Tobias Rose-Stockwell | How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy―And What We Can Do About It

Srini Rao

Tobias, welcome to the unmistakable creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Thanks for having me.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Alright.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it is my pleasure. So you have a new book out called outrage machine, uh, how tech amplifies disconnects disrupts democracy and what we can do about it. And you referred to me by Matan Griffel, but right when I saw the title, I was like, yeah, I want to know about this.

Because it's such a prevalent issue. But before we get into the book, I wanted to start asking, what did your parents do for work? And how did that end up shaping what you ended up doing with your life?

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Yeah, well, thanks for the opening question, taking it to an interesting personal place. My parents were actually, had kind of unconventional backgrounds. My dad was a musician who became a programmer and then a journalist in his kind of retirement years. And my mom was a librarian who became a college professor and a writer.

So she studied a lot of, you know, academia and in academia she studied Shakespeare and women's lit. So yeah, broad range here.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, how did that influence you? I mean, and particularly when it comes to journalism, like if you think about how journalism has evolved and how much has changed from when your dad was a journalist to now, like I remember asking Cal Fussman this question, uh, he interviewed all these people and I remember he said, you know, when he was growing up, it was like Walter Cronkite was the single source of truth. And he said, and the internet changed all of that. So I'm curious, like how your dad's, uh, career shaped your own and

What advice did your parents give you about making your way in the world?

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Yeah, so my dad, when he was a journalist, and this is kind of in the 90s and 2000s, he was a technology journalist for a while, and he was a reporter for the local paper that we, in the town that we grew up in. And he, you know, local paper was this kind of bastion of community, it was this very kind of central place that everyone in my hometown went to for.

good information and news happenings. It was this kind of community feed, this place where people kept in touch with one another and found out what was happening. There's this really important hub for kind of understanding. And so yeah, when he joined the paper, I think there was maybe 15 people on staff at that point in time, the local paper, and when he left in the early or in the mid-

2010s, I think there was two people on staff. So his paper went through this period of kind of being this, you know, this kind of golden place for community discourse to basically being a shell of its former self, which is indicative of the broader news industry and what has happened over the course of the last few decades with news and information consumption.

Srini Rao

So, I mean, how did that influence like what you've ended up deciding to do? And I know you talk about this later in the book, but I mean, since you brought up, you know, the local newspaper, like I was just thinking about the two local newspapers in the towns I grew up in. And I was thinking like, do I even remember the fucking name of the newspaper in Riverside? And I do. It's the Press Enterprise. But like the last time I saw the Riverside Press Enterprise on our doorstep was so long ago that I can't even remember when it was. But

What are the consequences as a society for us not having a local newspaper or community feed? Like, because to be candid with you, I don't think I know half of what the hell is going on in Riverside. Like, I don't know anything. Even in my Google News feed, there's literally nothing about Riverside in it.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Right, right, yeah, totally. Yeah, I think there's something to be really said for how important these central places were, and still are, to communities. Most of our attention in the last decade has gone to social media instead of traditional media. And there's certain kind of preconditions and certain kind of affordances that social media has, certain kind of design elements that social media has that...

that local news doesn't have, right? And there's actually strong correlation between democratic involvement in local politics in actually having kind of a view of what is wrong in your local community and having an available local newspaper. So, yeah, as this transition happened from kind of print journalism to social media, we lost a lot.

we absolutely lost a lot in that transition. And yeah, so I think growing up in that space and just recognizing, so my sister, for instance, when I was very young, she was on the front page of our paper. I had a couple of features in the paper when I was growing up as well. Everyone kind of had a touch point with this paper and knew someone who was involved with it or was featured in it at some point in time. And so it really was this kind of central repository for great community connection.

And yeah, when we all went to social media during that time, something was really lost, you know. I grew up in the North Bay and in the Bay Area and there were a huge number of fires that happened over the course of the last like five, six years, starting with some really, really terrible ones. Unfortunately, my parents' house also burned down in one of those fires.

But I remember the actual reporting that happened during that time was fantastic reporting. People really, journalists going out and actually recovering some of these really important events and fires and people's lives have been changed. But most people still went to social media to get information. And there was a lot of bad information about the fires, but people went there because it was fast and because it was urgent, and because they had been habituated to going on social media to find information.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

on a regular basis and it makes sense that, you know, they would do that for sure, but something was absolutely lost in that transition, mainly that like factual information actually has become much harder to find and rumors have become far more pernicious and available as a result of social media. There are these kinds of analogs to it on social media. So there's like a Facebook group from my hometown now, but you go there and it's like, you know, that's a 30% personal branding and people promoting their own little things.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Uh, in, in town, you know, uh, 30% kind of gossip, right? Like just literal gossip about, about stuff that, that may or may not be true. Uh, and, and then like, yeah, and then maybe 40% photos and, you know, people just kind of offering up stuff for sale or whatever else. So it has taken some portion of the place of, of the local news, but, but at large, the thing that was lost was a real kind of window into the central, uh, or organ of the community.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

that everyone used.

Srini Rao

Well, it's funny because I have, for all intents and purposes, basically quit Facebook. I have literally not posted anything there for the better part of this year and probably the same as Instagram. OK, I scroll through Instagram just to see what's going on and talk to a few friends. But one of the things that I always find fascinating about people who are writers or journalists who predated all of this is the difference in their commitment to craft versus

the people who are sort of like, you know, like these millennial modern journalists who write for Business Insider. I'll give you an example. So Business Insider published this, like 30 lessons from 30 years from some girl. And I wrote, you know, I do this every year on my birthday, like I write. And mine was like the equivalent of like a book. You can find it on medium somewhere. It's ridiculously long. And I submitted mine to Business Insider and hers was just literally like a list of one sentence each. Yeah. And I'm like.

So this is what they prioritize because I mean, to some of the points you made in the book, it's like click bait. Um, and it was to me, that was just a, a commentary on like, what has happened to our capacity for depth when it comes to our consumption abilities, but also like when you think you would talk to somebody like Cal Newport, you're like, wow, this also has like a pretty significant effect on our ability to create things of depth.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the internet has, has trended, uh, towards, and this is just a, this is a function of economics, uh, as much as anything else, but the internet has started this process of, uh, of really reducing, um, you know, per on the, on the per click basis, it's much easier to get, uh, to get, uh, ad revenue for, uh, for short stories versus long form content, right? Because you can, the more short stories you consume, uh, the better, uh, yeah, the better, uh, income stream that is for the

for the online outlet. So that is like a fundamental problem. You'll see this happen a lot of times with the stories that have these listicles where you go from, it's like one story, but you have to click through to the next page to get to the next list item because that story's worth 15 times the ad value of a single story where people are slowly reading and calmly consuming their long-form content.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

So, yes, the kind of listicalization of the internet is a real phenomena and not a good one, I think, at large. But that is definitely a function of the attention economy and the way it's designed right now, unfortunately.

Srini Rao

Well, I mean, your mother being a professor, your dad being a journalist, what did they teach you about truth, journalism and craft when it comes to writing?

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Yeah, great question. So on the journalism side, my dad was at this paper and just understanding what it took to go out and get a story. Going out and actually having a bunch of conversations with different people, verifying, trying to do fact checking, trying to make sure that there's primary sources involved in a story, trying to make sure that there's some kind of corroboration, some kind of foundational sense of corroboration so that the thing

So it's not just kind of a, you know, a puff piece or something that's, that is based on, on rumor hearsay. That, that basic kind of structure, just like watching him go out and trying to corroborate stuff is really a critical, interesting thing that I think is not part of discourse about what journalists do. Journalists do have, you know, a lot of kind of reputational capital on the line when they're putting things together. And so if you publish a falsehood, unlike on social media, you can get called out of it.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

on that and you can lose your job. Right, so there is actually some professional risk involved with that and that was really important and foundational for me understanding and writing about this book. So yeah, my book is very much about kind of the, kind of how we understand the truth, right? What the foundations are of truth and how do we know the difference between rumor or hearsay?

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

and actual verified information. And it turns out that is very knowable. We actually do have fingerprints for good information versus bad information. And that's not something that I think is a common piece of knowledge. People tend to consume information online at face value a lot of the time. And they usually align that with their kind of moral dispositions or emotional dispositions. So if they see something that disconfirms their emotions,

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

then they'll be like, I don't believe that. Versus something that kind of confirms their emotions, their emotional kind of tribal biases or their confirmation bias. Then they'll share that onward, right? But that's not actually how we got ahead as a species. Like we were actually required some really important structures to be put in place into how we share information. And so in my book, I go back way to the beginning of kind of the printing press and before to try to unpack.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

what it was that made both news gathering and academia different from other forms of information generation. And yeah, it turns out that both of these kind of institutions, journalism and academia, have really important structures in place that primarily have to do with being able to call each other out on what you might call bullshit. Right? When one person says something that is false, then there's reputations on the line.

for the, for the, the person that says the falsehoods. So, uh, so, and they, they actually get, you know, called out or demoted or, or fired if they, um, if they say the wrong thing and you can, you can find these knowledge networks, right? This is basically the creation, this difference between, uh, between kind of viral information networks, like social media and actual knowledge networks, which is places where a lot of institutions, individuals with reputations on the line are actually competing.

to call each other out on bullshit. And the result of that is actually better information for all of us. That's what labs at universities do. That's what multiple journalistic institutions do, right? That are covering kind of the same area, the same beat. People could be like, that didn't happen. Well, that happened. And the result of that is actually, and that's science, is how we got science in the first place, is people being skeptical of one another in these really controlled settings.

but it's kind of the hidden, the invisible, you know, the invisible story of how we know so much about the world is the creation and evolution of these knowledge networks.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean, I totally get that because my dad's a college professor. So I get that whole idea. And I want to come back to this idea of science. Like you may have read it. We had a guy named John Petracelli here, wrote a book called The Life Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit. And like he goes through like all the various forms of media and he even like calls out TED Talks, even though he himself had a TED Talk about why TED Talks are bullshit, which I thought was pretty hilarious. But let's get into the book because you.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Nice.

Srini Rao

open the book by saying this book is about a machine designed to make you angry. The machine has a purpose to inform you of what's happening in the world. Its job is to get you to pay attention and it has become exceptionally good at this task. This task so good in fact, that it has found out what makes you specifically you very mad and in the process has divided you. It's fractured you into opinions. It asked, it has asked you to be for or against each new issue it has served. This machine is our modern media system. And like just as I was like,

reading that I couldn't help but notice one of the strange paradoxes and I like had this con conversation with my dad constantly about the news because you know he watches the news every night I'm like dad I'm like you're missing one fundamental thing here the news like yes you might think it exists to inform the public but the primary purpose of the news is to sell ads it's a business and so talk like how did we get here in the first place?

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Right, right. Yeah, so I mean, I really try to, in this book, start from the kind of platonic elements of what journalism is to try and understand what, like how does the media work? What is it doing to us? And whatever it's good things and whatever it's bad things, and try to take a pretty neutral stance throughout it, but with the general recognition that something is pretty wrong with the way that we process information.

We, you know, we, we get, uh, news now that is so, uh, omnipresent about what's happening in the world. We have so many sources of potential, uh, outrages, discontents, uh, problems, right? The world is full of issues. The world is full of problems that need solving, but we are finite individual humans and we can't expect to solve all of them. So there's this real mismatch with the quantity of available things.

to upset us and outrage us and entertain us to some degree, because sometimes sensational news is entertaining, but there's a mismatch between the number of problems that are available to us and our capacity to actually process those problems. So there's this filtering process, there's this filtering mechanism, which is traditional media, which tries to take the stuff that is most interesting to us and serve it to us and get us to pay attention.

And what I mean by pay attention, I mean literally pay attention, right? We are actually paying our attention because our attention is worth money to advertisers. And that is the kind of core function of the news industry is to package our attention is to package our attention and sell it to advertisers while also serving us information that is happening in the world, contemporary, contemporaneous information is happening in the world. And that's the core, that's the core.

mechanism that also in these most recent years has become so efficient at finding the specific issues that trigger you, right? We built this very fundamental kind of triggering system that will find the specific issues that are most likely to trigger you and serve those to you because it's more profitable. And I don't think this was a nefarious

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

thing by any means, you know, I know a lot of people that were very early at social media companies and they were designing a lot of these algorithms and a lot of these design elements that have brought us to this point. And it is just really a kind of efficient efficiency function. They've just gotten much, much better at doing this thing. But us as consumers, we are struggling as a result of that. We you know, there's far more information than we can actually digest and find useful.

these days. So we need to figure out a better way of navigating this cacophony of urgent issues. Because when everything is urgent, right, nothing is right. If we're if we're overwhelmed by the horrors of the world, then we feel paralyzed, right? We we feel helpless. And that's not a productive place to be, especially in democracy, because in a democracy, we require good information, we require shared information in order to solve problems together.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, talk me through the history of various communication mediums, because I know you wrote about them in the book, like the printing press and, you know, radio, television. Like talk to me about how this problem has evolved with each sort of iteration of what we consider the media.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Sure. So each new media technology that comes along has a very disruptive period that comes in its wake. We tend to look backwards at the innovations and the tools that we use today. And we tend to think about them as being lovely little miracles that we enjoy. We appreciate the fact that we can turn on a television and get

live news streaming into our homes. We appreciate the fact we can turn our radio in the car. People do that less and less these days and get live information about what's happening. We appreciate the fact that we can buy a book for cheap, extremely cheap, right? And get great, great information about what's happening in the world. But each of these inventions in terms of how media is produced, each one had this period.

that involved a really explosive disruption behind it. And so, while I was writing this book, I asked the question, I was like, what is it about this moment in time that feels so problematic? I think everyone has some feeling that there's something wrong. There's something going wrong in the world right now. Things are, like the future is an anxious place. You're anxious about the future. There's a fearful place. There's a lot of concern about what is happening.

Like I just could not shake the feeling that this is a totally new experience, a totally new subjective experience in history. So I basically went back in history and I spent six years researching this book. So it was a pretty deep dive, but I went back to every major media disruption from the printing press afterwards to look at these kind of these huge, chaotic

cacophonous disruptions to society that happened in their wake. And it turns out each one has a period of chaos that follows. So the printing press was this fantastic invention. It was an innovation in its time. And it was basically a 100-fold increase in output. So you could previous to that point just print a few pages per day. And all of a sudden, you could print

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

hundreds of pages per day. And so back in Europe, when that happened, this was actually a surprisingly violent invention. You wouldn't think that you'd be like, oh, books are great. But if you look at what happened with Martin Luther, who is this Catholic priest who got very upset by the way the Catholic Church was using the printing press to actually print these little indulgences, which were little...

kind of hall passes to heaven. So Martin Luther, he went out of his way to write down his 95 Theses, which were basically little outrages, little angry, it's basically a tweet storm. If you look at it right now, it really resembles kind of a modern Twitter thread. But each one is a point about how the church is doing something wrong and how it needs to be fixed. And those...

those medieval tweets, they went viral. They intersected with the printing press and they were printed in town squares, they were printed all over Europe because this new medium allowed for that information to spread widely and the result was this huge upset to.

European society at the time, which ended up causing roughly a hundred years of civil wars as society kind of reformatted itself to account for the huge new interpretations and understandings of the Bible, which was soon translated into a common language in common German from Latin for the first time because of the printing press. But there was this kind of cacophonous period of civil wars and massacres and...

you know, viral misinformation everywhere that came as a result of the printing press. And we don't think about it that way historically, right? We wouldn't want to give up our books. We wouldn't want to uninvent the printing press, but there was this period afterward that was terribly upsetting for society, right? So, it turns out each media technology has this kind of period afterwards. I call it this dark valley of hidden harm because the harms of a tool are actually obscured by...

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

its widespread adoption. And it turns out, you know, everything from the printing press, the telegraph, to the radio, to the television, each one has these kind of viral explosions of problems that come from misuse of these tools. And society takes a while to figure out how to make them useful and not harmful. And, you know, as we're entering into the world of AI and as these kind of new media technologies and new other technologies are coming

use much more readily, I think we need to be, we need to understand this pattern, right? This is a pattern that happens when new media is a new tech comes into our lives, there's going to be harms that come from it. So we need to kind of get closer to this recognition of how bad it could be before it gets really bad. That makes sense.

Srini Rao

Yeah, like does it seem like it's amplified this time just because of the scale? Because one thing I think that you alluded to in the book is like the major difference I think here is that what these companies are able to do is to capture our information at scale and then also our attention at scale and then spread information at scale, whether it's factual or not.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Yeah, absolutely. So this is a difference. A difference in degree can create a difference in kind, ultimately. So this is new. I think that the broader patterns hold from century to century in these adaptations to new pieces of technology. But this is a new time. I don't think we've gotten this close to the instantaneous ability to.

to spread a single piece of information at the speed of light around the world. And that is kind of, you know, we've basically maxed out the speed of information traveling between brains. And that is a strange, that is a strange new superpower that we have, right? We were all kind of imbued with this superpower of telepathy for the first time as a species, right? Like I can think a thing, and as long as I can get it out of my brain

press send on the tweet or the X or whatever it is, the post, I can get it anywhere on earth to the right audience if it has the right ranking algorithm, getting it to the right people. And that is a real new liability in a lot of ways, right? But if you look at the types of information that tend to go viral, the types of information that tend to travel the quickest, it's not actually the best.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

information. It's not the best sourced information. It's not the best understood information. It's usually stuff lacking context. It tends to be highly emotional. It tends to be outraged. It tends to be things that people instantaneously emotionally respond to. And that's not great for sense making in the wider world, right? So if we're only getting the emotional hot take and not the verified, you know, d***.

deeply referenced, understood version of an event, then we're going to respond the wrong way to that. And I think that's one of the core issues with modern.

Srini Rao

Let's talk about context because I think that is one of those things that I feel is like completely. I feel like we're context blind when we consume self-help books, when we watch the news, when we see things on the Internet. And you say that without context, ambiguity can lead to devastating misunderstandings. The act this act of packaging a social post captures a moment without context, like an unflattering still image frozen from otherwise cohesive film.

It allows us to copy and paste the most salacious seconds from a much longer story into an unforgiving environment where it's primed for judgment. But what happens next is worse, context creep. Those who are most offended by this initial post want to share it with others, and in doing so, they inject it with their own editorial bent. Something that was already taken out of its original context is now placed in an entirely new one. And there are a couple of things that this reminded me of. Trevor Noah, when he did his final episode,

he has this like probably one minute monologue where he literally says context is everything. And yet it's so frequently overlooked. And you know, like the funny thing is like I had this bizarre experience where Glenn Beck found my book and you know loved it and ended up being on the Glenn Beck show. And this was like back in 2013. I didn't know the first thing about Glenn Beck. I didn't even know who he was. Like my dream media appearance was The Daily Show. So you can imagine how little I knew about Glenn Beck.

But I remember when I shared that on Facebook, people were like, this guy's an asshole. I wouldn't want him to make my book a best seller. And I was like, well, guess what? He agrees with me on something. So let me go talk to him and find out what that is. But one thing that really struck me, and I know he's said some just atrocious things, like I've seen some of the video clips, was the difference between the general public perception

and who he actually was. Like I ended up writing this piece about like, you know, like the difference between persona and persona, person and how media creates a mask because all of us in the public eye are playing characters to a degree. So talk to me about the role that context plays and more importantly, like why are we so blind to context?

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Yeah, context is such a fascinating and important thing that, you know, I think once you, once you recognize how easy it is to lose context in our modern media ecosystem, it's hard to not see it, right? It's hard to, it's hard to not recognize how, how problematic certain media can be. So you know, every time we put a piece of information into

social media or any kind of media really, we're actually changing that information, right? We're taking it from its kind of original form, which is nuanced, it's long form, it's rich, and we're turning it into something else. So that, you know, this is like a Marshall McLuhan thing. The media is the message, or the medium is the message, right? That when we actually turn something into media, we change it in a fundamental way. You know, with social media, that change is very

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

apparent in that you have oftentimes a character limitation. You don't necessarily know if it's a real person behind the actual post itself. You don't know if the bearer is trustworthy or not. You don't know a lot about the original information when it goes into there. You actually just only know what you get from this small text box of information that comes on the other side.

And so there's a couple of things that I think are really important to recognize, that when context is collapsed into this, right, you're losing the kind of charitable interpretations of, especially if it's a contentious event, right? Something that happens, say you and I have a discussion or argument and it gets heated at one million moment in time. And I say something, or you say something that's a little bit, kind of uncharitable. And we discuss it and then we get to some kind of resolution about it and we give them some more common ground around it.

someone can take this conversation we're having and cut out that particular piece of the disagreement in which I call you a name and you respond in a mean way, and they can turn that into a piece of viral media. And so the careful nuance, the natural resolution, all of the stuff that went, the lead up to that event, also the lead up to the miscommunication or the difficult moment.

That is all lost, but it's packaged, and we lose a sense of reality, in that we lose a piece of actual, real lived experience there, and instead, we're given this tiny emotional chunk of information that is engaging to us, right, but also not completely true. And that's bad, right? That's bad for, I mean, it's a necessity of efficiency to get the information.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

out there sometimes, but what social media does very, very well is it allows for misinterpretation, right? So that piece that is taken out of context, the descriptive context and forced into this tiny box, it is now ripe for misinterpretation and it's ripe for someone taking a side, my side or your side in that conversation, in that argument.

without understanding the deeper nuance of that disagreement. And then what social media does very, very well is it allows for us to add our own context to it, right? So it's not just lacking context. It allows for people to say, oh, you know this disagreement that they had? Like, this is what it means. This is why it's more important to society for us to understand this kind of reckoning, this anecdotal reckoning.

for any kind of hint of power asymmetry between you and I, any kind of, if say, I'm a Republican and you're a Democrat, then it becomes a post about identity, right? People can say, oh, this is what's wrong with Republicans, or this is what's wrong with Democrats. And it becomes this kind of like fun house mirror, misrepresenting reality and the deeper engagement, the deeper kind of nuance and.

and information that was present in that conversation. So it's kind of turning that information into a moral play for all of us, right? So they had these moral plays back in the middle ages in which people would like watch the righteous person deal with a difficult moral issue and then resolve the moral issue in a way that was educational for the observer. Basically,

That's what social media does on a regular basis, turns everything into this deeply moral play in which we're all kind of taking sides on one side or another. And that tends to actually inflame a sense of in-group and out-group bias, right? So if there's a power asymmetry that's available for one group versus another group, then you can use that as the example of this is why all of those people are bad, right? Or this is why all these people are good. This is why my group is good.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

And so that's one of the reasons why we see so much, I think, identity information on social media these days. So many indicators of identity, like hashtag identity, this hashtag identity, that is because we are threatened by a lot of these, uh, these kind of moral, uh, anecdotes that, uh, we get served more of the outrageous anecdotes that we get served on a regular basis. So we want to defend our in groups and denigrate the out groups. And that's one of the fundamental problems with social media.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, it reminds me of my experience with reality TV. There's this Netflix show, Indeed Matchmaking, that I was on. And I remember talking to my cousin when I signed the media release. He's like, it doesn't matter what the release says. Anybody can make you look like a jackass in editing. And he's like, your job is to make sure you don't give them any ammo to do that with. But even when I saw how the show was cut together, Cal Newport asked me, he's like, so what are the, you know, what's the situation here?

He's like, is it scripted? I was like, no, it's not scripted. Like everything you see is like spot on. I said, but I was like, the job of a reality TV producer is not to showcase reality. It's to entertain the audience. Reality is pretty fucking boring. It'd be like, here's Srini Rao brushing his teeth. Here's Srini Rao taking a shit. Nobody wants to see that. You know, it's like, let's find the crazy, like, it was pretty, you know, like, you know, the girl they matched me with, like basically became the villain of the show, but like she did a lot of ways. Like.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Right. Yep.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Right.

Srini Rao

gave them so much material that they ended up building the whole season pretty much around her. Because I remember talking to them, they're like, when she would talk, they're like, keep the camera rolling, do not turn that thing off. So that's one thing that this reminds me of, but I think that there's no way we're gonna get out of this conversation without talking about politics and elections because of the role that it played. There's one thing that caught my attention is that graph that you have of like,

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Right.

Srini Rao

media attention by candidate. I think you know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. And like, you know, because my dad never had these like conversations about Trump. And I was like, you know, like, whatever, like, I, like, personally, I think the guy is an idiot. But what I do think he's absolutely brilliant at is, like, to me, the reason he won was he understood the way the media works better than any of those other candidates. Because like, I remember

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Right. Yeah.

Srini Rao

By the time I had heard of the other, like, the Republican candidates, I was like, wait, Trump was already the nominee at that point. I was like, Jesus, this guy drowned out everybody with the way he was able to court media attention by saying the craziest shit imaginable. Cause like I told one of my friends, like, think about all those crazy things he said and how many times those soundbites were played for the next four years. Over and over.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Yep, absolutely.

Srini Rao

So this is a bizarre question. Like one, you know, what role does social media play in not only our political discourse and how, you know, but and how leaders elected and what's it going to mean for the future. But just out of curiosity, if there was no Twitter, like if Trump had ran for president pre-social media, do you think that he would have had the impact that he did?

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Definitely not. And you know, he tried actually. You can look back. He was considering candidacies many, many times between, you know, earlier on in his career. We've known who Trump is for a very long time, right? I think this is really interesting about Trump is like recognizing that he has been in the public eye for a very, very long time. And he's actually publicly explored candidacies for the presidency for a very long time as well. And yeah, that particular graph.

that you're talking about is media coverage of top presidential candidates during the 2016 election, during one period of the 2016 election. And he got like almost 5X the coverage of any other candidate, including Hillary Clinton at that point in time, in terms of homepage mentions during that period of time. And yeah, he's a fantastic, he's a brilliant media strategist, right? He has a great kind of media sensibility.

and understanding what will actually capture the most attention of his audiences. I think what's really interesting about Trump is actually if you look back during this period of between 2011, 2012, there was this transition that happened in his media, in his social media presence, in which he went from being a kind of standard celebrity online persona, right? If you look back at his Twitter, his tweets from that era.

You can see that he would get an average of roughly, you know, 40 to 50, uh, retweets per item, uh, proposed that he would make. Um, and there's something that happened, uh, it was around June of 2011 in which he, I think he was watching Fox news at the time, uh, you know, and before this point, it was, you know, uh, check out my new development and Trump's Oh, or I'm going to be at the, I'm going to be on the view tomorrow, enjoy. And it was a standard kind of celebrity. Uh,

information that he was putting out on his Twitter account. But what happened in June 2011, he was watching Fox News and he was watching a segment about Barack Obama and he tweeted something about how Barack Obama is a radical. Like he's a radical politician with a radical agenda. And his tweets went from, you know, average of 40 retweets to

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

a thousand retweets for that particular tweet. Right. So there's all of a sudden he had this tremendous signal from his audience. People, uh, people commenting on it, people retweeting. It was like huge attention. Right. And you actually watch from that point, you can see how he begins to lean into this more outrageous, bombastic blowhard personality, uh, and begins to tweet more and more outraged stuff. Right. So he actually becomes trained.

by Twitter throughout that period to express the more extreme versions of his perspectives. And you can just watch it happen. You can watch it from week over week from that point, him leaning into this kind of extreme and outrageous personality that we've come to know as the primary personality displays as a presidential candidate, as a president, because he could see that it actually captured a lot of attention.

Right. So, uh, so it's, you can, you really recognize how powerful this thing is, how powerful social media is as a tool, both for finding audiences, but also for being manipulated by the response of those audiences. Right. I think that, you know, Trump has been, you know, like I said, he's been in the public eye for his whole life, my whole life, the entire time that I've been alive, Trump has been someone that has been known, you know, and he wasn't always this outraged, uh, bombastic, um,

kind of toxic individual for a huge portion of the country. He was actually like, he tried to play the media game with traditional media. He tried to go on the talk shows and look like a wealthy businessman who said how it was. And he really did try to kind of court his audiences in the way that he thought would get the most attention at that point in time. And with the old school media environment that required him to kind of be a smart moderate.

right, more or less. And the result of social media was that, him on social media was that he actually, he had this new vehicle through which to lean into a more extreme persona, because that's what his audience wanted. So this is the phenomenon called audience capture, which I think is a really important one for recognizing how social media kind of turns us into more extreme versions of ourselves and how it actually trains us to be slightly more extreme in our opinions.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Um, no matter where we are, because we are all signal processing machines. So if we respond to certain types of signals, you know, I'm posting throughout the day or throughout the. The weekend I post about this. I post about that part of my job. I post about a baby picture. I post, you know, a picture of my cat. And then I post something I'm angry about. It turns out moral outrage has a 17% boost to virality, uh, per moral and emotional word that you use. So if I say something, if I'm like stuck in traffic, for instance,

And, uh, you know, I tweet, I'm stuck in traffic that will get, you know, average engagement. But if I tweet, uh, I'm so angry, I'm stuck in this horrible traffic. Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, he needs to figure out how to fix this. This is a disgrace. I'm disgusted. That is far more likely to get traction online. And as a result, I'm going to get, I'm going to start tweeting stuff like that more because that, that

Srini Rao

Hehehehe

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

actually gets more signal from my audience. It actually trains me to respond in that way.

Srini Rao

Well, OK, let's do this. I want to come back to that. But let's talk about the role of AI. Like, I think I am an AI enthusiast, like, to a degree that some people think, OK, like, Trini's lost his fucking mind. Like, I think as a creative person, this has enabled me to do things that I've never been able to do before at a speed and a scale that I've never been able to do before, and with nowhere near the amount of resources. Like, I was literally in my MemNote taking app yesterday saying, how can I use your capabilities to build an artificially intelligent team?

like create different roles, which I thought was like, this is really cool. Um, but I also understand there are consequences to this. Um, because one of the things that you say about AI is that there will literally be no aspect of human life that won't be affected by it or touched by it.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Right. Yeah. I think that AI is a huge, uh, a huge new, uh, technology. It's usually media technology also because right. It's really just taking kind of the corpus of all of human information and turning it into a new, uh, a new kind of digested form of media that we have available to us. So I think that, yeah, I think AI is going to be an enormous, uh, I mean, already as deeply disruptive, uh, to our species, you know, like the, the strike in Hollywood. I don't think that would be happening without

AI right now, I think we're going to see a lot of industries going on strike in the near future because this is going to upset a tremendous number of historically good-paying jobs, that kind of thing. But I think the bigger issue with AI, I don't think you need to have a sci-fi, dystopian, hand-wavy mindset to kind of...

see actually where we're going with this stuff right now. So the algorithms that we currently use to capture attention, they're extremely powerful. They're profoundly influential to our politics, to us as individuals, to our communities, to our identities also. And if you think about the current way we spend our time online, a lot of that is actually dictated by algorithms.

controversial statement, but we're becoming essentially, if you draw this line out, you know, 10 years into the future, right, as these algorithms get better and better and better at being, at being a, and I'm talking about specifically engagement algorithms, right, which is what has allowed for TikTok to become the most popular platform in the world. It's, you know, the primary thing that's, that's pushed Facebook and Twitter and

uh, YouTube to be such enormous players in our daily lives. Um, but these algorithms are, you know, they're, they're going to be increasingly influential to us in the future. And I think that you just draw a straight line out from where we are. And you can kind of see a future that is not a good one, which includes, uh, which includes us basically being, uh, something akin to feed animals for, uh, for.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

algorithms that need our data, right? That need our information. And so that sounds a little salacious when I say it like that, but like these tools are others, right? They are almost creatures and machines or organisms in themselves that want to capture our attention for very clear purposes. And it's not a nefarious purpose necessarily.

But reality, I want to say this, I come back to this on a regular basis, but reality is already quite tenuous for us, right? As a society, right? We don't actually know a lot about what, we don't know, like fake news is a real thing. Real news, I think, is losing the, real information is losing the battle against fake news, right? And I don't think it takes a whole lot for us to actually lose our foothold.

in reality, you know, nearly half of the country right now believes some proven falsehoods about the 2020 election as an example, right? And that's largely a result of algorithms that are a little bit better at capturing our attention and serving us with the things that we want to believe, right? So I think there's a point in which the exertion required to stay integrated with the rest of our species actually feels like too much.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Uh, you know, where our minds want to go unchallenged, uh, where they want to be comfortable and that's what these algorithms are really good. That's when they get us right. When we're tired, when we're hungry, uh, when we're just exhausted by the world. That is the one I find myself so deep in my feed. That's when I find myself stuck to my device and was like kind of unable to put it down and, um, that's where they, that's where they take hold. That's what, you know, when we're sad, when we're depressed, when we're disempowered, when we're, when we're feeling like the world doesn't have something for us, that's when we're stuck in our feeds, um,

So that's what I'm concerned about is that basically reality, shared reality, I mean, qualify shared reality becomes actually a difficult and inconvenient thing for us as we become more dependent upon these tools for understanding the world.

Srini Rao

Well, to go back to what you said about Trump and what he found was we're being as manipulated by these algorithms, by the audience's response to us as much as we're feeding these things. You actually quote this thing where you say, according to Stanford economist James T. Hamilton, he suggests there are five economic questions that explain what comes out of a reporter or producer, the five economic W's, who cares about a particular piece of information, what are they willing to pay for it?

What are others willing to pay for their attention? Where can you reach these people through media outlets? When is it profitable to provide that information? Why is it profitable to provide that information? So this got me thinking, like, one, how in the world can responsible journalism coexist with an ecosystem that rewards people for being salacious? Like, if you think about it, it's like, okay, well, if I'm running a media outlet, which I am, and it's like, okay,

I can have something batshit crazy go out that like generates a shit ton of ad revenue or I can basically, you know, play it safe. Obviously, the person who does the former is going to come out ahead. You know, and I remember seeing the CBS documentary once about a sweatshop in China somewhere, I think somewhere in Southeast Asia, there was a sweatshop and it was going to be on CBS and it was about Nike. Nike happened to be sponsoring the Olympics that year.

on CBS, so they killed the documentary.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Right? Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah. And to me, I was like, okay, wait, that's like a small problem. But like on a bigger scale, like, how can you have a media system where people are rewarded for producing things that are salacious, outrageous, and, you know, create like, you know, emotional responses in people. And at the same time, like be responsible in terms of how we produce.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Yeah, so that's a great frame, I think, for thinking about. I mean, that's a great, also a horrible story, right? That there was people that, inside the media organization that killed the story because it was related to a sponsor. That's.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

But if you think about it, if you are the CEO of CBS at that point, you have a fiscal responsibility to do that. Nike sponsoring Olympics is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to your company. And even if you looked at any of the things that media company presidents said during the 2016 election, I saw an interview with Jeff Zucker, the CEO of NBC. Somebody asked, did you keep Trump on because he got good ratings? And he kind of smirked. Les Moonves literally said this may not

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Totally.

Srini Rao

good for America, but it's been damn good for CBS.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think CNN made a billion dollars in gross profit over the previous year from Trump. Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I wondered, I was thinking to myself, all these media companies are gonna really lose a shit ton of money now that this guy is out of office.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Right, right, right. I mean, he's still selling ads for us, right? He's still generating plenty of controversy. Yeah, definitely. And he could well be the front runner as well for that. I mean, he's currently the front runner, but he could well be the primary candidate next year as well. Yeah. So I think that's a really important thing. I'm curious, how did you know about the story that it was killed, that particular story was killed?

Srini Rao

He's still very much in the news, yeah.

Srini Rao

To be honest, I honestly, I'm pretty sure it was a YouTube documentary that I saw about sweatshops and it was a journalist telling this story and that always stayed with me because it got me, because you know, like we have advertisers as well on a podcast and it got, it just got me thinking about like, wow, will I kill a story for the sake of ad revenue? And like, you know, that, like if I were like between, if it was like, Hey, it was 15 grand, you got to not air this one episode. That'd be a hard thing to say no to.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Yeah, totally. Yeah, that's agreed. I mean...

Srini Rao

Well, like and I've had people who've emailed me and asked me to take certain episodes down But you know, so we had to mark Elliott from Nixxiom here who wanted to share a different side of the Nixxiom story Like, you know, which was like a more positive side and I was willing to hear him out because I was like, okay Look, like I'm not invested in Nixxiom in any way at all. I want to hear what you have to say You know and it pissed somebody off like one of my one of my readers actually listeners actually emailed and said I want you to I wish you would take it down

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean, I think what you're speaking to is this fundamental need of news and media producers to stay in business, right? You know, if a newspaper can no longer support itself, it is like literally forced out of business, right? And profit and influence are needed for it to survive. So if it becomes unprofitable, then it won't actually.

keep living. And we have all been born into a media environment. Most of us were born into a media environment that included this whole enormously powerful set of institutions that was the old guard media. It was the big three networks. It was the major national newspapers and they together constitute this kind of cartel of information, of new information for us.

that provided both an enormous service to society in so far as like it actually gave us information, kept us on the same page about issues that were important to the day, but it also did kill certain stories that were inconvenient or not part of the narrative, right? I mean, I'm just, I'm always surprised at how I go back to the 60s and the 70s and

in the United States to try to understand how crazy of a time that was in the United States, which was basically, you know, there was over 2000 bombings, domestic bombings in the United States in the early 1970s in one year, right? And people didn't know about those because they weren't covered, right? They were literally terrorist bombings, domestic terrorist bombings that were happening all the time during that era. But they didn't hear about it because it wasn't pushed through the mainstream media.

And similarly, if you look at the first few years of that decade, you had the assassination of JFK, of MLK, of RFK, and of Malcolm X within like an eight or nine year period. People were just major, major politicians and mainstream people were just killed on a regular basis. But still.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

When I, when I talked to people that were alive during that era and the talk, I asked them, how, how does, how was that different? How did that feel at that moment in time compared to now? And almost universally, they'll say, Oh, now is worse, right? That was worse because back then it felt like we were still kind of on the same page. Right. So there was, there was this, this giant, you know, kind of a hand, right. That was over the top of all of our information consumption at that moment in time, which was the mainstream media that would.

force us to consume a certain type of information. And it constitute kind of a shared reality for everyone as a result. And there's, you know, I don't wanna be too nostalgic about that era because there's a lot of things, you know, a lot of minority voices that were lost during that period. And a lot of people that didn't get their stories told and a lot of really important narratives that weren't leveled for us to reckon with. But it also did.

keep us more or less on the same page and allow us to kind of cohere around a shared reality. So then that era is gone. I wanna be clear, like we're not ever going back to that, to that degree. Information is gonna find its way out to all of us. But there is something that I think is interesting and different about today that's important to recognize, which is that currently we have people who's...

uh, reputations and profits are actually bolstered by, uh, appealing to the biases of their audience, right? While before we had, uh, when you have a whole lot of different media organizations checking each other's biases and running stories against one another. Um, then you actually have basically reputations on the line and people are called out for saying falsehoods on a regular basis today, we actually have benefits for appealing to those biases.

And those benefits outweigh the detriments. So if I want to build an audience online, it's much smarter for me to try to find out exactly what they want and serve news stories and information to them that appeal to those biases in a fundamental way and to get them riled up about stuff. One millennial-focused publisher, major editor of a major millennial-focused publisher, told me, it's not our job.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell 

to challenge your opinions. It's our job to ride those biases as far as we can go, as far as we can take them, because that's what makes money these days, right? And that is a transition that happened, I think, that is really important to recognize that we're currently living within. And that's how falsehoods get huge, people that spread falsehoods get huge followings online, and that's how we've ended up in this kind of cacophonous information environment where it's very difficult.

tell what is real and what isn't real. But I also think that it's possible for us to find a better way through this. I think that the current design of our social tools tends to prioritize information, right? That is not based in reality. And it doesn't take a whole lot of design tweaks to actually change things to make them slightly more oriented towards truth. And I don't mean that in terms of having, you know,

the old model of a, you know, smoky boardrooms of people deciding whether or not to cover, you know, a sweatshop story, for instance. But good information has a fingerprint. Like we actually know what good information looks like. It has waypoints that it hits or it doesn't hit. It has people who are professionally skeptical in the mix. And it has like a, you know, a rough pattern that is available to us, right? There's a reason why we still mostly trust Google and mostly trust Wikipedia is because

they use different forms of citation to make sure that information is actually coming to you that has a good reference source, has good sourcing. And most of the time, stuff on social media does not have sourcing, right? It doesn't have any kind of structure of sourcing. It doesn't have an easy way to source things really. And it's prioritized mostly based on whether or not we'll just click on stuff. So I want to like...

put on a little bit of an optimistic hat here and say, like, I think this is actually fixable in a lot of ways. We don't necessarily need to live in a post-truth world. It's actually possible for us to design these tools to give us slightly better and more accurate versions of reality.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Like, you know, I personally can't help but wonder like, you know, is that going to come at a cost for these companies? Like will it, you know, like potentially hit the bottom line if you were to do that when people aren't clicking as much? That's just the first thought I had. But I want to finish by talking about one last thing here, which was COVID in particular. Like you wrote about this WhatsApp group in the book, which, you know, I mean, I think COVID was such an interesting experience of like seeing how Polar.

Like we took a health crisis and we turned into a political one, I felt like. And like, you know, my sister is a doctor, my dad's a virologist. So you can imagine where I fell on all of this. But I have friends like very close friends who to this day refuse to get vaccinated. And like I, you know, one of my closest friends like will not get vaccinated. And, you know, like I haven't been able to see her because we had a night, you know, my sister had like a baby at home. I was like, you know, I'd love to see you, but I can't right now because it's too risky.

And she was totally cool about it. But like the thing is, like to your point, like, I think when I talk to some of these people, they're so convinced of whatever it is they believe in. They'll come up with all sorts of sources to back up their thought process, too.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell 

Yeah, totally. I have a lot of friends also that are extremely vaccine skeptical as well. Yeah, and look, COVID was a test of our epistemic foundations. It was a test of our information processing abilities as a society. And it's one that we failed, I think, dramatically. We really did fail it. And

The repercussions of that are still being felt in a lot of ways, right? I think, you know, RFK Jr. having a major candidacy is a result of that kind of epistemic failure in the same way. Yeah, so to speak to this and I think it's really important to have compassion for people that might not believe the same things that you do, you know, I come up pretty hard for you know for a capital T truth in the book, but I also really

try to break down the ways in which people can easily get information that doesn't confirm this kind of mainstream narrative about COVID and the vaccines. So the story is I was in New York during the early days of the pandemic. And when the city was shutting down, I was

trying to get good information to friends. I was just a little bit early in kind of tracking what was happening. I follow a lot of public health individual, uh, practitioners and, um, uh, people that work in, uh, people that are doctors and people that are just very kind of close to these, these problems, uh, and pandemic preparedness and stuff like that. And so I was really just a couple of weeks ahead of the wave of people coming to grips with the fact that their life was going to be changed. Um, I was part of this WhatsApp group. That just was.

you know, it was a, just a fire hose of terrible rumors, gossip of misinformation about what was going on during the pandemic. And, you know, people were saying that there was gonna be a run on the banks and people were saying that the city was gonna be shut down, there's gonna be martial law and you know, that the bridges were gonna be shut down and people were gonna get shot. And it was just, it was a scary time. People really didn't know what to do. And so in my extended community, there was a WhatsApp group that was a balloon to about 250 people that were trying to get good information about the pandemic.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell 

And I was doing my best throughout it to try to help filter the crazy narratives that were coming in about what was going on. And it became basically a full-time job, just trying to verify information as it was coming through. These crazy, crazy narratives that were coming through WhatsApp. And this is really indicative of what was happening on social media at large. Everyone suddenly went to social media to get...

Good information or accurate information or privileged information. I think it's really important to recognize it. We all want privileged information We all want to find you know, we all want to know the person that knows the thing that That that is the better source of information. We all we all kind of seeking that right and I call these people Trust proxies, right? The we used to kind of think of Walter Cronkite as you said or you know Dan Rather is being kind of trust proxies for what is actually happening in the world

but they don't have the same sway anymore. Instead, we go to these people that are in our communities that maybe look like us or sound like us or sound smart. They might be adjacent to the industry that we are trying to get information on, and we look to them instead. And a lot of these people are, you know, there's like one or two degrees away from us. We might follow them online, they might be a friend, they might be a friend of a friend, but we look to them for accurate, privileged information.

And I think it's really important to recognize, you know, if you are far away in this broader network of people that do public health work, if you're far, if you don't know any doctors personally, if you're not connected to, you know, a public health person, you don't know anyone that's working in an ER, if you're far away from these sources of information, then it makes a lot of sense that you might be skeptical of a vaccine.

Right. So, so, uh, you know, I have some friends that, uh, that are doctors that have actually worked on vaccine, uh, preparedness and also vaccine trials. And I know what goes into that process, right? They actually, you know, how strict they are, how long it takes. Um, it's kind of amazing that we even get vaccines after the end of this process because it's so expensive and so hard to actually make sure that things are going right and that there's actually good, good data showing that's effective. Um, but if you're far from that process, like it's.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell 

it might as well be aliens, right? Offering you up a special injection that's going to save them from a disease that they've never heard of before, right? So it makes sense that people are skeptical of that. They might as little as, it will literally be aliens that are, come down from above saying, oh, you might get this disease and this disease, in order to get through this disease that you might get or you might not get, you need to actually get an injection. And so that's like to me,

understandable that people would feel skeptical of that considering our current information environment. So just to, and to, to know about this, like WhatsApp group, what I did to try to help, you know, reduce the flood of misinformation was I just, I woke up one morning in this process of, you know, the city shutting down all this crazy stuff happening and people had made me a primary moderator of the group.

Like, one of the admins that started the group just made me the primary moderator because I had spent so much time and effort just trying to filter through good information and bad information. And so what I did was I implemented some very simple rules for tracking for people's posting on this group, which was you have to post primary sources, no memes, you can't post memes. Memes are actually not great for sense making. They're more, they're clever ways of...

parsing kind of political perspectives and giving us emotional hits and humor, but they're not actually helpful for us in finding good information. So primary sources, questions are okay, speculation is not okay, rumor is not okay. And just doing that, just basically saying like, you need to source your statement, you can ask any question you want, but you need to source your statement and no memes. Just that, it cut out 80 to 90% of the garbage information that was.

that was going through this feed. And it actually became a pretty decent source for accurate news and information that was coming through online. And so, just the process of sourcing, and like we went through this before, right? Like there's a, the history of this is actually the history of how we got to the enlightenment. Right, like before we had the printing press, we couldn't even compare texts. We couldn't source anything because we didn't have enough books around a source information. As soon as we could source information, we could start to corroborate whether or not

Tobias Rose-Stockwell 

claims were true, like you'd have a book that would have an alchemical incantation next to an actual medical intervention, right? And like you can't compare, you can't figure out if that's accurate or not until you have something else to compare it to. So that process of citation is such a core piece of how we figure out what is true and something that's very much missing from the current social web and something that I think we could add in and make it much better.

Srini Rao 

Wow. Well, this is clearly a very deep rabbit hole. So I want to finish with my final question, which is how we finish all our interviews. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

eah, so the question is, what do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable? So obviously, when you write a book, you have to define terms, as you know. And for me, that definition was something that is so distinctive that nobody else could have done it but you.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

I think that something that makes people unmistakable is their desire to be okay with the difficult process of finding the truth. Truth is really hard and if you are willing to kind of sit with the ambiguities and not go with the immediate emotional reaction, but actually sit with some of the kind of

difficult contradictions that come from the information that we're blasted with on a daily basis I think it makes a huge difference To the quality of your work and your thinking So I think that yeah really being willing to explore the gray areas. That's where the richness is and That's where we can we can find much more accurate versions of reality

Srini Rao

Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, the book, and all the rest of your work?

Tobias Rose-Stockwell 

Yeah, you can find me at outragemachine.org. And there I'll have a sub stack that I've been building and putting helpful tips and tricks about how to have a healthy relationship with social media and how to kind of understand how to fix this current outrage machine that we're all a part of.

Srini Rao

And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.