The Daily Beast Podcast - Joe Rogan Is Mainstreaming Right-Wing Misinformation

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

The “Joe Rogan” experience is off the cuff, unedited, and very often entirely off the rails. Alex Patterson of Media Matters says the podcast is “a bastion of toxic masculinity… that leads listeners further down rightwing rabbit holes,” and notes that Rogan’s “dedicated listeners are mostly young men… listening to all three hours and taking in completely unfounded conspiracy theories without any of the fact-checking that would come for a more traditional journalistic enterprise.” Plus, Samuel Woolley, the author of The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth and the director of the Propaganda Lab at the University of Austin’s Center for Media Engagement, explains why “the right is a lot better than the left at leveraging the internet and leveraging both organic engagement and inorganic engagement to megaphone out their content,” including by using networked propaganda, where “what begins on social media as a quote unquote organic phenomenon, which is oftentimes not organic, then ends up on cable news, then back on social media and so on and so forth until it's really unclear where it came from.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart, conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. I often say we have an interesting show today, but we really brought it today. Alex Patterson, a senior researcher at Media Matters, who's been monitoring Joe Rogan, is going to talk to us about why this is probably the most important story of the media is uncovering. Then we'll talk to Sam Wully, who authored the book The Reality Game, as a professor at University of Texas Austin and the head of the Propaganda Research Lab at Engaging News.

He'll talk to us about the unseen hand of rage farms and how it's affecting our politics. But first, let's have some fun. Andy Levy. Molly Jongfest. What world is Kirsten's cinema living in? I think the short answer is her own. As we record, she is, I guess, finishing up or just finished up her little speech on the floor, where she, you know, she had advised reporters that she was having Biden for.

lunch because it's a lunchtime speech. And she's basically up there explaining why she will not vote to end the filibuster. And I think, Molly, you were the one that pointed out. She employed some good fake crying. It was a sort of shaky voiced. I want Jesse to play it. I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country. The debate over the Senate 60 vote threshold shines a. light on our broader challenges. There's no need for me to restate my long-standing support for the 60-vote threshold to pass legislation. There's no need for me to restate its role protecting our country from wild reversals and federal policy. It is a view I've held during my

years serving in both the U.S. House and the Senate, and it is the view I continue to hold. There was a lot of energy taken into its sort of waveringness that one doesn't usually hear. And she said that she was very against explosive rhetoric and partisan division. And that is why she is going to support the filibuster, which will continue partisan division and not protect voting rights, which might help. to save democracy because why not? But was she wearing denim? She had a line in there where she said, I wish there had been a more serious effort

on the part of the Democratic Party lines to sit down with the other party and genuinely discuss how to re-forge common ground on these issues. And that's where, like, not in this world. Like, this doesn't work. We know it doesn't work. And she knows it doesn't work.

And it's just to get up there and say that the problem is that Democrats aren't sitting down with Republicans who have shown absolutely no interest in any of this over the past, you know, at minimum over the past five or six years is just, it's straight up insane. It's gaslighting. It absolutely is. And it's just, that's why she is just, she is often her own little world with her fake, funky little outfits and her ugly glasses. And am I allowed to say that? I mean, I hope so. You're allowed to insult her fashion sense if you want, Andy, but just know that I'm a huge fan of it.

Are you really? I call her my cringe crush. You could make a case. No, we're not getting into Jesse's weird romantic peccadillo. Now, we don't. Maybe after the podcast, Jesse, but we need to talk about this. You and Jesse can face time about this. But I'm just saying that Mansion comes from a state where Trump won 69 percent, right?

Manchin, you can see he has no political impetus to support anything that Democrats want to do, especially because he makes all this money from coal. He gets, you know, he's really in bed with all of the stuff that a reasonable climate policy would completely, you know, sort of start us getting away from, which would be good. But someone like cinema, that's a rapidly bluing state. And even if Democrats lose it, it's going in the direction of Democrats. even if there are some slip-ups, it's really a blue state. So what's happening here is we have a candidate who was at one time this groovy green party activist and who has, you know, there are millions of speeches of her from the early 2000s saying things like, you know, we got to take down Mitch McConnell, we got to, you know.

And all of a sudden now she's become pro-filibuster Barbie. I believe there's actually a speech from her like 10 years ago explaining why the filibuster was very bad. Yes. Yeah. That's the thing with her. And that's, look, I don't want to get too much into the clothing aspect of it. But it is important to me for one reason.

And here's why. I think there are people who dress funky because that's how they want to dress. And more power to them. Like, good for them. Just dress how you want to dress. I don't believe that's the case with her. It's all an act. It's a sham.

It's a look. It's narcissism. It's just, she just wants to be noticed. And that's why she dresses like that. It's not because she has. kind of, you know, that's her fashion sense. And I think that translates into what she's doing politically. You know, she knows that if she's just another one of 50 Democratic senators, she doesn't get, you know, we wouldn't be talking about her. And no one would be talking about her. And that's

what she wants. She wants to be talked about. And so she has, you know, radically changed her views. And, you know, she holds herself out there as like this, you know, individual, you know, and that she's different and marches to the beat of her own drum. And the fact is, no, no, she doesn't. She's just trying to get attention. I think the most interesting thing is that, yeah, this is where her and Marjorie Taylor Green are exactly the same. This is branding baby, as they say. You could see Marjorie Taylor Green like making money.

I mean, she's a horrendous human, but she is fundraising off of this and there's small dollar donations. And the base of the Republican Party agrees with Marjorie Taylor Green a lot more than the base of the Democratic Party agrees with Kirsten's I think Marjorie Taylor Green agrees with Marjorie Taylor Green. Like, I think she's sincere in her beliefs because she's a fucking whack job. Kirsten Cinema is not sincere in her. Like, she's not, she's not even sincerely bad, you know. Right. And that's like Manchin.

I mean, Manchin is, you know, yes, he's in the pocket of big coal and as we've discussed, you know, big houseboat. But I, you know, he has been the same person, his whole political career, basically. So like, what you see is. is what you get with Joe Manchin, and he sucks. Let's, you know, I'm not saying he doesn't suck. He reliably sucks. You know, like, that's, you know he's going to suck.

Cinema is just, like, she's just, again, she's just trying to, like, she should just move to Hollywood. That's clearly what she wants. Where does this go for her, right? She's not going to get reelected. She can't run as a MAGA. Like, I mean, does she become a lobbyist? I mean, there's got to be some kind of, she must be smart enough to have some kind of goal here,

right? I guess. I mean, I, I guess I just don't care. Look, I know what you mean. And yeah, I don't know where it goes for her. But most likely, I think you're right, though. I think it goes to her being a lobbyist and making a lot of money. Right. But I'm just, I just want to reiterate, I am so sick of hearing this stuff about the Democrats need to reach across the aisle more. Fuck that. I mean, and look, a million of us said this, hundreds of millions, I don't know how many millions because Joe Biden ran on this platform and we knew it was garbage then. I think he sincerely thought he could reach across the aisle because he remembers the Senate being much different than it is, you know, now. But, you know, we all were like, no, you can't, you can't with this group

of Republicans, you can't reach across the aisle. You just can't do it. And for Kirsten Cinema to get up there now in 2022 and say that that's the problem is, it's just the height of, of stupid. Yeah, it is. No, it's completely nuts. But Mitch McConnell is thrilled. I mean, she's made Mitch McConnell very, very happy, which is something you never want to do as a Democrat. You never want to see a smiling turtle. Right, exactly. So speaking of a total disconnect with reality, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are fighting because Ron DeSantis won't disclose his vaccine status. What are you two seeing there? So it's not that they're fighting as much as it's that Donald Trump has. has sort of figured out that Ron DeSantis is his biggest enemy in the Republican Party. And the person, remember, the polling is 59% of Americans don't want Trump to run again. So, like, a DeSantis who's, like, very Trumpy in certain ways, but is much more of the kind of mainstream Republican that Republicans feel comfortable with is a real threat to Trump.

And he's, I think he's worried. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I also would say they're not fighting because DeSantis, you know, Trump gets up there and says that the, you know, there are politicians out there who have been vaccinated and who have been boosted, but refuse to say they have and he's calling them cowards. And we all know that he's talking about DeSantis. But they ask, I guess, you know, DeSantis's campaign is like, well, Donald Trump never mentioned Ron DeSantis by name. So this has nothing to do with us. Which, so yeah, they're not fighting because DeSantis, he's too cowardly to admit he got boosted and he's too cowardly to admit that Trump is calling him out on it. So it's just this hilarious little thing where it's a one-sided fight, which, you know, I guess is smart for DeSantis in his cowardly way. But no, I do think you're absolutely right, Molly. This is Trump firing early shots for 2024.

Right. And the calculus that I think is interesting is that Trump is big enough and loved enough in the far-right bays so that he could conceivably take it down to Santis. But what's interesting is he has gone pro-vax, which remember for most of the pandemic, he's been very kind of like sort of, you know, he got vaccinated in secret. He wouldn't cop to it. And now all of a sudden he's had this kind of pivot where he's been like, boosters are good. You saw him with Candace Owen saying boosters are good.

and Candice Owen saying he's just too old to use the internet so he doesn't know. Right. Right. So I feel like you're in a place where now he is going ProVax and he's hitting DeSantis on being on being boosted. So I feel like that's a sort of fascinating switchover. And I mean, I think DeSantis is way more interested in like science and less interest. I mean, Trump, you know, believes that global warming isn't happening.

I mean, I think DeSantis is a little bit smarter than that. Not much. But so it's interesting to have him be the sort of anti-science in this fight and Trump to be the pro-science. I mean, it's very weird what's happening here. Yeah, absolutely. Except, you know, as we, I think we discussed last time with Trump, you know, he's finally realized he wants to get credit for the vaccine. So it's all about his ego. Because as you just pointed out, he got, Trump himself got boosted sort of secretly.

And it wasn't until like a week or two ago that we found out that he had, in fact, got boosted. So, you know, he's a coward, too. It's cowards all the way down. Like, it just, you know, it doesn't matter. But you're right, because I do think, like, Trump just doesn't believe in climate change. DeSantis, I think, believes in climate change and just doesn't give a fuck. So it's like, to that extent, at least DeSantis is generally more pro-science in the sense that he at least recognizes that it exists, you know. I saw a thing, Steve Dees, who's a, I guess, a big conservative talk radio guy, is now saying that, you know, Trump has become a Pfizer pitchman.

And it's going to be really, it's actually going to become really interesting to see if this is a huge fault line in the 2024 campaign. If Trump is suddenly, like, if enough of that base is anti-Vax, will he lose people to DeSantis? And if he's starting to lose some of the talk radio guys, that that's sometimes an indication that that's where the base is going. I think you mean the surviving talk radio.

Yeah. No, that's a good point. That's a good point. I mean, Trump was the one who like hit on anti-vax as like a useful way to get this sort of, you know, because he was able to get some of those far-lefty kind of QAnonis soccer moms in California on board. So I think that if this ends up being the thing that comes back and destroys him, that would be very poetic. Yes, it would be a nice little bit of irony. I do have to point out that, you know, Pfizer has had a Republican candidate be a spokesman before because Bob Dole was the spokesman for Viagro. Oh, that's right. The thing I was thinking about is you do see, like, these Republicans are constantly given chances to get rid of Trump, and there's too cowardly to do it. And the thing I was thinking about today was with McCarthy, Kevin McCarthy, has this opportunity. to participate with the January 6th, we know he has crazy stuff because we already saw this week the, you know, that there were Republicans who were doing falsified election certifications in different

states. I mean, there's all sorts of fuckery. So we know Kevin McCarthy knows a lot of stuff. And yet he was like, I will not participate with January 6th. I mean, they could get rid of Trump tomorrow just quietly if they participated in the January 6th. hearings and gave them information. Yeah, but there are precisely two members of the House, Republican members of the House, that have any kind of, you know, courage at all in this case, and it's Adam Kinsinger and, you know, Cheney, whatever. Liz Cheney. It pains me to say it. Liz Warlord Cheney. Yeah. But look, yeah, I mean, Kevin McCartney has precisely two balls fewer than he should. And he contradicts himself. You know, we know, we know.

know what he said right after January 6th, and we know how upset he was about it. And he knew damn well what was going on back then. And now he just walks around like, well, I didn't say that. I didn't say that. When he's, things that he said on tape, things that he said that have been recorded, he now claims he never said. Back then, he told CNN that he would testify about the conversations he had with Trump on that day, you know, and right afterwards. And now he just says, oh, that's not true. I never said that. But we know he said that. We heard him. say that. And then that brings us to, and Molly, please take this away. That brings us, I think, to one of your favorites, Senator Lindsay Graham. Senator Lindsey Graham, on television, as he does,

again, I just want to point this out. I feel like I say this on every episode. Mitch McConnell is probably the worst person in the world, but he is the most effective Senate leader, majority. He got three Supreme Court justices in there. One from a Obama, right? He stole one seat from Obama, one in the middle of the term, and one, like, while people were already voting in the next election. Like, this man, I mean, he has completely changed the entire makeup of the Supreme Court, you know, and he said, and he said things like you wouldn't let Democrats bring up the fact that Amy, Connie Barrett was in a weird religion and that it influenced all her beliefs about, you know, everything in the entire world. So, yes,

I would say that this guy, he may be not a great guy, but man, is he effective? So here we have Lindsey Graham on Fox's opinion shows saying that if Mitch doesn't get on board, there may not be a place for him because Trump is the head of the party. Yeah, I mean, you've got him, like, I guess it was on Hannity show, and Hannity, you know, Hannity was very, uh, You know, Hannity has had it with Mitch McConnell. He's very frustrated with Mitch McConnell. And that's bad for Mitch McConnell because, you know, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson

basically run the Republican Party. So, you know, so he's talking to Lindsey Graham about it. And he, you know, asks if Graham, you know, will support McConnell in the future as, like, majority leader, you know, next time the vote comes up. And Graham's like, well, you know, the majority leader has to, you know, the majority leader has to work well with President Donald. He kept calling him President Trump. And it's like he's not President Trump. Stop saying that. Like, you know, and then he said, but basically, Lindsey Graham at least was admitting that the entire party is enthralled to Donald Trump. And so I guess I'll give him credit

for, you know, as the expression goes now, saying the quiet part out loud. He admitted he comes out and he says, you know, whoever the majority leader is has to work well with President Donald Trump. And so, okay, yeah, we know. Like, we've all known that. And it's, I guess, maybe good to hear someone actually say it. But it's also just, like, how do you go through life just being like that obsequious? It's just, it's so pathetic. It's just absolutely. It's just absolutely. I know. But it's absolutely pathetic. But they're all like that. I mean, I know. You know, is Lindsey Graham worse?

I mean, he's not worse than Kevin McCarthy. He's not worse except that, like, again, we talked about Marjorie Taylor Green earlier, who, you know, I, again, we'll say I believe has the, you know, she does believe the bad shit crazy stuff she says. Lindsay Graham was not this person six years ago, you know, he wasn't good. I'm not saying he went from being a great person to being a shitty person. He was never good. but he wasn't this person. He was much more aligned with someone like John McCain, you know, who, again, I'm not saying you need to like John McCain. I'm certainly not saying that. But, you know, McCain stood up to Trump. But Graham just, he's given up all sort of pretense of being any kind of individual who, you know, has any kind of convictions whatsoever. And he's just all in on the, you know, we must bow before God, Emperor Trump. So the base is excited about Trump, but he still can't win a general, right? Unless

something happens, you have a situation where Republicans could just pivot to someone else who could win a general, and they're choosing not to because they're so cowardly. I mean, it is sort of amazing. Yes, but I don't agree that Trump can't win a general. I mean, you know, if I think I would agree on that if we didn't have an electoral college system. But given the system we have, I think there's every reason to believe that Trump could win a general, not necessarily that he will, but that he very well could. I mean, you know, it was close. He won one and it was close last time. And so I don't think we can say that he can't win a general, even if the polls show that 59% of the people don't want him to run again. Well, okay, but if most of those people are in like, you know,

I don't know, New York or California, it doesn't matter. So, you know, we have this, honestly, I've been anti-electoral college for decades now, and I used to get shit on for it. And now it's kind of nice to see that a lot of other people are now saying, you know, that the system sucks. But given that that's a system we have, and given that we know there's a very good chance of fuckery in 2024, I definitely would not say that Donald Trump can't win a general election. I agree with you. There might be a candidate who's more appealing to independent voters or conservative Democrats.

One thing Graham said that I do think is true, he basically said that the 2024 nomination was Trump's to, you know, if he wants it, he's got it. And I definitely agree with that, at least as of right now. Look, things could change, you know, the army of the unvaccinated, those who are still among us in 2020. 23 when voting starts, you know, could rise up against him. Right. No, it's true. I mean, we don't know how this goes. Yeah. Hey, folks, if you haven't heard every single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program.

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the daily beast.com. Alex Patterson is a senior researcher at Media Matters. Welcome to the new abnormal, Alex Patterson. Hi, I'm happy to be here. Can you explain a little bit of why the Joe Rogan show,

a little bit of what it is and why there are so many hours of it. Absolutely. So a bit of background on Joe Rogan. He's a comedian and MMA expert who has risen to sort of international stardom and influence. He has the most popular podcast in the world. And he publishes three podcasts a week that are usually about three hours long. And they're completely off the cuff, unedited, recorded conversations between him and his guests. And over the past year or two, I would say, his podcast has really took in a hard turn to right-wing misinformation. And he's regularly hosting right-wing pundits, conspiracy theorists who say completely absurd things on his Spotify podcast. I want to just drill down on that for one second. It's a three-hour podcast. How is it available? It's available on Spotify, but it's also available

on streaming, right? Joe, we're going to actually sign an exclusive deal with Spotify. last year that the Wall Street Journal reported was worth $100 million. So it's actually exclusive to Spotify. He used to publish his videos on YouTube where it would be like the highest viewed podcast. But as Spotify has sort of tried to foray into the podcasting world, they brought Joe Rogan on as sort of their biggest hitter. And they've really promoted him.

He was their most listened to podcast host in 2021. We should say he is still on YouTube. is just in clip form now, and it's usually also what they decide to clip is like, hey, the vaccine, that thing's for cissies. What the hell? I can't believe you pussies are taking this thing. Jesus. Did they clip that or do other people clip that? No, they clip it. Yeah, he still has, um, part of his deal, which he's discussed on his podcast was like, the importance of keeping his YouTube clips on his YouTube channel. Oh, interesting. A crucial part of why I think it's important to report out on the extremism of the

Joe Rogan experience is that he has, like, dedicated listeners that are mostly young men who are likely listening to all three hours of his grovel and taking in completely, like, unfounded conspiracy theories without any sort of fact-checking that would come for a more traditional journalistic enterprise. Alex, I want to just set up one more thing for the audience. I remember before he signed the Spotify deal, I got to see a media sheet. And the numbers they were showing for his reach were three to four times bigger than the biggest cable news hosts, and the only thing that was even close to him was Howard Stern. Is that about what you've observed?

Yeah. Wait, I just want to stop for a second, because I've also heard that it's actually not true because it's more hours, and so they're comparing the cumulative numbers to the actual numbers of cable news, or is it really, like, because the statistics I saw were like 15 million versus 4 million.

Yeah, I think there's a fair amount of information, interpretation there, but the number I always returned to of was reported by the Washington Post last May. And it was showing that Rogan has an estimated 11 million listeners per episode. That's more than like four times as many people as primetime cable hosts like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson. So I think we often view folks like Tucker as like our biggest like white nationalists and problem in chief, whereas I really am trying to push the conversation to understand that Joe Rogan is often the person that is mainlining right-wing lies into our broader public. Yeah, I mean, I'm even looking on YouTube, and if we think of it this way, he was consistently

the number one podcast on the Apple charts when he was still there. And like, is Bernie Sanders interview alone has 14 million views? Yeah, he's sort of year after year, just the most popular podcotes host in the world. He got famous through reality television, just like Trump. Yeah, I would say so. He has early... Because he was the host of Fearful. factor. Yeah, that's his like, I'd say before the podcast would be like his most notable public role that he's been doing the podcast for so long. And I think it's its biggest strength. He was early into the game and now he's established a huge base of listeners. So, Alex, you hit on a thing that I thought it was important since I've been shocked how little this has been covered for how much

magnitude is, is that he has like what I like to call the illusion of fact checking where he has this producer, which, you know, gets very offensive to podcast producers like me, where this guy who basically like, Jamie, call up a fact check on that. And the guy's like, yep, it's right here on Info Wars. Hillary Clinton had a cocaine cartel in 1989. Yep, sure enough, Hillary Clinton was in charge of bringing cocaine to America. Yep, we got it, Jamie. Thanks. Can you explain a little bit about that? I can. The Joe Rogan experience, I think fills a specific need, particularly among white men in the United States, to feel like they're independent thinkers, to feel like they're taking in some media landscape that is unique to them

and is edgy. And by working with his producer, Jamie, to lend some veneer of credibility to the false claims he makes, I think that bolsters the feeling among his listeners. And an additional thing I'd like to point out is that Joe Rogan is rarely held to account for all the lies he promotes on his podcast for all the bigotry he promotes on his podcast. But when he is, he has a very cunning way of avoiding any sort of accountability. And that's first by saying that he's a moron. He'll always say, like, oh, I'm literally, quote, a fucking moron. You shouldn't trust the things that I said. And then that's just doubled down by Spotify repeatedly failing to take any action against his show. And it's just showing that Spotify is putting profits over our nation's

public health when Joe Rogan is becoming a huge misinformer on the COVID-19 pandemic. Yeah. So one of the things you talked about here was that it's getting worse. I was pretty early on listening to Joe Rogan and I listened to some episodes. And there was always some real bat shit conspiracy. He welcomed Alex Jones many times and people just like him. But can you talk about some of the most recent egregious things he's done? Yeah, absolutely. I first started monitoring the Joe Rogan experience when he invited Abigail Shrier on. She's a Wall Street Journal writer who has now dedicated her whole career to spreading anti-trans lies in the U.S. media. Wow. She writes for the Wall Street Journal? She does, yeah. That's crazy. And she basically claims

that young trans people don't know who they are and that if we just deny their existence, perhaps it will go away as how I would summarize her points. And at that point, I thought, more critically that Joe Rogan's podcast is the most popular in the world and that it is a target media matter should take on. And since then, I've seen, particularly as we've been going through the pandemic, Rogan invite extreme conspiracy theorists and folks who lie about the pandemic on his show. Just in the past two years, Rogan has encouraged healthy young people not to get vaccinated. He's lied repeatedly that the NRNA vaccines are a form of gene therapy. and he also recently promoted an anti-vaccine rally on his podcast.

So it's getting to a point where Rogan's extreme lies about COVID-19 aren't just one-offs, but a clear pattern of behavior. Like one of his defenses is that he's stupid. Do you think, from listening to him a lot, that he's stupid, or do you think that this is actually sort of intentional? That's a complicated question. And I would say he's cunning. I think we often see prominent men in media.

when they're ever held to account to try to deflect any sort of responsibility by claiming to be morons or that they didn't know what they were doing. But he's clearly shown that he knows how to navigate systems of power successfully. He's repeatedly bragged on his podcast that Spotify hasn't taken any action against his show. One time after one of his guests was spedding anti-trans rhetoric, he literally said, you can say whatever you want, we're on Spotify. That's good. I'll be, I'll be using that one of my writings. One of the things that he sort of uses his defense besides that is that he has people who are not necessarily as, right. It's not quite the same as Fox, right? Like, he has sort of more of a mix, even though he has really, he has really, really scary, you know, people like Alex Jones. He also has people who are slightly more, a little bit more liberal. I mean, what do you say to that?

I think, yeah, like last week he had carrot top on his show, and they just discussed comedy and, like, general things of that sort. And it wasn't any sort of harmful rhetoric. And I think that's what the specific problem of the Joe Rogan experience is. It's like eating a bag of skittles, and one of those skittles is a poison pill. Like, you have to sift through a lot of garbage before you find what's really harmful. But I think that is why we need to take. Rogan seriously because he's building trust among his dedicated fan base. And then why would they question him when he says that like Joe, when he questions if it would, if Joe Biden actually received the COVID-19 vaccine. Jesus. Does he say that? Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious about that. Yeah, he, on September 30th, yeah, I can, and I can share this with you afterwards, but like on September 30th, he claimed that Biden didn't actually receive the COVID-19 booster shot because it would have been unsafe and potentially dead.

deadly to do so on live TV. Jesus Christ. Another one of his lies that I'd love to mention is that he's also repeatedly spread the basis claim that the Biden administration is trying to stop people from receiving monoclonal antibodies. Right. That's a big lie. Yeah. He promotes ivermectin on his show regularly. And people have pointed out that his, is particularly even this Peter McCullough interview that he recently did, is even more extreme than when Fox News or even Newsmax puts on the air.

Yeah, I think comparing the extremism of chur. Rogan to Fox News and Newsmax is generally a losing game. They will always outdo one another. And I think it's a more helpful way to look at it is to situate Rogan. Right. It's moving the Overton window. A more helpful way to just to situate Rogan as a crucial component in the right-wing media ecosystem. And he also plays an incredibly important role in the right-wing media echo chamber. He can take really small fringe ideas and broadcast them to an incredibly large. audience. This interview that Jesse brought up is an interview with a guy who claims to be involved with the creation of MRNA, though there are a lot of people involved in the creation of

MRNA. And this interview was kind of one of his really worst interviews, and it was so bad that it actually was removed from YouTube. Can you explain a little bit more about that interview for those of us who are not completely online all the time? I can. Yeah. Peter McCullough is... doctor, scientist, who is a darling of right-wing media. You can regularly bring him on and he will spread lies about the COVID-19 pandemic. And of course, Joe Rogan invited him on his podcast to continue spewing those lies. And there was some reporting that YouTube took down that interview, though I think it's important to note that that interview was published by a secondary account. It wasn't published

by the Joe Rogan experience. It was someone who sort of ripped the interview and uploaded it to YouTube. So I don't think we can definitively say that YouTube took it down for COVID-19 misinformation. Oh, interesting. But one thing I would like to highlight, though, is that interview specifically prompted that interview with Peter McCullough and

another with Robert Maloney, who is a serial misinformer on the pandemic, prompted an open letter from hundreds of doctors and science educators calling on Spotify to moderate and put an end to COVID lies on the Joe Rogan experience. Has there been any response? Not to my knowledge. I don't believe a Rolling Stone broke the story,

and I don't believe Spotify provided any on the record comments. As it currently stands, Spotify doesn't have a public policy on their website around COVID-19 misinformation, though they have told the New York Times and other outlets that they don't allow dangerous content about the pandemic on the, platform. Well, in that case. They're trying to have it both ways, and it's just absolute lip service when their most prominent podcast hosts repeatedly violates any sort of policy they may claim to have. So what you're saying is that young men in the millions are listening to this podcast

and they're getting bad information about COVID and they're also being drawn into the right-wing media industrial complex. Yeah, I completely agree with you. His post- His podcast is a bastion of toxic masculinity that directs his listeners to right-wing and far-right pundits, which we know will then in turn lead those listeners further down right-wing rabbit holes. Time and time and again, media matters has showed that social media algorithms will only further radicalize Rogan's listeners. And so the problem is greater than Rogan's podcast himself. When he invites someone like Alex Jones on his podcast, his listeners are going to go to Info Wars, and they're only going to become further isolated from reality.

And when it comes to the pandemic, it will only further harm our nation's public health. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. This was really interesting. Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate your time, and it was great chatting with both of you.

Sam Wully is the author of the Reality Game and is a professor at University of Texas, Austin, as well as the head of the Propaganda Research Lab at Engaging News. Welcome to the new abnormal, Sam. Thanks for having me. I am so excited to have it. you because I wanted to talk to you about a lot of stuff, but the first thing I want to talk to you about because you do research in media engagement and in technology. And so the first thing I want to

talk to you about is this idea of rage farming. And then we'll pull out and talk about other stuff. But I just want you to get you in this because we talk for my newsletter, which I will not plug because it's from the Atlantic and not from the daily piece. But I just want you to talk. talk to us about this idea of engagement, positive or negative. Rage farming is this concept of getting people to respond to a message on social media or more broadly on other media platforms by making them as angry as possible and getting them to click something or like something or, in the case of Twitter, retweet it with the end goal of making the content more popular. Because social media is a quantitative game and it has

a big quantitative bias, if you can get more likes, more retweets, then your content has much more likelihood of going viral and then spreading to the masses. And so oftentimes, political groups, say, for instance, in this case, the Texas GOP spread a message that is really inflammatory and then a bunch of liberals respond to it and inadvertently end up allowing that tweet to go viral and to be a trending tweet on Twitter. I think it was the number four trending tweet. And this is all part of a larger sort of infrastructure of strategies that I call manufacturing consensus. So using social media to create the illusion of popularity for content. And it grows out of the Tromsky's idea of manufacturing consent, of course.

But yeah, it's this idea of using all this sort of like fake or inorganic or manufactured engagement to create a store. I mean, if you look at Facebook, for example, one of the things that we often talk about, if you look at the, there's a thing called crowd tangle, which will have the 10 most popular pages on Facebook. And nine of them will be Ben Shapiro. Can you explain that phenomenon to our listeners? Yes, absolutely. So in short, the right is a lot better at doing this than the left at leveraging the internet and leveraging what we call both organic engagement and inorganic engagement to megaphone out their content. And so back in 2016, a lot of the conversations were about the ways in which bots or social bots,

these automated profiles that people could buy as followers were used to massively boost people's profiles. so if one person could buy 10,000 bots to automatically spread content, then it would spread all over the web. Now, social media companies have gotten savvy to that. And so most of the time now, what people are trying to do is coordinated organic engagement rather than coordinated inorganic engagement. And that means that they're using these strategies like rage farming, or they're doing things like for like campaigns or click-for-click campaigns,

where they organize a bunch of their followers who have the same political ideology as them to just like content around the same time. And then it trends. then it goes viral, and then it spreads across the internet. And so it's just a way of gaming the system in a way that I don't think Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter intended. And it, in fact, is actually against their terms of service in many cases. It's like a sort of more complicated bot farm.

It's funny because I was talking to someone who is a media reporter, and he was saying that they have a thing for cable news that scrapes the internet to sort of dictate stories that they should be following. Yeah, and it's kind of like the snakey didn't get its own tail, right? Because then they're going to come across stuff that has been manufactured and created by these people on social media. And it's a big cycle of what people call media manipulation. Right. It's called data miner. And data miner will get sort of go scrapes all of the internet to find stories that are. I mean, it's anything that gets a lot of traction and it will then flag that for cable news.

So you ultimately have a sort of Mobius strip of cable news and social media. Yeah, exactly. There's this book out there called Network Propaganda, which talks about exactly this phenomenon. And it's basically saying that what begins on social media as a quote unquote organic phenomenon, which is oftentimes not organic, then ends up on cable news, then it ends up back on social media and so on and so forth until it's really unclear where it came from. Oh, yeah. How much do you think that Democrats are hurt by, because I think by this kind of content, it strikes me that it's a lot. And one of the things, there was an ABC clip. Actually, you know what, let's go into this because I really want to talk to you about this. There was an ABC clip. It was a clip of Dr. Walensky. It was edited down. So ABC is not a bad faith actor. They're the mainstream media. This clip was edited down. It made it look like she was saying that people with four comorbidies. or more those were the people that were dying, and it almost made it sound like she was pitching

a sort of eugenicsy, you know, move. When in fact, if the longer clip has much more context and that wasn't it at all, that clip went everywhere. Yeah, no, this is a phenomenon that people like me

have labeled cheap fakes. So it's the use of editing of clips to make it look like someone said or did something they never said or did. And basically all you need is a, is a really basic audio editing package to do this. In fact, my last book, it's called The Reality Game, and it's how the next wave of technology will make the truth. And it's all about how, like,

these kinds of audio editing systems and even more sophisticated stuff that can help you to create deep fakes, which are actually edited through AI, then create these videos where basically a version of the truth exists that is not true. It's fake. It's false. It's created. Another example of this would be like the video of Nancy Pelosi back in the day that was slowed down to make it look like she was drunk, right? But that's like a real fake. I mean, this is like not even a fake. It's just slightly out of context.

Yeah, I mean, if you just take a clip, one clip, or if you just edit things, context matters, right? And the problem here on the internet and more broadly, the problem with sound bites and things like that is you get all of these hot takes and out of context clips. and and they fuel the outrage machine that is the Internet. I want to get back to Facebook now because this is actually a much bigger platform than. Even though I'm a person of Twitter, Facebook is actually a much larger platform, right? With much more meaningful in the world, right? With, you know, there are people who are suing them right now because of a genocide.

I mean, they really have a long tail. There was a news cycle about a month ago. The Facebook leaks. It really did show that Facebook is at best a bad actor, right? I mean, what did you think of the Facebook leaks? And then what did you think of their immediate pivot to meta? Yeah. So I think that the Facebook leaks revealed to us that Facebook had a lot more knowledge

about the ways in which their platform was causing harm than they led on. They had done actual research, a lot of actual research that was leaked to the Wall Street Journal that showed that they knew, for instance, on Instagram that, there was a lot of harms, particularly in this case for young women, but also in other contexts that there was serious issues for the ways in which Facebook was used for political repression and other things like that, particularly in countries like Myanmar and Burma, or former from Lee Burma and the Philippines, but also in the United States, also across Europe. And so Facebook, the way that I've heard people put it in the past, which is kind of silly,

but makes sense is that they're flying the plane while the plane is being built. And that's really frustrating because they've launched this incredibly powerful, incredibly potent tool that is now being used more for authoritarian purposes than far more for authoritarian purposes than it is for democratic purposes. In fact, you might say that Facebook is a tool is more beneficial to authoritarian countries and that democracies just don't seem to know how to use it. It's really such an important point. So we had this Facebook leaks, news cycle, well coordinated, all of the newspapers sort of got in on it. It was some of the best reporting I've read in a long time. And then immediately Facebook, without skipping a beat, went right into, you don't like us in the 2D universe, wait till you get a luck of us in the metaverse.

Oh my God, yeah. Myself and everyone else, I know that studies this stuff was just flabbergasted, was sort of like, oh my gosh, this is insane. What is going on here? But it made sense. I mean, it was misdirection or it was, hey, look over here instead of like what we're doing here. But it's in line with what Facebook has been doing for the last several years. Facebook has put tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars at this stage, into the development of VR and AR, much like Amazon and some of the other big companies, Apple. And they're putting a lot of their stock in making sure that the metaverse, so to speak, comes to fruition. And to bring it up again, and I apologize, in that book, the reason why it's called the reality game is because most of it's about virtual reality and augmented reality and the way in which because of these investments these companies are making in that space, we have to be thinking about what disinformation and misinformation and hate is going to look like in a virtual landscape.

Because as one of my friends, Toshi Hu says, the body has no metric for fake. Like, you can see fake text. You can see a fake video. but how the hell do you feel fake with your body? That's really interesting. Yeah, we're going to die. I was a little depressed before we started this, but I'm feeling much more depressed. Now, do you think that there is a way for, I mean, I feel like we keep coming up against this idea that Facebook does not seem at all interested in regulating itself, right?

Because, or do they? I mean, you know what's going on here. What is your take here? Facebook's done some things to stop, for instance, the use of bots, and they've done some things to label advertisements, and they've made movement. But it's usually been in response to being called out about particular misuses of the platform. And so it's an indication of the fact that Facebook's not going to do a whole lot unless other people find out they're doing things that are wrong. And that's problematic. Right. For any number of reasons. Well, for so many reasons, but also because researchers like me don't have access to the data because it's proprietary and Facebook hangs on to it. really tightly. And so third party oversight doesn't really happen. And Facebook also doesn't want to regulate itself for another reason, which is that they don't want to be seen to contrabeen free speech, and they don't want to basically get into the situation they're actually in, which is where

conservatives and liberals alike say that they're being unfairly targeted. Right. But it's crucially necessary for the government at this stage, the U.S. government, while they can, to step in an attempt to regulate this space. And I know that there are some politicians in the Democratic Party and even some in the Republican Party who have floated some policy that would be sensible. Because if we're just relying upon Facebook to regulate themselves, we're going to really enter into a brave new world of problems. And we're also going to risk the fact that they might just reverse the self-regulation that they've imposed. And I mean, I think it's important also to mention that the local news money, the money that used to go for ads in your local newspaper now goes to Facebook. Oh my gosh. Like I think that

that's a, I'm really glad you asked that because I think that that's a huge problem. Facebook and Google have also done so much to really destroy local news infrastructure, to take away the funding and to ruin the funding models that most newspapers and TV stations on a local level relied upon. And even on a national and international level, they pull not only the advertising dollars, but they also do this thing where news organizations now have to rely upon Facebook or Google in order to get the word out. And so they have to try to do. do exactly what we were talking about earlier, which is kind of hack the system in order to get their stuff to be prioritized or in order to get it to trend in order to get people to actually

read their content. Because as Pew has shown and others have shown, you know, a huge proportion of Americans go to Facebook to get their news. But Facebook's not a news provider or producer. Right. And so that means that Facebook has basically become an arbiter of the news, regardless of whether or not they still have a trending news sidebar. They are in control in a very big way of information intake in this country. And that's a huge problem, especially given what you just said about crowd tangle and the fact that oftentimes nine of the top 10 websites that are trending are extremely fringe and frankly extremist. Right. Your sense is that this could be at least improved with some government regulation. I think that regulation could certainly help. I think that there's

things that can be done at a federal level to prevent misuse of these platforms, but we're way behind. I also think that the Federal Elections Commission and the Federal Communications Commission can do more. The FEC made a decision in the early 2000s to basically say hands off of social media and the Internet during elections, which was insane and has led to most of what we see now. We also need new platforms. We need new social media. We need to put pressure on venture capitalists and others to produce social media that actually operates for the benefit of us rather than operating in order to just manipulate us and get us to have eyes on the screen. Oh, that's interesting. As someone who's married to a venture capitalist who focuses on education but still is in that field. I've never heard anyone say that we need to be pushing for new social media. So that's a really interesting idea.

So you're saying that part of it is like abandoned Facebook. Let's find something that isn't trying to poison our society. Yeah, I mean, like work within the capitalist system that we have, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on who you are. And get the VCs and the incubators, like white combinator. to produce social media that actually are more beneficial for us, that have media literacy integrated, that are better for kids, better for older people. That's actually the core idea of my book, the last book I wrote,

is let's produce some new platforms that are actually better for society. Are you seeing that anywhere? There's some stuff that's happened, that was happening prior to the pandemic, that I don't know if it's come to fruition. But things like Mastodon and Duck, Dock, Go, and Mozilla, those kinds of organizations provide a framework for how we might actually leverage an internet that is actually good for democracy,

good for society, more than it's bad. This is so great. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizza Gate, and scarier than a Mexican getaway with Ted Cruz? The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams,

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Andy Levy. Molly Jongfest. I'm not allowed to make fun of the fact that this is our only segment. So let's just get going on it then. All right. So who is your, and I feel like your fuck that guy is more of an idea than a person. Well, yes, for the most part. But it does kind of boil down to one cause to my fuck that guy.

So my fuck that guy is the Hillary 2024 nonsense that's been bubbling up for the last couple of days. And it started with a column by Doug Shone, who is paid to write this column like every, year basically, and nobody takes it seriously, except for the good folks over at Fox News, who can't believe they're good luck, and have just made it their, like, I think it might be their most covered story over the last two days, according to what I've seen on Twitter anyway. And they are so happy at the possibility, even though they know it's garbage. Like, they know it's nuts. Like Harris, Harris Faulkner introduced the story on her show as speculation.

over a possible third White House bid by Hillary Clinton. I can't even believe we're saying this. It's gaining steam. It's gaining steam on your network. Well, it's also gaining steam on Twitter. It's not even gaining steam on Twitter. On Twitter, people are, even on Twitter, people are smart enough to be like, this is just a dumb, a dumb, Doug shown column.

You know, Fox News can't stop talking about it. And sure, if you have your TV tuned to Fox News all day, you would think that this story is gaining steam. But it's the dumbest thing. Hillary Clinton is not running in 2024. There is nothing I own that I would not bet on this, including both of my kidneys. So I really hope I'm right.

But she's not running in 2024. This was a dumb column written by honestly a fairly dumb guy. And not even, I don't even mean. dumb in the like he has an IQ of 60. I don't mean that. He's obviously he can string words together and dress himself and stuff like that. But he knows it's not happening. He's writing it's, it's pure clickbait. It's what he gets paid to do. And nobody should pay attention to it, except to laugh at it and to make fun of Doug Schoen and the people that are taking this seriously. So that's my fuck that guy for this show. Shit posting in the Wall Street Journal.

Yeah, exactly. That's, I mean. Yeah, exactly. Everyone wants to be drill. That's all they do in the Wall Street Journal editorial page. So it's basically just shit posting. Yeah. It's the New York Post for people who have an MBA. I like that.

That's a good point. So my fuck that guy is Mitt Romney's niece. Perhaps you've heard of her. Rona, Rhonda, McDaniels, whatever it is, lots of ours. She sucks. She was his press secretary. She wore pearls. No, that's the other one.

No, she was the head of the RNC. That's right. I was confusing her with the daughter of Huckabee. Yeah. Who also is, there's a lot of nepotism. I mean, I say this is a beneficiary of nepotism. There's a lot of nepotism in that Trump White House, in the old Trump White House.

So anyway, the story is she has come out against doing debates. Oh, that's fun. Why even debate? Why? Why have Republican candidates need to answer questions when I think they would agree to do debates if they knew that they could have the moderator be Tucker Carlson? You're talking about presidential debates? Presidential debates and vice presidential debates. Okay.

They are opting out of the not-for-profit, non-partisan debate structure. And they're opting out. There's no more. You're not going to, you know, I'm taking my cake and going home. Not great. Do you guys think this is goalpost moving so that they can get more leverage? Or do you think this is just doing a pre-handicap for knowing that Trump's going to bomb them yet again if he's the nominee? That's a good question, Jesse.

and I think there's a very good possibility that this is goalpost moving or a negotiation tactic or whatever. But the fact is, I think that what they want is sort of, there's no way the, what is it, the corporation for public debating or public debates, the CPD. Public broadcasting. I don't know how they can agree with what the Republican Party wants. And like if they do, I think you're going to see the Democrats saying, well, we're not doing that. Yeah, I think fundamentally, though, this has just, you know, all the Republican Party has been doing for the last year plus is trying to make it easier for Trump if he wants to run. And this is just more of that. No, I think that's true. So, yeah, I think, Jesse, the answer to both of your questions is yes, because, Molly, I come 100% agree with you that they would just assume there not be, you know, presidential debates involving Donald Trump. But on the other hand, if for some reason they got the TPD to agree with all their ridiculous demands, they might feel okay with Donald Trump on a debate stage.

So it could be a little of both. But ultimately, I think, Molly, you are 100% correct. And I agree with you. We are in a place where Republicans have decided that nothing good can happen to them in the mainstream media. And because the right-wing media is so big and powerful. and getting more powerful every day, they don't need the mainstream media. And I think that's what's really scary. Yeah.

And they know that, you know, 90 to 95 percent of the right-wing media marches in lockstep with some very rare exceptions. So they're very comfortable only dealing with, you know, the people that will kiss their ass. Yeah. So there's no need to ever do debates or ever go on MSNBC or NBC or CNN or even. You know, I mean, you can, these Republicans are setting up a world where they only go on friendly stations. Absolutely. And it's working for them. All right, guys. Alternate theory. Rona just read the art of the deal. She's tried to show off to Trump that she did. I wish I could say that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life, but it's not.

It's certainly possible. I mean, I think the reading is unlikely. And I bet Trump is mad about the art of the deal because, remember, he got mad at the ghost writer. Yeah. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode.

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