Trending Towards Violence with Charlie Warzel

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And what we have in the aftermath of these big events is an information vacuum, right? And the internet has become so good at filling that. The internet abhors an information vacuum and it basically incentivizes all of these people through these different social media feeds to fill it, right? And there is this attentional incentive baked into that. Elon Musk is performing essentially, whether he believes it or not, whatever. But what he's doing when he's tweeting, when they still haven't probably moved Charlie Kirk's body to a hospital to be treated, is this notion of, I am going to give this crowd what it wants. And in some ways, give himself what he wants, which is the dopamine hit of that engagement. Everybody online is, they're looking for those hits. Charlie, is this based on, you know, we're rewiring our brains. How much of this is cynical? How much of this is a biohack? In the same way, I liken it to, if you're a chef in a restaurant, right? And you want people to eat your food, like you've got some hacks. You'll throw in, you know, a little sugar into the marinara. You'll put a little fat, a little oil, a little salt, a little something to get people lip smacking good. That's one thing. But there are labs, where people work on ultra-processed food that's designed to hack your body's ability to stop you from eating. That force you, in some ways, beyond your ability to control it, to continue to eat. Is that the insidious secret sauce, that online is ultra-processed speech? It's a really interesting way to put it. I want to be careful with terms like rewiring, because there is this great debate that is going on about how bad are the phones? How bad is the internet? What is it doing to kids? What is it doing to adults? I fall into the camp of, it's very clear that something is going on here, right? I can't believe this thing ever. It's right next to me. I'm doing a freaking- I can't believe this thing ever. I'm doing a freaking podcast with you. For God's sakes, Charlie, we poop with it. Yes, among other things. And so, there's clearly something going on. There's something with the dopamine, with the way, with the intermittent reward cycle, right? Because you post something, you do something for this crowd, and it's not reliable whether or not the world's going to shower you with the attention and the affection that you want, or whether the algorithms from these companies are going to do that. Right. So, you have this, you're pulling the slot machine all the time. What it's doing long-term, I'm not exactly sure, but what is very clear is that it is changing our incentives, our behavioral incentives. And I think it is turning us often into the worst possible versions of ourself, right? I think a lot about the way that tech companies and algorithms work with food as well. But the way I think about it is, if you said to somebody, hey, I'm going to try to diet this year, right? I'm going to try to eat well, and part of that, and get fit, whatever. Part of that is, every day at four o'clock, I'm going to exercise. Seven days a week, I'm doing it, right? I want to be a better person, or a better version of myself. And then every day, that friend at 3.57 slides you a donut. And says to you, you don't have to eat that donut, but it's there. I mean, you could nibble it. You know how much you like donuts, right? And you eat the donut because it's been a long day, you're in a moment of weakness, whatever it is. You just feel like, you know, you want to do it. And then the way you feel. Yeah. That's the thing though. I would say that they understand, understand the biorhythmic changes in your day to know the exact right time to wave that donut under your nose. That it's almost worse than just being a dick. It's that it's, I mean, I was watching the trending topics, Charlie, like a horse race, hoping upon hope, like this is what's happened to us. You're praying that it's not committed by somebody that the other side can weaponize. And so you're- You're watching, you know, trans start to trend and then griper starts to trend. And then this other thing starts to trend and, and it's all, I don't want to say misinformation because you don't know yet. It's, it's non-information it's merely accelerants, right? These are just accelerants. All right, folks, I'm going to, I'm going to share something with you. You might not know, you know, I'm lazy, but, uh, you know, and when I talk about that, I'm talking about obviously food, eating food, uh, cooking food is takes time and I'm hungry now, but, uh, I got to tell you something. I got the perfect solution. There's a company called Factor. Factor, they got you. Chef prepped, dietitian approved meals, make it unbelievably easy to, to get your meals to stay on track, healthy, healthy food, yet still comforting and delicious. 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Like when, when you say something like, you know, I, there, there, there's almost like a understanding, like the bio rhythms and things like that. I think a lot of it is actually dumber than that. I don't think that they, I think that these algorithms are optimized for engagement, just broad engagement. They don't care whether or not that engagement is screaming to end the rights of trans people or that engagement is like, look at this kitten. It's, you know, it's furry and beautiful and you know, LOL. Don't you think they understand that outrage and fear travels faster than even adorability? That, that when you, when you monetize or maximize for that, don't you think they know? I mean, I watch it on the evening news, man. They understand that like, if some, if a terrible crime happened in the Bronx and they've got video of it and that's, what's going like, it's not, they always save the end in America. First, uh, tonight is always the last story where they're like a girl sold a cupcake for, uh, you know, adoption shelter. Like, they know what drives the most engagement. They, they, I, they absolutely do. I'm not trying to let them off the hook, but I think the technology is, is dumber in that way. I mean, some of them are, are more sophisticated. I mean, TikTok, for example, is a genius, an evil insidious genius invention in that you are giving it every time you scroll to a new video on TikTok, you are giving it a signal. It takes what that video is and it has it categorized 50 different ways, right? It's a sports video. It's a, you know, music, it's a band. Oh, it's this clip, this sound clip, whatever it is. And you're voting every six seconds or less. If you flick off something really quickly, your algorithm changes just a, an, and just an infinitesimal bit. They say, oh, Charlie's not into that today. Do you understand how these work, Charlie? Do you, are, are, are you privy in any way to these, to these algorithms? No, and no, no, nobody is really, you have to, they're, they're, these are company secrets, but how is that possible? Think about it with food, right? Right. They have to tell us what's in it. Now. They don't have to tell us that beaver anus has been substituted for strawberry flavoring, but there does have to be a chemical listing there. How is it possible that, that these programs, which have such an impact on our lives and certainly on the lives of young people have no responsibility to the public to in any way, Instruct how the fuck they're put together. and what they're doing to us. I think there's, I think there's two reasons. I think the first reason is, is simply that the, the, the way that regulation works, the way that any, you know, to get all this going works so much slower than these companies work. So any time they're tried to be put in a box by lawmakers, the things change, right? The, the whole paradigm changes. You make a rule to govern Facebook after the 2016 election, say, which, you know, it didn't happen, but like, say you did that and then bite dance and from China comes up with TikTok and there's this whole new way, there's a whole new thing. There, there's a little of that going on. I guess maybe there's three things. There's also a, a lack of understanding very clearly, like Congress has gotten slightly better, right? There's, but there's, there's a lack of understanding. And third, I think is the, Yeah. Horrific. You know, it's, it's the same problem we were just talking about polarization of all this stuff. There is from the left, this desire of, Hey, you know, we have clearly a neo-Nazi problem on some of these, you know, websites and platforms and these harassment problems and these things of, you know, targeting real human beings, swatting them, doxing them, getting them in trouble with their job, getting them fired, all these, all these actual real world harms. These are real world harms and things that are happening. And you have, that is sort of the perspective that, you know, progressives come to this fight with it. And then on the right, you have this sort of, you know, free speech maximalist in theory idea, which is if anything is, if you try to do anything to these platforms whatsoever, you are putting your finger on the scales. That's right. It's cloaked in this idea of, of free speech. Doesn't talk about the fact that there, there's a line from, um, this, this, um, researcher, Renee Duresta, who is great on all these topics. And she has talked about freedom of speech and freedom of reach. And these platforms with their algorithms are about reach. It's not about speech necessarily, right? You can, you can say a lot of stuff on these platforms and it gets through, or, you know, now a lot of these platforms don't care about content moderation. But the whole part of the algorithm is what is it boosting? What is it sending out to more people, right? You know, it's different than standing in the town square and speaking versus standing at it and having a bullhorn that reaches, you know, entire municipalities or whatnot. Right. Or, or knowing in the town square when you're going to show up and then following you, because they also do that. There's notification, you know, if, if, if somebody on your list put something out there, you know, they're in the town square and you can run and harass, right. Or, or wait, waking you up when you're asleep, you know, until you got to listen to this. Right. Right. And, and so you have this argument that is coming from the right, which is basically any attempt to shut down some of this political intimidation, some of this, you know, some of this, some of these communities that exist to harass and, and, and belittle and, and, and cause this like physical world violence that is immediately, seen by the right as this putting the fingers on the scales of who gets to speak and who doesn't. Or it was like until a week ago and now it's not. Or, or until it, it, it, until they get power. Or until it's not convenient and they want to get somebody else off there. Until they get power. Elon Musk's whole reason supposedly for buying Twitter, which is now X, was this idea of restoring free speech, right? That, that Democrats have censored conservatives forever. So he buys the company, he reinstates people like Alex Jones, a couple of neo-Nazis, you know, just a whole slew of people who've been banned, not because of their speech, but because they broke the rules, right? They, they broke the rules of engagement for this. It's a platform. It's not the government. It's right. And does all this. And very clearly has put his fingers on all kinds of different scales there. They're, I mean, the, the one, Mecca Hitler would, would say. The one that we know about. He's turned Grok into, yeah, that's what, and that's what I'm saying though. It's completely obscured. You, you can't see into it. Right. And, and so this also causes regular people. And this is, I've been watching this happen for over a decade to become conspiracy theorists about what happened to the thing that they posted or said, right? There are so many people I know who are totally just regular, not public figure type people who have, you know, said, I think I'm being shadow banned. I think I'm being shadow banned by X or Facebook or whatever. And I'm like, you're probably not on their radar. You know, like if you're just a regular person living your life, but because these things are so opaque, because we don't know what is happening, we create these different stories for why this post didn't go viral or why I'm not getting followed as much as I think I should, or, or, or, you know, why X, Y, or Z is happening. But the, the reality is too, that there is stuff happening, right? There, these, these companies are tweaking these things. I mean, Elon Musk, of course, it's not free speech. It's ultra processed speech and algorithm. It's one thing. Look, the fact that it links you to other people, the fact that it drives comments and the comments drive more engagement is what turns it from free speech into ultra processed speech. It is designed to pull you further and further into the platform and further and further down the rabbit holes. There is gravity. There is a inertia there. There are forces there that are at work that are not at work in normal free speech settings that are manipulating the dynamics. One of the sort of most sobering stories of this that I covered right, right after the 2020 election, right after January 6th was, I was looking at different people who had stormed the Capitol and, you know, looking through their social media presences. And there's one guy who was a kind of small time right wing influencer. And I went back, we downloaded his whole Facebook account to look at like a decade. And it was very clear that starting in like 2014, 2015, he was trying to get, he was just a guy who was trying to get some attention, right? He was, hey, look at my, look at my standup comedy thing. No, that's not working. Okay. Open mic night, like all these different, you know, here, here's my startup, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all these things, nothing catches on. And then sometime during COVID, he posts something about vaccines, just not even, not even that, just sort of like, I'm kind of skeptical of this thing. The post, he was getting, you know, maybe one or two likes on every single post, 250 likes. The next post, a little further, he goes just a little bit further with it, right? Yeah. Cut to six months later, this guy's storming the Capitol and, you know, vlogging himself doing it. And it's like, that's it right there, you know? Do you think this is, that it's, that the difficulty here is you're creating a kind of army of, of nihilist influencers, because you have to, get the dopamine hit. Look, we've all, anybody out there who's, who's done drugs, me, me being one of them, understands that like part of the problem with drugs is like, to get that same hit, like you got to go further. Like that's kind of the issue that it, it, it goes very quickly from, uh, I feel a part of something to, I need this somewhere that my nervous system, has overtaken this, that the pleasure is now not pleasure. It's desperation. And I think the worst part about all of this though, is that for some people, right? I think that that's accurate how you're describing it. Some people get rewarded and figure it out. And I mean, I just, if you sort of look at the, the political situation that we have in the aftermath of the Kirk stuff, we have an influencer who, was assassinated. The Trump administration sent two podcasters who just happened to be working for the FBI to Utah to investigate that. You're talking about Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who are now the, right. The heads of the FBI. Sent two other influencers, like people who've made their, their bones using all these platforms to create these audiences and continue to sort of, you know, ratchet up the take. I mean, you just have like these, these influencer dynamics because the show must go on, right? Because that's really important. But don't you think some of that is because power understands, look, propaganda and, and information, whoever controls that has a huge advantage in terms of political power. And so, They're just understanding how to weaponize these various platforms and and everybody is trying to do that to you know whatever aim it is you know every medium that came before it had the same problem i've never seen it supercharged in in this manner it's not that people didn't you know father coglin loved radio you know once radio hit his propaganda was supercharged television had the same thing man everybody remembers you know morton downey jr that wasn't so much political or jerry springer but it was a a ratcheting up of dopamine hits to watch something and you saw those things aren't sustainable they they start to spin out of control into caricature that even though it's done that online it hasn't been a detriment to the purveyors of it all right guys these days you every headline feels like it's been engineered to make you either furious terrified or both it is it's honestly maddening like you can't even you can't watch it you can't read it you can't deal with it well ground news is here to help you fight back against the tyranny of reptilian emotion that these other news organizations are trying to hit you with it's a response to this fear and anger based media they don't they don't tell you how to think or feel about it they don't tell you how to feel they aggregate and organize information just to help readers make their own decisions ground news provides users reports that easily compare headlines or reports that give a summarized breakdown of the specific differences in reporting across all the spectrums it's a great resource go to groundnews.com slash stewart and subscribe for 40 off the unlimited access vantage subscription brings the price down to about five dollars a month it's groundnews.com slash stewart or scan the qr code on the screen it's all personalized too that's the that's like the big difference right because if you are again like what i was saying with the you know with the stuff on tiktok and the scrolling and giving that the micro feedbacks to tailor everything to your interests perfectly right there are a lot of people who are coming to any influencer who is polarizing whether it's charlie kirk or you know whomever they're coming to them in the exact right way right they're it's not like a clip of the influencer saying something that they might disagree with it's them talking about the subject that they care about that they like right they're finding like influencers will spend a lot of time on air right or a lot of and they will clip up these things in all kinds of ways because they're also trying to find as broad and diverse an audience right they'll talk about cancel culture and netflix specials or whatever right of the movie of the week that matters the little thing and then they'll talk about sports and the aggregators at the larger media companies will find the most explosive clips and they'll put that out every i mean the one thing that i want to say is everybody's playing the same game and that is to join in in this new kind of everything is content content economy and an assassination i think the thing that has been so jarring is that an assassination is content is another driver of everybody's you know i picked up these followers i did that you know people shit posting people posting horrible things about a family that's just lost a father you know the you know all of this and you know what's interesting to watch cable television sort of displaying its own kind of vestigial uselessness that you know they're going back and forth as though they might be the issue when they're not even part of the game right now right they're following and by the way this kid he's on discord or some other platform why you would name your platform after like argument you know it's discord it's shittiness but who even knows the ecosystem that he's swimming in we don't know any of this doesn't look doesn't look like it was a great one oh honestly how could it be right but so the uh the charging document or whatever whatever we're calling it of the of the shooter i first of all i don't want to name the shooter because that's also a part of all of this right like this is the these mass shooters now are showing us with each of these killings that they are absorbing all of this they're absorbing how you and i talk about it and they're absorbing how you and i talk about it and they're talking about it how i write about it right how cable news portrays it all of these things so in that charging document the shooter inscribed a bunch of different hyper very online phrases on the bullets and stuff right right and was texting with the roommate right after or right before the assassin the roommate or the the the boyfriend or girl but like right i don't they're in a relationship i think it seems but again maybe who the fuck knows right and said i i can't get it like directly quoted but it's it's something like if i see whatever the phrase is on fox news like i'm gonna lose it right essentially saying like it's a troll like the bullets these things oh my god you're saying they're saying oh if you do that and you get on fox news like you win the day on the internet like you've won so these people are like assassination influencers like murder influencers you know there was exactly uh on the very same day there was a 16 year old kid who shot up his high school in denver right and again hasn't really received the coverage because i don't think it it fits as well into the algorithms engagement model but apparently this kid was involved in a whole other subculture uh online that is a a public murder subculture if that's to to use the wrong phrase but do you know anything about that subculture as well or or is it all part of the same weird thing so it's it's very amorphous right like online communities tend to be this way i mean some of them are very rigid but generally you know the best thing and the worst thing about the internet right is that if you are somebody who feels very alone and has some really niche things right like i i love whatever this trombone player i'm growing up in iowa you know i feel like i'm a weirdo i'm an ostracized by whatever you can go on the internet and you can find the 11 other people who like have that strange hobby that strange weird thing and you can find each other and there's great stories there right like that's it's a wonderful thing the exact same thing works with people who love and are really interested in the columbine shooting and not because they think it's an interesting historical thing it's because they idolize the killers the internet puts these different communities together and then not quite exactly the same as you know netflix's if you liked this show you might be interested in but organically there is this sort of referral thing right where oh you're involved with this very kind of messed up subculture well you know there's some people on the outskirts who are part of that and they'll help introduce you and so there are these there's uh terrogram which is basically like a terror a terrorist subculture like public acts of terrorism but not you know joining isis or whatever like it's just like regular people who are fascinated by this and want to take up a political cause there's you know this far right the neo-nazi kind of stuff that's very real and actually you know bigoted luigi mangione has an entire subculture of supporters for vigilante assassins right like it's and and i don't know if that's the thing you don't know is are they part of those communities or are they lionized by those communities but we're separate from that like is there we what we have we have some evidence in certain all right talk about that so um there was i'm probably gonna get the the particulars wrong but there there are two recent school shootings from last year and earlier this year in nashville and in madison wisconsin and i'm gonna confuse which is which but they there was there's reporting investigative reporting that shows that they crossed paths online and that to the two shooters separately knew each other um on the internet on the on the on the internet on the internet right and it's not that they were best friends or anything like that but when the first shooter you know committed the act of violence and murder and what That other, the second shooter, I'm just trying to not name names here because I'm sticking to that. The second shooter was like, oh my God, I know her. By the way, it was a young girl. It was a 15-year-old, I believe, girl. That is something that is also changing. The threat profile of this is experts who I've spoken to who study this stuff have said it's democratizing because there are mass shooter online fandom communities that exist. Some of them are around specific instances like Columbine. Some of them are just simply, there's the Christchurch shooter who is lionized. There was a shooting that I wrote about, and I think it's like two weeks now, but it feels like 20 years. Oh, Jesus. At a church in Minneapolis, and the shooter had inscribed all these other shooters. On their gun, and all these online memes and phrases. That was very clearly, very, very clearly just fan service, essentially, to this community. Saying, I'm going to do it. I'm going to be the next guy, and you're going to write my name on the next gun. That's what it's about. Oh, Jesus. It's the cinnamon challenge. It's the kind of thing that goes viral online. But to the extent of depressing. Impravity and murder. Is that sort of similar? Yeah. I mean, essentially, yes. Very truly, these dynamics, the thing about the internet is the specifics are always very different, and the specifics certainly matter. But there are a lot of very similar dynamics that happen. When I talk to some of these analysts and researchers who spend time in these, you know, at great psychological pain in these subcultures or around them. What they describe, essentially, is like a kind of love bombing that these groups have. So someone will kind of wander in, right? Maybe they're just interested in true crime, and they're pretty depressed, and they're pretty upset. And they see this subreddit or whatever, not subreddit, but some community, online community, that is interested in school shootings. And they don't know exactly what they're getting, but the people there know how to groom them. They know how to bring them into the movement. They know how to treat them, give them something they're not getting anywhere else. And a lot of times, the people who end up, you know, going way down the rabbit hole, tend to feel extremely alienated from their communities or from their families or personally alienated, you know, by their own life choices in whatever way. There's this way that these communities pull them in and know how to do that and get better at doing that and give them essentially a safe space. Like a cult. That's how cults operate. Yeah. They love bomb you and bring people in who are searching for something and bring them into these smaller subcommunities, offer them. But the question then, oh, Yeah. Yeah. becomes like, what is the radicalizing factor? And can they take somebody from neutral? Like, do you know, I know you did like a blank slate user thing on X. What happened then? Like, how did that, what was the dynamic of that for you? So, yeah, when I did that, this was right around the 2024 election. And my personal experience in there. My personal experience I was having, you know, doing research and reporting was that the site was getting worse, right? I was starting to see like straight up neo-Nazi content in my feeds without showing any affinity for that myself. I'm always like, when your For You page shows you that, you're like, what have I done to make you think that that's for me? And that's the thing, right? That's the sort of, you know, quote unquote, invisible algorithm. That's the sort of, you know, algorithmic hand that you're sort of saying, well, okay, is this Elon Musk? Is this whatever? So, what I did is I created a new account, you know, got a different browser, whatever. So, I didn't know who I was. Created a different account. And I can't remember exactly, precisely the things that I said I was interested in. But I think it was like technology and sports, right? Like very, very bland. Sure. Just like, this is like, I'm a person. I have some interests. Yes. Yes. I'm not going to tell you what. I didn't follow anyone. First thing I see when I open it. I open up the new, you know, for you feed, because I'm not following anyone. Eight Elon Musk ones, you know, tweets. Well, that's a welcome from the. Of course, from the concierge. It's like when you move into a neighborhood and somebody brings over the big basket of fruit. You've joined a community. Yeah. I'm trying to see what else. I got it here. Okay. Musk post was the first thing. A post from Donald Trump. A tweet from an account called MJ Truth Ultra. Which offered a warning from a supposed FBI whistleblower that said, vote, arm yourself, stock up three to four months supply of food and water and pray. After that was a post from a MAGA influencer. Wait. Whoa. Yeah. Nothing tripped this up. You're in a clean. Does it think? Because is there something suspicious maybe about not having any data? History that makes it think like, oh, this, this is an experiment or a Russian bot. Like, is there, was there something to the fact that you were a clean slate that seems suspicious? I mean, if that is the case, I don't know why you'd be serving a supposed Russian bot would like vote and arm yourself and stock up. Like wouldn't a Russian bot enjoy, I guess, maybe destroying the fabric of the United States. Like the answer to that is that I, I can't. I can't be sure, but I also, again, these things are not that savvy. Like they're just trying, this is a number, all these platforms are numbers games, both with engagement, but also with users. Like. But it's clearly not agnostic. It's, it's pointing you in a very particular direction. It is. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a thing that there was a, like a couple of posts from libs of Tik TOK. There was a post from Benny Johnson and Jack Posobiec. All right wing content. All of it. All of it. Yes. And you've not engaged with any of this yet. No, nothing. This is just the first scroll, just the first scroll. That's your starter kit. Yeah. No, truly. And, you know, I, I let it kind of marinate, you know, I checked back in a few times and it essentially was like, it devolved into like videos from, you know, like the manosphere influencers, like Andrew Tate, there was a lot of MMA stuff. It was a very like stereotypical. Like version of, of a user, which happens to be the core user now. Young male technology sports. So they just think like, if you're into technology and sports, you're one of us, you're in the bro sphere and we're gonna, we're gonna give you that stuff that just massages that reptilian part of your not quite formed brain. Right. And, and bring you in. Yeah. I mean, it, it, like, it's, it's kind of, it's kind of mind blowing. Like, cause there's, you know, like you said, well, okay, what's, what was the catch there? Like when I was performing this experiment, I wasn't expecting to just be able to like copy and paste that into an article and be like, well, there you go. Like, I thought I was going to have to work a little for it. Right. Right. You're going to have to work to join the manosphere. Right, right, right. Now, what would that have been? If I can ask, what do you think that would have been? On a different social, like either Instagram or blue sky, like does blue sky immediately bring you to like Lilith fair? Like what, like what's, what's the difference? I don't, I, blue sky is not really algorithmic in the same way. It's, it's sort of a experiment to try to do the internet in a different way. It has its own polarization issues. It has its own, you know, people have been bullied. But it is, it is a, it's kind of a different experiment. It's trying to be not speed run all the mistakes of, of, of, of Twitter threads is like threads is like you have like REI and Johnson and Johnson tweeting, like, what's up? It sounded like you were going down to like RC Cola. You're like, well, there's Coke and there's Pepsi. Hey, you know, RC Cola is a, yeah, that's fine. It's, you know, it's like, it's like brands mindlessly tweeting. Like, you know, it's like Starbucks saying to Burger King, like you up, you know, like, like it's just, it's bad. Very, very kind of dead inside. It's radicalizing the Burger King, but. But again, like TikTok is the, again, the most sophisticated version of all of this, right? Because you open that up, it's going to throw you really popular posts. And sometimes those will be political, right? But a lot of times those will be. Silly dances or, or, or what have you. The thing is, it gets real good at. like there's a there's a situation where in in my reporting that all sorts of people have gotten like in trouble with their spouses because like they stay too long on like a video of a buxom woman and then tiktok's like oh he's a perv got it okay let's give him oh my god let's give him boobs right and so you just end up with this for a while they've got to try and game their own feed like neil degrasse tyson neil degrasse tyson come on tyson let me let me get some astrophysics in there we got to get the boobs out and and yeah but like this is also something that you know not to not to over generalize like for a generation but younger people early millennials zoomers whatever the other generation's called i don't remember uh they're very good at kind of speaking to the algorithms in this way like they know you that they're being perceived right in this way and they're you know they're good at sort of trying to you know clean up their timeline or do 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deterrence plans start at 49.99 a month visit simply safe.com slash licenses for alarm license information the thing that struck me if if communications are to be believed is the utter sort of lack of understanding that you've ended a life the the the impact of that seemed completely bereft of of consequence like did not understand or did not care yeah i mean i think i think some of that you know it's that is beyond my scope when it comes to like psychological issues of of of depression or whatever but the thing that i really can understand and i actually think that the thing to take away from most of these violent acts is this sort of irony poisoned nihilism that is sort of the lingua franca of the internet that there is this like lol nothing matters kind of feeling the only thing that really matters is you know getting a rise out of different people performing for your people like this minnesota minneapolis shooter people this is this is the church or this is this i mean here's how horrible this is i'm like are you talking about the church or the guy who went and killed uh melissa hortman i mean that's no sorry yeah no i know right sorry this is the church that happened like two and a half weeks ago this person had all kinds of awful stuff like you know like racist white supremacist anti-semitic stuff scrawled on his guns and his his magazines right he also had weird stuff about like you know exxon like down with exxon and down with black rock like all these weird things he had all the shooters sort of that extreme left and extreme right meeting it's that everybody talks about that that sort of extreme left extreme right meeting and sort of this weird place but i think it wasn't that i think the point is they knew when they did this that it was going to make news that it was going to be picked apart that he was going to be treated like a puzzle to solve by the media by you and me and that's why there's all this stuff that is on there that is actually ideologically incoherent so in some ways you're saying that that the idea behind all this is nothing more than murder fame in your online group and also now let's all sit back and watch the world burn yeah are we already behind on all of that you know we're discussing it uh in terms of the algorithm on social media have they already found other deeper caverns where they're living that aren't even touched by those algorithms are these people even on yeah you know instagram or are they living in under is it subterranean from that even i so these these communities a lot of them will exist in like chat spaces which aren't really algorithmically driven you know like some of the some of what does chat space mean like what so like like a like there are whatsapp groups there are telegram telegram is a is a messaging service that is infamously it it doesn't moderate like it took the european union and the department of justice a lot of work to get them to try to get rid of isis content right like they do not moderate for anything they're free speech maximalist um platform right and so that like there are there are communities there right on on telegram uh right the terrorism white supremacy the school shooter fandoms these you know whatever um there are you know discord as you mentioned is a platform that does moderate but is sort of you know locked in this whack-a-mole game right you were mentioning with cults and leaders there's no leader to a lot of these things right it's an amoeba right it's the borg it's it's this weird headless yeah it's it's it's a headless network you know i i wonder sometimes this is where we're at now ai is going to supercharge this i'm assuming it's going to supercharge the algorithms is going to make this worse do you have a sense though of are other countries facing this issue why is america seem to be i mean other than our unbelievable access to the weapons of death is that the only thing that that supercharges this in this country because europe for all its problems doesn't seem to have this one it seems like it's probably like the original sin when it comes to taking online violence and chaos and nihilism and making it physical like you know it's just pretty easy but but it doesn't seem to happen in other places certainly not as often and as as constantly as it does here yeah i mean i think the closest thing that you see globally is terrorist organizations right like fringe radical terrorists but i we have an isis of disaffected fucking high school students and college kind of wow wow i mean that's deep man that's that's but there's but there's not but there's not an ideology really behind it other than this I mean, again, I think like when I go back to watching – like one of the things that was so frustrating, whether it was this church shooter in Minneapolis or the stuff with Kirk and the bullets. Like the first thing that came out was that like ATF unsourced or one-sourced Wall Street Journal report that said there was transgender ideology on the thing. And it's like when I see that as someone who's spent a lot of time trying to wrap my head around this stuff, I go, oh, man, whoever that person was who wrote down that report, I don't care. care if they're politically motivated or not and maybe they are maybe they're not but i know for damn sure they have never spent time in these communities right you don't just say words like that that we are jump we are jumping to conclusions that favor whatever our narratives are when that's the the exact point of these people is to be enigmas to be puzzles to have people not understand or maybe some of them go that way and some of them are much clearer uh about their political aims but it's the certainty that you see in legacy media creates more misinformation and uncertainty is is kind of the point in the chaos so like if you go into these if you go into these communities right like so one that's you know like we hear a lot about 4chan right if you go into one of the sort of political message board political message boards on on 4chan part of what you're seeing is just a lot of chaos right there's just a lot of people you know insulting each other but they don't really mean it or they do me like it's just like there's it's just it's kind of nuts and there is a way in which like these communities have have this feeling and by committing this act by murdering a bunch of people they see it as a troll like they are trolling everyone because just you watch donald trump's going to get on fox news and say something right or msnbc is going to do this or these lawmakers are all going to point the finger or oh god they're playing they're playing the response i i mean truly that's like i feel sometimes like i'm again over generalizing when i'm when i'm looking at this i think it's hard to have any conversation without over generalizing but every person's you know got their own motivations whatnot and then you read the charging document of charlie kirk's shooter and it says man if i see this on fox news i'm gonna have a stroke like that's the that's the quote right and i'm like well there it is like that's that's it that's one of the one of the things is they want to see the reaction from the so-called normal world or and wants to see the normal people not be able to understand it they want they want the reporters the journalists the lawmakers the investigators to try to solve their puzzle and fail because they and and that's when you think about it that's so human right they they they want to try to be understood but they also want to be seen as yeah unendingly i've got no sympathy no no for the misunderstood you know miscreant that's like i just want to be seen and you're like there's man i'm not going to be seen i'm going to be seen i'm going to be seen man fucking take a painting class like get good i'm certainly not defending it no no no that's that's what it is i just meant yeah yeah i i get what you're saying do you think look anything that can be constructed can be deconstructed are there tools that can give us a better sense of when these things are going to break into real life and and and are we going to have to understand how to utilize those is that the way out of this i mean i don't know how i don't want to be like the the kids in the underground subreddits but you know let's face facts like the overwhelming majority of it is pretty harmless right but is there some way to crystallize where the real peril is and and how to find our way out of it i think that there's a there's such a number of ways you could go with all this right like one of the things that when i talk to a lot of these researchers they all sort of like put their head in their hands because they're like what i'm going to say to you sounds so naive and like so pie in the sky and like you know you're going to dismiss me immediately but they're like we we need more like third spaces and community spaces and and like like the we need the infrastructure that's not digital we need the physical infrastructure that's not digital we need the physical infrastructure that's not digital the answer is midnight basketball yes the answer is is a community of people who care about and and and keep people who are showing these types of tendencies from you know driving themselves or running into the arms of of these other people right like you know the one thing that that this one researcher uh at university of uh of boulder alex newhouse told me is that you can see from these people a receding from the the physical world when they start to really go down these paths like right they're not going to school right like they they're they stop they stop going to these things and they start spending but this kid didn't seem like that at all no oh he's having dinner with his parents he's going to work he's going to school he's doing the whole thing like and that's why we don't know right whether we still don't really even know he's not he may he may fit into this other box but it's very clear there are a few little things that signs and things that he left that he thought would either be nihilistically funny or or what or whatnot but there is like a like a a physical thing right or or was like this person is a hateful person and i've decided to be uh the judge jury and executioner like it could simply be that right truly and and i i wrote i wrote this in the in the last piece but the the thing that the most i think unnerves people the most is this idea that there might not be an ideology to pin it to like it's not even like i think a lot of people were like oh i hope it's not my side you know who who did this i hope that person's not on on my side because i don't want to have to answer for that or whatnot or that's going to make things worse for me somehow or the you know but i think even more unnerving to people is this what what what what what made them do this right what like where where was the what fail safes you know didn't work sure no it takes you back i think in some respects you say okay we've seen assassinations before in our history we've seen uh times of volatility and you know insecurity and generally revolved around either you know vietnam war uh racial issues or you know different things this feels like clockwork orange this is a whole other sort of subculture that like you say it is you know it has its own language it has its own mores and it's yeah it's it's why the manson case created such a hysteria back when that first surfaced yeah i mean i think it's really interesting people i think it's really interesting people i think it's really interesting people have brought this up and again this is a little outside of my zone of expertise but i think it's interesting you know we don't really have like a serial killer problem in the same way that you know historically we had but we do have this mass shooting problem right and it's interesting yes it's it's it's interesting is this a different expression of a type of violence of a type of thing you know instead of right like are we seeing the same things but they're you know they're it's being sort of transformed by our current culture our current media our current you know whatever a nihilism that's always been with us supercharged by technological advances and again that's a little that's a little beyond my my scope but i think it's i think it's certainly fascinating i think it's i think it's good to like keep in perspective with this because you can immediately sort of go into the doomer territory with all this it's very easy to do yeah but i i do think that you know this isn't the cause of the problem it's the cause of the problem it's the cause of the problem it's the cause of the problem it's the cause of the problem it's the cause of the problem it's a common experience of being online no i know this is it's one of those things where you're like but you know think of all the people who aren't shot like it's one of those like yeah okay all right no totally i but i think like i think when you're trying to address this i i think one of the biggest issues there's obviously like the technological issues i think like the government needs to really start taking this even more seriously oh well they are they apparently are going to on the left apparently they're not going to do it right right and apparently george soros is going to jail for this one right yeah no that's uh it's not going to make make anything better yeah but uh i think the biden administration sort of right at the end designated this terrorist sort of online group terrorgram you know uh as a as a you know domestic threat which you know puts it in a in a different category and and allows you know the actual law enforcement agencies to sort of take this more seriously to you know to monitor this stuff again that gets into conversations about surveillance and what were we doing you know surveilling our kids and our kids going to get you know caught up in this thing because they're ironically posting about whatever you know it's not it's not a um it's not a coincidence that these communities are all cloaked in 85 layers of irony because it also makes it a little harder to track and understand what is actually going on until it might be too late right uh but you know i also think i think like one of the biggest things here is that and And that I see in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination is that people need to start taking the internet much more seriously. Like I have had journalists that I have seen who have sort of glibly and proudly been like, well, I don't know about like those spaces or those types of things. And what I would say is like if you are trying to cover politics in 2025, you need to know what a discord room is. You need to know how these things operate. You need to understand – I'm not saying you have to be – drive yourself mad or anything like that. But you have to understand these things because what we are doing right now is we're very clearly as like a broad media and political system, cultural system. We are playing into the hands of these people who are doing this. We are giving them what they want. We are performing for the internet. And you see this after Charlie Kirk's assassination. You're watching internet desitants perform with either shitposting or thing. You're seeing cable news certainly perform. All of it's – are prayers enough? They're going through all the stages. They're going through all the stages of how a story is in some ways put through the refinery of our modern media outlet. There's very little insight and a lot of performance. And maybe that's the exact wrong thing to be steering into. I have no idea if this would have as much of an effect as I think it would. But if the media stopped naming these shooters, I think – I think that that is like such a small thing that actually goes a bit of a way because, again, the thing that I think was so chilling about the Minneapolis church shooting is that they wrote all of these names of other mass shooters on the gun. Right. The shooters – That was very clearly a – Christ's church. I want whatever media storm those people had. I want that. Precisely. I want to be the next name on the gun. Hey, listen, man. I'll let – I know you got a lot going on and I appreciate you spending the time with us. I got to tell you, I made my bones in this business spending hours and hours watching cable news. It was a corrosive experience. I can't imagine because I think you're doing the same but in an even more difficult and acidic environment. You're with the atmosphere of Venus. We were still on Earth but you're in a whole other area. So much appreciated. Charlie Warzel, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of its newsletter, Galaxy Brain. Thanks very much for talking to us, Charlie. Yeah, thanks for having me. Wow. So it is – I have to say it's sort of what I thought it was. It's sort of – It's sort of strange, unregulated, wild west culture where the worst version of yourself is not just in any way visible but encouraged, cultivated, fertilized. It is exactly the kind of environment that we need to aerate if we are to move forward in non-native. In nihilist fashion. Yes. That is for sure. But I do want to thank Charlie for taking the time. And I also, as always, want to thank all those that work on this podcast who do such a great job week in and week out. The – not unsung heroes. Sung – they are the sung. We should sing their praises more often. Our lead producer, Lauren Walker. Producer, Brittany Mamedovic. Producer, Jillian Spear. Video editor and engineer, Rob Vitolo. Audio editor and engineer, Nicole Boyce. And our executive producers, Chris McShane and Katie Gray. We will see you next week under hopefully more pleasant circumstances. Bye-bye. The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions. It's a production of Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions. It is not meant to represent the views, opinions, or opinions of Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions. All delivery fees may apply. See our seven-day return policy at caravano.com. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. The message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. 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