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leaders. It's never been harder

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paycor.com/leaders. The

0:27

MAGA world has much stronger ties among

0:29

its supporters and I think it's because

0:31

it really does empower them. What Trump

0:33

did, I think, was he helped cultivate

0:35

a community where he sent a signal

0:37

by his own behavior because at 3

0:39

a.m. he was tweeting about whatever.

0:42

Crazy shit. Crazy shit came to mind or whatever he

0:44

saw that he thought was cool or funny. And

0:46

he sent a signal to

0:49

his supporters that it's

0:51

good. It is useful to my campaign for you to just

0:53

post whatever you want about

0:55

me. Hey everyone, you

0:57

just heard from today's guest, journalist and author,

1:00

Sasha Eisenberg. So

1:02

way back in 2012, when I was working on my last campaign, Sasha

1:07

wrote a book called The Victory Lab about how the

1:09

Obama reelect and other Democratic campaigns had

1:12

used what was then revolutionary technology to

1:15

reach voters and increase turnout. It

1:17

was an optimistic take on the role of tech

1:19

and politics based on the impact of

1:22

the pandemic and the impact of the pandemic on the country. It

1:26

was based on the idea that voter targeting and

1:28

digital fundraising could lower the barriers to

1:31

political participation and organizing. Then

1:33

the 2016 election gave us Trump, fake news, alternative

1:37

facts, and a mess of bad actors who

1:39

exploited technology and online platforms to

1:42

spread disinformation and propaganda that

1:45

made voters more confused and

1:47

more radicalized than ever. It

1:49

came from the Russian government, but also from

1:51

the Trump campaign, right-wing media, and

1:53

from his trolls and kooks who remain difficult

1:56

to track. All of this

1:58

led Sasha to go back and reevaluate the... offline.

4:00

That was a very analog book.

4:02

I hardly mentioned the internet in it.

4:04

And that's because all these innovations were

4:07

tethered to people's real identities at their

4:09

home address and campaigns getting better at

4:11

door knocking and direct mail

4:13

boring stuff. And their

4:16

use of experiments to figure out what worked. And the fact is a

4:18

lot of that was being done

4:20

in this country by people

4:23

who their funding structure and their ambitions

4:25

were tied to getting people more involved

4:27

in the process. So they were these

4:30

innovations were used for campaigns to

4:32

get more efficient at registering voters,

4:34

turning them out. You know, these micro

4:37

targeting, it's not to say that

4:39

every statistical model was used to give people

4:41

good information, but it's good to give people

4:44

more precisely targeted information, which

4:46

is generally in the service of informing

4:48

voters and educating them. And

4:51

I think what we've seen is that we have all sorts of people

4:54

in politics now who are

4:58

willing to do things in the context of a campaign

5:00

that we're outside of what political consultants

5:02

sort of thought was fair game before. And so

5:04

what we see is that all a lot of

5:06

the technical innovations can be turned

5:09

on their head and used for ill. So

5:11

what made you want to write this latest book? So, you

5:13

know, I've been having a conversation with a book editor

5:16

that book came out in the fall of 2012, right

5:18

before the reelection. And a book

5:20

editor had been coming to me for for years saying I'd

5:22

love to do a follow up to the victory lab and

5:24

all the stuff in that area seemed very incremental to me.

5:27

And a few years ago, it really struck me that the most

5:30

interesting sort of frontier

5:34

of innovation in campaigns was thinking about this

5:36

new asymmetry that had been created. We're

5:38

now in an environment where legitimate

5:42

political actors, candidates,

5:44

party committees, super

5:46

PACs, labor unions, people who, you know, have

5:49

to report to the FEC or the IRS

5:51

and be regulated and held

5:53

publicly accountable, are now

5:55

dealing with a situation where their

5:57

opposition isn't necessarily isn't their opponent. It's not.

6:00

another candidate. It's not

6:02

another party committee. It's not somebody

6:04

who's playing by the same rules, might not even be in the

6:06

same country as we are. And the

6:09

whole structure of all

6:12

the logic of political communication, the playbook

6:15

that people like you and your co-hosts

6:17

here grew up with was,

6:19

I think, tethered to a bunch

6:21

of 20th century institutions and assumptions

6:23

about communication. And what

6:26

we sort of call disinformation, which I think is a sort

6:29

of useful catch-all term for a lot of crazy stuff

6:31

that happens online now, I

6:33

think has made clear that all

6:36

of those assumptions are basically outdated.

6:38

And this question of

6:40

how and when you respond to

6:43

an attack, the old playbook

6:45

just doesn't make sense anymore online. And so this

6:47

was a few years ago really struck me that

6:49

coming to discover what the smartest people in

6:52

this area of politics were thinking about

6:55

how you make those determinations and navigate

6:57

the online landscape was

6:59

really interesting to me. I want

7:01

to get into sort of how

7:03

the playbook has changed and how

7:05

political actors are sort of using

7:07

technology, not just for good, but for

7:09

ill now. It also seems to

7:11

me like some of

7:14

this change happened because

7:16

the internet itself changed and

7:18

technology changed. Like Obama

7:21

talked about this last time we interviewed him on

7:23

Pod Save America. And he

7:25

said that the key difference was

7:28

that our campaign saw the internet and

7:30

social media as a tool to organize

7:33

people offline and

7:36

in-person meetups. He was talking about

7:38

that, which also allows

7:40

for like more nuanced, thoughtful

7:43

conversations between supporters of

7:45

a potential candidate who may not

7:47

agree on everything. And now

7:50

so much of political organizing

7:52

and campaign work itself happens

7:54

only online. And

7:56

obviously the internet and social media, especially not

14:00

modern campaigns on the right and saying, is there any place you

14:02

should be talking to? And

14:04

what you recognize is

14:08

that you cannot find people in

14:11

the Republican party, and this bridges the sort

14:13

of MAGA world and the establishment professional world,

14:15

who will even accept the premise of

14:18

that quote unquote disinformation is like a

14:20

meaningful category of speech. And

14:23

basically I think the consensus view, and

14:25

this has now become a core, a

14:30

core precept of the Republican party

14:32

now is that disinformation is a

14:34

concept that academic

14:39

researchers conjured so

14:41

that they could work

14:44

with federal agencies to

14:46

exert pressure on

14:49

social media platforms to censor conservative speech

14:52

in the service of Democratic candidates and

14:54

campaigns. And that's

14:56

what it is, and that is a

14:58

very hard conspiracy theory to break. And

15:01

now we actually see what that looks like when

15:03

it's turned into action, which is the Jim Jordan

15:06

Weaponization Committee in the House,

15:09

Republican attorneys general who are, have

15:12

been suing platforms about this. But this,

15:14

you know, it's really notable, Donald Trump

15:17

announces he's running for president in 2024,

15:19

literally the first policy pronouncement he makes. He puts

15:22

out a video, it's not about trade, it's not

15:24

about immigration, it's not about any of the things

15:26

that we think Donald Trump cares most about. It

15:28

is saying I will get rid of the people

15:30

at FBI who

15:33

are doing counter disinformation work and my

15:35

government will not work with

15:37

social media platforms. This is the first pledge that

15:39

a candidate for president makes. And I think

15:41

it's because it is a sort of central organizing principle

15:43

of the Republican party now. Do you have a

15:45

theory on why there

15:48

is that difference in how each side

15:51

views disinformation? And

15:54

is it based in ideological

15:56

differences? Is it political? Is

15:58

it situational? and that I

16:01

think Republicans have sort of historically,

16:04

especially in the Trump era, sort of been

16:06

on the offense in trying to

16:08

spread or use some of these

16:10

tactics to either suppress voter turnout or

16:12

confuse people, stuff like that, and maybe

16:14

Democrats have not done as much of

16:17

that. Yeah, so I think

16:19

that there's a bit to all this. I

16:21

think it's situational to some extent. I think

16:23

that, you know, in

16:25

the sort of thrashing about for explanations for

16:27

why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, disinformation

16:31

in some form or another popped

16:33

up a lot. And so I

16:35

think that there's a sincere view

16:37

among non-crazy Republicans that this

16:40

has become a crutch that Democrats

16:42

use to sort of evade

16:45

responsibility for

16:48

elections that they lost. It's sort

16:50

of the new favorite like deus ex

16:52

machina for Democrats who just want to sort of, you

16:54

know, don't want to contend with the fact

16:56

that either their policies are unappealing

16:58

or their candidates suck or whatever it is.

17:00

So I think there's something to that sort

17:02

of turn on on Silicon Valley from the

17:05

right that has sort of become this supposed

17:07

free speech campaign is

17:11

pushing back against the fact that content

17:14

moderation, the political side of content

17:16

moderation policies are seem

17:19

to do more damage to conservative communication

17:21

online than in the US than

17:23

liberal progressive communication online. And we should know like

17:25

most content moderation stuff that they're doing is about

17:27

like child porn and people

17:30

selling drugs and like all sorts of stuff

17:32

that does not have a conventional sort of

17:34

partisan attachment to it.

17:36

But the fact

17:38

is that, you know, the online

17:40

right figured

17:44

out how to use social media more

17:46

effectively for certain types of communication than the left

17:48

did. And, you know, there

17:50

were all of those, you know, when

17:53

Kevin Roos from the New York Times started

17:55

publishing the top 10 most

17:58

traffic things on Facebook every day. from

18:00

CrowdTangle, you know, it was always Ben Shapiro,

18:02

and it was like seven or eight of

18:04

the ten were like overtly conservative day after

18:06

day, right? And when people

18:09

started mapping how information

18:11

moved online, there was an

18:13

asymmetry to it, which is

18:15

that these right-leaning

18:19

sites, many but not

18:21

all of whom trafficked in

18:23

stuff that was, you know,

18:26

inaccurate or disreputable, had

18:28

a much stronger hold and

18:31

sort of network analysis on traffic

18:33

than the, you know, mostly

18:36

mainstreaming news organizations that were providing

18:38

stuff to folks on the left.

18:40

And so I

18:43

think that folks on the right basically

18:46

think that all of this is a correction

18:48

to weaken the hold on a

18:50

sphere of American life that they had sort of figured

18:52

out how to master. And

18:55

now I think the idea

18:57

is that the American left is

18:59

sort of not playing fairly and

19:01

trying to weaken their hold or silence

19:03

them. This

19:12

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19:29

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19:32

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a Vrbo. Post-2016,

20:47

I remember sitting in a focus group for

20:50

this other podcast I do, The Wilderness, and

20:53

I was asking people why, this was

20:55

like third-party voters, people

20:57

who decided not to vote for Trump or Clinton, and I said, why

20:59

didn't you vote for Hillary, you know, and they said, oh, she's

21:02

just awful, and I was like, what was it, was

21:04

it, and I'm thinking about all the different, was it

21:06

the email, was it this, and they're like, oh, well,

21:08

she killed all those people. I

21:11

was like, I'm sorry, what? So it's like, now

21:14

here is someone who clearly has

21:17

bought into a piece of disinformation,

21:19

right? But absent

21:22

that disinformation, is that the

21:24

kind of person who probably would not have voted for

21:27

Hillary Clinton anyway? And that, I think, is what's hard

21:29

to tell. I also think

21:31

the real, the challenge for the left is, and

21:33

this may be a bit of a straw man, but

21:36

I have noticed over the last

21:38

several years, particularly after 2016, some on the left

21:40

seeming to

21:42

believe that we can

21:45

fact-check our way out of

21:47

disinformation, and I wonder

21:49

what your reporting and research says about that.

21:52

Yeah, so I think there are a lot of reasons to think

21:54

that kind of the conventional way of pushing

21:56

back on some of the things that are

21:58

happening, and I think that stuff just is

22:01

ill suited for this, right? So a few reasons.

22:03

One, there

22:07

is the, what

22:09

people call the Streisand effect, right? So

22:11

you take something that's maybe not circling

22:13

at a high level or reaching a lot of people, and

22:16

you come out in the Biden campaign. We could talk a

22:18

little bit about the Obama experience because you guys had a

22:20

very different posture towards this in 2008. But

22:22

the idea that you'd come out and say,

22:25

or if you're Hillary's campaign, and you would

22:27

say, she has not killed anybody, might send

22:29

people looking for it. Wait, what? Two,

22:32

there's actually a lot of cognitive science that suggests if

22:34

you go out and say, I did not kill anybody,

22:36

and you don't really frame it the right way, you

22:38

actually reinforce the suspicion among people who

22:40

might have thought possibly you killed somebody,

22:42

that there's something there. The

22:45

whole structure of the internet, of the

22:47

algorithmic internet, social media in particular, is

22:49

that in trying to

22:52

fact check or dunk on or

22:54

sass somebody who posts something wrong,

22:57

you can end up, by

23:00

engaging with it, sending more traffic to

23:02

it. So it is directly

23:04

counterproductive. And then I think the bigger thing is

23:07

a general sort of communications playbook thing, which is

23:09

if you spend all day

23:11

just answering what other people say about

23:13

you, you have only a limited capacity

23:15

to communicate on the things you care about.

23:19

To your persuadable voters,

23:21

to your donors, to your supporters,

23:24

to the media. And

23:26

if you spend all day responding to crazy things

23:28

that people say about you online, you will run

23:30

out of the ability to talk about the things

23:32

you want to talk about and you'll be. And

23:35

so, and then

23:38

I think there's the basic thing, just common sense,

23:40

which is part of the

23:42

reason we're in this situation is that

23:44

people are fundamentally non-trusting of a large

23:47

significant portion of the electorate is not

23:50

trusting of traditional news sources or other academic

23:52

institutions, the people who produce fact checks. And

23:54

so I think it, and

23:56

that those organizations have trouble getting in front of the

23:58

people who. who are in

24:01

information silos or filters, whatever metaphor we

24:03

use. And so the idea that if

24:05

only they saw this thing from PolitiFact

24:07

or the AP, it would change their

24:10

mind. No, the reason that they are

24:12

open to that is related

24:14

to the fact that they are fundamentally

24:16

distrustful of the Associated Press. And so

24:19

we're just not addressing the issue.

24:21

This to me is the sort

24:23

of fundamental asymmetry between left and

24:25

right in trying to fight

24:28

disinformation is because the

24:30

right, especially in the Trump era now, is

24:32

a coalition of low trust

24:35

voters. And that's

24:38

okay because their project

24:41

under Donald Trump is to continue

24:43

to erode faith in institutions, to in

24:45

some cases tear down institutions. And so

24:47

that works for them if people are

24:50

pissed at institutions, even if their

24:53

people are running the institutions. It doesn't

24:55

matter. They're just trying to confuse people.

24:58

The left has now

25:00

been put in the position of,

25:03

especially Joe Biden, being the defender

25:05

of institutions, the liberal

25:07

democratic order, but of course all

25:10

the other institutions that come along with that. And

25:12

so we're trying to like, it's

25:15

an uphill battle trying to both

25:17

fight disinformation and trying to

25:20

defend a set of institutions

25:22

that people have lost faith in. Yes. And it's

25:24

not the job of any political campaign to protect

25:28

institutions or educate voters for its

25:30

own sake. And so I think

25:32

that there is this sense that

25:35

the folks I write around this book are pushing

25:38

back on, which is we need to, and

25:41

so much of the disinformation, the

25:44

Hillary killed people woman.

25:46

That question, which

25:49

is, is this somebody who theoretically was persuadable,

25:51

got this bit of information and it pushed

25:53

them away from Hillary Clinton? Plausible.

25:56

Yeah. Is this somebody who, Clinton

26:01

was receptive to this ridiculous

26:04

claim and then used it

26:07

to justify what she had already decided to do

26:09

or wore it as a token of identity. So

26:12

much of on

26:15

any given day of, if you're on

26:18

the Biden campaign, so much of the stuff you

26:21

would see on the internet attacking Joe

26:23

Biden is being created by Trump supporters

26:25

to amuse and impress other Trump supporters.

26:29

It's like an Etsy

26:31

DIY marketplace, but with just memes

26:33

and gifs and what Trump has

26:35

done that's

26:38

sort of remarkable, I think, is that

26:40

he, by retweeting and sharing, endorsing, whatever

26:44

stuff that people create, has helped

26:47

to turn this

26:49

cargo cults into really

26:52

formalize it. So

26:54

now you're not just creating lies and conspiracy

26:56

theories and stuff to impress your friends and

26:58

build the community, but if

27:01

the leader takes it and holds it up

27:03

for everybody, you've succeeded. And so

27:05

the difficulty for the Biden campaign, I write a lot

27:07

of how they sort of navigated this in 2020, and

27:09

it's similar to what they're thinking about today, is

27:12

how do we measure, and this is

27:14

just a, how

27:16

do we figure out the small share? If you spend

27:19

all day, if you're a public

27:21

figure or institution, people

27:23

are going to be lying about you and the stuff you care

27:25

about, issues you care about every day online, probably

27:28

for the reasons we just talked about, 99% of

27:31

it you should ignore. It would be counterproductive to

27:34

engage with. The 1% could

27:37

be a real problem. And

27:39

so figuring out what is the 99% that

27:42

is not actually an electoral problem, it's not getting

27:44

in front of the small share of voters who

27:47

are persuadable on topics that they

27:49

care enough about to change their vote choice, or

27:52

in fact, their likelihood of turning out, their

27:54

voter's likelihood of turning out. That's

27:59

the challenge. is

28:01

isolating, getting

28:04

data to make an intelligent determination about

28:06

when is this going to make the

28:08

jump from the sort of insular community

28:10

of people who use disinformation not to

28:13

persuade other people, but I think to just sort

28:15

of affirm their community and

28:17

get in front of a share of people

28:20

or people who by definition are lower information,

28:22

later to tune in and how

28:27

do you respond to it then without

28:32

reinforcing it or appealing

28:34

to forms of authority that those

28:36

voters are not likely to respect

28:38

in the first place. So talk

28:40

a little bit about how the

28:43

Biden campaign did this

28:45

in 2020 because, you know,

28:47

Rob Flaherty is one

28:49

of the big characters in your book. He was just

28:51

done offline a couple of weeks ago. He's now the

28:53

Biden's deputy campaign manager, but he was the digital director

28:55

on the 2020 campaign, and

28:57

they sort of had a new strategy

29:00

around how to deal with myth out

29:02

of both track and then fight disinformation.

29:04

Yeah. So Flaherty and the

29:06

Biden digital operation were in the summer of 2020

29:08

blessed with these two

29:11

things you don't get a lot. They had a fair bit

29:13

of time by campaign standards and more money than they

29:15

actually knew how to spend. And

29:17

so Flaherty had been thinking a lot. He'd worked on

29:20

Clinton's campaign in 2016 and so had sort of been there at

29:22

the origins of

29:25

like the panic around disinformation and had

29:27

sort of regretted that they did not

29:29

take it seriously early enough to do

29:31

anything about it. And so he'd always

29:33

wanted to do something. And so they

29:35

end up in the summer of the

29:37

campaign and there's this money and time

29:39

that comes their way. And

29:41

he decides that they

29:44

really want to dig into identifying

29:46

what he calls distinguishing this market

29:49

moving information. He says, you know,

29:51

we have one goal. It's to get to 50 plus

29:53

one. We do not care about

29:55

anything that's online unless it's helping us get there. We

29:59

need to be really. ruthless about not getting

30:01

distracted by disinformation that isn't actually an

30:03

electoral problem for us. And

30:07

we need to, as a

30:10

result, focus just on that, which is going

30:12

to get in front of those persuadable voters in the, you know,

30:14

whatever it was, seven or eight states that

30:16

they care about on the issues that will

30:20

affect their vote. And

30:23

what they did was they worked with this

30:25

firm called Bully Pulpit Interactive, which was one

30:28

of the big democratic digital firms. They

30:32

did, they tested a number

30:36

of basically viral narratives that were

30:38

circulating about Biden online. They called

30:40

them all disinformation. It's not

30:42

a great term for this because some of them are based

30:45

in a fair bit of truth and some of

30:47

them are not. And

30:49

they polled a universe of persuadable

30:51

voters and they basically care

30:54

to ask two things. They

30:56

said, would you be familiar with this message? Would it

30:58

affect your, with the storyline

31:00

rather, and would it affect

31:02

your vote choice between Trump and Biden? And

31:04

they mapped this on an axis. So one

31:07

axis was the reach,

31:09

how many people were familiar

31:12

with the storyline. And the other axis

31:14

was the impact. Would

31:16

it affect their vote? And

31:19

so they found, for

31:21

example, you know, and the idea was only

31:23

stuff in the upper right hand quadrant where

31:25

it had both reach and impact was worrisome.

31:27

Anything in the bottom, let's keep an eye

31:29

on it. Maybe it can make

31:31

a jump. Maybe voters opinions can change, but we don't

31:34

need to do anything on it. What they found, for

31:36

example, was that the Hunter Biden storyline had

31:39

a lot of reach. People were very familiar with it. Trump

31:41

had already been impeached over this, but

31:44

they- They had a lot of reach

31:46

even though it was apparently censored. It was, yes. Even

31:49

though the laptop was censored. We did not get to see

31:51

the dick pics, but people were still aware. Yeah, we're still

31:53

aware, right? And

31:55

but it didn't have a lot of impact. Voters said it wouldn't

31:57

affect their choice, and they did focus groups, and it revealed that

31:59

in the- In this case, voters

32:02

did not see, this fairly

32:04

small share of persuadable voters did not see

32:07

Biden as fundamentally motivated by personal gain. So

32:09

even though they were familiar with all the Hunter

32:12

Biden stuff, they did not actually change their impression

32:14

of Biden on something that mattered. The

32:16

age stuff, what they called the Sleepy Joe

32:19

storyline had both reached, people obviously knew that

32:21

he was old, and

32:24

it had impact. Voters said it could affect

32:26

their choice. And the focus groups revealed it

32:28

wasn't actually because they saw him as, that

32:31

they were worried about physical fitness. And

32:34

the thinking in the campaign and the sort

32:36

of traditional communications team for a while had

32:38

been, okay, we need to deal

32:40

with this. We're going to have photo ops of him

32:42

on a bicycle. We're going to have him jog up

32:44

the steps of the plane. And

32:46

the focus groups revealed that these

32:49

voters were not, they weren't worried that like he wouldn't get

32:51

his steps in in the White House, right? They

32:53

saw him as a fundamentally weak political figure. I think

32:55

a lot of this has to do with being defined

32:57

as vice president. He got through

32:59

that big primary field and was like never the main character.

33:02

And voters didn't really know what he

33:06

cared about and what he would do. And so they

33:08

maybe had suspicions that he wouldn't be calling the shots

33:10

or that he would be following somebody else's agenda. And

33:13

that manifest itself in a

33:15

receptivity to claims

33:17

that he was frail and

33:19

old. But

33:21

this research revealed that wasn't the underlying

33:24

issue. And so I quote

33:26

Danny Franklin, who's a pollster, didn't work

33:28

for the campaign. He says, you know, fundamentally

33:31

they weren't worried about his fitness. They were worried

33:33

he was not going to be the author of

33:35

his presidency as the line. And so

33:38

the way that they pushed back against that was

33:42

not to do things that look like

33:44

they were responding to age. But

33:47

if you found yourself Googling

33:50

Biden and senile, for example, in the fall of

33:52

2000, you might

33:54

get a cookie dropped in your browser so

33:56

that when you go to YouTube the next

33:58

time, the pre-roll. video you see

34:00

was like 15 seconds of Biden

34:02

speaking to camera about how

34:05

growing up in Scranton gave him this

34:07

view of economic policy. And

34:09

this was the stuff that tested best because

34:11

the voters who were receptive to this weakness

34:14

were reassured by saying, oh, this guy can

34:16

actually articulate what he cares about and why.

34:19

And so how

34:21

Flaherty defined this shift in thinking

34:24

was to go from having a

34:27

what he called a supply side approach

34:30

to disinformation, which I think is

34:32

generally the way that the media,

34:34

a lot of academic researchers, certainly

34:37

the default assumption of people in politics has

34:40

been, which is, okay, where's this coming from?

34:43

What platform is it on? Did people use

34:45

AI to make it? How's

34:47

it spreading? Are they making money off of it? And

34:52

instead what he called a demand side

34:54

approach, which is, what are

34:57

the underlying anxieties or concerns of

34:59

the voters who might be open

35:02

to a given storyline and how can

35:04

we address those without

35:06

playing whack-a-mole with whatever the new

35:09

trending thing is today? And

35:11

it is, you know, I think

35:13

both a real tactical shift in thinking

35:16

about how you do this, but it also is

35:18

a sort of conceptual shift that I think many

35:20

of us who are worried about this as a

35:22

problem should think about. I think way too many

35:24

of our conversations and news coverage are sort of

35:26

about what plot, you know,

35:28

who's doing it, how it's moving, what tools

35:30

they're using, and not enough about like the

35:32

fundamental question, which is basically

35:34

why such

35:36

a significant portion of our country right now, gullible,

35:39

so gullible and susceptible to certain storylines over

35:41

others, right? There are tons of conspiracy theories

35:44

that are going to travel today that are

35:46

not going to catch on, right? That somebody's

35:48

going to create on a 4chan board and

35:50

is going to go nowhere. QAnon,

35:52

start on a 4chan board and seven

35:55

years later is driving aspects

35:58

of our politics. trying

36:00

to think about and research why some of

36:03

these, you know, why is vaccine skepticism around

36:05

COVID so persistent,

36:07

but, you know, people

36:09

stopped worrying about fluoride in their water, right,

36:11

why, and if you care about

36:13

pushing back on them to

36:16

figure out what the underlying issue is there instead of

36:18

just, you know, chasing whatever

36:21

today's meme or gif is. I

36:23

will say from a, from

36:25

my experience as a campaign hack,

36:28

it feels very intuitive, this

36:30

whole, and because if you're looking at

36:32

it from a campaign perspective, you of course want to

36:35

focus on the demand side and not the supply side.

36:38

And even hearing like the,

36:41

how the Biden age concern is

36:43

really a concern about weakness,

36:46

that is also something that candidates

36:49

have always had to deal with. Like we had

36:51

to deal with that. Obama wasn't old. It was

36:53

actually the opposite problem. Obama was too young, so

36:55

he was going to be weak. Obama was too

36:57

inexperienced, so he was going to be weak and

36:59

not the author of his own story. Then once

37:01

he was the president, then

37:03

it was he's too aloof,

37:06

he's too nice, he's

37:08

too professorial, but they all, the

37:10

underlying challenge was that people were

37:12

worried he was not going to

37:15

be as in control of events.

37:18

And, you know, we did the same thing in, in 08. We

37:21

tested some of the

37:23

scariest attacks that

37:25

we thought would be most damaging to Obama. We

37:28

tested like, I think at some point, I

37:30

think Axorad and company like created fake ads

37:32

to test with focus groups, right? Of like,

37:34

how was the Bill Ayers thing going to

37:37

play? How was Reverend Wright going to play?

37:40

And the challenge now

37:42

is, all right, so you identify

37:44

the most damaging narratives based on

37:46

the information environment in which you're

37:48

operating, conspiracies, QAnon, whatever it may

37:50

be. Then the question is,

37:53

how do you determine the

37:56

best way to counter those narratives? And

37:58

then how do you... disseminate

38:00

that message to the right people. Yeah.

38:03

And I should say, like, I think a lot

38:05

of this shift, a lot of this does seem

38:07

intuitive to people who were

38:09

thinking about message strategy informed

38:11

by opinion research, but

38:14

a lot of the decisions about responding

38:16

to this were being done by digital

38:18

operatives who... And I think this is... That's

38:20

interesting. There's a big... There has been in

38:22

democratic politics for a big disconnect between those two

38:24

groups of people. Yes. And so, I think some

38:26

of it's a mindset and tools issue, which is

38:29

if you are a digital operative...

38:31

And there's a sort of fusing of

38:33

people like Rob Farady, who are... And

38:35

we're just starting to see, I think,

38:37

a generation of people who came up

38:39

through digital communications, sort of move into

38:41

the normal hierarchy of a campaign instead

38:43

of staying

38:46

there. But often, they were

38:48

looking at the social listening

38:51

data that was content-driven. It

38:54

was what are the posts that are moving? What

38:56

accounts are they going through? They were not focused

38:58

on... Polling

39:01

is fundamentally focused on voter opinions.

39:04

This was focused mostly on what

39:06

content is moving. And so, I

39:09

think some of it took the

39:11

Biden campaign bringing

39:14

together a digital communications apparatus

39:16

that had an ability

39:18

to track and measure data and

39:21

come up with some of the targeting tactics

39:24

so that you were putting

39:26

these responses in front of the people who were

39:28

most likely to be susceptible to them. But

39:32

fusing it with opinion research, polling

39:35

focus groups that was focused on the voter

39:37

side of it. The... One of the...

39:40

I think that there's this ongoing debate in

39:43

progressive politics right now about

39:47

what do you do with the conservative

39:49

media ecosystem? You have groups

39:52

like Sleeping Giants, which have been

39:54

very effective, I think, at driving

39:57

boycotts and... scaring

40:00

advertisers away from sites like Breitbart

40:04

because of their content. The Biden

40:06

campaign made a different decision. We are

40:08

going to try to buy ads on

40:10

Fox News and Breitbart because their research

40:13

suggested that at least some portion of the

40:15

people who would be exposed to this, who

40:17

were persuadable, that's where

40:20

they were getting information and that they wanted to

40:22

be adjacent to it. And so I think

40:24

that this is going to

40:27

be an ongoing problem, especially as the view

40:30

of social

40:32

media sites themselves are becoming ... It

40:36

was not morally controversial 12 years

40:39

ago for the Obama campaign to decide we're going to

40:41

put money on Facebook. People might have questioned the efficiency

40:43

of it or tactile. It wasn't like we're going to

40:45

give money to Exxon Mobil or Halliburton or something. And

40:47

now I think you have a lot of progressives who

40:49

view some of the social media companies as

40:55

analogous to tobacco

40:58

or chemical companies or whatever.

41:01

And so I think that there's going to be ... Probably

41:04

it's going to break out more into the

41:06

open going forward as to what extent do

41:08

you spend money in the places where ...

41:11

When we saw this about should

41:13

Democrats give interviews to Fox News? I was just going to

41:15

say, I've always been on the side of the

41:17

moral argument is almost beside the

41:20

point. My view is the

41:22

campaign operative or former campaign operative, which is,

41:24

is it right or

41:27

wrong to go on Fox News? Are you

41:29

helping fuel their ratings? Are you doing this?

41:32

And it's like, is it effective or not? Is

41:34

there evidence that if you

41:37

go on Fox News and you are able

41:39

to communicate in a way ... If you're

41:41

debating Sean Hannity in a three minute interview,

41:43

perhaps it's a fucking waste of time because

41:45

you're not getting your message out at all.

41:48

But are there people, even if it's a tiny

41:50

slice of people, are there people who are getting

41:52

their information from that news source that

41:55

are, like you said, that are potentially persuadable and

41:57

if so, how are you going to

41:59

persuade them? Right, like, how are you going

42:01

to reach those people? In what ways are you

42:03

going to reach those people? And if they're only

42:05

getting their information from a whole bunch of places,

42:08

that's one thing. But if they're only getting their

42:10

information from Fox, and they're still not decided that

42:12

they're going to vote for a Republican, then yeah,

42:14

maybe maybe Democrats should play in that information space.

42:16

Yeah, no, I think that this is, you know,

42:18

there are it's gotten harder to target political

42:23

advertising. I mean, it's one of these these

42:25

areas where the sort of innovation narrative turned

42:27

on its head. I think, you know, Apple

42:29

killed the cookie business. So there are a lot of things that might have

42:31

been available to campaigns 10 years ago, to

42:33

try to target individual voters online.

42:35

That's interesting. That's changed. It has

42:37

gotten more difficult now. And so

42:40

I think increasingly,

42:42

it's become important to get into the networks

42:44

where the people you want to reach are

42:46

as opposed to using the sort of infrastructure

42:49

of ad targeting to, to get

42:51

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here is the beautiful truth. Johnsonville don't

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or no bun, at least we're all

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talking and sharing again. And yeah, the

43:53

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oceocean.com I

44:34

was talking to a senior Biden person

44:37

last week and they

44:40

were saying that the the biggest

44:42

challenge, they said the entire campaign comes down

44:45

to you know there was this

44:47

this chart of like Biden's you know winning

44:49

by 50 points with people who

44:51

get their news from newspapers and and

44:54

and network news also you know and

44:56

the places where Biden's losing

44:58

the most and is behind Trump by the

45:00

most are people who either get

45:02

most of their news from social media or people

45:05

who don't tune into the news

45:07

at all don't follow the news closely at all and

45:10

that Biden person was saying like their big challenge

45:12

is trying to figure out

45:14

how to reach those people. How

45:17

would you assess how the Biden campaign is

45:19

is doing that

45:21

in 2024 and how they're handling disinformation and

45:23

the information

45:26

environment in 2024 particularly

45:29

compared to what you wrote

45:32

about in 2020? So I you know

45:34

I think that there's far more focus on

45:36

recruiting influencers you

45:39

know not just the people who do makeup

45:41

routines and but

45:43

people who have who are

45:46

not necessarily political communicators foremost

45:48

but have circles

45:50

of readers, followers

45:52

who who rely on them for

45:54

information and you know that

45:56

the fundamental tension here is between

46:01

the command and control mentality of the

46:03

modern political campaign

46:07

and the fact that the internet does not

46:09

lend itself to top-down communication.

46:14

And you go back to, oh wait, the

46:16

things that the Obama campaign chose to use

46:19

the internet to do very effectively were

46:24

get contact information for people so that you could ask them

46:26

for money in new ways and ask them to volunteer in

46:29

new ways and cut down the friction of having to go

46:31

into a field office and allow them to make phone calls

46:33

from their dining table. But in every

46:35

instance, you are either asking them to do

46:38

something very specific and targeted. And

46:40

if they were going to talk to other voters, usually

46:42

it was offline. And

46:44

it was with messaging and training provided

46:46

by the campaign. And

46:50

this is why when people come into a field

46:52

office, campaigns don't tell

46:54

them, hey, run over to whoever you love

46:56

to talk about politics with and argue

46:59

with them for our candidate. Here's

47:02

a list of people that we have identified and

47:04

here's the messaging that we think will work with

47:06

them. And don't go beyond

47:08

the bounds of what we tell you to

47:10

do. And what

47:12

Trump did, I think, more a function

47:14

of his instinct than any great strategy

47:16

was he helped cultivate a community where

47:19

he sent a signal by his own

47:21

behavior because at 3 a.m. he was

47:23

tweeting about whatever crazy

47:26

shit came to mind or whatever he saw that

47:28

he thought was cool or funny. And

47:30

he sent a signal to his

47:32

supporters that it's good.

47:34

It is useful to my campaign for you to just

47:36

post whatever you want about

47:39

me. That was never

47:41

a signal that traditional campaigns, not

47:43

just Democratic campaigns, John McCain was not sending a

47:45

signal to people, hey, you know, say whatever you

47:47

want about me or my opponent. But

47:49

I think that, you know, what

47:51

we have seen is that Democratic

47:54

campaigns, I would argue that the

47:56

Obama campaign, which we certainly until

47:58

2016 said was the most trying

52:00

to influence what the newspapers and TV networks are saying

52:02

and your paid advertising is still a thing. But

52:05

you need to play in a world

52:08

where word of mouth and rumor and

52:11

person to person communication and homemade

52:14

messaging are going to be

52:16

a way of reaching people. And

52:18

I don't see that the Biden

52:20

campaign has gone quite that far yet.

52:23

No, it's funny because it's different parts of the

52:25

campaign. It's sort of like your

52:27

background, right? Like you said, there's the

52:29

difference between the digital organizers and the

52:31

message polling people, also the comms people,

52:34

right? The

52:37

generation of communications people today are still trained

52:39

by our generation of communications people, which is

52:41

like, here's the main message for today and

52:43

here's the talking points, but it all feels

52:45

like it's very stilted, like if it leaked,

52:47

we would all be okay kind of thing.

52:50

And the other part of it is I think a

52:52

lot of those people were shaped by the Swiftboat Experience

52:54

in 2004, which was this traumatic

52:56

event for democratic communicators. And the lesson

52:59

from it that you guys internalized in

53:02

08 was

53:04

don't let anything that anybody bad

53:06

says about you go unanswered because it

53:08

could start as this little thing in

53:10

a small media market in Pennsylvania. And

53:12

if you let it move, it's going

53:14

to get everywhere. And

53:17

that's terrible advice now. But

53:19

I do think that... I think

53:21

I see so many examples of fucking

53:23

swinging at every pitch. And

53:26

I get it because, I mean,

53:29

part of this is the challenge again about a

53:31

challenge of running against Donald Trump.

53:34

And Trump gives you so many targets. And

53:37

he says so many crazy... He

53:39

floods the zone with shit, whether intentionally or not.

53:42

And so you feel like you have to

53:44

swing at every pitch. And

53:46

there's a ton of attacks on you, so you have to

53:48

defend each one. But even the ones that you know are

53:51

damaging, right? Just today, we're

53:53

talking on Wednesday. And Wall Street

53:55

Journal had some story where they

53:57

talked to a bunch of... Republicans

54:00

basically who said that Biden is

54:02

slipping, right? And they

54:05

don't have any Democrats on the record. They only

54:07

have like Kevin McCarthy on the record, which is,

54:09

it's like ridiculous, you know? And

54:11

I only noticed the story

54:13

because I went on Twitter and like all

54:16

like Biden supporters are sharing the story to

54:18

dunk on it. And I'm like, I

54:21

don't know that this would have been a big deal otherwise.

54:23

And I realized that the age thing is

54:26

that damaging narrative. I'm sure it's even more

54:28

so now than into 2020 for

54:30

a host of reasons. But

54:32

I wonder if there's

54:35

like best practices in, you

54:37

know, prioritizing certain narratives and then

54:39

figuring out how to respond in

54:41

a way that doesn't amplify the

54:43

attack itself. Yeah, and I think

54:45

in this case, you know,

54:48

I think that they're sort of torn between a

54:51

very old fashioned idea of trying to send a signal

54:54

to other reporters about what, you

54:57

know, about the quality of reporting. I

55:00

think that there's a, but the fact is that,

55:02

yeah, so the people in the White House are

55:04

on the campaign who are pushing back are probably

55:06

trying to communicate with basically nine reporters at the

55:08

Washington Post and Bloomberg who might do their own

55:10

version of this story. And try to

55:12

shame the wall. Try to shame, yes. With there's value

55:15

in doing, of course. Absolutely, but the fact is that

55:17

then you have a whole community of, you know, lefty

55:20

online personalities who

55:22

have their own audiences who take a signal from,

55:25

oh, well, you know, Andrew Bates at the White House

55:27

is shaming the Wall Street Journal. That's what

55:29

we should be doing today. And then it becomes the

55:32

dominant thing that the pro-Biden internet

55:34

is on today is shaming a reporter at

55:37

the Wall Street Journal about a

55:39

story that probably very few

55:42

voters who, you know, whatever have seen to begin

55:44

with. Or if they did, it would be like,

55:46

oh yeah, I do think Joe Biden's hold up

55:48

for that for a while. Yeah, right. But

55:51

it's funny because like I tweeted, you know,

55:53

a story where, the only thing I

55:55

did is I did not respond to what I tweeted a

55:57

story where there's like seven Republican senators who were like, yeah,

58:00

that people have sort

58:02

of adjusted by degrees, but have not

58:04

had a wholesale rethinking of everything we

58:06

thought about how to communicate was

58:08

tethered to this environment. And those 12 news

58:10

organizations, we should note, like, you know, we're

58:12

at a moment where American

58:15

media aspire to a certain type of

58:17

neutrality that is close

58:19

to unique in the world. And

58:22

we just have this peculiar confluence of factors

58:24

in the late 20th century that

58:28

the created communications playbook that is

58:31

no longer applicable. And it's

58:34

going to take, you know, a significant

58:36

shift. And I think the minds of

58:38

people who are making decisions inside campaigns

58:40

to fully break away from

58:43

it. Yeah, and again, it's like, you

58:45

know, mission accomplished with trying to

58:47

shape the

58:50

traditional media in a way that's going to be

58:52

beneficial to Joe Biden and not to Donald Trump.

58:54

Because again, all the people who are reading the

58:56

New York Times, all the people who are watching

58:58

CNN, they're voting for Joe Biden. Or at least Joe

59:00

Biden's winning them by a huge amount, way more than

59:03

he'll ever win the presidency by. But then

59:05

I think of all the platforms now, especially in 2024, like

59:07

TikTok, one

59:09

of the reasons it is so scary to

59:12

I think a lot of Democrats right now and problematic

59:14

is because you can't even track the

59:17

misinformation, the disinformation on TikTok or the

59:19

propaganda or whatever you may want to

59:21

call it. And that I don't know

59:24

how you solve for, because

59:26

you can, you know, like the Biden

59:29

campaign is on TikTok, great. And

59:31

they're talking to some influencers, but then like beyond

59:33

that, how do you even know what's on there

59:35

that's damaging? Yeah, no, I think that's, you're absolutely

59:38

right. I mean, so, you know, a TikTok content

59:40

doesn't have a link that exists in the world,

59:42

right? So just as a simple fact, you can't

59:44

send somebody in a conventional way the way you'd

59:47

send them a tweet or a Facebook post. And

59:49

that makes it for researchers impossible to see how

59:51

something moves. And in addition to

59:53

the fact that the algorithm is particularly

59:55

opaque and you're getting stuff from people that

59:57

not only do you not follow, but. but

1:00:00

it's hard to tell how and why you're getting it.

1:00:02

And so

1:00:05

it is, I think

1:00:08

rightfully people are sort of

1:00:12

vexed by it. One of the main characters in the book,

1:00:14

this woman, Jory Craig, the first thing that she does when

1:00:16

she goes to work for a campaign, she was basically the

1:00:18

first counter disinformation operative in American politics. And

1:00:20

the first thing she does when she goes to work for

1:00:22

a campaign or a party is

1:00:24

what she calls a landscape analysis.

1:00:27

And it's basically, let's map the

1:00:31

communications landscape in the area we care about.

1:00:34

It could be an issue area like abortion,

1:00:36

it could be a geographic area like Arizona.

1:00:39

And let's see what are

1:00:41

the crucial nodes for

1:00:45

information to move, how are things networked,

1:00:47

and what is a baseline level of

1:00:49

communication on a given topic or theme

1:00:51

every day? So I think one of

1:00:53

the things that people who are not

1:00:55

looking at this in a sort

1:00:57

of ongoing holistic way do is

1:00:59

something's trending. Okay, you know, Sleepy

1:01:02

Joe is trending today. Well, do

1:01:05

you know if it's trending any more than it trended yesterday?

1:01:07

Do you know if it's trending when the same people with

1:01:10

whom it trended yesterday? And

1:01:13

so some of it is just to create that

1:01:15

baseline map so that when

1:01:18

you get into the ebb and flow

1:01:21

of a campaign and stuff is moving,

1:01:23

you have some sense of context or

1:01:26

proportion. And it

1:01:28

has been over the years gotten easier and

1:01:31

more difficult on some of the platforms to

1:01:33

have the data to intelligently

1:01:35

assess that. But TikTok

1:01:37

is orders of magnitude

1:01:39

more difficult to make sense of than

1:01:41

Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any

1:01:43

of the places. Yeah.

1:01:46

Last question, I'll let you go. Other

1:01:49

than this, any individual political

1:01:51

campaign is, I think, the

1:01:54

concern that this is just incredibly destabilizing

1:01:56

to democracies, not just here in the

1:01:58

United States, but all the world. Have

1:02:01

you seen any examples

1:02:03

or signs of hope

1:02:06

that people are

1:02:08

developing tools and strategies

1:02:11

to actually push

1:02:14

this in a better direction so that we can sort of

1:02:16

get a handle on this? Or is this just still

1:02:19

sort of the Wild West and people are just trying to, you

1:02:22

know, just do what they can and individual

1:02:24

campaigns? I think it's closer

1:02:26

to the Wild West. And, you know, the thing

1:02:28

we haven't talked much about is the role of

1:02:31

the platforms themselves and their policies in this. I

1:02:33

think if you want to find causes

1:02:36

to be optimistic, it

1:02:39

would be to hope that the sort

1:02:41

of posture of the platforms is cyclical

1:02:43

here. You know, we have since 2017,

1:02:45

roughly, you know, which I think if

1:02:50

you had to pinpoint the moment where

1:02:53

the techno-optimism we started with turned to

1:02:55

whatever we're in, whatever bleak reality we're

1:02:57

in now, it's Cambridge Analytica story broken

1:02:59

in 2017. And I

1:03:02

think that was the moment that probably the consensus view of

1:03:04

people was like Facebook's probably

1:03:06

a net neutral or good

1:03:08

force in American life to a net

1:03:10

bad force in American life turned. What

1:03:14

has the platforms

1:03:17

have gone through, I think, like

1:03:19

their third sort of cycle of

1:03:22

just their posture towards content moderation

1:03:24

on politics. There

1:03:26

was a big show in 2018 and into

1:03:28

2019 of saying we take seriously, basically

1:03:30

policing content

1:03:36

around elections in particular on our

1:03:39

platform, not just

1:03:41

in the US, but, you know, Facebook

1:03:43

created this global election war room where they

1:03:45

hired a lot of people and they went

1:03:48

to the media and said, like, we have

1:03:50

our hands around this and we are committed

1:03:52

to making sure that people don't get bad

1:03:54

information on our platform. We're putting resources behind

1:03:56

it. That

1:03:59

was the. Generally,

1:04:01

I think that attitude was shared by the

1:04:04

major online platforms through

1:04:06

the 2020 election. After

1:04:11

obviously right after January 6th, basically

1:04:13

every platform took down and

1:04:15

their biggest show of commitment to this

1:04:17

principle took down Trump's accounts.

1:04:21

And then a few things happened afterwards.

1:04:26

The Republican Party organized

1:04:28

itself against content moderation

1:04:30

as a policy position

1:04:33

to Twitter,

1:04:36

which had been,

1:04:38

I think, generally putting

1:04:40

upward pressure on other platforms

1:04:42

by taking this relatively seriously.

1:04:46

After the Musk acquisition, obviously, you

1:04:48

know, created a floor whereby there

1:04:50

was very little motivation for other

1:04:52

platforms to spend more

1:04:55

or expose themselves more to public

1:04:57

scrutiny through this. And now I think, you

1:04:59

know, certainly for the rest of this year,

1:05:02

we are in an environment where

1:05:05

the companies that run the platforms have

1:05:07

basically concluded there's more to lose by

1:05:09

antagonizing the right than

1:05:12

there is to gain either in

1:05:14

civic terms or in sort of PR

1:05:16

terms by placating, you know,

1:05:18

a broad center and left that want to see a more

1:05:21

active sort of content

1:05:24

moderation. Now

1:05:27

that changed quickly and it could change again. And I think

1:05:29

it is worth, if you go back to the utopian times,

1:05:31

some of that was that, you

1:05:33

know, people like us looked at campaigns and

1:05:35

thought, hey, generally this is getting people more

1:05:38

involved and that seems good. But part of

1:05:40

it was that companies like Facebook wanted to

1:05:42

be associated with politicians like Barack Obama. Like

1:05:44

that was a very successful PR effort. You

1:05:46

know, Google and Twitter loved

1:05:49

being associated with the

1:05:51

I mean, Google with the Arab Spring.

1:05:53

I mean that and to you, I

1:05:55

could imagine, you know, there was there

1:05:57

were just the valence of this is.

1:06:00

Social movements are being created on our

1:06:02

platforms. We are bringing people into a

1:06:04

community. They worked very hard

1:06:06

to be associated with politics during

1:06:09

that period. They also, it's a

1:06:12

big advertising, you know, $16 billion or

1:06:14

something is gonna be sent on the

1:06:16

election. That's a significant share of

1:06:18

potential advertising revenue. I

1:06:20

could imagine it would

1:06:23

not take a whole lot over the next

1:06:25

two years or four years for some of

1:06:27

these tech platforms to think, okay, there's a,

1:06:30

you know, these platforms have all sent some

1:06:32

signal, like we're not really a place for political communication

1:06:34

anymore, to start saying, hey, we want

1:06:36

some of that advertising business back. And part of

1:06:39

that is we need to send a signal to

1:06:41

political communicators that, you know, in

1:06:43

the same way that Fortune

1:06:45

500 companies don't put ads in porn

1:06:47

magazines, that we are like a place

1:06:49

where they want their logo to appear.

1:06:52

Two, I don't necessarily

1:06:54

see this person on the horizon, but

1:06:56

I think one charismatic candidacy or

1:06:59

one major geopolitical movement that seems tethered

1:07:01

to the uplifting

1:07:04

potential of social media could

1:07:06

incline some of these companies to want to be

1:07:08

associated with it, or a

1:07:10

change in control of Congress

1:07:13

and the White House that align

1:07:15

in such a way that there's

1:07:18

a serious fear of regulation as there was in the

1:07:21

2018 period that

1:07:23

makes the companies say, we're gonna try

1:07:26

to stave off the regulation by doing more ourselves. I

1:07:28

think that is a conceivable

1:07:30

shift. And I think it, we

1:07:32

have seen that they can turn

1:07:35

the switch on both

1:07:37

specific policies and putting the resources behind

1:07:39

them pretty quickly and could do it

1:07:41

again. Yeah, I think that's all right.

1:07:43

And I think to your point about

1:07:46

the potential charismatic candidate,

1:07:48

I just think whether it's a single candidate or

1:07:50

a movement, I do think that the

1:07:53

pro-democracy forces do need to find

1:07:55

a way to develop these same

1:07:58

strong communities online. that are

1:08:01

bound by sort of joy

1:08:04

in what they're doing. Like,

1:08:06

we think that there is

1:08:08

this sense of belonging you get from whether it's

1:08:10

QAnon or being at a Trump rally on

1:08:13

the right, and I think we need to

1:08:16

figure out on our side how

1:08:18

to create that, or at least how to encourage

1:08:20

that, even if we can't necessarily

1:08:22

control it. So, Sasha Eisenberg, thank

1:08:24

you so much. The book is The

1:08:27

Lie Detectives. It's a great book, everyone

1:08:29

should read it. It's a quick read,

1:08:31

but just fascinating stuff if

1:08:33

you're a campaign nerd and an internet

1:08:35

nerd like me. So, thanks for sitting down

1:08:37

with me. I really enjoyed it. Thank you,

1:08:39

John. Before we

1:08:42

go, some quick housekeeping. If today's conversation with

1:08:44

Sasha about people in politics screwing shit up

1:08:46

freaked you out, or better yet, if it

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fired you up, then boy, do

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we have a book for you. We're officially

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1:09:03

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taught himself how to make bread. Good

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