Offline with Jon Favreau - Were Trump’s Opponents Too Online? Plus, R. F. Kuang on Her Twitter Era Novel

Episode Date: January 21, 2024

R. F. Kuang, bestselling author of Yellowface, joins Offline to discuss cultural appropriation, the flatness of social media friendships and feedback, and the tortured relationship between literature and technology. Kuang recounts how pandemic doomscrolling destroyed her attention span, the book she wrote as a result, and how she’s reclaimed her focus and social life since. But first! Jon is FINALLY back from his two weeks of paternity leave — he and Max break down how Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy ran their campaigns like a 2016 meme war. Then, they compare the unsettling voice of AI Dean Phillips to the unsettling voice of human Dean Phillips, and unpack why no one is happy with Substack these days. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

I don't think that we are hardwired or naturally suited to dealing with the tremendous amount of feedback that our current internet age affords us. I don't think anybody's brain has the capacity to deal with thousands and thousands of reviews of your own work. At some point, it's just, it's so much noise. There is no way to helpfully sift through all of that. And if you're already anticipating what the shape of the review looks like before you've even written the manuscript,

then of course your work is going to be diluted and weak and uninteresting. You will inevitably offend some people if you're writing anything of any value. So I think there are enough young writers who have this attitude that literature isn't dead. But of course, it's a pressure and a danger to literature that I don't think existed in the Victorian era where Charles Dickens could just throw fan mail unread into the fire. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. You just heard from today's guest, New York Times bestselling author RF Kuang. Later, you'll hear a great interview I shared with her about her novel Yellowface, a psychological thriller that tells the story of a white writer who steals an unfinished manuscript

from her recently deceased Chinese American friend and passes it off as her own. The book tackles questions of cultural appropriation and representation in the publishing industry, but a lot of the story takes place on social media. With the internet fame it promises, the reputations it destroys, and the nuanced debate it flattens. It's basically a perfect offline book, and I invited her on to unpack all the questions it raises.

But first, Max and I are back in studio. John, welcome back, buddy. So great to have you back here. Is it good to be back? I guess the tone, there was like, was I sarcastic there? Were you asking me if it's good for you to be back? Or are you asking me if it's good for you to, I think it's good for you to be back. It feels great to be back.

I think this is good for you. We are recording this on a Friday. We start, I started, I came back Monday night for the Iowa caucus, Pod Save America. So it's been a real week. Couldn't keep you away. You really put me to shame that I had to take three weeks off when I was sick, and you took two weeks for the birth of your child. It's really making me feel kind of bad about myself.

You know, my whole life is just parenting and working. There's really nothing. Parenting and potting. When I was parenting during my parental leave, the times when I wasn't parenting, what was I doing? Not much. Sleeping, checking in on Slack.

Were you ever slinging takes with the kids? Who was slinging takes? Did you do ad reads with Charlie? Spent a lot of time with Charlie. Okay. And so we were just chit-chatting about politics. And about BetterHelp. And about BetterHelp. And about BetterHelp.

That's correct. All right. It's been a minute, so there's a lot of news to unpack here. But we wanted to start with the thing that Max and I have been following most closely, the Republican primary. After a commanding victory in Iowa and a growing lead in New Hampshire, it seems like Donald Trump is already pulling away with the nomination. Ron DeSantis, you guys remember Ron DeSantis?

Announced his campaign on Twitter spaces with Elon Musk and a few of the besties from the all-in pod. One of the great calamities of our era. It might be now that... Hundreds of thousands of people kicked off the broadcast. It might be one of the worst campaign launches of all time. It's pretty incredible. It might be the worst campaign launches of all time. Maybe the worst campaign launch of all time.

Yeah. Anyway, his campaign is now giving off some real Sixth Sense vibes as he wanders around South Carolina thinking that he still has a chance. Every time I see him on TV, it's like, is that guy still running? I thought we were past this. I thought we agreed this wasn't happening. Still running. Still looks as miserable as ever.

Also, online culture warrior, the vague Ramaswami is out of the race and only the comparably offline Nikki Haley has shown any signs of life. She's still hoping for a big upset in New Hampshire so then she can then go to South Carolina and lose.

But I wanted to talk about this because between DeSantis and Ramaswamy, they were two very online candidates. And to do is they were going to reproduce Trump's big 2016 primary insurgency victory. The kind of narrative in the party of which has always been that he courted these online social media fandoms, even when he was this outsider who no one in the party liked. And this pushed him over the top. And they really did like on paper, they really did execute on this. Like they really like they courted a lot of influencers. They were really like both of these campaigns were talking the talk about the like far right online fever swamps that Trump kind of started with in 2015 and 2016. And it

did not work whatsoever. And I think that it's like interesting to think about what does that tell us about what they and maybe we got wrong about the role of Internet in politics, because clearly there was something off on their like premises beyond just them being like bad candidates, which they are, too. I have a lot to say about this. You're in the right place. First of all, let's talk audience. Right. first of all let's talk audience right like social media users uh and this is generalizing across all platforms though each platform has its specific set of demographic characteristics of users but social media users in general are more likely to have college degrees

and more likely to consume a lot of news most voters do not have college degrees and don't consume a lot of news. So already, if you are focusing as a candidate for president intensely on people who are online, you are missing a large section of the electorate. Now, in a primary, especially with the caucus, right, in Iowa, right, where you have to leave your home, go show up at a caucus site, sit there for an hour. Those people tend to be overrepresented, more online, more educated, generally. It's the online audience is a that these guys are talking about. I think that that's I think that that gets to a couple of mistakes that they made. One was that like they kind of misunderstood where the online energy was for Trump in 2016. Like the stuff that we all heard about that made it into the news every day was Trump courting the like Milo Yiannopoulos,

Gamergate, 4chan, Pepe the Frog people. That's like really not where the votes are. And if you actually look at his like penetration on social media and where the votes were, the audience that he was reaching online, and I think there was a big audience he was reaching in that primary, was like Facebook dads and moms. And like this older demographic that is much larger that was on Facebook that was kind of like this latent far-right audience waiting for somebody to activate them. I think another big mistake that they made is they, you really understand that in 2016, we've kind of forgotten about it,

but like social media was kind of like terra nullius in terms of politics. Like no one really owned it yet. No one had courted it. It was kind of taboo to talk to the online far right whatsoever. So it was easy for Trump to go in and capture it. But like Trump owns that territory now. Like this is a big thing that Santa'santis campaign kept running into is they could find online influencers, but even if that audience did matter, they couldn't actually control that space because

there's too many pro-Trump voices there who are trying to shout them out or doing hashtag putting fingers, which he is. I also think that in 2016, Trump ended up getting a lot of support from all of these various alt-right online figures because they were attracted to his message. That campaign in 16 when it started out wasn't a campaign at all they did not set out to say

okay we got to go after Milo and then we got to go after the Pepe guy and all that kind of stuff they didn't do that he just had a message and the message resonated with some of the worst people on the internet many of the worst people on the internet and to the extent that he was like the twitter candidate he was tweeting crazy shit right and it was getting a ton of attention because he was tweeting such outrageous stuff online. And so it became like a magnet for the discourse.

And then it was covered on television. Right. Which is still how, and radio and everywhere else, which is still how a lot of older voters, especially voters in the Republican base, Republican Party at this point, get their news. And I think this also affects sort of, like, it wasn't just that DeSantis and Vivek didn't like figure out how to get into these online communities. It's that they thought that the issues that these online influencers cared about and their hobby horses represented what the broader Republican electorate also cared about. And I don't necessarily think that's true. I think it also really speaks to how the Internet has changed since 2016, where I think if you would like basing your entire worldview and your theory of politics on 2015, 2016, I think that was a time when there's a lot of evidence that they Milo Yiannopoulos, Gamergate types, it's a very small audience, but that young online social media far-right fan base that did have a real effect. That's a really big audience and those people did get really excited for Trump. And in a Republican primary, you actually only

need like 40% to dominate basically because the primaries are winner take all. But I think what has changed is that those like online far right influencers that DeSantis and like Vivek were doing a lot to court, like they did get a lot of those guys. They're no longer the entry point to the Facebook audiences because the social media landscape has gotten too fractured. And I think their biggest mistake that was a part of this

was they bought the Trump campaign's kind of own internal propaganda that they were the meme wizards who made all of this happen. And they're like Steve Bannon, it's like doing the internet dark arts. And there's this this study that i think about a lot this big like harvard university study after 2016 that was like

what the hell just happened that looked at social media and the internet during the campaign and what they found was that um as like one example of what the platforms were doing is a big one is that breitbart news remember breitbart News, the like crazy far right fever swamp, like Steve Bannon's publication, was the third most shared news source across all of Facebook from 2015 to 2016. And by far the most shared right wing news source. And it was super pro-Trump. And we know that this was the algorithm because it got no audience on Facebook before an algorithmic change around 2015. Its audience surges, and then later there's another algorithmic change and an audience is collapsed. And the same thing is happening on Twitter, where Breitbart

News is becoming the center of discussion. Immigration stories, Breitbart News articles are getting shared more than twice as much as all combined articles by any other news source, which is crazy because it's like 20 people work at Breitbart News. So I think this is all showing that the platforms were pushing audiences towards Trump. They were all converging algorithmically on these things. Wasn't the other way around. Exactly. Right. Trump was this passive beneficiary. And this was kind of this one-time phenomenon of all of the platforms pushing this one direction of picking up the Gamergate, Milo Yiannopoulos, Pepe the Frog stuff, shoving it out to these huge audiences in a way that they don't do anymore. Not because they've

become responsible, but just because they just changed how their algorithm works because they think there's better ways to cultivate huge audiences. So if you're trying to reproduce that, that just those currents that were kind of pushing Trump along aren't pushing in that direction anymore. I think that's all right. I also think that the medium matters here, right? But it's also, I think the medium is not the message. And once you get in front of audiences that are now much more fractured and siloed because of all of the changes that you just mentioned you still have uh to sell the product sure and i think because ramaswamy and desantis spent so

much time in those fever swamps they started talking and caring about things that like broadly the republican electorate didn't care not not enough of them cared about. Like, even all the, you know, the DEI stuff, right? That is a, there is a very, a small segment of the Republican base that really cares about that. Even if their values are generally aligned with that. You need to have, like, a fucking PhD in this shit to know, like, everything that Elon Musk and Bill Ackman and then, you know, like, all the, you know you know ben shapiro all these other people are talking about and i think that again the republican party base even in the primary you have like most of them are not avid news consumers right and i i don't know that i think trump has a better handle on what more of the base actually wants and talks about. If you looked at the entrance polls in the Iowa caucus,

so DeSantis wins voters who care most about abortion. Nikki Haley wins voters who care most about foreign policy. Both of them? Exactly. But those two groups of voters, the voters were like really into the social cultural issues and for policy make up a very small percentage of the overall Iowa electorate and voters who care about immigration, which was the biggest category, along with the economy, Trump wins those going away. And I think that also speaks to why 2016 was a particular moment when the being very online strategy worked really well, because 2016 was a time when a lot of voters on the right really cared about immigration. Now, some of that didn't have to do with immigration. Some of it actually had to do with social change and internal migration communities. A lot of it had to do

as a backlash to perceived threat from the Islamic State. And there'd been a couple of big terrorist attacks in the United States. So I'm not ennobling these attitudes. I'm just saying they existed. And something that Trump could do because he was the only social media, internet, far-right candidate is he could create a permission structure for people to have a level of white nationalist anti-immigration views that no one else in the primary field was going to let them have. And now if you're trying to do that as Ron DeSantis or Vivek Rasami, which they are definitely trying to do, Trump's already there. He already owns those voters. So you can only kind of break the seal of that white nationalist taboo once,

although the social media is the venue to do that. I actually think DeSantis got kind of closest to this when his big reelection for governor, his like big victory that everyone in the party was so excited about. I read that as part of what he was doing was kind of creating a permission structure for homophobia and transphobia in a way that didn't exist among the electorate.

And the moments when I was most worried about him surging were when I thought, okay, this is an attitude that Trump isn't tapping into that DeSantis is really going to activate in people. And I think that theory of going, being very online is sound to some degree, but you're right. It's not, it's not, thankfully, it's not the primary issue for most voters. Right. And it's I mean, it's not the primary issue for most Republican voters is still bad. Their immigration views, their views about crime. Right. Like all of this stuff is still. But it's just it's it's it's not as it's it's much more salient than some of the stuff that DeSantis and and widespread than some of the stuff DeSantis and Ramaswamy were selling. I also think, you know, there's this big question of like, why do so many voters not understand that like Trump is running again

and he's going to be the nominee and we could have another Trump presidency. And why aren't we talking? Why isn't most people talking about it as much? Why isn't he sort of the locus of our attention in a way that he was in 16 and 20? And I think what you were just talking about, how social media and the platforms and everything is fractured. I think that also explains this phenomenon. And Catherine Miller in the New York Times wrote this piece last month

about why Trump's candidacy isn't dominating the discussion like it did last time. And she makes a great point about this as well. She said, it just feels as though it requires much more work to find and understand the main news events of any given day now. A hazy feeling, yes, but one people seem to express often. I have noticed that. That's a great point. There was definitely a thing in 2015, 2016, where Trump would do a tweet. And part of this is his ability where he knew exactly what to say and exactly what buttons to press. But it was all anybody would talk or think about for the rest of the day. And it doesn't really happen anymore with anything.

Well, because Twitter is dying and threads hasn't taken off and Facebook is not what it was in terms of news and politics for ill or for better, for better or for worse. Yeah, we're kind of just getting like a different version of bad where all of this like pull to extremes and polarization is still happening on the platforms. All these groups still exist on platforms. They're just not creating this like algorithmic online monoculture. Right. And we also don't have it on television really anymore. Right.

And so the cable viewership numbers are way down, network news also down, and newspapers are dying out everywhere. All these trends have accelerated. And I do think it's causing the broader electorate to not have a cohesive, similar view of what's going on in politics. And a lot of people just aren't paying attention anymore. It makes me really curious what it's going to be like and feel like when the general election starts in earnest. Like, are we going to start to feel like, okay, we're actually all in it.

We're all strapped in this roller coaster together. And like, it's time for us to like really care about what's happening. Or a lot of people are going to wake up on November 6th or whatever the day is after the election. I promise we'll tell people when the election is going to get closer. Not misinform you. Yeah, we won't tell you to vote on a different day. That's not what we do here. Because that's illegal.

Like, are we all going to wake up and be like oh right the election just happened and maybe something bad came right well that's but like where is the place that we all come together and talk about this stuff we do because we're well crazy the friends of the pod discord obviously yeah we are we are a subset right for sure right but like for you know all of all of your friends and acquaintances who are not political junkies like us like what i'm wondering in my life when are those people gonna be like oh is it is trump and biden again and trump could and trump said he's gonna do all these things in his second term like where are they gonna get that information from are they

on twitter it's not really there anymore they're getting push alerts on their phone like what are they watching the news at night are they tuning into cnn which had like ratings of like half a million people on the iowa caucus night god really yeah wow it's really bad it's wild no one's tuning in it makes me think about i i've i'm doing another round of book promotion right now because the the spanish edition is coming out and i was talking to somebody this morning who was like, oh, so are we just due to relive what the United States went through with the 2020 election over and over again? And I was kind of saying like, well, in some ways, sure, because social media is with us, but the way that these platforms work is constantly changing so much. And we really don't know what the consequences of that are until we're standing

in the wreckage of it yep yep so that's hopeful uh isn't it nice to be back before we move on there's one more campaign related story in the washington post that i'm dying to talk about my god uh this is this has everything uh here's the headline and the subhead silicon valley insiders are trying to unseat biden with help from ai a new super pack tied to open ai ceo sam altman and billionaire bill ackman there he is again is backing democratic challenger dean phillips but wait it's even worse than you're imagining. The Super PAC has launched Dean.bot. It is an AI chatbot that talks and answers questions like Dean Phillips. Here's a clip. I'm prepared to lead with a fresh perspective and a commitment to bipartisanship to truly address the challenges of our time. Are you AI? Yes, I'm a digital clone designed to share my political vision and policies, but I'm not the actual Dean Phillips.

Let's focus on building a better America together. What have we done to deserve this? So can I just say, you sent me this clip and I listened to it and I was like, this sounds fake as hell. This is the most obvious AI bot I've ever heard. But it turns out that's actually just what Dean Phillips sounds like. You know, I interviewed him in the like yeah that's pretty much pretty cool i genuinely thought this entire story was a parody and that the post was just fucking with all of us i did i couldn't do that i was like and and it's got all it's bill ackman's in it again and i know it does seem it's so funny

that we're doing ai bot dean phillips a guy's not busy You just have him read the ad. Who is this for? Who asked for this? There is a supply and demand problem here. There was plenty of Dean Phillips. He's showing up. He's doing campaigning. He's got plenty of money. No one's showing up.

He's not registering anything in the polls. And enough about him. These two fucking yahoos out in Silicon Valley. It says so much though about silicon valley and silicon valley's that culture's view about politics they think they're going to do tech and it will just we did a tech look now all the voters are going to come to us because we did a tech and they and they really do think they can play god yeah they do they're they're like these these political people are ridiculous why is biden running against – he's too old and Trump's too old and how do we not have better choices?

There's something there. Right, which is the easy part, right? The easy part is to be like, yeah, look at all the problems we have and isn't politics annoying, blah, blah, blah. And then the answer – Dean.bot. It's like all these polls that show like a generic democrat beats uh beats donald trump and so these silicon valley is like oh you want a generic democrat we're gonna give you generic democrat not just dean phillips but a robot dean phillips how's that it's so funny to me because

you and i have had so many conversations about the potential horrors of artificial intelligence in our politics and like where are the safeguards and what are the things it could do and all the like different iterations. And something that I think we just straight up never considered is that the people designing the artificial intelligence would be too stupid to know how to deploy it correctly. It's never occurred to me. Until the Dean Phillips bot becomes sentient. And then. He turns into Skynet. You know know what that would be such a funny outcome i'm okay with it i'm okay with the dean bot skynet apocalypse in the latest poll we have uh joe biden at 40 and then uh

nipping at his heels is ai dean phillips the dean 1000 way down to 2% as real Dean Phillips. I just pictured Dean Phillips' face like grafted onto the Terminator robot body. And you know what? It's funny. I would vote for him. Now, there's a NYU professor quoted in the piece who said, you know, the problem is once we have AI versions

of candidates chatting up voters, it's a short step to bots used by political opponents to fool voters into thinking that politicians are saying things they never said. And soon everyone gets so cynical about all of this fake communication that no one believes anything anyone is saying. So that is the long-term danger. Don't think we're, we are not there with the Dean Phillips chat bot yet. I, I, I, you know what? I say, God bless. I cross my fingers and I hope that Ellie, every Silicon Valley artificial intelligence intervention into politics is a Dean Phillips bot.

That's perfect. Spin your wheels on that. I just want to say, like, I am not out here trying to develop apps, develop AI chatbots, because that's not my area of expertise. Sure. Okay. my area of expertise. Sure. Okay? So folks in Silicon Valley, Bill Ackman, Elon Musk, the fucking all-in besties, just do your fucking thing. Whatever you're good at. I don't know what it is. Some of you

are good at a couple things, I guess. Just focus on your own shit. Don't pretend like you know politics or really how humans operate. Should we set up a political consultancy to be sold out to Silicon Valley billionaires where they say, should we set up a political consultancy to be sold out to Silicon Valley billionaires where they say,

should we set up a Dean dot bot? And you and I say, no, no. And we'll take your check now, please. And they say, okay,

thank you. Not worth the money having to talk to them. Not worth the money. All right. In other news, Substack experienced a mass exodus this week as notable publications, including Casey Newton's popular tech newsletter Platformer, announced they were leaving the site following Substack's failure to commit to proactively removing pro-Nazi material. Here we are again. Another issue with Nazis.

Nazis bad? Yes. I think you could say yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You have been talking, you were telling me this week that every platform feels morally compromised these days, which leaves a lot of small and up and coming publishers and businesses know where they feel they can ethically publish and promote themselves. TikTok's polarizing. We've talked about TikTok.

Don't come after us. Meta, deprioritizing news, Elon Musk, right? Right. What implications do you think this has? What are your thoughts on the Substack? This story really resonated with me, not because it's like yet another content moderation, like a platform won't remove the Nazis story,

not because I'm worried about like Casey Newton, like God bless, he's going to be great. But it really feels to me like it's emblematic of this moment that we have reached where like all of the platforms kind of feel morally compromised and we're kind of at this point like partly because we've been through so many rounds of these like another platform that won't remove the nazis like we realize now and we have this like general awareness that we didn't even just a few years ago that these decisions might seem small in isolation because it's like the individual

Nazis that are on Substack, they like really don't have that many followers. Like it's not clear they're reaching a lot of people. But we realize this is representative of this kind of like right libertarian ideology in Silicon Valley. And we realize that the decisions in the aggregate end up like not just tolerating individual members of the far right, but like really abetting the rise of the far right at a moment when that's really dangerous. So it feels like we have to do something as Casey Newton did by leaving Substack. But at the same time, like there's not a lot of places to go. And I thought it was really striking. Like a lot of

Substackers are saying that they can't leave Substack because they count on it for for referrals because it's their source of employment because if they leave and go to another platform it's not clear they'll be able to get people to like jump from one to the other and like i'm not trying to knock on casey here but like he has a huge platform from a new york times podcast so he has a luxury we'll do this but like and again so do you and i like we can take a break from twitter and instagram because we have a more traditional media platform to speak from but it like i think it's really this like moment where we're all kind of stuck where the platforms are bad but like what are you going to do and again from the user perspective right from the person who's trying to figure out what's going on in the world and read news right you're like so casey moved over to ghost right now i i subscribed to casey's newsletter and the way he he constructed it like i didn't have to do anything right like i'm still getting the emails and it's not everyone

can do that right and so if you're a user you're like okay uh i finally subscribed to sub stack newsletters and now what's ghost now do i have to sign up for ghost? And should I go check threads? Is there anything going on in threads? Some a little bit, but now we're going to go back over to X and that's a disaster. And then should I go toot and skeet over here? And where should I check?

It is, we are, there is no public square anymore. There is no town square. Yeah, right. And I think that's a problem. I think it's a problem for democracy. And I do worry that the media has become so decentralized and so splintered and so siloed that there is no place where everyone can sort of share the same news, read the same stories. And it's just as a news consumer, you're not sure where to go. If you're trying to organize politically, you're not sure where to go because if you're trying to organize people on Facebook, God forbid, which I know most activists aren't even using anymore because they consider it so compromised. Like the loss of these spaces is really meaningful because social media companies have been so effective at dominating so many things that we used to be able to do without them.

They know that they dominate the media. They dominate, we connect, we organize politically. I think that if there's a silver lining here, it's the fact that there's now this consensus that the status quo is kind of untenable and we see the harms now and we're all very aware of it. And, you know, there's not a, there's not a blue sky for news and organizing and information. And I don't really have, we don't have a solution yet for what we're going to do. But I think that we're in a much better place than we were a few years ago where we understand that we do need something new. And that we see the harms from the way the platforms work now. You know who's going to figure it out?

One of these guys in Silicon Valley. I think the Dean bot. They're going to crack it. Dean bot. I'm guys in Telly and Valley. I think the Dean bot. They're going to crack it. Dean bot. I'm going to go ask Dean bot. I'm using Dean bot's guy. Okay. So before the break, some quick housekeeping.

Vote Save America is about to kick it into high gear, so now's the perfect time to get yourself some VSA gear. Grab a brand new tee or crew neck that's perfect for wearing to your next volunteer shift or just around the house while you rant about gerrymandering to your dog. Plus, 100% of the profits from the Vote Save America collection will go to support VSA and grassroots organizations working to give Americans the tools they need to have an impact. Head to Kroger.com slash store to shop VSA. of our massive hit digital series, Political Experts React. Dan Pfeiffer and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki go through a roundup of the best and worst ads from the 2024 Republican primary. They discuss the last ditch efforts of a dying DeSantis campaign,

Nikki's Hailie Mary strategy, and a Never Trump ad that's been airing during town hall events on Fox News. Should be a shame to yourself. I know, I didn't write it. This episode of Political Experts React drops tomorrow. Check it out only on the

Pod Save America YouTube channel. After the break, my conversation with RF Kuang on the ways online discourse has changed the publishing industry, why who has the right to tell a story isn't the right question, and what it means to be a storyteller

in the modern era. Rebecca Kwong, welcome to Offline. Thanks so much for having me. So I've been telling everyone who listened to read Yellowface. It's one of the best books I've read in a very long time. But when I started it, I had no idea that the book would explore so many of the themes that we've talked about on the show, which we launched during the pandemic and is about all the ways social media is breaking our brains. And Yellow Face is a novel you wrote during the pandemic where social media basically breaks the brain of the narrator, who's also a writer dealing with some newfound and unearned celebrity. What made you want to write the story and write it when you did? Well, 2020 was a terrible time for everybody's brain.

The reason why the novel is written in that particular style, by which I mean very reductive, simplistic sentences, sentences that sound like they're tweets. So they appeal to easy frames of reference and are not difficult to digest or unpack. The reason why the novel is written like that is because that was all I was capable of reading and processing at the time. I went into lockdown thinking this will be great. I have so much time on my hands. I'll finally be able to time. I went into lockdown thinking this will be great. I have so much time on my hands. I'll finally be able to focus. I'll read all of Dostoevsky. I'll read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I will emerge from this experience fluent in five languages and having read the entirety of the English canon. And obviously that didn't happen.

What happened instead is that I was doom scrolling constantly. And I found that my attention span was completely shot that if I was able to read fiction, I would only be able to read things like psychological thrillers, things that are really quick and easy and pacey and just propel you to get to the finish line. But I could not unpack a paragraph anymore. This was very bad for my academic work. And when I was able to go out into the world again and see people and get off my phone, I immediately stopped writing the way I did in Yellowface. But I think it contributes a bit to the addictive quality of the prose, because that is the type of writing that grips

you when anything else with the slightest degree of complexity or nuance or difficulty cannot. So the immediate impetus for that book is just that is the type of information I was capable of processing. It seems like we were all living online and negotiating our identities and dealing with each other's digital doubles because we couldn't see each other in person. So that was the only world I could write about. I'm very happy not to be there anymore. Me too. Well, it's funny because everyone who listens to this show knows that I used to read a long time ago and have had trouble digesting novels myself. And now I'm wondering if Yellowface was basically the first novel I've read in years that I finished in a day. I used to do that all the time, like back in

college. And now I'm wondering if it's because of the way that you wrote it, because my brain has been broken by Twitter too. Yes, it's as easy as reading a tweet. I will not write like that ever again. But it was a fun one-off experiment. Maybe during the next pandemic, I'll go back to my Twitter novels. Please. So the book, which is the story of a white woman who tried to pass off a manuscript by her recently deceased Chinese-American friend as her own, has unsurprisingly generated a lot of discussion about cultural appropriation and representation in publishing. Can you talk about how your own experiences in the industry informed your thinking and writing on those issues? I try never to write too autobiographically,

so there's never a point where I inserted something into the text that was a direct reflection of an encounter I've had in publishing. But I've been circling around a discomfort for a while about the way that non-white writers or writers from generally marginalized backgrounds are commodified or promoted on the terms of that marginalization. it's almost like being Asian American or being a woman or any other social identity becomes just another marketing label in addition to, oh, this is a fantasy and it will appeal to readers of fantasy, or this is young adult novel and it'll appeal to YA readers.

And I've seen my in-house marketing documents with the list of five things that are attractive about the book. And I've seen that one of them for me is the author is Chinese American and her voice will appeal to people who are interested in authentic voices about this identity, whatever. I feel very strange about this because it seems like this is the least interesting thing about the book or about my books generally, and does not seem to be a good reason like prime aphasia to pick up a novel and it gets to this weird and very shallow and I think ill-considered way we think about race and publishing and storytelling which is just that oh there is something virtuous or particular from coming from a certain standpoint. And we ought to celebrate that in and

of itself rather than considering the author's background and identity as part of a whole matrix of things that affects how successful the text is or why we ought to read it. So I had been getting more and more frustrated with being pitched as an Asian American writer or a Chinese American writer, as opposed to just a writer who tells interesting stories, who you should read because they're interesting stories and not because it's Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and you're trying to fill up your checkbox of, you know, five AAPI writers you should read to feel good about reading diversely. I hate that. Well, it also seems like this sort of intersects with the debate about cultural appropriation. And you've said you feel strongly that authors shouldn't be told what they can and can't write based on their identity.

Why do you feel that way? I think it's the wrong question to ask or the wrong way to approach this topic. And a little bit of history on why we use this language about cultural appropriation, language like stay in your own lane or language like own voices is a few years ago, there was this movement in publishing to, and I think it was very well intentioned movement coming from the right reasons to try to redirect publishing's resources and support towards authors from marginalized identities who were fighting for better representation in stories. and just fed up with years and years of the most lazily and exploitative and cruel stereotypes about their people being reiterated in stories, oftentimes for children. I think the hashtag own voices movement came from the young adult middle grade space. And that's particularly critical because when you think about children's literature, there is that didactic element of

what kind of worldview is this text exposing a child to? How is it teaching them to consider difference and others? So there's this very well-intentioned push to get publishers to support authors who were writing about their own communities, right? So if you had a short story or like a picture book about a Chinese American family,

then you might support hiring a Chinese American family, then you might support hiring a Chinese American author. The problem with that is that I think it pigeonholes authors of color and marginalized authors more so than it opens up opportunities for everybody, because then you get cases in which there is a stereotype of what does the Chinese American writer write about? Oh, she writes about immigrant trauma. Oh, she writes about how people made fun of the shape of her eyes or how her lunch smells. She writes like Amy Tan. And I'm actually going through a phase where I'm going back and reading Amy Tan for my qualifying exams list. And I do love her work. I forgot how much I loved it, but I had spent so much of my adult life running away from

the themes in her fiction and how she writes about them because that is how every single Chinese American author thereafter has been pigeonholed. If you write Chinese American fiction, you write like her. And so I think better questions to ask when we're thinking about texts and who's writing them and how relevant the author's background should be are twofold. The first question that I think always gets ignored in conversations about diversity in publishing and who gets to write what is, how good is the text? There's a really big difference between a well-researched, well-intentioned, critical, nuanced approach towards a history that somebody

might not have a personal relationship to. And many of the best works in the English canon are works of this sort, right? And I don't think there's a good argument for why they should not be published or why we should not read them. And sometimes the texts are really bad. They're really lazy. For instance, if anybody's familiar with the American Dirt controversy, I think the better arguments against that book are on the merits of the text itself and how the story has been done rather than whether the author had the right to write about immigrants in the first place. Now, the second question is who is publishing or who are publishers giving money to? Who's getting paid to write these stories.

And this is a question about the industry and about what kinds of faces and voices that people in acquisitions meetings find profitable or attractive to American reading audience. And that's very worth prodding and pushing to figure out whether we're just publishing the same sorts of faces over and over again, because that is the assumed face that will sell well, or if there are other authors and voices

that we ought to be highlighting. And neither of these have anything or can be boiled down to the very silly question, I think, of, oh, does this author's racial identity qualify him to write about this? I think that gets us nowhere. Yeah, I mean, do you think that debates about cultural appropriation can sometimes get conflated with debates about representation? Because it does seem like you can criticize the publishing industry for not doing enough to support writers from marginalized communities, while also believing that it's not cultural appropriation to write stories about lived experiences that aren't necessarily your own. Yeah, I think that's right. I'm also really not sure what the working definition of cultural appropriation is anymore. It's been stretched in so many ways that I don't

find it a useful framework. Yeah. I mean, I also just think there's a larger value here, especially with literature and writing, which is the ability to sort of step into someone else's shoes and step outside of your own world and give people sort of a sense of what other people's lived experiences are. And I do think that it helps generate sort of a sense of empathy that I think that doesn't get valued enough these days. I don't know. I mean, I've had like a small experience with this and how could you possibly write speeches for Barack Obama, the first black president? And I was like, well, I mean, part of the way I did is I had to really step inside his head, what he thought, how he lived, listen to everything he

said, work with him closely. Because if I was just some guy they hired on the outside and just started writing speeches like I thought sounded like him, then yeah, it would be really, it would just be bad writing. And of course, it would sound like just some white guy wrote the speeches. And so it really does, I think, when you're writing literature require and writing novels like you do require yourself to like do the research and actually like do more work to sort of step inside an experience that's not your own yeah and again this is an issue of craft right it's not an issue of permissions or racial background it's an issue of how good are you at your job um and the same applies to fiction writers if we didn't force ourselves to step outside of our own personal

backgrounds and experiences and imagine how the world looks like from multiple points of view, then we could only ever write memoirs or autobiographies. But good books succeed because the author can come up with multiple imaginary friends and make them feel viable and real and authentic. And I should hope that like even my white characters are compelling, even though I have no personal experience of being white myself. So I talked to Chimamanda Adichie a year ago about writing and literature in the internet age. And she said that she worries specifically about American literature becoming flat and boring and constricted because younger writers are afraid to write about certain subjects or characters or life experiences for some of the same reasons we've been talking about. Do you have any concerns about that?

I understand where that concern is coming from. I'm really hesitant to generalize about where writing is headed or about cohorts of writers because I think the industry and literary economy has become so diversified that for every person who's like terrified of their own shadow reading all their goodreads reviews and trying to write the most unoffensive text ever in order to appeal to as many people on the internet as possible there's also somebody else who refuses to get any social media accounts and it's just like churning out genius. I'm exaggerating here, but so I don't want to disparage other younger writers that feel silly, but I'll talk about my own personal experience of whether I'm worried that social media might defang my work or make me less bold in the themes I'm willing to tackle.

It's a learning process because I don't think that we are hardwired or naturally suited to dealing with the tremendous amount of feedback that our current internet age affords us. I don't think anybody's brain is, or has the capacity to deal with thousands and thousands of reviews of your own work. And when you first get published and you realize that your work is spreading and that people that you will never meet and could not imagine existing have opinions about you, that can be very debilitating and a sort of a shock.

And I certainly felt when my first novel was published, it felt like being exposed to a live wire all the time. I didn't know what to do with myself. And I felt that my subjectivity was disintegrating a little bit because I just, of course you want everybody to like you. Of course, you want to appease every single reader, but you're getting all this feedback from so many different angles and you don't know what to do with it and you don't know what the core of yourself is or how to hold on to that in face of this swell of opinions. So as you move through your career, or at least as I did, I had to learn to walk the tightrope between obviously having some finger on how my works are being received so that I can write better books, but also being able to tune out

most of the feedback because at some point it's just so much noise. There is no way to helpfully sift through all of that. And if you're already anticipating what the shape of the review looks like before you've even written the manuscript, then of course your work is going to be diluted and weak and uninteresting. You will inevitably offend some people if you're writing anything of any value. writers who have this attitude that literature isn't dead. But of course, it's a pressure and a danger to literature that I don't think existed in the Victorian era where Charles Dickens could just throw fan mail unread into the fire. Yeah. How did you get to that better place where you sort of struck a balance between like processing some of the reaction to your work, but also not trying to let it paralyze you?

I think it actually helped that I wasn't an overnight bestseller. I think people who immediately go viral or become very well known for their first novel struggle with this more than I did. But I had a very gradual ramp up to bestseller-dom. My first trilogy eventually found its audience and it has since done very well, but when it first came out, it sold maybe a thousand copies in the first week. It didn't make any bestseller list. So I was sitting there at the ripe age of 21 thinking, oh my God, the whole world's going to

read my books and half the stores I walked into didn't even carry the book. I think dealing with those small amounts of feedback that gradually ramped up over time and attuning myself to the shape of that and how it feels and learning to block it out while the popular trilogy was going on prepared me to deal with the larger scale of feedback when Babel came out. And then by the time Yellowface came out, I just wasn't interested in social media at all. So I'm told there's some very nasty reviews, but I don't even know what they say. And that feels great. And in the six months since that book has come out, I read Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism, which I really like and have become the most annoying prophet of that book

to all of my friends. I know people have very strong feelings about Cal Newport, but I happen to be the kind of person who loves that kind of self-help book, and I think his arguments are completely correct. So since then, I've become even more of an extremist about not looking at the internet and only using the internet as it suits me. So now I don't have no concerns whatsoever about what people are saying about me and how it affects my work because I just don't see it in the first place. What are your internet habits like? Are you like off social media? Do you check social media?

Is there Twitter? Are there any other platforms that you're on? I'm not on Twitter anymore. I'm very sad about Twitter. I used to really enjoy it because it did seem like this wonderful place where you could find people that you would want to have in-person conversations with and get recommendations for books that you would read after you'd closed Twitter. And it doesn't seem like that kind of space anymore. I like Instagram because I like pretty pictures and I like to post pretty pictures, but I'm quite disciplined about how much time I spend on Instagram. Cal Newport recommended the Freedom app. I got the Freedom app. I block almost everything except for about half an hour during the day. And otherwise, I just, I have so much time to get so much done. Like I read more than I used to. I used to read entire books in one

sitting. And during the pandemic, I lost that habit and was fighting to get it back. And since my digital minimalism extremism kick started, I found that I can just like swallow information like I wasn't able to before because I just I have my attention span back. At one point in Yellowface, June, the narrator says, Twitter is realer than real life. Do you agree? I guess I deny the premise that there is some distinction between the real life off the internet and real life as mediated on the internet, because obviously things that happen on Twitter have important consequences for your career. There is this controversy scandal, I don't know, some news story about a month ago about an author who'd been making up

negative Goodreads reviews for other authors. And this started on Twitter. So because tweets like exposing this author went viral, she then lost her book deal and was dropped by her agent. So things you say on the internet and how people react to you and talk to you about Twitter do have significant material consequences offline. At the same time, Twitter is so clearly not the be all end all of our cultural worlds. And oftentimes I'll see a tweet go viral and then assume that everybody knows about this and then find I have to explain like several layers deep of celebrity gossip in order for somebody to understand the joke that I'm trying to tell them. Yeah. One thing that really bothers me about social

media is that it sort of forces people into binary thinking. So everything is either black or white, good or bad. Everyone has to pick a side. The two main characters in Yellowface are morally ambiguous, to say the least. Do you think that audiences, especially chronically online audiences, have less patience for nuance and gray areas because of sort of our social media culture? I don't know how much patience they have because I don't really know anybody who's chronically online, so I don't know how that kind of mind operates anymore. It is obvious, though, that it's just impossible to have a discussion with any kind of complexity or grace on Twitter anymore, because it would demand acknowledging that it's not the case that one side is virtuous and holy and wise and the other side is like a demented monster that should be sentenced to hell forever. But maybe that there's been hurt on both sides, perhaps unequally

distributed, but that you can hold multiple truths in your head at once. And I actually think about this a lot because people ask me why I like teaching and why I'm still in academia. And my answer is always, I love that we are able to unpack things and have space for doubt and uncertainty in the classroom. It's this, I mean, I don't know any other discursive space like it uh certainly none that exist on the internet because they devolve so quickly just to add homonym name calling and the worst faith assumptions about others but in a classroom you have people who will come in who have all done the reading first of all that's critical when people have sources to point to and arguments and like a tradition of discourse and what they're talking about. That's already a world of difference from a Twitter conversation. But when people are

willing to admit that they've been wrong or to sit in silence and like untangle something slowly over an hour, that is a kind of patience and grace that my students are willing to extend to others that I do not see anywhere on the internet. And, you know, it's possible to be able to do this in the classroom and then like binge TikTok and Twitter as well. So we're capable of multitudes. So I'm aware of drawing any conclusions about what kind of novels chronically online people have patience for. So my point is just that it's a world of difference in the kind of discussion you can have on different platforms.

And I really prefer the classroom one. You're making me miss the classroom and miss academia. Now that I am chronically online, because it's my job in politics and is a profession where there's also not a lot of room for nuance, especially in the internet age. And I do miss having the debates that you could have when you were in college that are more nuanced and subtle. And like you said, people are actually reading the material and bring real arguments and are trying to persuade one another. You've said that writing can be isolating, which is one of the reasons I stopped doing it long ago. And oddly enough, you become even more isolated when your only interactions with other writers or even just humans like happen via social media,

which happened to a lot of us during the pandemic. You've talked a little bit about feeling that way. How did you deal with that? It turns out that actually social media is not the only way to sustain relationships, even in circumstances like a pandemic. You can literally call somebody on the phone. Like you can write your friends letters. I had a bit of a breakdown over the summer, which we don't need to get into. But it culminated in my writing all my close friends this really. And I look back at this email and I think, my God, she was not well.

But it was this really unhinged email where I quoted digital minimalism a lot. And then I said, I hate texting. Don't text me, like, nobody texts me, how are you doing, because I will not respond. But I want to go back to letter writing. And I want to go back to phone calls. And, and I'll hold friendship office hours where it's, sorry, that's such an obnoxious term, friendship office hours, but generally, like a time of the week when anybody can call me and assume that I'm going to have time and I'm going to pick up because I got so frustrated with this really light shallow and very distant way of sustaining a friendship

because volume doesn't make up a meaningful connection right if you send each other 10 memes a day you still haven't talked about anything of importance so um I'm actually thrilled that my friends took me up on that challenge and started writing back. And one friend will write like by hand, like six, seven pages, which is really astonishing because I refuse to do that for more than a paragraph before my hand starts hurting. But it just astonished me how willing people were to become very vulnerable and to discuss in detail things

that bothered them or things they were hopeful about, things that had given them grief. And these are not things that you can casually introduce in a text, right? In a text conversation, you always have to preface it by saying, oh, I'm going to be really serious now. I'm so sorry about that. But actually, my mom just died. And I hate this culture of constant communication, but always holding your friends at an arm's length. So I forced my friends to go analog with me and write letters and do phone calls and just see me in person more, right? Like I host dinners at my home. I have more teas. This is not something you can do during a pandemic, but it's something I've been grateful to do

afterwards. And none of this involves checking each other's Instagram feeds. I actually, I don't look at the social media feeds of any of my close friends. I just assume that if something significant happens, they're going to tell me and, and they do. And it's such a better way of living and sustaining interaction or sustaining relationships than, than being addicted to your phone. Yeah. And it's, it's so funny you say that I have a text chain. That's probably like the text chain I'm on the most with, uh, four friends who are all Obama people. We're all in politics. And all day long, we're just texting each other news stories.

And we're talking about the news. And we're talking about politics. And every once in a while, I'm like, I haven't even like, I don't know how their lives are going. I don't know how their kids are doing. I don't know their wives are doing. Like, what's going on? And you realize that it is the form of communication that forget about

social media, even just texting when you have those relationships that they can be about sort of one specific thing and not and not like you said, those seven page letters that your that your friends are writing. Have you have you found that since you started having more of those meaningful connections, whether it's in personperson friend office hours or letter writing, that that then helps you deal with isolation when you are just writing yourself? It's not so much about isolation as it is just making me a better writer. I have this theory that we're not as good at writing fiction as we were like 30, 40 years ago, because we text too much and nobody's writing like long letters by hand. And I'm reading this

Sylvia Plath biography right now. It's Red Comet by Heather Clark, and I'm really enjoying it. But I'm just struck by the sheer amount of historical detail that Clark is getting from Plath's journals and her letters. Because if you tried to do that kind of biography of somebody today, you'd have to scroll through all these meaningless text exchanges and emails that say nothing. And I feel like we don't write that sort of incredibly articulate, beautiful letter anymore. Those letters, they're not even published work, right? They're not work that's meant for many, many eyes to read. They're just meant for an audience of one. And yet, so many of those passages, they took time, they took labor, and they required sitting down and thinking and crystallizing your thoughts and pondering how to articulate

your feelings and your experiences. And Plath was doing this constantly. And since I started doing it, I found that my sentences have gotten stronger. The images that I reach for, just my capacity to describe a deeper well of feeling has grown. And that's very exciting. There's also the most convenient fact of letter writing, which is that when a letter is really good, you can turn it into an essay and sell it. So I read, so I listened to Olivia Rodrigo's sophomore album, Guts, and really loved it. And then wrote this like 10 paragraph long letter to everybody raving about Guts. And then, and now it's been published by Time. That's cool. Oh, I got to read that. I love Guts.

It's a good practice. I encourage everybody to go back to letter writing. It just makes you a stronger writer and then gives you a well of material to repackage and sell if you ever are on a deadline crunch and need to put together something nonfiction really quickly. Well, this is great. You've given me a lot to chew on and I'm going to go listen to Guts again, read your essay about it, and then maybe I'll try to write a letter to a friend. Rebecca Kwong, thank you so much for joining. Fantastic conversation. The book is incredible. I highly recommend Yellowface to everyone. Go pick it up. And thanks for joining. Thank you. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher.

Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos provide audio support to the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, Reid Cherlin, and Andy Taft for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.