Panic World - Boomer brain rot started long before Facebook

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

Why did boomers “go crazy” — and was the internet actually to blame? Ryan is joined by Sam Seder to trace the long history of boomer radicalization, from the Fairness Doctrine and Rush Limbaugh to Fox News, 9/11, Alex Jones, and the algorithmic media ecosystem that followed. Together they argue that the internet didn’t create boomer brain rot so much as supercharge a worldview that had already been built by decades of grievance-driven mass media. Our guest Sam Seder hosts The Majority Report, whose past episodes can be found here, on YouTube, and all major podcast platforms (or check it out live Monday to Friday from 12-2:30pm). Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our exclusive Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I remember the first uses of like OK boomer happening when I was in college still. So like late 2000s, I was like entering the workforce 2010, 11, 12. And like I didn't like boomers for reasons I didn't totally understand. Like I knew that that you made fun of them. Like that was the point, I think. I distinctly remember somewhere probably around 2016 or 17 when my daughter started saying that to me. She was like 12 or 13 or 14. Do you remember what she would OK boomer you about?

Anything. So right now, for instance, I'm Skibbitty. Oh, you're Skibbitty toilet. I'm Skibbitty. I'm Skibbitty toilet. I am definitely not Sigma Riz. Okay, I'm sorry to hear that. And that could be in any context.

I feel like not being Sigma Riz is fine. You know, I think that's fine. I found it disappointing. Okay. Well, I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, that's too bad. I like to think I'm a Sigma male, but maybe only some days. I'm Ryan Broderick.

Joining us throughout the episode will be our producer, Grant Irving, who pops in from time to time. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And today we are questioning the very premise of our show, which is, we're going to try to answer the question, was it the internet that made boomers go quote unquote insane? And I have a different theory I'll be sharing a little later. But joining me is, so Grant wrote this, and I'm really sorry for how Grant described you here. I just wanted to be clear. This is from Grant. The left's hippest gen Xer. Host of the majority report, destroyer of many recent viral videos, Sam Zader. Hey, how are you doing?

Welcome. Thanks for having me, Ryan. And then thank you, Grant. Are there other Gen Xers? I think there's a few on YouTube. I am very, very early Gen X. Okay. Does that mean young Gen X or older Gen X? Well, I'm not even sure what that means. But I am like, you know, like a year away from being a boomer. Okay, okay, I got you. So I'm more into that. A lot of my friends, I guess, which I didn't realize, are boomers.

But not the boomer boomers. Not the boomer boomers. Sure. No. Do you remember the first time you thought maybe the boomer mindset was aging poorly? Yeah. In the 80s. Really?

I mean, there was something wrong in the 80s, and I had a feeling it had to do with the people like Wall Street, Michael Douglas character. Right. Of course, great is good, Gordon Giffel. Yes. Yes. I think I perceived him as a boomer. I don't know if Michael Douglas, per se, would have been, but I think so. I do think you've touched on something really important about sort of talking about generational politics, which is that it can get very fuzzy.

I think the further you kind of like go down this rabbit hole, you're kind of like trying to put people. into boxes that might not actually exist. Maybe. I think our generations have gotten appropriately smaller in this era, but probably needed to be a little bit smaller. There needed to be another generation, you know, somewhere between Gen X and boomers. That's interesting. Yeah, because I do feel like millennials run right up against Gen Xers.

Like I had Gen X coworkers and Gen X bosses. Like that was like that that was my introduction to the world coming out of college. And then my parents are boomers. But the difference between the Gen X and the boomer line just feels it feels drastically different to me in ways that I think are interesting. But I feel like my concept of like the baby boomer culture as a culture as it exists would have been like when I discovered John Stewart and like cable news. I feel like it was like very post 9-11 to me of like, okay, this is a cohort of people that have different views of reality than I do. that John Stewart was a boomer. No, no, no, that it was like discovering the Daily Show in high school and college,

like learning about cable news and the world of it through the Daily Show, through that lens, kind of introduced me to the idea of baby boomer culture as something divorced for my life in a way. Yes. I mean, the funny part is that John Stewart is a boomer. And he's... Damn. I mean, it's weird. It is weird.

Because I do think that he is in that cohort that really, that really... should be between Gen X. And although like I sort of feel like I'm actually Gen X and the people after me are not. Because the Gen X, like when in the early 90s, I understood, you know, you had Copeland's book, but I understood Gen X to be the guys in slackers. I would say so too. And they are actually probably boomers.

Oh, this is wild. They're a year or two older than me. This is already getting off the years. I love this. And I hung out with people like that. Right. And so I feel like there's a cohort in between boomers, which should take some of the late-hanging fruit, but maybe the highest fruit or the lowest fruit.

Yeah. From the boomer and maybe a year sort of like younger than me, that should be really the Gen X because we were the ones in the shadow of the boomer generation. The problem with the boomer generation was their size. And the sort of like intersection

with their size with, I would say, probably are subsidizing corn. Okay. In the early 70s, Nixon's commerce secretary, they made an active decision to subsidize corn so that people would have more disposable

income. Oh. It would drop the price of food. And that's the era where everything went to shit, in my estimation. Okay. Not just because of the corn, not exclusively because of the subsidy. But it was the disposable income. It was the disposable income.

And it was also the era when, Lawyers got to, got to advertise. So, okay, yes. Now, yes. And now boomers are now, like, in their, like, early 20s, their 30s around that time. They came into Wall Street also, I think, like, just the generation just a little bit older them, like, and started doing a lot of, like, the financialization. But they're the ones who really juiced it, I think.

I also, I mean, tell me if I'm off base here, but I feel like there's something very unique, mirrored by millennials to a degree actually, where the boomer generation, you know, as general terms here, remembers a world without really a modern idea of mass media and then kind of comes of age during the full corporatization of mass media. And I do think they're like a very unique generation in that way, more so even than the millennials, where they, their viewpoint, their sort of sense of reality was canonized by the television, by mass Hollywood appeal, by popular music as a concept, which like, you know, didn't really exist before, let's say, if you wanted to be simplistic, like Elvis into the

Beatles era, like, all of their lives were sort of reflected back to them as like this homogenized media reflection, which I think is like kind of important for thinking about their politics now. Like they, that's my read on it. I think that's true. And I would add to that by saying it wasn't just that it was homogenized. Because arguably, I think in their minds, it was counterculture in some ways. But it was a perfect reflection because they were the first to have that commercialization. And they were such a big generation.

That's the whole point. They were such a big generation that their whole perspective as it's like dictated by context. And in those days, context was much more now. Right? Like you only had three channels of television. You only had so many, you know, musical options. Right. Right. Like things were just more narrow. And so their tastes as defined by their context was completely and almost it was the exclusive product of culture. And so like that's how you get the me generation. because it really is completely centered around your perspective in a way that, like, A, you may not have had mass culture in the same way prior to or commercialized mass culture prior to that generation. You do have it today, obviously, but it's far more fragmented. And so even the millennials who have that sort of buying power to dictate, they're still on some level.

We're still all living in the shadow of the boomers because everybody was selling to them. Right. And that is a perfect tee up for, so we try to figure out like when the idea of like the boomer brain rot concept started or like how it began. Like how did we get here? And it's kind of a, it's a hard story to tell. But where we start, I think, which makes sense, I think to me, is August 1987 when Reagan and the FCC abolished the fairness. doctrine, which for our listeners required national TV and radio networks to give airtime to both sides for controversial topics.

And then, about a year later, we see the emergence of a local conservative radio host. I'm sure you're a big fan of this guy, Rush Limbaugh. I'll tell you something. I actually have listened to probably more Rush Limbaugh than anybody you will ever interview. That's my guess. I would take that bet. Absolutely. Here is a Wall Street Journal op-ed that directly connects his success to mainstream media

and now being able to sort of take sides. And they write, many people say, I need to be balanced with equal time, Limbaugh said. I don't need to be balanced with equal time because. And then the crowd that he's speaking to starts cheering, I am equal time. And I do feel like this is sort of the most important domino in this story. So now by 1990, Rush is the most popular radio show in America. and the New York Times writes, his persona, comic blowhard, his style, a schizoid spritz, balancing between earnest lecturer and political vaudevillian.

So what are your sort of earliest memories of Rush? And more importantly, I think the world before Rush and then after, because I feel like that is the watershed moment here for a lot of this stuff. Well, I'll tell you what I do remember. I remember George Herbert Walker Bush having to apologize to Rush Limbaugh. I can't remember what it was about, but he had to go. on there and apologize. Wow, like a real cowtale moment.

That's wild. I think, I don't know if it was like 91, 92. I don't know if I had this sophistication to understand exactly all that was going on. But, you know, Herbert Walker Bush was sort of like the balance to Ronald Reagan's ticket. And Ronald Reagan was so ascendant by that point that Herbert Walker Bush needed Limbaugh's blessing. Yeah. And it was really just bad comedy mixed in with like this.

this, you know, sort of almost like coast to coast quality conspiracy theory. But the Republicans had to count out of him. Because he was so powerful? Yeah. Yes. Before we go any further in the timeline here, I do want to ask a question because I think it's, I want to pin this question across the whole episode because it's one that I truly don't have the context for it.

And I'm hoping to get an answer maybe or at least come to some sort of conclusion, which is, do you feel like people were waiting for someone like? Rush Limbaugh or were changed by someone like Rush Limbaugh? Because I feel like if we can answer that question. I think there was, I think there was a little bit of both because Limbaugh's big thing was do not doubt yourself. Limbaugh's number one job throughout, you know, and having listened to him probably from, you know, early 90s to at least through 2010, 2012. But his big thing was

do not doubt yourself. Do not let the creeping doubt here. And it was basically his way of saying like, if you start thinking that you're being racist, no. They're wrong. If you think that, if you think that like, hey, is this a bad thing that we're doing this to the planet?

No. Like all of the things he was basically telling boomers, reinforcing this notion of like the world is in your image sure which is like you know what they were learning from commerce like you're seeing yourself reflected back on television because you're the biggest market you're important right do not doubt that there's any experience outside of that

that is valid and that was it basically i mean i remember this one segment and this must have been sometime around like 2007. I'm listening to Rush Limbaugh, and he's talking about how the loony left environmentalists, and he's got this great story, and he starts to read the story.

And I know what he was doing, because this is what I would do on radio too. Like his producer had given him a story, and yellowed it for him. And he's reading about the Swiss Alps. And these loony lefts are putting on, a and he's reading it they're putting like tinfoil on the mountain because they're so afraid of global warming and that it's melting and then as he reads it he inadvertently reads the part which

says that this was done by the corporation that owns the mountain because they were worried about losing profits and that he quickly goes to break but the idea was that everything he would do And people would call in and he would say, don't doubt yourself. Do not doubt yourself. And that was the big thing that they wanted because this is an era, a cohort of people who live through. And by cohort of people, I mean white men. Right. Yeah.

And women, white women. The unfortunate women married to them. Exactly. White, yes. And they're going through a tremendous amount of social change. that necessarily places them lower

than they were in the social pecking order. In other words, you know, it's more egalitarian. They were on the top and and

Gen Xers of my age, we were on the sort of like just on the other side of it where like the idea that women can make money is not like a revolutionary. Yeah, it's not going to end the world. There was a cohort of people who just like resented the fact like Brett Kavanaugh.

Yeah. Although he's more a Gen X, I guess. But he, the idea that like, hey, when I was born, I was sort of bequeathed something. And it was taken away from me. Exactly. And it was taken away from me. And Limbaugh was there basically the people he spoke to. didn't quite have it taken away from them.

It was just being threatened. And so they had to be, like, their perspective on the world had to be maintained. So I won't torment you with Rush Limbaugh clips, but I am going to show you one just a second. And I think it's a really fascinating clip to look at because I had heard this argument last year that I hadn't really considered. And I kind of like it, which is that when you have something like the sexual revolution happening to, let's say, baby boomers in their teenage and early 20s, And then you see the rise of mass media, corporatizing it, homogenizing it, sanding down the counter cultural, you know, aspects of it. What you're left with is what you said earlier, the me generation, the idea that, you know, everything can be found inside, everything can be found within. And we found this ad from Rush Limbaugh that I think is a fascinating artifact because it does sort of tie to this idea that boomer conservatism is based around a,

a weird sexual politics. Let's put it that way. So tell me if you can hear this. Here's your chance to start the new year the right way. Now available, the official Ditto 1991 T-shirt, just 1250, or the Ditto-1991 sweatshirt only 1995. Order yours today. Now, for people who cannot see the clip,

that is three people, a man and two women, showing off their Rush Limbaugh shirts as they pop champagne. And I believe that this is. heavily implying that you can tell people that you're a swinger if you wear Rush Limbaugh merge. I believe that's what I'm looking at right now. I mean, I'm not sure. I think what's more, I think, listen, I think what's more irrelevant is less that they're swingers, but that the white guy is literally centered.

Yeah, he's in the middle of both women. That is true. Yeah. He is literally, and they are both sort of clocked to him. That is the dynamic. You said that politicians at his height, let's say, in the early 90s, were sort of appearing on his show, apologizing to him. Do you feel like that fundamentally did change the Republican Party as an institution? Absolutely.

His ability to move people, he put conservatism on steroids. Well, when we're talking about the 90s, though, we do have to introduce one more character here before we get any further. So in 1996, a couple years after the Rush Limbaugh explosion, Austin, Austin, Texas is getting very popular, and they have a local public access TV show full of weird freaks. And at the time, a 22-year-old weird freak, possibly the comedian Bill Hicks, who faked his own death and then reinvented himself as a talk show host, a man named Alex Jones appears on TV. And the observer at the time describes it thusly. On his early shows, Jones would sit behind a desk in front of a star map of the universe and take calls, ranting red-faced into a camera about the police state, the new world order, and exposing shadowy elites. and he quickly gets a radio show, the final edition.

Was this on your radar in the mid-90s? I had a buddy who was into him. I don't know how he heard him at that time, but it had to do, maybe this was the early odds, with David Ike. Because the funny part is that- Sure, the alien conspiracy theory. Yes.

Lizard reptilian. And the funny thing is that, I've seen a clip of Alex Jones saying that David Ike is the turd in the punch bowl that basically, you know, he's put out there to make the truth that people like Alex Jones were exposing seem like discredited conspiracy theories. Oh, that's fine. In fact, we just played this clip on the show, that clip of Alex Jones recently on the show, because it is also extremely reminiscent of a clip.

of Tucker Carlson in 2000 saying that Bill O'Reilly was a fraud and he was going to get uncovered at one point. And I think what happened to both Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones is they both realized, like, wait a second, no, these guys are just succeeding, succeeding. And so I think Tucker Carlson realized like nobody's ever going to blow Bill O'Reilly's every man cover. matter what he does. And I think Tucker Carlson adopted that. And I think Alex Jones, to the extent that he, you know, was conscious of what he was doing, saw that David Ike was, was like, this is where we're going to go. And he, he followed that conspiracy thing. But I would also argue that it's not inconceivable to me that Limbaugh was drawing from Alex Jones in terms of conspiracies or that Jones was drawing from Limbaugh in terms of the idea of conspiracy selling.

I mean, this was always out there with the John Birch Society. I mean, there is a long tradition of these type of conspiracies on the right, but monetizing them, you know, this is the era when that happened. I'd even say like figuring out how to package them into something like, you know, I compared a lot to WWE. I think a large part of that is figuring out like the irony levels there, the sort of like how do you make it theatrical? And one sort of interesting Alex Jones subplot I love to bring up when I talk about him is that there's this feature, I think it was like Vanity Fair or something many, many years

ago about this couple in Brooklyn that kind of got sucked into a cult and they eventually commit suicide by walking into the ocean together. And it's like, it's a great story and we'll link to it in our show notes. But if you read it, it's a fascinating sort of artifact of its time because it talks about this weird shock jock from Austin that moves to Williamsburg and gets like ingratiated with like the Vice magazine set and he think he's like this cool renegade. And I think it's like a very fascinating example of like how irony kind of played cover for Alex Jones at the beginning. In fact, he ties for a local poll for best talk talk radio host in 1999.

He gets fired because the radio network doesn't like him. And the Austin Chronicle wrote at the time, Jones who hosted the final edition, so named because you never knew when the government might shut down, might show up at the station to force you off the air, was instead forced off the station by station management last week. And the reporter in this thing seems to kind of be into Alex Jones. They write, I still at least appreciate the fact he was tackling political topics. And from a different perspective than the right wingers who dominate talk radio, such as G. Gordon Liddy. And unlike much of the so-called black helicopter crowd, he isn't racist, he saves all of his ire for government and corporations. And I feel like that

is a very important innovation from Alex Jones is like tapping into this like keep Austin weird freaky deaky gen Xer kind of mentality and like taking that torch from Rush Limbaugh in a lot of ways. But it's also interesting to think that like they were they were sort of aware of each other. Yeah, I got to imagine that they were. I mean, the radio's not that big. They also probably were very, very aware of Art Bell. And, you know, Art Bell, coast to coast. that show was also

you know would I mean you know a lot of times it was more like paranormal or a UFO but they would occasionally there would be some like somewhat like Bilderberg stuff

that would come in and so all of that is in that mix at that time and one of the things that the fairness doctrine, the repeal of it did. And then I would also say with Clinton's Communications Act in 96. Right. This would have been right around when Alex Jones launches, yeah. One of the things that it did is it just started to like ramp up the ability for corporations

to monetize this stuff. That all played into it. There was like a there was a business model that was driving a lot of this stuff. After the break, we're going to be talking about what I think is probably the biggest next important moment in our story here, which is obviously 9-11. But before that, here's a word from our sponsors, commemorative gold coins. Check out some commemorative gold coins. And we'll be right back. I think we can kind of all agree that, like, 9-11 is a mass radicalization event for America.

Like, it is the line in the sand of the 21st century. I've been trying lately because we just did an episode about, like, people who's parents are being radicalized by the internet. And so I've been spending a lot of time, like, putting myself trying to empathize with, like, the mindset of someone who gets sucked on a rabbit hole, you know, someone in their 60s, 70s. And something that I keep coming back to is this idea that, you know, if you were born peak Cold War paranoia and then you see 9-11, I have some sympathy for the, for older people who have now since just gone off the deep end. I mean, do you feel like that experiencing like that kind of, you know, environment throughout your life that does create paranoia naturally, right? Like, that's not totally out of control, out of the question. Yeah.

And there was already this sort of like thing in the air from that generation, from the Reagan era, right? Like, because remember, Bill Clinton in its first term, he only won 45% of the vote. He didn't even have a majority of people. Typical Clinton behavior stealing an election, you know, those people. Day one, it was Limbaugh was talking about impeachment on day one. Do you get dizzy watching the same things happening over and over again like this? Well, just to take a tangent, in 2004, on Air America, I got to interview with Janine Garoflo Gore Vidal multiple times. And he would come in, and he had just written the United States of Amnesia.

And his whole argument was like, this country doesn't remember anything. Like, nothing. And I couldn't fully grasp what he meant until I see, like, the reformation of George Bush. And, I mean, you know, all the, like, the Lin-Cheney. I mean, like, nobody remembers anything. It's so disturbing. But what 9-11 did, I think, is, like, you still had in the air this sort of anti-hypity. sentiment.

And a lot of the hippies were, again, the silent generation. They weren't actually boomers. That's so well to consider it. But you're right, yeah. The boomers saw the hippies get like more disillusioned and really just came down and got the sort of like. Like the scraps of it, yeah. The me focus part of it.

What was left for the boomers was just the more material aspects. the individualized part and the part that was bad was like the sort of Morgover and hippie part. It was set up for us to be attacked was a function of some, you know, like sort of national weakness. And so a lot of people, you know, just decided like I get to get muscular. I mean, that's like what turned Bill Maher into Bill Maher. Guys like that really sort of lost their minds a little bit. And to tie it to sort of this idea that the boomers, like, mass media is to baby boomers what the internet is effectively to millennials. It is this, like, massive new technology that they are growing up with and alongside and reflecting themselves back to themselves.

And if you spin through like some of the crazy controversies, well, first actually, 9-11 is, I had a history of terrorism professor in college once called it the most perfect spectacle ever devised by human beings. There's nothing more impactful visually than the 9-11 was. But then its effect on mass media is also fascinating to sort of look back on. So here's a quick list of a few things that happened here. You know, there's a massive list of songs that Clear Channel basically doesn't allow stations to play, including Benny and the Jets, Green Day's brains do in the air tonight and great balls of fire. I get it. You know, that must have been a fun job for someone to put together. Sequels to the movie's True Lives and Forrest Gump are.

both canceled. The idea of Forrest Gump stopping 9-11, I think would have probably not made a great movie. I could make that now, though, maybe. There's nonstop news on terrestrial TV, cable news kind of comes into its own at this moment. Baseball games are canceled for the first time since D-Day. And obviously, everyone assumes that the X-Files predicted it because of that one episode with the lone gum in where literally 9-11 does happen like several months before it actually happens in real life. It feels like the moment where mass media is no longer just reflecting our tastes and our interest or the taste and the interest of baby boomers, it's now like dictating reality and what they're able to even sort of like experience.

Like it's, it's like almost like the moment the machine turns back on them in a weird way. Yeah. I mean, I think that's true. And I don't know, I don't know how conscious I was of that in the moment because, you know, it was scary. It is scary. I mean, it really was actually scary. And, you know, I lived in the city and I lived almost next door to a National Guard.

I don't know what you call it, not a base, but a building where like they were bringing the bodies. And so there was so many photos that went around. I feel like it was like 26th Street between Lex and Park maybe just plastered with photos of people looking for their loved ones. And that, you know, it probably existed only a couple of months, maybe, but it felt like it was an eternity. But yes, I think that's true. I know, like, being in New York, I just remember thinking, I mean, we had to evacuate. I was living in a building on Park Avenue in 29th, Park Ave South. We had to evacuate because they thought another point was going to hit the Empire State Building, like, I don't know, five or six days later.

And just there was this idea of, like, one guy could walk into Macy's with one stick of dynamite, blow himself up, and half the city would leave. I mean, so there was definitely like this definitely subsumed the consciousness of the nation for, you know, like at least up into the run up to the Iraq war. I mean, I remember going to Nebraska, that same guy actually who was an Alex Jones fan and going to Nebraska and going to Nebraska and getting off the, I guess going from the Omaha airport to Lincoln and seeing this massive, and this had. have been in 2002 and driving on the highway and seeing a big billboard of a fireman like when others ran out he rushed in

we're in Omaha Nebraska like why is there all this sort of like oh and there was also just intense like security at the airport and I'm like they're not going to hit Omaha they did it in New York because all the cameras are there

but yes it changed mass media, I think, like, basically, it definitely defined the constraints of what the conversation was. In fact, Janine Garoflo was one of the few people who was allowed at that time in that run-up to the Iraq War to go on television to say we should not invade Iraq. They would not let anybody else on. She was just, she didn't want to do it, but she was recruited because they literally would not let anybody. anybody else on. And then she would go on and they would say like, what are you doing here? You're an actress. Why? Like what what possible expertise do you have? This was like, people were constrained. And, you know, even like Trey Parker and the other guy, you know,

who did South Park. Yeah, they were attacking anybody who was anti-war who was weak in that way. Fox News, its existence since 1996 at this point. The internet is in its like infancy. This is the year they start to make money. This is the year Fox News becomes Fox News. They were completely subsidized by Murdoch. I think up until that's insane to consider, actually. In 2004, a poll of New York residents finds that half of them believe that there was some sort of foreign knowledge from the government of the attacks.

The conspiratorial thinking is everywhere. and Alex Jones is having just a field day with this, obviously. You know, he's got all kinds of predictions that he's now saying, you know, that it was an orchestrated bombing from the government. The European Union will become the most powerful government on the planet, that Iraq should be nuked, that Osama bin Laden wasn't behind this at all, that maybe Germany was behind it somehow. I mean, he just goes and goes and goes for hours. And, you know, we've come around to this point a lot in our show, which is like the combination of cable news and the internet and now an entire sort of generation of American politics and entire American political cycle through the lens of Limbaugh and now Alex Jones, it just felt like very fertile soil for conspiracy theories as we now think of them. Conspiracy theories, but also sort of just like, I mean, what Limbaugh was doing at this time was calling going. Montanamo Club Gitmo.

I forgot about that. Yeah. They had a whole merchandise line of Club Gitmo stuff. Like they are, Grant is wearing one of those shirts right now, which is sort of embarrassing, but like we can't. It's, yeah, okay, Grant. But yeah, no, I forgot all about Club Gitmo.

Don't you understand vintage, Ryan? Yeah. It's a prior. Yeah, we're selling them on the Panic World store now. They probably are worth something now, but I don't know that most people are wearing, the people who have them are even wearing them ironically. still. Right. These type of conspiracies grow, right, when there's a sense that we're not getting, or at least then, that we weren't getting the real story. And I, you know, like, I, I think that

was the case that we were not. It was really just Bush really dropped the ball. But the interesting thing that happens, like over the course of the next really 10 years, and I think part of the it, frankly, was also like the 2001 election, to be honest with you. I mean, excuse me, the 2000 election. That was like, I think 9-11 overshadows it, but it was huge. It was, it really. We're talking like peak hanging Chad. What is it? The, uh, the, uh, the, the, the, the, Brooks Brothers Riot. The Brooks Brothers riots, yeah. But all legal people like, like, were like, that shouldn't have happened based upon our system. And there was this sense that, like, and part of it was because of the the ascendance of the Federalist Society.

The underpinnings of the things that kept us within the norms ended. And so by the time you get to Benghazi, 2012, yeah, and it sort of drags out until into the I think the story of Benghazi was there was a CIA outpost there that was maybe shipping weapons to maybe Syria or something to that effect. I can't remember the details now. But nobody wanted to talk about that. And so the Republicans seized upon that vacuum of information. Like, why was, why were, what were they doing there?

Why did the, this guy from the consulate run to, you know, run to this annex and Benghazi. And they knew that, I mean, I feel like part of this also happened with like the investigation of of of of of of Trump in some way that there is stuff that the government doesn't want to really come out and there some people take advantage of yeah the lines that different people and and that's how you build these conspiracies and it was just so effective for the Republican party and what I think is like super fascinating when you look at this sort of post 9-11 period not only you know you you now have the world that Rush Limbaugh created and you have this very, very active boomer audience.

Fox News is now profitable. They are figuring out how to create a dozen Rush Limbaughs that can talk to you 24 hours, day, seven days a week. And then you have the appearance of Facebook in 2006, which appears like it's promising an alternate ecosystem. But what it actually does is sort of just lay on top of the existing structure. Because by 2011, you have the news feed, which launches. It's the first algorithmically curated feed like it.

And by 2011, there's an academic study that's sort of tracking American polarization, and it finds quantitatively offline audiences may be less polarized and some would have suspected. 13% of Fox News's audience is liberal and 26% of New York Times readers are conservative, consistent with the view that the internet will increase segregation. The most extreme internet sites are far more polarized than any source offline. So it is just automating what had started effectively in the 80s. And we're going to talk about what happens when you do. do that and you get a guy named Donald Trump on the scene right after the break.

But before that, a word from our sponsors, more commemorative gold coins. When was the moment you kind of thought like, oh, Trump might actually become president? I was an MSNBC commentator at the time. I was going on Chris Hayes' show. I was in the green room. And I can't remember. there was a couple like weekend anchors in there or something. And I, and they were showing him come down the escalator.

And I'm like, that dude, he has completely turned the race upside down. I didn't think he could be the president, but I thought for sure that he could be the Republican nominee. And I think, if I remember correctly, Hayes and I, I think it was shot like Mystery Science 3000 and we watched him come down on the escalator. And you're like commenting on it. Yes. And at the break, I turned to him, I'm like, dude, this is serious.

Like he, they had built a suit. You know, George Bush was the CEO president. And Paul Ryan and the rest of them, I mean, the whole Republican sort of, and Limbaugh did this too. Being rich was morally righteous. Being poor was morally unrighteous. if being rich is morally righteous, then the billionaire on the stage is always correct. You can't argue against him. And the other thing that I understood because of how much right-wing radio I had consumed

is that Trump was 100% right-wing radio. He was just getting everything from guys like Mark Levin and Laura Ingram and Hannity and Limbaugh, for that matter. Like it was all right wing radio talking points. That's where the anti-immigration stuff came from. Okay, that's that that is really interesting because it does feel like by the time we get to Trump, he's now fully in the pocket, as you said, of conservative media. But also importantly, his campaign is the moment, it's the beginning of conservative media digitizing effectively. Like obviously there was right wing websites, forever, judge report, you know, all that stuff.

That was huge. But the difference is this. Drudge was a conduit to mainstream. So like all the producers at like ABC or the cable news, they'd all read Drudge. Yeah, exactly. And that's the way that the right would launder their narrative. They would do it through Drudge. By 2016, they no longer need to launder their narrative into mainstream media because they

media world was self-sufficient. Yeah, I mean, in 2015, Alex Jones is now fully online, you know, streaming nonstop, Info Wars. And he has Donald Trump on as a guest, as he's a candidate. And I want to read a segment here from the interview. Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down. Trump tells Alex Jones. And then Jones replies back, my audience, 90% of them, they support.

you. Then Trump wins. And there's, we have another study here that sort of shows that by this point, there is effectively like no right-wing trust in media. They don't really understand mass media anymore. And the study reads, as political scientists, Christian Hosum explains, what Trump does is connect that that type of opposition to the media into a form of conservatism that just wasn't around before. And one byproduct of that is that media mistrust, is more central to conservatives group identity than it was before Trump. Or as Lee put it, signaling media distrust is much the same as wearing a red MAGA cap. And for many Republicans, that might mean distrust of the media is better thought of as a way to understand the centrality of the partisanship to their identity.

So it's like this is the moment where the mass media generation, it's all ending. And now, like they don't even understand that they're still consuming mass media. It has changed. It's different. And the mass media president, the guy who's shaped from the apprentice and from Howard Stern appearances and letterman appearances, it's all morphed into politics. And like in many ways, it feels like the final stage of sort of the boomer story is like mass media just created their president. Yeah. But I would still contend that like what happened was that mass media no longer existed in the way that we understood it 20 years earlier.

Right. And you had 50% of the media being consumed was just like a self-enclosed bubble. And they no longer had to filter it to ABC because it doesn't matter because there are people aren't watching ABC. They're just watching. They're watching Fox. They're watching all these different internet plays, whatever it is. And the Republican Party did the same thing. Like, people forget Mitt Romney went to go kiss Donald Trump's ring in the run-up to the 2012 election.

Is that that haunted photo of them at dinner together? No, no. That's the, that dinner is one where Trump invited Romney to maybe you'll be my secretary of state. That was 2016. People forget that Mitt Romney made a special trip to New York City to literally kiss Donald Trump's ring. in 2012 because Donald Trump was the one who did the whole birther thing. And he needed, he needed Trump's blessing.

And so, you know, Trump was already sort of like this, he was the equivalent of like, the liberal left never understood the power of right-wing media. And so they couldn't understand who Donald Trump was in this alternate universe. What he meant to those people? He didn't know. They barely understood that there was this alternate universe. And they thought it was still the universe as opposed to, you know, and he's just like this

ding-dong fake billionaire on TV. But in this different universe, he was not. He was a different guy. He was the guy who was telling the truth on, you know, about Obama. Well, it's funny you talk about how like the liberal left like didn't understand the alternate universe because it does feel like after Trump has elected the first time, you see this, I mean, I was working in newsrooms at the time and I was doing these stories where there's just a rush of stories about like millennials not really understanding why their parents have voted for Trump.

Like I, you know, it's a common theme. It feels like almost a defining millennial experience in a lot of ways. And Luke O'Neill, who writes, Welcome to Hellworld, which is great, collected a bunch of stories like these. And I want to read one, which, which, which, uh, which, uh, an excerpt from one, which reads, another person told me that Rush Limbaugh sent his father on the path to isolation before eventually mainlining Fox News on a regular basis. Eventually, out of the blue, his mother filed for divorce.

He was crushed, couldn't understand why, and took comfort in drinking while watching his friends on TV. She is happier than I have ever seen her, and he is sad and angry living in the basement of a rented house still watching The Five, Tucker Carlson, James Piro, etc. And that is it in a lot of ways. It's like the ecosystem got so big and so vast and so comforting for people. And then we didn't see it forming. Obviously, it's clear now to look back.

But at the time, I mean, did you see? Oh, yeah. When did you sort of start to worry that this stuff was like becoming bigger than the alternative or even sort of mainstream, like journalism? You know, I started, you know, I was in a show business and then I sort of fell into radio in 2004. And that was when there was like the blogosphere. And so the thing that we were, you know, sort of like railing against was like, why is ABC News getting its, like, dictating the news from the Drudge report? So that was the worry there, you know, at that time. And then, but in 2006,

Stephen Sherrill and I wrote a book called Fubar, which was essentially, you know, the tagline could have been this is not your father's Republican Party. Like the the, the, if you listened to talk radio and believed in it, like believed it was actually moving people, which I did. I mean, that's why I went into talk radio. You saw this coming in the aughts and maybe even the late 90s. Like this was, it just was growing and growing and growing. Can I ask kind of a maybe a silly question but it's one that I've been sort of wondering recently. It feels like in many ways, the radicalization of talk radio in the 90s and early 2000s, you know, it's something you experience in your car alone, probably.

It's in the air, like literally. It feels very similar to the way we talk about radicalization with something like TikTok now, where it's very personalized. Your TikTok feed and my TikTok feed, never two shall meet. How did you get the sense that this stuff was permeating culture? Like what sent up the antenna for you? Because I do think that that is like a major roadblock in talking about this stuff now when we're talking about algorithms, which honestly are sort of the same. It's this thing that is just ethereal and out there, but it's clearly doing something to people.

So how did you clock that talk radio was having an impact? I mean, I lived in, I grew up in Massachusetts. I lived in Boston. I grew up in Worcester. Hell yeah, North Shore. Let's go. Well, not quite North Shore. Oh, I'm from North Shore.

Yeah, I'm from North Shore. Yeah, I'm not sure. Don lights on Marblehead. I'm from Marblehead. There you go. I mean... Grant is shaking his head. He's so pissed right.

Let's just get Dave Portnoy in here. Don't say that. There's a weird, strange thuggyness that exists in Massachusetts that belies its reputation. Yeah. And I feel like that's where I got a lot of, like, my awareness of that. Like, you know, just sort of just dudes you just talk to. And then all of a sudden, like, they're going into these weird rants. But I know where it's coming from because I listen to right wing talk radio.

I mean, I've said this exact thing about Joe Rogan. Like, in the last few years where I'm at a bar. I played softball with Rogan in the early 90s. He was a comic in Boston. No. And he good? No. He throws like he's throwing with his not right.

not correct car. Incredible. No, but I would be at a bar in my hometown, you know, for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and I'd be talking as, you know, some guy in doing high school, whatever. And all of a sudden, he launches into a bit. And I'm like, I know that that's from Joe Rogan. It's so funny that you notice the same. Like, that is, maybe it is like a New England sort of like,

you're breaking the, the barrier of what's acceptable casserole conversation into like a New England bar. And you're like, and if you know what they're talking about, it's like, you've clearly heard that somewhere. Is that like, it just so happened that I listened to a lot of, of right wing radio. So in conversation, if I had I not, I'd just be like, wow, this guy's weird. I'm like, what the fuck is you talking about? Like, you can't believe what he was saying.

Like Hillary Clinton, like drag a body into a park. And I don't know, the guy was wacko. But as soon as you hear that stuff, again, you're like, I know exactly what the source of that material is. Sure. Yeah. With Trump, they were building essentially this. suit and he just fit it perfectly.

Right. This is all at the end of the day about a cohort of people, white men who lost something real. I mean, in addition to the broad-based hollowing out of like rural towns and manufacturing, which impacts everybody, they lost social status. You know, like, you know, when I'm a kid, every TV show I watch is about me in some fashion.

It's either about like when I'm older or as a kid or, you know, like, women exist there as a, my mother or my girlfriend or my future wife. And now all of a sudden, like, I'm watching Seattle's commercials and it's like, what's that black dude doing? Like, well, that's supposed to be me there.

He's taking the bone pills now. Exactly. Wait, wait. What is this lawyer as a woman? And, you know, that's, that was a story of reconstruction, right? Like, the way that they, the idea was like, how can we convince? And there was some sector of the white population that, that, that, that didn't bite on this. Like some of the, you know, populist didn't bite as hard as others.

Like, how can we convince these poor white people? people, that there's a problem with black people actually taking political power. And, you know, we will stoke the fact that, like, okay, you're poor, but at least you used to be higher in the pecking order than black people. And it is, we're watching the fallout of like these liberation movements that happen in the 70s, in the 80s, you know, and really come. to fruition in the 90s and in the aughts

maybe not even the aughts really just the 90s yeah the the resent that's generated there and they've figured out how to sort of maintain that resent and sort of like give this vision to like gen z in my estimation of like your inheritance has been stolen

from you you should just know and I think like one last piece of this that I do think is important to touch on before we sort of end wrap up here which is that like as the internet became more corporatized, website as a concept doesn't really exist anymore. And the platforms that most of, you know, people my parents age are using are closer in construction to cable news. They're closer in construction to radio. They are just endless content factories that now know what you want and know how to sell it to you. And it, you know, that is, I think the final piece. And I think this is why a lot of people say like, oh, yeah, boomer

brain rot, you know, like they're on all these apps making them crazy. And it's like, no, like, the apps figured out that you can have someone stare at them 24 hours a day if they just tell you what you want to hear. And so it doesn't surprise me that the generation we have the most information on in terms of what they like, all of popular culture as it's ever existed, I can just beam AI generated videos of the Beatles reuniting into their brains. And at the end, say, don't put fluoride in your water. And I can become a. billionaire. We know what they like. They are the most targeted generation that's ever existed, probably. That's why I don't buy the idea that the internet did something here. It's,

it's that these, as you said, these stories have been playing out for decades now. And this is the, I assume, the final kind of chapter here, you know, in terms of human longevity is concerned for them specifically. You know, we are sort of hitting the Twilight era for them. And yeah, it's not surprising to be the internet plays a role. But I don't. I don't think it is like Facebook made my dad crazy. No, not Facebook did it. I think it, I don't think it's the internet that did it. I think it was really just, again, maybe it was a steroid on some level.

But we also, I would add. It's like Cialis. It's like a Cialis. Yes, like a time release Cialis. It's a time release. Yeah, exactly. But I would also say that like, you have to remember the boomer brain was completely. I have one in a jar.

The boomer brain was completely formed without a tool to deal with a digital world. Yeah. We would go to the library. We wanted a book. We would have to go through a whole, like, file of cards and then get a number and then go to the other file. It was so linear that you could not at any point get diver. I think that like is if you grow up without any, you know, we have a generation of kids who I think have like ADHD because of this stuff. But I suspect that down the road we're going to figure out how, and kids are going to figure out how not, how to maintain focus in some way.

They're going to readjust their signal to noise ratio, you know, detector in a way that like you didn't have to. employ when you're that age. And now they can't. All the dopamine hit stuff aside, which I think is true, et cetera, et cetera. I think they're just more vulnerable to not knowing they're being fed this stuff in the way that they are. Like, you know, you can hear people your age complain, like, my Instagram feed sucks now because or, you know, my TikTok feed sucks because I did this or that.

And you're not going to get that level of savvy from, you know, a boomer necessary. No, they're just like, oh, nothing's on. It is, but it is. Yeah. Yeah. I want to thank you for coming on the show. This is a great. I could keep talking about this stuff for hours and hours.

I assume everyone listening knows where they can follow you, but where can they follow you if they don't already. If you are a boomer, let me explain that I live on YouTube. www. You can, you can just, you can find them. majority report as a podcast every day. You can watch it live on YouTube or Twitch every day

and you can find the show on YouTube or Twitch after the show. We do noon to like 2.30-ish. That's good. That's like a good block. These Twitch streamers now,

they're doing like seven, eight hours. They're wearing diapers in a chair. I don't know how... The kids do that. I don't even know if he goes to the bathroom during the day. No, I don't think he does. I don't think he does. He's got a catheter. I have a catheter, too. I have a catheter. I've actually paid myself like three times during this.

No, we know. We can see your face. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator. And our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Devin Moroni and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their deputy director of brand and social. Marianne Couga is their director of marketing, YouTube, and podcast growth marketer,

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