YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Marantz

lines on the record: 142
first: 2019-10-09
most recent: 2019-10-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We're hearing it bigly and greatly, but a lot of that stuff. Leaps directly into Trump's mouth. He says, hey, hashtag Sick Hillary is trending. What's up with that? Or coughing Hillary or whatever? All those hashtags were literally Mike Cernovich getting on his Periscope feed, saying to his core 2,000 followers, let's get this hashtag to trend. I mean, very overtly, it's not even like shadowy Russian hackers. We don't know who they are. We need to. It's like, he's just doing it out in the open. And it's not even against the rules. So I said, can I come sit with you in your house in Orange County, California, and watch you do this? He was like, yeah, sure.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he is also kind of leading from behind where news cycles are going. So he's kind of the guy behind the guy when Rush Limbaugh hears some rumor on Twitter that Hillary Clinton has Parkinson's disease. Or when you hear on Hannity that maybe Hillary's wearing a catheter or something, just these insane things, a lot of those things originate from Mike Cernovich's Twitter feed.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's, I mean, that's the choice of our times. And this is also the dividing line between how they treated me, you know, coming into their spaces as a, you know, figure of the Jewish elite media. Some of them were totally cool with that and some of them were like, you're my enemy. So, anyway, so Cernovich is on the alt light side of that spectrum. He's fine with me being Jewish. He's married to a Persian woman. So he's not that kind of odious, but he's many other kinds of odious.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They also get divided over what they call the JQ, which is the Jewish question. Are we cool with the Jews, or do we want to gas them? So these are the kind of people”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So all these threads kind of come together in this guy. He's a kind of lawyer. He comes onto the scene like Milo with Gamergate. He becomes this guy who's on Twitter yelling at people who don't like Gamergate and saying, this is about free speech, this is about ethics and journalism. Feminism is cancer, blah, blah, blah. He's a troll. He has some beliefs, but he's also an opportunist. He's like the other people we've been talking about, smart but not at all interested in consistency. He lies all the time. He is deeply misogynist. He's deeply whatever. He claims that he's not an out and out white nationalist. And there becomes this clear dividing line in 2016 over, are you a pure white nationalist like Richard Spencer? And in that case, you're alt-right? Or are you more like Cernovich and you're alt-light”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, where I picked it up was so I was looking at how these things were all interrelated. And there was a part of me that wanted to go. And there was definitely that element of me. And then the other element of me was like, they are influential whether I like it or not. Alex Jones has this huge listenership. I tried to do a profile of him. He agreed, and then he chickened out. I wanted one profile subject for the New Yorker that could sum up what I called a reductio ad absurdum. A reductio ad absurdum being misconceptive of if we had a good system, this absurd outcome would not be coming out of it. So if the media matrix we had set up was working right, these people would not have the influence they had. So I wanted one example. The example I settled on in 2016 was this guy Mike Cernovich.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. And so for a while, he had a lot of influence on the people he was writing about and attacking and etc. But it was designed to get people all mad, whatever side, either people you're against or the people you're trying to organize. Yeah, it's just.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But, like, there's a certain living within. The world you want to live with in that is very Trumpian and very Gatsbiesque. It's like, I am the American dream because I just make myself that way.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There and you can tell that in his mind he is those things, he is this high flying celebrity wearing this design or clothing, whatever. But the scene around him is just so dismal and pathetic. And it's like they're kind of like shutting down, you know, they're closing the bar at this sad hotel bar. And so I said to them, so is this free speech thing going to happen tomorrow? It was. Tomorrow was supposed to happen. Right. Everything had been cancelled already. And he was like, darling, it's going to be fabulous. There's going to be a speedboat and I'm going to be there and my coat's going to be flapping in the wind and you'll be there and there'll be a drone flying and capturing footage. And I was like, Milo, you know that shit is not going to happen. Right. And in 12 hours it will have not happened So, why are we sitting here”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I have my Louis Vuitton luggage and darling. I'm so fabulous, and his idol is Mariah Carey. He's like this very, he thinks of himself as a pop star or like a real housewife or something.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, anyway, I went there knowing it was going to fall apart to kind of write that story. And I'm sitting in this sad chain hotel with him in Walnut Creek, which, you know, nothing against Chain Hotels in Walnut Creek, but that's not there. That's not the image Milo likes to present to the world, right? He likes to be...”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, everybody loves free speech. So we go, I went there kind of knowing that it was going to fall apart because you could tell. He was making these big public announcements of like, Eric Prince is going to be there. And Charles Murray's going to be there. And Charles Murray was like, no, I'm not. I never even talked to that guy.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he's not a deep thinker. He's a very quick thinker. He's a sophist. And I also, having spent a lot of time around Milo, you know, there was this thing, this is cutting forward, but he was in 2017. He was organizing this thing at Berkeley that was going to be called free speech week. Because these guys love to talk about free speech. And it's a great Trojan horse for them.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. I mean, he's Boris Johnson. He's like smart enough to say things that sound smart, but doesn't actually have enough of a soul to really care about being consistent.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a lot of these people I don't. I mean, a lot of these people have a rise and fall arc and, you know, to the extent that this book leaves you feeling hopeful, it is that a lot of these people. No longer on top of the world. And that's certainly true of Milo. He was a British Gadfly. Hesitate to even say journalist. I mean, column He was a troll. I mean, he was a troll before there really was a vibrant social internet.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even though they don't Manipulated, you dumbasses. Well, this is the thing. I mean, that's my favorite. I think of me. Yeah, all these people who, their whole kind of self-identity is being contrarian and not running with the herd. And it's like, what do you think all those other people around you are, if not a herd? Right, right.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The irony is they are completely getting manipulated, even though they don't think we don't like being manipulated. I'm like, oh, you're so manipulated, you dumbasses. Well, this is the thing. I mean, that's my favorite.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't even in the book because it's kind of deep or history, but I researched it for the purpose of sort of knowing it as a background thing. We think about Gamergate as sort of, you know, everything is Gamergate. That's true. And one of the things that feeds into that is that Bannon and Milo were like, okay, there's this army of disaffected young people. Maybe some of them are too young to vote. But again, if politics is downstream of culture, it's not just who's going to vote. It's how do we shape the entire discourse? How do we talk about whether feminism is an accepted part of our American fabric or just this annoying thing that we can just stomp all over? So it was the website, but it was also let's recruit the energy of these disaffected. Gaming weirdos and turn them into an alt-right army. And so then cut to me”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially. Website, he starts some podcasts on satellite radio stuff was big. Yeah, but really anything at his disposal, I mean, the other thing he found was there is a bunch of video game On these live chats who a lot of this”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea The engagement thing is key. Emotional engagement is the lifeblood of the viral internet. And they see that pretty much before anyone does. Right.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They can't go there. And that's the thing. So you have these people thinking that why do we do it this way? And it's using these tools that are very inexpensive and viral and effective. And the architecture of them. Works towards engagement is enragement, I think the idea, and they see that, and it's a perfect way to tear things down.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you could just step back and go, is shareholder value the right thing to optimize for? You could ask these deep questions. And look, I mean, the Silicon Valley guys. Are good at asking contrarian questions in lots of ways, but when it comes to really, really core beliefs like. Is the whole thing we're engaged in good or bad for the world They can't go there”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. It's path dependence. It's how we've done it. I mean, one of the patrons saints of my book is this philosopher Richard Rorty, who there's a lot to say about him, but one of these things is in addition to the concept of contingency, he talks about ironism, and ironism or irony to him is the notion that you can reconsider at a deep level the way you do things.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People do. What's really interesting to me, you know, if you want to give Bannon or Trump a compliment, which I always thought he reminds me a lot of Silicon Valley people in that why do we do it that way? And questioning even why do we walk across this street this way? Why do we drive down that like we could do it another way? And that's when you start to question that and say, in fact, I'm going to walk this different way. Like it really does. Why do we do what we do? For most things, no reason. Totally. It's just.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And one of the big undercurrents of the book is that norms are this thing that are much more delicate than we thought and much more contingent than we thought. The word that I keep using in the book is contingent because Subject to historical forces. It's not like we're on a path toward good and the shining city on the hill. It's not like we're on a path toward inevitable destruction. It's whatever happens.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right, right, among many. But they're all sitting there asking him, what's your goal? And he says, My goal is to tear down the New York Times and CNN. Which if you're a politician, you don't think about that as your enemy, but he was very clear, this is the big brother we're going after. So Breitbart becomes obviously Steve Bannon takes it over after Andrew Breitbart dies, Steve Bannon then very clearly again sees there is no boundary between politics and media and information. There's nowhere in the Constitution that says the press is this and the president races that and”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But he also was like a culture warrior in the sense that like a lot of revolutionaries, he didn't have a clear sense of what he was going for. He had a sense of what he wanted to tear down. There's this amazing footage of him from this documentary where he's sitting with Dana Loch, who's now head of the NRA and all these kind of early, I mean, Ben Shapiro was part of that circle.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So these tools are great for anyone who's cheap tools for, like, it's sort of quick bomb making, quick kits. Totally, totally. So you started looking at, so Andrew Breitbart was when he started Breitbart.com, which was originally just a website, but that's really where a lot of it.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, was that they didn't allow in the regular media. And it was the regular media was sort of center left-ish. I wouldn't say they're liberal. I think they're center-left-ish. Institutionalist. And these people didn't have tools. And this is why, to me, I had Ralph Reed in an early All Things D a long time ago, because I thought they were using online tools, emails, much better because they didn't have choices. They weren't allowed in the mainstream. They weren't given that access. And Fox News was one expression of it, but online was perfect. It was a perfect way to reach people. Same thing with the Russians. They lost the Cold War. Guess what? Online tools are great. Dictators love online.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How could we be big journalism? We're the renegade upstarts. But then actually the joke becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have very coherent polic And the kind of more Breitbardian way of looking at it was like, no, you could. Be on the apprentice. That's a good Campaign ad, that's fine So that's all kind of in the background. Then when it's 2015,”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he died in 2012. But he saw this coming in the sense that he has this amazing appearance on Fox News where he goes, he's talking about Donald Trump because Donald Trump is a big celebrity. And they're like, why are you talking about Donald Trump in the realm of politics? He's not even a conservative. And Andrew Breitbart says, no, he's not a conservative, but he could be president Celebrity is all that matters. Politics is downstream from culture. And when culture becomes a product of social media, of what we pay attention to, then it doesn't matter. We have this traditional way of thinking that, well, the way you become president is you rack up endorsements in small town newspapers.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. All right. So you went and looked at the gate crashers. Let's give us a little idea of your. Almost like the cast of characters, of, you know, at the beginning of Shakespeare play. Who are they? Who are the key ones? And how did they have different? I think Andrew Breitbart was one of the most important ones initially.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the new thing, I mean, among many new things, there have always been propagandists, there have always been lies. Always been racist, but it wasn't viral. It wasn't infectious.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. And again, like Trump, a lot of the people I spent time with in the book, the Mike Cernoviches, the Richard Spencers, the Mike Enochs, the Milo Yiannopoulos, the Alex Joneses. They are not great political minds. Not great philosophers, they're great media manipulators. So, in fact, this is kind of like a little magazine nerd tidbit, but every New Yorker story has a rubric at the top, like a little what topic is this going to be, whether it's a profile or whatever. When I was writing about these people, we didn't know what to call those pieces. Was it like, it wasn't politics, really. So we called it Annals of Media. Because that's essentially what they are propagandists.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a working title was The Gate Crashers. So let's go with the barbarians at the gate. As they storm the castle, right?”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of like really immersing, I mean, they might give you 45 minutes in a conference room, but So I said, okay, if I can't go to the new gatekeeper institutions, let's go to the gate crashers. Let's go to the people who are trying to tear down these.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the way I like to look at stuff in my sort of New Yorkery way is to really sit and immerse with it and sit in people's houses and not just read stuff and talk to them over the phone Immersed myself. So at the time, these companies are a little more open now, but at the time, Facebook was not going to let me do that. Twitter was not going to let me do that. I mean, they still won't really. But at the time, they were totally closed door.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, but the Andrew Breitbart insight that politics is downstream from culture It's all connected. So I started kind of looking into this and just trying to forget my prior assumptions and go like, well, why can't Trump win? People are paying a lot of attention to him, attention is currency. And if that is true, then it's bigger even than Trump. It's not just this guy might win. It's also like what we pay attention to is completely unregulated. There's no gatekeeper anymore. It's all just we're flying by the seat of our plans.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technology, yes, manipulation of news cycles through TV, and it's all connected, right? So, what people are talking about on Twitter becomes what people are talking about on TV. That feeds the newspapers. It's all part of it. And also, We'll get to Andrew Breitbart and kind of the roots of the far right. Right,”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm so excited Yeah, thanks Yeah, so I started at the New Yorker in 2011 As an editor and a little bit as a writer, and then I shifted more into writing. In around 2014, 2015, I was seeing, as a lot of people were, as you were media and tech and business are all kind of gloming into this one swamp of stuff and it's changing everything about how we understand our world. And then politics was always part of that. But obviously, as soon as Trump comes down that escalator, everything changes, right? Trump's only real skill is as a medium manipulator. So then suddenly it was like this thing that I'd been paying attention to kind of on the side, like, what is the future of media? But it kind of felt like maybe a fringe kind of business story. Now it's like the story.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as someone who thinks everyone should be kicked off Twitter except me, Chrissy Tegan, and maybe George Conway. But in my spare time, I talk tech and you're listening to Reco from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is Andrew Morantz, a staff writer of the New Yorker who has just released a very important book. It's called Anti-Social Online Extremics, Techno Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. Something I talk about a lot in his book. He explains how the alt-right cynically took advantage of the freedom they had online, bringing extreme voices into the mainstream. Andrew, this is my jam. I'm so excited to have you here Enrico Deco. Yeah, thanks. Let's talk a little bit about how you got to this book. I want to talk a lot about what's in the book. Talk about your background a little bit so we have some sense of how you got to this. Yeah.”
2019-10-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT