The Internet Does Its Thing with Luigi Mangione

The shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson captured the internet's attention last week. Then, a suspect, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, was arrested, and social media really went wild. Why, in a week of historic headlines from around the world, did this story captivate so many, so thoroughly? Show notes: Suspect in CEO’s Killing Had Discussed His Health Struggles on Reddit (The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/10/nyregion/luigi-mangione-health-issues-reddit.html) r/GetNoted (Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/GetNoted/) What Can We Learn From the C. E. O. Shooting Suspect’s Goodreads History? (The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/10/books/review/luigi-mangione-goodreads-history.html) Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. It was hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores the intersection between fashion and sustainability. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:19Speaker 01

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• 0:35Speaker 02

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 0:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hey.

• 0:45Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, hey there.

• 0:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  How are you doing? How are you feeling about the world, the state of our country and the world?

• 0:53Amory Sivertson?

  You know, the news this week has been super rough. WBUR is in its fundraiser right now.

• 1:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01Amory Sivertson?

  And we've had a genuinely really hard time. I mean, it's easy to talk about the importance of a news source like WBUR.

• 1:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09Amory Sivertson?

  But we're having a really hard time doing the whole like, and we also bring you joy. And so I'd like to think that Endless Thread helps with some of that, even though when there is news like there is right now, we can also help kind of explain it in our own way and be familiar voices helping wade through unfamiliar territory.

• 1:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think that's right. And also you can help us by going to wbur.org/donate.

• 1:39Amory Sivertson?

  That is absolutely true. Yes, that too, that too.

• 1:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Friends.

• 1:43Amory Sivertson?

  Very important.

• 1:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:50Amory Sivertson?

  How are you doing?

• 1:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm good. I'm feeling a little like everything is completely out of control. And I feel like this story, I've just been like doom scrolling Reddit, as I am want to do all the time. But particularly this story of the United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, being shot and killed by someone who now is apparently in custody.

• 2:23Amory Sivertson?

  A suspect, at least.

• 2:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  A suspect, who has been, I believe, charged at this point, at the day we're recording this, the end of the day, Tuesday, Luigi Mangione. What has been surprising to me is just how, at least on the internet, the support of the shooter has been full, 100%. Like, get out the guillotines, shoot them all, kill them. And what strikes me about that is that feels like a sort of step change in how we talk about accountability for the wealthy.

• 3:11Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, for sure. There is huge news happening everywhere, but I think the fact that online and in the spaces that you and I frequently occupy, the fact that the death of United Healthcare CEO is the story, is telling. And that's why we're talking about this.

• 3:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  What do you think it's telling us?

• 3:32Amory Sivertson?

  It is both the story of a murder, which captures people's attention for, you know, obvious but sad reasons. But also, you really feel this tension of...

• 3:45Amory Sivertson?

  Was this justified or not, online at least?

• 3:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  I mean, that's, that's what I mean about accountability, right? Like, we're in this zone where I think a lot of people don't think that there will be accountability for the CEO of an organization that a lot of people would say denies 30% of claims and basically is set up as a profit-making machine that has blood on its hands of, I don't know, tens of thousands of people for denying them healthcare. Like, this is in this, like, really tricky zone of, like,

• 4:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  there is no struggle but the class struggle. And that's what I see online in the way people are talking about this.

• 4:26Amory Sivertson?

  I, I would also say that, that this story is one where the internet, and I mean, the internet at large, people online, people on social media, on platforms like Reddit, feel like they can help investigate because it is a developing story.

• 4:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:42Amory Sivertson?

  And so when there are holes to fill in, the internet generally gets to work at trying to fill in those holes. And at a time when we leave such vast digital footprints, from our typical social media accounts to our, say, Goodreads accounts, the internet knows how to get to work in a way that can be productive and helpful and super counterproductive and confusing.

• 5:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, it's like, internet, do your thing. Oh, my God, the internet did its thing.

• 5:14Amory Sivertson?

  Yes.

• 5:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  And, and, and I also think there's another layer of it, too, because this was an unsolved, but very publicly viewed killing. And it reminded me of the Boston bombing, the Boston Marathon bombing and what Reddit did in response to that. And the very negative impacts of that. Especially as I was seeing some stories online about online investigators, like people on TikTok and elsewhere, essentially actually refusing in some ways to investigate or try to solve this. There was like a bunch of people, a bunch of internet users who were like trying to figure out where this guy was or just sort of participating in that mystery of like, oh, my God, who could this guy have been?

• 5:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  What, what, what were his motives, et cetera? And then there were people who were like semi-professional, whatever, TikTok investigators, who were effectively refusing to engage in that manhunt.

• 6:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  For what appeared to be a mix of reasons, like somewhere in between, let's let the professionals deal with this to I don't want to get attacked because myself or doxed myself because of how many people are this guy's like, he's like Robin Hood. Like, people were cheering online, this guy getting away.

• 6:37Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, and we should not say everyone, but

• 6:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Right.

• 6:40Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, when you take a spin through Reddit and now that this this person has been named especially, you scroll through and search this guy's name on Reddit and you will find an overwhelming amount of support.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Guys, wake up. New Luigi Lord just dropped.

• 6:54Speaker 05

  Some people are zooming in on the middle of the eyebrows. I think that's just because it's grainy.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I don't believe for a second that this guy just got caught. I believe that this guy made a very conscious choice to get caught.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  So, multiple news sources, including People Magazine, have found his Reddit account.

• 7:10Speaker 05

  Bro's Twitter has gained 232,000 followers in hours. Absolutely ridiculous. He's kind of cute, though. Can I say that?

• 7:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Today on Endless Thread from WBUR, we're talking about

• 7:28Amory Sivertson?

  How the internet is talking about Luigi Mangione.

• 7:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Memes, manifestos, conspiracy theories.

• 7:36Amory Sivertson?

  And uncomfortable truths.

• 7:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  A thing that jumped out to me very quickly, obviously, there were assumptions made very early on, and those assumptions may have had some merit in that people were like, oh, this person has to have or have a loved one who had their healthcare denied or gone had some version of their healthcare go terribly sideways. It's since come out that apparently this guy had back surgery that did not go well and seems to have changed his personality, according to some reports, which is apparently a thing that happens. But again, that's a lot of speculation. I think the thing that jumped out to me very

• 8:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  quickly was the other side of it. So, the fact that, according to a few people,

• 8:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  There started to be the scrubbing of information on other public healthcare CEOs. So people were flagging, for instance, that photos and pages on Wikipedia were being changed and edited in real time. So one of the examples of this supposed scrubbing, I saw on Late Stage Capitalism, that subreddit, do you know that one?

• 9:03Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, of course.

• 9:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Always, always on Late Stage Capitalism. And the title of the post was, "Oh, the rich are real scared." And this was a screenshot of the David Joyner Wikipedia page. And it says, "An editor has nominated this article for deletion." That's what it says at the top of the page. And it says, "David Joyner is an American business executive. He is the president and chief executive officer of CVS Health." So like, these are some of the things that people start to see and say, "Oh, people are reacting to this and like, now that this person has been executed, maybe there will

• 9:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  be more." And the super-rich CEOs are trying to make it hard to find them and kill them. Now, of course, any publicly traded company, a little bit of research, you can get past the Wikipedia article and actually find the names of people who are the leaders of publicly traded companies. And it's relatively easy to find images of those people on the internet. So like, I think this is like, the lowest level of like, internet research that someone could do if they were wanting to go after a CEO. So I don't know how much actual deterrence that is, but I found that in reaction, apparent

• 10:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  reaction to this killing, and that jumped out to me as kind of interesting.

• 10:35Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, so speaking of scrubbing from the internet.

• 10:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 10:39Amory Sivertson?

  Something that I found is Redditors commenting on the fact that the suspect himself is a Redditor. And they tag an account. The username is Pep Mangione. And that happens to also be this person's actual Twitter or X account. And so if the X account and the Reddit account are the same...

• 11:04Amory Sivertson?

  They believe that this account was suspended. So I'm going to click on the account right now because it is hyperlink in the post that I'm looking at.

• 11:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 11:13Amory Sivertson?

  And indeed, it says this account has been suspended. So suspended is not straight up banned or removed as far as I know. It's suspended for a period of time. What we don't know is whether what these Redditors are asserting is true, which is that the suspect was super active and had a ton of content and engagement on Reddit.

• 11:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 11:36Amory Sivertson?

  And people are saying that as soon as he was named Reddit admins swooped in, suspended that account. And I've contacted it. We know it is suspended.

• 11:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 11:49Amory Sivertson?

  But what was the order of operations? So I did reach out to Reddit.

• 11:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Our former partners, our former podcast partners, Reddit.

• 11:55Amory Sivertson?

  Exactly. I did reach out just trying to get confirmation of that. Did you know for sure that this was his account? When did the suspending happen? And if invited them on to explain the reasons for suspending the account and what their procedures are around this.

• 12:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Cool.

• 12:10Amory Sivertson?

  Because the interesting, well, a lot of it's interesting to me, but part of it is a person's Reddit account is technically public information.

• 12:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 12:24Amory Sivertson?

  And so when you suspend the account, you are removing a lot of clues about the person potentially.

• 12:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 12:32Amory Sivertson?

  And it raises the question of who has the right to have access to those clues? Does the public have the right to still have that information at their fingertips? Did they suspend the account to withhold the information and pass it along to law enforcement? And if so, don't we still have a right to see it? I mean, it could be that there's a very good reason for this and someone would say, no, no, no. Here's why we had to remove it or just restrict the access to that information for X, Y, and Z. And I'm completely open to that.

• 13:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:04Amory Sivertson?

  But I did find it interesting that if this person was an active Redditor, that suddenly an account would be suspended and you wouldn't be able to see their existence on Reddit.

• 13:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  That I totally agree that is like fascinating and like.

• 13:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Befuddling, I guess. And I think also that that feeds into a lot of what we were also seeing online and what also always happens when something like this happens and the internet kind of like starts to try to solve for the thing or answer questions before the news media does, which is just a reality of the world that we live in now, which is this like explosion of conspiracy theories.

• 13:42Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  At the same time.

• 13:44Amory Sivertson?

  And just to say, as of the time that we're taping this, I have not heard back from Reddit about, to confirm that, yes, they suspended the account right away and to comment on why and what the plan is for the suspect's Reddit account. So we'll see.

• 13:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  We'll see what they say.

• 14:00Amory Sivertson?

  Invitation still stands. Yeah.

• 14:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  More about the conspiracy theories and the misinformation in a minute.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Is sustainability in fashion a selling point for consumers?

• 14:32Speaker 06

  I think the sustainability gets advertised as being a big driver of fashion, when in fact, I think it's way down on the list of purchase criteria for consumers.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on whether consumers can be both fashionable and sustainable.

• 15:00Speaker 01

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• 15:32Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Alison Aubrey, longtime health and science correspondent with NPR. And I've got a new podcast all about the science and wisdom of life after 50. It's called Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. We want to take you on a journey to help you explore all the opportunities to make change and feel good as you step into middle aged and beyond from WBUR and NPR.

• 15:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Your Turn with Alison Aubrey from NPR and WBUR. Supported by AARP. New episodes every Thursday.

• 16:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, so one of the general conspiracies that like has exploded since Luigi Mangione has been brought in, I mean, there are a lot of, immediately the internet has questions about Luigi.

• 16:20Amory Sivertson?

  Of course.

• 16:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  And lots of memes. Anyone named Luigi is going to get memed.

• 16:26Amory Sivertson?

  Yep.

• 16:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  But one of the general conspiracies I saw that I thought was, again, just like kind of interesting or notable, or this, this seemed very like internet-y to me, the way people dive in and start to do research, is immediately people were talking about the eyebrows of the suspect who was brought in and comparing those eyebrows to the eyebrows of the very sort of grainy image that we had of the shooter who had, you know, a face mask on and his hood up, et cetera, but seemed to have some like pretty distinguishing kind of chiseled, maybe, features, one could say, like, I don't know. How would you describe the features in that image?

• 17:10Amory Sivertson?

  I don't feel like I could make them out enough to describe them as chiseled, but I know what you're talking about with the eyebrows, where they, Redditors are saying that Mangione's eyebrows are, there's, there's more there.

• 17:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  They're bigger and there is more of a unibrow.

• 17:27Amory Sivertson?

  There's more, it's inching towards a unibrow, whereas in the original photo of the suspect that was released, they did not appear to be quite so. Approaching unibrow hood.

• 17:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah. And this is the kind of thing that I think just like blows up when this sort of thing happens, right? Like, people just start tearing everything apart and coming up with all sorts of wild theories.

• 17:52Amory Sivertson?

  Yes. Eyebrows look pretty different from picture to picture, I will say. You need some good lighting to see how, what percentage of unibrow achievement one has.

• 18:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, along with the conspiracies came a lot of digging into, as soon as this guy was named, the information that exists online about him. And that's also sort of a fascinating thing to watch in 2024. Fascinating and, you know, maybe a little bit macabre, like, thing to watch is like, the internet, as soon as there's a name, like, the internet finds out every possible thing that might have been left as a trace, or a fingerprint, or a, you know, a sort of philosophical position that this person has had on the internet.

• 18:45Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. So, one example of this is his Goodreads account. And his Goodreads activity has gotten more attention because of a review he left for a very particular book. This is called Industrial Society and Its Future.

• 19:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:05Amory Sivertson?

  Written by Theodore John Kozinski.

• 19:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Classic.

• 19:09Amory Sivertson?

  AKA, the Unabomber. And this does appear to be a legit review, according to Fortune Magazine. Mangione writes, "It's easy to quickly and thoughtlessly," well, I think he meant to say "thoughtlessly," "write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it's simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out." And this is because Ted Kozinski was known to be anti-corporate. And Mangione quotes in his review, "A take that he found online."

• 19:48Amory Sivertson?

  And in this quote, it says, "When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods," meaning Kaczynski's, "but to see things from his perspective, it's not terrorism, it's war and revolution." And then further down, "We're animals, just like everything else on this planet, except we've forgotten the law of the jungle and bend over for our overlords when any other animal would recognize the threat and fight to the death for their survival. Violence never solved anything is a statement uttered by cowards and predators."

• 20:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Geez.

• 20:25Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. So this review was left in January of 2024. And someone really went through Mangione's Goodreads takes and saw that he happened to give Ted Kaczynski's book four out of five stars.

• 20:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  The thing that sort of fascinates me and also makes me wonder where we're all going and why is there a hell sign right there and why am I in this basket?

• 21:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Is like McDonald's, which is, you know, the place of business where somebody recognized Mangione's upper brow, apparently, and called the authorities in Pennsylvania. After days and days of this like super intense manhunt, McDonald's has been absolutely dragged and review bombed.

• 21:24Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, that particular location in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Yeah.

• 21:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  It does not have four out of five stars, like Ted Kaczynski's book, according to Luigi. It has like a half a star at this point. And apparently, Google stepped in to help McDonald's rectify this, which, again...

• 21:44Amory Sivertson?

  Wow.

• 21:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Interesting. And I actually saw a tweet of Burger King saying, "We don't snitch." Now, I think the good news is that Burger King is not that stupid. And Snopes has reviewed this because it really blew up this Burger King tweet. This supposed Burger King tweet.

• 22:07Amory Sivertson?

  Was it actually tweeted from the Burger King account? Or this was a total Photoshop job?

• 22:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is just a Photoshop job that blew up for like half a day.

• 22:17Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 22:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  And again, this is like the thing that's like so complicated about how we actually like digest information now as this like globally connected network of users. When something really big happens, the news of that actual factual thing happening spreads like lightning. And the sort of like culling through the sort of processing that we all do of that news is more and more confused and mixed up and full of conspiracy theory and full of Photoshop things and fake things and rumors, et cetera, et cetera.

• 22:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  And now we have 50 times that amount of misinformation like slammed into our craniums every time something like this happens.

• 23:10Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 23:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  And that freaks me out.

• 23:13Amory Sivertson?

  It freaks me out too, for sure. And I try to look for the little bright spots where you can get them.

• 23:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Love a bright spot. Can I get a bright spot?

• 23:25Amory Sivertson?

  You can, you can. I will mention a subreddit that I stumbled upon in looking at some of this. It's called Get Noted.

• 23:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, yeah, yep.

• 23:35Amory Sivertson?

  And this is a subreddit that draws attention to the times when people get fact checked on Twitter or X, of course, now. So you may have seen, if you are on the platform X, you may have seen a post that you're not sure if it's true or not. And then you'll see a little community note or it'll say like, "Readers added context to this post" because it might be misleading. So there was a tweet. From someone whose username is not important in this moment, but they supposedly tweeted out the suspect's manifesto, because it was said that he was found with this three-page handwritten manifesto on him when he was arrested.

• 24:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:21Amory Sivertson?

  This manifesto was posted to a Substack.

• 24:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:24Amory Sivertson?

  And this person tweets it out. Readers added context, which is the Substack was launched after the suspect was already arrested. Also, this is missing quotes noted by a police official who saw the suspect's handwritten manifesto.

• 24:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm.

• 24:41Amory Sivertson?

  So there's reason to doubt this manifesto. And I heard about all of this on GetNoted, the subreddit. And so that, to me, is a little bit of a bright spot, because it's a place where you can go to just see the things that deserve a more critical eye. And someone commented when this particular tweet was posted with the manifesto and said, "I get the feeling this sub is going to get a hell of a workout in the coming days, weeks, and months." And that is true. And I'm glad to know that places like this on the internet exist to say, "Hey, take a beat, take a breath. Let's wait and see if this is verified." Because could it be that this is his manifesto?

• 25:23Amory Sivertson?

  You know, it looks like it's missing key information.

• 25:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:28Amory Sivertson?

  Then again, Newsweek went ahead and published something saying, "Unverified Mangione Substack Manifesto Shared Online." And so to even share that to their site will make some people think that it is more likely to be legitimate than not.

• 25:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, I think what I like about that, and just to be absolutely clear, like, I am pro-internet users figuring things out. One of the things that's complicated in all of this is like, yes, it does freak me out, this sort of like...

• 26:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  Breakneck speed at which we all digest this stuff and come up with theories and try to chase those theories down, et cetera, et cetera. But I want to believe that internet users can work together to actually solve for things. And that includes universal healthcare, by the way. But I also just think like, that's a really happy thought of, you know, just thinking about the fact that we can be teammates in discovering and maintaining and communicating the truth.

• 26:35Amory Sivertson?

  And the adage in journalism at least is being right is better than being first.

• 26:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm.

• 26:40Amory Sivertson?

  And it sometimes feels like that rule doesn't apply online because it is, you know.

• 26:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 26:47Amory Sivertson?

  Citizen journalism and citizen fact finding missions are citizen based. They're not actual publications, but I think if we all tried to adhere to that more, ah, we'd be in a better place.

• 27:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  And as long as you're standing behind me in the line for the water fountain, I totally agree.

• 27:06Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 27:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  I was first.

• 27:09Amory Sivertson?

  Oh. But yes, if there are major developments, we will, we will be there for you following as others follow along online.

• 27:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Be nice to each other.

• 27:23Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, my gosh, please, please just be nice to each other.

• 27:36Amory Sivertson?

  Just a little postscript for you here. As of finishing this episode, we have not heard back from Reddit, but reporting from the New York Times cited a Reddit spokeswoman who said the company's policy was to suspend accounts that may potentially be related to suspects in high profile criminal investigations. As to the logic for that policy, they did not elaborate.

• 28:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston.

• 28:14Amory Sivertson?

  This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and co-hosted by us, Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson.

• 28:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  We produced a little bit of it, too, I would say.

• 28:22Amory Sivertson?

  We scoured the internet.

• 28:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  We looked at the internet and we copied some links and pasted them in a document.

• 28:30Amory Sivertson?

  I spent way too much time scrolling through content on a story that is tough. Tough waters to be swimming in, but that's what we do.

• 28:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Point being, Grace Tatter is the MVP here. Mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikas.

• 28:46Amory Sivertson?

  The rest of our team is Emily Jankowski, Dean Russell, and managing producer Suma Tajoshi.

• 28:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you've got an unsolved mystery, an untold history, or a wild or concerning story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up, [email protected].

• 29:11Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring fashion and culture journalist and author Dana Thomas on the origin of fast fashion.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  In the 1990s, during the early days of globalization, a small brand out of Spain called Zara was deciding to spread its wings beyond Spain and move throughout Europe and roll out its stores of not expensive, kind of fashionable clothes, middle-market, accessible fashion. And what they did for their business model was they would go to fashion shows and see what was the hip thing, and then reinterpret it in less expensive fabrics, just like Gap was doing. But at the time, Zara was embracing this business model called QR, quick response, which was in In fact, invented by the US apparel industry.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Basically, you'd put in a few items of a collection in the store. And if it did really well, then you put more into production and you put them in the store. And if they didn't do so well, then you stopped it and you moved on to the next thing. It was like, almost like doing a focus group drop of clothes in the store and seeing what works, what doesn't, and what does, you play. So they started moving into this area of quick response and turning out more collections more quickly and getting onto their store floor faster. And they saw that by doing this, by upping the number of times they did drops in the store to every two weeks as opposed to four times a year, that their numbers of visits from consumers went up dramatically.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.