The Present Age

The Present Age is reader-supported. Please consider subscribing to the free or paid versions. Thanks!Today, for another edition of You Know, where I introduce you to someone who is starting a newsletter who you should know, I am joined by the insightful Maris Kreizman. Maris is the former host of the beloved podcast The Maris Review, the new head of the recently relaunched newsletter of the same name, and a celebrated cultural critic who bridges the worlds of literature and pop culture. With her extensive experience in book publishing and her sharp commentary on contemporary media, Maris brings a unique perspective to the world.Can you share a bit about your journey from working in the book publishing industry to cultural criticism, podcasting, and now newslettering? What are some of the pivotal moments that sort of shaped your career?Yeah, in my About Me section on my Substack, it starts, takes a long drag on a cigarette because I feel like I've really seen it all. I started out wanting to be a book editor and I did that through most of my twenties. And then I was laid off and had to find work that was more in and around books. So, I worked at barnesandnoble.com and Kickstarter and Book of the Month.And while I was doing all of that stuff, I sort of realized, as we all did back then, that it's nice to have a personal brand. It really is. And it's nice to have one that is not attached to your profession or the way you earn money. And I began to realize that I loved writing as much as editing. So I do some book criticism and some TV criticism and I started freelancing. And I started my podcast for Lit Hub because I was getting frustrated that I couldn't pitch conversations or profiles with authors anymore at most publications now that aren't paying that much attention to books.I figured that was a way to talk to the people I wanted to talk to on my own terms. And this will be kind of a continuation of that. It won't be audio to start, but I get to talk about what I want and when I want to, and that's so freeing.You've been really vocal about the intersection of literature and the broader pop culture. How do you think that relationship has evolved with the advent of digital media and social platforms? You know, “BookTok” and such.Yeah, I have to admit that I am a lurker on BookTok, [but] have not participated. I started out on Tumblr, and that was really my main platform. And since I started out on Tumblr, I think social media in general has gotten more toxic and digital media has gone from an industry that was booming to one that I hope is still around tomorrow. So it becomes really important to have a way to talk about books that doesn't rely all the time on those platforms. … There are so few platforms now to talk about books other than BookTok. BookTok has become so big that you might start thinking those kinds of books are the only books out there. And there is a vast world and it would be so wonderful if there were a platform for all of the kinds of books that I enjoy.Yes. Which brings me to my next question. With so many new books being published every year, how do you decide which titles and authors you'll engage with? Are there any particular trends that excite you?Parker, this one keeps me up at night and makes my apartment a wreck. It's really hard. There are some books that I know are coming and they're written by someone I already admire and that's really exciting. But getting a first novel from someone I haven't heard of is so exciting and I don't have time to read them all. And sometimes it's really just luck of the draw. I pick one and then I'm in it. And that's why book criticism is so important that we need as many people as we can to be picking out those debut novels and small press books and telling people about them. Because I'm not looking at trends.I'm just looking at whatever looks interesting to me, which is specific.Finally, tell me about the Maris Review, the newsletter and how does it differ from your podcast (RIP) of the same name and what can readers expect format wise, frequency, et cetera.I think my main challenge with my Substack is going to be that I have become so disillusioned with the publishing industry and the digital media industry. And I just have to always try to keep my love of books and the excitement around books away from that.And so the Maris Review will be a place where you can see what I'm reading, see what I'm going to read next, hear my thoughts on the latest scandal — scandal's a big word for the book world, but kerfuffle, perhaps. I hope to talk about adaptations because that's such a big way that people find their way into books. I hope to do author interviews and perhaps audio once again.I'm so excited to figure out what my own constraints are going to be. I have so much freedom now and I'm getting ready to kind of wheedle it down.That’s it for me today. Thanks again for reading! Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to read a book called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt. The argument made in the book went like this: with the rise of smartphones and other internet-connected devices, there’s been a massive uptick in mental illness among Gen Z youth and adolescents. Haidt connects these two, arguing that these don’t merely correlate, but share a causal link. I saw a lot of really positive coverage of his book, a lot of really fawning praise for his work, but something about it didn’t sit quite right with me. It all fit too neatly.There was a review of the book published in Nature that tore into his findings, which I recommend people check out. I’ll link that in the notes here. But for today’s newsletter, I’m sharing an audio interview I conducted a couple weeks ago with Siva Vaidhyanathan, the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, and one of Haidt’s more vocal critics.In the interest of fairness, I’ll also be linking to the original book, some of the more positive praise it received, and some coverage of the controversy it’s caused. I hope you enjoy this special audio edition of the newsletter. Full transcript included, obviously.Parker Molloy: All right, so it's so great to talk to you. And so I spent the past week reading Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation. And I really wanted to chat with you about it because I know this is a topic on which you've done a lot of study on, and I've seen your social media posts about it. And yeah, so the basic argument that he makes throughout the bookThe book is very repetitive. He repeats his thesis over and over. He makes the argument essentially that the rise of what he calls phone-based childhood, which he refers to as all internet-connected devices, has replaced play-based childhood. And that is primarily to blame for the Gen Z mental health crisis. So I wanted to know what he got wrong here.Siva Vaidhyanathan: Sure, sure, sure. Well, let me start with what he got right. Right. First of all, it's indisputable that young Americans, especially girls and young women, are experiencing higher level of expressed mental distress and emotional distress than we have seen in some time. Right. So that that pretty much tells us that something is happening in this country and probably a few other countries that is creating some combination of suffering we have not seen before and an ability to express and a willingness to express that misery. Right. So, you know, it's a weird thing to look at historically and height doesn't tend to look at things historically, but, you know, life for most people in most of the planet is better than it has been ever in human history.So in the long curve, you know, misery is down, but that shouldn't be a reason to not take seriously the stress, distress and suffering of so many millions of young people. Now, the other thing he gets right is at least in the American context, a steady change in tactics of parenting and the experience of childhood. That's well documented. You don't just need anecdotes to show you this. And it comes in many forms, of course, and it's largely class -informed. So we do see, and we've seen for decades, a sense of parents being both more protective of their children's loose time, right? And this can come from various sources. It can be influenced by the moral panic about drugs or the moral panic about kidnapping or exploitation or any of those things that has been circulating in our media for so many decades, convincing parents that they have to manage children's time precisely.You know, along with the hyper competitive culture that we're seeing among the more privileged classes in the United States where everybody's struggling to get into the same 20 colleges and everybody is trying to sign up for the travel soccer team. You know, all of these things have definitely shifted the practice of parenthood and the experience of childhood. Now, for people who are not privileged,Of course, we've seen the proliferation of demands on parents that take them out of their children's lives, right? So it's not like the free -range latchkey child phenomenon is gone. It's just alive among lower -income families and lower -wealth families, because of course, no one can afford childcare.No one can afford a nanny. No one can afford for one parent to stay home and not work. All of those things that allowed, especially the one parent staying home and not working, which was a luxury long gone in this country, allowed for children to have that space and that security. And so all of these things are long-term changes over four or five decades we've seen. So what happens in the 2000s and what happens to crater mental health among young people? Well, I think it's important to remember that when you're talking about, first of all, as diverse a population as the United States and as complex a question as mental health is thatYou should resist looking for one factor or even trying to isolate variables to find the main factor, the universal factor, the contributing factor. That is what leads us astray. Right. So this is what I think he does wrong. What I think he does wrong is he starts out with a very poor archaic theory of technology. And he starts out with an ahistorical approach to what has changed in American life in recent decades. But he still has this phenomenon that does speak to his thesis, which is that there is a demonstrable drop -off in well -being starting around 2010 or 2011, which is four years after the iPhone is introduced. And just as we start to see younger and younger people get smartphones or get mobile phones at all. And look, every child who has a mobile phone, everybody under 18 who has a mobile phone or has a smartphone has so for a particular reason. There was a conversation, they're expensive, there was a commitment, there were rules set down, there are reasons for it and there are often very good reasons for it. But collectively you do have this change.So he sees a correlation here and it's irresistible to him because of course if he can spark panic about this, then he can create a tremendous amount of attention and then he can be the one stepping forward to try to, you know, prescribe a problem. But this isn't going to help, right? This isn't going to help because the problem is complex.Let's concede that moving one's eyes from the park to the phone is not healthy. I think it would be hard to argue otherwise, right? We experience in our daily lives, it's just so obviously not as healthy as running and playing and playing kickball and softball and street hockey and all of those things, right? So at the same time, let's concede that people do engage with these screens and the apps on them for reasons that are important to them. It's not a default. People have particular uses and needs that they're satisfying by moving to these phones. So again, let's concede it's not great. But that leaves us a huge gap between not great or even bad on balance, and being the chief cause of this high level of distress. When a much more reasonable explanation, and I think a richer explanation, is that a number of factors work synergistically to affect not only an individual's mental health state, but collectively a population's mental health state. It's safe to say that there are people in our country in our communities who are better off because their screens, their phones, the apps on their phones allow them to build community, allow them to find people who have gone through similar experiences to whatever stress or distress they're experiencing, right? People who find mentors, people who find guides. This has been well documented among queer youth for many, many decades, right? Thatthat the ability to reach out beyond your immediate surroundings and find stories and role models and guides and peers could be crucial to surviving some of the most and thriving through some of the most stressful developmental moments that a person can go through. And so for someone in a hostile family or an uncaring or an unreasonable family, or an unreasonable community or church or whatever, these sorts of tools can be crucial. Now, who knows how many young Americans use these tools for that purpose, but we know it's not zero. We know it's significant and we know it's important to them. We also know that children whose families are dissolving or children whose families have lost wealth, houses, jobs, over the cascading economic crises, first the 2008 crisis and its long legacy wiping out American wealth, and then the COVID crisis, right? The sort of two convulsions happening in their lifetimes. How many found solace, community distraction, fun, joy through their screens when nothing else was available?So going back to this question, remember, Haidt has a two-part diagnosis, but he and everyone reading him seems to be only focusing on the second part of the diagnosis. The first part of the diagnosis is that childhood has changed. We've gone from having a sense of free-range immersion in our immediate surroundings, our physical landscape, our communities, other people face to face, and shifted our behavior toward these screens and it has not been healthy, right? So you don't even have to go as far as height to say the problem is the phones. Maybe the problem is everything else in society, right? Maybe the problem is that everything else in society seems scary, unfriendly, unwelcoming, not permitted by certain parents, right? And the only reasonable escape is to go to one screen. Now Dana Boyd did tremendous qualitative research on these very questions about a decade ago before smartphones themselves were the screen of question and when there were plenty of other platforms accessible largely through computers that young people were starting to use.And it was really cl

Parker Molloy: My guest today is Matt Negrin, a senior producer for the Daily Show with Trevor Noah. And just about the only person on the planet, I know who gets more irritated about the way politics gets covered in the media than I do. Matt, thank you so much for joining me.Matt Negrin: No, I'm obviously happy to have a contest with you about who is more angry at the media on a daily basis. It's a contest in which we both lose so full in on it.Well, I was thinking about this. So this is going to be the first episode of my podcast for the new year, because I had to take a month off because I was just like, “Why am I doing this?”I take a month off because I celebrate January 6th privately. And so I really just a full-on month of just remembrance.Yeah. Well, I mean, if Christmas starts in November, January 6th starts in December.January 6th creep is a real issue that we need to address, people are putting up their January 6th gallows way too early.So I feel like the two of us started the Trump years as relatively sane individuals who just happened to consume a lot of news media. What happened to us?The question is how did we become totally crazy while also feeling that we're the only sane people in a world in which everyone else is crazy, right?Yeah. Pretty much.To me, it feels like the beginning of the Trump years, or the beginning of the Trump term was like, okay, obviously this is a catastrophe, but maybe, just maybe our trusted news media will do the right thing and we'll hold this guy accountable. We'll check him, we'll provide a level of accountability that you and I haven't seen in our lifetimes really. And obviously, that didn't happen. So I think the ongoing frustration with that is what has, at least for me just made me question what is going on with this industry that I was a part of? That I spent almost a decade in, how did I not see that this was kind of inevitable? And then when I left the industry, I was like, all right, now I feel like I can talk about this stuff freely, which is kind of a bad sign that people in journalism can't talk about what's really happening.And that's been kind of the undertone I think of journalists will tell you privately in the DMs that they agree with what you're saying, but will never say it publicly. And that's bad.The Present Age is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.Yeah, well, on that sort of the same kind of thought, I get a lot of people who will text me or DM me to say they liked something I wrote and I'm like, "Cool. I would appreciate a retweet." And they're like, "Sorry, I can't."It's just, "I'll get in trouble if I do that." I've heard from so many people at newspapers and TV networks who say the same thing. And they're like, "God, you're so right. Thank you for doing this. This really needed to be called out." And my response is always, "You are totally in a position to call this out yourself." And they all say, "Ah, you know I can't do that." And it's like, “ha ha.” Yeah. Well, that's fun. Thanks for your help. But I'm just going to sit back and let this profile of Greg Gutfeld just kind of go out and get tweeted about, and I won't do anything about it.Yeah. “I won't criticize it because I don't want to get in trouble with the bosses.”Exactly. I don't want to mention how we gave a platform to Josh Hawley. I don't want to be the person who does that. It's not my role. Yeah.So speaking of giving a platform to Josh Hawley and giving a platform to Ron Johnson and giving a platform to Roger Marshall and Rick Scott and Mike Ron, and all of those. So is Chuck Todd your nemesis? And does he know that he's your nemesis?Okay. The word “nemesis” requires the person to acknowledge your existence. So I think the answer is no, I don't think he has ever once acknowledged at least explicitly, any of the good faith. I would say criticisms about Meet the Press, but I've heard from enough people to know that like yeah, he's aware of it. They're aware of it. They're all aware of it. And one of the NBCPR guys, Richard Hudock has engaged with me on Twitter. So has another producer for Meet the Press. So yeah, they're aware, but they do not respond anymore and I think part of it is because they probably know it's not a good look to be fighting on Twitter. But also I think they know that some of these things are indefensible.So you can't defend Chuck Todd for putting Roger Marshall, who is a Senator who voted to overturn the election on Meet the Press. You can't defend that. It's an obvious message that Chuck Todd thinks it's okay to give a platform to people who tried to overturn the election. And that's simply something that if you're a good faith journalist, you probably don't agree with. So I don't relish the idea that there's a guy on TV who is my nemesis, but at the same time, why aren't more people talking about this? It seems very dystopian. I don't know. What was your feeling after January 6th? I feel like there were a bunch of us on the left who were saying we have to hold these people accountable by not giving them platforms or at least by branding them explicitly every time they're mentioned or on the air with a reminder that they did this thing. Right. Do you remember that feeling?Oh yeah. I mean, I wrote an article for Media Matters in December 2020. So it was before January 6th where I was just like, “What they have done is an unacceptable attack on democracy, et cetera, et cetera.” And yeah, so then of course, then January 6th happens and the-You brought up Mike Braun, that's a triggering person for me because I remember in December, I think it was December 6th, I hope I'm right about that. I'm going to Google it real quick because I'm pretty sure I'm right. I've just ingrained all this stuff into my f*****g head. Yeah. December 6th, 2020, Mike Braun was on ABC's This Week and he floated this conspiracy theory that boxes of ballots were being hidden under a desk in some state and that there was a video showing how the Democrats were trying to steal the election. So this is a month after the election. It's, I guess three weeks after Biden was declared the winner. And you have a sitting senator on ABC talking about this conspiracy theory. That is at the time, the media was feeling out this world, right?“How many senators are going to help Trump try to overturn the election? What is the line?” And Mike Braun was seen as a non-crazy Republican by a lot in the media. And then he goes on This Week and pushes this thing out. To me as a producer or as a host or as a person at ABC that should have been the cutoff line, like okay, we're ending this interview. And it just went on for six minutes. They didn't even talk about the thing they were going to talk about, they just talked about voter fraud and that's millions of people who are seeing that and thinking what is this video? What is he talking about? Maybe there is something to this. That to me was like, Mike Braun is not Josh Hawley, he is not Ted Cruz and that's kind of the point.They can all be pushing this conspiracy theory or different versions of the conspiracy theory. And the media is going to accept them because they don't have this outwardly crazy Marjorie Taylor Greene-ish stain on them. Mike Braun looks like an honorable person, but if you look at what he really does, he goes on Newsmax and talks about the same thing. So that's why that guy is very triggering for me. Months later you have Donie O'Sullivan, who I think is a really sharp reporter at CNN going to these QAnon rallies, interviewing people who are saying the election was stolen. And they specifically cite the thing Mike Braun talked about. So, this is how misinformation spreads. It spreads on mainstream media. And the fact that these networks keep putting these people on, to me, indicates they either don't know their role in it, or they're just totally fine with it. I don't know what another option would be.Yeah. I mean, that's... God, I remember when I first got hired at Media Matters, one of the first things I did was I flew out to DC because we decided to do a thing where I would work in the office one week and then spend a few months working from home and then kind of repeat that. And I flew into DC and I saw a guy wearing a shirt that just had a big letter Q on it, standing on the steps of the Supreme court with a selfie stick, taking a picture where he is making a real tough guy face. And it was just him by himself. And it was the first time I had ever seen anyone in person wearing a QAnon kind of thing. And I thought, “Ha ha, that's so funny.” It's not so funny anymore. Part of the issue is that these views aren't debunked on TV instead what you get is you get, "Hey, do you think Joe Biden won the election?" That's not good. Presenting it as a question is part of the problem.Right. And there are multiple journalists who have done this in GOP primary debates over the past year, there was one in, I think it was Hugh Hewitt who did it in the, oh, what race was it? I can't remember, but he was moderating a debate. And he said, do you believe Joe Biden won the election? Okay. You're a journalist on MSNBC, you should not be allowed to do that. There was another local news reporter in New Mexico who was moderating a special house race primary and, or I think it was actually the general election, and she said, "Who do you think won the 2020 election? And how do you plan to work on work with others who disagree with you?" Don't frame this as an issue, it is not an issue.Part of the problem with the Q stuff that, what you just said made me think of is, when QAnon first started becoming a topic that the mainstream media had to talk about. They did it really poorly. And I remember the Q baby at the Trump rally, someone held up a baby with a Q on the shirt and it was like Q baby. And then QAnon went nuts. And then someone was wearing a Q dress and the letter Q. And so then the media

This is part 2 of 2 of my conversation with Matthew Sheffield. If you haven’t checked out last week’s episode, you may want to do that here:Parker Molloy: A lot of criticism of Democrats seems to ignore the asymmetric nature of partisan media. There's a massive right-wing infrastructure in place that can keep the same topic and headlines for an indefinite amount of time. This makes it easy to pick a topic re-alert invented to hammer away at for their own political goals, and I think we saw that recently in Virginia about critical race theory and all of that. And you have people like James Carville offering advice like stop the wokeness, but what he seems to miss is it's not Democrats who are pushing these narratives. If Fox News wants to spend every night between now and the next election claiming that Biden quadrupled everyone's taxes or made it illegal to breathe oxygen, they can, and some people will believe it and they'll repeat it.The Democrats who lost these recent elections, they didn't run on critical race theory or defund the police or anything like that, or LGBTQ issues, which, trust me, I wish the Democrats were as pro-LGBTQ as right-wing media make them out to be. But I don't know what they're supposed to do, or even more importantly, what legitimate news outlets are supposed to do to counter this. If Democrats weigh in on every nonsense issue that comes up... As we're recording this, we're in day two or three of them freaking out about Big Bird. There's a new target every day that gets thrown out there. If they weigh-in, they lose because they're weighing in on something as trivial as Big Bird. If they ignore it, it just builds up and so all of it's a long way to ask you what... How do you fight back against that when the infrastructure is so... It's a very strong infrastructure that right-wing media has built. You have Fox and Gateway Pundit and Daily Caller and Daily Wire and all of that; they keep bouncing the same ideas back and forth. Oh, commentary from a Daily Wire contributor turns into a Fox and Friends segment with that person, which then gets put on Daily Caller. It's this very incestuous, basically. It's an echo chamber. And people often talk about there being, "Oh, the liberal bubble, get out of your liberal bubble." That was something we heard over and over and over after 2016, and then after 2020 there was a big push to, "People have to get out of their liberal bubble," again. The answer is always people on the left need to do this. It's never people on the right need to get with reality. That's never something that gets brought into it, and that's one way I feel like mainstream outlets are failing us is that they don't realize, or they refuse to urge people on the right to maybe be less extreme. You hear after the recent elections, there's been this push, hey, oh, does Joe Biden need to move to the right? Has he been too extreme? He hasn't really done anything extreme. The policies he's proposed have generally been pretty well supported. There's nothing crazy in there, especially when you consider that when Republicans passed the tax bill in 2017, it had something like a 30% approval rating. It was super low and they passed it anyway. And it remained unpopular, but they didn't care.Matthew Sheffield: Well, there's a lot to unpack there.Oh yeah, I'm sorry. That went on forever on my end. The first thing I would say is that after Republicans lose elections, they don't think, well how can we move to the center? What is the message that we can say that will make people like us? They don't do that. They never do that. In fact, what they do is to say, "How can we change the environment so that our ideas can propagate better?" And nobody on the left does that. And part of that is why I started my website, Flux, to try to focus on some of these larger issues and larger trends. In terms of Christian nationalism and the Republican mind, I just did a long interview and discussion about how this works. The Left Behind novels. People have heard of them but did you know that they were written by the... from one of the co-founders of the Council for National Policy? No, I didn't.Which is a right-wing networking organization. The Left Behind novels are designed as political propaganda. That's what they're for; that's the point of them. But people just think, well look at this stupid moron Kirk Cameron movies and whatnot. Of course it's done. Whatever. Understand-Yeah, that God's Not Dead; that whole series of movies, too. It's all the same.Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, of course it's dumb, but you have to go to the next step which is what is the point of these things? Why do they exist? How many people are reading them? And in the case of the Left Behind, those things have sold over 100 million copies.Yeah. Which, in fairness, it's a cool premise for a book, but it's definitely... I feel like it's a cool premise that could've been done in a less super propaganda type way, which I guess that just becomes the Leftovers.Yeah, the end of the world, Satan trying to kill everyone or the demons or whatever. Hell, that's every f*****g superhero.Yeah, it's true.Marvel literally has a god character, Thor, in its pantheon of superheroes. Yeah, it is a cool premise, for sure, but people have to understand what does it... The way that it's executed is designed to tell the audience who reads the books or watches the films or whatever that Democrats are the literal, not metaphorical, literal servants of Satan. Yep, that's... Yeah.And that reality that there are 10s of millions of people who think this. Have you ever seen that discussed on cable news? No.I don't think ever.No. And if it was brought up, people would get slammed for, "Oh, your generalizing," which, okay, but if one Democrat somewhere saying, "We should defund the police," gets turned into, "This is what Democrats believe," there's no... No one goes, "All Republicans believe that forest fires are started with a Jewish space laser," like Marjorie Taylor Greene said, but that's kind of how things are when it comes to you find one fringe-type character on the left and that becomes this is what Democrats believe, this is what the left believes.Yeah, or even in the case of Black Lives Matter, there were some acts of arson or criminality that were conducted, but if you act... I actually was watching the... I live in Long Beach, California; I was watching some webcam footage that people had, the public webcams, and I saw the protests. They were in an area and then they left, the protesters left. And then some people drove in from who knows where and then broke into a store. They had nothing to do with these protests, they were just looters and were not affiliated with the groups. But nobody reported that.Yeah. Well, and also with that, there was this narrative last year as that was happening, "Oh, Democrats support riots and mobs and violence and looting and burning," but I don't know, there might have been a couple who were outspoken on the more extreme ends of whatever was happening, but for the most part, Democrats were like, "Violence is bad, violence is wrong. No violence. Stop it." That sort of thing. But it's-Well, and then, yeah... Oh, sorry.There was this idea that Joe Biden was... these were Joe Biden fans. No. No one who goes and calls themselves an anti-fascist is a Joe Biden fan.They hate Joe Biden.Yeah. Joe Biden, he's the middle of the road. I don't know. He's, "Is Pepsi okay?" as a person, you know?Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.That sort of thing. He's no one's first choice. Yeah. But I would say, though, that, yeah, I don't think, though, that the mainstream media is adequately positioned to cover this. And Democrats and democratic leaders and funders and activists need to understand that the mainstream media will never be up to this task. There is nothing that you can say to them because most of them operate... Their training is basically show up in a building and try to find people and ask them about legislation. That's the only thing they know how to do. They don't know-Repeat whatever gets told to them, which that's one of those things that, especially during the Trump era, was pretty obnoxious because you'd have respectable mainstream reporters tweeting out whatever nonsense Trump said that day or whatever-Yeah, "I had the biggest inauguration attendance ever."Yeah. One guy who used to do that a lot was this CBS reporter, Mark Knoller, where he would just say nonsense. Trump would say nonsense and he would just type it up and send it out and everyone would be like, "Why are you doing this? You understand that this is straight-up untrue. You don't need to share it word-for-word without saying-“Are you a stenographer?”Yeah, well exactly. And then he... I forgot, there was-He retired, actually.Yeah, he retired and then immediately started popping up in the replies of some... I forgot who it was but some democratic lawmaker said something that was a slight exaggeration and he popped in to go, "Actually..." And it's like, where was this guy? Where was this guy the past four years? But-Yeah. Well yeah, so basically what has to be done is that there has to be multiple organizations started who will not only document the lies but also actively push back against them and then also try to stay in touch with the democratic base and get them to be engaged and continue to be engaged, then also to... And then there also need to be groups that are out there telling people who vote Republican, "This is who you actually are supporting when you support these people," because I can tell you so many people who I know, they have no idea. I personally didn't know about this stuff and I worked in media commentary and analysis and I didn't know how crazy these people were. And so the mainstream media isn't going to report it because they are so upset. The only thing that they can understand is an elected politician said this. And sometimes they will debunk it, ma

This week’s podcast guest is Matthew Sheffield, the founder and editor of Flux, a new online community for progressive writers and podcasters. I was interested in talking to Matthew about his earlier life experience as someone who was present when right-wing media really started building the echo chamber. The interview went pretty long, so this is part one of two. The second portion will be posted next week.The Present Age is a reader-supported newsletter. Please subscribe. Thank you!Parker Molloy: Joining me today is Matthew Sheffield. One of the first things I wanted to ask you is can you tell me a little bit about your connection to right-wing media? How it started, what you did, how your views changed over time, how your involvement changed over time. You offered to share the tale of your exit from the world of right-wing media and I would absolutely love to hear it.Matthew Sheffield: Okay, all right. Well, my background is I was raised as a Fundamentalist Mormon, and Mormons basically, a lot of people don't know, but Mormons actually are the original Christian Nationalists. Mormonism was founded on the idea that America was the choice land above all other lands. That's literally in the Book of Mormon. And that Christopher Columbus was moved upon by the holy spirit to discover America even though he never came here, but... And so Mormons, to some degree, kind of created the environment then rubbed off on a lot of people. I was brought up in that environment very much to a large degree. I have seven siblings, and my family and I, we traveled all over America doing an informal ministry because Mormons don't actually have ministries; they're not allowed to have them by their church. It's a very centralized bureaucratic church, and so I was in that. Part of it was that we were so disenchanted with the regular Mormon church. It wasn't fundamentalist enough for us. But luckily, we were not into polygamy, so that was at least good for us in that regard.But I didn't want to go on a regular Mormon mission because when you turn 19, that's what young men are expected to do. But I was so disenchanted, I was like, "No, I want to do something else." And it was, unfortunately, a really bad idea in retrospect, but in any case, we started traveling around America playing classical music on the street, literally. That was my misspent youth. We did that, and in the course of doing that, for whatever reason... This was the pre-internet days. We actually watched the evening news on TV, and our family watched the CBS Evening News. During the imbroglio over Bill Clinton's impeachment, we decided that we thought Dan Rather... One of my brothers and I decided we thought Dan Rather was unfair. In retrospect, he's obviously shown he's a fairly progressive guy. But anyway, we decided we were going to start a website called ratherbiased.com, and it basically was blogging before there was even a word for it. We got picked up all over the place. I guess people liked it, or some people liked it. We did that for a few years until we got thoroughly and utterly sick of talking about Dan Rather, and so we quit the site in 2002 and we got so many requests to bring it back for 2004 from our... Because we left the site up but we didn't want to do it. But so many people were like, "Please, please bring this site back." And so we said, "Fine, we will." But we had decided at that point we're definitely going to stop no matter what after the election's over. Well, after the election was over, we actually kept going because Dan Rather had gotten involved with that document scandal where he used fake documents to say that George W. Bush had avoided the draft in the Vietnam War. I think that's probably true that Bush did that, but when you're using documents that were typed up in Microsoft Word and you're presenting them as if they were made on a typewriter, that's pretty embarrassing. Anyway, that just exploded in popularity. We thought, my brother and I, we were tired of our family ministry by that point but we had no way out to go and do something on our own. None of us had ever had an internship, none of us had any friends because we lived basically a nomadic lifestyle. We grew up in trailer parks and tents, so yeah, we had no network. I went to I think eight different colleges, and I have two other ones from my high school years, so I've got 10 universities on my transcript. Originally, we thought, well what if we had a website that brought together left and right-wing media criticism? We actually started recruiting a bunch of people for it, and there was a ton of interest for it and people liked this idea. We actually found... before they had signed on with anyone, we found Matt Yglesias. We also found Ezra Klein while they were in college and a bunch of other right-of-center people, and so a lot of people wanted to do this but then we got to the point where we realized, oh, we don't have any money. We can't pay anybody to do this stuff and we have no way of raising money. We're like, f**k, I guess we'll have to just go into right-wing media because we have no other options. It was a weird moment because I remember I applied... I had never even applied for a job before, and so I went up and applied for, I think it was Nordstrom Rack or something like that and they never got back to me, and I was like, man, I don't know. I have no idea what to do. My university people had no interest in helping me, and so we're like, all right, well I guess we'll team up with a media research center and start News Busters. News Busters was basically like a large format version of what we had been doing at ratherbiased.com, and they had apparently seen what we were doing. Actually, we ended up getting more publicity for our stuff than they did, and so we started News Busters. After that, it was basically the first-ever think tank blog publication out there as far as I know. And then a bunch of people started trying to get into that business as well and Heritage Foundations did it, and actually, Media Matters, as I understand, was inspired by what we were doing to some degree. And then I started a business basically sort of duplicating that idea. Had only Nordstrom Rack gotten back to you, this could've all been avoided. Apparently yeah, yep. We did that for a while and then I actually tried to do that... After we started working with them, the first day after we moved out... My brother and I actually had money, we could move out so we did as soon as possible. And I was 27 at the time, and we both... The first Sunday after we left, moved out, my mom had put up a paper on our kitchen because we were living together, actually. She put a paper on it for the address of the local Mormon church, and my brother and I, we got up on Sunday morning with enough time to go to it, but then I looked over and him and I said, "I don't want to go. Do you want to go?" "No," so we didn't and we never did. We never went again after that. Anyway, long story short, our faith in Mormonism and religion generally collapsed after that, but not our interest in right-wing activism. I, for a number of years, tried to make space for non-Christians in the Republican party. And, well, ultimately that was a fool's errand as I soon discovered. Well, not soon, I eventually discovered. I guess the big catalyst for that discovery... Well, there was a couple of things. One was that I kept noticing how people were stealing my ideas on the right. I would go to an organization and say, "Hey, I've built these things here that have millions of readers that are nationally known. I could do that for you." And then they would say, "Well, I don't know, I don't know," and then a few months later big fundraising campaign: We're doing this large website and we need your money. Of course.Yeah, and so that kept happening to me. At first, I thought, well maybe it's just because I'm not... I don't know. Because I grew up in a trailer park and I don't know anybody. I'm not an elite Republican consultant or whatever. And that's what I thought for a while. But then eventually I decided to start writing a book to try to improve conservative politics. And by improve, I also meant to help them become more responsive to public sentiment, so public opinion. And in the course of doing that I began researching why do they pursue these ideas that people don't want? Where does that come from? I had always stayed away from the religious right just by being not religious, but I actually started reading their stuff and I was horrified at what I was seeing. I remember reading a story of this man who was, he's a Hindu priest and he was invited to give the... The US Capitol has a daily prayer session at the beginning of all their... when they're in session, and they invite different people do to it. And this guy, who was a Hindu priest, was invited to do it. And so he got up to do it and people started... They invaded the Capitol, actually. This was a predecessor of January 6th, and no one has ever heard of it. But this happened, and they invited the rotunda and started screaming about Satan and, "We have to stop this." They were demanding that he be arrested. It was awful. I was like, is this what I am helping here? And so I started trying to rewrite to, I don't know, oppose that Christian nationalist extremism, but eventually, I got to the point where I realized, you know what? The reason that they do these things is because they think they're God's servants. I could write all the best words, to use Trump's phrase. I could have all the best words, the best-written book in human history and it wouldn't matter because they're doing these things because they think God wants them to do it. And their ability to distinguish between their own ideas and the will of God is none; it's nonexistent. And it was a profoundly depressing realization because I had thought that there were sincere motives about policy and America and the public servic

Parker Molloy: Hello, hello. My guest this week, today, whatever, you're listening to this podcast is Michael Ian Black. Hey.Michael Ian Black: Hey.How's it going?That was quite an introduction.It was. I'll record something. I'll record something before this, talk about... I'll be like—You're making a big assumption that people are going to know what that means or who I am.No, no.That's just a giant leap that you're making.I'm going to be like, “He's the guy from that show Ed.”“He's that guy that maybe you saw on TV several years ago.”“Did you have VH1 in the early 2000s?”“That's right. Then you know my next guest.”Yes. That will be the intro I'll record. Yeah. So thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me for this podcast, which will be listened to by tens of people. Maybe hundreds if we're lucky.Well, that's more than come to my comedy shows lately, so I'm thrilled.Yeah. Which kind of leads me into what I wanted to chat with you about. So my podcast and newsletter are both about communication. That's just the general idea, which is great for me because it gives me the opportunity to talk about pretty much anything, because pretty much anything falls under the category of communication. But specifically I have been really interested in stories about how the pandemic has forced people to change how they communicate. For instance, pandemic's caused a lot of people to recalibrate how they interact with the world. You've got bands forced to put off touring and instead trying to sell tickets to livestream concerts, reporters had to rethink news gathering to account for a world where people isolated themselves away from society and just ate up whatever the Facebook algorithm gave them that day. How has the pandemic affected your work, and your ability to work, for that matter?Well, it devastated it. My main sources of income are acting, performing, and I guess those are my two main sources of income. So showbiz shut down, venues closed, and so there was a year and change where it was very, very difficult for me to make any money whatsoever. I joined Cameo. That was helpful. I made Cameo videos for people. That was my main source of income for 2019 and 2020, which, you know, that's not great, but it was a help.Cameo is interesting to me because half the time it's like, oh, that's really sweet. You got that celebrity to wish so and so a happy birthday. And then the other half of the time it's “haha, you tricked such and such celebrity into saying something coded and really weird.” And “tricked” is questionable, as it is, because some people just might be like, “Sure, I'll say whatever you want.”That's me, I'll say whatever you want.Anything.If you want to pay me 85 bucks to say, “You know what? Hitler had some good ideas,” I'm happy to do that.Cool.Whatever you want.That right there is just going to be my promo for this episode, just you saying...I'm service-oriented, I just want to make people happy.Yeah, I'm like, how can I get more people to listen to my thing? I'll let Michael come on and talk about—I'm not saying it's my opinion. I'm just saying you paid me to tell you, and I'm fine with that.But yeah, that's kind of the general vibe is just this idea that... Especially people involved in performing, whether it's comedy or acting or even writing. Your book came out last year, right?Yeah. My last book came out in September 2020.Yes. It was called A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to my Son, which you sent me a copy of that, and I read it, and it was great. And it was mostly serious, but also funny. One thing I found interesting about it was really just the fact that you focus on a lot of darkness in that book. I think you opened it with talking about mass shootings, right? Or something like that. How challenging is it to be funny in a world that is not funny, that has so much darkness; climate change and the pandemic and mass shootings and all of that stuff?Well, I'll take the question generally speaking first. Which is, I'll say it's... Humor has always been the way that people cope with terrible circumstances. Humor will always find a light through the cracks. It's just a coping mechanism, it's genetic, it's just who we are. The way you alleviate suffering often is just to make light of it, just to make a joke of it, just to flip the awfulness on its head, even if it's just for a second. So I think that's just who we are as a species. Specifically, with this book that I wrote, which does start with school shootings, I gave myself permission to not try to be funny. I gave myself permission to just say what I thought about stuff, and if there were jokes along the way, so be it. But I definitely wasn't trying to make it a funny book in any way, shape, or form, which is why the subtitle is A Mostly Serious Letter to my Son, because that's what it was.Yeah, yeah. Yeah, If someone bought that thinking they were going to get a lively romp of happiness, that's not-A lively romp of school shootings and the problems with contemporary masculinity, this wasn't the book.Yeah. That's not the book for you. Yeah. So that's interesting, just kind of how comedy as sort of a release valve to cope with things outside of our control.So comedy is just a form of creative expression. All art is just... I think it's all the same thing. It's all how we deal with the condition of being a human. It is just our natural impulse to create. We don't have a choice. It's just part of who we are as a species. So it's going to express itself as art or music or comedy, or whatever else. I was going to say architecture, but I don't think it really will express itself as architecture.I mean, it could. Did you hear that there was a recent that article about the billionaire who was like, I'll give you $200 million if you let me design it?“If you let me make a giant coffin for your students.”If I was really rich, that is exactly the kind of thing I would want to do. I'd be like, yeah, I'll give you money, ... if. And then just put one really strange condition on everything.“No, it's going to be a state... Look, guys, it's going to be a state-of-the-art dorm. I'm going to pay for the whole thing. The only thing that's a little weird about it is to get up and down it's chutes and ladders, and the chutes are all water slides, and they all end in a vat of hot chocolate. Can we just agree that that's okay?”I want to build Willy Wonka's factory. We can house people in there. Yeah, that's totally what I would do.One thing that I also wanted to ask you about, because you are so much better at this than I am, is you listen to people a lot on Twitter when it comes to... Because your comedy isn't necessarily political, but that doesn't mean that you're not involved in the world around you or anything like that. And I've watched some really interesting interviews that you've had. You went on Dave Rubin's show five years ago, or something like that, and had an interesting conversation with him. You went on Adam Corolla's podcast last year, which I mean, he's a comedian, but he's also extremely political. And you have these really interesting conversations where you're able to kind of diffuse, cause them to put down their defenses for a little bit, to have honest conversations, which is honestly lacking in now.Because half of the time if you watch Dave Rubin, he'll be going on some rant about how trans people are bad or something like that [Ed. note: in the off chance that Rubin or his fans see/hear this, before they respond, “Uh, he’s never actually said ‘trans people are bad,’” understand that I am speaking generally about his tendency to invite anti-trans people on his show to give them a supportive space to argue against basic legal protections for trans people — with virtually no pushback from Rubin; additionally, while he’s had a couple trans people on, they’re “pick me”s who’ve essentially adopted the right-wing stance on whether or not trans people should be legally protected from employment/housing/health care/public accommodations discrimination]. But the conversation that the two of you had was really interesting, because it was focusing on these commonalities and how to agree on the goals and maybe disagree on the methods of getting there. What's the secret to doing that, to breaking through to people? Because I think that's something where I find myself hitting a wall when speaking to people who have extremely different political views than me, but you seem to be better at it.Well, I think it's a couple things. The first is, part of what I learned on Twitter was you got to understand what you're trying to accomplish. If you're just trying to rile up people that's easy to do and fun and funny, and you'll absolutely be successful at that, no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on, no matter... If your goal is just to upset people, that's super easy to do. And sometimes that is absolutely my goal. Sometimes that is just the funniest way for me to get through my day is just to upset people. And sometimes, incidentally, people on my side. Sometimes just I'll say something that I know is just going to rile up my political allies and watch them go nuts, because it's funny to me. If the goal is to actually have a conversation and engage with people, and that is absolutely sometimes the goal, I think you said it yourself in the question, just listen, just listen.And before you listen, take the leap of faith that that person has sincere beliefs that they think are reasoned and logical and come from a good place, that they think that their worldview is the correct worldview, that they're not inherently malicious people. And I think if you do that, those two things, you'll tend to have a pretty good conversation with somebody. And I think most people aren't malicious. I think most people aren't malevolent. I think most people do believe what they're saying. Now there are some people whose beliefs are so abhorrent that I couldn't have a

Parker Molloy: So you've been writing this awesome newsletter over on Substack, called The Sword and the Sandwich. Can you tell me a little bit about that?Tal Lavin: Yeah, so I launched, actually, this month, October 4th, and it's a really odd... It is an odd mix. Like, I recognize it's an odd mix. The sword is first of all, because I own a bunch of swords, and love them, but also, it sort of symbolizes like I'm writing about the American right and far-right, and then the sandwiches are very literal. Like, for a really long time, I have been obsessed with Wikipedia's list of notable sandwiches, which has hundreds of sandwiches on it, from all over the world, and I have wanted to address this in some systematic way. I love projects that have structure that I can f**k around within, like a sonnet.So the premise is I'm going through every sandwich on that list. It's very arbitrary, you know? Obviously a Wikipedia thing, so it's... But I'm treating it almost like a sacred text, and then going through it and writing essays, or interviews, or recipes, or stories about each sandwich. We've covered the American hero, the bacon sandwich, and bacon, egg, and cheese, and now this week, we're on to bagels, which is exciting for me, so yeah, this week's content is harrowing tales of child abuse and bagels.That's just such an interesting combo. And just to be... Like, those are separate posts. They're not-Oh, yeah, it's not-They're not one in the same.Yeah, so it's like Monday is the s**t that will horrify you, and then Friday, we're riding into the weekend--is the stuff about the American right.No, Friday is the-Horrifying bagels.No, I really aim not to traumatize anyone with my sandwich posts. These are nonviolent sandwiches. It's like I need the break, psychically. Maybe readers do too. Sometimes, it's really hard to shift moods, when... Like, the current series is about corporal punishment in evangelical households, and the sort of ways it impacts people as adults. So it's really hard for me sometimes, to switch modes. I almost resent it. I'm like, "Ugh, now I have to write about bagels," but then I spend an hour researching and writing about bagels, and I feel better, and then dive back into hell.Yeah. Well, as you mentioned, you published the first of a three-part series on corporal punishment, evangelicals, and the "doctrine of obedience," as you write in the piece. I found it fascinating because I honestly didn't... I've never really thought about the history involved in all of that. I'm used to people on Twitter being like, "I don't think it's wrong to hit kids. I got hit, and I'm fine," and then you look at them, and you're like... They're not fine.No. Yeah.No, it's like, "Oh, you think you're fine. But are any of us, really?"I'm not.I'm definitely not.I'm so not fine, and I wasn't raised evangelical. I'm a Jew, and I'm a childless Jew even, so it's not... I can keep some distance from the material. Well, obviously so many people shared their pain with me for this series, lots of different facets of their pain, their stories, how they're coming to terms with it, how they're healing, and to me, not to be melodramatic, but it felt like, "Oh, this is why I became a journalist," and like, I have to hold this pain gently, and treat it well, and treat it as the sacred trust it is. I mean, I don't believe in any god, but whatever. Sometimes I think of things as holy or sacred, as just a stronger word for like really important. Feels necessary.I've been astounded at the response. I mean, I tried to... I have a tic about historical research. Like, almost every piece I've ever written has some element of history in it. I also dove a ton into primary sources for this piece, which in this case was Christian parenting guides, of which I read big swaths or the entirety of like three or four books, and then tons of people's testimony about how these doctrines affected them.And then, I looked at what's the historical context? Like, why did all these books start getting written in the '70s and updated in the '90s? I mean, corporal punishment obviously has been around forever, but like, corporal punishment as sort of a political necessity and as a theological doctrine really arose as like... and the evidence is pretty clear, in the books themselves, and also in like the historical record, that they arose as basically a backlash, both to the work of Dr. Spock, who wrote Baby and Child Care, and he was super popular, and everyone loved him, and he was also an antiwar activist in his later years, and got arrested protesting Vietnam. And he said don't hit your kids, right?It's hard to overstate how much these authors hate Dr. Spock. Like, they hate him. They think he sucks, and he's the reason everything's wrong, but anyway, you have this Dr. Spock influence telling you not to hit your kids, and then essentially what these books posit, or what they feel they're reacting to is like, a lot of the movements in the '60s were student-led. The antiwar movement, the gay rights movement was a youth-led thing in many cases, or perceived as a youth-led movement, the feminist movement was really led by young women, and the sort of curative, the corrective force is writing these books.James Dobson, of Focus on the Family fame, his first book was called Dare to Discipline, like he's like, "We're fighting against this godless heathens that tell us not to hit our kids." So basically, they're saying chaos and social disorder starts in the home, and you have to hit your kids to get them in line.I cannot wait to read the second and third piece of this, because the first one is great. It really starts to get into Dobson, and The Pearls, and all of that stuff, and the responses have been heartbreaking, that I've seen from people, where they are talking about how it affected them on a personal level, and on one hand, it's amazing that the story has resonated with that many people, and that that's clearly captured what they're feeling and what they're going through, and I mean, that's just you being a great writer, and interviewer, and researcher. I mean, beyond that, it's just so profoundly sad that there are so many people in this world who have been hurt in that sort of way. They haven't felt able to express these ideas themselves, for fear of backlash or for fear of coming off as weak. That was another thing that I saw in some of the replies here, but-Or because they were taught that it was holy, that it was ordained by God, and a lot of the people, the people who spoke to me, have left evangelicalism. There's a process, it's like a very common term, and sort of ex-evangelicals. Basically, it's just calling it deconstruction, sort of tearing down the doctrines you were raised up with and figuring out a new way forward, and I really applaud people who are doing that work. It's very difficult. It's very painful.My Substack's really new. Like, I have 3,000 subscribers. It's small. The post, as of now, it's been out for less than two days, and it's gotten 50,000 views almost. I think to me, that's just an indicator of how it resonates, how people... I mean, first of all, I think there are a lot of outsiders who are sort of horrified, and then there are a lot of people who are like, "This was my childhood. I've never heard it discussed this way. I've never connected these dots." And the heartbreaking thing is like people are so grateful, grateful, that someone cares, anyone, about what happened to them. Generations of kids, generations. Like, the people who talked to me ranged from 22 to 65. It's very much a live issue, and it's still happening, although spanking is, thankfully...I hate the term spanking, actually, because spanking, I think has a lovely place in kink, but when you're talking about it in child-rearing, you are talking about hitting kids, so I've actually sort of very consciously, in my public speech about this stuff, stopped using that term, because it feels like a euphemism to me. You're talking about hitting children with the intent of causing pain.That's exactly it. I made the mistake of not writing down any questions, because I was like, "I know you. We're going to just-"We're just going to vibe about-Yeah, and it's like, "Oh, man. This is so dark and hard," you know? But that's what I love about your writing. You wrote this amazing book, Culture Warlords.And yeah, it was about basically me f*****g immersing myself in online Nazi life for like 18 months, and it was hard. It was a hard thing to do, as a Jew, as a person, who doesn't like seeing clips of murders on my phone all the time, presented as just and right. But I guess yeah, my beat is like looking into darkness and coming back out with a report.It feels weird to be like, "You're so good at this," you know? This thing that involves hate, and darkness, and pain, but your book was my favorite book of last year, and it's one of those books that I recommend to anyone who's at all curious about what's happening in the world, because I don't think you could talk about any current event without talking about how so much of our lives is affected by the far right, and white supremacist groups, and antisemitic people, and it's really kind of scary how much all of that overlaps, you know? You have the white supremacist groups.They tend to overlap in their beliefs with a lot of the evangelical groups, which tend to overlap with a lot of the anti-LGBTQ groups, these sorts of things where there's a very powerful and strong coalition of people that, I don't know, they just make the world a worse place by what they do and what they say, not by existing. I mean, I'm all for people existing. I want to make that clear, but I think that their actions and what they do just makes things so much harder. Is there anything in going into writing that, or in just your work generally, that surprised you? Were there any ideas that you had, that you had to challenge and rethink along the process?Well, so one o

Parker Molloy: Joining me this week is Pete Croatto. Hey Pete.Pete Croatto: Hey Parker. How are you?I'm doing okay. I'm hanging in there. I'm surviving. It's becoming fall. It's getting cold outside. I love it.Me too.It's rainy right now. It's fine.Matches my mood. I love it.So you wrote a book about the NBA and how it became so entwined with pop culture. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and your book?Certainly. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I'd consider myself to be a sports writer. I mean, I've written about sports for years and for Slam and the old good Deadspin and Grantland and various outlets. But I've always been driven kind of by my curiosity about certain topics and yeah, and that's kind of kept me afloat, but I've never really been a beat reporter or a sports reporter. And I'm pursued by my curiosity more than anything.So about eight years ago... Wow, it seems like a long time ago, I wrote a piece for Grantland on Marvin Gaye's National Anthem at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game. And that piece was about... I interviewed 25 people and it was 2,500 words and it was a piece I'm very proud of and it's still on the Grantland site. But in writing and reporting that story, there were just a lot of unanswered questions. And the one thing that I kept going back to was how did the NBA get to a moment where Marvin Gaye went from being this scandalous choice, who does this rendition of a national Anthem that is soulful and R&B flavored and really is unlike anything anyone has ever heard before, where that becomes normal, where that becomes like where someone like Fergie singing the National Anthem is normal or...How did the NBA become the cool sport? That whole point in the market transition between the old stodgy NBA and the NBA that we see today. And I couldn't really explore that in a 2,500-word piece. And I kind of became convinced that this was a book. So through several years later and a lot of false starts and a lot of questionable decisions on my end, I wrote this book. But yeah, never really been a sports writer. I've been a freelance writer for 15 years now. I started off in newspapers and just by happenstance and good fortune, I got into sports writing.Well, that's cool. Yeah. I mean, I really liked your book because it- It really took this... Which, up until I've moved a few months back I had it next to my desk, but now I don't. It's a good book it's called From... I don't want to get it backwards. From Hang Time to Prime Time, right?There you go. Yeah.Yes. From Prime Time to Hang Time, to whatever time to... Yeah.The orange book. That's what I call it.It’s the orange book with the TV head and the dunking. I'll be sure on the transcript of this to include a photo of the book cover so people will know what the hell I'm talking about. But yeah. The book is filled with a ton of really interesting stories and it's something that I kind of thought about, but haven't necessarily put in much research trying to look some of the stuff up. Because I mean, I remember it was just... I mean, it seems like it was just a few years ago, but it's possible it was longer, where players would be fined for not wearing the proper attire to the pre-game stuff. It was very uptight and fairly recently, and now it seems like it's gotten to this point where the players have really taken it upon themselves to express themselves and to kind of ease out of that sort of era. What do you attribute to that?That's a good question. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that if you look at the NBA's demographics now, it's mostly African American. And I think as time has gone on hip hop culture has really become mainstream more so. With each year that passes by, it becomes more and more ingrained into the culture. And that's really what you see now is you see things that would've been, again, dismissed 15, 16 years ago are now just sort of... It's normal. It's the way things are. I mean, it takes a long time for things to become embraced into the culture. And I think what you're seeing now, again with the whole fashion element of the NBA becoming a very hip hop league, a league that isn't very suit and tie like the NFL. That I think that's a very much a reflection of who's in the league and also how the culture's changed.You made a good point just now with the dress code. I really think that had everything to do with David Stern being the NBA Commissioner at the time. And David Stern is a key figure in this book, but at the time of the dress code ban, I think he was in his mid sixties, early sixties. And he was at a time in his life, like a lot of people where you get older and you don't understand things. And when you don't understand your first reaction is to chastise or to ban, or to make a rule, instead of asking questions and understanding what the intentions are. To me, David Stern's failings as a commissioner kind of came to light as he got older. And he got older and the players kind of stayed the same age, they're all still men in their twenties and thirties for the most part and younger as the NBA draft became more about getting high school kids in there.Yeah. Definitely. For some reason when you said that, the first thing that popped into my head was David Stern doing Matthew McConaughey's line from Dazed and Confused. He's getting older, they stay the same.Yeah. I'm not going to even adventure to do impression of David Stern doing Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. I have so much collateral as a public person. I'm going to make sure to stop right there.Yeah. You don't want to become known as the guy trying to do David Stern as McConaughey.No, nobody wants that.But yeah, I mean, so one thing that I do is I... A few years ago I started to get into video games again. Because that's the thing, whenever the world gets crazier, I pick up a hobby that seems to be from my childhood. I was just showing you earlier. Baseball cards, that's my new one. Picking up baseball cards. So a few years back, I just kind of on a whim was like, "I'm going to buy a Nintendo Switch because that way I can play games" because I was playing a lot of games on my phone and what would happen is I'd get popups that were always terrifying. It was always like, "Hey, Trump just did this crazy thing." And it was like, "oh no, that is not relaxing. I can't relax when I'm holding this thing that constantly tells me what's happening in the world."I bought a Switch. And then from the Switch, I ended up getting a PlayStation. And once I had the PlayStation, I started buying all the sports games as they came in. Madden and MLB: The Show and NBA 2K, that series. And so in the latest one, latest NBA 2K game, which came out just, I don't know, like a month or two ago. It's really interesting how the cultural elements plays into the whole thing. If you do the MyCareer mode. Yeah. There's this thing where you can do certain things and get points toward becoming a music mogul. Or you can do something else and, and start your own fashion line.And it's really interesting how much non-basketball stuff plays into it. But it seems to work. I mean, a while back, I was tweeting about playing it where I'm like, "there is basketball in this game at some point." But the player that you are in the MyCareer mode, it's like a guy who made videos and he's a YouTube star and now he's basketball star. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense because it's not actually a path to the NBA that you actually seem to take, but it's a lot of fun. And I thought that it was really interesting to see how that kind of worked in. One thing I have been thinking about, which is also kind of represented in the game in the sense that there are a lot of, really not so subtle, advertisements built into that like the dude who plays Jake from State Farm.I saw that. That was crazy.He's in the game. And he shows up several times. At one point he's in your apartment. You come back from a game and he's like at your table. It's weird. It's very strange.Do you think any player in any sport wants to hang out with Jake from State FarmProbably not.I can't imagine anybody like Russell Westbrook or Aaron Rodgers actually wanting to spend their spare time with Jake from State Farm.Yeah. So he's in there, but then I thought, "Oh man, that's not really subtle," but that reminded me of how now on the uniforms for the past few seasons, there have been all these ads. What are your thoughts on the advertisements on the uniforms? I'm not a fan. And I mean, I feel like it'd be weird to be like, "yes, I love this," but how much?See, I'm not a giant fan of them, but I understand why the NBA does it. And what you mentioned before about this whole... The marketing being folded into NBA 2K, which is delightfully absent from the NBA Jam console arcade game that my family got me, that's what the NBA's always done. The NBA has always had an alliance, sometimes an uncomfortable alliance with his advertisers and it's been this way forever, starting back to. I mean, how many leagues have advertisements for their own product? The NBA action, it's fantastic. So that has been baked into the NBA for years. So the logos don't really bother me. I don't like them aesthetically, but to me, this is what the NBA's always been about.One of the guys I spoke to for the book, Joe Cohen, who founded MSG Network, he delivered the quote, which I think explains everything about the NBA and why we're able to roll with the punches as well as we do. He said that the NBA's tradition is that it has no tradition. So all these things that you see with the video games and the patches, and even the advertisements on the floor, have you noticed this, where it kind of switches over every quarter? Those things seem weird and kind of Orwellian, if I hope I'm using that term correctly, but they-Well, no one else is, so.I'm going to hop on. It all seems doomed because the NBA has always been about never staying still. I'm curious to hear your thou

On this week’s edition of The Present Age podcast, I chat with writer Thor Benson about some of his recent work covering mental health and the pandemic.Parker Molloy: Hey, joining me is the Thor Benson. Hello.Thor Benson: Hi. Thanks for having me.Yeah. Thanks for taking the time to join the podcast. I am very interested in some of the things you've been writing over at... I read the two pieces you wrote for NBC. Can you tell me a little bit about those and how they work into your larger work basically? Also, let people know who you are.For sure.I'm an independent journalist. I've been doing this for about a decade now. Started as a freelancer, have been a freelancer most of the time, but I've had staff jobs here and there. I've written for Daily Atlantic, Rolling Stone, NBC, Business Insider, all kinds of people. And during most of the time I've been writing, psychology has been a pretty big focus of mine, all kinds of science writing and tech writing, and neuroscience also interests me. And when the pandemic started, I was very worried about how it was going to affect people mentally in terms of being quarantined, and isolation is not good for people. It was necessary, of course, because it was God damn pandemic happening.So I was thinking about that a lot and I started researching it and talking to experts and writing about it here and there and then I connected with an editor at NBC at some point, and we were talking about different ideas or what articles we could do together. And I was like, "I've been really wanting to write this big all-encompassing article about the psychological effects of the pandemic, and I feel like we've been in it long enough now that we can have some observations." So I reached out to a ton of psychologists and finally found some that actually had data and stuff to share about how people are dealing with things, and it's really interesting. And then we parlayed that one into another one about people were being crazy on airplanes, they're still doing it, because of mask rules and I think just from being cooped up with each other and being stressed. And so I did an article about that too.Well. That's cool. So what kind of stuff did you find when you were talking to these people? Was there anything that surprised you or was it what you expected?I would say the effects of it were expected, that people would have anxiety and depression and maybe even PTSD from these experiences. What was shocking was how confident everyone I talked to was about if these effects would be long-term and they all seem to think for a lot of people there are going to be long-term effects that won't go away when things go back to, quote-unquote, normal.Well, that's something that when we were first chatting about this, about doing the podcast, you sent over your articles and I thought this is perfect because my mental health has been absolute s**t since the pandemic started. It wasn't great before the pandemic, but that's a different story for a different day. I don't know, there's something about just the whole world having similar issues that make me feel slightly better, but also really worse. It's that weird oh, I'm not alone. Oh no, the whole world is falling apart, that sort of attitude.Part of the reason I was inspired to write about this and why care about these things is because I've dealt with anxiety and depression in my life, so I get it. And so I wanted to hear what other people have to say about it and what you can maybe do about it. I don't know.So what can people do about it? Is there anything to keep themselves from stressing out too much?I could give my personal advice based on what I know of psychology. I think it's good to make sure you're not isolating. Don't constantly be ingesting the news and just try to have some perspective. I feel like things are better now than they were the worst of the pandemic. At least I'm vaccinated now, I can see people and not be so worried.I don't know about you, but I'm still terrified of catching COVID.Yeah, I definitely don't want to.I don't know. I see people post online, Twitter, being like, "Oh, got a breakthrough infection, this sucks." And then there'll be like, "Well, I was really sick for three days, but I didn't go to the hospital." Great. That's good. But also I'm going to do whatever I can to not get sick for three days, just generally speaking. In normal times I'm not going around licking doorknobs or whatever, just being like, "Well, what's the worst I'm going to catch? The flu? Meningitis?" That would be bad, but that sort of idea. And I understand that I'm lucky in a sense that I live with my wife and my dog and my cat, I have not been alone as so many people have been.And I even begin to imagine how frustrating and bad for my mental health it would be if I were alone. And it's something that I'm trying to understand, trying to understand how we communicate in times where we're apart. And that's one of the general ideas of the newsletter that I'm doing, the podcast, that sort of thing, how we communicate in times of hyper-connectedness where we're not in the same room, we're not in the same city, that sort of thing. And so can you tell me a little bit about what's happening on airplanes?So I've often been called overly empathetic. When I see people acting this way I'm like these are douchebags, but I feel bad for them because obviously, something's not going right with them. And so I was like, "I'm not going to excuse any behavior, it's wrong to be aggressive on airplanes, but I'd like to figure out if there's maybe a reason they're behaving this way."Reminder: The Present Age is a reader-supported newsletter. If you enjoy this or other posts, please consider becoming either a free or paid subscriber:And so I found these two psychologists who had done a lot of research into how the psychological effects the pandemic were playing out in people's behavior and they said that, "Yeah, essentially when the pandemic started, it was really stressful and we didn't know what's going to happen and then it just kept going, and so we just had this acute stress response all the time, chronic stress. And so you're always on alert. You're always a little stressed out, even if you don't notice it. And when that builds up over time, people just start lashing out, especially when things like masks have been so politicized and everyone's it's us versus them. It's not surprising that people, when they're asked to put on a mask or something, if they have these views would get really aggressive maybe in ways that they wouldn't otherwise through a pandemic."And I understand that to a certain extent. I don't think anyone likes wearing a mask. Some people might not mind it. Personally, I don't mind wearing a mask because I've always worried about how my face looks when I'm in public.Try having a beard. It looks so weird with the beard.I like wearing sunglasses too, because I like people not being able to see my eyes. It's very strange, but the combo is perfect. It's basically being totally in disguise. I was thinking back to a few years back, I remember there were some cities responding to protests about... I can't remember what the topic was. I think it might've been Confederate statues possibly. I don't know. It sounds like a thing people protest, but there were some cities around the country they were implementing these rules that banned people from wearing masks for a while, which is funny in hindsight where it's now we're like, "No, no, no, please wear a mask. Please cover your face, please don't let us see who you are." But that's interesting.And one thing I've also been thinking a lot about when it comes to the pandemic and how we're adapting to all sorts of things, even just on my end, we got a puppy in January 2020, and so it wasn't the plan for us to be constantly around. And now he has these extreme separation anxiety issues where we have to make a point of leaving to try to condition him to be okay with that sort of stuff. And I can't even imagine how that affects people with children or people with their extended family members who need in-person care, that sort of thing. Is there anything that you've been reading about or anything that came up about those sorts of worries or is that beyond—Well, no, there's definitely been some research into it. I haven't read a time, but as far as I can tell this whole situation has been very traumatic for parents and children. Parents because they're trying to take care of their kid and that's already stressful enough and then you add the pandemic stressors, worried about the kid getting sick and are you getting sick and not being able to take care of the kid. And then for the kids, if they're quite young they don't know why they're putting this thing on their face and they don't really understand something as large in scope as a pandemic and maybe they weren't able to go to school and see their friends. So it's been really tough.I'm sure. And that brings me a little bit to the other piece you sent me, the one for the new station that was about climate anxiety and declining birth rates. Can you tell me a little bit about that piece?So I want to say, as I do in the piece, right away that I think the biggest factor in the declining birth rates is economics. It's really expensive and income inequality is bad, but there's also, I believe, some psychological components there. We just have a really uncertain future we're facing, and especially when you're going through a pandemic you think about climate change and you're like, "Things are only going to get worse from here," and that make you less likely to have children or maybe have fewer children. Research seems to show that people are okay with the idea of replacing themselves, but they don't want to go beyond that, so maybe they'll have two kids and a lot of people seem to be worried about if by having kids there'll be contributing to climate change because kids use

My guest on this week’s podcast is singer-songwriter and [checks notes] king of Halloween Nick Lutsko. I’m really excited for this episode, and I highly recommend checking out the audio version if you can, as there are a few song clips in there (as well as a live/acoustic version of one of Nick’s songs at the very end).You can follow Nick on Twitter at @NickLutsko. His Patreon can be found here, his Bandcamp here, and his YouTube channel here.As always, if you enjoy the podcast and/or the newsletter, please consider subscribing and sharing my work on social media. There are free and paid subscriptions available. The Present Age is a reader-supported newsletter, and I appreciate your support!Parker Molloy: Nick Lutsko! Thank you for joining me today. I appreciate it.Nick Lutsko: Yeah, thanks for having me.So you just released the third installment of your Spirit Halloween trilogy, I guess.Yes.So how'd that come into existence for people who are familiar with the first two, but not the third?So, I did the first one mid-September of last year, unsolicited. This is the Spark Notes version. And the whole, I guess, kind of joke about that song was it's a theme for Spirit Halloween, but really it was more just a ploy for them to pay me for writing. The song was about my payment for the theme.Right.So, they reach out and they actually did pay me some money and they were really cool about it. And then they got in touch, said they wanted to do another one. So then after the unsolicited first entry, I did a sequel that they paid for. I guess technically they own it. And then they reached out early this year and made it pretty clear they wanted to do something again this year and they wanted to up the stakes. I think the language they used was, "How do we top last year?"Yeah.And my response initially was like, "If we're going to top last year, I think we need to get a significantly bigger crew." And when I say significantly bigger, that's more than me and my little brother who shot it. The first one was just me on my cell phone. The second one was me and my little brother in my house. And then for this one, I was proposing like, let's get a crew and a production team that can actually work on this thing and make it legit and cinematic and all that.And their response was sort of, "We don't want to lose the weird guy in his basement vibe." Which is fair. It might have also been a, "We don't want to spend way more money on this." So it just kind of forced me to get creative. At that point, I think I'd already kind of had the idea that I wanted to set the song as like, "We're coming out of the apocalypse," and like, "Things will return to normalcy," or not even that, "It'll be a utopia because Spirit Halloween is back."Yeah.And that was kind of the gist of what I was pitching to them. And I really didn't know how I was going to be able to shoot an apocalyptic wasteland in my basement, or I really dug myself into a hole because I wrote the song and I was happy with the song and then I had no idea how to shoot it. And I reached out to Brielle Garcia, who has been a follower of mine on Twitter.And it's kind of funny because she pulled my own card of me making stuff for Spirit Halloween unsolicited and she started doing unsolicited Snapchat filters for this dumb, fake gremlins movie that I made. And so I knew that she was way more technically savvy than I am. So I reached out to her and said, "Could you help me out with some of these visuals?" And I had no clue what I was getting myself into because she was able to do things that I could have never done in a million years.Sounds cool.So, yeah, yeah.How long did that take you guys to film and because it definitely seems like a larger production than anything else you've put out.For sure. Yeah. Well, I shot it all in my garage. My wife shot me in my garage as our baby was like chilling in a playpen in the corner. It felt very silly because I'm supposed to be interacting with this apocalyptic world, but I'm actually in my garage.And I have no idea if she's going to be able to do the things she says she's going to do because usually that stuff's done on a green screen.Yeah.But yeah, I think it was all done in about a month. I shot the footage in my garage. I sent it to her and yeah, it was insane, the amount of work that she did and how quickly she did it.That's cool.The way she explained it to me is, I think she uses video game engines maybe.Technology has just really advanced to where people are capable of doing things out of their bedrooms. It would've cost millions of dollars and tons of time, just a few short years ago. And I guess a lot of people haven't even figured out how to do some of these things and she's just on the cutting edge and yeah, it's pretty crazy that it was only her and I working on it and opposite sides of the country. She's in Seattle, I believe. And I'm in Chattanooga, Tennessee. So it was a cool project.Yeah, definitely. And I think that, because I was going to say, the first time I heard your music was all the Super Deluxe stuff that you did.Yeah.I guess, one of, sort of the benefits of Super Deluxe kind of disappearing or going away or whatever is the fact that then you kind of like, you were not just hidden behind the sort of the curtain there.Right.It was like, "Oh, hey, this is the dude who did the emo Trump songs or the Alex Jones thing."Yeah. Exactly.Because that was the thing. And I think it, that stuff resonated with me because it's like, so I'm 35, so the early-mid 2000s were high school. And at the time I was really into bands like Taking Back Sunday and Thrice and Thursday and all that. And there was this sort of holy s**t moment for me, where it clicked for me that Trump's tweets and sort of self-pitying statements were about being unfairly attacked and whatnot really read the type of the bands that were trying to make music like that, not them but the weird knockoff where it's like, "Oh man, you're trying too hard." You know?Right. Exactly.And from that moment on, anytime I'd see something stupid he said, I'd be like, "Oh man, this is like some kid with Hawthorne Heights lyrics as their AOL instant messenger way thing." You know? So I'm glad that that made it into my timeline because then that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole where-Nice.Then I was checking out your other music that is not comedy and-Cool.... so I was kind of, can you kind of tell me what are some of the differences between Nick Lutsko serious singer-songwriter and Nick Lutsko, weird guy in his basement singing about Spirit Halloween?Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question that I feel like the lines become a little more blurry all the time. Especially as we're planning live shows and it's like it's a smaller set of people, but there are definitely people who were into my stuff before I started doing these sweaty frantic songs on Twitter. And there's a subset of people who are going to come to the show expecting to hear that. And there's going to be people who are coming essentially only expecting a comedy show. And then there's a lot of people who've reached out a bit similar to you that said, "I really enjoyed your comedy stuff and I dove deeper into your other albums and I really enjoy that as well." So it's like trying to figure out how to frame both of these things and I wish I had a better answer. I think once we start playing shows, I'll get a better feel for how those two worlds can kind of coexist.I did this Vulture article. They did the premier of the Spirit 3 song and I said something like, "The shiny sheen of sweat on my face is like my Spiderman suit to my Peter Parker." And it's obviously just a dumb joke, but it's interesting in that, like even though I've done albums that are not comedic whatsoever. And even this goes for my Super Deluxe stuff as well, I think it all kind of comes from the same place. And it always comes from my frustrations with the absurdity of the world. And especially the last album I did Swords before I started doing these Songs on the Computer. All of those songs were just a direct, almost involuntary response to the Trump administration and the Trump campaign.And it was all written 2015 to 2019. And the whole album just kind of has a sense of like, "Am I the only person that is seeing what is happening? And is this a weird fever dream nightmare, or is this reality?" And I finished doing that album and I really was anxious to create something that was fun and happy. And I just wanted to do a 180. It's like, "Okay, I've spent the last few years just really hyper-focusing on all these things that just really distressed me and bummed me out." And it's like, I want to write some fun music. And then 2020 happened, we went into a global pandemic and George Floyd happened. And it was just all, it was like all these gut punches over and over.And it became abundantly clear that I wasn't capable of sitting down and writing fun, happy, quirky music. And the one song I did that was non-comedic was called Spineless. And it was just even darker and than all the stuff from Swords. And it's funny because it wasn't until I retroactively looked back and realized that through the Songs on the Computer project, I was able to do what I wanted to do, but it's not like I sat down and I'm like, "I'm going to take all these dark, angry feelings and just do the most absurd, silly version of these things." It was just something that I just instinctively started doing, and I never really analyzed too much whatever I'm doing in the moment, it's usually other people telling me what they like about it.And then I'm like, "Oh yeah, that's what I did there." There's not a lot of, I don't know, analyzation happening as I'm... Because I moved so quickly when I do them, which initially just started out of necessity between juggling multiple jobs, it would be like, "Okay, I have a free day this week so I know I need to put something out on this day." And yeah, that essentially b

Welcome to the Present Age podcast [and transcript]. I’m your host Parker Molloy. Joining me today on the show is Aaron Rupar, the author of the new Public Notice Substack. Let’s get started.Parker Molloy: Hey, Aaron. How's it going?Aaron Rupar: I'm good. Thanks for having me on the podcast.Yeah, of course. As soon as I heard that you were starting your own thing, I wanted to get you on here to talk about it, so that anyone who's listening to this can go read your new Substack. Can you tell me about it?I appreciate that. Yeah, I'm viewing my Substack, which I'm going to call Public Notice, as basically an extension of the sort of coverage I've been doing for four or five years now, I guess maybe six. Boy, I started, well, early 2016, so five and a half, going on six. Which is basically coverage of Trumpism, right-wing media, and where they fit into the broader sphere of American politics. As with any of these Substacks, I think things have a tendency to evolve as you go, and you get a sense of what works with your audience, what doesn't work, what sort of things people are interested to read more about. And so I'm viewing it, at least initially, as a more conversational and iterative version of the sort of writing I'd been doing at Vox, with at least three newsletters a week to begin with. Actually, to begin with, it'll be more. I think I'm going to be doing a daily one for the first couple weeks and then scaling it back to more of a normal schedule after that.But, yeah, I'm hoping that it'll be a place that people can go to get up to speed on what the big media stories of the week are, how right-wing media in particular is covering the broader picture of American politics. And a lot of good stuff that you're familiar with too, from your background at Media Matters. So that's how I'm viewing it going in. Like I said, I'm sure things will evolve. And it's always daunting when you're at the beginning stages of something like this. But I'm hopeful that a lot of the audience that I've developed over the years will come with me and check out the newsletter, and hopefully enjoy it. So we'll see how it goes.Yeah, definitely. Most people, if they're not familiar with your writing at Vox, they're probably at least familiar with the videos you post. You post constantly. Videos from all sorts of political events, Trump rallies, et cetera, et cetera. One question I had about that was, are you still going to be posting videos, and is your Twitter feed going to change at all?I don't think it's going to change at all. It took a lot of outlay, in terms of money, to get some of the services that previously I had organizations paying for, whether that's SnapStream or TVEyes, things that I rely on to be able to do live posting and media monitoring. Again, all stuff that I'm sure you're familiar with from Media Matters, which also is very active in that space. But that's the idea, is to keep Twitter pretty constant. And so for people who just enjoy the video tweets and the video threads, not too much should be changing on that front. But then for people who do enjoy my writing, I'll be doing at least a couple of free newsletters a week, and then one paid one that I'm imagining at this point will be a summation of the most buzzworthy segments and news stories from media. More of a media-focused newsletter than the other two, which I'm thinking will be more focused on politics.But I know that that's been a huge thing for me in terms of developing an audience, has been Twitter. And so it's expensive. And that was kind of a thing as I was leaving Vox and planning this next stage of my career. I felt kind of exhausted from all of the negotiations that I had to do just to try and strike deals with SnapStream, TVEyes, places like that. But I think I'm pretty geared up at this point to have all the same services that I've come to be used to, and to come to rely on to some extent, to do the type of media coverage that I do. So, for people who are just interested in my tweets, I think people, even if they have that level of interest in my work, and that much shouldn't be changing too much.Cool. And also anyone who's a fan of your tweets should probably subscribe to the newsletter, which I'm not sure if you mentioned, it's called Public Notice, right?Yeah. I thought Public Notice, it works for the type of stuff I'm going to be doing, trying to surface stories that are in the broad public interest, kind of in the sense that a public notice, as we historically think of it, is like a broadsheet that you'd see in a town square or something like that. I thought that dovetailed nicely with the idea that I have for this newsletter being a broadsheet summarizing, again, the things that I'm paying attention to in the sphere of media and politics.It's like trying to name a band. I've played in enough bands where the band name can always be kind of a fraught item to agree on, to come up with. And so for a while, I was just going to go with the Rupar Report, and I still may incorporate that as the name of the paid newsletter that I do, or I might use that as a section of the newsletter. But yeah, I like the ring of Public Notice. I think it works for the type of work that I'm going to be doing, and so, yeah. That's going to be the name of it.Oh, yeah. Whenever I hear one of these really good names, I'm just kind of like, "Dammit, why didn't I think of that?" You know?Yeah.I like mine. I like The Present Age, but also-Yeah. I like it too.I kind of wish it was something that felt... Because in my mind, I pictured it like, "This would be a great title for a magazine," or something like that. But then as time goes on, I'm just like, "Man, I wish it was just something that was like, boom, here's what you're getting," that sort of thing, instead of having to be like, "So if you read some philosophy, blah, blah," having to go into detail on that sort of stuff. But, yeah, Public Notice is just a great name.Thought so.And is that going to be at publicnotice.substack.com? [ed. note: the address is aaronrupar.substack.com]Yes, that is what it's going to be. So, for many, many years I owned aaronrupar.com. I was just paying for it in case. And then I ended up just earlier this year letting that lapse. And of course it was snapped up. I no longer own it. And so that is still actually, as we record this here, that is still a little bit unclear exactly what the URL is going to be. But I believe it will be aaronrupar.substack.com to begin with. I'm still debating if I want to pay for the aaronrupar.info, or something like that. Yeah. One of those things where, for many, many years for GoDaddy, I just had money going out the door to hold this URL. And then, I don't know if I was trying to cut costs or something, but I let it lapse about a year ago, and here I am. I went back to see if I could purchase it and it's been snapped up, it's no longer available.So, yeah. It'll probably have Substack in the title to begin with, but from what I understand those are things that are pretty easy to change down the line. The main place to find me will just be check out my Twitter account, I'll have a link there. But I'm guessing that for people who are listening to this who maybe aren't on Twitter or something like that, aaronrupar.substack.com should be the place to go to find that.Absolutely. Yeah. God, that sort of reminds me of, a while back I was looking for an email address or something like that. And I was just like, "I am going to sign up for a Gmail address that's just my name, Parker Molloy." And it was taken, and I'm like, "Who the hell took this?" I kind of want to send an email to it and just be like, "Who are you? Why'd you take my name?"Yeah. Well, there might be another Parker Molloy out there.It's possible. I-Yeah. There's an Aaron Rupar in Wisconsin. My last name is fairly... There's a few of us, but... I mean, with all of the people out there, odds are there might be another Parker Molloy.Yeah. Yeah. One thing kept coming up on searches, something like an 18th century Irish immigrant or something was named Parker Molloy. I'm like, "That sounds about right. That's perfect."I don't think that person would've opened a Gmail, but-No, probably not.Unless they did some time travel or something like that.Who knows? Who's to say? So you were recently in Chicago. Right?I was, yes.I saw on your Twitter.Yeah. It was amazing. Right now, I've been spending a lot of time during the pandemic here, I'm in Minnesota, presently. And so we, my two younger brothers and myself, decided to go to Chicago for... The main thing we were going for was the AEW All Out show, which was amazing, and actually worked out quite well for us because it was in Hoffman Estates. Which, for people who aren't familiar with Chicago, was way in the northwest of the metro. But if you're coming from Minnesota, it lopped an hour off of the drive, so it made it actually even an easier drive. When you're in Minnesota, a five hour drive is actually... seems like not that of a deal, because we're so isolated here in terms of other metros.But yeah, we ended up making a really fun weekend out of it. We did a Cubs game and we hit up the barcade in Wicker Park and all that fun stuff. And my family, we've been quite diligent about COVID stuff, so we were kind of worried about that. But when we got back we did the rapid test just to make sure that everything was on the up and up. And now at this point it was weeks ago, so I think we're in the clear. But one of those things that we had planned, in the very bright and sunny days of June, when it seemed like we were kind of pulling out of this pandemic. And then of course by the time the trip actually happened, COVID was much more of a concern. But it was actually, given how much time we've all spent at home over the past year and a half, it was really fun to get out there.I'd never really done a trip like that with my brothers either. So to do a brothers road trip, and

On this week’s podcast, I interview my friend and former co-worker Eddie Geller. Eddie is running for Congress in Florida’s 15th district. If elected, he would have the best taste in music of anyone to ever hold office. Just throwing that out there. Let’s get started!Parker Molloy: Hey Eddie, how's it going?Eddie Geller: Hey, thank you for having me. It's going pretty well.Well, that's good, it's always good to hear. So you're running for Congress?I am running for Congress in the 15th district of Florida. I don't know, when you say it, it sounds so serious.I'd like to just add a question mark at the very end. Congress?Congress? Yes. I mean, I'm a big believer that good people got to run for office. So it's something I've been thinking about for a while and it really is January 6th, it's just was so appalling and just felt like, all right, I've been thinking about doing this and Republicans don't seem to be able to find the bottom and so I wanted to throw my hat in the ring.All right. Well that, I mean, seems like as good a reason as any.Thank you.It would've been a little strange if you were like, well, January 6th settled it because I really want to know what it's like to be under siege.“That will just look like a lot of fun. And I just-”“That looks so fun!”“... thought if I could get in there. No, I wanted to send people endless fundraising emails, that was truly the impetus.”Yeah. That's one thing I think that you and I have in common, I mean, you ask people for money for your campaign, I ask people for money for my newsletter, it all works out and both of us do not have as much money as we would like to have. So.Yes, fair enough to say. My campaign account is very different than my bank account.Yeah. So one thing I'm curious about, how did Chuck E. Cheese prepare you to be a member of Congress?That sounds like a silly question but to me, it is very real. So when I first started working at Chuck E. Cheese I was a 15-year-old young man looking for guidance, looking for a life, and of course, the big mouse came calling. The thing about Chuck E. Cheese and I talk about this with some folks is, my boss at Chuck E. Cheese, this guy named Jeff I'm still good friends with today, Jeff sort of took me under his wing and he introduced me to punk rock because I was playing a lot of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and was very into Papa Roach at the time. Don't laugh, it hurts when you laugh.Right there that disqualifies you.That's the part you can't use, that is the true oppo. Now, he heard me listening to Papa Roach and he's like, "Eddie, we got to fix this," and he made me a mix CD. I remember Alkaline Trio, Saves the Day, Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil were on it. And so, I mean, punk rock and music is such a huge part of my life but I think what I really still hold on to, I mean, I still love those bands, but is that there is a world outside the mainstream that you can absorb and take in and there are ideas and thoughts that you won't hear on cable TV. And that blew my mind because this was before the internet, the internet was there and it was there awhile but hadn't really blown up. And then it was like, oh, there's so many cool and interesting perspectives so then it was actually hugely influential. And I also learned how to make a pizza, I mean, that didn't hurt either.Yeah. Those are life skills.Life skills. And now there's arguably too many perspectives out there.Yeah. Now it's like, “Oh no, we went too far. Now literally anyone can just pop up on the internet and claim that their cousins, brothers, friends, uncles, testicles have exploded or something.”Yeah. Or that there's a conspiracy that so-and-so stole an election or whatever, I mean, did not see that one coming.Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that is I think the most predictable thing ever.Yes. Well, I mean I guess I just mean back in the days of AOL and, I'm in a chat room, isn't the internet fun? And I'm meeting new people and here's these bands and then a little bit of everything all the time.So tell me a bit about yourself. I mean, we know each other but for the listeners at home or wherever.Sure. Let's see. So the funny thing is, I'm trying not to go into candidate pitch which is so front of mind and just give the real stuff. I feel like, Parker, we're friends and you deserve the real deal. Who am I? I did grow up in Florida and went to the University of Florida. And when I was in high school I was the class clown and got in a lot of trouble for it and I was a fat kid, which there's nothing wrong with that, everyone should love their body or if they want to change their body also wonderful. But in any case, I was a fat kid that was very effecting and made me very depressed as a child and so being a class clown was sort of the manifestation of trying to navigate that. And so when I was around 17 or 18, like I said, I'd make jokes in class and my friends would encourage me and be like, oh, you should do stand up. And for whatever crazy reason after enough prodding I was like, okay, this is a good idea, again, question mark.But I actually think that when I decided to do that, again, I don't remember if it was 17 or 18, I think that was a defining moment of my life to step on that stage and tell some jokes just because it was like, oh, you can face your fears and you can overcome them. And then I think everything since then it's just been like, well, I'm not stepping on stage to do stand up for the first time in my life, so sure I can run for Congress. But anyway, so yeah. So I started doing comedy in high school and I think I found this identity and then I went to the University of Florida and I did improv with this group theater strike force, changed my life because I really found my people.But I remember sort of my friends would give me s**t because I was the person who was always like, I care about politics and I care about this thing, and folks were like, I just want to do improv, and I'm like, but we should pay attention to the war in Iraq and all that stuff. And so I feel like I had these dual sides of me, it saw like, oh, I'm a performer and I love doing that but also I really care about what's happening in Washington or whatever, and feeling so frustrated, I mean, I feel the Iraq war was the defining political event of my life. I remember in 2003 just seeing us go to war and just feeling this can't be happening, how can we be doing something so terrible and there's so much energy behind stopping it and yet we can't stop it and it still just happened. And I think that took a toll on me in the sense that, we have to be able to do something.So anyway, so I'm still doing my comedy thing, I go to Los Angeles, I started doing improv and comedy out there. I do not hit it big but I enjoyed performing on a regular basis, I was in a few commercials, I had a line in a movie and it was really fun. And I think anyone who has the opportunity to get paid to act or paid to do their art form is really gratifying and I loved it, but still, I felt that I wanted to do more or wanted to do something with my creativity that wasn't selling Dr. Pepper. Not that there's anything wrong with Dr. Pepper, I just feel like that's a problem we've solved in our society is how to get people to drink Dr. Pepper. So I fell into the world of-You're going to lose the coveted Dr. Pepper drinker vote which is a large lobby.I don't know, they're going to come after me, the Dr. Pepper folks. I mean, I haven't had a Dr. Pepper in a long time, third grade.I had one yesterday.Oh, really?And they are great.They are great.There are two things I drink all day, Diet Coke and Diet Dr. Pepper.I was just going to ask if you were a regular Dr. Pepper or Diet Dr. Pepper.Diet.Yeah. No, I've rocked a number of Diet Dr. Peppers in my life. Okay. So, okay, I've realized I'm monologuing a bit and you're so gracious to let me do it. But in any case, I found this merger of creativity and politics and activism and so I've been running with that ever since. And you and I were together when we were at Upworthy but also I spent time at the Democratic National Committee, I worked with MoveOn. And so anyway, so then we get to me now who's like, I'm going to run for office because I think ultimately again, I've been on the outside doing my best to make a difference and this is me saying, I want to take a shot of being on the inside and represent folks and do some good from Washington.All right. And your announcement video took the form of a jingle?Yes.Yeah. How did that happen?I launched with a jingle video. Well, once I decided to run I knew being a former comedian and being a video producer I had to do something interesting. And so I had been thinking about it and then I was watching this show, I don't know if you've ever seen it, Somebody Feed Phil, and if you haven't seen, it doesn't matter, but it's this traveling eating show hosted by the guy who started Everybody Loves Raymond, his name is Phil. And anyway, the intro to the show is, a happy hungry man, and it's kind of a vibe, it's like a Full House type vibe, and it just dawned on me like, oh, that would be a fun way to introduce myself.[Clip of Eddie Geller’s announcement jingle plays]And then as soon as I thought of that, I was like, well, it should be a full-on pair, let's just go there, let's just do the pair.Go full Full House.Go full Full House. And I listened to all those, the Family Matters, Full House, Step By Step, you name it, I was listening to it and trying to figure this thing out. But in any case, so then I had this idea and I reached out to a mutual friend of ours, Eric March, who also worked at Upworthy, just a brilliant writer and comedian and he helped me write the jingle because I'm not a musician. And so yeah, so we worked on it, came up with the music and the lyrics and then we reached out to a producer named Alison, she did a great job taking it from a piano piece with lyrics into the full-blown jingle and then filmed all these funny bits aro

This week on The Present Age Podcast, I chat with Franchesca Ramsey. You may know her from her YouTube videos, her time on Comedy Central’s Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, her web series MTV Decoded, the recent iCarly reboot, NBC’s Superstore, or even a Maroon 5 video.Parker Molloy: Hey, Franchesca, how's it going?Franchesca Ramsey: Hi Parker. I feel like the standard answer is it's going good, but the realistic answer is taking it day by day.Yeah, it's a challenge.It is a time. It's a time, but we're here we are doing the best that we can. I'm trying to hold on to the fact that I'm healthy and I'm working and I'm working on stuff that I'm excited about, so those are the things that are getting me through.Yeah. And when did you move? Because you said you're out west now, right?Yeah. I'm in L.A. I had such a strange journey here. I technically was here in September working on Superstore for three months, but I still had an apartment in New York, so I was subletting an apartment here for three months. Then I signed a lease, went back to New York, packed my apartment, and then physically moved everything here on December 1st. So technically I've been here a year, but I'm counting December as my full anniversary in Los Angeles.Cool. Well, congratulations on the move.Thank you.And also, and so here's kind of the funny thing with Superstore, I watched Superstore since the first episode.Oh wow.And then I didn't see that you had posted online that you were, pardon me, I'm just at home watching, and I was like, okay, cool. And I'm like, wait, hold on. I know her. We worked together.That's so funny. A number of people said that. I mean, social media is so strange because sometimes it feels like you're getting all the updates from someone, and then suddenly you get none and you realize like, oh, this person's just not in my feed anymore and I'm not sure why. I've been taking a lot of extended social media breaks and I took a big one right when I booked Superstore. So I wasn't even online for a while. I don't hold it against anyone if they're not up to date with what's happening in my life.It was a pleasant surprise! You were great on that show!Thank you.One thing I like about the show is it really seemed to show...it was a very labor-focused, it shows from the worker's perspective talking about unions and stuff. That's not something you see on TV much.I think a lot of times so many shows you can see the transition when the people making the show start making lots of money, become very out of touch, and you see it with celebrities too, where either their stand up or their Instagram posts or their interviews are really about normal people s**t. And then there's like this moment where they become celebrities and that happens in TV shows too. And with Superstore, it was very much the opposite. It really felt like, oh right, the people that are working on the show have worked in retail, they know what it's like to live paycheck to paycheck. They know what it's like dealing with customers. And that's why the show, I think really spoke to a lot of people because it just felt really real.Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And that was one of the coolest aspects of it because you always have shows like Friends where people are working these kinds of low-wage jobs, but then are living in these fancy apartments.Beautiful apartments while working at a coffee shopWell then you'd have like on Superstore, it'd be oh, someone is sleeping in the tunnel under the stores, something like that where it's just, that's more realistic, I guess. But, yeah, that was cool. And I mean, you've done so much. You had a really big YouTube following for a long time, and then had your own MTV web series.Yes, which Parker wrote for, yes!Yes!So many episodes, Parker.Thank you.You turn those around and it was so delightful that I got to work with you again.That was so much fun. Yeah. It really was.It was really great. I just had to hype you up because... I always showed up that you worked on that show, but I think people don't know, it really does take a village. It's not just me.Yeah and I mean, and the thing I appreciated about that is I've wanted to write TV for a while, and that was a nice opportunity to really kind of get into that sort of quick writing scripts and stuff. So I really appreciated that opportunity when you offered it to me.No, cool. So great to work with you!But yeah. And then you worked on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, which got canceled far too soon.Yeah.You wrote a book, you made a pilot for Comedy Central. I already mentioned Superstore. You worked on iCarly reboot. And you were in a Maroon 5 music video with Ilhan Omar.Oh my God. Yes. Before everybody knew who she was. I mean, it's just, yes. Well, I have done all of those things!You're done a lot of stuff. So what are you up to now? Like, work-wise, what are you doing?I'm writing on Yearly Departed again...Oh great!On Amazon, which is the end of the year comedy special. And it was so wild because it was the first thing, the first job that I had during the pandemic.So it was a remote writers' room. There was no vaccine when we shot that. So it was stressful going to set and getting tested all the time. And this was a time when the rat rapid tests weren't really available. So you had to go get tested like five days before that. And then you had to come a day before and get there super early. And it was just like a whole process.So this time around things are a lot different. We're actually going to have an audience this year. My mom is going to come and sit in the audience, which is going to be really fun. So I'm working on that.And then I sold a pilot to a streaming service. I sold two pilots. So I won't say who they are because I hope they're listening and they're like, oh, she's talking about no week. She's talking about us. Yeah. Pit you all against each other. So I am like racking my brain right now. I'm trying to hit my deadlines, which is not fun, but I'm making it work. And yeah, that's it, that's it.Your average person is doing like a little bit, a little bit of everything. You’re doing four, five people's worth of work, that sort of stuff.I’m an overachiever, but here's the thing is I realized that I thrive when I'm busy and that I will complain the whole time, but if I'm not busy, I will complain because I'm bored. So I would rather be busy than bored is the thing that I've been saying to myself.That's a good point. I think that I kind of have that, that same issue, but I ended up convincing myself that it's better to be bored.There is power in taking time off, and I'm actually kind of juggling all of these projects and a big part of why I've taken on lots of things is especially in an industry like television, where so much is out of my control. I find that it's better to have multiple things in development so that when, and if one thing does not come through that my whole world doesn't fall apart.So I'm right now looking at all the things I have in development, what's most important to me, what am I okay with if it falls apart and also what will I do in the event that nothing goes.And so a part of me is kind of like, I hope these things happen, but if they don't, I'm kind of, because I had to take some time off. I might just take the end of the year and just not do anything, which I have not done in a long time.Yeah. Yeah. And it is nice to take a break. And that was one thing that I, when I first started doing this the podcast and also the newsletter that I was with, I quit my job in June and was just, I'm just going to kind of dive into this and hope for the best. And it's scary, but I'm trying.Yeah. But I think a lot of people did that this year. It either, they were forced to do it because their job ended or they needed to move back home or their living situation shifted in whatever way.But I think also it's just been a huge time of reflection where people are saying like, I could die. Do I want to do this thing that I'm putting all this time and energy into? Isn't making me happy. Is it paying my bills? Is it contributing to the world? Or whatever your priorities are. And so it's really brave to say, well, this isn't working out for me and I'm just not going to do it. And if things need to change, you can go back and get another job.Yeah. Well, exactly and hope for the best. It's not like working in media was, is particularly stable. Anyways. It's not I was leaving some super stable job that I know will be there 20 years from now. it's entirely possible. I could have gotten laid off two months later anyway. So I might as well be something that I like.Yeah, It's true.But one thing I kind of wanted to talk to you about is back when you were on YouTube a lot and also I do appreciate that, your, the most recent YouTube video you uploaded was from like a couple of years ago.Yeah, I don't do YouTube videos anymore.Yeah. And it's just you and Michelle Obama, here I am just me and Michelle just chilling here and then, “I'm not going to update anymore.” That is such a perfect flex.Oh, that's so funny. I didn't think about it that way, but yes my last video is myself and Michelle Obama.But one thing, one thing that sort of happened when you were really putting a lot of time into YouTube was you got a lot of...you kind of were one of like the early targets of those response videos, which for people who aren't really familiar, first off, you're lucky. But second, it's like, there's this whole genre of video where someone will just watch someone else's YouTube video and then offer their commentary or to debunk in argument or however they try to frame it. But I mean, in your case, it was just someone, it was kind of a lot of people just being really mean and racist and...Oh, yes.Which is awful.Yeah. It was a perfect storm. I mean, the internet has changed so much since I started creating content. And it seems like it just gets faster and faster, but in many ways, Decoded, and what

Welcome to another episode of The Present Age podcast. I’m your host Parker Molloy.Joining me on this week’s episode is writer and podcast host Molly Jong-Fast.Parker Molloy: Oh, hello, Molly! Molly Jong-Fast: Hi, Parker. It's so fun to get to meet you!Yeah, I know! We followed each other on Twitter for, what? Four or five years or something?I don't know. It feels my entire life, but I know it's not.Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just the past several years have been a lot. So, but yeah, this is the first time we're actually talking and seeing each other. That's right. The people listening cannot see us, but…No, but we exist. Yeah.So thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me for this, for my fledgling little podcast. Oh, I'm honored. It is nothing compared to yours, I'm sure.I mean, I would say, the thing with podcasts is you just, you do it. And then people, I mean, unless you have the suspension of disbelief, then you can't do ... you know what I mean? So just, why won't it be fabulously successful?Yeah. It'll be great. It'll be great. Well, so basically with this, so I started, I made the decision to leave my old job and start writing a newsletter, which we'll see how that works out. And then-Bari Weiss is making $8 million a year.I am not making $8 million a year.Honestly, how is she making ... She's not. She's making ... supposedly what the reporting was $800,000, but I was like, "It's possible."It's possible. I do not doubt for a second that there are people making millions of dollars a year with Substacks. But I am not at that point.Me neither, but yeah. But yeah. So when doing that, I was just like, "What else can I do?" And one of the people at Substack who they run my website or not run it, but power it, they were like, "Well, we just added podcasts." And I was like, "That's cool. That's an interesting idea." It's my way of doing podcasts without having to dive too far into it. So here I am trying a podcast, but one thing I always tried to do is I tried to get a transcript of every episode made in full, which is either extremely time-consuming or very expensive, but I think it's worth it.I mean, transcription services are my nemesis and you will see why when you transcribe me, because I have one vocal cord. So I sound very weird. And then I have all sorts of weird affectations that are not necessarily fancy. Some of them are just saying “like” or verbal ticks. And so I come off ... You'll see.Okay, we'll see. I'll send this through the service and we'll see how it goes. But yeah. So when I invited you on, I was just like, "I'm sure she'll write something amazing that I will then be able to be like, 'Yes, let's talk about that.'" So luckily for me, you did, you did recently write something amazing.Oh, thank you.So I want to talk about your new piece for Vogue that's titled, “What our new age of pandemic anxiety looks like and how to deal with it.” Is that okay with you?Yes.Awesome.I am like, this is a topic that I am so well-versed on, I hate how well versed I am.Oh, same, same, which is the thing. So I really related to it, especially in this idea of health anxiety, which isn't actually a term that I've heard before, which you described as the conviction that even though you don't have any symptoms you know deep down that you're sick, and that is just me to a freaking T. Can you talk a bit about your experiences with that?Please. So I had an interesting, I had ... a very anxious, I was very anxious always in my life. And my aunt told me once that my grandmother had said, "I am not religious. I am just profoundly superstitious," which I feel points to a family that has long suffered from anxiety. And I always think you don't get to be the Jews who left Europe in the 1800s without being very stressed. Because not only were you ... you were like, "We're out of here. They're going to murder us." And a lot of my ... on my grandmother's side, I had great grandfathers who had died in the pogroms, and so I do feel like really, the anxious people got out early and because they were like, "We're all going to get murdered." So in some ways it was a good adaptation, right? Anxiety. It saved all our lives. I see a kid here.The kids have no ... they come in and come out. Teenagers. But so in some ways it was good. My grandmother was like, she had worry bagels. She had worry fish. She had when you got on an airplane, you got on with your right foot, you knocked on the side of the plane three times and you got ... right? So I am coming from a very crazy bunch of people. And growing up I traveled a lot with my mother. She would always be crossing herself. I mean, we're Jews, but crossing herself, we get on an airplane, praying, rosary beads, was raised by a Catholic nanny who had lots of rosaries. I had rosary beads on my bed. The craziest stuff in the world.So when I got to be about early thirties, so I had always been very neurotic and I went through a period where I didn't fly, which was complete ... people were like, "What are you in lunatic?" And I was like, "No way." I mean, yes and no. So, but then when I got to my early thirties, I had this best friend who, she was like all of us a complicated person, but she had ... and she had this terrible story where her mother had gotten murdered and then her husband had divorced her. And it just been this terrible story. And then she had gotten this brain tumor. And as soon as she got it, we sort of knew it was like ... I mean, brain tumors already, you don't want one. And this was like the worst one. And it just ... So for a year and a half, she fought and fought and fought and fought, and it was the worst thing I've ever seen. She died right after she turned 40. She was on a walker. I mean, it just was, she couldn't talk. I mean, it was just awful. And basically, the minute she died, I was like, "I have one too." And it was because I just couldn't process that this could happen and that this is just the way life is sometimes, and so I became obsessed that I had one too. So I went down this road of health anxiety. It's funny because if you look at the statistics, it's 5% of all ... it's about half of all anxious people suffer from health anxiety. And if you think about it, so the statistics are 10% of the American public suffer from anxiety.I can't imagine it's that low. I mean, if it is then everyone I know is in that 10%, you know what I mean? And so I went through a period of being convinced that I just needed one more scan. I just needed one more of this. I just needed one more of that. If we could just get through this. Also, during that time I got a melanoma on my back, and it was a zero stage. It was fine. They caught it very early, but that also triggered my ... I was in my mid-thirties, and I said to my dermatologist, I was like, "I can't believe this happened to me." And she was like, "You're totally pale. You grew up in that generation that never used sunblock. And you're 33. I can't believe you didn't have a 10 years ago."But that was good for me because I get stuck in my own head in a very kind of ugly way, so to be able to get someone who says stuff, "Come on, man," to quote Joe Biden, is very helpful for me. So I got the melanoma taken out. I'm very careful about getting a check, but yeah. So it's interesting too, so that was how I got into it. I hope I answered the question.Absolutely. Okay, good.Absolutely. It's just something that I really relate to. And just at the beginning of the pandemic, I used to joke around to myself that this was kind of my Bain in the Dark Knight Rises moment. By that point, I'd been working from home for several years. I was like, "Oh, you're worried about catching a deadly virus every single time you step outside? Welcome to the club." And part of why I kind of struggled so much with health anxiety is that deep down I know that there will come a day where my worries aren't unfounded, where I really am sick, where I really will get worse and where I really will die. And that sort of this idea that floats through my head constantly. You always get better until one time you don't.But the thing that I learned a lot from a lot ... I stopped going to regular therapy and I got this behavioral as to really focuses just on anxiety. And most of his patients are either flying or health or agoraphobia or something. And the thing that he always says is, "With anxiety, it's the inability to live with uncertainty."Ooh. Yeah. That's an interesting way to kind of think about it. And that is again, tragically relatable for me because it's this, I don't know. And I feel I have worked in the wrong industry to have this sort of feeling because I was ... a lot of that kind of carried over to fears of things like getting fired or being laid off and not being able to pay my bills. For instance, I used to sort of worry that I was constantly on the verge of losing my job and then I would convince myself, "Oh no, it's all just in my head. I need to overcome this, and watch, everything will be fine." And it usually is until one time it isn't fine. And one time I did get laid off at a job that was just downsizing.And then I had another job where they laid off a bunch of people and I kept making the cut, and then finally one surge of layoffs I did not. And these things rather than see them as rare occurrences that we just sort of have to deal with and roll with, I kind of kept ... the negative things would reinforce all of my bad habits and all of my bad thoughts. And that was kind of something that sort of played into it with the pandemic, especially as a plays out. Because when in early 2020, there was ... remember back when they were like, "Don't buy masks. You're fine. You don't need masks." And then I went in, decided, I was like, "Screw them. They're lying to us, I'm getting all the masks I can." Which I know that's not helpful. I know that only fuels the toilet paper shortage stuff that we had going on. But I also had a lot of toilet paper

Welcome to the Present Age podcast. I’m your host Parker Molloy.Joining me on today’s show is animator and crypto art creator Bryan Brinkman. His work has appeared at places like The Tonight Show, Saturday Night Life, and even Sesame Street. Today, he’s going to teach me a bit about NFTs.Parker Molloy: So, joining me today on the podcast is Bryan Brinkman. Hello.Bryan Brinkman: Hello, Hey Parker.How's it going?It's going very well.So, I wanted to have you on the podcast to talk to you about your art and your work, which I really like and enjoy. And also the one thing that I don't understand, but I want to understand, NFTs. Can you help me understand what an NFT is and how that applies to the art world, basically?I can do my best to try.All right.Because it's an ever-growing description because every week there's something new happening in the space. But just to start out, I would say an NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. Kind of the idea behind it is that you can authenticate digital assets through the blockchain. And so, as a way of storing imagery or content. It's a way of saying, "Hey, I possess this digital asset," and that gives you the ability to trade it and resell it or do whatever you want with it. And so that's kind of the basic idea around what an NFT is, but then what that asset can be is exploding into a million possibilities.Yeah, I was reading something the other day about how people have other applications of the same blockchain technologies. Someone was saying, "Oh yeah, one day we could have contracts and deeds to houses and stuff like that on there". And that's really interesting. And I think that part of the issue is that a lot of people just struggle to understand the concept, because for instance, like in NFT might be something like a video or a GIF, or just a still image. Right?And people might think, okay, well, why would I buy this when I can just look at it anytime I want, I can make my own copy of it. I could just pull up a website that has this on it and look at it. For people who are thinking about trying to kind of explore that space as either a creator or someone who just wants to get involved and support artists. I guess that's another big thing, which I understand that that is definitely one of the reasons someone would want to pay for something as opposed to just looking at it on the internet.I think that's a good question. The first thing that comes to people's minds, when they say it is, why would I pay for JPEG when I can just download it or screenshot it? And I think that same idea can be applied to a lot of art. Why does any art have value? It's because there's a group of people that all agree it has value, and that gives it value.I think you can kind of look at the NFT collectible art market as being similar to what baseball cards were in the 90s. Those cards are printed for probably a penny on a piece of cardboard paper, but the value is whether a lot of people altogether go, "Hey, this Michael Jordan rookie card is worth more than this other card."And so I think it kind of falls into the same thing as that the NFT is just a medium and a canvas for people to create on. And the idea of I could just screenshot that, well, you can't go and sell a screenshot, but you can authenticate that you own the original copy of an NFT and someone will want to buy that.And that's really interesting. And that's a good point. I mean, the only real differences, the fact that there's a physical object to hold onto with, for instance, with baseball cards, which funnily enough, I was recently thinking about maybe getting back into collecting baseball cards because every once in a while, when the world gets too chaotic, I try to pick up a new hobby. So I don't just explode on Twitter or something like that.And a few years back it was comic books. I was like, I'm going to just get really into comic books and that's been helpful. And then it was video games, and it's all these like going back to my childhood kind of things. And so I think baseball cards is the next kind of going down and just looking into the state of that industry right now is really interesting as well. I don't know, I remember growing up and it'd be like, here's this one card, this is the card for this player for this year.And now it's like, “Well this one, if it has a blue border, it's worth more than if it has a multicolored.” And I'm just like, man, it's so complicated now.Well, the sports card, yeah. The sports card industry's kind of changed a lot recently too. I've been looking at like, they have like column like penny cards. When you buy these boxes and they have pieces of jerseys and autographs and all these amazing hand drawn pieces of cards and stuff, they've really upped the trading card game to keep up with kind of the collector mentality in recent years. Which is something I wasn't very aware of until like the past year.Yeah. And just the day I was looking at Topps, the trading card company. They have a section on their website that's now just Topps and NFTs. And it's kind of that same idea of trying to be like, yeah, you can own this rare whatever. And then there are some people who sell like a penguin or something. And I'm trying to understand that. And I don't know, I feel like I'm just like a million years old.No, I think there's, in my mind there's kind of two worlds of NFT collecting right now. There's the art side. And then there's the kind of the collectible side and the collectible side falls into that kind of sports card mentality where there's high volume and there are big communities backing it. And with the penguins, there's 10,000 of those penguins. And so having a feature in the New York Times will give all these people excited and the prices fluctuate, and it falls into more of like kind of a stock market mentality where there's kind of this liquidity to these collectibles. Whereas the art side falls into a slightly different category where it's more of like artists building communities around their work and their style. And that falls into kind of like the auction house world and the New York gallery world versus kind of like the sports card collectors.So there's all these different entry points. And I would say like a lot of the space grew because of a website called NBA Top Shot that came out about a year ago and kind of brought that sports card, collecting mentality into the space. And then all these people did it. They kind of got a sense and they started to wrap their minds around, "Hey, these digital assets hold value". And then they started looking elsewhere. And so that they kind of branch off into what else there is, because I think it was [inaudible] who's an artist in the space. He made a tweet the other day. That was like, "When you used to meet a celebrity, you'd ask for an autograph, but now you ask for a selfie," and that mentality of what has more value to people these days? Is it the digital experience or is it this physical thing you hold? I think that's changing rapidly, especially with video game skins, and how you manage your digital content and video game worlds. For instance, I think translates very one-to-one with NFT world.That's yeah. That's a good point.Kids, these days. They care more about digital assets than putting paintings on their wall. They, they want to show paintings on their phone that they can show their friends.Yeah. And that's really interesting. And I mean, one way I have been trying to wrap my head around that over the past several months. And one thing that I've seen as a criticism of NFTs and just things that involve crypto generally is like the energy consumption of that. But it, everything seems so unclear when it comes to the environmental effect of any of this. Do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, I'm sure you have thoughts on that.Yeah. I mean I think it was around January, after I'd been in the space for a year, that article kind of came out written by this guy named Memo and it was kind of this jarring account of how much energy could be consumed at a maximum amount, if everything travels all these places and burns all this energy. And there's certainly different blockchains that consume different types of energies. And there's these arguments of kind of proof of work versus proof of stake. Ethereum is not the best at it. And they are actively trying to move to this new Ethereum 2.0, that will reduce this all by like 99%, but it's a slow process. So in the meantime, there's a lot of these kinds of like, they call them side chains where people can kind of mint on these layers, two solutions that take up less energy.But after that article came out, a lot of the NFT websites made commitments to offset their carbon emissions. So, I mean I've seen in the six months or so I guess it's been maybe eight months since that article came out, that has been a key point of almost every project is to offset that as artists. I did my calculations and offset it and I've done charities to raise money for that. And so there's a lot of ways you can kind of work towards that in the short term while they're kind of finding solutions in the long-term.And then a lot of artists that really feel strongly about it have moved to other blockchains, like Tezos, there's a website called hic et nunc, which is a very silly name, but I consider it to be kind of like the Brooklyn indie comic NFT site. So there's a lot of really cool art there, that's a lot more affordable and they call it clean NFTs. And so there's a lot of different ways people are kind of working to get around that in the short term, but there is certainly a lot of criticisms that are, I think are valid about Bitcoin and other blockchains that aren't working towards solutions in the longterm.Yeah, that's it, it's one of those things where I feel like the backlash to it was so swift where it was, if you buy an NFT, you're destroying the planet and you'd be like, whoa, I don't think that that is necessaril

Welcome to the Present Age podcast. I’m your host Parker Molloy. Joining me this week is meteorologist and climate scientist Eric Holthaus. Eric operates The Phoenix, a Substack about humanizing the climate emergency.He’s the author of The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming, and he founded Currently, a free subscription weather service.Parker Molloy: Joining me today is Eric Holthaus. So what I wanted to ask you was, after the IPCC released its most recent report, there were a lot of really downer headlines about it. And when you sent me a copy of your book last year, one thing I liked about it was the fact that it was hopeful and that's not something you really see or hear too much on this topic anymore. Yet it was realistic. Can you tell me a little bit about why it's important to not embrace climate nihilism, I guess?Eric Holthaus: Thank you so much for inviting me. I think that we don't really have a choice anymore. Honestly, if we are going to do what we need to do in the time we have left, we have to change the narrative. We have to really unlearn that climate change is an inevitable disaster and that we're all going to die, and instead think about it as a justice issue, just like other justice issues, and get angry. And that comes with the realization that a better world is possible, that there are systemic changes that need to happen in every aspect of society anyway, and that's literally what the climate scientists said this week was we have to change every part of human society at a rapid scale in order to get down to the emissions goals that we need to do to preserve the habitability of our planet. What's more important than that, than being able to live on a planet, right? We don't have anywhere else to go. We have to do this.One thing about that, which the past year has messed with my head a little bit on I guess, is the fact that we're in the middle of this pandemic where you have people who aren't taking these super simple, easy, mild inconveniences to their life, to go get vaccinated or to wear a mask or to stay six feet apart from someone. And I keep thinking to myself, if people won't do that stuff, which feels like the bare minimum, I just don't know how we can expect people to get on board with doing the big things necessary to tackle climate change or tackle any of these larger problems that are facing use, these existential problems, which is something that I've been thinking a lot about lately as it comes to just places that I know that I've lived that have changed for reasons not related to climate.I just wrote a blog post about how my favorite baseball team is the Chicago Cubs and how Wrigleyville, the area right around the stadium, has changed so much in the past decade that it's just almost unrecognizable and there's this sadness that comes with that. In your book, you've written about how that sadness is applying on a global level. A sort of... I forgot. There was a word you used for it. It's escaping me right now, but it basically this idea that nostalgia for a loss...Solastalgia.That's it! That was it. Do you think that we can actually address this? I want to believe that humanity can come around and address these issues, but at the same time, I feel maybe I'm a bit cynical as far as the politics of any of this goes because a lot of my work has been in monitoring media and that has left me jaded.Yeah. First off, there's no parallel or precedent for the kinds of change that we're seeing in the entire really existence of humanity. That's what another thing the report said this week was it's been 150,000 years since temperatures were this high. It's been two million years since we've had this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Human civilization is about 100,000 years old and modern humanity, our species is only about two million years old. So we are seeing changes that our species, humans, have never seen before at a rate that is not something that we're built to process. So it's normal for us to feel really weird and uncertain about this time. It's not something that we're built to process to have geological scale change happening in the span of one human lifetime.So it's normal to feel those weird conflicted feelings because we're trying to make sense of it all in the base back part of our brain as well. It's not just wondering what are we going to do about it, how are we going to motivate people, but it's like we're trying to survive and thrive as animals at the same time. So I think that one way that I've been thinking about is that it takes a lot fewer people than you might expect to create that rapid large-scale change. It's not like... What's it called? The critical mask of vaccination or mask-wearing the herd immunity. We don't have to get 90% of people on board with any particular climate action for it to be effective. We just need really honestly to destroy the fossil fuel industry. That's just the largest, richest, most powerful, most profitable industry in human history.Simple.Yeah. So we need to do that, but we also need to embrace the anger and embrace the courage that comes with reading reports like this, knowing that climate change is not something that's just passively happening, it's something that's being done to us. It's an injustice. And right before COVID, we were hitting those critical social movement tipping points of national governments were starting to respond to people in the streets and saying, "Okay, we're going to get on a rapid climate change action trajectory because you're going to shut down the country if we don't." They were afraid, the leaders were afraid, I think for the first time on this issue. And I don't know what it's going to take to get that to happen again, but I know that it will happen again because that is the most effective way of creating rapid change is demanding it. Honestly, in a democracy, that's what we need to do.Do you think that the answer is in government policy or is it in trying to just encourage companies to do better? That's where I'm always lost when, when it's okay, be angry, push for change, but how? Just your average everyday person, if they want to create change, what should we be pushing for? What sort of policies or actions or attitudes? I mean, because I understand that one thing we have going for is on the side of people who want to prolong humanity is the fact that fossil fuels, the profitability just keeps ticking down as compared to some of the renewables. But what should people like me or anyone listening to this do? What's the policy to argue for it?That satisfying answer is that you just need to do whatever will get you up in the morning. Honestly, there are so many parts of building this new society that is not extractive, that is focused on regeneration and resilience. So care work, education, public safety, public health, anti-racism, all of those things have to happen in order to do the slow society-changing work, regardless of whatever, carbon tax or whatever is passed. I'm not personally very motivated by calling a senator or protesting or any of that kind of stuff, because it feels too abstract to me. For me, I enjoy teaching my kids about nature or I enjoy taking a break from the screen and going on a walk outside and just thinking for a little bit as what do I want my neighborhood to be like? What feels achievable?And having conversations with friends, just keeping my motivation up, honestly, because as someone who works on climate change every day, that's a major challenge that I have. I'm in therapy. I couldn't do this without really knowing that there is some hopeful change that's possible. I know everyone needs their time to process and acknowledge what's happening, and there's a place for everyone in the climate movement, you don't have to consider yourself an activist to be someone who's creating effective climate action, but I feel like we have to demonstrate to each other that we can help each other through this time. Because I think for the last couple of 100 years, it's been this every person for themselves mentality in broader society.And that is something that really doesn't match with a more ecological approach, which is the way we're going to have to restructure all parts of society. So the more that you can get yourself into the mindset I'm part of a network, I'm part of a system, I'm part of an organic thing that can respond and be flexible rather than it's just me on my own. Climate change is not your fault. Climate change is not something that you are personally liable for, but you do have a responsibility to show up, just like you have a responsibility to show up to be anti-racist or you have a responsibility to show up to be a part of broader society. You have to pay your taxes, you have to follow the rules of being a pedestrian. You still have a responsibility to each other. That's what happens in being a member of society, but you don't have to do it all yourself.I think that one of the problems seems to be the sense of rugged individualism, that I can lift myself up by my bootstraps and if someone else can't, that's their problem. And that's something that we've seen over and over with the pandemic and why that approach has not been a good one because there are a lot of people who I don't quite understand how, but they just don't seem to care about anyone else. And there was an old Huffington Post blog that someone had that was...I love that.I don't know how to...Explain to you that you should care about other people.I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people. That was it. It's something that just sits in the back of my head. Just thinking about that and how true it is. And I think that that's why when you see people angry about the concept of intersectionality, for instance, which is just this understanding that there are all sorts of factors in life pushing in all sorts of different directions. And

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Present Age podcast. I’m your host Parker Molloy.Joining me on today’s show is the man behind what I’ve long referred to as “the only good government Twitter account.” His name is Joe Galbo, and he’s the social media specialist at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.Parker Molloy: Joining me today is Joe Galbo. Joe, what is it that you do?Joe Galbo: Sure. Well, I make memes for the government. No, so yeah, I am the Social Media Specialist at the Consumer Product Safety Commission. We're a small, federal agency, about 500 employees, with a budget of about $137 million dollars, and we regulate consumer products, so everything from ATVs to toaster ovens, to children's clothing, basically thousands and thousands of things people use every single day, and we're the agency that makes sure those things are safe.It's not just product updates. It's not just recall updates, it's a lot of awesome memes. That is what drew me to the account, not my love of product recall.Sure. You have a bunch of characters in these memes. Can you tell me a little bit about how that got started? How did you pitch the idea of creating Quinn the Quarantine Fox, and your various other ...Handsome Ron.Handsome Ron, yeah.Copernicus Jackson, yeah sure. Right from when I interviewed at the agency, back in, it was June 2016, which is basically a lifetime ago for everyone at this point. I explained to my supervisors at the time, "Hey, I want to join the agency. I want to do public education campaigns, but it's not going to look necessarily the way you all have been doing things." They were cool with that, to their credit. Right from the get go, there was an understanding that, "Hey, we're going to do something and it's going to look a little bit different."I don't think they anticipated so many talking animals at the time, and to be fair, I don't think I anticipated that either, but as I explored the agency's messaging and the types of things we were trying to educate people about, it became very clear to me that our guidance to people, how people could live a little bit safer, all came across very standard, and a little bit boring, so again, wear a bike helmet, when your message is wear a bike helmet, or don't plug your space heater into a power strip, that's good advice, but it's not necessarily the most exciting advice.When you're out there on the Internet, and you're up against celebrities and influencers, and every brand is trying to be funny, if you just go out there and start telling people to make sure they clean their dryer vent lint, the lint out of their dryer vent, you're not going to be very successful. I think the strategy really came out of looking at what our messaging was, and then again, seeing how simplistic it was, and saying, "Okay, if this has any chance at all of making it out there online, we're going to have to go big and bold, and we're going to have to do things in a super fun way."Now, as far as pitching characters individually, it's one of these situations where if I have a good idea for a new character, I'll go try to find a stock photo that supports that. With Copernicus Jackson, who's one of our cat characters, I knew I wanted a great cat character, and it really was just a matter of finding a good stock photo that represented a cat, that looked excited and interested in something, but not terrified of something. That was a lot of time searching through a stock site to find it, and then once I did, coming up with the name, again it's, a lot of times it's about, "Hey, have I heard this character name out there before," and if the answer is no, then okay, can we try it. It's a lot of Googling to make sure I'm not reusing character names that exist anywhere else.Yeah, it is a little bit, I want to say ad hoc, because there's definitely strategy there, but it's very organic. Again, I'll try to leverage training topics a lot, so if there's an animal trending or something, I'll try to come up with a character in that moment. Yeah, it's a little bit a mix of method and then all over the place madness for sure.One of the reasons that I really just love the account, generally, and this is a big part of what I'm trying to do with this newsletter, and this podcast. I'm really focused on the way that we communicate, and yours is one of the most interesting communication strategies I've seen, especially when it comes to something that comes from the government. You really expect, when you think government Twitter account, you think it's sterile, straightforward, just telling you what you need to know. Meanwhile, it's, "Hey, here's an ATV and a T Rex." All of that stuff that really just, it gets people drawn in, the response to your Tweets is just phenomenal.It's always funny seeing people who are encountering it for the first time, going, "Did you get hacked?" Oh no.We do get that one a lot, yeah. I think things have changed. Communication has changed, and I don't want to sound like a cliché, but the past decade, forget about it. Everything's different, and even the past five years it feels, to me, it feels like things are very different. The government, just the way it operates, where everything has to be by the book and by the law. By its nature, it is slower than the private sector. A functional government will be mostly slower than the private sector moves, and in communication, again where things move twice as fast in every other industry, yeah it can feel like, again, a lifetime. I think one thing that we really struggle within government, and I've had a chance to speak to a lot of people in government at this point, who do communication, there is that constant tug of war between, "Hey, we have to be an authoritative voice, and people have to trust us, and we have to get the message out there in a really clear way." What you were just speaking to, which is it's also very boring when you just do that, straightforward. The Internet is not designed for boring content, which I guess is not a thing that people meditate on very often, but I think part of it too is at a small agency like CPSC, where our budget is, again, only about $137 million, which in government money is not a lot at all, compared to the FDA or the CDC, where you're talking billion-dollar budgets and more. You just can't do it the boring way online, you just can't.I do think government helps itself when it’s very relatable to people, and I think that's one thing that we hear a lot about this strategy is that it's not preachy. It's not coming at you in a way where, from a place of high authority. Again, it is advising you on a better way to live your life a little more safely, but it's not doing it from a pulpit. It's not going it from an ivory tower. It's down here with the regular people, where regular people like talking dogs, and regular people like robots that go on picnics with their friends. Again, I don't know, at least those are the things I think regular people like.Like you said, it seems to be working so far, and we're just very grateful for that, honestly.Yeah, of course. I'd say for about a year or two I'd see your Tweets and just be like, "What is going on inside this person's head?" It's great to actually talk to you, and to be like, "Oh look, this is a human being, who seems to share the same sense of humor as me," and other people seem to be into it as well.Yeah. I guess one thing about me, I love working in communication. Back in the day, I wanted to be a journalist, but I graduated from college in 2008, where being a journalist would have been very difficult at the time. I fell into this government communication thing through advertising. In my heart, I always fantasize about being a TV showrunner, like on an animated series. That, to me, is the most fun you could probably have in a job. In some ways, what people are seeing here is the Joe Galbo version of what a TV show might look like.Right.A lot of these memes could easily be turned into PSAs or video products, and that's not an accident. My passion lies in visual storytelling, and I do try to inject a lot of narrative into these things, to a point where sometimes it's like my supervisors are like, "I don't know, is this one maybe too complicated for people?" I'm always like, "No, trust the audience, they're going to get it." More often than not, they let me go that route.Again, it is a delicate balance, and I think one of the things I like about the, I guess you could call it a template we use now, is that at the top there, where we have the narrative or the crazy visual, you can almost do whatever you want at this point, and then as long as at the bottom you're delivering that safety message that's going to help save lives.Yeah.That's one thing that's been super fun, and now it's really just trying to push us in new and exciting ways. We just started doing LGBTQ graphics a short time ago, and that's been very exciting. It's one of these things where, again, not that we've pushed the envelope in government communication, how do we keep pushing it, and how to we keep making sure we're getting these messages in front of people, on an Internet that is constantly more fractured by the year.Yeah, and everything is constantly changing, and what works today might not work next year, next month, or next week. I don't know, have you watched the Netflix show, I Think You Should Leave?No, not yet. I haven't yet.Okay, you should watch that, because it's like the TV show version of what you do, just weird, out there. What you do is a combination of that show and Portlandia, which I mean as a compliment.Thank you. No, you're actually ... One of my very best friends told me to start watching that show, so you are totally in line there. Now I'm going to definitely have to watch it.Yeah, I think you'll like it. I think it will be right up your alley.That's awesome, thank you. I think, again, it is that fine line of being referential to things that are going o

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Present Age podcast. I’m your host Parker Molloy.Joining me on today’s show is baseball writer and all-around good dude Keith Law. Keith is the author of two books — Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, The New Ones that are Running it, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball and more recently, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves.Parker Molloy: All right. Joining me this week is Keith Law. Hey, Keith.Keith Law: Hey, how are you?I'm doing all right. So one of the reasons I wanted to, to kind of have you on here was A, my love of baseball. B, we've been talking for what, like three, four years or something now.Yeah, I think so.Yeah. So, and you're just a great person to talk to on Twitter and everything like that. But C, a big part of this podcast and newsletter is, has to do with the odd times that we live in.And on that front, there were few things as bizarre to me as baseball during the pandemic, which at first it seemed like the 2020 season might be canceled. And then it came back. It was a shortened season, but without fans. And then watching on TV, there were the cardboard cutouts of fans that was kind of weird. And the fake crowd noise that came with it. To me, it was a bit like watching a deleted scene from an Avengers movie where all the actors you have Mark Ruffalo in a mo-cap suit because it's like, he will be the Hulk here when we finish the CGI, but it's not done yet.Right. “We haven't finished painting in the players yet.”So that's kind of what it felt like. And it was so odd to me. And I can't even imagine what it was like for you, someone who you cover baseball for a living. So what has it been like writing about and covering baseball in such an odd time?Yeah. Last year it sucked from a work perspective. It's the first year, since, before I got into the industry. So my first year doing anything baseball professionally full time was 2002, my first year in the Bluejays front office. And so 2020 was the first time since probably, well, before then, that I went a full calendar year without going to a baseball game. I think if you even just count the high school and college stuff I do, I went something like 380 days between going to games, which was, I mean one, just lousy because I like doing it. Right. It's the best part of job is going to the games evaluating players. But also it was just sort of wait, how do I do this? Right. There's so much of my job is so much of it is driven by the act of going to the game and either seeing the players or it's people I talk to when I'm at the games or afterwards, "Hey, I just saw your AA affiliate. This guy looked really good. What's going on with…, Hey, did this guy get a new pitch?"That's just such a huge part of the rhythm of the job. And then to have basically no minor league, anything, in 2020 and very little college or high school stuff. And I don't really go to major league games much, if at all, because I can watch them on TV and often have better views on TV than I'm going to get at the ballpark. Especially last year where they were like, "Oh, you can come sit in the press box, but you can't go. You can't walk anywhere. We're going to actually physically nail you to your seat."Oh, fun.Yeah. So it was just sort of wait, I have to rethink how I do parts of my job. And I would just watch certain players on MLBTV and write pseudo scouting reports like, hey, this is what I saw so far.It's not great. I don't love it, but this is what we got. At least this year, I did some high school stuff, a couple of college things. I flew once in the spring, once I got my second shot. And then once the minor league started, I could actually go to games. I have been doing that one or two a week, which is less than I would usually do but still at least I'm going out and seeing games. That's been easier. And it's like, "Oh yeah, I remember how to do this. I know what this is." First few were weird. Definitely. But then after a while you sort of get back into the rhythm. It's like, "Oh yeah, I've been doing this for a long time. I think I can do this."When it comes to the actual Major League Baseball sort of experience, I keep thinking back to... There was that game in Baltimore, during the Freddie Gray protests where the White Sox were playing the Orioles. And it was just so surreal with no sounds. And I kind of wanted that to come back. I was kind of looking forward to this like chill, silent thing, but then they pumped in the fake crowd noise and...Well, that game was such... Obviously circumstances were terrible, but just from a baseball perspective was so fascinating. It was like, oh, this is what baseball sounds like with nothing else. And it was like, this is kind of cool. I like this. Yeah, you could really hear the crack of the bat. You can hear the pitch hitting the catcher's mitt. To me it captured some of what I like of going to these low-level games whether it's high school or low minors. And I was at a game the other night. Where the heck was I on Tuesday? On my God, so bad. Wherever I went though... Aberdeen, I went to Aberdeen, which usually they draw pretty well. But for whatever reason, this Tuesday night, there was nobody there at all. I could have had a one-on-one conversation with the second baseman, and it would have been we had no problems hearing each other.And, but there's part of that I absolutely love too, because then I can just hear what's on the field. It actually gets, I don't love all the shenanigans that are there, the music and stuff between. Oh wait, we have a five-second delay. We got to play song. We can't have anybody be bored ever, but whatever, I'm not the audience for them. Right. I'm not the target.But then it was even more glaring to when they have to pipe in five seconds of Fall Out Boy, because they got to play the latest hits, obviously, that are 20 years old. And then it's no, no, no I was listening to the game. I was really into the sounds of the game. And I love that. That to me is a big part of it. And it's actually very comforting to me when I'm at a game, and it's now the real sound is what's on the field. All the other stuff is very, it's like static where it's very distracting to me, because I try to be very focused on. It's usually I'm focused on a player more than I'm focusing on the game itself, but still it's the same thing. It's the sound. The sound is part of the experience and part of what I love about going to games.Yeah. Music playing constantly, constantly having different sort of ways to keep the crowd entertained.Yeah. It's like, they think people are going to leave in the fourth inning if they're not sufficiently entertained. So no, no, no, no, they're here, and many of them have already started drinking, so they're not leaving right now.Yeah. Well, exactly. And also a lot of the stadiums aren't exactly right in the middle of a city. If you drove out there to go to that game, you are there. But also it just strikes me as so odd that minor league baseball players are famously underpaid and can barely kind of scrape by. And it seems so weird that there's this fun house pushed around them as they're really just trying to get by. I mean, one thing I love about minor league baseball are the hats. I have a bunch of just various, I've got the Rocky Mountain Vibes, which it's a s'more that's on fire, and it's just chilling out with sunglasses, and it's just the best thing ever.Sure, that's what I do when I'm on fire.Yeah. No, totally. I mean, that's it. It's perfect. It makes sense. And the reason for so much of that is teams will rename themselves these kinds of goofier things.Oh yeah, the Jumbo Shrimp. That's one I can't get past.Jumbo Shrimp. Yeah.Somebody had me on the radio. I think it was ESPN radio had me on to talk about Cleveland changing their name to the Guardians from an obviously racist team name. And I said, explained why it's a good name. It has a classic feel. It has a local tie-in, et cetera. It's not ridiculous. Right. I at least have this worry that anytime any team's going to have a new name that they're going to pick something that a bunch of people got in a room and they did marketing. And suddenly they're going to, oh yeah, let's... The Jumbo Shrimp is a great name for a minor league baseball team. It would be a horrendous name for a major league team. And that's if you just know baseball, you completely understand. If you don't follow baseball, you'd probably say what is the difference? I don't understand. It's hard to explain. It's just, we have such a dichotomy between what is big league and what is not big league.Yeah. It would be odd if there was a Major League Team called the Cleveland Trash Pandas.Trash Pandas. This is the other one I was going to say. Right. I had a choice, right. A friend of mine he's driving cross country because he's moving to Arizona. And he texted me from the Amarillo Sod Poodles stadium. Which another one, I don't even know what that is. Stadium looks nice though. I got to say. I have never been there, but…See what I've got here. As you can see, I have a bobblehead of the SeaWolves. Nick Castellanos.Yes. “And there's a drive to left field and that'll make it a four-nothing ballgame.”Yeah, there it is.Yes. When I worked for the Blue Jays, the New Haven Ravens I think were sold and the new owners moved them to Manchester, New Hampshire, which they played one year in a temporary field and got a great new stadium. Used to love going up there. And they were the Fisher Cats. What the hell is a Fisher Cat? And turns out it's local. Right. It absolutely makes perfect sense. But it's a weasel. And I would have to say the New Hampshire Weasels probably just wouldn't sell as well. So I mean, I think they made a good choice. That to me also is sort of the difference between it's the same thing. It's the difference between a good name and a

Welcome to the Present Age Podcast.I’m your host Parker Molloy.On today’s show, I speak with my friend Carlos Maza. As the host of Vox’s “Strikethrough,” Carlos helped shine a light on the way the choices made by the media helped raise Donald Trump and Republicans to power.His videos, with titles like “Why every election gets its own crisis,” “How Trump makes extreme things look normal,” and “The decline of American democracy won’t be televised,” were some of the sharpest pieces of media criticism of the past five years.And then he stopped.After becoming the target of an anti-gay harassment campaign by right-wing YouTubers, Carlos was let go by Vox despite being named one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential people on the internet in 2019.I recently had a chance to chat with Carlos about all of this, and I’m really excited for you to check this out. Let’s get started.Parker Molloy: So joining me today is the wonderful, the great, the talented, the prescient Carlos Maza.Carlos Maza: Hey, Parker. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here.Yeah. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on my new podcast-type thing. It's an adventure every day over here.It's badass to watch you evolve over the years that we've been friends and it just feels like getting a front seat at a really cool story. So it's a pleasure.We took a similar path in the sense that we both maybe have gotten a bit cynical over time and not unjustifiably so.I would say my path is one marked by increasing cynicism, for sure. Yeah.Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's part of why I wanted to talk with you because the other day, I was going through and I was looking at old Vox Strikethrough videos and I rewatched all of them because one, they're very good, but two, looking back at them, it's just like, "Yes, everything he said was on point." You really broke down how Trump makes extreme things look normal, how harassment on Twitter became a giant issue, how the narrative around Antifa would keep flying up. And then also, I think this is important. It's you had one that was about the decline of American democracy and about how media generally is not equipped to deal with this.And I think that we've seen that happen more and more over the past year or two, especially and we're at this point where there are people literally trying to overthrow the government, but media still can't stop inviting these people on meet the press and whatnot and treating them like they're totally normal. So I'm just curious, how do you feel about what's happening in the world as it relates to things that you predicted would happen in the world? Things that you were pointing out were happening in the world?You mentioned cynicism, and that's my primary response to all this. Is that when I was making those videos, many of them were right at the beginning of the Trump era and then over, I think the first two or three years and it felt like sounding an alarm bell on a crisis that could maybe be averted. There was this feeling, I think for me during 2017 where I thought this might be a wake-up call. I'm sure everyone felt this way. Every week, this must be the thing that snaps things back into normalcy or back into some realistic sense of how bad things are getting. And now that we're so long away from that initial moment of weird optimism, my sense about it was just like, "Yes. I felt like I accurately described what's going on and I feel a little silly that I had hoped that things would correct themselves.”I think I still had some faith maybe in myself as a media critic, or just more broadly in the media establishment, their ability to react to crises and adjust and course correct, and I think right now, you might feel a similar way. My sense is no amount of good media criticism will change corporate media's incentives. And I think media watchdogs are valuable, but in the sense that you can move the beast, I think there's very little that good-faith criticism can do because the people who make these media calls are not operating from a journalistic priority. They're operating from essentially a business priority. Yeah, I've just become really cynical. I look back at those videos and think, "What a sweet summer child unaware of how hopeless this is."Yeah. That's how I look at a lot of my writing. A lot of my writing that I did over at Media Matters. So it was the same kind of thing. It was, "Tucker Carlson is a fake populist." It was, "Look out for the dog whistles," and stuff like that, but we ended up... Everything just kept going along as it was going along. And I wrote an article about the importance of not letting Trump and his cronies get away with trying to subvert democracy back in December. This was before January 6th, because it was clear what he was doing. And even after January 6th, there was a week or two where everyone was like, "Oh, well, we have to rethink things." And then they just went along doing the same exact things they've always done. So I feel like I am lacking in hope and optimism, which might be called for. I'm not quite sure.We both started in this weird... I think we both got to know each other and we're doing work around queer issues at around the same time and I think... I don't know. I'm curious about how you feel about it, because my sense about it when I was doing it was like, "This could help." I had some real faith that I could alter the language and behavior of journalists and that's what motivated me, and I've had to go through a real shift on my own personal work journey about what I'm trying to do and what I think is possible and what I find useful, and that shifted a lot for me. Have you felt a similar...? We both started off as these fire-brand-y activists and I don't feel like that anymore.No. Yeah. I mean, the past several years, anytime someone's used the word activist to describe me, I'm like, "Please don't. Please just don't." I mean, at one time maybe I would have been fine with it, but the more time has gone on, I went into... When I was writing articles about trans issues at The Advocate, for instance, I did that for about a year and I was operating under this assumption or this hope that by doing this, I could help enlighten the ignorant. I went into things under the assumption that by shining a light on injustices or explaining politely to people, "Hey, don't call trans women men, or maybe you don't need to include the person's former name in this article as they were not famous under that name. So there's no actual reason to add it." And stuff like that would happen constantly. And I think that there was some good that came from that.Some good, but overall the messaging is just lost. And over time, we've seen these queer-specific publications either fold or shrink down to nothingness or just have zero traffic and that aspect of things hasn't been picked up by mainstream outlets. And that's scary to me, but at the same time, I wonder if it even matters and that's where I'm at.Yeah. My sense is like I think I had a very rosy belief in the arc of the moral universe and things always slowly getting better, which is I think a luxury/hangover of the Obama years to some extent, and that feeling has been... I've had to grapple with that sense of I ended up part of some big inevitably successful project. What I do matters very little in the grand scheme of things and how do you try to fight for a better world when you get a sense that it might not matter, or if it matters, it's not because of you? And that's been a real... I was curious to how you felt about it because I think we both went through a collapse of faith maybe around the same time or a collapse of optimism and it's fucked me up as a writer and as a creator and looking back at my old Vox videos, I'm like, "I'm a very different person now in my heart, even if the arguments they make would be singled out."Yeah. I feel the same way. I feel like a lot of my earlier writing, even though it came off in that firebrand-y activist-y approach, even though that was what I was doing then, I feel like I came to it with such a different energy. And now it's just this sort of, "Well, if things are bad, things are always bad. Things will continue to be bad. They'll probably get worse." And I don't want to feel that way. I want to feel optimism, but I want to feel optimism with justification. I want to feel justified optimism and I don't. And I think that the power of media generally is important. And I think that some of the flaws that have happened along the way, really come down to the fact that you'll have places like CNN's Reliable Sources, for instance, that show. They'll have the same people on constantly to talk about, "Oh this newspaper in that town," or they'll have Ben Shapiro or Eric Erickson on or whoever, and what are we learning?What are we doing? What's changing? And I think that there's this reluctance to put people who really challenged the narratives that are pushed in media out there. The whole time that you were making these videos for Media Matters and Vox and on your own as well, it just blew my mind that you weren't being constantly booked on TV, because everything you were saying made perfect sense. And when I would use that to try to show someone who really meant well and wanted to learn something different, it would be effective. The way that you presented arguments was always so straightforward, but not condescending, which I think is really important, and I think it would've done a lot of good for CNN, MSNBC, whatever to put you on air, but that didn't really happen and made me lose a little faith in...Not that I had much faith in corporate media, but it made me lose the remaining amount of faith that I had, because they would rather keep putting the same old, same old people back on and making the same arguments and pretending that they're not seeing what's happening in the world and it's beyond frustrating.What have you been up to because that is somethi

Parker Molloy: So, I was on your podcast, Well, This Isn't Normal, back in April of last year. And I think at the time I was still under this impression that this was all going to be somewhat temporary, in terms of pandemic-related stuff, that by the fall things would return to a sense of normalcy. And now more than a year later, it seems like we're just starting to get back to whatever normal is. So, I know that the pandemic hasn't exactly helped my mental health, but I'm doing my best to power through. It was wondering, how are you holding up these days?Sara Benincasa: I am doing pretty well, but so much of that is not of my own doing. It's of my own doing in the sense that I've gotten help, I've asked for help and gotten help. But what I mean by that, is that it's not internally generated. I haven't done it all on my own. I am a member of a 12 step program, and I am a person who goes to therapy every week, talk therapy with somebody who specializes in addiction, and also does a lot of stuff with mindfulness, she's also a mindfulness meditation teacher. And then I see a psychiatrist once a month. And all of this happens online, although I did go to an in-person 12 step meeting, which was very cool. For the first time in a long time, that was very special to get to do that.But I've also got family and friends who are engaged in their own self work, whether it's through the work of sobriety, through the work of talk therapy, through fitness for their mental health, whatever, and obviously physical health, too, whatever it may be. I've just started doing pilates, which is very helpful with breathing and just being in my body, which for a lot of people, I know it's hard if you were... Either if you're dealing with some difficult memories of trauma that caused you to disengage from being in the physical body, or if you simply are somebody who mostly has gotten positive feedback from stuff you do with your brain, which your body is your brain too, but you know what I mean. If you got all your pats, and love, and approval from say, getting good grades, maybe the physical aspect of health was not emphasized, or whatever. So what I'm saying is through teachers, facilitators, mentors, sponsors, things like that, that it is a village of humans who help me stay on point. But I also, Parker, cannot believe that was April of last year.That's the thing, I had to look it up, and I was like, oh no. It has been so long, it's been a year and three months, I guess. So, time flies when you're living through a once-in-a-generation pandemic, I guess.Time is different now. Time is absolutely, there's somebody who I met in person after talking to them for four months, and it was the first time we hung out, or maybe the second time we hung out. People said, "Oh, how long have you known each other?" And we said, "Oh, this is just our second time hanging out." And then we said, "Oh, but we talked to each other for four months online. We became friends," and then it made sense. And other people shared stories of the same. Emotional time is different from chronological, calendar time, isn't it?Yeah, that's an interesting way to think about it. Because yeah, I'm trying to rework pre-internet days, or where I would make friends in the physical space, where it would be like, yeah, you hang out with someone once a week and then over the course of several months, yeah, you get to know them. But online, you could talk to someone every single day. It's almost like you have a coworker sort of relationship, it's like oh, going into the office today, and by the office I mean Twitter.Yeah. And you have these almost old-fashioned, Victorian era, or pre-invention of the telephone, epistolary relationships. Like it's all going to be in a Ken Burns documentary in a sepia filter, but it's over emails and texts instead. So much of it is through words, where we don't get the visual cue. Right now, you and I are using video, which is great because I can see your visual cues and the movement of your face. But there are still some pieces of information that we could only pick up from each other by being in person. I don't know, like if there's a loud sound. To me, it's not going to sound the same as it does if I were in the room with you, and I could see how you react to that.And I wouldn't intellectually be parsing that, but I would notice, oh, okay. That sound really startled Parker, maybe Parker really just doesn't like that kind of sound. Or maybe it would startle me too, like oh yeah, a bomb exploded down the block, nobody was hurt, in this theoretical example. I'm just pulling real-world experiences from s**t the LAPD did recently, like blowing up a bunch of fireworks and horribly damaging things. But you know what I mean? There's some things, like what if I smell really bad to you? You don't know that right now, you could just think I'm great. And then in person you could be like, this is terrifying.Be like, “oh my God, I can't believe I've been friends with her. She smells so bad, I'm so embarrassed.”“I invited her to my wedding, or the baptism of my eighth child” or something. Or I told my family, "You're going to love her so much," and she smelled terrible.“She's so great, and I bet she smells nice.” That was a weird assumption to make.It is true though for dating, people have said to me multiple times, you have to see if you guys like the way the other person smells. Which I think that's so gross to say it like that, but I also think it's very true.Yeah, that's probably true. Because if someone or something smells, that kind of throws off the entire vibe.Yeah, and pheromones too. I think it might not even be... I might have a perfectly nice perfume or whatever, but there is something chemical that happens that we know about, where people just pick up on cues about each other, and you fit or you don't. And I think that can sort of, it's chemistry. You don't know if you have chemistry, chemistry of friendship, chemistry of romance. I have a friend with whom I have great creative chemistry, it's not a sexual chemistry. Although sexual chemistry is creative, but we get excited about pitching ideas back and forth. And it's fun, and it feels like, kids playing in a sandbox is what it feels like. Very pure delight.And on that note, in terms of pitching ideas and stuff, what have you been working on? You're always working on something cool and different, and it's, oh, she's comedy, writer, on Twitter, and writing books and stuff like that. What have you been up to lately?Thank you.Any cool professional things, or just kind of-Well, I did my buddy Chris Gethard's podcast, which is called New Jersey Is The World. And Chris was saying... First of all, I wish I had Chris's career. Chris's career is above and beyond what I have done in my opinion creatively, which I know we're not supposed to compare, but I'm just prefacing this. Chris said in the podcast, he was like, "I feel like you are a person who has a career that's really similar to mine, in that people are like, 'Are you a writer, a comedian, you act once in while? What do you do?'" We both are very, I think he would probably agree that we are very fortunate to have gotten to have careers like the respective ones that we've had.And Chris is an incredible performer. I am much more of a writer, but I do enjoy performing once in a while. I have a day job, one of my books is called Real Artists Have Day Jobs. So I work in nonprofit digital marketing, which is really fun. And as a sober person, oh my God, what a change. It helped influence me to get sober, just because oh, suddenly my job wasn't showing up to make jokes at 10:00 PM in a club, And then getting wasted and getting paid with booze. It was like, oh, your job is to be on the phone at a very specific time of day, and figure out how to help out people in a certain way that they really need. That's real important. The nighttime stuff is cool too, but if you're hung over at 7:00 AM on that call, that call's not going to go great, and people will suffer. The people we serve through the nonprofit will suffer.So, that was one of the... I still didn't get sober for another year and a half, but it was one of the things that made me go, maybe puking and having hangover diarrhea is not the best move, when I'm having a pretty important phone call. So that was very helpful. But also, a paycheck is great and health insurance. And also I find a lot of meaning in that work. And then I wrote on a couple of episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is super fun and exciting. Just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, pitching. Like, oh wow, just being on Zoom for hours with 10 hilarious people, just pitching jokes for robot puppets and a human to say, so that was super duper fun.And juggling that with a day job was obviously something else. But there is a benefit to being based on the East coast when you're interested in Hollywood type stuff, which is that if you can do it remotely, if you've got a normal times job on the East coast, chances are you can do your West coast work after hours. You know what I mean? Because of the time difference, sometimes it works out.Yeah, sure. And see, then there's me in the middle in the Central time zone.You're in the middle.I'm just in the middle of everything. I'm close to nothing, but not too far from anything, if that makes any sense. It's like I can actually out West for two hours.Yes, it's perfect And Gethard and I were talking about this on his podcast, New Jersey Is The World, on this most recent episode. Which I don't know when this podcast episode will come out, but this episode of his podcast dropped in, I guess July 17th, something like that, 2021. Anyway, we were talking about things that are Jersey-ish, because we're both from New Jersey and so are the other hosts, Mike and Nick on the show. And I said, Chicago is not the New Jersey of the Midwest. It's like the Manhattan, or the Paris, or the something. But there i