

At what point do we just recognize that this is the second American Civil War? I mean it's all the bad blood, brother versus brother versus colonel. It's got everything.

Why don't you take us back to the beginning? Munch Squad, a podcast within a podcast on My Brother, My Brother and Me, has been dedicated to covering the latest and greatest in food offerings, as you'll go on to explain. Chicken Sandwich Wars have been dominating this for years now at this point. How did this start?

I have always been, and I think I got this from my dad, I've always been sort of a sucker for— I mean, I don't know how to say it other than just marketing. I'm like an absolute sucker. A lot of that is me being willing to just sort of go with it, and finding that I'm happier if I'm not fighting the thousands of advertising messages that are being sent to me on a daily basis. I just kind of go with it. I love to try new consumer products, and I know that's goofy, but whenever you would go to Columbus, Ohio, it's a popular test market for new products so you'll see drinks you hadn't heard of before, whatever. Dad would always do that when we were kids. Any new drink, he would come home with a 12-pack like, "All right, guys, this is the new Crystal Pepsi, they're calling it, so you guys have got to try this."

Yeah, anytime I see new stuff like this, it comes from a genuine place. I genuinely think it's fascinating. What I love, though, is when I find out that these companies have to put out press releases for these dumb products. No matter how dumb the thing is, they’ve got to let people know about it and someone is tasked with the job of writing the press release for something that is a sentence.

I mean it's always a sentence, right? "We now have a chicken sandwich." "We are Dunkin' and we put beer in coffee, and you can buy it at the store. Please go buy it." I did one a few weeks ago that was like, "Extra gum has a new pink lemonade flavor. Here's the press release." It's like, how would anybody know that's even a new product? If I saw that, I’d assume they’ve sold it for 20 years. It's just wild and I think that that's really funny.

The first one I did was Taco Bell doing the naked chicken taco, which is when they made a taco shell out of a chicken breast, and it's so vulgar.

Everything about it is vulgar! It makes me want to be a vegetarian. It's a vulgar exercise, and I was like, "This is too great. I’ve got to share this with people." That was back, I don't know, 2016, around there or something like that, and we just kept going with it because the press releases just kept getting wilder.

It slows down sometimes. But there's always new stuff to make fun of, and I just think that it's great. It feels like when you're somebody who cares about doing comedy that doesn't specifically target people, especially marginalized groups or just anybody specific, anybody individually; we really try to be upbeat. I feel like making fun of not just corporations, but marketing for specific consumer products is as near to a victimless crime as you can get. Even the people writing these things know like, "Yeah, this isn't going to get me my Pulitzer. It's all in good fun." But yeah, that is the Munch Squad.

Yeah. Limited time offerings, they've always existed, right? There's always been the McRib, there have always been things like that. They are increasingly unhinged and I don't think anybody's been following that quite like you.

Yeah, I do. I have exposed myself to a wide variety. Sometimes, the product will be wild, but there's just nothing. They don't have the press release. I’ve got to have the press release. I’ve got to have the news. I have to have someone reporting it journalistically who is also paid by Pepsi or Taco Bell or whatever, and it was the same company, but you know what I mean. Yeah, I have followed the space very closely.

Yeah, it's been just genuinely a pleasure to listen to. Again, you've developed this form of taste, I think, among these sorts of products. You've been able to clock if they're only in one restaurant for one hour in Anchorage, Alaska.

I'm glad you're bringing that up. Thank you. That does make me very angry and that is something that has happened in later Munch Squad and almost kind of put me off of it, is you start to see these companies that are just doing it for the bit. If they're doing it for the bit, it's a lot harder for me to do jokes about it because they already know that it's dumb. Pepsi did Peeps-flavored Pepsis and you had to get them from a contest or whatever, and it drives me crazy.

Just have the strength of your convictions to make your dumb soda and let the market sort it out.

I don't even think this is on Munch Squad; it's something we talked about on my cereal podcast, the Empty Bowl, but Carvel, the ice cream cake people, they made a "cereal" that was just the crunchy chocolate bits that go in the middle of the ice cream cake with the fudge sauce. You know what I mean? They made a cereal out of that, but they're in little tiny boxes and they only sold them for one day at their stores.

It's like, just make it or don't. You know what I mean? Cowards, everybody. I don't like that stuff. Make a product, put it out there for everybody. Don't do like the CurderBurger where you only do it for one day. I did talk about the CurderBurger because it was a burger with a loaf of cheese curd on it in Wisconsin. That was pretty good. But by and large, wide release or nothing. That's what I say.

You can't not talk about a CurderBurger.

Yeah, and people could go buy that. You could go buy it in the store. It's usually my cutoff. I prefer a wide release, but still.

You've been covering this for a while. Again, I can't imagine the amount of time that you spend on QSR magazine.

A lot.

A lot?

Paper and digital.

Oh, you get the print? You get the dead tree edition?

Some fun-time jokesters signed my P.O. box up for a subscription to that. I get lots of them. Someone signed us up for horse magazines. Thank you. That's great for recycling. Someone signed us up for the gas station mag — they have a publication for new gas station convenience offerings — so I try to track the sources wherever they are.

That's incredible. Again, your history is journalism. You founded Polygon. I've always enjoyed that element of Munch Squad where it's like, "Clearly, this is something that's going on." And I'm glad that you alluded to, again, your father has roots of journalism as well, that this is a trade that you've been applying for quite some time.

Yes, that was my first job outside of retail. It was in my mid-20s. I got hired to be the news editor at a small paper in Ohio, and I was desperately underqualified, but I just sort of kept scamming my way up and pivoted over to video game coverage, mainly. I know enough journalism to know how to pretend I'm doing journalism in the Munch Squad, so that's about where my skillset is at this moment.

Do you have any favorites that come to mind? Any specific limited time offerings or press releases that just really kind of made a dent in you?

Let me think. Taco Bell did a naked egg taco. You know when they did the chicken, but this was a gigantic fried egg that they folded up into a taco shell and made a breakfast offering? That's unacceptable. That's simply not a product that anybody should be consuming.

Burger King, the Nightmare Burger where it was black for Halloween, remember that? It gave everybody black poops. That was a fun time to be in the business. Yeah, Burger King will dye their buns sometimes and it ruins people's bowel movements.

Man, Chris Angel had a restaurant. Do you remember? I had to look up the acronym. Chris Angel made or opened a restaurant, it's spelled C-A-B-L-P. It's Cablp, and that is short for, of course, Chris Angel Breakfast, Lunch, and Pizza. They call it Cablp. I don't even know if that's still open. That was back in 2021, but Cablp. Oh, God, that still hits. Cablp.

The Chicken Sandwich Wars were obviously launched into devastating effect in August of 2019. Where do you see that going? For a while, there was quite a bit of activity and now it's been, kind of they're in the long haul, I’ve got to say.

From your view, where are the Chicken Sandwich Wars at?

At this point, I feel like a lot of us have moved on from the war part of it. I feel like what we're seeing now is we're entering a phase where we're all sort of culturally accepting that every place has a chicken sandwich. This is what's weird about the Chicken Sandwich Wars, if I may.

You may.

These places all had chicken sandwiches.

That's the thing that people forget, right? They had chicken sandwiches. They were bad.

The only one people liked was Chick-fil-A, and they turned out to be a little bit questionable on some of the donations of groups they're giving to, a lot of anti-LGBTQ places, so people stopped eating the chicken sandwich.

For me, that's the beginning of the chicken sandwich. That was the only good one you could get. They turned out to be some nasty dogs over there, maybe, and so nobody's going to eat that chicken sandwich anymore. Somebody had to step in.

As long ago as 2005, McDonald's came at the crown. They came for true at Kathy's Kreations, which, they still insist that they made the first chicken sandwich, and that just seems wild to me. It's a fried breast between a bun. Come on, nobody can invent that. It just is. It just exists as these two products are created. As soon as we had bread and chicken, somebody was like, "Wait, I got it. Hold on. Step back." So I don't grant that to Kathy or Popeye's, to be fair, that both of them claim to have the first chicken sandwich.

Anyway, so McDonald's in 2005, they had a Southern-style Chicken Sandwich, and that was it. That was straight up. We got a potato bun, we got two pickles, we got pickle-brining, let's go. It had a good run. I think it was a decade that it continued. Even they were in the game.

Then when Popeye's decided like, "Hey, why don't we try? Why don't all of us other restaurants try to make a good one instead of making a forgettable option for your cousin that doesn't like hamburgers? We'll actually try,” then you started having more and more people come out.

Walter, do you know — this is true — between the beginning of 2019 and the end of 2020, do you know how much sales of chicken sandwiches increased?

I do not.

It's really easy to remember this statistic because it is 420 percent.

That's a memorable statistic.

It's a memorable statistic. It's how I remember that my daughter was born at 4 p.m. and 20 minutes. 4:20 is when my kid was born. 420 percent. That is how much chicken sandwich sales increased.

Everybody's just like, "Hey, restaurants are selling good chicken sandwiches now. We should probably go get them." But the wars, I don't know why it had to be a war.

Everybody in the war, by the way, always shouts out all the other people in the war, which is wild because that doesn't seem to be a good marketing strategy to just be like, "Here are some other places that have done this and now we're doing it too." But I think it's also the Chicken Sandwich Wars, I think what that is is directly connected to Munch Squad.

Because I think it is someone that had to do a press release about a chicken sandwich, and they're like, "It's got to have some kind of angle. I don't know what the first line of this press release is going to be. Maybe wars; I keep talking about the wars that are going on that everybody seems to be so hot on," and that was just like the angle. It's solved. If you have a chicken sandwich and you're writing a press release about it, you’ve got to mention the wars.

And the more belabored it gets, the better for a lot of these. It's like, "We're finally strapping on our chicken rifles and wading into the trenches to blow the other sandwiches straight to hell. We're going to make some chicken sandwich widows out here. Let's go," and it's gross. Just say it's a good sandwich or bad.

For years, we've maintained neutrality, but today, that is enough.

Right, and neutrality, I have to be clear, is a bad chicken sandwich! It's not like no chicken sandwich. It's just, let's try to make a good one.

Yeah. It is really funny that you can draw a fairly direct line between the success of the gay rights movement and a 420 percent increase in chicken sandwich sales.

It's beautiful. It's a story of love and acceptance. I mean really, war is such a misnomer. It should be a cultural shift of people unwilling to accept lesser treatment by buying evil cursed chicken sandwiches.

To show you how seriously these places took it, in Huntington, West Virginia, where I live, they opened up a Bojangles — which is like lower-tier Popeye's, it's a mid-tier Popeye's — but it was huge in Huntington, so much so that they had to reroute traffic on Route 60 around the line for Bojangles.

It got so bad, KFC, there's another KFC down the road about a mile, and they put up a sign that just had a big picture of the Colonel and it said, "We make chicken around here." Outside the Bojangles, the KFC put up like a, "Hey, not in our town. This is a KFC town," and hey, hand to God, that Bojangles closed. I don't know what the Colonel was working over there, but it worked. They're back to the only chicken on Route 60 as far as I know.

Listen, you start a battle? Send in the Colonel.

Yeah, if you're going to come for the Colonel's crown, you best come for the bow tie. You’ve got to come correct. No way. Is it the bolo? What would you call that? It doesn't matter.

I would call it a bolo.

You get the idea. Bolo? Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about this current season of The Adventure Zone. You have been the game master for it. I've really, really enjoyed it. I've dug it a lot.

Thank you.

I really mean that. Yeah, it's a phenomenal season. I think the setting is excellent and I want to talk a little bit about that because it is very theme park, Disney inspired, I would say. I think that that ties in decently well with Munch Squad in the sense that there is a commentary about commercialization, but nevertheless identity-bound to American pop culture. I guess I'd love to ask you a little bit about where some of that season came from and where that setting came from.

Yeah. Everybody else in my family had run the game. Oh my gosh, my Arby's big cheddar bowling shirt just got delivered. What a delight. Remind me when we're done, I'll make sure to grab it so you can see, it's going to be a wonder.

I hadn't done the game master thing yet. It always seemed kind of overwhelming and I waited, and I put it off as long as they would let me, because I didn't think I'd be very good at it. I finally was kind of forced into it and we found this game, Blades in the Dark, that's about theft and heists, and I liked that kind of thing. I think that that kind of thing is cool and a nice change of pace from murdering your way through caves or whatever happens in others.

I am a huge theme park nut, I always have been. I think that they are fascinating. I think I even like reading and understanding and learning about them more than I like actually being there. It's more like a hobby. No, I'm the most annoying person to walk around Disney World with. You do not want to look every f*****g four steps at some other dumb thing I've got to point out. I love that kind of stuff.

So I was like, "Well, okay, if I were going to make a world that could incorporate all this junk in my brain, then I would make a giant park like that on a grander scale." So the theme worlds, in this park I called Steeplechase, the theme worlds are layers stacked on top of each other, and each layer is a completely immersive sim. I love immersive stuff like that, too, like Sleep No More, things like that where it's bringing you into the experience, so I thought this would be amazing.

I kind of made my dream place to go to, and then the show, as we've gone on, has really been about me wrestling with these ideas of a society obsessed with entertainment and obsessed with distraction. I'm not coming out as a cultural critic, because I'm very much lumping myself in with that, this idea that you lose yourself so deeply in distraction and entertainment that you lose contact with the world around you or forget what you would consider your actual or real life.

That has been the thing that I've been sort of exploring with it, is what is the impact of that? What kind of obligation do you have to the real world and the people around you versus losing yourself in it in a fiction? Very aware, the whole time, that we are making an escapist fiction at the same time as I'm talking about this, so it is a little bit of an ouroboros, but yeah, that's what it's been.

Also, that's a very highfalutin way of describing it, and I'm terrible at describing stuff in ways where people would actually want to listen to it, but I swear it's a lot more fun than that. There's a layer that's like a noir crime kind of deal, so I watched a bajillion, every noir movie I could get my hands on to really tap into that aesthetic. There's a fantasy layer where we've incorporated elements from previous Adventure Zone shows. There's a reality show dating kind of thing.

But that's the idea. Every layer is people pursuing their fantasies while these three creeps try to rob them blind, so it's been a lot of fun. We're heading toward the end, I think. The next few episodes, probably, it's finally wrapping up, it'll be somebody else's problem, but I feel really good about what I've been able to do.

When I started, it seemed so overwhelming until I realized it's just like eating an airplane. You start, you’ve got to take it into really small chunks, and then eventually, you're halfway through the wings.

It's a really fun listen.

Thanks.

Again, you have some really exciting ideas in there.

I read no internet feedback at all. No Reddit, Twitter, nothing about it, so when someone does tell me that they like it, it is a genuine delight because I'm basically in a vacuum, and my wife won't listen, so I don't know.

It's very fun on the ground, like you were saying. It is three interesting people stealing interesting stuff from a cool place. There is just something that you were talking about when it comes to escapism where it's just, escapism as a genre is a reflection of the society from which you're trying to escape, right?

Right.

I think that you're pulling out some interesting strings in the show when it comes to how creative work is valued, how it's not, how people engage with it, how it's not how people engage with creators. I'd love to hear a little bit more on how you feel about that.

What specifically?

I can't help but notice that at the time that AI is attempting to replicate a lot of the creative efforts of people who really try at making art, you have an element of the show that's talking a little bit, I think, or at least reflecting a little bit of some of that subtle change.

It's weird, right? That was not a conversation when it started. It's moving very rapidly. The idea that a computer could do a reasonable facsimile of me, Justin McElroy? I'm not exactly like a once-in-a-generation talent. I'm like a bunch of SNICK and Pee-wee's Playhouse, and then I had an acting major, and you stir all those together. I'm not one of the A-listers there. I feel like a computer could get me pretty quickly, honestly, but seeing that start to take place, that's been tough, right? Because I didn't ever think that would happen to me. I still don't for me, specifically, but there's definitely a future where this stuff is algorithmically generated. It's scary. It freaks me out.

I have AI characters in the story and a lot of those AI characters, we call them “hard light,” and it's basically a hologram that has feeling, that can feel things, tactile, and they're very much having conversations about sentience and what it is to be alive. We have a few different characters and classes of people who are trying to break out of that idea, that if you have been created by someone else, are you devoid of creative energy? Can creative energy exist being created by a computer? Again, there's a nice thing about this: I don't have any answers. I'm just doing a role-playing podcast. You can think about it all you want in your own time. I’ve just got to fill 60 minutes and then I'm out.

A computer doing a reasonable facsimile, like animatronics, are a fundamental element of the history of theme parks.

Yeah, and those have continued to improve. When you look at it, Lincoln was the first one, and that was very much a Walt Disney passion project, wanting to create a Lincoln that could be entertaining on its own.

There was so much work that went into that, and such a big valley between the real and the fake, and that valley obviously has continued to shrink. Animatronics were a big part of what I was thinking about with Steeplechase. Specifically, the Carousel of Progress is an attraction at Disney World, and it is the only attraction at Disney World, as far as I know, that was directly worked on by Walt Disney, because it was created for the '64 World's Fair and then it was adapted to the form it finds itself now in Walt Disney World.

It is the stage show that has had the most performances of any show in America. It's about a family through the generations, and basically the stage is split into a four-quadrant pie and the audience is in a big ring that moves around to the different quadrants, which is the same family in different eras.

I started thinking about how these animatronics have done this show more times than anybody on earth. If you start to let your imagination go a little bit, especially with the AI stuff happening, you're like, "Well, what if they realize that?"

You know what I mean? What happens when they're like, "Wow, I'm tired of doing this show over and over again"? And I find that a really interesting thing to think about.

That's really fun. Again, it's definitely worth checking out. It's a good entrance point, I think, if folks are interested in checking out the podcast.

Yeah, all of our arcs are sort of self-contained. “Steeplechase” is a fine place to start if you can deal with me shaking off the jitters for the first three episodes.

It's great stuff. Last thing I wanted to throw on the table is that you've been doing graphic novel adaptations of the first The Adventure Zone arc, Balance. How's that been? You just have a new one out this year. I think there's a new one coming out next year.

Usually, about one a year.

How's that experience been?

It's amazing. Honestly, it's a weird project where so much of me is in it from where we did The Adventure Zone, but it's such a team project. Obviously, Carey Pietsch, she's the artist for the series, she's bringing so much to it and creating so much of the visual language of that world. My dad, Clint McElroy, has been a comic book writer for many, many, many years, so he's really taken the lead on it, and I'm mainly tweaking the dialogue from my characters, putting in more boner jokes and stuff.

It's funny because they were so wildly successful. I think the first two or three were number one New York Times bestsellers on a specific chart, like a pretty specific chart, which no one ever puts on the book jacket, right? New York Times bestseller in self-help paperback trade version number eight. No, but this is a number one, I could say; yes, I'm a number one New York Times bestselling author, and what I did was I told my dad to make these few jokes better.

That is why in my freaking obituary, it'll say number one New York Times bestselling author, because I told my dad that "Kenny Chesney might be a funnier reference here than Jimmy Buffett. Why don't we do Kenny Chesney?" Okay, great. Here's your bestseller plaque. No, but they don't send you bestseller plaques. My dad made one for me for Christmas. It was beautiful. I have it hanging up and I can tell people like, "Yeah, I punched up my dad's jokes. No problem."

Wow. Justin McElroy, New York Times bestselling author.

Number one. Sorry.

Number one.

Sorry. Thank you. You don't want to be that guy, but...

I apologize. Justin McElroy, number one New York Times bestselling author on a specific chart.

Several-time number one. No.

Five-time.

Five-time.

Where can folks find you? Where can they enjoy more of your work?

My manager gets mad at me because I always give people the wrong address, but it's themcelroy.family. If you go there, you'll find all of our stuff. Tours are there. We got a few more shows this year. Videos, podcasts, whatever you like, it's all there waiting for you.

Well, hey, thanks for coming on.

Hey, thanks for having me, Walter.

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

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

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman, who writes the Soundbite newsletter. Here's a recent thing what I wrote about it:

The hottest thing in music touring right now is selling affluent 30-somethings their old eye shadow and tight pants back for a considerable markup, with alt-rock bands making a killing on the road. The forthcoming When We Were Young festival in Vegas has sold 160,000 tickets, Blink-182’s North American tour just wrapped with $85.3 million gross on 564,000 tickets, which follows a 2021 outing by Weezer, Green Day and Fall Out Boy that grossed $67.3 million on 659,062 and an $88 million My Chemical Romance tour. Anyway, if any bookers want to take a look at my high school iPod Mini, I have absolutely categorically figured out exactly what the next three years of successful concert tours are going to be.

Right now the podcast industry is in utter chaos, the music industry is beseiged by an enigmatic TikTok and the rise of AI, and the main things that appear to be working in the record business are unexpected niches, like country music and Mexican regional music. Ashley’s covered it all, so I wanted to have her back on to chat about it, in audio no less!

Carman can be found at Bloomberg.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Ashley, thank you so much for coming back on, it's a pleasure to have you.

Yeah, happy to be here.

You cover audio; it's a big beat, it has a lot going on, and it's been a really dynamic couple of months it seems, in your field. What's been going on?

Basically my beat, I started out covering the podcast industry over at The Verge for a number of years, then came over to Bloomberg, still with that intention to cover the podcast world, but also add in some of the music industry, really getting both sides. Obviously, audio can also include audiobooks, all the various genres of audio that exist in this world, but primarily focused on the podcast space and music industry. What's been going on? Podcasting has been having a little bit of a market correction reckoning. The music world is pushing for a whole new streaming model and wringing their hands over generative AI. So, busy dynamic moments on both sides of the industry.

I recall reading a little while ago that the audio slice of the pie, so to speak, is increasing, but the individual groups within it are rising and falling pretty dynamically. I guess let's talk a little bit about what hasn't really been working super well lately. You've written a lot about the podcast industry and the consolidation that we've seen in that. What's been going on in the past six months; it seems like there's been a serious contraction?

Yeah. So, essentially the very sped up version of the podcast world up until now is, starting around 2019, you had Spotify enter the space, spending a ton of money, which basically set off this huge gold rush around podcasts. Amazon entered the world with Wondery, adding it onto Amazon Music, Spotify obviously making its acquisitions, SiriusXM, iHeart, which of course has been in audio, and SiriusXM having been in audio, but really in earnest signing big lucrative podcast deals. And that goes on for a few years. You have the live audio craze of Clubhouse, and then this past year, really what's happened is this moment of, okay, we spent a lot of money on these podcast deals and locking up some of these big names in exclusive partnerships, but are we actually making our money back on those deals?

I think that's what we're starting to see now is this correction of, hey, what were these deals really worth?

Was this just a super frothy, hyped ecosystem that got us into some financial troubles? So, now, with that in the rearview mirror, some more awareness around the smart deals that could be made, you're seeing some consolidation in the space, even on the smaller network side, who were maybe benefiting from that frothy environment. Now they're like, okay, we need to figure out how we're going to survive in this ecosystem, especially when there's a broader ad pullback in the market. So, they're starting to consolidate, the bigger companies are laying folks off because they just got over their skis, as far as the investment, and yeah, it's just been a rough time, honestly, but I'm hoping that it turns a corner soon.

Yeah, it seems like frothy is a good word. What companies, what kind of podcasts and what industrial organization structure has been the most durable? It seems like the big guys who put a ton of money into recruiting maybe a lot of talent from movie and television, those haven't necessarily done as well, because they were very ad sensitive, but that's not everything. There are still a lot of things that are working in podcasts, it seems.

Yeah, and I guess the important caveat here is that podcasting is growing. Audio companies’ revenue is growing in the podcast world. It's not the type of downturn we're seeing where all of a sudden it's like we lost 7 billion listeners this month. It's not like that. The space itself is actually growing, it's just when it's in relation to the deals themselves and how much was spent for the return, it was maybe just a little too early for that moment. So what's working is people do enjoy listening to podcasts. I personally, I see it in my friends, which granted, I have the bias of being a media reporter, and my friends are also media people, but they buy stuff from podcasts. They enjoy engaging with it.

So from that perspective, I actually think podcasts have a lot of might, and there's been a lot of stuff written recently, not from me, but other great reporters, who have covered just how important podcasts are in the political landscape, as well. You can really see the impact and the amount of conversation they can drive and really bring people to make certain decisions. So I think that actually the spotlight is on them; it's just the business has been a little tricky.

Yeah, it's weird, I've seen a lot of podcasts that had been very ad supported for a while often start pivoting toward live events and whatnot, which is what music acts do historically as well. You don't always need to make all your money off of the physical sales, it can also just be actual events.

The podcast touring definitely still exists. I don't know if it's the biggest slice of the pie, but there's of course Patreon and subscriptions, which have been a success story for the podcasters that can make it work. So, there are alternate avenues for success.

What else isn't really doing all that swell when it comes to audio right now? I know that podcasts have had a hiccup, but you've also run a couple of times about how Spotify is looking to raise prices, potentially, and you're looking at some of these larger companies that have tried to really control a lot of the audio pie that might not be doing as well.

Yeah. So, I think what you're hinting at maybe is just the streaming environment for music. Really what we're seeing there is, it's really obviously reversed the trend of piracy, back in the day, and we're streaming now, companies are doing great, the music companies are growing, they're public, all of that. But what we're seeing in that world is a little bit of concern over the potential future, which is how do they continue growing? How do they maximize the dollar from the streaming services? You've seen price increases. And then also, even more somewhat forward facing, just how do you deal with generative AI when maybe that would lead to an influx of content out there?

How do you actually allow artists who do this for a living and maybe aren't necessarily totally financially motivated by it to actually have their music be heard and make money off of it? And then of course, in the music world, you also have the struggle that TikTok runs so much of this now in the conversation, so what do you do? How do you break artists? How do you make superstars when a lot of this is at the whim of an algorithm?

Yeah, I don't have it in front of me, but I feel like you wrote something a little while ago about how some of the major music companies are even starting to invest in some of these streams, whether they're the lo-fi or high-pitched streams, to capitalize on some of that social. Am I remembering that correctly?

Yes, and I also need to put myself back in that story. The piece that I wrote was about sped up songs, which is a TikTok trend; it's like chipmunk singing, it's just sped up tracks. And what the major labels have covertly done is run Spotify accounts that have all those tracks on there. So, it kind of gives off this veneer of, oh, this is some low-key TikTok DJ who put this up here, and I stumbled upon this big secret, when actually it's totally blessed by the labels and ensures that when you're listening to that song, they get paid the proper royalties.

Because obviously if some random person uploaded a song, I guess we would say illegally, without the proper rights, and they don't properly tag the rights holders, the rights holders don't get paid. So you could see the incentive to be like, here's your cool thing, but we're actually going to make our money off of it.

How widespread is that? That's wild.

I wrote about, I believe it was a Universal account that I wrote about, and I think I wrote about a Warner account as well. So, in those two cases, there were two different accounts. And then, gosh, I would need to check, but one of them actually put out an official compilation of sped up songs.

There are ghost kitchens for music now, that's amazing.

Yeah.

So let's talk a little bit about what's hitting.

A story that you wrote fairly recently, that I really enjoyed because it struck me directly on target, demographically and generationally, was about how one of the biggest hits on the road these days, and one of the biggest tours out there, and one of the biggest odd successes that we've seen in the live events industry, has been the late aughts revival of rock, whether it's Blink-182 or any of these other emo-related bands. I dug that because obviously everybody likes reading about themselves at times, but this seems like it was a little unexpected, that it really is hitting. Why is that?

Yeah, so what I wrote about — you did a good job recapping, but just to cover even more so is that — yeah, you have tours like Blink-182, they got back together, their tour is massive. I have the exact number: The North American leg of their tour grossed $85.3 million and sold 564,000 tickets according to Billboard. Yeah. So they've just had this massive success, which has also translated to streaming, and then you also have tours like My Chemical Romance, who reunited, that did also amazingly well. They grossed $80 million on their tour last year. And then, additionally, there's just this When We Were Young festival, which maybe you've heard of, in Vegas, which is a who's who of that era and rock bands. And so, really what we're seeing is these bands command an audience, even though their heyday was 2004, or even the late ‘90s.

And I don't know exactly what's causing it. Obviously, it could be that folks like us, we're older, we have jobs, we can afford to go to concerts, we have a disposable income, maybe we're going to see it. Maybe the torch is being passed from our parents' generation of rockers down to them, and they're going to become the big rock stadium X, that everybody goes to see in the summer, or whatever it is. Or, this is kind of the X factor, is maybe it's the Y2K interest from Gen Z, and this resurgence in that aesthetic and culture. It could be that, too; it could be all those things. But yeah, it's cool to see, and it's definitely a trend that people are banking on.

Yeah. And again, the numbers here are wild. You mentioned Blink-182, I think they have the fifth- or sixth-highest three-month live grosses. They are genuinely one of the most competitive acts out there per that ranking in that post.

And they're touring a ton. I mentioned the North American numbers, but they're going around the world. It's almost a year-long tour, so it's going to be massive.

Great. Yeah, it's definitely a cool trend, because one thing that you've written a lot about is that what's hitting now is really inconsistent. We can talk about a couple of things; one thing I want to talk about is Mexican music, one thing I want to talk about is country music. Where do you want to go first with this? Because the things that are doing really, really well are fairly eclectic.

Yeah, we can start with any of them. I think the story of country music is pretty interesting.

Morgan Wallen has just been a force who, without getting into the full story, he was caught on camera using the N word — not great, a lot of issues around him. Also, there was some COVID stuff, back in the COVID days. So, really, he's just had this moment where his fans are committed, they love him, he's selling out stadiums, doing really, really well.

His story of the country music is interesting, because you have these acts who are starting to be, I guess you would call them crossover? They're starting to reach into a pop audience, even. And also you have this sort of cultural shift that some people would like to see in country, which is maybe more voices from women, or Black artists, or LGBTQ artists, and the struggle between that and the reality that Morgan Wallen is the biggest country star in the world right now.

So, that's the story of country, and it's an interesting one, because there's definitely some tension there.

Wallen is interesting for a lot of reasons, but his album, One Thing at a Time, has been topping the rankings for quite some time. He did some interesting stuff with that. He clued in on a trend, on how to, not manipulate per se, but how to use streaming incentives to their advantage. Because a 36-song record that is almost two hours long, which you rarely see, but if you're thinking of a streaming thing, that could make sense, right?

Yeah. If you want to give fans a lot to listen to, you definitely could. Although, I do think a lot of it is probably all going to his singles. I hear them everywhere I go, and that's even in New York.

Yeah. Taking another step, Mexican music in particular, you had this really great story, I want to say beginning of June, end of May, that was all about that niche in general, and there's been a lot of regional music that has succeeded. That's riding a couple of different other trends, right?

Yeah. Obviously, Mexican music is sung in Spanish most of the time, and so what we're seeing there is just a continuation of growth in the Latin music broader genre, which is Bad Bunny, obviously huge, Rosalía, lots of others. So, with Mexican music, we're seeing artists like Peso Pluma, who is 23 years old from Guadalajara, he's also just been this huge act, and really the sound is truly a regional sound.

And there is controversy with that, as well, around this genre called narcocorridos, which are stories around drug cartels, just Wild West stories, almost. And obviously, there's been some pushback on that, but once again, this music is really reaching people regardless of whether they speak Spanish or not.

And I think the story with Mexican music is going to be, can it become as big as Reggaeton or Dembow, or something that really translates across the world? Right now we're seeing it in Mexico, obviously, the U.S., but can it really go to Asia? We're starting to see hints of it. But that's the next turn of the screw for that genre.

Really? So, it does make sense that it could succeed in America because there's a large Spanish-speaking audience here, but the next marker of success is, is it going to be played in Japan?

Anywhere in the world. But yeah, obviously Asia would be amazing. I spoke to some people who were like, yeah, we have listeners in Japan, which is so cool, but yeah, you want to see it succeed in all sorts of different regions that maybe don't necessarily have that direct tie to Mexico or Spanish language.

Yeah. I know that they've done phenomenally well in North American tours. Bad Bunny's tour was huge.

Yeah. Bad Bunny was huge, and all these Mexican artists have also been touring for years. The U.S. has a huge Mexican population, or descendants of Mexican people, so it definitely does very, very well in North America.

That's exciting. It's a really great newsletter, I enjoy it a lot. And I'm interested in the space, and it's just been very cool because this seems like a very transformative time, where finally the music industry has, as you mentioned, put piracy at bay, but at the same time, there are still some issues lurking.

I remember you had a story a little while ago about how people are concerned about streaming fraud, and some of the numbers that are out there when it comes to possible streaming fraud are pretty remarkable. What do you make of that?

So, streaming fraud is an interesting conversation because that's one that I feel like for years wasn't really widely acknowledged, it was just maybe discussed behind closed doors. But more and more now companies are discussing this. I believe Universal talked about it, or at least nodded to streaming fraud as an issue that they're trying to handle, on their earnings call.

It's just a bigger conversation in the space now, and I think part of this does come from that urgency of, okay, again, assuming there will be a future where generative AI puts a lot more music on platforms, how do you know who is there authentically? Who's getting fake streams? How do you qualify that? And quantify that? I think there's just this motivation to really crack down and make sure everyone's getting paid their fair due, and obviously the labels don't want to lose market share to what they would consider either outright fraud or just not human artists, or I don't even know, not real artists, I guess.

What do you mean by that? That's interesting.

It's kind of talked around, sort of this idea of real artists who are artists, musicians that are like, “This is my career, this is what I want to do,” versus someone who might be financially motivated and goes to an app to generate a song, and is like, “This is a way for me to make money.”

Or, UMG has talked a little bit about noise, like white noise, for example. Is that worth as much? Should that be worth the same amount as, I think Warner famously said, "An Ed Sheeran song?" Should those be counted the same and be worth the same amount of money? The labels would obviously say no, and I assume people who make white noise would say yes. So, this is the dynamic right now.

And the entity that currently gets to decide that is Spotify.

Yeah, the DSPs.

That's an interesting one, I feel like I'm going to see more of that in the future. So the newsletter is Soundbite. It's a Bloomberg newsletter, and it's very, very cool.

Before we wrap it up, anything else that's been on your mind lately? Any stories from this summer that you feel folks should maybe be paying more attention to, whether they're inside or outside of the music industry?

I think the one that everyone's watching is the generative AI story. The thing I'm watching there is it's a lot of theoretical conversation, a lot of talk, and then you have some actors being like, okay, we're going to not allow any AI-generated songs on our platform. I'm curious what the policies look like around that; I'm curious about how they define an AI-generated song. I think that is going to be a big part of the conversation, definitely the legal side and then maybe even the government side. I just think that story is going to keep snowballing into something.

Obviously this is not the only industry that is reckoning with the potential for AI. A lot of it comes down to just who gets to use it and when. Can an artist use AI during the creation of a song, versus can a label use an AI to make the song, versus can a DSP use it to flood their network with stuff? It's a weird peculiar question that, you're right, is entirely theoretical in so many ways.

Yeah, exactly.

Cool. Well, Ashley, thanks so much for coming on. Where can folks find you?

I am on X aka Twitter, I guess, @AshleyRCarman. Honestly, I'm a nerd who's like, follow me on LinkedIn, to be honest. And then, please do subscribe to my newsletter. It is free.

Yeah, it's great.

So that's exciting.

You got some really good data in there, I'm very fond of it. Anybody who listens to stuff should definitely check it out. Ashley Carman, thank you so much for coming on.

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

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

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to my friend Neil Paine, a sportswriter at FiveThirtyEight who can also be found at Neil’s Substack. I’ve been following some recent spat going on in NASCAR between ownership and the different charters; here’s a recent thing I covered about it:

NASCAR team owners collectively boycotted a quarterly meeting with NASCAR leadership over a kerfuffle over the sport’s business model, which they argue pays track owners considerably more than it pays the racing team owners. The $8.2 billion media rights deal inked prior to the 2015 season splits the money 65 percent to the racetracks, 25 percent to the teams, and 10 percent to NASCAR itself, though there are just two track operators: Speedway Motorsports and, well, NASCAR, which owns most of the tracks on the Cup Series. Team owners don’t like this arrangement, and argue that they have to spend a great deal of time trying to recruit sponsors in order to make their money, saying that sponsorships are 60 percent to 80 percent of the budgets of the 16 chartered teams.

Fascinating! It’s a corporate battle with billions on the line! What’s not to love here! I knew Neil was into NASCAR and I wanted to talk to him about how the sport got into this mess and what the heck happened to it.

Neil can be found at FiveThirtyEight and Neil’s Substack. Incidentally we can also be found out our hockey-related friend podcast A Couple of Goons.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

All right. Hey Neil, how's it going?

Hey, Walt. Good to be here.

People know you from many different places, primarily FiveThirtyEight, where you're a sports writer. But I wanted to talk to you today about a thing that I think is going to be very off-topic for a lot of readers in my newsletter and maybe even some reviews in your work, which is some extremely fascinating stuff that's happening in NASCAR, a league that has long existed but has diminished in notoriety.

You and I have been talking a little bit about this on the side and I am just endlessly fascinated by some of the machinations going on in it. I just wanted to have you on to talk all about it. Do you want to talk a little bit about your experience with NASCAR and what drew your attention to it?

Yeah, so I'm from the South. I'm from Atlanta and grew up watching the races and following the sport as a child. I think that that was something that was a lot more common at that time. We're talking about the '90s and the early 2000s being the heyday of not just my fan interest but also a lot of people's fan interest in the sport.

I've recently gotten back into it over the past couple seasons, I don't really know why. I've definitely gotten more into motor sports in general with Formula One also coming back on my radar. That has actually been very popular among American audiences, I think, since you saw the Netflix series Drive To Survive and just people getting into the dramatic aspects of that, not necessarily maybe the on-track drama, but the personalities and the soap opera between the drivers and the teams, and all of the different backstabbing. Machinations is a good word for it that you used earlier.

You see that in pretty much every motor sport though. I think that people, if they wanted to expand their horizons to a sport like NASCAR, there are so many beefs between drivers in NASCAR. The great thing about NASCAR is in Formula One, you do see sometimes drivers, they will wreck each other in the sense that they won't give someone space around a turn or something and they might touch wheels, or they might run into someone. But when you run into someone, it's the end of their day because the open wheel cars are pretty fragile, comparatively speaking.

Whereas in NASCAR, these are big freaking tanks of vehicles that can hit each other. Often, there’s this term, "rubbing is racing," where basically if you're not bumping people while you're out on the track, you're not really fighting for position. You can hit someone and as long as you don't put them into the wall, you can keep going.

I think that that is unique in the way that it feeds into the aspect of rivalry and aspect of animosity between drivers, because you can get back at someone later in a race if they did you dirty earlier in a race, in a way that in Formula One, if you hit and mess up your front wing or whatever, you're both done for the race.

Neil, I'm exhausted at the fact that you found another sport that is basically just hockey.

Yeah, I know the checking aspect, definitely, the full contact aspect bleeds over between the two, I think.

That's cool. I didn't know that you followed it when you were a kid, that's nice. I guess you got on my radar recently because there's beef on the track obviously, but there's also lately a lot of beef between NASCAR itself and the people who own the franchises. It's got this really interesting structure. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, so starting in 2016, they put into place what's called the charter system, which for people that don't know, basically there are like 40 cars on the track for every NASCAR race. And in the past, you showed up for the race weekend and it didn't matter if you were a low tier team or one of the best; you still had to qualify and make a certain lap time and be among the top 40 or so qualifying cars to make it into the race on Sunday and, therefore, to get paid for the weekend.

At the peak of NASCAR, if you go back and watch some of the old broadcasts, you'll see they list out a dozen or more teams that didn't qualify. So, cars that tried, they made the effort, they came out to the track, they got everything ready and they just didn't go fast enough to make the cut and they didn't end up making any money from that.

Starting in 2016, they put into place these charters, which guaranteed that 36 cars would at least be able to have entry into the race. So, it only left four chances for teams that weren't part of the charter system to scratch and claw their way into the field for any given race. For those 36 teams, it offered a lot of cost certainty and also income certainty and it made things a lot easier for their dealings with sponsors, which, we'll probably go into as well, is a huge deal for NASCAR teams, more so than maybe any other sport.

And so this charter system, it was put into place to make it more attractive to invest in a NASCAR team. I think since you've seen those go in, you've seen that Michael Jordan owns a team now, or co-owns it, the 2311 racing team, and you're seeing people because they can now latch onto these franchises, it's essentially the same ideas like the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons. The teams that go into the charter is a car and the car number that goes with it. Sometimes the same owner can own multiple charters. So, Joe Gibbs Racing — Joe Gibbs is a former NFL coach who also runs a super successful NASCAR team — he has four charters, so he has four different cars on the track. But some teams only have one charter and these charters can be bought and sold between the different team owners as well. They can transfer the rights to the charter and that has allowed the value of those charters to go up.

But the problem is that the charter system, when it was put into place, it has to be renewed. It's not like a permanent fixture in the way the sport is structured. So, there's some opposition at the top of the NASCAR food chain, because NASCAR itself is just the governing organization that oversees all of the races.

It has said, "We're not really sure if we're going to renew the charters." And the teams are like, "You better renew the charters because this is the one thing that's driving our value in investing in your sport and making it more attractive for people to come in as owners and know that they can have that secured spot." That's a big part of this battleground, like you mentioned, between NASCAR, the organizing body, and the teams themselves.

There are also the racetracks in the mix as well. The way that the money is split for a television contract, for instance, they have a big TV deal coming up I think after this season, maybe the NBC rights are up or whatever. They have to figure out a new TV contract and then figure out how that pie gets divided up among the teams, NASCAR itself, and the racetracks.

The teams have complained that pretty much all of the money, or the overwhelming share of the money, goes to NASCAR itself and the tracks, and that they're not really getting that much, and it's much less equitable than you see in other sports, where in the NFL or Major League Baseball, you see roughly a 50/50 split between the teams and the players.

In their mind, they're thinking of themselves as franchises that then supply the talent, the players, or in this case the drivers to the league, which would be NASCAR. NASCAR sees it differently. They see the drivers or the teams and drivers as independent contractors, and just part of this mix that also includes the racetracks that they have to coordinate with to stage the actual race events themselves.

Combine that with the fact that advertising makes up a huge share of the revenue for any of the teams and teams are starting to lose really high profile advertisers. We’re talking about the early to mid-2000s, the heyday of NASCAR, you had a lot of companies that just seemed like it made a ton of sense for them to be in NASCAR. Lowe's Home Improvement or the Home Depot, or just iconic brands being in the sport, that then you could associate with the driver. In a lot of cases the driver was in TV commercials — Tony Stewart was in Home Depot commercials — and it was really fed into a relationship where this sport, and by extension the driver in it, are the face of our brand and we have value in that.

Those brands have left NASCAR over the past decade or so, and you're not seeing them really replaced with the same level of iconic brand. A lot of the cars that you see out on the track now are obscure, really more like niche motor racing, or car-related brands, and certainly not the sort of shiny big type of brands that you saw in NASCAR's heyday.

That's trouble.

That is big trouble, because advertising revenue from having these cars basically be rolling billboards for a particular brand, when the big brands leave, you get less advertising revenue. Since the teams are so dependent on that, that increases their desperation to leverage the charter system as an alternative means of getting revenue.

This money bit's fascinating, and I want to get into sponsorship, so we'll get into that in a little bit.

But first, I want to get into one other thing real quick, which is NASCAR itself. Most other leagues are large nonprofits, like maybe they're Major League Baseball and they have a century-old antitrust protection. They tend to be organizations that are either owned by the franchises or exist as a not-for-profit that basically serves as an intermediary between the franchises.

But NASCAR is just a family business!

Yeah, the France family, which goes back to this guy big Bill France who essentially created NASCAR. I mean, there were unaffiliated, loosely-run stock car races in the South before he came along, but he was the one that was able to wrangle together the support of all of those different factions and pull them into one system that then ran a series of circuits that became NASCAR. And it was all centered around things like the Daytona 500, which used to be literally run out on the beach of Daytona, Florida.

And they built the Daytona Motor Speedway and they built Talladega, the other huge super speedway in Alabama. And you can see why the France family, and it's now run by his son, that they see it as being an extension of their father's legacy to continue running it. Bill France, he ran things, I don't want to say with an iron fist, but it was what he said went back in the day. A lot of what he chose to do with this sport was responsible for growing it. You couldn't really argue with his choices because the sport was making so much progress.

Under the leadership of the rest of his family, though, you can take issue with that, and I think that's why maybe the France family and NASCAR itself as the central organizing body has lost some of their ability to have unchecked power over the sport, because a lot of the decisions that were put into place to try to make the sport more popular and capitalize on its moment of popularity in the 2000s have backfired and drove away the existing fans while not really adding new ones.

Fascinating. The money split is wild, because now I want to talk about the tracks, which, I was reading up on it and the tracks get 65 percent of the money from the TV deal. They're a huge factor. And then I read a little more, and it was like there are two track operators. And one of them's NASCAR!

I mean NASCAR, when they pay the tracks, they're actually also paying themselves. That goes back to the analogy to a sport like the NFL, where again the teams and drivers want it to be like, "Okay, Joe Gibbs Racing is the Patriots and yeah, Hendrick Motor Sports is the Eagles," or whatever. But NASCAR almost sees it as the tracks are the franchises, because the tracks are where they're actually holding the events, and the teams are just the players. The Eagles can cut some defensive back, but they're still the Eagles afterward.

Whereas in the case of the teams, they're like, "Can you really have a sport without Denny Hamlin? Can you have a sport without Martin Truex Jr.?"

That's probably the most similar aspect of this fight to the fights that you see in other sports, which are between the owners, who are represented by a Rob Manfred or a Roger Goodell type of commissioner, and the players; the players are making the argument that we are the sport, people come to see us, they don't come to see the laundry that the players are wearing in the form of uniforms.

You see parallels of that in this NASCAR spat where it's like, are you really coming for the track or are you coming for the players or for the drivers? And you can see why they are coming for the track in a lot of ways. That's what makes this more complicated, is because the tracks are so ingrained into the culture of the sport. Could you have a NASCAR without a Daytona or a Talladega? The tracks themselves make up so much of the fabric of what we think of as NASCAR.

Which is true, but you can have a race without Daytona and the answer is F1. F1 is in Vegas, now they're in Miami; they're eating their lunch domestically. It's interesting that you can watch this, if you look at it very closely, it's like, “Oh yeah, NASCAR totally has the advantage because people come for the tracks, not the drivers.” And then if you take two steps back you're like, "Oh wait, no, there's other racing in the world."

Well, and there are other sports as well, and that's really interesting. NASCAR was in a position of real relative power in the mid-2000s. In 2005 I think they were the second-most watched sport in the country behind only the NFL. That was the peak moment of the sport, where all of the big advertisers were in on NASCAR as the fastest growing sport in America.

Wow.

The story of NASCAR since then has been a story of really steep decline, I think, in both viewership, money from some of those advertisers, and just general fan interest in a lot of ways. The sport is no longer at the peak of its space in the cultural zeitgeist, to say the least. And there are a lot of reasons for that that I think nobody can really fully agree on.

Like what?

Well, in my opinion, the biggest reason is that they put in trying to capitalize on the success and looking around at the other sports leagues and thinking, "Well, they have playoffs, so we need a playoff system as well. We can't have a situation where some guy is so far ahead in the standings in the last handful of races of the season that why would you watch? We need to manufacture some drama late in the season, the same way that every other sport does with its playoffs."

So, they put in this thing called the “Chase for the Cup” starting, I want to say it was in 2004 or 2005, was the first year that they put it in.

The problem has been that the rules around the chase keep changing. It's a very convoluted system. If you think about the playoffs in other sports, it's pretty straightforward, right?

Yeah.

At the end of the regular season, every team that doesn't qualify for the playoffs is eliminated, and then you have head-to-head competitions until you whittle it down to the Super Bowl and whoever wins is the champion.

You can't really do that in auto racing because you can't really have a race with two drivers in it. That would be incredibly bizarre. And so, what they do is they still have the eliminated drivers be in the field, and they run the races the same way they would any other race, but the drivers that are qualified for the championship chase just are competing against each other as well. And they get a separate series of playoff points, and then they've added stages—

Oh, screw that.

Well yeah. They've added stage racing, which is where they put in these competition caution flags three times in the middle of a race, so that they pull the pack back together and you get points for winning the stages that are subpoints within a race. I think one of the valid complaints is that the system has become so convoluted that it's very difficult to keep track of the implications or the stakes.

It's not like in football where you can just look at the score and realize, okay, this team is winning and these are the implications. And maybe if I need to, I'll look at the standings and try to come up with the little permutations that people do in week 18 of the NFL season. That's about as complicated as it gets for the other sports. But in NASCAR, it's like that all the time! And even more convoluted because of the points system.

I think that has really backfired. It used to just be like you just went out and raced and whoever won the most races or had the most points, that's who won the championship. I do think NASCAR was also a victim of its own success in a certain way, in which you saw in the past the drivers used to be guys like Dale Earnhardt, who was the son of another NASCAR driver, but he grew up in relatively modest circumstances in North Carolina.

He was a dyed-in-the-wool racer and he was a man's man and one of those types of guys and he didn't take any crap from anyone. And he wasn't really about the corporate scene. I mean, he was just about doing whatever made sense in the moment as a racer. A lot of guys were that way. It was a very Southern sport and they all came from that shared background.

But as the sport became more popular, you saw drivers come from other parts of the country, like Jimmy Johnson and Jeff Gordon before him, but especially Jimmy Johnson, I think, is the poster child for this. He's from California. And when you hear Jimmy Johnson talk, he's kind of boring. He doesn't have that sort of same kind of colorful personality. He's very corporate. He's like, "Well, the Lowe's 48 Chevy did great. My guys put together a great race car for us today and we did the best we could." It's this very robotic type of talking, that I think a lot of the guys have, especially as NASCAR had a higher barrier to entry in terms of finances for a family trying to get their son or a daughter into driving. You had to be rich to be able to participate in this sport when you were young. And then that's the type of people that rise up to the highest level later on.

So, a lot of the drivers now, I feel like fans complain that they can't connect with them in the same way because the fan base is fundamentally more of a blue-collar working class type of fan base, more concentrated in the South.

They want John Wayne on wheels and they're instead getting the spokesperson for Walmart.

Absolutely. I mean, that's a great comparison. I think that they found it more difficult to relate to the drivers. So, when you combine that with the super convoluted playoff system that feels very contrived, and the fact that the playoff system, it produced a lot of Jimmy Johnson titles, he won seven titles, which is tied for the most of all time, and he's arguably the greatest driver ever. But that came at the expense of somebody like Dale Earnhardt Jr. who never actually won a championship despite being the most popular driver and the son of the previous greatest driver of all time, and a guy who really embodied that spirit that has been lost.

So, I think you had situations where there was a misalignment between who the champion was and the most popular driver, and just a lot of different changes. I think in a lot of ways, this doesn't get talked about a lot, or maybe as much as it should have, but I think the 2008 financial crisis also played a big role in the decline of NASCAR.

Oh, now you have my attention. Go on, what?

Well, so NASCAR's fan base was probably affected by that more, just in terms of the region that it's concentrated in and also just the more blue-collar type of fan base, that you saw them probably lose a lot of disposable income and just not have that same ability to attend races, or watch them on television, and they would be less attractive to sponsors as a result of that.

You can go back and watch a race and see that it's sponsored by American Century Mortgage or something like that. It's a lot of the stuff that we saw in other sports for sure around that same period of time. But I think NASCAR in particular was in that sweet spot of demographics where the rise of NASCAR was fueled by a lot of the same things that drove the housing bubble and the various other aspects that were not sustainable about that economy. And then it was also taken down by the same things when those evaporated.

So, those are my two cents. You'll hear a lot of culture war talk around it as well, where they'll complain that NASCAR has gone woke and all this stuff because they won't let them fly Confederate flags in the infield at races anymore, which was a thing as recently as maybe four or five years ago.

Oh boy.

I don't buy a lot of that. I think that mostly, it's just really difficult to get people to buy into a sport when they have trouble relating to the drivers, trouble following the standings and the playoff system. I forgot to mention also, the broadcasts have drawn a lot of complaints, especially this year, but I think in general about having commercials during green flag racing, about the fact that the races are really long.

Baseball we're seeing as an example of a sport right now that's making a concerted effort to present a more viewer-friendly product that has less downtime and more action and doesn't drag on. And they've been pretty successful so far early in the season with the pitch clock and some of the other things that they've done.

Whereas in a NASCAR race, man, you have to be committed to watching this thing for four hours on a Sunday. And that's a pretty big ask, I think! Especially given how many different options people have now for entertainment. I think that is also combined with the fact that maybe millennials are not as into car culture and they're not as into some of the things that maybe people that were drawn to NASCAR were in a previous generation.

Off the top of my head, those are all I think probably the most valid reasons why NASCAR has lost its cachet. We're just seeing the effects of it because it's a sport that wants to feel like it's in that same conversation with the NFL and the NBA and the NHL and Major League Baseball. But the numbers don't really bear that out as much.

Now, it's still relatively popular. I mean, that's an interesting place for it to be as well. Rumors of NASCAR's decline have in some ways been overstated and in some ways, they're also still trying to claw their way back to where they were in 2005 and not finding a way to move forward and think about 2023 instead.

Talking a little bit about sponsors, because I did want to hit that before we wrapped it up, it's interesting because from the perspective of the France family, being a very successful popular regional sport that promotes the venues that you yourself own is a fine outcome for them! But I can understand why for the charters and the cars and the drivers, maybe regional popularity isn't what they want.

They look across the ocean and they see F1 being one of those popular sports on the continent. I think you can see that there's a world in which NASCAR can be very lucrative while still not being nationally dominant. But that's not a world that the drivers want to see, and it's not a world that the sponsors would probably want to see. How do the sponsors factor into it?

Yeah, the sponsors being a national brand I think is what drives every sports league and their ambitions. I don't think NASCAR, to their credit, they did not rest on those laurels of being a regional sport. In some ways I think the fan base complains that they're almost ignoring the Southern roots of the sport too much by expanding to places across the country and going on these cookie-cutter tracks that ignore the special historical tracks that there are in the South.

They're trying to go back and re-appreciate the roots a little bit more. There was a track called North Wilkesboro in North Carolina that got shut down and they moved away from it in, I want to say the '90s. They've actually restored it. And Dale Jr. has actually been a big driving force behind that. And they're going to race there again and they do dirt track races in cup cars, which they used to really never do at Bristol.

That was a couple weeks ago as well. So, they're trying to make an appeal to that core base and fan base. But I think there is always this tension in a sport like NASCAR between the original fan base and the Southern roots of the sport, and expanding it is almost your duty as a sports league, to have that ambition to be a bigger brand and capture more of the market share as a league, compared with some of the other leagues that they feel like they're on the same footing with.

That tension is probably stronger in NASCAR than any other sport. Maybe you hear a little bit of this in hockey, where it's like, "Why are they expanding to the Sunbelt or the West Coast of the U.S. when they should be concentrating on Canada?" I think that's an interesting parallel for NASCAR because in NASCAR it's like, "Why are they focusing on the rest of the country when they should be focusing on the Southeast?" But you don't hear that in the NFL. There's no talk of, "You should be respecting Canton, Ohio, as the seat of NFL history." You just don't hear that. Or Green Bay, or something.

Yeah, I do think that all of these historical factors and the different competing interests come to the fore in NASCAR more than other sports because it's the curse of being either the largest fish in a small pond of the leagues that are under the big, major pro sports leagues, or they're the smallest fish in that huge pond, and they can't really decide which of those they want to be.

Fascinating. So now, I think what needs to happen is we need to trade one Canadian hockey team for a racetrack that will be located in Manitoba, just to maximally piss everyone off.

I would love to see that. Yeah, I don't think they’ve raced in Canada. I could be wrong about this. There are street tracks in places like Toronto and Vancouver, where indie cars would race, but I don't think NASCAR has done that. But I wouldn't put it past them.

I mean, they're doing a race on the streets of Chicago, which sounds like the execution of the prep for it has been a disaster, but it seems really cool also. And they did a version of it on iRacing, which is a video game, during COVID; they actually broadcast and had real drivers driving the cars virtually on the streets of Chicago, which was the brainchild of it.

They're doing some of these gimmicky things that the fan base is pissed off about, but I still think could be cool. I'm of also both minds on it as well, because I love when sports do things that are outside the box and just weird, but hey man, it could be cool, throw something at the wall. That was the spirit of original sports leagues like a hundred years ago, and in some ways we've lost that spirit over time as they've stagnated and become more concentrated on not losing their spot in the pecking order.

You could see a sport like NASCAR being more willing to take chances, but sometimes those chances work out well. Sometimes when you shake up your whole playoff system and nobody can keep track of it and it makes no sense and it seems super contrived, they work out poorly.

When your playoff system is too heavily mathematical for a FiveThirtyEight sports writer to really engage with, you screwed up badly.

Thanks again for coming on. Again, I think it's not a topic that crosses a lot of people's plates all the time, but I think it's a fascinating thing. So, thank you for coming on doing it. Neil, where can folks find you?

Well, they can find me at FiveThirtyEight, of course. Some of my overflow ideas are at my Substack, which is neilpaine.substack.com. You can find some of my NASCAR thoughts on there.

It's really fun. I like the whole things that are a little bit about messing around and having fun with it, both in sports and in your work, man. It's good stuff. I'm enjoying the Substack.

Thank you.

Sweet. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

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

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

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Abraham Josephine Riesman who wrote the explosive new book out this week Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. I have been looking to this one for a while, I was a massive fan of her 2021 book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee.

The subject matter of this one will be of interest not just to wrestling fans but among anyone who has felt the reverberations across pop culture, sports and politics of one extremely complicated family and their very influential “sports entertainment” business.

The book is out this week and can be found wherever books are sold. Riesman can be found at her website and on Twitter.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Josie, thank you so much for coming on.

Hey, I'm so glad to be back. Fire away.

You are out with the new book Ringmaster this week. I have been looking forward to this all year, honestly, since I heard you announced it. Folks might know you from your Stan Lee biography. Both of these stories are about complicated men who worked in the entertainment industry and how it kind of destroyed them, I guess. What drew you to Vince McMahon?

I was a teenage wrestling fan from the ages of about 13 to 16. I was very obsessively involved in Vince McMahon's product, the World Wrestling Federation, as it was known then. And three years isn't all that long a period of time in adult human years, but in teenager years, those are a century each. It was a time when I was very impressionable, and wrestling made a big impression on me. And after I gave up on it around 2001, I stopped watching for like 20 years. And then when I was done with my biography of Stan Lee, True Believer, I had to come up with something else to write. And I was having a conversation with my wonderful spouse, who ended up being my frontline editor on this, but was not at the time, S.I. Rosenbaum, and we were just chatting about what could the next book be.

And one of us said, what about a biography of Vince McMahon? Now, she'd reported on wrestling in the past as a local news reporter. Not on the WWF, but on the wrestling world, so she was familiar with him. And I obviously was familiar with him, had a lot of distinctive memories of him, had some knowledge of his real life. But it was, as is true of most people's knowledge of Vince McMahon's real life, ill-informed, because he's very good at deliberately altering your perception of him. So it just seemed like a natural idea. He is this amazing individual whose story had not really been told in the particular way that I wanted to tell it.

It's a fascinating business story, it's a fascinating cultural story, and we'll kind of touch on each of those elements in a bit. I guess to give folks a little perspective who might not be totally familiar with wrestling, what role does Vince McMahon play in the evolution of it, and what it's become today versus what it was maybe 50 years ago?

Sure, yeah. Vince is the singular man of professional wrestling right now. There's no one more powerful or influential than him, both in the present and also in the recent past. Of the living people in wrestling, no one has had more of an influence than Vince McMahon. He took over the company from his father, who was a wrestling promoter, like his father before him, in 1982 and 1983. He, over the course of that year, purchased the company from his father and some minority shareholders.

And after that, Vince sort of went on a war of conquest. Up until then, wrestling had been this largely regional phenomenon. You had regional territories where local bosses, who operated not unlike mob bosses, would dictate what pro wrestling was in that geographic territory. And it was an oligarchy. It wasn't a democracy, but it was an oligarchy. It was not unlike the English nobility circa Magna Carta, where it's like it could have been the beginnings of democracy, but democracy it wasn't. But the fact was that power was more diffuse than it is now. Because Vince went on this little mission to take over wrestling in America and Canada, and he did entirely.

It's not exactly a monopoly because there are small other promotions, there have been. Now there's a pretty big rival promotion AEW, but for about 20 years there, from 2001 until 2020 or so, Vince was essentially unopposed in the world of professional wrestling. And the whole art form has been changed by that fact, by the fact that this one person has so much outsized influence on how it has evolved in the past for decades.

And it really was a conquest. Again, he cajoled and destroyed and won over and allied with—

And bought, don't forget bought. The big thing was he would flood the zone with money and tell the top talent at any given territory, come over to my shop and you'll get paid more. And it's a very punishing industry financially, so unsurprisingly, a lot of people said yes. And similarly, he would just buy TV slots in rival territories and start broadcasting his show in syndication. One of the WWF's employees spoke to a reporter in the early ‘80s or mid-‘80s and said that Vince was executing manifest destiny. Used that actual phrase. It was an apt comparison, let's say that.

Yeah, and I think that I would love to hear your view on how he changed wrestling to reflect him, because we're going to get in a second to how wrestling kind of changed a lot of the world around it; but whether it was the body building league that he backed for a bit, or whether it was the distinct styles in wrestling, I suppose I'd love your view on, what does the Vince McMahon wrestling world look like that's different than perhaps what came before?

The Vince McMahon world of wrestling for one thing, this is perhaps the most important thing, it no longer claims to be a real sport. This was perhaps, I mean, there's a lot that Vince reshaped, but a lot of it's sort of technical. It'll be like, oh, well he started doing this kind of camera thing. It's a vast accumulation of little things that result in an altered tapestry. But the big historic, world historic break, was Vince in the mid-‘80s started pushing to get his business deregulated so he didn't have to have state athletic committees overlooking health and safety and levying taxes. And his big strategy for that was not in public, but behind the scenes in legislation sessions and in lawsuits. He and Linda, his wife, and their underlings would say, ‘Don't worry, this is all fake. You don't need to regulate this like a sport, because it ain't a sport. It's just like the Harlem Globe Trotters or the circus.’ That was the comparison they always made.

And it's unclear whether Vince ever intended to make that all that public. Perhaps it was inevitable that it would've been, but he was kind of caught off guard in 1989 when, after four or five years of this deregulation effort and after some lawsuits that he or Linda had testified in in which they'd said all that, it finally got reported.

The New York Times ran a big story called, "Now It Can Be Told, All These Wrestlers Are All Just Having Fun." And it was about how the WWF's deregulation campaign, especially in New Jersey, had resulted in them going on the record and saying in legislation and in legal proceedings that wrestling was fake. And Vince was kind of caught off guard, because he was not intending that to be a big public New York Times story, but he'd already laid the groundwork, whether or not it was his intention. That effort also combined with something that was very public, which is that he started referring to his product in the mid-‘80s as sports entertainment, not wrestling. It was sports entertainment. And that change, that shift toward acknowledging wrestling's fakeness in a grand way, was just a sea change. It resulted in a lot of enormous upheaval.

Yeah. I suppose I'm interested in, then, how that deregulation and that upheaval affected not just folks who worked for him, but the product as well as the human beings who worked for him. So much of your book is about the relationships between Vince and various different wrestlers. If he's the only game in town and if the state's not paying attention, that lead to some significant negative impacts for a lot of people, and a couple significant positive impacts for another group. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. In the absence of anybody telling Vince what to do in a meaningful way, he was able to execute a lot of very abusive business tactics towards his workers. Wrestlers are not employees, they are independent contractors, they don't have health insurance provided by WWE, as it's known now, and they are in this very low-paying profession compared to other athletic events of similar spectacle and notability.

Like, you have these people who are every bit the athletes that a basketball player or a football player might be, but they get paid vastly less, and have so few job protections and no voice, because again, there's no collective bargaining. And so that has manifested itself in a lot of death and destruction. Not to put it too bluntly, but I could go on all day about all the people who've been affected in that way.

Just a few off the top of my head, Owen Hart, a wrestler himself, but also the younger brother of the very famous wrestler, Bret Hart, Owen Hart died in the ring. He was doing a zip line stunt — well, technically it was called a descender stunt, but that's getting technical. He was doing this stunt where he was flying in from the rafters at a pay-per-view event, and Vince had changed up who was managing that stunt, and the person who did it was allegedly somewhat incompetent, and the botched stunt led to him falling 70 feet and hitting the ropes and then falling into the ring, and he died mere minutes later, and the show went on. That was the thing about Vince, was it any other athletic event, if one of the players died, I can't imagine that the game would've continued. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there’s some sports example that I'm not aware of, but it would be completely obscene and impossible to imagine a sporting event continuing after one of the players died.

But that's exactly what happened with Owen Hart. Vince told them to keep the show going, and the arena crowd — it was 1999, so we don't have as much internet penetration in a remote location — but you had all these people in the arena who therefore didn't know whether Owen was dead or not, thought maybe it was all part of the act, because they weren't told. And they cheered their heads off for the rest of the show thinking maybe that was all part of the show. That's just one example. There are countless people who've died young because of injuries or head trauma or steroid use, drug use, any number of things that just go completely unchecked or largely unchecked in wrestling, because it's just not a regulated or unionized industry.

The steroid component was a huge part of it as well, too.

Yeah, back in the ‘90s, it's actually kind of interesting. The steroid scandal that the WWF found itself in was arguably held up as a bigger deal than the concurrent scandals about rape. Vince was accused in that same period in the early ‘90s, and then especially in 1992 of raping a female employee in 1986. He was accused of actively knowing and looking the other way about child rape in the WWF among the so-called ring boys, these sort of underage boys who were hired to do odd jobs. And the steroid thing, and there were a bunch of other sexual misconduct allegations, but those were two of the big ones.

The steroid thing was always held up as a bigger deal than any of the other stuff. It was the steroid allegations, and those were specifically about distributing and pushing steroids on the wrestlers, which was a bit of an abstraction because Vince didn't have to actively come tell any wrestlers to do steroids, they knew that that's what the boss expected of them.

So trying to pin it on a specific like, oh, Vince said to this one wrestler, ‘You need to do steroids today, and here they are,’ that was going to be very hard to do. So it's very odd to look back on the steroid trial — well, the steroid scandal is what led to the federal trial that Vince faced in 1994 — and yet you look back on it and the steroid allegations are easily the least interesting, or at least scandalous or least harmful in many ways; even though steroids are very harmful, they're nothing compared to rape.

And it was, I wonder why the media attention went so much to the steroids. I think a lot of it just had to do with the war on drugs. There was just a general moral panic about about chemical substances, especially their use among young people. And I'm not saying young people should be doing anabolic steroids to bulk up, that's not what I'm saying at all. But I think it maybe got held up as a bigger deal than some of the allegations that may now seem more serious. Because it was part of this larger American phenomenon.

It was also likely more obvious on its face, as well as more easy to report on?

Yeah, you're absolutely right, but that doesn't necessarily preclude media from making hay out of something just because it's harder to prove, especially when it's something salacious and tabloidy like sexual misconduct. But I'm sure that was part of it, yes. With the steroid thing, you just have to turn on your TV and you see all the evidence you need by looking at the Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan, as opposed to some of the other stuff.

I want to talk about some of the really cool reporting and new information that you broke in this, and just kind of things that I got out of your book that I have never seen or really kind of felt before.

And I got to say, one theme that I think you keep coming back to is just that how Vince is able to do this is that he appears to be preternaturally charismatic. And you have a couple scenes in the book, I recall one where I think he's talking to Bret Hart, where he's just able to win somebody who is technically in conflict with him, fundamentally over to his position. There was also the excerpt this week that ran about a negotiation between him and one of those ring boys.

Could you talk a little bit about, I guess, his character and his skills, and what his talents are?

Vince is an enormously charismatic individual, which is interesting because he wasn't as a child, this was not necessarily a phenomenon for his entire life. I spoke to many people who knew him when he was young before he got involved in the wrestling industry, and they all said he was kind of unremarkable. They liked him, but he was not president of the class, and oftentimes he wasn't even doing any extracurriculars.

So at some point, either it flowers or he learns it, and by the time he meets Bret Hart, Vince McMahon walks into a room and everybody looks at him. I've never been in a room other than an arena with Vince McMahon. I've never interviewed him. But everyone I know who has said they've been in the same room as him, they all say it's like gravity, you just can't escape the pole of wanting to be around this sort of uncanny dude.

It's not just that he's charismatic, he's also just physically odd to look at, and that's appropriate because Vince and his father both really understood that the human mind is easily hackable in one very particular way, which is that humans don't know what to do with uncanny-looking other humans. If you see somebody who's really big, just enormous, you're going to pay attention to them.

And if you can win them over after they started paying attention to that person, then you've got it made. And Vince is an enormous guy, not as much, he's older, but in his prime, and his prime lasted well into his 60s, he was just a bulked out dude. It's something that everyone remarked on, even before he started wrestling or doing anything as a real character, when he was just an announcer. I was talking to people who watched him in the ‘70s when he was an announcer starting out, and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, we would watch and we'd be like, “Why is the announcer so jacked? Is he going to wrestle at some point? What? Why is that happening?”’

Whether that's intentional or not, it's effective. People are weirded out by Vince McMahon, and that leads them to pay more attention to Vince McMahon, and that's something he used to his advantage a lot.

That's fascinating. I think that wrestling has lended itself rather well to memes; a lot of Vince's actual strategy with recruiting and retaining wrestlers was to find folks who had a very distinctive look. If you look at who has gone mainstream in Hollywood from wrestling, they're gents with a very specific aesthetic. Do you want to speak to some of that?

Yeah, I mean the people who have broken out of wrestling and become people that your mom might recognize are John Cena, Hulk Hogan, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, these extremely charismatic, extremely large, chiseled, slightly odd-looking men, and very few of wrestlers have actually achieved that level of mainstream prominence.

But the ones who have have been very successful. I mean, John Cena is probably the most popular wrestler who's still sort of on the roster. He occasionally wrestles for them still, but all these past stars who are still in Vince's fold, they all know where their bread is buttered, and they don't piss off Vince, they have had a lot of influence.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson's star is falling at this moment thanks to Black Adam, but that doesn't mean he's not one of the more recognizable humans on the planet. He could still run for president, he keeps teasing that he might.

Jesse Ventura, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, was not created by Vince initially, but he became a megastar thanks to Vince, and Jesse was the governor of Minnesota, and now is an influential conspiracy theorist. It's like these people come at the world from odd angles, and end up taking it in even odder angles.

Yes. Can you think of any recent examples, perhaps from recent American politics, that could potentially back that point up as well?

Yeah, right. Well, I don't know why I didn't talk about that, but yeah, there's a particular member of the WWE Hall of Fame who happens to have been the 45th president of the United States: Donald Trump. Vince and Trump are very close, they've known each other since the ‘80s.

Trump was the host of two WrestleManias in the ‘80s, and then would appear at wrestling events and class the joint up. And then eventually, most notably, he had this whole storyline where he was a character as himself, and he was in a rivalry with Vince McMahon, and they had the Battle of the Billionaires at WrestleMania in 2007. And it was a real interesting spectacle, in retrospect. I mean at the time people ate it up just because it was a reality star and another reality star essentially being goofy on television, but it ended up having a lot of significance.

I really think that experience of doing that storyline was transformative for Donald Trump, because Trump wasn't a guy who worked rallies as of 2007, really, that was not his milieu. And he's not somebody who likes watching politician speeches, it's not like he's learning how to work a rally from watching George H.W. Bush deliver the State of the Union or something; he learned from wrestling.

I say he has known Vince since the ‘80s. He's been watching McMahon Family Wrestling since he was a child. We have people on the record talking about him watching. We have people on the record talking about watching Vince Sr.'s wrestling show, that's Vince's dad, in the ‘50s, in the ‘60s, and he was really influenced by that.

Donald Trump loves wrestling, he has watched it for a very long time, and I think the experience of doing that storyline and watching all that wrestling, but especially doing the storyline, really taught him how to work a crowd into a fervor by tossing them little bits of unspeakable truth, and big chunks of completely outrageous lies, and delivering them all with the exact same level of commitment. And the crowd ate it up, and I think that was a taste of something that he then craved more of.

Fascinating. So again, the book is called Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and The Unmaking of America.

Josie, I want to kind of back out a little bit and talk about not only this book, but your previous book, because again, I mentioned in the beginning how there's a lot of connective tissue there, and how these are folks who have a chip on their shoulder, they're not in the mainstream, and they really lust for the mainstream, and then that fundamentally changes the way that they view the world, the people around them, and the folks who work for them.

Just kind of take a step back, what kind of connective tissue do you see between Vince McMahon and Stan Lee, two men who are fundamentally instrumental for the current state of pop culture?

For a huge cog of what happens in culture now and politics, as well.

They were both men who created a character based on themselves but not themselves, and then lost themselves in that character. That's the most obvious comparison.

Stan Lee, Stan Lee was born Stanley Martin Lieber and became this character named Stan Lee. And eventually that was all that was left, was the Stan Lee character, at least in most of his interactions with people outside of his inner circle. And it was a prison for him in many ways. It was, by the end, very different from how he acted with his intimates. And with Vince as well, Vince, when he became a character in the wrestling as a supreme super villain, he became Mr. McMahon, that was the official branded name for his character. And Mr. McMahon was seemingly at least an extrapolation of Vince, and I think in a lot of ways it was an extrapolation of Vince, but Vince has always maintained, ‘Oh, Mr. McMahon isn't me. Mr. McMahon is based on all the people I hated when I was growing up.’

And we didn't really have time to get into it in this interview, but my whole big fat theory about that is, he's talking about his father, Vince Sr., who he never says anything mean about, but I can't imagine he doesn't have deeply conflicted feelings, even if he's not really in touch with them, about this man who abandoned him for the first 12 years of his life, and then was cold to him for the entire rest of the time they knew each other.

We can go there. I mean again, he did kind of run off and join the circus, so to speak, when his father reentered his life.

Yes. When he met his father at 12, he threw himself into wrestling. He became a huge wrestling mark. He was not into wrestling as a child up until then, but when he found out that his father had this whole other life doing that, he wanted it, and he threw himself into it. He became his own wrestling promoter in high school.

Vince had never talked about this, but I uncovered it. In high school when he was at military school in Virginia for two years, he would stage wrestling shows in the school gymnasium. This was his beginning, and he's never talked about that because it interferes with the story he's tried to foster of himself as a juvenile delinquent, rather than somebody who was doing fights only for show.

I guess to kind of add on to that, you had a hell of a time reporting this out. It was a lot of records; covering a guy as slippery as somebody who has a wrestling character can be difficult in its own right. What went into some of the reporting?

A lot. I mean, it was a lot of going through documents and a lot of cold calling, not a lot of travel, because this was a pandemic book for the most part. I did go to North Carolina. That was my one priority: All the other travel was optional, but I had to go to North Carolina as soon as there was a vaccine. And lo and behold, once there, I went down there and I found a lot of stuff.

It was very interesting. You found this total counternarrative to what Vince had told everybody about his youth. And yeah, it was a wide array of things, lots of interviews, I talked to more than 150 people, building off of other secondary sources. You know, how does anybody write a book?

Well, so the book is called Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. Josie, do you want to tell folks where they can find it?

Look for me at abrahamriesman.com, or you can look just at the book, at ringmasterthebook.com.

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Megan Garber who wrote the new essay collection On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics from The Atlantic.

Megan is a writer at The Atlantic, and the magazine has compiled a number of her essays into the new book. It’s a great read, an exploration into the ways that American political actors have parlayed the techniques of entertainment to their own ends. Today, we talked about amusing ourselves to death, what happens to a country when politics becomes entertainment, and Dwight Schrute. 

Megan can be found at The Atlantic and the book, as well as several other new compilations of essays from the magazine, is available wherever books are sold. 

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Megan Garber, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

You have a new book, it's a collection of a lot of your essays at The Atlantic, it's called On Misdirection. What prompted you to figure out this beat and tease out that you were covering misdirection over the past couple years?

A lot of the things that have really interested me about politics and political discourse, let's say, over the past few years are the ways that we are trained to see each other and then also to not see each other. It seems like so many things, so many of the big political stories, particularly at the beginning of the presidency of Donald Trump, and then up till now, so much has come down to are we seeing what we should be seeing, or are we in fact looking away from what we should be seeing?

Ideas about vision is actually one of the main drivers of all of these essays, which are very different other than that. I'm a political junkie, I love to follow politics and all of that, but I kept feeling for myself just as a news consumer, "Is this really the most important thing right now?" All these shiny distractions, daily outrages that come and go, and I know I myself, as a news consumer, often feel very addled, almost, and just in a constant state of distraction.

So these essays really do try to figure out what happens to that form of distraction on a mass scale. If I'm not the only one feeling this, but if a lot of people are feeling this, what are the consequences of that?

I loved how also you kept it in some of the more conventional forms of media as well, too. I know that a lot of our conversation about distraction has been related to social media and algorithms and kind of blamed on Silicon Valley ghosts that are destroying our brains.

But a lot of what you talk about is just super day to day. It's the way people talk about other people, whether it's on television or radio or things like that. Do you want to expand on how it's not just necessarily what we're doing online?

The first essay, actually, is a look-back at the scholar Neil Postman, who's one of my favorite thinkers, critics, et cetera. He wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985 that was looking at the impact of television, essentially, on American culture. And as you might guess from the title, making an argument that the entertainment has slipped the bonds of mere fun and mere escapism and distraction and has actually come into our lives and come to infiltrate lives in a lot of ways.

Looking at him in retrospect is the first essay in the collection. We chose that specifically because I think one of the other arguments underlining a lot that's in the book is that entertainment, as much as I love it, and I am an inveterate lover of entertainment of all kinds, but it can, I think, also become fairly pernicious when it becomes our standard of judging things in the political realm.

One example that's in another essay in there is the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The talking points, it seemed to me, among Trump's allies had nothing to do with the facts at hand. This was a legal proceeding, conducted by lawyers, by Meta lawyers, in fact, in Congress. Yet the arguments were nothing to do with the facts, but "this is boring." That was essentially what it came down to. "Ugh, snooze, ugh, no one's watching this." All that kind of stuff.

When again, this was an impeachment trial of a president, there were facts at play, and yet the talking points completely elided that. What struck me as well, though, was it was not just partisan talking points. One news organization had an entire op-ed about the impeachment trial, sort of complaining that it lacked pizazz. Pizazz was literally the word that was used.

I think there's this way that if we're not careful, the sort of logic of entertainment itself, this idea that everything has to be fun, that boring is its own kind of factual argument, that's what can happen. That was what Neil Postman was talking about.

That, I think, is what's happening right now, too, where just entertainment becomes the only thing that matters at the end of the day. That can become, I think, pretty quickly dangerous and bad for us as a culture.

That was a really remarkable argument in the book. Again, I'm a huge fan of pop culture. I like being entertained, but it just felt weird how so much of the language and the desire of pop culture was being adapted and weaved into politics.

You mentioned obviously Trump, and rallies, and the impeachment, but you had an example in there about Pete Buttigieg after the Iowa Caucus that I thought was really potent where it's just, the question isn't like, "Did we win?" It's like, "Aren't we having so much fun?"

Exactly right, and the Iowa Caucus is as famous and infamous for not having an immediate result. Very quickly, things went awry in a quite extreme manner there. Exactly what you said, Pete Buttigieg put out a talk saying, "We have shocked the nation," claiming victory even though no such victory had been claimed. Just like you said, this idea that shock is even part of the conversation, that shock is a value on its own, I think just speaks to the way that fun and high emotional stakes of everything are infiltrating, I think, our rhetoric and logic as a culture.

I think also just we talk a lot about overheated rhetoric. Just everything is heated, and everything is ratcheting up at all times, and I think one of the extensions of the ratcheting is that we as news consumers and as citizens just become accustomed to evermore levels of drama, of outrage, of everything. We're sort of losing the ability, I think, to have a moderate anything in our conversations. Everything is just bigger, dramatic jazz hands.

So, we may as well get to some of the heart of this. There's obviously a guy who comes up a couple times in your book who is very good at this, bit of a controversial figure, but you just keep on coming back to him, I think, for reasons that are clear.

What draws you to Dwight Schrute?

I will say, during the early days of the pandemic, I've always been a fan of the show The Office, and I went back to it as a comfort watch, a soothing watch in these really awful days. I was newly familiar with The Office.

For anyone who might not be familiar, The Office is a U.S. sitcom, but it focuses on a very small office in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There is a boss, Michael Scott, who is kind of an oaf in a lot of ways. And then one of the other characters in the show is, yes, Dwight Schrute, who I've always been fascinated by, because he's this amazing contradiction, this walking category error.

He is a beet farmer, but he has these authoritarian tendencies. I'm trying to think of how to describe Dwight. He's just a lot of things at once. I think one of the things that's so interesting about him is that he is this person who very much thinks that he knows better than everyone else what the rules are, that he can decide the rules for himself and then, importantly, inflict them on other people.

So, Dwight thinks he is basically the ultimate agent of law enforcement, literally and otherwise, in the office. In fact, again and again is a physical danger to his colleagues. Just that tension in Dwight felt very resonant to me, as you say, for other political figures and power players as well. I wanted to look at Dwight as almost a character and a trope who conveys so much about the people in political power, often, who make up their own rules and then enforce them and inflict them on everyone else.

This idea of, "We're doing it because I said so," and that's the only explanation you're going to get, and these lies that just, everyone just lies without any real sense of backlash or anything. And a lot of that, to me, seemed to be conveyed in Dwight.

There's an appeal to him. You can understand, in a democracy where appeal is a key component of accessing power, that despite the obvious flaws in his leadership capabilities for a large duration, you can see how a guy like that just might appeal to a large group of people. I guess we can now broaden it out a bit, how do you think that applies to American society as a whole?

A lot of the supporters of the fellow we've been talking about, poll after poll suggests that they feel a sense of encroachment. They feel like they used to be de facto at the top of American society and feel like now they are being pushed down a bit. I think there's a lot of indignation there and a lot of wanting to feel a little bit reassured that, "No, you still do have power. You still do. You can still say for everyone else, as you have throughout history."

I think there's something about Dwight definitely that sort of conveys that idea. Donald Trump, very famously and infamously, promised, "I alone can fix it," with 'it' being fill in the blank. There's something in that message, there's something very reassuring to people who feel very caught in a tumult and who feel very unsettled and everything. So much is in flux right now and I think to just have that sort of authoritarian presence who can just say, "Trust me, I've got this. I can make the world make sense again," I think there's something very appealing just about that message.

Then, of course, there's a question of how true that is, how politically problematic that is, et cetera. But in terms of rhetoric, I think that's very powerful. There's the adjunct to that message, which is if Donald Trump can say what's what, if he can look at an orange and say it's an apple, and just by force of will have the orange in some sense become an apple, I think there's also a silent message to people that they might have that same agency. They can still be the ones who decide. There's a very powerful message in that.

You had a line toward the end of that essay, I think, that was just resolving Dwight's arc. You wrote this I think in October 2020, which was a fascinating time for a lot of people. You basically wrote that "his arc as an agent of chaos is simply not sustainable." Toward the end of it, he domesticates a little bit just because that's what folks want. I guess, how do you see that potentially applying beyond strictly the American television program The Office?

One of the things that's so interesting to me about The Office itself is that you could see, or at least when I was rewatching it, what really struck me as a writer — not a writer of sitcoms, but a writer in general — I could see the type of arc that they were trying to give different characters. Just like you said, Dwight, after a while, a character like that can't simply stay an agent of chaos. There has to be some kind of evolution and some kind of arc to the character, or else it just gets too repetitive.

Something about the arcs, I think, is very revealing because I think to the Neil Postman point, in the very broad sense, Americans are being conditioned to understand the world in roughly the same way as a sitcom understands the world, which is a character like Dwight needs, the arc needs, the evolution needs a bit of catharsis at the end.

A lot of us are now coming to see the world itself in those terms, where we expect our political stories, we expect our real stories of everyday life to also have some tidy conclusions, to also mimic the flow of a TV show and a sitcom.

That's one thing I would say, there is this logic of sitcom built into things, and I think that's what can make so many of the problems we have, which are so big and intractable — climate change would be one I would point to — that really resists a Schrutean narrative arc.

It makes it sometimes hard for us to talk about. I would also say that The Office's writers recognized how deeply viewers — and I would also then say citizens and people and news consumers — how desperately we crave a catharsis at the end, in whatever form that might look like. Catharsis is a very important idea, both in sitcom writing and in the broader world.

I like that idea. I do want to talk to you a little bit about the arc of your book, which was really, really great. It's a collection of essays, and I imagine that the order in which you present them, there was a lot of thought that went into that. You kick it off very much talking about irony and satire and how they're having a good moment, you talk a little bit about the Science March. I'll let you take it from there a little bit.

But in the end, you also finish on the idea that "if you brand yourself an entertainer and not a journalist, you can spread falsehoods in the name of fun." You start off in a place where people are having fun for, one might think, deliberate and somewhat positive-facing means. And then in the end, that can get co-opted in a manner. Do you want to maybe talk about some of that?

Sure, and thank you, that's such a good observation, totally.

The book begins in this essay about Neil Postman looking at the March for Science, which it was put on in the same general time that the Women's March was happening, that people were trying to find ways to protest against the new presidency. This was a march that was very self-consciously designed to support science, facts, et cetera. I did not attend myself, but I was looking through Instagram afterward and looking at all the photos, and that's the way of the modern march, is to have your march, which happens in person, translate to Instagram, translate to memes.

One of the things that you're supposed to do, really, as a good attender of these marches is to come up with a costume that will go viral, perhaps. I mean, there were some really good jokes, they were great, they were great costumes, great signs, all that stuff. But I just kept thinking, what now? Speaking of catharsis, is this enough catharsis for people? Is this going to feel like, okay, well we did this, so what else can we do? That's enough. We've had our catharsis, we've made our point?

I don't mean to suggest that everyone involved just stopped at the march, but I do think that sometimes when this becomes our mode of political expression, there is a little bit of a, "Okay, but how are we going to actually defend science in real life? How are we going to defend women's rights in real life?" I worry sometimes that just the fun itself and the act of togetherness and all of that can be its own catharsis, and then not actually translate to additional action in the real world.

That's a real, good point. I do want to stay here, because I know that we're on a roll, but it is interesting because the Science March, it seemed a very fun vibe. Everybody picked their favorite XKCD, it was a good time.

Then if you were to compare that, as you just did, to the Women's March, which was not distinctly as much of a good time, one of those movements had a little bit more staying power, one might say.

That's totally right. I want to also be clear that I think the fun elements of things can be great. Throughout American history, fun has been an important means of political expression. People sometimes forget the book Common Sense, the Thomas Paine track that at some level really did help to foment the revolution, not only was it passionately argued and this very compelling piece of rhetoric, it was also just really funny. It was a work of entertainment. People would read it aloud to each other around the fire, and it had that level of making politics fun.

That is a really important element of politics, to make people feel engaged. But then I think for me the question is: To what extent does the fun encourage us? To what extent does it activate us? To what extent does it bring us together in community, or to what extent does it sort of alienate us from the reality of politics and condition us to see, again, everything as entertainment? In which case the fun isn't the means, but the fun is the end, essentially.

Do you want to talk a little bit about how you close the book? I know you talk a little bit about Tucker, but you also talk a little bit about basically how everybody's having fun now.

It's not just a technique used by those out of power to somewhat mock and undermine those in power, it's also used to enforce it a little bit, too.

Speaking of Tucker Carlson, he famously in a legal case, his lawyer argued on his behalf that he is not a journalist, he is an entertainer and therefore can say anything he wants to say, and that argument won, that argument held sway.

I think again and again, rhetoric that I would see as propaganda that really is designed to make certain Americans think that other Americans are less American and in some sense less human, that's a big part of the rhetoric going on in that show. It comes across, it is presented as entertainment. It's presented as, "Ah, we're just asking questions." Like, "Oh, it's not that big of a deal."

There's a real minimization of rhetoric that I find to be very dangerous and frankly scary. We see that idea again and again. One of the subsidiary ideas that I tried to consider in these essays is, "What does propaganda actually look like?" Because at least for me, when I hear that word, I think of Soviet billboards and I think of the mid-century and very sort of overt, direct, "You should believe this."

And now propaganda has taken on this much more insidious form where it's the same types of messages, it's the same attempt to win hearts and minds over to a cause, whatever the cause may be. But the propaganda itself is not overt; instead it is very buried in just messages that look like fun, that look like just entertainment. That is a really scary development because it means the propaganda can have even more power than it might otherwise to affect the way people see the world.

Again, I really enjoy your work. I'm so happy that it's been compiled into this, On Misdirection.

I have recently, and then for a little bit of a while, I have had increasingly complicated feelings toward The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I was a teenager during the Bush administration, and that was very much, I think, something that was formative for me.

But I think it's impossible to look at what came after and what that flowed into, even Tucker directly, somewhat, through that somewhat fateful Crossfire interview. I think it's impossible to look back at the past 15 years and not see the fingerprints of that on a lot of different political movements that are not necessarily what it was originally going for.

Yeah, that's such a good point. I would say, too, I mean, I think The Daily Show in my mind is a little bit of a piece of a broader collapse, almost. The Daily Show is very much a response to the rise of just reality TV in general. I would argue that the whole point of that genre is to collapse the real and the fake into one thing and be entirely unclear about where the reality ends and the fiction begins.

The Daily Show is very much an extension of that. Around the same time, you've had just so many other cultural works in that space where the whole point is just to poke fun at the idea that you can even distinguish between fact and fiction. That, to be clear, that is not propaganda on its own, but I would also say that this idea that fact and fiction on some level can't be extricated from each other, that is a very foundational argument of any propaganda.

I think we're starting in the '90s with reality TV, to some extent with social media as well. Where are the people on social media, are they people at all or are they characters in a show? It can be very hard to tell. We've been on this path since at least the '90s, possibly before, where just everything blurs together, and the fact looks like fiction, the serious stuff looks like entertainment, the entertainment looks like serious stuff, and everything is just in this blurry, chaotic mess.

Again, you mentioned the Science March, but I went to the Rally to Restore Sanity when I was 20. The fun vibes of that, "We're all in this together." But, like, that was also the thing in D.C. from January 5th to 7th, 2021. I love in your book just how you went through all the different ways that this is manifesting.

Thank you so much. Speaking of the order, we were going for that arc, so I appreciate that that was really clear, because it really does feel like one of those sort of paths that you can see in retrospect. And at the time, it's hard to know what's exactly happening, but now even just 10 years later, five years later, things become much more clear.  

And then, too, at the end of the book, the final essay is about how endings themselves, the sense of things will come to a satisfying conclusion, that that alone, that logic — which is so much a product, I think, of movies and TV shows and all of that — how that logic alone can be really pernicious for people, because most things will not have an ending.

Most things are fluid, news stories are fluid. Yes, there are some beginnings and some endings, but usually they're going to defy that in some way. I think as Americans, we are so conditioned to expect the catharsis, expect either the happy ending or the dramatic one. I think the arc of the past few decades really shows how connected everything is and how hard it is to distinguish the beginning of one thing and the end of the other.

I’ve got to say, I almost wonder if it's systemic in the States. The thing that I envy the most about parliamentary systems is that inevitably, the country's leader, "the protagonist," will leave in shame. They will lose eventually.

And you will have a conclusion to the end of the Winston Churchill arc of the United Kingdom. We don't have that. Barack Obama's still around, Donald Trump's still around. I wonder how much that's systemic.

No, that's such a good point. I will admit this is a little bit extreme of me, but I actually do think it's true; you look in pop culture right now and what do we have but sequel, after sequel, after sequel? The highest grossing movies of 2022 were all sequels. We have this idea of the end of endings, essentially. And it's not just in politics, it's sort of everywhere.

On the one hand, we crave the endings and expect the endings, but on the other hand, we live in a culture where nothing necessarily ends. The sitcom, however many years later, will get its almost inevitable reboot. Thanos will clap his hands, and that will all be undone. I won't say anything else for anyone who hasn't seen, but there is this sense, I think, that even the ending is not necessarily an ending. There can be resurrections and all of that stuff. Like you said, the presidency never ends, it just sort of takes its final form.

Do you think that maybe that's going to get people a little bit more comfortable living in that ambiguity of things never necessarily ending?

It might. It very much might, but then I also think that that desire for the ending is just so baked into our culture that I think it will be more of a tension becoming more comfortable with the flux.

Well, you have teed this up perfectly because I would like to end this podcast. Megan, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you.

This was such a great conversation. Why don't you tell folks where they can find the book, a little bit about it and where folks can find you?

The book is called On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics. It's really just a look at ways of seeing in politics, and the ways that we have of not seeing in politics; how we look at each other, and then fail to look at each other; how our vision is often misdirected by the magicians in power in politics. You can buy the book, as far as I know, wherever books are sold. I know I have a big preference for IndieBound. I love that site, but everywhere books are sold.

Great. I know some of your colleagues are coming out with other ones of these aggregations of essays.

If I could share those, please, that would be great, too. We have Lenika Cruz, my colleague, writing on BTS. She is, I would say, one of the foremost experts on BTS and fandom and it's a lovely book, really. It actually made me very emotional reading it; it's wonderful.

Past and future guest of this particular newsletter, Lenika Cruz.

Oh, you're going to have so much fun. That's great. Then the other one is my friend and colleague, Sophie Gilbert, writing on womanhood and her experiences with womanhood, a feminist examination of pop culture and so much else, and that, too, is beautifully written. It's wonderful. So both of those books are excellent, excellent.

Excellent. All right. Well, hey Megan, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you. This is so nice to talk.

Well, we'll see if we can reboot it next year.

Yeah, inevitably, yes.

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

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

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Eric Vilas-Boas who wrote If Rotoscoping Isn’t Animation, Nothing Is for Vulture. Here's what I wrote about it:

This year director Richard Linklater released the film Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, which is animated through rotoscoping. Essentially, live-action footage is painstakingly animated over using a technique that harkens back to the dawn of animation, a process that required a suite of about 200 2D animators for costs upwards of $20 million. The animated film, however, has been rejected by the animation committee of the Academy Awards, arguing it relies on live-action footage even though the film clearly surpasses the requirement 75 percent of running time must be animated. Linklater and company are ticked off, claiming that the branch has been captured by corporations and aimed at children, with 19 of the past 21 awards for Best Animated Feature going to CG-animated kids movies, and with just two independent studies winning.

Eric is brilliant on the topic of animation, he was one of the founders of The Dot and Line animation blog and is one of the most plugged-in writers on the topic these days.

We spoke about why the awards scene around animated film is chaotic, why it’s a demoralizing moment to be in the field, and how streaming has upended the industry.

Eric can be found at @e_vb_ and at Vulture.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

You wrote a really fascinating story about a new film that's coming out from director Richard Linklater. Before we dive into the whole concept of rotoscoping and whatnot, do you want to tell folks a little about your history with animation? You're currently at Vulture, you've got a long history of working in this space. What's been your journey in covering animation so far?

I've been interested in this area of coverage for a long time. I always wanted to be an entertainment journalist. I always wanted to angle my career in that direction. A buddy of mine and I looked around at the space of magazine journalism a few years ago and we noticed, "Oh, there's no The New Yorker for animation coverage." No one covers cartoons with what we thought was a level of both consistency and seriousness.

We started this website called The Dot and Line based off an iconic Chuck Jones short cartoon; that was in 2016. My friend and I, John Maher, started that site. That site was just our way of covering animation from a fan perspective and a magaziney perspective, a bloggy perspective, and also covering the business through the same lens.

We never made any money. The Dot and Line shut down, we gave it a viking funeral in 2020, in the beginning of the pandemic, very lovingly.

I always really loved cartoons and animation. I wanted to cover it more deeply and make sure that it had a place in the media ecosystem that I was working in. These days I've parleyed that experience into writing about animation for Vulture, for Thrillist in the past, for Hyperallergic, for The Observer. Now I'm currently in Vulture where I edit most of our streaming coverage, and then also work on the occasional animation and cartoons piece, which brings me to this topic today.

I just wanted to make sure that we got that set up, because there's this idea that you've always been reporting on how there's tension in animation, how there aren’t a lot of people who treat it seriously, that there's a tremendous amount of effort and art that goes into it but that mainstream sources oftentimes don't necessarily understand what some of the power and appeal of it is. That all really comes to a head in the story. Do you want to talk a little bit about Apollo 10 ½ and how it was made?

It definitely hits a lot of points for me. Apollo 10 ½ is a rotoscoped movie directed by Richard Linklater, a very well-regarded indie filmmaker who has done both animated movies like A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life as well as live-action movies like the Before trilogy and Dazed and Confused, and a few other things that you might have seen before. Apollo 10 ½ is basically his latest animated effort. It was made by a large team of around 200 animators through a studio called Minnow Mountain, based in Austin, Texas, where Richard Linklater is also based. Apollo 10 ½ is essentially a coming-of-age fantasy story about a kid who gets to experience sitting in a NASA space mission.

The opening hook of the movie is like, "Oh, we made the space capsule too small and now this preteen child must be signed up for a NASA mission." And it's a fantasy. It's meant to be fantastical in a way that live action can't be. Richard Linklater has talked about this, so that's all well and good. Apollo 10 ½ was released on Netflix earlier this year, over the summer. It was also submitted for Academy Award consideration for Best Animated Feature.

Best Animated Feature is an interesting category and we can get into why. But long story short, the film was rejected from consideration over the summer on the grounds that it "did not meet the definition of animation" according to the Academy's feature animation committee.

That's ticked a lot of folks off, because it is animated with a technique used called rotoscoping which as you wrote, goes back to some of the earliest days of not just animation but film, period. Do you want to talk about what the controversy is there?

To give just a definition, rotoscoping is essentially you'll film something in live action. The tool that was invented was literally called the rotoscope, and it was invented by this animator Max Fleischer, who people might know from the Superman cartoons. These old 1940 Superman cartoons are some of the best cartoons of their kind even to this day; they're very well respected. He invented this thing in 1915 called the rotoscope. What the rotoscope is is essentially a multi-plane camera on steroids that allows you to film something in live action, and then to trace the images of what's been filmed into an animated form — to trace the outlines of something and create art out of it, essentially.

The Fleischer brothers used this on a number of their animated cartoons. They had this series called Out of the Inkwell: They traced Cab Calloway, the jazz musician, dancing and doing some awesome moves in some of their cartoons. The upshot of all this is that it looks really good. It's an easy way to capture fluidity and a certain level of realism, without having to draw every single thing from nothing, essentially. It's a technique that's been used for decades upon decades by not just the Fleischers but also animators at Disney. Snow White heavily referenced a performer named Marge Belcher using similar techniques.

It goes all the way to Ralph Bakshi's 1970s Lord of the Rings film, which famously uses rotoscoping. You can argue one way or another over whether Ralph Bakshi's rotoscoping looks good or not. I think a lot of it looks really good. Lord of the Rings is not a very good-looking movie, but it's interesting, I think.

People feel a lot of different ways about rotoscoping. Part of the mystique of animation is that something is artistic and being delivered in front of you, in a moving way that literally tricks you to think that these images that are just layered on top of each other very, very fast are actually moving. That's the point. I think that it takes an element of the mystique out of it, or the artistry out of it, to hear later on, "Oh, that was traced," or something like that. But the reality is this is just a tool, it's just a technique that a lot of animators and a lot of your favorite movies have actually deployed over the years. A lot of movies that you might know.

The crux here is that the animated film division of the Academy came to the determination that this wasn't an animated film, because it required rotoscoping as much as it did. And it's got a lot of people ticked off for a lot of different reasons.

2D animators obviously have had a hell of a time just continuing their craft. Just in general, the category as you wrote has been really dominated by fairly colossal corporate interest for a while. Do you want to talk a little bit about what specifically this tempest is all about?

I think it's really frustrating to anybody who knows about the history of animation to call a decades-old technique used in animation not animation. So that's one side of that argument.

Another side of this argument is the corporate aspect of the specific animated feature award. It's not Best Picture, which has been around for forever. It's not as clear-cut as Best Actor or Best Actress or something like that. Best Animated Feature has been around since the year 2001, so it's newer. Ever since 2001, it's always been largely dominated by either 3D CGI movies and/or films that are owned or have been distributed by Disney-Pixar. To pull out some examples, I think Shrek won the first year, and last year Encanto won.

I don't have the history in front of me, but every year it's an ongoing joke in the animation community like, "Oh, another CGI movie is going to win." And it's very rare that, number one, a 2D film wins, even more rare I think than that a film that's not owned by a large mega-conglomerate, either Disney or Dreamworks, wins.

They've all been Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, with the exception of one Aardman picture, and then Spirited Away.

Two independent studios have won over the past 20 years, which is like, I personally don't like those numbers. A lot of folks can say otherwise.

And then there's this other side of the argument, and I think the animator Phil Lord got into this a little bit when he tweeted last year and a lot of people tweeted: The larger cultural understanding of the animated feature category is that it's made for children. That animation is just for kids, and that this is a juvenile pursuit. I think that the presenters at last year's Academy Awards leaned into that.

It was really patronizing, if I recall.

Yeah. The tone of that is very patronizing.

You look at the animator Richard Williams who passed away a few years ago, this is a person who is known for a hyper-realistic, very, very fluid animated style. He's the reason that Who Framed Roger Rabbit looks as good as it does, because he impressed upon his animators, "You have to make sure the eyelines match up between the cartoon characters and the actors on stage."

You look at artists on his level or on a Miyazaki level, or to go back even further a Chuck Jones level, and to say that they are making stuff that's only for kids is, if it were me, if I were in their shoes, I would find it very offensive. I would find it very patronizing.

It's an interesting category for a lot of reasons. I looked at it last year because I'm obsessed with the Oscars, and Pixar usually gets a bid, Disney usually gets a bid, Dreamworks usually gets a bid, one of the other biggies gets a bid. And then they'll usually get an international feature or one of the Ghibli, Aardman worlds.

It's weird that there's clearly a degree to which the animators within the division have enough clout to get those nominees for those international features and those smaller indie features, but it does seem that the branch is dominated by the kind of folks who just want to give it to Pixar, Disney or Dreamworks.

That's the story the numbers seem to tell us. I think one of the frustrations, and I understand why it has to be this way, is that you do want to know how these voting bodies work, but it raises a wide variety of complications if we knew exactly how everybody voted, but a lot of the stuff happens in a very opaque way. Richard Linklater, in my story, when I interviewed him for this Apollo 10 ½ thing, his words I think were, "We really just don't know who's behind this decision making." The only way that he can conceive of it is that like, they must have something against rotoscoping, or, against us, "us" speaking for the independent animators that he works with.

To him, to them, it feels like a David and Goliath situation where I'm sure a film like the latest Disney-Pixar thing that is made for $150 or $200 million or whatever it is, they would probably have no trouble getting nominated for anything, for clearing through any of the rules that are stipulated. This film, which is made for $20 million and there's definitely an outsider feeling there on the part of him and his animators, they're running into trouble.

It's a challenging category because again, the work is really fairly incredible coming out of even the larger houses, not to diminish any of that. It is just weird.

That's the thing too. No value judgment, it's not an artistic judgment on the artistry of a film like Encanto or Turning Red which are stunning, beautiful animated movies. I cried during Encanto not quite like I'd cried in any movie that year that it came out. But I think the tension is really like, "Oh, why is animation only this?" I think that's the question that is on some of these other animators’ minds and on Linklater's mind.

It's almost entirely 3D animated stuff. Again, I'm a LAIKA stan, and it's just shocking to me that they occasionally get the nominations, but it's a little evident that the body is just going to be predisposed toward 3D computer-animated graphic stuff instead of the 2D stuff, instead of the anime stuff, instead of the rotoscoping and stop-motion stuff.

Yeah. LAIKA is a perfect example; just everything that they put out is amazing, it just looks stunning and it feels like if they get a nomination, it's a good year.

You also cover a lot about just how the business of animation and streaming has really fundamentally changed; a lot of that, whether it's Crunchyroll merging with Funimation, whether it's all these streaming services jumping directly into the world of animation and then some of them getting cold feet and then getting the hell out. It's been an interesting couple of years for the business itself. Do you maybe want to talk a little bit about streaming and how that's changed some of the math for animated stuff?

I'm glad you asked about that because we're in this moment right now, this sense in the animated world that this idea that animation and animators are playing second fiddle constantly to the world of live action. It shouldn't really be that way. These movies and shows take a lot of effort to produce and they do connect with kids and with adults in very, very profound ways. But we're in this moment where it's like, "Oh, you have this corner of the entertainment industry that is doing all this stuff but it feels like it's not getting recognized."

Even within that side of the entertainment industry, you have these aspects of it that are, like anything else, it feels like the big dogs are running the show, like the indie animators are doing their own thing, doing something different but then maybe they're being shut out of awards consideration.

The same is happening on a macro level. In terms of what I've been covering, to take the streaming wars for example, part of the larger capitalist world in which we operate — for example, Warner Brothers Discovery, the company removed I think 36 titles off of HBO Max without warning over the summer as they were trying to carve down on overhead and slash $3 billion worth of debt which the merged company had inherited.

A big part of that was animated shows. A lot of animated shows were in that mix. A few of them, like Infinity Train for example, an amazing show, a brilliant genius show, very not of the same mold as other programming like it, Infinity Train was spiked from the service and all their social media accounts were eliminated. I think the music on Apple Music was removed. This all happened within a span of a few days to a week.

I don't know the status of Infinity Train's physical media, but the sense of it was that this show had disappeared off the internet, completely disappeared. And as a fan, you're kind of like, "What the f**k?" As a fan, you're like, "What just happened here?" Offhandedly, I talked to people who worked on the show, and they were also just confused like, "What's going on?" I think that they were all blindsided. The creator of the show, Owen Dennis, wrote a very good Substack post on that exact thing, that feeling of blindsidedness.

You've got all these things going on and it's not helping. Animators, or people who are fans of animation, it doesn't help them that some movies are being treated with seemingly a different set of rules as other movies, debatable on whether those rules should exist or not as they pertain to the Academy Awards. It feels like they're being devalued by some of these large companies that own some of the titles that they worked on, either to slash them to just offload debt or to eliminate them entirely for no reason. It seems like the reason is money, which to me doesn't really seem a good reason at all.

Then at the same time, something like the Academy Awards, and the award is presented, are we then going to be treated to some hacky line from the last year's best supporting actress or whatever saying, "Oh, animation is so good for kids. It's so great to watch when you grow up, this is what you do when you're a child, and that sense of wonder" or whatever.

I don't know, man. If all this stuff is happening to you and you're an animator and you're already baseline underpaid, because everybody's underpaid in Hollywood or anywhere in media, you learn that your work is being devalued by the company you work for. You learn that, an opportunity that I have to go on stage and accept this award is being seen as this purely juvenile pursuit that only appeals to children. Again, we're speaking hypotheticals for all of this, but the multinational company worth billions upon billions of dollars that happens to have billions upon billions of dollars in debt, essentially disappears your cartoon from the service that it was running on?

I would be demoralized. I'd be very demoralized.

Demoralized is a really good word. It's also fascinating because it's objectively wrong. Adult animation, it's really hit a stride recently; demand is only going up.

I alluded to Crunchyroll earlier, but again we've seen demand for anime go through the roof. It seems like it's very much a dated mentality that animated programming is exclusively for kids. It is just a separate art form in a way.

You've written a lot in particular about how creatively we've been in a bit of a renaissance when it comes to what one can do with animation and who animation can be for.

Yes, absolutely. I don't know, some of the best action filmmaking that I have ever seen has come from Genndy Tartakovsky, director and creator of Primal and Samurai Jack and Dexter's Laboratory.

I interviewed him a few years ago and I can't remember the exact quote, I’ve got to pull it up in my notes. I think I asked him something on the level of, "Would you want to direct a live-action film?" or something like that. And for him, it's not about that. It's not about "graduating" from animation into live action. I can't remember the exact quote, but he told me, basically, it's all about filmmaking. It's all about composing shots, creating storyboards, getting the timing, getting the action and putting a film together.

I just saw a tweet today, it's Steven Spielberg getting interviewed about something 30 or 40 years ago. He talks about how animation is the father of live-action filmmaking. The quote is like, "They need to know how a chipmunk rolls into a bank of snow or whatever, because they need to paint every motion of that chipmunk rolling over and over and over across 12 cells per second." This is Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg gets it. Why can't anybody else get it?

I talk to folks in the comics world who say very similar things, where it's just, they're not trying to storyboard Marvel movies 10 years from now. They're trying to do something in a format that you can uniquely only accomplish in that. You can do things in animation that you cannot do in live action and that's what makes it very cool.

It's not for nothing, but the conversations that are happening in the film and TV animated world are probably also happening at the same time in the VFX animation world. We're hearing a lot about these video effects workers on these Marvel movies talking about their labor issues, everything from increased workload leading to overly demanding schedules, and so the product resulting in it looking bad, the product looking not what a movie should look like and not adhering to some of these basic rules of filmmaking, framing and making sure what the stakes are. I think we're just in an interesting period where a lot of these big productions are coming out, you've got Star Wars, you've got all these Marvel movies, you've got the DC Extended Universe. All those require intense special effects like animators. And these two practices are very closely linked, even if they're not going after the same goals.

Where can folks find you, Eric? Where can folks find your work and what are you working on these days?

Yeah, I'm at Vulture. My Twitter handle is @e_vb_, and anything I write these days typically winds up at vulture.com.

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

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

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week in another special podcast edition of the newsletter, I spoke to Max Fisher, author of the new book The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.

It’s a fascinating book that looks at the science — the neurology, the social science, the psychology — of what social media usage does to us. It’s riveting and provocative and will definitely change the way you view social media apps.

The book can be found wherever books are sold, online and IRL and at independent bookstores. Max is on Twitter at @max_fisher

This interview has been condensed and edited.

You are the author of a new book called The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. I thought this was a really interesting topic for you, because normally you're a national security reporter. You cover a lot of different international events. I was really struck by why you were drawn to social media, but the more that I learned about it, the more it made sense. Do you want to talk about how you fell into this?

Like you said, my background for years has been international reporting, so reporting on global politics and conflicts and wars. I did not think of social media as a story that was for me, or something that I frankly paid a lot of attention to. I thought these are just websites, it's just apps on your phone. How significant can it really be other than as a tech or business story? And that started to change for me, the way that I think it did for a lot of us, after the 2016 election, where there was kind of this sense that social media had something to do with Trump's election, but nobody was really quite sure what it was. It was with the platforms, they're very polarizing and there's a lot of misinformation on them. There are all of these weird, crazy groups and online subcultures on them that all seem to be converging on Trumpism.

I, like most people, still thought, well, these platforms are just reflections of what's already happening in the world, or at most their experience, like any website that you would read or any publication you would read, and maybe there's just a little extra amount of misinformation or garbage in them than other places.

That really started to more significantly change for me about a year after Trump's election when I went to Myanmar to report on the genocide there, which of course was this horrible and very sudden explosion of just complete societal violence between the majority Buddhist group and the Muslim minority.

When I was there, I had the same experience that everyone who was reporting on the genocide there at the time had, which is that social media seemed to be just everywhere in the story. I don't just mean everywhere in that everyone you would talk to would be citing things back to social media, things they'd seen there, groups they organized there, social media being involved, although that was also a big part of it. But also in the sense that it was just very clear, although in this way that was really hard to define, that social media was playing a much more active role in what was happening.

A lot of the hate speech and a lot of the incitement and this general sense of a societal movement to destroy an entire minority population was something that had emerged on the platforms, and in the way that people were using the platforms. They were experiencing on Facebook, especially, but also WhatsApp and Twitter, that it was pulling something out in them that had not been there just a few years before when social media had been completely absent from the country. Due to sanctions before like 2016, you couldn't get a cell phone, you couldn't get social media. And then all of a sudden social media was everywhere and then society took this huge shift.

Shortly after I was there, even the United Nations had concluded that social media had played such an enormous role, that one of their officials said that Facebook had played a "determining role in causing the genocide," which was a crazy thing to hear, that just this website would be driving something so enormous and so wide-scale and something that felt like it was coming from up out of the ground, but maybe it was also coming from these platforms.

It seems, just again, so much of what we've been talking about in just a general sense is social media as a business story. But I love how this happened accidentally, almost, because you just realized, no, they're just actually a social accelerant in different countries.

Yeah, right. It's actually playing an active and really significant role in the way politics works and the way the society works. That was kind of the fuzzy sense that I, like a lot of people, were getting. Then I started to notice, because of my job, I would travel around to lots of different countries for different stories or just to report or get a feel for things. Everywhere I went, I would hear over and over again these stories that would link back to social media, that would be like a microcosm of the Trump phenomenon or the Myanmar phenomenon or usually kind of both.

It would be smaller scale because obviously things of that scale only happen a few times in a century, but it would be a village that would suddenly combust into this crazy violence over rumors that had spread on social media. Or it would be a town that would get overtaken by this mass hysteria that would link back to YouTube. Or it would be this far-right figure or this far-right group who had always been on the fringes of society and then social media came in and all of a sudden that far-right group or figure was the most popular thing and completely running the culture and then would get elected to some local office.

It started happening over and over again. That was when I thought, okay, there's enough of a pattern here that it's worth trying to understand, why does this keep happening? What is it about social media that seems to be at least potentially having this extreme of an effect on the way that societies and politics work? Why is it the same pattern over and over again?

And that started for me in early 2018, and it became a series of stories for the paper. Then it became the book of trying to answer this question of, what is social media? How is it changing us? How does it change our behavior? How does it change the way that our minds work? How does it change our politics?

I tried to pull in for that a lot of traditional on-the-ground reporting of finding a story of a place or people that had been affected by this and then retracing step by step how it had happened, what it had to do with social media.

But also, and this is the part of the book that I'm really proud of because I feel like it's the first time it's been done on this scale, is to try to pull in every relevant field of scientific inquiry that was looking into this, because I wasn't the only one who was having this realization. There was also this whole constellation of neuroscientists and social psychologists and social scientists who were all having the same sense and were trying to empirically answer these same questions, pulling together a lot of their research. There's some original research of theirs that appears in the book. But to try to get a sense for how is this happening? Why is it happening? And what does it mean for us as a species?

I've been reading your work a long time; one thing that I've always admired about it was you do really go to the mattresses when it comes to figuring out the research and actually what's being done in the academic world as well as the scientific world, as well as all that. And so I have been looking forward to that component of this. You want to talk a little bit about what the science is beginning to reveal about how social media gets its hooks in us?

Oh, man. It's a big question.

A book-length question, one might say.

Right. Let me give you a couple of examples to give you a sense for how people are starting to understand it. These are just teeny tiny tips of the iceberg of understanding, because to understand something as huge as the effect of social media on society, there are like 18 different steps in the chain of you interacting with a post and then that happening on a scale of billions of people and then society changes. There are so many things that happen in that system that you can't understand all of them, but I couldn't possibly relay all of them in one anecdote, so I'll give you two.

The first is, there was one study where these social scientists wanted to understand, okay, does social media actually change us? Is it just, we happen to be on the internet and other things are changing? Can we actually narrow this down?

They took these two really big groups of people, an experimental group and a control group, and they had the experimental group deactivate Facebook for four weeks. So just four weeks, which relative to the amount of time that we all spend on these platforms — 10 to 15 years into the social media era — is very small. And just one platform, not even all of social media. You would expect the effects to be very small. Then over those four weeks, they monitored any possible thing they could think to measure. What's changing with these people? How are they changing the way that they think about the world, the way that they interact with the world? They found two really significant changes in the people who deactivated Facebook for those four weeks. The first was that they became just much happier. They had an increase in happiness and life satisfaction equivalent to about a third the effect of going to therapy, which blew my mind.

Holy crap.

I know. Because therapy has a huge effect on your happiness and it's also really expensive, but turning off Facebook is free. That was one of a lot of pieces of research that support this theory, that is now very widely accepted, which is that social media is addictive, physically addictive, and that it creates a chemical reaction in your brain that makes you feel compelled to go back to it. That is a piece of evidence that we don't use it because we like to use it or because it makes us happy, but rather we use it because we've been addicted, even if we hide that from ourselves and we tell ourselves that we just want to pull up Facebook or Twitter.

The second thing that they found was that those people who had deactivated Facebook, their level of political and social polarization changed pretty dramatically. It was political and social issue polarization, which means the degree to which they were polarized on issues that were salient in society rather than overall how they kind of viewed the world. They found that that reduction in their polarization was equivalent to 50 percent of the overall increase in polarization in American life over the past 25 years, which is the entire cycle of the polarization of American politics. The researchers, if they were here, they would be grabbing at my shirt to emphasize that that doesn't mean social media drove 50 percent of overall polarization in American life. But it does mean that its role in the way that we as individuals experience that polarization is extremely dramatic.

Of course, this is just a few thousand people for this study, but if you ask yourself, okay, what about if that's all of society, then the effect starts to become pretty dramatic. That's when it starts to change politics, overall. If everyone is 50 percent more polarized than they would be if they turned off just this one platform, God knows how much less polarized they would be if they turned off all the platforms and for a longer period of time. That was one piece of evidence that didn't measure how social media changes you, but was just really one of many very strong pieces of evidence that it does change you in these ways that we kind of have a fuzzy sense that they do, but okay, it really shows you that it does.

Another study is one in the book that I cite the most, not because I think it's the most consequential, but because it hit really close to home for me personally. Everybody I know who's like you or me who's very engaged in media or in politics who spends a lot of time online, it's like, whoa, okay, that's a little scary, that did show how it changes you. For this study, a group of researchers took a group of people for this experiment, and before the experiment, they tested them all on their level of internal outrage. So how prone were they to outrage as people, and they gauge this.

Then they had the experimental group of the people in this study send a fake tweet on this fake Twitter platform that was built to look like Twitter so that they could control the experience, that expressed outrage in it. Even if these are people who didn't really want to send an outrage tweet, they would say, “You have to send it.” For the group of these people who sent the outrage-filled tweet, they would show it back to them later and they would show it with a lot of engagements on it, a lot of retweets and likes.

This is something that we know the platforms do, because there are these other experiments that show that if you have outrage words in your post its reach will be dramatically amplified. Sometimes you think, oh, outrage travels well because people respond to it. That's actually not why it travels well. The reason it travels well is because the platforms will deliberately pull it out and then shove it in front of a lot of people to engage them because it's this very charged emotion that gets a lot of participation.

They've got a thumb on the scale.

They've got their thumb way on the scale.

So if you send an outrage tweet, it will get engagement almost certainly because the platform has ensured that it will, because it's a great way to keep you on the platform and keep your friends on the platform. What they did in this experiment is they would show people that their outrage tweet had done well, and they found that it made those people more inclined to send more outrage tweets in the future. If they went through this cycle a few times with people, had them send a few outrage tweets, the really stunning thing that they would find is that these subjects in the experiment, even if they had not been prone to outrage beforehand, even if they were not outrage-inclined people, that they would become that way. That they would become not just more inclined to send tweets with outrage in it, but even when they were away from the computer, even when they were away from social media, their internal nature had become much more outrage-prone.

This training that they had received on the platform because they'd gotten this positive social reward, this is something that hits on this very deep school of social science and social psychology that says that our sense of morality, of right and wrong, is something that we derive heavily from social cues. If we think our community of people around us really want us to behave a certain way and will reward us if we do, we become internally more prone to chase and to seek out that behavior, not just because superficially we want the positive attention, but because our minds have tricked us into wanting to do that in order to get in good with our community because of the nature of the way that we evolved and just how we are as a species.

That was something that really blew my mind, because it shows you that the platforms are deliberately inculcating a type of activity that doesn't just change how you behave with your own social media, but that changes your internal nature. It changes the way that your emotions are. It changes the way that you behave.

And when you start to see these — because there are dozens of examples like this in the book, of these kinds of changes that it imbues in you — when you see all of these, and then you see that it's the overwhelming majority of Americans engaging with these systems dozens of times a day, American life today starts to make a little bit more sense. You start to see this kind of training effect and this change that really does feel like it's been society-wide, is something that is driven, I think, a lot more than we thought, or maybe wanted to admit to ourselves, by these incredibly powerful companies and their technology.

It's so interesting that you call it a training effect, because as you were describing that experiment, I was like, yeah, I've seen that experiment before! If the monkey presses the button and then they receive apple juice, then all of a sudden they're going to really love pressing the button. It's weird that it's that simple, man.

I know. I think this is one of the wild things about social media, is that it is that monkey with a lever button. But these companies figured out, not necessarily because they were so insightful about social psychology, although if you go back about 10 or 15 years, there would be very open discussions in Silicon Valley within the industry about exploiting our cognitive weak points, about training us, about changing our nature in order to —

They hired people out of Vegas to do some of the engagement, is my understanding, too.

They modeled the platforms specifically and deliberately on slot machines, because slot machines are physically addictive. If you look at your phone, it looks like a slot machine. You've got the colors, you've got the flashing lights. You get that haptic feedback when your phone vibrates.

But even more than that, what they were trying to hook into was not just the kind of physically pleasing sense of pulling a slot machine, which is addictive and does make you want to go back to it. But they wanted to, and very successfully did, tap into social needs and social impulses, which is not something that we're used to having manipulated on a physical, chemical, personal level like that. I mean, we might be aware that it's happening with our politics, like, oh, politicians are appealing to our baser nature.

But the platforms have learned how to do it in this, like you said, this kind of monkey-in-an-experiment way, that is both extraordinarily powerful because it bypasses all of the normal social checks and the social norms that we use to mediate our own behavior, mediate one another's behavior, by delivering it through these kind of electric bolts to the brain of these reward systems and punishment systems, but also because its influence is hidden.

I think one of the most important things to understand about social media is that you log on and you think that you're having interactions with all your friends and all the people in your community, and that's where the feedback is coming from. That if you say something that they like and you get a lot of engagement, that means that your friends like it. And if you say something that gets no engagement, that means your friends didn't like it.

But that's actually not what you're experiencing. What you're experiencing are the preferences and choices and desires of these very powerful algorithms and many other systems that are built into the technology, that are deliberately designed to encourage and train certain behaviors in you because those are going to be good for boosting your engagement and for boosting the engagement of people you interact with.

It's interesting you mentioned politicians appealing to our baser natures, which has always been the case. For a long time I was wondering, what's the deal with social media? Is it additive or is it subtractive? Is it chipping away at the social mores that prevent us from being a******s to each other all the time, and is it subtractive? Or is it giving people new, fascinating ways to be cruel to one another and new ideas about how to do it, like additive?

Over the past couple years, I've come more in line to the latter idea, and over the course of this conversation, I've really come around to that. Putting it to you, what do you think more of it is: Is it social media giving folks new ways to engage and new ways to kind of self-polarize? Or is it just revealing an inherent polarization underneath the hood, just kind of removing some of the guardrails?

I mean, it's all of the above, I think. And when you're talking about something as complex, in the sense that there are many different inputs and outputs, as social polarization in American politics, there are going to be 30 different causes of that, and of course, none of them are going to be the sole cause and driver. The fact that there are 30 all at the same time means they're all kind of multiplying each other. You sometimes hear from the social media companies, they'll be like, "Well, how can you blame us for social polarization when there's a long history of racism in America and racism is playing a role in social polarization?" And it's like, sure, but if your product is worsening that by 10 percent, by 30 percent, by 70 percent, whatever the number is, then that's pretty significant even if there has to be something in there to multiply in the first place.

I heard this quote from this one politician in a country that I went to called Sri Lanka to report on the way that social media had basically blown up the entire country over the course of a couple of months, where he said, "The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind."

What he meant by that was that there had been racial animus in this country, there had been distrust, there had been weaknesses in the social system before social media got there, but it was the social media systems that amped in and multiplied this, not just in the passive sense that social media multiplies everything, which is another defense that you hear from the companies, but in the sense that these systems have learned, even if the people designing them didn't deliberately design this in, they have learned to hone in very specifically on very specific impulses — moral outrage, us-versus-them tribalism, more extreme forms of identity, narrower forms of identity, distrust of institutions — to really hone in on these things and to dial those just way the hell up. And to not do that for other forms of sentiment, not with other forms of engagement, like bringing everyone together, or a kind of shared sense of unity and purpose, or just information that is spread because it's true rather than because it's emotionally engaging or negatively engaging.

They just mega amplify those because those are the things that keep us plugged into the platform. The people who run social media companies, they actually have more than enough data to know this by now, because they started running internal experiments over the last few years to try to understand what their systems are doing. They're doing the same version of what social scientists have been doing from the outside, except they're inside the company so they have a lot more data that they can work with.

And all of their own internal researchers reach the exact same conclusions, that these platforms drive people toward very specific kinds of conspiracy theories, that they create very specific kinds of identity, the most extreme of which is QAnon, but you see things like QAnon over and over on the platforms because that's what gets people to engage more.

Even like Harry Styles and Chris Pine, that got real QAnon really goddamn quick in the course of like a day and a half.

That's actually a great example, because it's something where you pick a side: you're team Harry Styles, you're team Chris Pine, you're team Florence Pugh. And then that becomes a group identity on social media, that like, "Hey, we all agree that Florence Pugh is the best. And we all agree that the people who support these other celebrities are the absolute worst. And I'm going to make posting all day about how mad I am at people in this social out group, which is Chris Pine fans, which I didn't know I hated until 10 minutes ago, but now absolutely hate, my whole deal and my whole identity."

You see, it's exactly the kind of thing that does really, really well at boosting engagement. Social media did not invent Chris Pine and Harry Styles getting in a fight, but it did invent turning the fandom wars over it into just a whole-ass identity for seemingly a really large number of people. I think that that's actually a useful way to separate out what's the difference between what social media does and what are the preexisting things that it pulls from.

My hope is that the last chapter of this book is telling solutions for this possible problem. I would like that a lot because it seems like there’s a lot of problem here.

I guess, let's do this two ways. One, what would you recommend people personally do in their own lives and with their loved ones regarding social media? And then two, what are the big solutions that you're kind of looking at as a way to address some of these problems?

Sure. So there's a stock list of tips that I give, but I think what's more important than the specific tips is what ties them all together. I'll tell you the tips and then I'll tell you why they're important and what they tie together.

Limit your time. Obviously, limit your time on social media. Give yourself specific times to go on it. It would be easy to say, just delete all the platforms, never go online, throw your smartphone away and live in a cabin in the woods as a poet. But most of us can't do that. We have to be online. We have to be on social media because these platforms have completely conquered the way that we relate to one another and relate to the news.

Turning your phone on grayscale is actually a really, really effective way to make social media less addictive.

Wait, what?

Yeah. On iPhones it's really easy. You have to go into settings and change the setting where you turn it onto grayscale, and then if you tap the power button three times, it goes between color and grayscale. And because they're designed to be visually addictive, if you turn it on grayscale, you will just find that the emotional effect from being on the platforms goes way, way down and the ease of turning it off goes way, way up. It's amazing how much of a change you will see from that, which is again, proof that you're opening it because you've been addicted, not because you want to open it.

If you are using it, try — and this is a hard thing to sell to people, especially in a time of high stakes in politics and deep political polarization and where it feels like every election is maybe going to be the last election in American democracy — try not to outrage post. And if you do, quote tweeting, where you take someone else's post that you don't like, that you thought was dumb, and then quoting it, and then adding a comment about, "Look at this idiot, what they had to say," try to just never do that at all.

The reason not to do it isn't because that person doesn't deserve it. I'm not someone who worries about like, "Oh no, the coarsening of our discourse. Why can't we all get along?" Because there are good reasons we cannot all get along and there are some stakes for our politics right now. The reason not to do it is because, first of all, you're not actually adding anything. Probably this person you're quote tweeting doesn't matter. But also that is one of the most powerful ways that the system trains you to be prone to outrage, to stop reading, to shut down the intellectual and rigorous part of your mind and just engage the monkey brain, dopamine-chasing part of your mind.

If you just stop doing that for a month, I think you will find a really pronounced difference in social media. Try not to dogpile people.

Again, these are things where it's not just like, “Oh, it's not nice to do,” but it's because when you do that, you are complicit in the way that these mega companies are training you to use their product more and more, so you're taking more and more pulls of the cigarette.

You're the centrifuge that is really increasing the volatility of the environment.

If you're on YouTube, open it in incognito mode, because if you were logged in, or even if you're not logged in, but you are using it on non-incognito mode in your browser, it will track your views very carefully and it will serve you up related content that is going to be as likely to hook you in as possible, which is just a great way to be shown stuff incrementally over time, even if it's not immediately obvious, that is not healthy for you.

What all of these little tips have in common is they're all about learning to see social media as a drug, which it is. It's a drug in the sense that it changes your brain chemistry. It's a drug in the sense that it's addictive. And it's a drug in the sense that when you're using it, your behavior changes, parts of your brain shut down, your emotions change, which is true of any drug that we use.

It's also a piece of advice I'd like to give because, while there are a lot of drugs we can't do, there are quite a few that we have all kind of decided are worth it for us to do a little bit of occasionally. I had a cup of coffee this morning. I'll probably have, it's Friday, one to two glasses of wine tonight, maybe even three. But I know, because I understand that these are drugs, that they change my behavior, that they're not always good for me. I know to take them in certain ways that I have come to learn are healthy for me. I know not to drive a car after I have a certain number of glasses of wine. I know not to read certain things if I've had a drink because they might make me upset, or get into certain kinds of social situations. I also know that if I start to feel a certain way after I've had a drink or two, like I start to get annoyed with a friend who I'm out with, I know internally, okay, that's not me, that's the alcohol that's making me feel that way, and it becomes easier to mentally separate yourself from that.

I think when you use social media that way it becomes so much easier to use it responsibly because you come to see maybe there are certain kinds of activities that you try not to do on social media, just like you try not to do certain kinds of activities when you're on a drug or when you're on alcohol, because you know it's not healthy and it's not safe for you. And you also come to see the difference between, okay, I'm on Twitter, I'm on Facebook, and I'm feeling a certain way.

But now I understand because I know Twitter and Facebook are drugs that they are making me feel that way. It's not actually something real that's happening in the world. It's not something real that is happening in this conversation that I'm having that's making me feel that way, so I want to disengage from it. That's my number one tip for using it safely. It's just understanding what it does to you makes it much easier to kind of take a step back from it, I think.

That's great. The book is called The Chaos Machine. It is the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world. Why don't you tell folks a little bit about it, where they can find it, and where they can find you.

It is, as you would expect, everywhere books are sold. It got some good placements at Barnes and Noble and especially in independent bookstores, which has been great. It's on the major online shopping website. I know surprisingly a really large number of people who've gotten the audiobook. I'm not really sure why that is or why people love going to the audiobook for this one.

It's basically just a podcast that has a point.

Isn't that all books, are podcasts with a point?

Listen, we don't want to crack this one wide open too quick. Where can folks find the book?

Everywhere you buy books. You can find me, unfortunately, on Twitter at @Max_Fisher. That's really the only public-facing platform I use. That's another piece of advice, limit yourself to one public-facing platform. And yeah, I hope that people read it and enjoy it. And if you do, I would love to hear from you.

Yes. And if they do, they should quote tweet you dunking on it so that the tweet accelerates in the algorithm's reward.

Exactly.

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

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

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week I spoke to Kaitlyn Tiffany, the author of the new book Everything I Need I Get From You, out this week.

The book is a deep dive into the nature of fandom, and how fangirls have been instrumental in the design, growth and evolution of the internet and social media. It’s a great look that combines digital culture and pop culture.

The book can be found wherever books are sold, and Tiffany can be found at The Atlantic and on Twitter.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

You are the author of the brand new book Everything I Need I Get From You. It is all about the intersection of fandom and internet culture, and how they each feed one another. What got you interested in this topic?I was part of fandom myself, which is very obvious in the book and not a secret. I spent a lot of time on Tumblr when I was 19 and 20 and 21. Then I moved to New York to start working in journalism, and I started working at a tech website that was getting into internet culture coverage. It was sort of the only thing I felt I could contribute; I didn't know anything about tech, and as soon as they were talking about expanding their cultural coverage, I was like, "well, I can do Tumblr, that's tech, right?" That was how I started reporting on fandom professionally.Later on, I knew that I wanted to do a book about fandom because there was a lot of academic work about fandom already, but there hadn't really been, I felt, a satisfying, non-academic popular press explanation of how fandom and internet culture were intertwined. It just made sense to do it through the lens of One Direction, because that was where my personal experience was, and it's really hard to parachute into a fandom that you aren't a part of at the length and level of detail that I wanted to do.I love that you took it from the point of One Direction because I feel like boy bands have this habit of really dominating an entire conversation on fandom for a while. You can almost follow different eras with them, and the era where One Direction was phenomenally popular was a super transformational one for the internet as a whole. Do you want to kind of talk about One Direction, their run, and their role in the internet's fandom history?One of the academics I talked to for the book, Allison McCracken, I actually asked her, "When did fandom start on Tumblr? How did Tumblr become the fandom platform?" And she said it's three things that happened all the same time: Harry Potter, Glee and One Direction. Those three fandoms were huge in the early days of Tumblr, and I think really Glee and One Direction in particular, really solidified the visual culture of fandom, the tradition of making really elaborate gif sets and also of shipping. Shipping was huge. Anybody who doesn't know what that is, it's fan fiction, imaginative relationship pairings between characters.

I want to get into that a little bit later, too, cause that's a huge part of this, but yeah, go on.Totally. That was huge with Glee fandom and it was also big with One Direction fandom. Numerous famous pairings in One Direction fandom. Then with Twitter, I think One Direction just kind of coincidentally came along at the same moment when teenagers and younger than teenagers were joining Twitter. Those were really the first big years of Twitter having a youth culture. I think it was the combination of those two things, and then also sort of an underlooked part of the One Direction history, I think, is how much the YouTube algorithm was driving people to One Direction. I heard that from so many people that I interviewed who started out as just watching whatever pop music videos, and getting recommended the One Direction videos.

Then, crucially with One Direction, there was just so much content that it was really easy to fall down a rabbit hole, if you will. Once you got done watching all their music videos, with another pop star, you'd be like, "Oh, well that was fun, but there's nothing else to look at right now. I guess I'll have to wait." But One Direction was constantly putting out behind-the-scenes stuff on YouTube in a way that was on a much quicker pace, I think, than other pop stars were up to that point. Part of their allure was that they were just really rambunctious and irreverent to the idea of marketing, and it felt really immediate and genuine and authentic, which was something people really craved, the ability to connect directly or feel like they were connecting directly with celebrities at that time.The book is just so phenomenal. I thought it was really interesting because one of the bigger ideas now is parasocial relationships where fans feel that they have a specific relationship to an artist of various different degrees of fame. It felt like they were just some of the first folks to really monetize that and capitalize on that and really engage with their fans to almost encourage that at times, at least at the pop star level.I think it's hard to know, too, how much of that was actually deliberate and how much of that was just the fact that they were also teenagers and also just kind of wanted to be on Twitter and on social media. I think it was genuinely fun for them — maybe not for their whole career, I think there's definitely a point where it became less fun for them — but at the beginning I think they were just so shocked to be famous that they were like, yeah, let's record to front-facing camera video diaries all the time. Why not? And respond to people's tweets. And tweet about what kind of cereal we're eating for breakfast and whatever. Why wouldn't we? Everyone loves it.I loved how you really tie the development and the creation of internet culture to dominant musical acts at the time. I love the part that you wrote about the Grateful Dead and the early, early internet. Do you want to talk a little bit about the old days so to speak and what role music played in forming how internet subcultures form?Obviously that part of the book was not from firsthand experience, it was from historical research because that was before I was allowed to use the internet or even knew what the internet was. I actually have the book right behind me, The Virtual Community, which is the history of the WELL, which is really fascinating and talks a lot about Grateful Dead fans in the early forums, the kind where you had to pay to use them because they had to pay for server space. The most enthusiastic participants in these early forums in California were Grateful Dead fans. One of the early operators of the WELL even said, "I think that they were kind of single-handedly keeping us afloat, keeping us in the black."I thought that was really interesting. Grateful Dead fans were huge in early online bulletin board culture and when I was doing the research for the book, it was really remarkable to see just how every step of the way, each time some new platform or some new use of the internet was created, the first people to really eagerly use it would be fans and often music fans in particular. I don't know exactly why that is, but it was pretty consistent. There was Nancy Baym, who is a researcher, an academic, and has a really great book called Playing To The Crowd that has a lot of that history in it, and I cite quite a bit in the book.I just like how the very structure of the internet at times is like you just mentioned, informed directly by the music nerds and obsessed fans that immediately rush to it and really bear out its potential.And platforms will create or kind of take shape around fandom and ultimately end up creating features or having to respond to fandom like Twitter. It's funny to go back and kind of read the news coverage of how Twitter was dealing with fans in its early years in 2009, 2010, because they were completely baffled by its energy. There's an odd tension there, because these are extremely enthusiastic and frequent users of their product. But they're also people who tend to be kind of breaking the rules or breaking the features. They're trying to game the trending topics. They're circulating content to which they do not own copyright. They are sometimes harassing people. I feel like Twitter was caught on its heels and had to really figure out how do we keep fans on the platform, but also make sure that it doesn't become completely unusable for anybody who doesn't want to participate in fandom.It definitely gets things very real for platforms very quickly. You can tell even with BTS and Army, and there was an early story with Twitter that Justin Bieber, an apocryphal story I should say, was responsible for 3 percent of their traffic for a good while there. It's just so interesting that fandom is so intense that even servers have trouble with it sometimes.Yeah, totally. I think the Justin Bieber story was funny to me because journalists who were writing about it kept saying there are specific servers in Twitter headquarters for Justin Bieber tweets. And I was like, how would that work? There's just one server that's got the song “Baby” on it. It's in charge of playing that for anybody who listens.Yeah, yeah, exactly.I do want to talk a little bit about how you mentioned that they played trending topics, they played the algorithm. You had some amazing stuff in there about how One Direction fans attempted to play the Billboard charts and attempted to do whatever was necessary to do that.

Obviously Numlock is a newsletter that loves data and the stories that inform it. I love that part where it was all about the lengths that a fandom will go to to specifically exploit algorithms designed to rank what music is popular at the time. Can you talk about that?That was based on reporting that I did when I was at The Verge and I was just scrolling through my Tumblr feed being like, I’ve got to find something to write about. I came across fans who were posting about gifting iTunes singles, which was something that was really interesting to me. The purposes of it were several, but it was whenever there's a new One Direction song coming out — or at the time I think it was Harry Styles' first solo single — in order to boost the sales in hopes of getting him better chart performance, and also in order to engage in a spirit of community, people would sign up to gift the iTunes single to someone else because you can only buy it once yourself, but you can gift it and that also counts as a sale.

But you can only gift to people who live in your country. So they made this elaborate system for pairing people up in a spreadsheet. Oh we got 30 people willing to give away iTunes singles in Brazil, do we have 30 people who will accept the gift? All of that stuff. That was very elaborate. I was really intrigued by that.

Then once I was asking people about that, they started to tell me about the other things they were doing to boost the single, which I just thought were so interesting. There are the kind of obvious ones of getting everybody in the fandom to just blast radio requests on Twitter and whatever, or Shazam the song over and over so that's recommended in Shazam.Then the really interesting one was that in order to boost the song's positioning on American Billboard charts, people who did not live in the US would download VPNs and basically fake their Spotify streams so they would appear to be American Spotify streams. I think a couple of other reporters asked Spotify and Apple Music and other streaming platforms about their awareness of that kind of behavior. They definitely did not give straight answers on whether that would work. The Billboard charts similarly were kind of vague about how they determine inauthentic activity. I thought that was a fun story. I mean, obviously the number of fans who were participating was not high enough to really make a difference.Also just the basic math of how many times a person would even be able to stream the song in a day, it just didn't add up to the point where you were going to really make a dent, but it was really just funny and fun to see people trying. I thought it was really interesting that that became kind of a ritual of waiting for a single to come out, preparing to put this giant machine in action. In the final edits of the book when it was read by a lawyer at FSG, she asked me to rephrase that section a little bit, because it read too much like an instruction manual on how to do those things. And I was like, "I don't know if these things are illegal, but okay."For those who are interested, the book is called The Anarchist Cookbook For Fans. How to Blow Up A Spotify Code.Again, it's a really incredible book, folks should check it out. I would like to read my favorite two sentences from it.

One Direction fans' relationship with the entertainment industry is adversarial, but mostly because they think they could run it better. Literally. In 2015, there were two separate fan efforts to buy One Direction out of their record label contract.

What on earth is happening there?Yeah, I can't say that I was personally involved in that effort, but I think that's part of the fun thing about fandom, that there are things that people walk around their daily lives accepting as impossible and unrealistic. And then fans are so on the very edge between reality and fantasy that it would occur to them, well, there are millions of us, logically, and if each of us gave a few dollars, we would have many, many millions of dollars, and we could just intercede in One Direction's career. I mean, I don't have any understanding of how their contract works and I'm sure that these fans didn't either, but you can see how they got there.That's incredible. I love how you talk about some of the mechanics of fandom. You talk about how they grow fandom and how some of the platforms can encourage fandom.

I also just really like how you really dive into some of the nature of obsession. We talk about conspiracy theories in fandom a lot, but in this specific case, there were a ton circling around this. It's not the first time. We're all familiar with Paul is Dead of the Beatles and whatnot, but why do you think fandom lends itself so inextricably to conspiracy theories and things like that?I think part of it is that if you are paying such close attention to something over such an extended period of time, you're going to start to notice things that seem to be important or seem to be overlooked, and pull them out. Especially in internet fandom, and especially on Tumblr, there is sort of an incentive to be the one to notice something that other fans didn't notice yet. You saw that a lot in the conspiracy theories around One Direction, which just to clarify, started with this theory that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, two members of the band, were secretly gay and secretly in love and secretly being forcibly closeted by their management. When it started out, a lot of people were really into it and it was fun and totally harmless.

Then later it took a little bit of a darker turn, just because of the extent that people went to defend it, which involved a lot of misogynistic vitriol around the women that either one of them were dating at the time. Most darkly when Louis Tomlinson became a father, a lot of fans became convinced at first that the baby was a doll, and then later that it was either a hired actor or the child of the stepfather of the woman who Tomlinson had been dating and who was his co-parent. That obviously was over a line for some people. It didn't feel over a line for others. Once you cross that line, you can go down some interesting routes. But to return to the question of why fandom lends itself to that, I think fandom is also in opposition to mainstream media a lot of the time. The Larry Stylinson community was very defensive about any kind of media attention and with internet fandom in particular and with One Direction even more so. There is just so much to look at and to wade through and so much evidence and proof that you can find. This is something people bring up when they talk about all kinds of internet conspiracy theorizing, including QAnon or whatever else. Not that I think that there are really a lot of powerful similarities between Larry Stylinson and QAnon, but part of why people get involved in that is because it feels like anybody can participate. Anybody can find something. Anybody could be the one to have an important discovery and kind of get clout within the community. I think that's part of it, and, yeah, I mean maybe fandom also does tend to attract people who are missing some other forms of affirmation or stimulation in their life and they can dedicate a lot of time to thinking about that stuff.Even the title of the book, Everything I Need I Get From You, is a fairly direct articulation.

I also want to talk a little bit about getting to the more innocuous side of some of that. The fan fiction component just really can't be ignored. Fan fiction obviously has a fairly long history, particularly obviously about fictional characters. It seems unique that particularly with One Direction, this was a situation where people and fans were writing fan fiction about actual human beings, to an extent that also now exists in other fandoms, but this felt like a kind of significant change in what fan fiction had been. Can you expand a little bit on that?Yeah. Real person fan fiction, or RPF, has always been a part of fandom, but it was a much more secretive part of fandom for a long time. There was a pretty powerful taboo against it, I would say, because a lot of fans were sort of rightfully concerned that outside eyes looking in on fandom are going to judge whatever they're doing as unhealthy and pathological. That writing about real people would attract a lot of negative attention. There was real person fan fiction, notably in the Beatles fandom, but a lot of that was disseminated only via letters. Later, real person fan fiction would've been disseminated mostly in private email list servs. It was pretty uncommon for it to just be published for broad consumption, especially in the early aughts, because platforms like fanfiction.net and then later LiveJournal put a lot of content moderation guidelines and limitations on that kind of writing and prohibited some of it.Part of the reason that One Direction was a turning point for real person fic was just that Tumblr was a turning point for real person fic. That was where a lot of fans went when they left other fan fiction writing platforms because of the limitations. They all arrived on Tumblr, and that's another reason why it became the fandom platform. I think that's another reason why the Larry Stylinson story is kind of sad, because people who were writing about Larry Stylinson in their fiction, I think a lot of them kind of felt you guys have ruined this by turning it into a conspiracy theory that embarrasses the whole fandom and makes it look like what we're doing is the same thing as what you're doing.It has also gone somewhat mainstream, in as much as fan fiction can be mainstream. Dream SMP, that's fairly large and it's about real people. If you looked at the AO3 top fan works from last year, you do see BTS show up on that, and those are real actual human beings. I don't know, it just seemed like it's gone rather mainstream, even if it was fairly taboo at one point.Yeah, totally. I, for a while, was following a lot of shipping blogs for women from the US Women's National Team soccer players. And that was really interesting to see. I didn't realize that people did RPF slash fic about sports stars.Just kind of backing out a little bit, what's something that you really learned about fandom that you didn't know going into reporting out the book?It was just really fun and interesting to talk to fans about what they got out of fandom. I found it really striking just how interesting and different they all were. Not that that was surprising in itself, but it was surprising how easy it was to get there. Part of what I talk about in the beginning of the book is this trope or this image that people have of a screaming fangirl, and that image is obviously based in reality. People do go to the concerts and scream.But it was really interesting to me and exciting that you can approach someone who ostensibly is that and ask them one question and they will tell you so many interesting things about like, what fandom means to them, their positive and negative experiences, how their relationship to fandom has changed as they've gotten older. And all that was super interesting. That part was really fun to hear about girls who, like me, cared about this thing a lot eight, nine years ago, but still are thinking through their relationship to it now as adults.

What would you say your relationship is to it now?I mean, it's definitely different than it was when I was on Tumblr all the time. One Direction doesn't exist anymore, so it's different for that reason, too. But I still get really excited about whatever Harry Styles is doing, whatever Niall Horan is doing. He's actually my favorite member of One Direction. That's a way of kind of breaking up monotony of being an adult, or I guess, just a way of thinking about how my own identity has changed. I mean, I was working on the book during the pandemic, so I did a lot of just sitting in my apartment, kind of reliving being 19 and being on the internet all the time, looking at One Direction. That definitely got a little weird at times, but it was also really fun.That's amazing. The book is really fun. I enjoyed every word of it. It's called Everything I Need I Get From You. Kaitlyn, where can folks find you and where can folks find the book?I'm on Twitter @kait_tiffany. I'm also on The Atlantic under my author page, and the book you can find pretty much anywhere I think. I mean, I usually share the bookshop.org link because I think they're cool. And I have not used Amazon in five years. So don't use Amazon. Don't tell Amazon I said that.Or if you want maybe access it through a VPN and then just stream it constantly to get it up the charts.Yeah, exactly. That'd be great.

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

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

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week I spoke to Alison Griswold, who just restarted one of my favorite newsletters, Oversharing, which is all about companies in the sharing economy.

Since pausing the newsletter, Griswold went to grad school with a concentration on sustainable cities, and is coming back with a renewed interest in the ways that tech companies are interacting, improving and undermining different cities. We spoke all about what’s changed, and how the sharing economy has an effect on the world.

Griswold can be found at Oversharing.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Thank you so much for coming on today. You have just relaunched Oversharing, one of my long favorite newsletters. Do you want to talk a little bit about you know, what drew you to the space to begin with? I know that the sharing economy has come to mean a lot of different things and that evolution has rolled with the times. What consistently fascinates you about this space?

Well, first of all, thank you. I love having you as an Oversharing fan. It means a lot.I fell into the sharing economy because I had various jobs as a business reporter and through that wound up covering some startups. I like to tell people I'm not really a tech reporter, I'm a business reporter who writes about tech companies from a business perspective. Then the ones I just thought were most interesting was the sharing economy, because this was when it was the early 2010s and Uber was just starting and Airbnb was starting and it was kind of clear they were going to be really big, but they were also completely chaotic, and that was so fun.That’s how I got into it, but it's just a really interesting space. I think we've talked about this before, but the sharing economy is this really fascinating intersection of what happens when you have a lot of money that's put into a particular area, and then you also have a fundamental rethinking of labor practices and employment practices. Then you also have disparities of wealth inequality and income inequality because more often than not, the consumers are sort of affluent educated individuals, and then the workers are often more working-class, trying to just top off their income for the week, so you have all these factors that go into the sharing economy and collide, and I think that's really interesting.Yeah, I love that note that you had about how you're not a tech reporter who covers business, you're a business reporter who covers these tech companies, because again, it is so interesting that oftentimes the innovation that these companies have is not necessarily a technological one, but rather some combination of cloud services and also just labor and interacting with their labor in unconventional ways. It’s been a little bit since you went on hiatus, so what have you seen in the interim on that?Yeah, before I went on hiatus, I wrote a piece for Oversharing. It was something like, "What even is a tech company anymore?" Because it was that time when Casper was going public and everyone kept covering it as "Casper, this tech company," and I was just like, "They sell mattresses online. They're not a tech company. They're a mattress company that sells online. When did everything that has a website become a tech company?"That's funny. They’re not even technologically-enabled mattresses, they're just a delivery company.Yeah, so I think at some point we started to conflate tech-enabled with tech company because a lot of things, especially now, right, we live in a digital economy, everyone is on their phones, everyone has the internet, most things that do well from a business perspective are tech-enabled in that they have a website, or an online ordering option, or there's some sort of software component, but that doesn't mean the product or the core business is tech.I imagine that one reason for that appeal is that it's probably a lot more intriguing to a future IPO to be a tech company, but the facts on the ground, again, you approach it from a business side and you look at the balance sheet and these are not tech companies.Well, and it's better for fundraising. I mean, this has been well discussed now, but part of the, I don't want to say "innovation," but part of what WeWork did so well was that it marketed itself as a tech company and that enabled it to raise a lot of money from venture capitalists and this sort of flush Silicon Valley ecosystem, which is where the money was, and fundamentally WeWork is property business, but I mean, we don't know, right; this is counterfactual, but probably WeWork would not have raised as much money if it had gone to traditional financial institutions and said, "We are raising money for a shared office startup." It went to Silicon Valley and it said, "Oh, we have this innovative new tech idea. Please give us billions of dollars."Yeah. It seems like it's a hustle. One thing I've enjoyed a lot about your coverage has been you went to graduate school and you studied sustainable cities. What do you bring in from that towards the new Oversharing relaunch?Yeah, it was a great program. I needed some time off from journalism to decompress during the pandemic and had been interested in going back to school for a while, and was thinking that a lot of the things I wrote about were fundamentally urban platforms and that they tend to work well in dense cities with a lot of people, and so I thought, "I know about business because I've covered it, but I don't know a ton about urban planning, and what an interesting thing to study and have this other lens on it," so yeah, it was great. There were a lot of classes on governing cities. A lot of it was sort of urban theory: "What is a city? How do we decide who has a right to it? Who has a voice? Who gets listened to?" Very sort of sociological framework, but I'm excited to bring that to Oversharing because I think Oversharing’s always been interested in these cultural, social questions that are raised by tech, and it's nice to have more of an academic grounding in ways to approach it.

I want to spend a little bit of time here because that's a really fascinating angle. I feel like I'm kind of reminded of one of your bigger stories about scooters breaking down and how they just weren't built for the wear and tear of an actual city. We've all been in an Uber before where it's a Toyota Corolla and it's seen some wear and tear. You always contrast that with the cabs in New York, which are specifically expensively designed, but built to be infrastructure for a city.

A lot of these new tools and replacements for infrastructure are actually kind of cruddy at doing that. They're not made with enough care that infrastructure demands. From your experience, what are some ways that now we see cities and startups attempting to create new infrastructure where there might not be that much “there” there?Yeah. I have two points on this. One is a thing I used to think about a lot, but didn't write about that much, was like you say, with scooters and Uber, these are for-profit companies offering transit services. Part of the reason they're able to do that is because they rely on public infrastructure, right?Uber and scooters couldn't operate without roads and sidewalks and all these things, but historically, we haven't expected these companies to pay into maintaining and supporting that infrastructure. So I think that's an interesting urban question, right? Should companies that profit off of public infrastructure also have a duty to contribute to maintaining, supporting and potentially expanding that infrastructure? That's something I would like to look at more.The second thought I had when you asked that is I'm doing something for tomorrow about this urban intervention in Los Angeles. It was just a fun story that was on NPR recently about people going around and painting crosswalks where they felt they should be.

I saw that!

Yeah, so this was something I studied in my program. It's called DIY urbanism or tactical urbanism. It's defined as unsanctioned interventions into the urban landscape, usually by a group of concerned citizens in response to perceived neglect from authorities.Traditionally, DIY urbanism is thought of as sort of fun and creative, but also, there's obviously tension because it might not be legal, there could be repercussions. I was thinking when scooter companies started, they didn't get permission, they just put scooters everywhere. I mean, in a way, that was also a DIY urbanism move, but the difference is it was for profit. Why do we get concerned? Why is it that a group of citizens is potentially going to be punished for doing something not for profit that is intended to improve the community versus a company is able to get away with doing the same thing, but explicitly to make money?

That's really insightful. Both of those points remind me of a lot of the early tension around Uber and Lyft being at airports. They wanted to be in the cab lines. They wanted to get good drop-off locations. The airports were like, "You got to pay for that, buddy." These municipal institutions were designed alongside cabs in mind where they do get to wet their beak by virtue of offering these services to pick up and whatnot.

It was just so interesting to watch eventually, depending on the city, either they got a good deal, a bad deal, you have to slip all the way out to a whole different LaGuardia terminal or something like that. It's been interesting to watch the evolution of how these really go from being a tech company to like a government liaison company. I love watching your newsletter kind of cover that shift.Thank you. Yeah, and it's not to say that the existing models or way the government does things are always right. I mean, a lot of times, they're not, or they could be improved on, but I guess the point is that every time we do one of these things or a company does, that is a choice, and that says something about what we value as a society, and what we think is the way a city should run and be functioning. To answer your question, I'm excited to have done the program and be able to apply that lens to these companies because I just think it will lend itself to a richer discussion.Yeah, I like that a lot. Actually, you had a post just last week about how the taxis are now on Uber, which years ago, would've been completely, incalculably not in the realm of humanity possibility.Yeah, I think it's borne out of supply problems. It's been pretty well reported that Uber went through this fundamental transformation during the pandemic, which was that everyone was locked down, people were afraid of taking cabs, and also, drivers rightfully were worried about transporting around people who might be sick. So they just saw this massive shift in their business, from most of the business revenue being rides to most of it being delivery, which made a lot of sense because everyone was home, everyone needed food and groceries and essentials and Uber was able to provide that service. But then, of course, people got vaccinated, things started to open up, there's COVID fatigue, the world came back online, and suddenly, people wanted to take Ubers again. And there just weren't enough drivers, so classic supply and demand, prices go up, wait times go up, people are unhappy. Uber has been on a campaign for almost a year now to try to get more drivers on the road.

They just struck this honestly hilarious deal in New York to bring taxis onto the app, which is arguably good for taxis, we'll have to see how it plays out, but if it gives them more choice, generally more choice is good. But yeah, just after years of denigrating the taxi industry, it's funny to see that in this moment of supply constraint and need, that is where Uber's turned.Yeah. It's like these companies, there's some more scrutiny under them now. You just have to turn on any streaming service to watch a lovely story about a founder of one of these companies one of these days. It is so interesting about how they took something that was very, very simple, which is like, "I need a ride somewhere and I'm going to pay a taxi $15 to accomplish this task," and then you had a post about the law in Washington state that was just, the jargon here is getting really out of hand.

It took something that was very simple of just like, "I'm going to pay a taxi cab driver to drive me to a location," to, "I'm going to use a ride-sharing service that will offer compensation to a individual to take some passenger platform miles through a transportation network company." That is an innovation in some regard, no?Yeah, it's a fancy way of redefining the taxi meter.Washington state, like you said, recently passed this law that sets a pay floor for ride-hail drivers, which is good because there's been a tension for a while in the sharing economy where workers want better wages and better working conditions and the companies say they also want that. Whether you believe that is up to you to decide, but then they say, "Our hands are tied. We can't provide these benefits because if we were to do that, it would be interpreted by regulators as us being an employer, and we can't have an employer-employee relationship, so we are legally constrained from improving the situation," and so this bill is one of the ways that they're now doing that. They're creating laws that mandate benefits and higher standards without making them employers.But yeah, there was a section of the bill at the very beginning, which just defined a lot of terms, and it is quite jargony, but it's also, I think, it's very helpful because it's hard to have an informed conversation about something if you're not able to talk about it in common language. I mean, we see this in politics all the time, right?Yeah.While it's jargony, it's helpful to say, okay, when an Uber trip happens, what are the different parts of that, right? What time should a driver get paid for? Because there's the time the driver's on an app, but they don't actually have a passenger for all of that time. Sometimes they're just waiting for a job to come in. There's the time when they've accepted a job, but the passenger's not yet in the car, and then there's the time when they pick up the passenger, so you have those three distinct segments. Which of those should the company have to compensate the driver for?

Got it. It definitely seems like, again, it's overcomplicated, but it also seems like that's been a broader shift in the overall economy. You've seen unionized workforces oftentimes dissolve into contractor-based systems where rather than having all of your suppliers be either in-house or through a dedicated network, the way to get into the middle or upper class in America is to become a contractor. Then it does seem like they took a lot of that mentality and they just tried to make it into like, "But what if we had that, but also you were still in the working class?" It feels like they're really trying to do some language shifts that are fascinating to watch in real-time, I would say.Yeah, also, I just think it highlights disparities in the labor system. Personally, I feel like a lot of worker classification is a class issue, but I don't mean that in the way class is often thought of.What I mean is when you're in a white-collar job, you get paid a salary, right? You're expected to show up to work. Maybe your contract says you work 9:00 to 5:00, or something like that, but often that's not enforced, often you can just go to lunch or take a break. No one's stopping the clock when you get a coffee, right?If you're an Uber driver, every minute is materially important to when you're getting paid and when you're not getting paid and that's just such a different way to relate to your work.Yeah. It also just seems like it's a step back in terms of worker relations in the country. But backing out from this topic a bit, I'm interested in how you spend a lot of time studying cities, you spend lots of time looking at these sharing economy firms. What is a city that's doing well at this? You always kind of see situations where cities will completely screw up. As a result, their downtowns are littered with abandoned scooters. But I guess, is there anybody or any municipality that you had a chance to look at that you think is doing all right, or at least going in the right direction?I think Paris is often talked about as being among the most ambitious in terms of getting rid of cars. Paris under Anne Hidalgo, the mayor, has very aggressively expanded cycling lanes, put money into bike repairs and helping people get bikes and all these sorts of things. They've been very creative with their initiatives.London has put up a lot of cycling lanes. Just in the past, I mean, in the three years I've been here, there used to not be any cycling lane on the main road outside my flat, and now there are, so that has happened while I've been living here. I've seen it go up.Then I wrote my dissertation for the master's program on the New York City Open Streets Program, which was really interesting because this was a program where New York fairly early into the pandemic decided they would cordon off some sections of streets and allow them to be open for dining and pedestrianized activity to sort of create more space for social distancing and outdoor activities. The thing I saw from, I looked at two of the open streets, and the thing that became very clear is it was just so scattershot. One was doing really well because it was totally community run in Jackson Height, Queens, and people were extremely engaged.I went to that one.Yeah, it's enormously successful, but it's not a testament to New York City, it's a testament to the people who've made it happen and are still making it happen.Then I looked at Park Slope 5th Ave., which is where I used to live, and that one's also successful, but for different reasons; it's being run by the local business improvement district, and it has a much more explicitly commercial focus, so it's been successful in terms of having a vibrant, commercial life, and a lot of dining, but people on 5th don't feel ownership of it the way that people in Jackson Heights feel that the street is really theirs and a product of community efforts.Then you have others that have completely fallen by the wayside because they don't have the business resources, or they don't have the engaged community to make it run, and the city really hasn't been engaged in providing that support, so it was just very interesting to look at this program and see that there was such a wide variety of outcomes because of lack of... Basically, the city said, "We've given you a stamp, you can do it," and that was it.Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I would say each borough is different. I live in Queens and I feel like, again, the Queens mobility stuff and new city stuff and new bike lanes and stuff, it feels like it's accelerating at a clip way quicker than any of the other boroughs, which has been of nice. I think there's a lot of community support for it.I guess just backing out a bit, where do you see the newsletter going in the next couple posts as you get it regoing again?Yeah, we're finishing up the launch period right now, which is a faster pace of production than it will be. Long-term, it's going to be three posts a week. The idea is that the core Oversharing, as people know it and have gotten it for a long time, a couple topics, maybe a short essay, links at the bottom — that will remain free to everyone because it's important to me that people be able to access Oversharing and people who've been subscribing for a long time don't feel cut out by it going behind a paywall; but also, we all have to make a living. Content can't be free, so some of it will be paid.

There will be more of an urbanism focus. There will be new posts as they happen. I'm casting a wide net for interesting people to interview, to do Q&As with. If that's you, please get in touch, email me at [email protected]. I would love to talk to you. I'm also toying around with the idea of having some sort of book club element where we read books about urbanism or gig companies, or maybe once in a while, just a fun book, because we all need a fun book.Yeah, can't all be The Power Broker.I did read The Power Broker. It was great.Classic. There are two types of people in the pandemic: people who wanted to read The Power Broker, and people who did read The Power Broker.Actually, well, I'll tell you my secret because we're friends. I did complete the entire Power Broker, but I rented it from the library as an audiobook. It was three parts.Ah, there you go.Each part was about 24 hours. I listened to it on 1.8X while I went on six-mile walks around London when the only thing you could do was go on walks during the pandemic.It was basically like a very, very intensive podcast experience.Amazing. I love that. I love audiobooks because they have the like, "Here's a miniseries of podcasts, but it's going to stick the landing.”Exactly.We'll know if he's guilty or not. That's really funny. Yeah, again, it's a really outstanding newsletter. I've been a long-time fan. Folks can find that just at oversharing.substack.com. Where else can folks find your work?I am on Twitter, but not a lot, at @alisongriswold. Yeah, mostly at oversharing.substack.com.

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

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

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Philip Bump of the Washington Post, who a few weeks ago launched his newsletter How To Read This Chart. I’m a longtime fan of Bump’s work at the Post; he’s a really compelling writer and an outstanding blogger and has been weaving data journalism throughout his work so organically for such a long time I wanted to have him on for a podcast version of the Sunday edition to talk about the state of the art and the newsletter.

We spoke about how charts took over the internet, how companies have managed to use increasing interest in data to suit their own ends in pitching mediocre polls, where the distrust of polling is coming from and the simple pleasures of weird charts.

Bump can be found at the Washington Post and on Twitter, and his newsletter How To Read This Chart can be found here.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

You have just started this newsletter called How To Read This Chart. It's probably, what, two months old at this point? It's already off to a really great start.I appreciate it. That was the goal. Try and have it be compelling, and get people engaged. But yeah, I think about two months, which is sort of crazy how time flies.In one of the early issues, you mentioned that you were looking for a combination of breeziness and topicality. Do you want to talk a little bit about what kind of motivated you to both start a newsletter in this space and also kind of what your angle is?I do a lot of charts for my day job at the Washington Post. And one of the things that I have found is that often I will create a graph which to me seems pretty intuitive, but requires a little more explanation than I would've expected. That is absolutely a failing on my part, right? My job should be to make presentations of data that are simply intuitive enough that I don't need to have a lot of explication, but I also think that complicated charts can be visually interesting, and provide a lot of information once you dig into them a little bit.

What I wanted to do was create something, create a tool, in which I encouraged people to be more open to more complicated presentations of data. To offer up interesting, visually striking data visualizations that I could then walk through, and say, "Here's how this works. Here's why this is actually a smart way to present this, even if at first it may be somewhat intimidating." Over the long term, with the goal of having people just generally feel more comfortable with looking at data visualization, understanding how to pick out their own stories from it, and understanding how it can convey a lot of information in the way that words can't.Yeah. I've enjoyed the approach and vibe of it a lot. I think that there are places on the internet that look at and evaluate and talk about charts a lot, and I think a lot of them will sometimes overengineer it. They'll be like, "Oh, look at this chart." And there are a lot of colors, there are shapes, there's a lot of stuff going on.

I think that what I've really enjoyed about yours is that you very much look at this as a process where there aren't really right answers. That there are just choices that are made. Do you want to kind of expand on how you view the process of creating a chart?One of the things that I do too for my job is I do a lot of charts, right? So that means that I'm not sitting down and workshopping, A/B testing, different versions of charts. I'm like, okay, I'm doing a story on something that just broke. I need to make a chart. I did one that I included in the newsletter, which I thought was pretty good, which showed the evolution of votes for Supreme Court justices since the end of the Civil War, essentially. And so you start off, and I had different representations. I took all nine currently sitting seats and I sort of had little lines that wound their way through them with little nodes for where a new justice was added.

And so at the beginning, it's just, they're all by voice vote, and so that's just a little black dot. And then eventually you start to see actual votes for it, and first all the votes are overwhelming, like 90 to 10 or whatever. And then all of a sudden you start seeing them being pretty evenly divided. That was something that I didn't have a chance to workshop because I needed to get it up because this is when Breyer announced his retirement.But I could then come back — and I didn't actually do this with this, I just sort of dropped it in a newsletter because I thought it was cool — but that's a good example of where you can say, okay, so how might you have done this in a way that provided more information? I got feedback from readers, like, this would be great if it's an interactive where you could mouse over it and see someone's name. That's absolutely true. I couldn't do that, in part because of the time crunch, but also in part because I couldn't then put it in the newsletter. There are all these boundaries and constraints. And one of the things I'm trying to do is get the voices of people who read the newsletter injected into the newsletters; I want people have feedback and thoughts to include that as well. Because part of the point is that I don't have all the answers.Yeah, I like that a lot. I like it because you really are grounded in news. Your day-to-day job is all about kind of covering the news. That comes with different constraints than doing a long term; if you had spent a week making an interactive about that, it wouldn't have actually been as effective because sometimes just getting something out sooner is better. No, exactly, you're right. I think too that one of the lessons there is that it doesn't have to be great, right? I mean you and I have experience in writing for institutions that have editors. But it is not the case that we simply write things and then let the editors clean it up. We try and write well the first time, right? This is a space where you don't have an editor. I don't have a graphics editor, right? Or when I do an interactive online, I don't have a data editor. Although I have sort of pitched that in the past as something that would be kind of cool. I mean, wouldn't it be cool if you had a lot of people who could do really basic code and then you could pass it over to a data editor, who could clean it up and make it, I mean, wouldn't that be cool? You could really expand the number of interactives you could do.

Yeah, FiveThirtyEight was a shop like that. That was a really good time.There you go. But one of the things is trying to encourage people to just sort of jump into it, right? You don't have to worry about it being perfect. In the same way that I've been doing this long enough now that I can do something fairly quickly that is effective and isn't necessarily buggy. But the way you get there is by just sort of jumping into it and doing as much as you can, and having fun with it and making it. And here's the other thing that I'll say, I will put out graphics that I think are cool that I recognize are going to be complicated to people. You know why? Because I do this whole day, and sometimes I want to just have fun with it. And I think that's okay too in a lot of circumstances.Yeah. And that reminds me, a few weeks ago you had a particularly neat visualization, I pulled it up, it's a keogram, right? There was a guy who put a camera on his roof. Do you want to talk about that one?It was really cool. A guy I follow on Twitter retweeted it, it's this astronomer who lives in the Netherlands. And literally exactly what you said. He put a camera on the roof of an outbuilding in his house, and just pointed straight up with a fish eye lens and took a picture every 15 seconds for the entire length of 2021. And what results from that is you get this really cool pattern, this sort of hourglass pattern of when night falls — obviously less night over the course of the summer, more night when it gets to be winter. You can see how the sky is different colored at different times of the day. So twilight and dawn are much more blue because the sun isn't reflecting off the clouds as much. You can see when the moon is moving through. The phases of the moon are depicted in it.

There's all this information. It's just this little rectangle with this little black hourglass sitting on a blue field. But when you look at it, you can pick out so much stuff. And then he, of course, as an astronomer, he finds a lot of stuff that you don't necessarily see. He goes through it and he picks out the movement of the constellations through the skies. He has this giant version of it you can get as well. And just, it's fascinating. It's just such a good use of visualizing data. It's not visualizing data intuitively. It's just a picture of the sky. But all you have to do is orient it by time of day and by time of year, and then all of a sudden you have an infographic that really tells you a lot about literally how the world works.I really loved it. Again, even as just like an art piece, it's really cool. I feel like there's been more conversation about chart crimes than it has in the past. You've been in the game a while now, and have definitely kind of seen good visualization, bad visualization, malicious visualization at times. That also seems to be a theme at some points in your newsletter. How has the internet's interactions with charts kind of evolved over the past couple years?Good question. I mean obviously it is something that's been powered by the connective capabilities of social media to a large extent. I think also there is a sort of nerdiness that emerges on social media more than in other places, just by virtue of the fact that it's grounded in technology, and age groupings and so on. And of course, you and I probably operate in nerdier circles than most people. Like my sister who spends a lot of time on Instagram, I'm not sure she sees a lot of chart crime tweets, right? Which isn't meant as a disparagement to her, she's just got different, more normal interests than you or I do.Part of it is not only the fact that you have that connectivity, which obviously we're all familiar with by now with the internet, but you also have a lot more people who are trying to present information. One of the things that's been fascinating over the course of the past decade or so is the ways in which corporations have really latched onto the idea of using data presentations to sell stuff. And so they'll do like these shitty polls, of like, "We polled 14 Airbnb members, and seven of them found that Airbnb is awesome." And they'll pitch those to Forbes contributors who go on to money laundering crimes. Alleged money laundering crimes...I didn't name names! But there's this pattern wherein corporations have figured out that people are compelled by data visualizations, and by sort of weird esoteric data points. And so they gin these up, but what that also means is that there's this big influx of visualizations and attention being paid to these things. A lot of media outlets who are trying to move from being crusty old newspapers to doing more interesting things online, there is this new attention being paid to how you present data for a lot of different reasons. I think that provides a lot more people who are skilled in this to some extent, and a lot more people who are paying attention to it, which I think is probably part of it.I love this point and I actually want to spend more time here just because it's rare that I get to be like, "Hey, you also see this, right?"

It is wild just at how regularly I will see press releases, I will see corporate blogs, I will see all this kind of stuff that will either be hinged on a poll that they ran because they would like to get into the press, and they realize that's a decent way to launder a talking point. It's almost interesting kind of watching some of the techniques of data journalism kind of get co-opted a little bit by some of these corporate actors.

You cover politics, and I'm sure that you see this time and time again in that space in particular too. You pointed out a LinkedIn poll a few weeks ago, that was just like, why are we talking about this? And this made it into what?It's in New York Times for God's sake, right.Is that a local newspaper? Where is that based?I live outside of New York City, and yeah, a lot of my neighbors get it. Yeah, I hope you've noticed that I go out of my way to insult The New York Times whenever I can in the newsletter. Not out of any ill will, but just because it's funny.Of course.There's one coming up in the one that's dropping this Saturday. Anyway! No, you're right, and part of that, I mean, bear in mind, you are familiar with political polls as well, but for years it's been a problem that you'll have political journalists who'll pick up internal campaign polls and treat them as serious, when those are the same thing, they're just marketing pitches using this front of data. You have that exact same factor which comes into play in doing politics reporting.You have a lot of journalists who simply don't know how to spot b******t, right? They just don't know how to be like, "I'm going to treat this with some caution." Instead they're getting pitched on, "Hey man, we have this new insight into what's going on." It's the exact same thing, it's just corporations have figured out how to do this.

And it costs very, very little money for them to do it. If they find a reporter who isn't particularly savvy in assessing the validity of data collection mechanisms, then they get a bite pretty easily. "Hey, I'm going to the exclusive. LinkedIn did this poll. And we found that X." And someone's like, "Whoa, that's cool. Thanks for the exclusive. Send me the data." And then you and I get it, and we're like LOL. What the hell is this?Again, I'm not trying to judge. In the same way that if someone asked me to be an opera critic for a day, I would totally embarrass myself! I just don't know it. I don't know that world. But there's a reason why, if someone's putting on a crappy opera, they might want to have me come and do the review, right? Because they know that I'm not going to understand what's going on. And so I think we see a lot of that with corporate pitching in particular.

It's great that you point out again, this isn't to knock the folks who do it because maybe they're credulous of a poll, but they're also like they take no b******t elsewhere. It's just kind of almost an expertise thing where knowing what's a rough poll, knowing what is a specious source of collecting responses, knowing what is, oh, the sponsor of this is perhaps a little sus. That is a skill.

I think that your beat at the Post has been really good at kind of calling some of that out in the past.Yeah. I mean, I think it's fun, right? I mean it's fun to have to catch Tucker Carlson, who I do not assign any good faith effort on his part. It's fun to say, "Hey, actually this graph that you used is nonsense," and to call that out. I mean obviously his nightly audience is slightly larger than my newsletter audience.A little bit.You don't know. You don't know. My newsletter audience could be two million. I will say this, it's definitely a percentage of two million!Rounded to the nearest two million, sure!That's right. We're even. I think there's value in it, but also in recognizing how, through intentionality or accidentally, the people can offer you information that you should be skeptical of.I felt like at the beginning of my career, maybe 10 years ago or so, the challenge was convincing people that there was value in writing about polls, that there was value in writing about this kind of data, that there was value in making all these kind of viz and putting this investment into it.

Now I feel like, battle's won, congratulations, high five, victory lap, champagne.

But now the challenge is like, oh, we've got to be smart about how we actually end up using it, because those tools have also been — whether it's through a profit pursuit, or whether it's through political pursuit — we won one battle and now, oh wait, there's actually a whole lot of cleanup that we’ve got to keep doing.No, you're right. I think that there are a lot of ways in which data presentation right now is sort of a risky endeavor. From the visualization standpoint, it is obviously the case that we get a lot of dubious, questionable presentations that make their ways in front of us. And I think we're calling it out.I think polling itself is something that we could spend a whole half hour talking about this separately. But I think polling itself is something, that the skepticism of polling has been weaponized in the same way that say skepticism of a coronavirus vaccine has been weaponized, right?That's interesting.That you can pick out particular ways in which you can cast out in order to try and undercut the whole thing. It is much more common that we see that with polling, in part because you're always going to find a poll that gives you information you don't want. One of the things I thought has been fascinating in the course of the past several months has been this spate of new polls showing that President Biden's approval is quite low, and just the number of people, including the president, who are saying, "Oh, you can't put any stock in that."

And it's just like, come on, man. How are you — and I made this point in the newsletter — you are asking us to say, here is the best information we have on the vaccine. It's imperfect. There have been mistakes that have been made. But we understand generally what things look like and we need to have confidence in that.

And then on the same side, you're saying I ignore these polls because they're bad for me. It's b******t. You can't do that. That's not how it works.I think that we're seeing, and we saw Trump obviously spend a lot of time trying to downplay and denigrate polls that showed him doing poorly, and I think that's damaging. I do. Because polls are, for all the complaints about going to a diner and talking to voters, and yada, yada, yada, polls are talking to 1,000 people at one time, asking them more narrowly tailored questions, and not having a lot of space for follow up, obviously, but that's what polls do. I think for people that reject them out of hand, I think just moves us more into this space of uncertainty where all sorts of bad things can happen.There are always good polls, there are always bad polls. I will just say, in your newsletter, How To Read This Chart, one pervasive idea that I like is that it almost comes off similar to like Wirecutter where it's like you're evaluating the different tools and trying to figure out what the best way to talk about it is, and how to use it and all that kind of stuff.

It's not like saying that the tools are invalid, or the tools don't work, or the tools always work, or this is a bad tool. It's acknowledging we're all coming from the position that this is a cool tool to have and a cool tool to use. Here are the best ways to use it. And also every time you make a bar chart, I get a commission, echoing the Wirecutter model.

I mean, the goal is to some extent — and part of this is informed by Edward Tufte, who we are invariably going to get to as part of this conversation. He does these data visualization things and is sort of like the godfather of all this stuff. When I worked at Adobe as a designer back 20 years ago, I went to one of his seminars. And the thing that always struck me about that is that you're sitting through the seminar, and it's like the morning— Have you been to one of his seminars?I've not, no.So the morning you go through it — at least in Silicon Valley 20 years ago — but you sit through this really interesting assessment of how data visualization works. The O-ring story from the Space Shuttle Challenger, and all these various ways in which presenting data is important. And then you have a break, and then you come back in the afternoon, and it's all about how to make cool charts and PowerPoint. And at the time, I skipped it. I was like, I don't give a s**t about making cool charts for PowerPoint.

But I realized it's brilliant from a business model because that's how he gets all these companies to pay to send people to his seminar, right? They go to seminar, and they say, "Hey, this is going to help me make better PowerPoint charts." And they're like, "Okay, fine. We'll pay the $1,500," or whatever. It's genius. But it's also value, that's the value he's added to people.One of the things I want do with the newsletter as well is give people, to some extent, some familiarity with the tool sets that are out there so they can broaden their approach a little bit. I will also at times slide in little recommendations. There was this spiral chart that was in the Times that got a bad rap, and I found a link to how to recreate that thing using R, which, no one that reads the newsletter is using R to make data visualizations. But A, it's there in case they do and want to, but B, it also makes them feel like, okay, I'm part of this kind of cool insider club that knows how to make visualizations in a pretty advanced way now. Which then gives people the confidence to do so, to explore it, ideally, hopefully. I don't know how many more charts I've brought into the world through my newsletter. Hopefully one or two!That's so smart. Because again, you never want to be in a course where you know everything. You never want to be in a course where it's completely out of your bound. You want to be in a course where you get a little bit of exposure to things that are a little bit beyond your grasp at the point and things that you have well in hand. I like the confidence that you put in your audience.

It's just really good stuff, man. Is there any particular thing that you've had a chance to write about that you feel proudest of in the past couple weeks?I mean, the keogram one was good, just because it was not specifically news-centered. I don't know, just one of the things I try to do with the newsletter, which hopefully I succeed at to some extent, is to make it actually fun to read. It's super easy to write about a chart in a way that no one is interested in it. I'm not going to say it's hard to do it in a way that's a little more compelling, but I try and make it like I want it to be something where someone who is not really familiar with charts picks it up and at least finds it funny, even if they don't really care about charts or even if they don't really necessarily get the charts at the end of the day. I feel like I've done a pretty decent job with that. I think that that's the thing which I am probably happiest about is that people who I know aren't nerds on charts will come back and be like, "Hey, at least it's fun to read," which I think is a step in the right direction anyway.Where can folks find it? Where can folks get a chance to subscribe? Where can folks find you?Yeah. I'm on Twitter @pbump. The chart, I mean, I think if you search How To Read This Chart, I would hope it comes up pretty high in the results by now. If you go to wapo.st/readthischart, that'll actually take you directly there and you can sign up. Obviously it's free. I'd be very happy if you subscribe to the Washington Post, of course. But it's a free newsletter, it teaches a little bit about charts. And if you stick around after the break, we'll teach you how to make the excellent PowerPoint presentations, so you can send me $1,500 for this seminar too. It would be great.

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