Filmmaker Daniel Lombroso on How To Stay Sane Amidst Radicalization

Ryan talks to director and journalist Daniel Lombroso about social media and the ways that people can be manipulated and radicalized by it, the Internet-fueled rise of extremist movements, and more. Daniel Lombroso is a filmmaker and journalist based in New York City. His most recent work is the feature documentary White Noise, which follows key figures in the American alt-right movement. Before that, Lombroso spent five years directing video shorts for The Atlantic. This episode is brought to you by Optimize, the membership that guides you on the path to living right. Optimize offers services like Philosopher Notes, six-page condensed reviews of insightful nonfiction books like Epictetus’s Discourses, Ryan’s The Obstacle Is the Way, and more. Members also get access to 101 video Master Classes, each one an intensive taught by experts about a particular topic. Visit optimize.me/dailystoic and get your first fourteen days free, plus 10% off your membership with discount code STOIC. This episode is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic is a maker of mushroom coffee, lattes, elixirs, and more. Their drinks all taste amazing and they've full of all sorts of all-natural compounds and immunity boosters to help you think clearly and live well. Four Sigmatic has a new exclusive deal for Daily Stoic listeners: get up to 39% off their bestselling Lion’s Mane bundle by visiting foursigmatic.com/stoic.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Daniel Lombroso:Homepage: http://www.daniellombroso.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DanielLombrosoInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dlumbo/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It feels like a whole other lifetime ago, but my first book was about media manipulation, how good people and, but mostly bad people are able to exploit loopholes and patterns in the media to get messages across. And this could be done if you're promoting a yoga studio or a charitable cause, but it can also be done if you're a bad actor, right? If you're a foreign entity trying to influence an election in a country, if you're trying to spread misinformation

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  or a conspiracy theory through social media, or if you're a demagogue, or worse, you can use the same thing. And so I was fascinated by this documentary that actually The Atlantic just put out called White Noise, which is basically a three- or four-year look inside the white nationalist movement and the extreme, extreme right wing, people like Richard Spencer and Lauren Southern and Mike Cernovich. And what's weird is I was fascinated with the documentary. I happened to know some of the characters in the documentary because, as it happens, I'd found out over the years that they'd read my book. The purpose of Trust Me, I'm Lying was to sort of expose how these things operate, so we're not at

• 1:52Ryan Holiday?

  the mercy of what I think are downright bad actors, people who are bad for the world, people who are emphatically embodying ideas that are against what the Stoics talk about. But in any case, here we are. And so I reached out to the director of the documentary, Daniel Ambrosio, and I said, hey, do you want to come on the podcast and talk about it? Because we've talked about this idea before of radicalization, that the Stoics are...

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  Not one to be radicalized. For the Stoics, it's about keeping an even keel. It's about keeping an objective view. It's emphatically about not falling prey to the impulses or the ideas of the mob, or the tyrant, as the Stoics would have called them. And so I wanted to talk about those forces which are operating on people, people you love and care about right now, people who are then, and this is something I talk a lot about in this book, this idea of trading up the chain, how a thing can start on social media, or Wikipedia, or start in a YouTube video and worm its way up and soon enough be a real talking point for global media outlets, even world leaders.

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  And that's one of the really fascinating things you see in this documentary, is how, you know, these figures, these almost cartoonish figures, that you'd think no one could be taking seriously, in fact, are reaching millions of people. And they're reaching people who in turn reach millions of more people. It's almost like the ideas are getting laundered. And so I think this is a fascinating episode. Daniel was actually, as you'll hear, was a little nervous to talk to me. He wondered sort of what my intentions were, which I thought was funny, but I totally understand it. And I think the interview turned out great. Can't wait for you to hear it. And look, if you know someone who's been sucked down one of these rabbit holes, if you happen to be someone who's, you know, explored some of these rabbit holes yourself,

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  I think this is a great conversation. I think the documentary is well worth reading. I streamed it on YouTube and I really enjoyed it. So check it out, White Noise Inside the Racist Right by Daniel Ambrosio. He's a great filmmaker and journalist. He was, for many years, he was a staff producer at The Atlantic. He's done all sorts of great work. This is his first feature, and it is the first feature ever made by The Atlantic. And you absolutely should check it out. So I thought we should start with you. You were a little nervous to chat with me. Maybe we should, maybe we should lay that out. It was because you'd heard of my work, but probably not the Stoicism work, I'm guessing.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's true. You know, I'm happy to talk to anyone about the film. It was four years of my life and I gave everything to studying and examining the rise of extremism in this country. I think I had some pause, knowing that you appeared in Mike Cernovich's film Hoax. You're an expert interview in the film. And at first that made me think that maybe you were, you know, more sympathetic to those views than I might originally have thought. But then I looked you up and saw that, you know, you've done a lot of really great work. I was actually just listening to your interview with Manu Ginobili, who I'm a big fan of. And that was awesome. So I'm happy to be here.

• 5:04Ryan Holiday?

  It's a weird thing because I wrote, trust me, I'm lying, intending, and I wrote it in 2011, the idea being like, hey, here's how these sort of thing, here's how like the logic of the internet sort of information ecosystem is working. And here are like sort of the vulnerabilities in it that admittedly, you know, my sort of work had led me to take advantage of, but mostly for benign things, right? But I was sort of seeing how this could be used more nefariously. And so when I wrote that book, my thinking was, I'm writing this so people in the media really understand how this works.

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  And not only did that, that message, that part of the message didn't quite get through because the media reaction was pretty negative about the book, but it happened that a number of the people that are in your film gravitated towards the book and it sort of informs the logic of what they do.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  I think that's definitely true. I mean, social media was seen very optimistically, as you know, at the time. It was right around the Arab Spring and everyone saw the potential of a decentralized internet where there are no, you know, industry gatekeepers who can tell you what can be published and what can't be published. And I think it was seen, you know, very optimistically as a way to connect the world. And we've seen over the past few years that it can be used much more nefariously. And I guess in a way you were, you were one step ahead of the curve there. I think it's. I would add that it's, it doesn't surprise me that they've picked up and appropriated your work. It's very common for them to look for different examples of ways to kind of weaponize information. And it doesn't really matter the political agenda of the writer who's doing it.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  I think they're looking for the most effective ways to, you know, package information and, and inject it into the mainstream. And it doesn't matter the source. I mean, they often cite, you know, 60s radical writers from the left, like Rules for Radicals, a very famous book on, on political organizing.

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  It's actually a great book.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  I've never read it, but it's funny that people in Spencer's world in particular cite that book often. And it was, you know, used a lot in, in the new left in the 60s and in the hippie movement fighting the Vietnam War. And many of them are now appropriating to, to fight their own war against white demographic change in this country.

• 7:24Ryan Holiday?

  That is something I'm curious about. Why is it that, like, usually sort of trolling or manipulation, there's almost a level of sort of covertness required or secrecy required? I think what's striking to me about not just the, the characters in the film, but, but this sort of level of, of media manipulation that we're seeing is, is kind of how transparent it is. Like, the methodology is very simple and the process by which it happens is very straightforward. And yet we seem to be so defenseless as a culture against it.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  I think that's true. And I think the starting premise is one that we're all familiar with now, which is that the most emotional content online is that which succeeds. So radical, extreme content is always going to take off. And you see that on the left, but especially on the right. And, you know, if you're just tweeting centrist, boring takes that could appear on CNN, you're not really going to go anywhere. But if you're Mike Cernovich, who, you know, is an out of work lawyer, living in a sunny life in Southern California, trying to have, you know, some impact on the world, and you start tweeting, you know, you see Hillary faint and start tweeting, oh, she's not, she didn't just faint, she actually has Parkinson's disease, she's deeply sick. That's so extreme and conspiratorial that people might respond to it. People might retweet it, people might amplify it.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  And I think you see in the case of Cernovich, you know, he was a struggling lawyer. He had a blog, he traveled the world, but he really saw a kinship in President Trump and saw someone who kind of reflected him really got on that train and used the power of social media, like I said, tweeting the most extreme things possible, the most provocative things possible and really kind of built a career out of it. And I think you see that across the film and across all of the subjects. I'm sure we'll dissect them, but Lauren in particular is the one who has just a very intuitive sense of how social media works. I mean, she, she got famous when she was 19, she hit it big, and she just understands at a gut level what will take off, how you need to package it, and especially on YouTube,

• 9:28Speaker 01

  what a video needs to look like to really take off and go mainstream.

• 9:32Ryan Holiday?

  There's a Frederick Douglass quote, I think it's like, a man is worked on by what he works on. I have this theory that as overt and deliberate as the manipulation that's happening with these extreme groups, they too are being manipulated by the same algorithm. So like, I feel like I know personally, a number of people, I was talking to another internet writer that I know, that sort of maybe 10 years ago were sort of like writing in the online pickup space or writing about self-improvement. They were writing about, even, even you look at someone like Scott Adams, who, you know, is the cartoonist behind Dilbert, and it's like they start, like, so they clearly had

• 10:12Ryan Holiday?

  a pred election or a sort of a lean one way politically, but then it's almost as if the algorithm and the desire that all writers have, and you as a filmmaker and a writer probably empathize with it too, it's like, we have this desire to be seen and heard and to get attention and to be in the, in the mix. And I'm wondering if they too are being radicalized by the desire for likes and attention. Do you know what I mean?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  I think that's absolutely true, and the subjects speak to it pretty directly. So Lauren got famous when she was 19 years old. I traveled. For three years of her life, from when she's 22 to 25. And she says towards the end of the film that her obsession for likes and follows and support has become so all consuming that she's never had the space in her life to actually make sense of who she is as a person. With Lauren in particular, this is very kind of fascinating game that's being played where she is her public persona and has become it and has become so handicapped by her audience and what they want that she actually never really had the chance to discover who she is privately. One kind of funny example, you know, I spent hundreds of hours with these people across five countries and 12 states. And I was driving with Lauren

• 11:24Speaker 01

  once in France and we always had time to kill. And I said, you know, what music do you like? Do you want to put something on? And it was hard for her to think about what she was into. I mean, she listens to like EDM playlists. And then eventually we landed on Frank Sinatra because she inherited, you know, a lot of that kind of music from her parents. But I think, I think these subjects would not be where they are without social media. And in a way, it handicaps you to your audience and you end up just kind of feeding meat to the base and in a way, becoming more extreme because like you said, they all have a need to be seen. And you're more likely to be seen if you're saying things that are extreme, that are provocative, that are potentially conspiratorial.

• 12:03Ryan Holiday?

  It's almost evolutionary. Like you said, like, so Mike tweets this one thing out and it gets attention. And then you're like, oh, I need to do more of that. Like in this, in, you know, much more innocuously, it's like, I see parents who have kids. It's like, oh, when I post pictures of my kids, they do better. And it's like, it's almost like we become slaves to these platforms and their sort of very insidious understanding of our human nature.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, you get a dopamine rush every time. I'm not all that active on social media. I'm using my accounts to promote the film now, but you get a dopamine hit every time you see someone liked something, someone shared something. I mean, it's that times 10 for these folks. And Mike actually has this amazing line that didn't make the film, where he talked about how he's a dealer, but he's also an addict. He's a dealer. He's a dealer in that he's getting all of these people addicted to his content and to the things that he's purveying. But he's also an addict himself. I mean, I spent so much time with him across the country and with his family. And he actually, you know, he's a supportive husband. He's there for his wife, Shawna, who's fascinating. She's, she's Persian American. They have a mixed race kid.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  But he's also addicted to his phone and always checking if the things he's saying or doing are being retweeted or being received well. And it's an addiction that he doesn't know how to escape. I mean, he constantly complained that back in the day, he used to read books and now he can't even read more than a few sentences. And I think these platforms have just fundamentally rewired our brains and the way we process information.

• 13:35Ryan Holiday?

  I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, who this is like a perfectly nice guy, a Christian, smart guy, always been generous and kind and empathetic. And it had been clear to me that he'd sort of, he had said something and I said, oh, that's not true. And he's like, oh, you gotta, you gotta follow this guy on Twitter. And I won't say who it was, but it's like a sort of a COVID denier type person who's become prominent since the pandemic happened. And it was like, it struck me in that moment, I was like, oh, this guy's been, he's been infected, like my friend has been infected. And not by, not by COVID, but by whatever strain of thinking this is.

• 14:20Ryan Holiday?

  And that's like, when I was watching your film, and I didn't know you had sort of shot that famous scene at the, at the, you know, the alt-right, Richard Spencer's talk right after Trump was elected. But when, when Richard Spencer says like, you know, hail Trump, and, and everyone sort of gets up, there's this one moment where one of the guys, he almost looks like a rabid dog to me, like he has this like intensity and anger. And it was, it was striking to me, it was like, oh, all the people in this room have been infected. Wherever Richard Spencer got his sort of nonsensical, you know, horrendous beliefs, he has gone around and spread them to these other people and they're now infected.

• 15:02Ryan Holiday?

  Do you kind of see the, the white nationalist movement as a kind of infection or is it something else?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  I think that's a very smart way to think about it. I mean, these ideas have tremendous emotional power. I think a lot of philosophies like liberalism in particular, appeal to the mind and really appeal to our notions of equality and justice, that we all live in a society together. Those aren't, you know, those don't appeal to the heart in the same way. I think- Fascist.

• 15:29Ryan Holiday?

  Not anymore, because we've known them for so long.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  We've known them for so long and they're so embedded in our culture and we learn them in civics class. I mean, I think they're the most important ideals, but they're, in a way, they're, they're, they're boring, they're mundane, they're part of our life. I think what this, what white nationalism and conspiracy allow you to do is that you feel in a way that you've discovered a secret truth. You've discovered something that's been hidden from you intentionally by the gatekeepers, who by the way, might happen to be secret Jews, because it's often dog whistle antisemitism.

• 16:01Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  And they've been keeping from you that actually, there's this other way of seeing the world. And there's this other, that actually, you're not just some bored, out of work, white kid living in your mom's basement. You're actually a descendant of a Greek and a Roman. You're inheriting this amazing, age-old civilization that is whiteness. And I think that's ideologically incoherent for a million reasons. I mean, there's never been any notion of whiteness. You could argue that there was British nationalism or German nationalism, and even that is complicated, but there's definitely never been a white nationalism before. I mean, white people have been killing each other for most of the 20th century. But those ideas, like you said, are infectious and they can spread and they feel good. I

• 16:46Speaker 01

  think that's the part that's really missing from the conversation is they, they're intoxicating and they make you feel this tremendous feeling of power and transcendence, like your life has a purpose beyond the kind of banalities of your everyday existence. And, and Richard is a demagogue. Richard is the one, you know, over the course of the film, you sort of see him fall off, but he has this rhetorical power. I mean, he really very consciously styles himself as a 20th century fascist after people like Mussolini. He knows how to speak. He knows how to dress. I mean, it's part of his package. And, you know, these kids feel like they're taking part in something that they're following this figure who's fighting for the preservation of Western society. And it's, it's tremendously destructive,

• 17:28Speaker 01

  but it's also tremendously emotional and powerful and it, it resonates with so many people. And I, I do think we have to take that seriously.

• 17:36Ryan Holiday?

  No, absolutely. I wrote this piece, and I think I sent it to you after the 2016 election, where this is sort of right in the middle of Milo's tour, which was getting all this attention, only, obviously, in retrospect, was it clear that it was sort of being funded by certain billionaires. But it struck me that, as this sort of virus is spreading, what's interesting is that the virus is actually not that infectious, right? Like, to 99% of people, when you hear Richard Spencer's ideas or Milo's ideas, you're like, this person is a clown. This person has no idea what you're talking about. So in a way, it's kind of like COVID, in that, like, most people, you know, you're

• 18:18Ryan Holiday?

  either asymptomatic, or, you know, you kick it the way that you do the flu. It's really those people who have some sort of pre-existing condition, or some inherent vulnerability that, that it really is dangerous, right? What's funny is, like, we think these ideas are viral, but in reality, they're very not viral. Like, if you, if you showed 100 people a video of Richard Spencer, the vast majority of them would be like, turn this off, right? But what, what it's like, 1, 1 out of 99 is like, ooh. So it's almost as if they need to be controversial, because the New York Times thinks they're denouncing Richard Spencer, and they are, but they happen to be accidentally exposing him to the 1 out of 99 that he needs.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  I think that's a way to think about it, but it's not really about the Richards, it's about the Mikes and the Loren's. I mean, what, what Lauren does so effectively is take the edge off of Richard, and by doing so, reaching hundreds of thousands or millions of people. So she's produced a few racist propaganda films now, one of which reached millions of people about the persecution of white farmers in South Africa, which has been debunked. But that went viral, it went through conservative media, and President Trump started tweeting about it. I mean, that started, to some degree, with Lauren Southern. With her second film, Borderless, about the migrant crisis, she was invited to the European Parliament to speak. I mean, never in my wildest imagination did I think

• 19:45Speaker 01

  a 19-year-old YouTuber from Vancouver, whose first viral video was holding a sign saying there is no rape culture through a bunch of sexual assault survivors, effectively shaming them, a few years later would be giving a presentation to European Parliament members. So I- I think Richard isn't quite the right way to think about it. Richard is the ideologue. He's the purest form. He's saying the quiet part out loud. But what people like Mike and Lauren are doing is kind of laundering a diluted version into the mainstream. And you see a lot of those ideas, maybe not Richard's extermination, but just a deep-seated fear of white decline, you know, seeping into mainstream media, into conservative media,

• 20:29Speaker 01

  definitely on Fox News every night and definitely in the White House, too. So I think, you know, maybe one out of 100 likes Richard's neo-fascism, but I would say 25 out of 100, you know, like Mike and Richard and Mike and Lauren and the stuff that they're purveying.

• 20:46Ryan Holiday?

  I got, I remember I got an email from Milo after the piece that was like, you don't understand how great I am. Like, it was just like, you know, deranged nonsense.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:55Ryan Holiday?

  And that was something that struck me. And so most people obviously haven't had that interaction with that person. Right? And one of the things that struck me as being powerful in the film is you sort of have these glimpses of like who they actually are. You know, I was thinking of the scene of Mike running up the hill, which seems so like, it was like watching someone try to be really cool, but failing at it really hard. I'm just curious, like, what, as someone who's actually spent time with them in person, when they aren't able to meticulously cultivate, you know, the image, the way that they can to their own audience, what is it that people need to know about these figures?

• 21:39Speaker 01

  I think the running scene is a great example. It's always a laugh line when we screen it. You see Mike-

• 21:44Ryan Holiday?

  It was like Napoleon Dynamite or something.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  You see Mike pop, it was unprovoked. Mike pops something like 14 pills, one of which is for erectile dysfunction or for male performance, let's say. And then he drinks two espressos and shows me his daily run, which is a couple sprints up a hill near his town in Orange County. And it's pretty clear, you know, Mike, I think the film at its core is about kind of the dissonance between the public persona and the private. So Mike, very publicly, is, is, is the epitome of the alpha male. You know, he has the good looking wife and the nice house. He lives on sunshine and sunshine. It's like, it's the pinnacle of the American dream. He lifts weights, he knows how to get girls. People really trust him in that world.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  So one kind of funny example, Lucian Wintrich, who's kind of a minor character in the film, he started the Twinks for Trump meme. When him and his boyfriend broke up, Mike Cernovich was his first call because he really trusted Mike as kind of a father figure, as someone that he could look up to. And I think publicly, Mike really presents that to the world and presents it effectively. And I think the whole, kind of the purpose of the film on some level is to kind of deconstruct that and see who they are in private. And that's why I think the document, the verite form, which is really observational, allows you to do that. And you see just how contradictory they are, how hypocritical they are. And I don't mean to point fingers, but how kind of, kind of empty they are inside at times.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  And I think you do see that a lot of them are kind of deeply sad or deeply confused. And the running scene is a really great example because like I said, he projects power, but you know, struggles to run 100 meters. Another example that comes to mind is Mike gives this big workshop around guerrilla mindset, teaching a bunch of young men how to be powerful and think positive thoughts. And then I interview him afterwards in the car and he admits to me that he's actually a deeply unhappy person, that he doesn't like him. He says, I'm not someone who likes myself particularly much. I think that's really important to, to reveal just at a human level that, that these people are struggling like so many. And when you have, we start with a quote from James Baldwin and he talks about this, that when you have a void, it's easy to fill it.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  And, and you know, hate or conspiracy is, is actually the easiest way, I would say, to, to fill that void.

• 24:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Did you see that Sarah Silverman clip that went viral where she was talking about like a friend of hers that had joined like a hate group and she was, she was talking to me like, this was a guy who lost his parents. He was lonely, was sad, and that was like the only group that accepted him. It's, it strikes me with like when, when I was watching your documentary, my wife walked by and Richard Spencer was on the screen and she was like, that's the most like repressed gay person that I've ever seen in my life. And she wasn't meaning that insultingly. Uh, there's nothing wrong with it. Her, her point was just like, that was someone trying very hard to be something that they're not. Um, yeah. And, and I, there, there seemed to be a vibe with all of that in those characters, which again, there's nothing wrong with it. It's,

• 24:44Ryan Holiday?

  it's that they're trying to find something they desperately need in terribly inappropriate places.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  I think that's a very good way to put it. And to take Richard as an example, Richard was second rate at everything. He was a second rate football player in high school. He was a, his dream, his great dream was to always be an avant garde theater director. And he tried his hand at it and was never, you know, especially good. And I think in a way with Richard, this, you know, being a kind of pseudo white nationalist is his great performance. I mean, he's sort of, he believes it. He is an ideologue, but he's also kind of cosplaying this historical importance. You know, he really believes that he's this dissident philosopher that one day in history will be received favorably, which I highly doubt. And it is all about performance. I mean,

• 25:34Speaker 01

  it's about performing and hopefully eventually getting the validation that you feel like you so desperately need. One example with Richard actually that comes to mind is this also didn't make the film, but he's very close to his mom. He's actually estranged from his father. His father is a very successful ophthalmologist in Texas and nothing was ever good enough for Richard's dad. I mean, he wasn't a good enough student. He wasn't a good enough athlete. And, and you could, and we could, I could really tell, meeting Richard and hearing about that, that it grated on him and he has this kind of feeling deep down that he, that he has to prove something to his dad eventually. And With all the subjects in their own way, they kind of have that origin story.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, we, we eventually, you know, decided to cut that from the film because we felt like it would veer too much into humanizing someone who's, who's so problematic. But I think it's telling in that, you know, there's this kind of impulse to be seen, to be heard, to prove the haters wrong. And they all, all the subjects in the film really have that down to the bone, I would say.

• 26:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like, look, we all have issues, right? Like, we all have issues with our parents, or we have issues with feeling inadequate, or with our identity, or we have things that we're, we're angry about, right? And to me, it's like, you're fine, that dysfunction, you can use that however you want, and you can channel it however you want, as long as you don't make the world a worse place because of it. And what seems to be that, it, it seems like they're all working out their own issues, but pretending that the, the domain or the field they've chosen to do it is not real life. You know, like, like-

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, Mike, it's a very good way to put it. Mike actually believes life is a simulation. He doesn't believe life is real. He says it sort of trollishly, but I think he believes it. You're right. Yeah.

• 27:21Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, Rich, Richard thinks you can, you can shout these things, get these people very angry, and then when one of them runs over somebody else with a car, it's not, it's not real. And, and I remember being somewhat familiar with these people in the 2016 election. It, it was like, they, it, it was almost, is, almost less that they liked Trump and thought he would do any of it, and more that there's this element of sort of owning the libs, or like, just trolling and getting attention, like, like, and I felt that on the stuff that I used to do from a marketing perspective, there is an element of just, this is a game, and it's fun to win at a game. It's just like, when your game is corrupting or undermining democratic norms, there's consequences for that.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  There should be consequences for that, but I think as the film shows, there are no consequences for that. I mean, all three subjects, white nationalist violence is surging around the world, you know, from New Zealand to El Paso to Pittsburgh, you know, white domestic terrorism is now the number one threat, according to the FBI in this country. And, you know, you could argue that it's a pretty direct line from the rhetoric of some of the subjects to the violence that's taken place. At the very least, you could argue that they're fanning the flames of a hatred that's being picked up by more radical members, right? And at the end of the film, I just put the question to them, you know, hate crimes are surging in the US and Europe. Do you take any responsibility for that? And all three of them echo each other. I mean, they all basically say the same thing. They say, if

• 28:51Speaker 01

  anyone engaged in aggressive violence against others, it's because they have disobeyed them. And I think, you know, that's a theme across the film, is that you can unleash violence vitriol, you can increase polarization. But if you come from a privileged part of society, you can also wipe your hands clean and walk away. And I think with Lauren, I wrote a long story about her that goes along with the film. She left the country, she lives in Australia now, and she's back to her usual grind. She's appealing, appearing on Australian, on Sky News in Australia as a conservative commentator, which is owned by the Murdoch family. And, you know, she hasn't had to deal with any of the consequences of what she's done. And I think that comes from a place of immense privilege.

• 29:36Ryan Holiday?

  So let's say somebody knew somebody that has become a fan of these people. Actually, when one of the, I was telling you, is like, some, some close friends of ours, great people, they were like, hey, I saw you in that, that documentary. And it was like, whoa, like, I didn't, you know, as I was telling you, it's like, I knew like crazy people watch this stuff, but like, the idea that real people were watching it, it's like, oh, again, here's someone who's sort of been infected. How do you bring someone back? Like, if you were, if you were talking to a Lauren Southern fan, what do you tell them? Like, how do you, because what cognitive dissonance does is it's like, people have probably heard what we've been saying about these figures and going, oh, they're just jealous, or, oh,

• 30:19Ryan Holiday?

  they're missing the point, or, oh, they don't get it. Like, how do you, how do you de-radicalize someone? I would assume that the figures themselves are irredeemable at some point. But how do you, how do you bring somebody back from the brink that is otherwise? You know, potentially normal human being.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Well, I think it starts with empathy and starts with understanding, you know. I don't believe that we should be shouting people off stages. I think white nationalism conspiracy is problematic, is making this country worse. But the only way to come back from the brink is to, is to listen to one another, to talk to one another, to hear one another out. And I think the film, I would say to watch the film, I don't mean to push it.

• 31:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  You know, I think the film is made in that spirit. I mean, it's made in the spirit of understanding. It's not humanizing, it's not amplifying, but it's understanding who they are and what they believe. And I think it just, you know, over the course of the film, you really see the vacuousness of these ideas and how empty they are. And how maybe temporarily they make you feel better, but in the long term, they just completely eat away at you inside. And I think I would, you know, I would try to communicate that to someone that like, yeah, this might make you feel good temporarily. But all the bullshit you're putting on your Twitter feed, that's going to come back to bite you. All of the hatred you're feeling towards your neighbor, like one day you're going to wake up and see that they have kids too, that they're trying to raise. They're trying their best, working two jobs.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  They're doing everything, you know, coming to this country, trying to achieve the American dream, which of course is harder to achieve than ever. So I think it really just starts from a, from a position of empathy and, and just seeing your neighbor as someone who's equal to you. And I tried to do that in my own way. I'm Jewish, I'm the grandson of two Holocaust survivors. And like I said, I spent hundreds of hours with each subject and most of it off camera, eating, traveling, just kind of doing the boring things. And when I had alone time with them, I would tell them about my story. I would tell them about the persecution of Jews, you know, six out of nine million Jews in Europe, or two thirds of Jews in Europe were killed 70 years ago. And I think people don't understand necessarily the proportion of that tragedy. And I think it just.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  There's immense power in just being able to sit with someone, have a conversation, and very calmly explain to them your perspective, maybe what your family's been through. You know, it might only change one out of 100 people, but I think in particular with antisemitism, I saw some of the subjects open their minds a little bit. One subject in particular made a lot of funny references and would joke about how hard it must be for me to be around people like him because he was so deeply seated. He at least became a little more self-aware. And another subject I knew actually created a meme of a river flowing, which is antisemitism, and the dam is Daniel. The Daniel's the one stopping the river flowing.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, I'm not trying to pat myself on the back. I'm just saying, there's a lot of, it's becoming increasingly rare, but there's a lot of power in just sitting with someone and talking to them and being empathetic, even if you completely disagree with where they come from.

• 33:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like you get this infection of conspiratorial sort of radicalism, but then it leads to this other infection of sort of like callousness, right? To me, that's been striking about the pandemic, right? It's like, look, if you want to believe that like this is a Chinese hoax or whatever, like, you know, it doesn't, sure, you can believe whatever you want. But what's interesting is how quickly that descends into, oftentimes, it's like, look, if you believe it's a Chinese hoax, or it was a weapon employed against us by the Chinese, you'd think you'd also be a person who's then taking it very seriously, right? But somehow, you're not. But what's striking, what I think what saddens me most about it is it's like, okay, so you

• 34:08Ryan Holiday?

  believe this extreme thing, and then this is also the person who's expressing sort of deeply callous indifference to the suffering or the pain of others.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:19Ryan Holiday?

  And so it's like, like, look, like, I totally get having a strong, let's say you have strong views on immigration or something, and then, but then you get to a place where suddenly that view is now, and maybe this is how it works, you know, you bring up the Holocaust, it's almost like a process of hardening or closing oneself off, so then you don't have to wrestle with the horrors that naturally, you know, come from what you're talking about. I don't know, it's just the meanness of it, I think, is so striking.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  I think that's a good way to put it. You know, Trumpism is something that's impossible to define.

• 34:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  I saw a shirt recently that people are buying that I think encapsulates it really well. It says, Trump 2020, fuck your feelings.

• 35:08Ryan Holiday?

  Fuck your feelings.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Fuck your feelings. And I think that is Adam Server, who's a great writer at The Atlantic, wrote a piece called, The Cruelty Is The Point.

• 35:15Ryan Holiday?

  And he That's one of the best pieces of the last four years, I feel like.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  It's amazing. And that that phrase has been picked up by the Biden campaign and others. And and it's true. I mean, the cruelty is the point. The meanness is the point. It's a lot of people who feel like liberals and progressives have been telling them what to think forever. And now, fuck you, we're in control. We won. We won, you lose. I mean, it's a zero sum mindset. And, you know, I get that it can feel fun and celebratory and great, but it's just kind of mean and awful. And like, who wants to live in a world where you where you say fuck your feelings to your your neighbors or your friends or your family members? You know, I have a lot of conservative, you know, family members and friends who are actually voting for Trump. And I don't think fuck your feelings.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  I don't agree with their political ideology and I try to talk to them about it. But that kind of fuck your feelings mentality is just so deep in our politics now and in our ethos. And and I think Trump is kind of the cheerleader and the avatar for that. And you just see it trickle down onto social media and into everyday life. And for me, that's actually the most upsetting, I would say.

• 36:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, this is where what you're talking about overlaps with what I talk about now. Because I think and I think people think that Stoicism is about not having emotions and not caring about emotions. Right? So you might think like Stoicism as this sort of tough, you know, stiff upper lip philosophy is sort of simpatico with like the fuck your feelings idea.

• 36:49Ryan Holiday?

  And I think that to me, that fundamentally misses the point. For for me, Stoicism is best encapsulated in this idea of like tolerant with others, strict with yourself. So I think a Stoic would say like, fuck my feelings. Like, I'm not going to go around being easily offended. I'm not going to be incredibly sensitive. I'm not going to be a snowflake that thinks like, no one can disagree with me. And, you know, no one can challenge me, so on and so forth, because that's what I control. That's me. But I actually think as a good person, your obligation is to be really sensitive to other people's feelings. Right? So it's like, you go through the world going like, hey, there's nothing you can say that that can offend me.

• 37:32Ryan Holiday?

  But I'm still going to try hard not to offend you because I don't want to do that. That that's cruel and unnecessary and unpleasant.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't know a ton about Stoicism, to be honest, but my, I actually am curious. My impression has always been just taking a bunch of like philosophy. I was a poli sci major in philosophy 101 is, yeah, like you said, like really appealing to the mind, to human rationality and kind of my kind of cartoonish image, like you said, is is not allowing emotions to guide you. But you're saying that that's not, that there is, there is room for for positive emotions or for, yeah.

• 38:18Ryan Holiday?

  It's it's not allowing your emotions to rule your life. But that doesn't mean that you then get to project this on the, well, first off, like being crappy to other people in trying to hurt them, like is, you can't say that's like being an even keel kind of a person. But I think, I think it's the idea that. There's a great line from Marcus Aurelius where he says, "To be free of passion but full of love." And I think that's the idea. So it's like, I'm not going to be extreme. I'm not going to be jerked around my emotions, but I am going to go through the world sort of radiating a care and empathy for other people and not want to, if I can, not hurt

• 39:01Ryan Holiday?

  them. So I think like, for instance, free speech is really important and we shouldn't censor ourselves just because other people might disagree. But there's still a difference between that and say deliberately trying to hurt someone's feelings, which is weirdly where I think we veered towards as a society.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's well put. All of our discourse is shaped around emotion and being aggressive and hurting each other's feelings. And I hope that we can move towards a place where it's coming from a place of compassion and less emotionality, I would say, is a good thing. As little as I know about Stoicism, that if we're coming from a place where we think first before we say, if we like take the time to process information. I mean, just the thing that comes to mind for me is on Twitter, I mean, this is, this is beyond, obviously, the alt-right. People are so reactive and it almost feels like high school at times where there's just hordes of people attacking someone for something that maybe was just misconstrued. I mean, there's such, there's so, such little emphasis

• 40:04Speaker 01

  placed on intentions now. And, you know, someone might have intended for something to be a positive and just worded it imprecisely. And it was a, you know, a completely sincere gaffe. Like it just, it wasn't meant to come out that way, but it did. And I see that happening more and more where people who I know who are good people, who are committed to the right things, might unintentionally, you know, say the wrong thing or imply the wrong thing. And, and people jump on it. And I think it can feel... Exciting and powerful and you see these online clicks really kind of swarming them. But I don't think it's good for the discourse. I don't think it's good for anyone's mental health. And it doesn't really help us get any closer to the answers. So I do, I do hope we can kind of return to a pose where you think and lead with empathy, like you said.

• 40:49Ryan Holiday?

  I think this is another place where stoicism comes in, which is like, yeah, people make mistakes. They say things. It's not representative of who they are as a whole person, so on and so forth. But it's also like, hey, you know, you can have a thought and not tell everyone who follows you on social media. Right? Like, like, you know, you can, you can just sit alone in your house, Mike Sornovich, and not periscope it. And just, you know, say everything that comes into your mind, right? Like, what seems to be getting a lot of people in trouble is this, this sort of unfiltered, you know, sort of vomiting of feeling and emotion and thought. Like, the line from Cato was, was, you know, "I only speak when what I, when I believe that what I have to say

• 41:32Ryan Holiday?

  is better said than left unsaid." It seems like also people have really taken social media as an excuse to just emote, you know, or just to riff when we'd probably be better, you know, being a little bit more deliberate because we don't always have the best impulses.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  I think that's true. And there's never really been a medium, to my knowledge, before in history that allows you to just seamlessly pour out a stream of consciousness into the mainstream, into the world. And people with a tremendous platform, basically being able to share what they're thinking, what they're feeling every moment of the day in 200 characters. And I think that does incentivize, like you said, a lot of thoughtless responses, a lot of thoughtless takes. In a way, it rewires your brain. I mean, even just me going through this experience promoting a film for the past two and a half weeks, I'm spending so much of my time just like refreshing Twitter, checking to see what people are saying about the film.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  It's become like, I'm not someone who's ever cared much about reception. I really love the work I do. I love reporting. I love engaging with the world. And now I've become, you know, Obsessed with what people are saying and what and how they're saying it and where they're saying it and the number of people who are watching. And there are so many people who have that. And I'm done with it. I need to, I'm actually going to California next week because I just want to kind of take a break. And it blows my mind that people, you know, for years and years and years can be doing this grind and trying to grow their audience, grow their following. And to use Cernovich again, as an example, I mean, the guy is tweeting 20, 30, 40, 50 times an hour. I mean, when you're sitting with him, he is constantly on his phone. He's constantly checking his

• 43:19Speaker 01

  mentions and like he, he struggles and gets anxiety when he's not near it. Lauren, in particular, gets a tremendous amount of anxiety when her phone is dying or there's not a wifi connection. I mean, it's this insane dependence that, you know, that the alt-right is, you know, an extreme example of, but I think many of us feel in our day to day lives. And for me, it's, I already feel it as being something that's personally destructive.

• 43:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like when you get an article that really pops and then it's like your whole day is wasted because you're just like, you want to see how it's doing. I've really tried to build my life as a writer, like, sort of independent of the metrics as possible. And that's probably sort of hampered my career in some sense, right? Because like, there are probably like, things that were really going that I could have, you know, thrown fuel on the fire. But to me, it also keeps you out of that feedback loop we were talking about, which is like, once you see what's working, it's like, becomes impossible to do anything but that thing. And that's a very corruptive place to be.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And it's something you hear with celebrities all the time, is that they have that one hit, and then every show for the rest of their lives, they're at MSG, and people are cheering for them to play that one song. And I think, no, but you see that in a kind of a funny or more repulsive way with these alt-right figures, is they had their, Mike had, you know, Pizzagate, this really destructive myth that basically morphed into QAnon, that there was a child pedophilia ring in the basement of Comet Pizza in DC. There's actually not even a basement at Comet Pizza. My friend was a waitress there. But, you know, it's, he felt like he had impact. It went mainstream. Of someone

• 44:57Ryan Holiday?

  With the Hillary Parkinson's

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Hillary Parkinson's thing is an even better example. I mean, he said Hillary was sick after she fainted. A few days later, it ended up on Hannity. A few days after that came out of the president's mouth. And I think once you feel that sensation, that intoxication of being powerful, of shaping the discourse, of being a meme maker, it really changes your psychology and you're chasing it constantly. You're chasing the addiction. And with Mike and with Lauren, I just saw that constantly where, you know, they would think back to their, you know, quote unquote triumphs and kind of were constantly hunting for that next triumph. And, you know, that, that, that pursuit just never ends and, and, and the grind will just wear you down eventually. And of course, they very rarely stop back to think, you know, what am I actually putting out in the world?

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Is it making the world a better place? They're thinking much more about how many people will tweet it, how many people will like it? How many of my friends will be impressed with the kind of work that I'm doing?

• 45:52Ryan Holiday?

  It's very, very short term too, right? It's not, it's like, you know, it is possible to make, it's not that hard to make good work that has real impact that people like. It's just hard to defer gratification long enough to do that, right? Like you worked on this film for four years, you know, or, or my, my, my books, they take a year or two years. And then, you know, even then, that's not the end of it. It's like, I think what people, people want this fantasy of like, oh, you can have impact on an election by tweeting. What they don't want to do is go like, hey, how can I really make like a strong sort of lasting, significant argument?

• 46:32Ryan Holiday?

  Or, you know, like, like we're, I think we buy into the, the idea that like, oh, just throwing stuff up on YouTube is like the, the way to have cultural impact.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And delayed gratification is hard. I mean, it's really hard to just, to just trust in yourself, trust what you're doing. If you're laboring away at, at a book for two years like you do, or a film for several years like I do, there's just a men, an immense amount of trust that you're putting in yourself. You're, you're hoping that one day it will be received well. Every time you open your phone, you see that a friend or a colleague or a competitor came out with something new that's better and is being received well and getting all these write ups and. I think it takes a tremendous amount of trust and patience especially, and it can be hard to do that. And I think the key for me, like, this is my first feature, but I made short docs for years and years at The Atlantic. I think the key for me, and it's a lesson I'm

• 47:25Speaker 01

  really still learning, is to just to love the work and to let the work be its own reward. And you never, you never know how something is going to be received. I mean, it's, it's the news cycle. It's the marketing budget. I mean, there's a million things that dictate that. But if you love the work, it makes it worthwhile. And, you know, when I eventually embark on my next feature, I think I need to do a better job of that, actually, because if you think about reception constantly, then you end up as someone like Mike or Lauren, who, or like many of the other, you know, influencers, the influencer culture that we live in now, where you're just constantly looking for that next hit. But those hits aren't satisfying. They don't, they don't really build you a legacy. They don't last. They just feel good for that moment, like, like any drug.

• 48:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, ultimately, all these people are doing very forgettable work, even as, as, as toxic as it is. It's very ephemeral. And it takes, I think, I think the idea of the effort being enough, which is like a really core Stoic idea, is critical, too, because like with your movie, it's like you knew that what you were doing had meaning and purpose. And whether it was seen by one person or a million people, that was worthwhile. I think the trouble is when you know that you're like, you're a charlatan, deep down, or you know that you're just cashing in on something or riding a wave, it becomes much harder to delay gratification, because, you know, you, you don't have the faith in the

• 48:53Ryan Holiday?

  purpose of what you're doing. Because you don't, you don't actually mean it. And, and if the culture suddenly shifted, as it may, after the election, a lot of these people are going to go to a different niche, you know, because the one that they're in will have been all mined out.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  That's a great point, and Cernovich encapsulates that. At the, at the top of the film, you see him proudly using the label Alt-right, which he was espousing around 2016, when people started breaking out into Nazi salutes and a girl was killed in Charlottesville. The brand became more problematic, and you see him kind of shift towards the center right and say, fuck Richard Spencer, I'm not him, I'm my own guy. You know, purely from a branding and PR perspective, not from an ideological perspective. And then over the course of my reporting and across the film, you see eventually he moves on to supplements, he's selling facial serums and skincare products, he's giving workshops to men. And I think a part of his calculation was that there was a time where racism sold.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  I mean, it was a tremendous commodity around 2016. Then people started to get tired of it to some extent. The social media network started to crack down to some limited extent. Either way, the brand became corrupted and he had to pivot. And I think with someone like Mike, he's a shapeshifter and you see that he's constantly using his platform to cash in on kind of the dominant feeling of the time. And as that changes, he'll shift. So he, you know, when Alt-Right was positive, he used it, but later on, he uses the brand he built to cash in and to make some money. And all of this stuff is ephemeral. It might help you in the moment to build a little bit of celebrity, but it's not, it's not a,

• 50:31Speaker 01

  it's not a lot, you know, selling facial skincare products is not necessarily a legacy that I don't think he or anyone else wants to have on their terms.

• 50:38Ryan Holiday?

  And how much money are we actually talking about with these people? Because I mean, you know, Richard Spencer lives with his mom, right? And, you know, there seems to be, they seem to have a real vested interest in making themselves look much more successful than they are, but maybe, you know, the clothes are threadbare and the cabinets are empty? Or are they actually breaking it in?

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Richard is independently wealthy. He's never had a source of income in his life. I mean, he, he's relied on donations to his, to his, you know, so-called nonprofit, but he mostly has leaned on his family's wealth who are independently wealthy. They're actually, there's, they're actually plantation owners dating back to Louisiana in the deep south.

• 51:25Ryan Holiday?

  That's fitting.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  You know, Lauren and Mike are able to raise funds. Lauren crowdfunds most of her documentaries. I've seen her raise thousands of dollars in front of my eyes and she pretty mindlessly just blows money. I mean, she would, when I was in France with her, when she was shooting her racist propaganda film, Borderless, I was shooting on the Atlantic's best equipment, which was a very basic GH. Well, we have an F, it's called an F seven, but we were shooting on our kind of our B camera called the GH five. Her crew rented the most decked out C three hundred, which is a great camera with Cina lenses and a shoulder rig. And then we found out that one of the crew members flew a drone into a mountain and lost it, like a five, $10,000 drone.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  And she just laughed it off and said, oh shit, how am I going to explain that to whoever? You know, it's the type of thing that if I ever, it ever happened to me and I had to go back to the Atlantic, I would be freaking out for days and trying to figure out the best story. But for her, it was something she could laugh off. So there, there, there was always a pretty steady stream of funding. It became harder over time as Patreon and others cracked down on them. But I think it is important to know and acknowledge that like, there are a lot of people, a lot of wealthy people who are attracted to these ideas, a lot of people in Silicon Valley in particular, and in the gaming community, who like Mike, who like Lauren, who probably won't fuck with, you know, real neo-Nazi Richard Spencer stuff, but are attracted to kind of the dog whistle messaging.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  And Lauren actually told me, and would show me a few of them, you know, prominent people would DM her and say, you know, I'm this board member, I'm the CEO, I'm this gaming executive, and I could never say it publicly, but I want you to know that I love, I love your work and I love what you're doing. And I really do think it is important that even if these are broken people, people who are confused, that we understand how much they resonate publicly and really in the halls of power and even among people of influence.

• 53:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, and I mean, obviously, I know some of these people right now because I'm a fan of their work, but because our works intersected, right? And what's weird about it is you're like, you're having a normal conversation as if they are not also producing abhorrent work. Like, I think that, to me, that, like, I remember when I was writing my Peter Thiel book, I went back through my old emails and I found this conversation that I'd had with A.J. Delario, when Gawker had written something horrible about one of my clients, and he was like, you know, it's all professional wrestling. And I think there's an element of that with these figures as well, which to me is the most damning. It's like, obviously, it's horrible what they're saying and what they're doing, but if you believe it, there's at least some level of sincerity to it.

• 54:15Ryan Holiday?

  I think there's also an element where it's like, these are actually just

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Opportunists.

• 54:20Ryan Holiday?

  Opportunists, yeah, exactly. And they don't give a shit about it, and they are deliberately profiting off of it, but they, no one thinks, no one thinks less of their audience than they do.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  I think that's true. You know, all of them believe it enough to propagate it, but I think in their bones, they're all contrarians. I think if we lived in the Fourth Reich, if we lived in a fascist dictatorship, they might be BLM marching liberals. You know, I think Lauren, in particular, her kind of founding myth, which is, honestly, we talk to the teacher and the teacher denies it ever happened, but she claims in high school that she was separated by race and gender, you know, women on one side, men on the other side, people of color on one side, white people on the other side, and she claims that she was really isolated and called out as a white woman, and that radicalized her.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  And she claims that she realized in that moment, again, the teacher denies it ever happened, that she could push back and fight. And she started basically saying the most explosive thing possible in her high school class. So she gave an anti-climate change presentation. For another presentation, she dressed up as Hitler and Mussolini with a friend. She basically realized at the age of 15 or 16 that if you say the contrary thing to popular belief, you can really get a rise out of people and succeed in the world. And that's, if you think about Lauren in particular, this young YouTuber who's, you know, 19 when she got famous and 25 now. Sure, she's sympathetic to white nationalism. Sure, she's unleashed all sorts of things.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  But in her bone, the most fundamental thing is that she's a contrarian and she believes the opposite of what everyone else around her believes. And in this moment in time, where at least mainstream society as of now still somewhat believes in liberal values, and they claim that the press and universities are progressive or liberal bastions, they feel like it's fine and it's rock and roll and it's countercultural to be a far-right extremist. And for Lauren, that lesson that she learned in high school, she's brought with her the rest of her life.

• 56:30Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that's where the empathy you're talking about is really so important because it is easy to think like, oh, I would never fall for these things. Well, that's because you're a fully-formed adult, right? With friends and a job and some sense of what's happening in the world. I sort of shudder to think, like, if I was 14 years old right now, instead of getting into heavy metal as I did, or instead of getting into Maddox or some of the other funny online writers that I was into, it's like, I remember when you could go on something awful and there was just funny, ridiculous, somewhat inappropriate content. There was no white supremacists were not trying to recruit you

• 57:11Ryan Holiday?

  on these websites the way they are now. And so it is sobering to think of if you were a 13-year-old boy or girl who wanted to have an identity that was different than what everyone else was doing, you know, these are the kinds of things that you might gravitate towards.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  I think that's the right way to think about it. That this, it's destructive, yes, but it's also a powerful subculture with its own code of communication, its own dress, its own way of interacting. And it basically gives you a feeling like you're part of something bigger, that you're part of a community, like being a metal fan might be like. Any sort of subculture, you know, one of the weirdest and most surreal things about reporting inside this world is you can forget at times. I mean, it feels like you're part of a clique, like you're part of a cult even. And you have to really stop and think and listen to realize what they're saying because they're using so many dog whistles and they're kind of just casually talking and communicating. But all of them feel like they've kind of

• 58:13Speaker 01

  found some personal identity through the group identity, much like the way a lost 14 year old who might discover metal music, goes to his first Metallica show, meets all of his new friends, would feel like he discovered something in that community. It's totally surreal to feel those parallels because I've done, I've done a lot of work in my career beyond this on, you know, penetrating different subcultures and insular communities. And, and this was kind of a very eerie parallel to many of the other ones who didn't have nefarious intentions, but kind of shared those, I guess, kind of cultural affinities or ways of communicating.

• 58:48Ryan Holiday?

  So last question, one of the things that I tend to find as a reaction, like, let's say I, I say something about this stuff, or like I was involved in getting this Confederate monument taken down in the town that I live in, or, you know, if you say like, hey, like, if you, if you sort of come out and go like, hey, this is not okay, this is not okay, this is wrong, you know, I don't want to be, I don't want this to happen. There's this sort of response, and I feel like it's really been weaponized in the community that you profile in the film. Is this sort of like, oh, that's just virtue signaling, right? And virtue signaling is a thing. And, and there's a reason that that word sort of that concept bubbled up, you know, several years ago. But it does seem like what the alt right

• 59:32Ryan Holiday?

  community has managed to figure out is sort of turn the, the case against virtue signaling into almost an argument for like nihilism. You know what I mean? Like, like, nothing matters. Everyone's phony. This is all bullshit. And, uh, like,

• 59:50Ryan Holiday?

  You don't actually care. Do you know what I mean?

• 59:52Speaker 01

  I do know what you mean. I mean, they're all nihilist to the bone. I think Mike, Mike, most of all. Mike is kind of a postmodernist who believes that words have no meaning and that there is no objective truth in the end, that you can't prove anything, that everyone, he has a line in the film, that there are parallel truths, that you can never, everyone can create and inhabit their own reality, and it doesn't matter if you think something is a fact, because I have my own facts. And I think that Kellyanne Conway clip from a few years ago, of course, was played to death. But there's a lot of truth in that, that when she said, you know, you might have your facts, but us in the Trump administration, we have our own facts.

• 1:00:29Ryan Holiday?

  We have alternative facts.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  We have alternative facts, exactly. And I think that is how they operate, it is how they believe the world works at some sort of intrinsic level. And it, one of the kind of weird ironies in all of this is they're, they're constantly attacking the kind of cultural Marxists at universities who are indoctrinating our kids in postmodernism. But there are few people I know who live and inhabit postmodernism more than these far-right figures who believe that truth is totally flexible, everything is plastic, and the world can basically be bent to whatever reality you're trying to construct. So they've basically come to inhabit the world that they despise, which I think is an irony that they don't even realize.

• 1:01:09Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's beautifully said. Yeah, it's very sad. There's that line from General Mattis, published it in The Atlantic, I think, where he said, you know, cynicism is cowardice. And I, I, what I've taken away from your film and the reading I've done and the people I've met, is that actually, it's all rooted in, the nihilism and the cruelty and the awfulness, it's all rooted in a kind of fear and pain and sadness that really stems from their own colossal failures as human beings, that instead of accepting, they've decided to project out at the world.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  I think that's true. I think unfortunately, that's true. And I just hope we can move to a place where, you know, people are able to fill that void with with different things with, you know, civic engagement or community or or family or friends and

• 1:02:02Ryan Holiday?

  Or church or a job.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Or church, anything. I mean, there are so many ways to to create meaning in your life. And, you know, I'm still figuring it out. But for me, it's documentary filmmaking. For me, it's my family. For me, it's it's being Jewish to some extent. And, you know, for a lot of other people, it's it's hate, it's conspiracy, it's it's white nationalism. And I just hope we can move to a place where that becomes a little bit less prominent.

• 1:02:25Ryan Holiday?

  Daniel, thanks so much. I'm glad we bridged this gap and were able to uh able to chat.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  That was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

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