The Daily Stoic - Filmmaker Daniel Lombroso on How To Stay Sane Amidst Radicalization

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Ryan talks to director and journalist Daniel Lombroso about social media and the ways that people can be manipulated and radicalized by it, the Internet-fueled rise of extremist movements, and more.Daniel Lombroso is a filmmaker and journalist based in New York City. His most recent work is the feature documentary White Noise, which follows key figures in the American alt-right movement. Before that, Lombroso spent five years directing video shorts for The Atlantic.This episode is brought to you by Optimize, the membership that guides you on the path to living right. Optimize offers services like Philosopher Notes, six-page condensed reviews of insightful nonfiction books like Epictetus’s Discourses, Ryan’s The Obstacle Is the Way, and more. Members also get access to 101 video Master Classes, each one an intensive taught by experts about a particular topic. Visit optimize.me/dailystoic and get your first fourteen days free, plus 10% off your membership with discount code STOIC.This episode is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic is a maker of mushroom coffee, lattes, elixirs, and more. Their drinks all taste amazing and they've full of all sorts of all-natural compounds and immunity boosters to help you think clearly and live well. Four Sigmatic has a new exclusive deal for Daily Stoic listeners: get up to 39% off their bestselling Lion’s Mane bundle by visiting foursigmatic.com/stoic.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Daniel Lombroso:Homepage: http://www.daniellombroso.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DanielLombrosoInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dlumbo/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoe podcast. It feels like a whole other lifetime ago, but my first book was about media manipulation, how good people and, but mostly bad people are able to exploit loopholes and patterns in the media to get messages across. This could be done if you're promoting a yoga studio or charitable cause, but it can also be done if you're a bad actor, right? If you're a foreign entity trying to influence an election in a country, if you're trying to spread misinformation

or a conspiracy theory through social media, or if you're a demagogue or worse, you can use the same thing. And so I was fascinated by this documentary that actually the Atlantic just put out called White Noise, which is basically a three or four year look inside the white nationalist movement and the extreme, extreme right wing. People like Richard Spencer and Lauren Southern and Mike Cernovich. And what's weird is I was fascinated with the documentary.

I happen to know some of the characters in the documentary because, as it happens, I'd found out over the years that they'd read my book. The purpose of Trust Man Line was to sort of expose how these things operate. So we're not at the mercy of what I think are downright bad actors, people who are bad for the world, people who are emphatically embodying ideas that are against what the Stokes talk about. But in any case, here we are. And so I reached out to the director of the documentary, Daniel Lombroso, and I said, hey, do you want to come on the podcast and talk about it? Because we've talked about this idea before of radicalization, that the Stokes are not one to be radicalized.

For the Stokes is about keeping an even keel, it's about keeping an objective view. It's infatically about not falling prey to the impulses or the ideas of the mob where the tyrant as the Stokes would have called them. And so I wanted to talk about those forces, which are operating on people. People you love and care about right now. People who are then, and this is something I talk a lot about in this book, this idea of trading up the chain, how things can start on social media,

or Wikipedia, or start in a YouTube video, and worm its way up, and soon enough be a real talking point for global media outlets, even world leaders. And that's one of the really fascinating things you see in this documentary is how these figures, these almost cartoonish figures that you'd think no one could be taking seriously. In fact, are reaching millions of people, and they're reaching people who in turn reach millions of more people. It's almost like the ideas are getting laundered. And so I think this is a fascinating episode. Daniel is actually, as you'll hear,

it was a little nervous to talk to me. He wondered sort of what my intentions were, which I thought was funny, but I totally understand it. And I think the interview turned out great. Can't wait for you to hear it. And look, if you know someone who's been sucked down one of these rabbit holes, if you happen to be someone who's, you know, explored some of these rabbit holes yourself, I think this is a great conversation. I think the documentary is well worth reading.

I streamed it on YouTube and I really enjoyed it. So check it out, white noise inside the racist right by Daniel and Broso. He's a great filmmaker and journalist. He was for many years. He was a staff producer at The Atlantic. He's done all sorts of great work. This is his first feature. And it is the first feature ever made by The Atlantic.

And you absolutely should check it out. So I thought we should start with you. You were a little nervous to chat with me. Maybe we should, maybe we should lay that out. It was because you'd heard of my work, but probably not. The stoicism work, I'm guessing. Yeah, I think that's true. I'm happy to talk to anyone about the film. It was four years of my life, and I gave everything to studying and examining the rise of extremism in this country. I think I had some pause knowing that you appeared

in Mike's Sonorvitch's film, Hokes, to your an expert interview in the film. And at first, that made me think that maybe you were, you know, more sympathetic to those views than I might originally have thought. But then I looked you up and saw that, you know, you've done a lot of really great work. I was actually just listening to your interview

with Mono Genobli, who I'm a big fan of, and that was awesome. So I'm happy to be here. It's a weird thing because I wrote Trust Me Amlin intended and I wrote it in 2011, the idea being like, hey, here's how the sort of thing, here's how the logic of the internet sort of information ecosystem is working. And here are the sort of the vulnerabilities in it that admittedly my sort of information ecosystem is working. And here, like, sort of the vulnerabilities in it, that admittedly, you know,

my sort of work had led me to take advantage of, but mostly for benign things, right? But I was sort of seeing how this could be used more and a fairiously. And so when I wrote that book, my thinking was, I'm writing this so people in the media really understand how this works. And not only did that, that message,

that part of the message didn't quite get through because the media reaction was pretty negative about the book, but it happened that a number of the people that are in your film gravitated towards the book and it sort of informed the logic of what they do. I think that's definitely true. I mean, social media was seen very optimistically. As you know, at the time, it was right around the Arab Spring

and everyone saw the potential of a decentralized internet where there are no industry gatekeepers who can tell you what can be published and what can't be published. And I think it was seen, you know, every optimistically as a way to connect the world. And we've seen over the past few years that it can be used much more and a variously. And I guess in a way, you were one step ahead of the curve there. I think it's, I would add that it doesn't surprise me that they've picked up an appropriated your work. It's very common for them to look for

different examples of ways to kind of weaponize information and it doesn't really matter the political agenda of the writer who's doing it. I think they're looking for the most effective ways to package information and inject it into the mainstream and it doesn't matter the source. I mean, they often cite, you know, 60s radical writers from the left like rules for radicals a very famous book on political organizing. It's actually a great book. I've never read it but it's funny that people in Spencer's world in particular cite that book often and it was you know used a lot in the in the new left in the 60s and in the hippie movement fighting the Vietnam War and many of them are now appropriating to fight the wrong

war against white demographic change in this country. That is something I'm curious about. Why is it that usually sort of trolling or manipulation, there's almost a level of sort of covertness required or secrecy required. I think what's striking to me about not just the characters in the film, but the sort of level of medium manipulation that we're seeing is kind of how transparent it is.

Like, the methodology is very simple and the process by which it happens is very straightforward. And yet, we seem to be so defenseless as a culture against it. I think that's true. And I think the starting premise is one that we're all familiar with now, which is that the most emotional content online is that which succeeds. So radical extreme content is always going to take off. And you see that on the left, but especially on the right. And you know, if you're just tweeting centrist boring takes that could appear on CNN, you're not really gonna go anywhere. But if you're Mike Cernovich,

who is an out of work lawyer living in a sunny life in Southern California, trying to have some impact on the world, and you start tweeting, you see Hillary faint and start tweeting, oh, she's not just faint, she actually has Parkinson's disease, she's deeply sick. That's so extreme and conspiratorial

that people might respond to it. People might retweet it. People might amplify it. And I think you see in the case of Cernovich, he was a struggling lawyer. He had a blog. He traveled the world. But he really saw a kinship in President Trump

and saw someone who kind of reflected him really got on that train and used the power of social media. Like I said, tweeting the most extreme things possible, the most provocative things possible and really kind of built a career out of it. And I think you see that across the film and across all the subjects, I'm sure we'll dissect them, but Lauren in particular is the one

who has just a very intuitive sense of how social media works. I mean, she got famous when she was 19, she hit it big, and she just understands that it got level, what will take off, how you need to package it, and especially on YouTube, what a video needs to look like to really take off and go mainstream.

There's a Frederick Douglass quote, I think it's like a man is worked on by what he works on. I have this theory that as over and deliberate as the manipulation that's happening with these extreme groups, they too are being manipulated by the same algorithm. So like, I feel like I know personally a number of people, I was talking to another internet writer

that I know that sort of maybe 10 years ago were sort of like writing in the online pick up space or writing about self-improvement. They were writing about, even you look at someone like Scott Adams, who, you know, is the cartoonist behind Dilbert, and it's like they start, like, so they clearly had a predilection or a sort of a lean one-way politically, but then it's almost as if the algorithm and the desire that all writers have and you as a filmmaker and a writer probably empathize with it too, it's like we have this desire to be seen and heard and to get attention and to be in the mix. And I'm wondering if

they too are being radicalized by the desire for likes and attention. Do you know what I mean? I think that's absolutely true. And the subject speak to it pretty directly. So Lauren got famous when she was 19 years old. I track her for three years of her life from when she's 22 to 25. And she says towards the end of the film

that her obsession for likes and follow since support has become so all consuming that she's never had the space in her life to actually make sense of who she is as a person. With Lauren in particular, this is very kind of fascinating game that's being played where she is her public persona and has become it and has become so handicapped by her audience and what they want that she actually never really had the chance to discover who she is privately. One kind of funny example, you know, I spent hundreds of hours with these people across five countries and 12 states,

and I was driving with Lauren once in France, and we always had time to kill. And I said, you know, what music do you like? Do you want to put something on? And it was hard for her to think about what she was into. I mean, she listens to like EDM playlists. And then eventually we landed on Frank Sinatra, because she inherited, you know,

a lot of that kind of music from her parents. But I think these subjects would not be where they are without social media. And in a way, it handicaps you to your audience and you end up just kind of feeding me to the base. In a way becoming more extreme because like you said, they all have a need to be seen. And you're more likely to be seen if you're saying things that are extreme, that are provocative, that are potentially conspiratorial. It's almost evolutionary, like you said.

So Mike tweets this one thing out and it gets attention. And then you're like, oh, I need to do more of that. Like in this, and you know, much more innocuously, it's like, I see parents who have kids,

it's like, oh, when I post pictures of my kids, they do better. And it's like, it's almost like we become slaves to these platforms and they're sort of very insidious understanding of our human nature. Absolutely. I mean, you get a dopamine rush every time. I'm not all that active on social media. I'm using my accounts to promote the film now, but sure. You get a dopamine hit every time you see someone like something, someone shared something.

I mean, it's that time's 10 for these folks. And Mike actually has this amazing line that didn't make the film where he talked about how he's a dealer, but he's also an addict. He's a dealer. He's a dealer in that he's getting all of these people addicted to his content and to the things that he's prevailing, but he's also an addict himself. I mean, I spent so much time with him across the country and with his family. And he actually, you know, he's a supportive husband. He's there for his wife, Shauna,

who's fascinating. She's, she's Persian American. They have a mixed race kid, but he's also addicted to his phone and always, you know, checking if the things he's saying or doing, you know, or being retweeted or being received well. And it's an addiction that he doesn't know how to escape. I mean, he constantly complained. But back in the day, he used to read books, and now he can't even read more than a few sentences. And I think these platforms have just fundamentally

rewired our brains and the way we process information. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, who this is like a perfectly nice guy, a Christian, smart guy, always been generous and kind and pathetic. And it had been clear to me that he'd sort of, he had said something and I said, oh, that's not true. And he's like, oh, you gotta,

you gotta follow this guy on Twitter. And I won't say who it was, but it's like a sort of a COVID denier type person who's become prominent since the pandemic happened. And it was like, it struck me in that moment. I was like, oh, this guy's been, he's been infected. Like my friend has been infected and not by, not by COVID, but by, yeah, whatever the strain of thinking this is.

And that's like when I was watching your film and I didn't know you had sort of shot that famous scene at the, you know, the alt-right Richard Spencer's talk right after Trump was elected. But when Richard Spencer says like, you know, Hail Trump and everyone sort of gets up, there's this one moment where one of the guys, he almost looks like a rabid

dog to me. He has this like intensity and anger. And it was striking to me. I was like, oh, all the people in this room have been infected. Wherever Richard Spencer got his sort of nonsensical, you know, horrendous beliefs, he's gone around and spread them to these other people and they're now infected. Do you kind of see the white nationalist movement as a kind of infection or is it something else? I think that's a very smart way to think about it. I mean, these ideas have tremendous emotional power. I think a lot of philosophies like liberalism in particular appeal to the mind and really

appeal to our notions of equality and justice that we all live in a society together. Those aren't, you know, those don't appeal to the heart in the same way. I think fashion is that. But not anymore because we've known them for so long. We've known them for so long and they're so embedded in our culture

and we learn them in civics class. I mean, I think they're the most important ideals, but they're in a way they're boring, they're mundane, they're part of our life. I think what this, what white nationalism and conspiracy allow you to do is that you feel in a way that you've discovered a secret truth. You've discovered something that's been hidden from you intentionally by the gatekeepers who, by the way, might happen to be secret Jews because it's often dog whistle anti-semitism. Sure.

And they've been keeping from you that actually there's this other way of seeing the world. And there's this other that actually you're not just some bored out of work white kid living in your mom's basement. You're actually a descendant of a Greek and a Roman. You're inheriting this amazing age old civilization that is whiteness. And I think that's ideologically and coherent for a million reasons. I mean, there's never been any notion of whiteness.

You could argue that there was British nationalism or German nationalism, and even that is complicated. But there's definitely never been a white nationalism before. I mean, white people have been killing each other for most of the 20th century. But those ideas, like you said, are infectious and they can spread and they feel good. I think that's the part that's really missing

from the conversation is they're intoxicating and they make you feel this tremendous feeling of power and transcendence, like your life has a purpose beyond the kind of banalities of your everyday existence. And Richard is a demagogue. Richard is the one, you know, over the course of the film,

you sort of see him fall off, but he has this rhetorical power. I mean, he really, very consciously styles himself as a 20th century fascist after people like Mussolini. He knows how to speak, he knows how to dress. I mean, it's part of his package. And, you know, these kids feel like they're taking part in something that they're following this figure who's fighting for the part of his package. And these kids feel like they're taking part in something

that they're following this figure who's fighting for the preservation of Western society. And it's tremendously destructive, but it's also tremendously emotional and powerful. And it resonates with so many people. And I do think we have to take that seriously. No, absolutely. I wrote this piece, and I think I said to you

after the 2016 election, where this is sort of right in the middle of Milo's tour, which was getting all this attention, only obviously in retrospect, was it clear that it was sort of being funded by certain billionaires? But it struck me that as this sort of virus is spreading, what's interesting is that the virus is actually not that infectious, right? Like to 99% of people when you hear Richard Spencer's ideas or Mila's ideas, you're like, this person is a clown, this person has no idea what you're talking about.

So in a way, it's kind of like COVID in that like most people, you know, you're either asymptomatic or you know, you kick it the way that you do the flu, it's really those people who have some sort of pre-existing condition or some inherent vulnerability that it really is dangerous, right? What's funny is like, we think these ideas are viral,

but in reality, they're very not viral. Like if you showed 100 people a video of Richard Spencer, the vast majority of them would be like, turn this off, right? But what it's like, one out of 99 is like, ooh, so it's almost as if they need to be controversial because the New York Times thinks they're denouncing Richard Spencer and they are, but they happen to be accidentally exposing him to the one out of 99 that he needs. I think that's a way to think about it, but it's not really about the richards. It's about

the mics and the lorins. I mean, what lorin does so effectively is take the edge off of richer and by doing so, reaching hundreds of thousands or millions of people. So she's produced a few racist propaganda films now, one of which reached millions of people. So she's produced a few racist propaganda films now, one of which reached millions of people about the persecution of white farmers in South Africa, which has been debunked. But that went viral. It went through conservative media and President Trump started tweeting about it. I mean, that started to some degree with Lauren Satherin. With her second film, borderless about the migrant crisis, she was invited to the European Parliament to speak. I mean, never in my world, this imagination

did I think a 19 year old YouTuber from Vancouver, whose first viral video was holding a sign saying there is no rape culture through a bunch of sexual assault survivors effectively shaming them. A few years later, it would be giving a presentation to European Parliament members. So I think Richard isn't quite the right way to think about it. Richard is the ideal log.

He's the purest form. He's saying the quiet part out loud. But what people like Mike and Lauren are doing is kind of laundering a diluted version into the mainstream. And you see a lot of those ideas, maybe not Richard's extermination, but just a deep-seated fear of white decline, you know, seeping into mainstream media, into conservative media, definitely on Fox News every night, and definitely in the White House, too. So I think, you know, maybe one out of a hundred likes, Richard's, you know, fascism,

but I would say 25 out of 100, you know, like Mike and Richard and Mike and Lauren and the stuff that they're that they're preventing. I got I remember I got an email from Milo after the piece that was like, you don't understand how great I like it was just like, you know, deranged nonsense. Yeah. And that was something that struck me. And so most people obviously haven't had that interaction with that person, right? And one of the things that struck me as being powerful in the film is you sort of have these glimpses of like who they actually are.

You know, I was thinking of the scene of Mike running up the hill, which seemed so like it was like watching someone try to be really cool, but failing at it really hard. I'm just curious, like what, as someone who's actually spent time with them in person, when they aren't able to meticulously cultivate, you know, the image, the way that they can to their own audience, what is it that people need to know about these figures?

I think the running scene is a great example. It's always a laugh line when we screen it. You see Mike. It's like Napoleon Dynamite or something. You see Mike pop. It was unprovoked. Mike pops something like 14 pills, one of which is for erectile dysfunction or for male performance, let's say.

And then he drinks two espresso and shows me his daily run, which is a couple sprints up a hill near his town in Orange County. And it's pretty clear, Mike, I think the film at its core is about the dissonance between the public persona and the private. So Mike very publicly is the epitome of the alpha male. He has the good-looking wife and the nice house.

He lives on sunshine and sunshine. It's like, it's the pinnacle of the American dream. He lives weights. He knows how to get girls. People really trust him in that world. So one kind of funny example, Lucien Wintrich, who's kind of a minor character in the film, he started a Twinks for Trump meme. When him and his boyfriend broke up, Mike Surnovich was his first call, because he really trusted

Mike as kind of a father figure, as someone that he could look up to. And I think publicly Mike really presents that to the world and presents it effectively. And I think the whole kind of the purpose of the film on some level is to kind of deconstruct that and see who they are in private. And that's why I think the very tape form, which is really observational, allows you to do that. And you see just how contradictory they are, how critical they are. And I don't mean to point fingers, but how kind of empty they are inside at times. And I think you do see that a lot of them are kind of deeply sad or deeply confused. And the running scene is a really great example, because like I said, he projects power,

but struggles to run 100 meters. Another example that comes to mind is Mike gives this big workshop around Gorilla Mindset, teaching a bunch of young men how to be powerful and think positive thoughts. And then I interview him afterwards in the car and he admits to me that he's actually a deeply unhappy person that he doesn't like him. He says, I'm not someone who likes myself particularly much. I think that's really important to reveal just at a human level that these people are struggling like so many. When you have, we start with a quote from James Baldwin and he talks about this that when you have a void, it's easy to fill it and hate or conspiracy is actually the easiest

way, I would say, to fill that void. Yeah, did you see that Sarah Silverman clip that went viral where she was talking about like a friend of hers that had joined like a hate group? And she was talking to me like, this was a guy who lost his parents, he was lonely, was sad, and that was like the only group that accepted him.

It strikes me with, like when I was watching your documentary, my wife walked by and Richard Spencer was on the screen and she was like, that's the most repressed gay person that I've ever seen in my life. And she wasn't meeting that insultingly, there's nothing wrong with it. Her point was just like, that was someone trying very hard

to be something that they're not. And there seemed to be a vibe with all of that in those characters, which again, there's nothing wrong with it. It's that they're trying to find something they desperately need in terribly inappropriate places. I think that's a very good way to put it. And to take Richard as an example, Richard was second rated everything. He was a second-rate football player in high school. He was a set. His dream, his great dream was to always be an avant-garde theater director. And he tried his hand at it and was never, especially good.

And I think in a way with Richard, this, being a kind of pseudo white nationalist is his great performance. I mean, he sort of, he believes it. He is an ideologue, but he's also kind of cause playing this historical importance. You know, he really believes that he is this dissident philosopher that one day in history will be received favorably, which I highly doubt. And it is all about performance. I mean, it's about performing and hopefully eventually getting the validation that you feel like you so desperately need. One example with Richard actually that comes to mind is this also didn't make the film, but he's very close

to his mom. He's actually estranged from his father. His father is a very successful ophthalmologist in Texas and nothing was ever good enough for Richard's dad. I mean, he wasn't good enough student, he wasn't good enough athlete and he wasn't a good enough athlete, and we could really tell, meeting Richard and hearing about that, that it graded on him, and he has this feeling deep down that he has to prove something to his dad eventually. And with all the subjects in their own way,

they kind of have that origin story. And we eventually decided to cut that from the film because we felt like it would veer too much into humanizing someone who's so problematic, but I think it's telling in that there's this kind of impulse to be seen, to be heard, to prove the haters wrong. And they all, all the subjects in the film really have that down to the bone, I would say. Yeah, it's like, look, we all have issues, right? Like we all have issues with our parents, or we have issues with feeling inadequate, or

with our identity, or we have things that we're angry about, right? Like we all have issues with our parents or we have issues with feeling inadequate or with our identity or we have things that we're angry about, right? And to me, it's like you're fine, that that dysfunction, you can use that however you want and you can channel it however you want as long as you don't make the world a worse place because of it. And what seems to be that it seems like they're all working out their own issues, but pretending that the domain or the field they've chosen to do it is not real life. You know what, like... Well, Mike...

It's a very good way to put it. Mike actually believes life is a simulation. He doesn't believe life is real. He says it sort of trollishly, but I think he believes it. You're right. Yeah. It's like richer things. You can shout these things, get these people very angry. And then when one of them runs over somebody else with a car, it's not, it's not real. And I remember being somewhat familiar with these people in the 2016 election, it was like, it was almost

is almost less that they liked Trump and thought he would do any of it. And more that there's this element of sort of owning the Libs or like just trolling and getting a tent. Like, and I felt that on the stuff that I used to do from a marketing perspective, there is an element of just, this is a game and it's fun to win at a game.

It's just like when your game is corrupting or undermining democratic norms, there's consequences for that. There should be consequences for that, but I think as the film shows, there are no consequences for that. I mean, all three subjects, why nationalist violence is surging around the world,

you know, from New Zealand to El Paso to Pittsburgh, you know, white domestic terrorism is now the number one threat, according to El Paso to Pittsburgh, white domestic terrorism is now the number one threat, according to the FBI in this country. And you know, you could argue that it's a pretty direct line from the rhetoric of some of the subjects to the violence that's taken place. At the very least, you could argue that they're fanning the flames of a hatred that's being picked up by more radical members, right? And at the end of the film, I just put the question to them,

you know, hate crimes are surging in the US and Europe, do you take any responsibility for that? And all three of them echo each other. I mean, they all basically say the same thing. They say, if anyone engaged in aggressive violence against others, it's because they have disobeyed them. And I think, you know, that's a theme across the film is that you can unleash violence,

vitriol, you can increase polarization. But if you come from a, you know, a privileged part of society, you can also wipe your hands clean and walk away. And I think with Lauren, I wrote a long story about her that goes along with the film. She left the country, she lives in Australia now, and she's back to her usual grind. She's appearing on Sky News and Australia as a conservative commentator, which is owned by the Murdoch family. And she hasn't had to deal with any of the consequences of what she's done. And I think that comes from a place of immense privilege. So let's say somebody knew somebody that has become a fan of these people. I actually, one of the, I was telling you, is like some close friends of ours, great

people. They were like, hey, I saw you in that, that documentary. And it was like, whoa, like I didn't, you know, as I was telling you, it's like, I knew like crazy people watch this stuff, but like the idea that real people were watching it. It's like, oh, again, here's someone who's sort of been infected. How do you bring someone back? Like if you were talking to a Lauren Sandler and fan, what do you tell them? Like, because what cognitive dissonance does is it's like, people have probably heard what

we've been saying about these figures and going, oh, they're just jealous or they're missing the point or they don't get it. Like, how do you, how do you de-radicalize someone? I would assume that the figures themselves are irredeemable at some point. But how do you, how do you bring somebody back from the brink that is otherwise, you know, potentially normal human being?

Well, I think it starts with empathy and starts with understanding, you know. I don't believe that Well, I think it starts with empathy and starts with understanding. You know, I don't believe that we should be shouting people off stages. I think white nationalism, conspiracy, is problematic, is making this country worse, but the only way to come back from the brink is to listen to one another, to talk to one another, to hear one another out. And I think the film, I would say to watch the film,

I don't mean to push it, but, you know, I think the film, I would say to watch the film, I don't mean to push it, but I think the film is made in that spirit. I mean, it's made in the spirit of understanding. It's not humanizing, it's not amplifying, but it's understanding who they are and what they believe. And I think it just, over the course of the film, we really see the vacuessness of these ideas and how empty they are and how maybe temporarily they

make you feel better but in the long term they just completely eat away at you inside. And I think I would, you know, I would try to communicate that to someone that like, yeah, this might make you feel good temporarily, but all the bullshit you're putting on your Twitter feed, that's going to come back to bite you. All of the hatred you're feeling towards your neighbor, like one day you're going to wake up and see that they have kids too, that they're trying to raise. They're trying their best, working two jobs. They're doing everything, you know, coming to this country, trying to achieve the American dream, which of course is harder to achieve than ever. So I think it really just starts from a from a position of empathy and and just seeing your

neighbor as someone who's equal to you. And I tried to do that in my own way. I'm Jewish, I'm the grandson of two Holocaust survivors. And like I said, I spent hundreds of hours with each subject. And most of it off camera eating, traveling, just kind of doing the boring things. And when I had a long time with them, I would tell them about my story. I would tell them about the persecution of Jews,

six out of nine million Jews in Europe, two thirds of Jews in Europe were killed 70 years ago. And I think people don't understand necessarily the proportion of that tragedy. And I think it just, there's a man's power in just being able to sit with someone, have a conversation, and very calmly explain to them, your perspective, maybe what your family has been through.

And you know, it might only change one out of 100 people, but I think in particular with anti-semitism, I saw some of the subjects open their minds a little bit. One subject in particular made a lot of funny references and would joke about how hard it must be for me to be around people like him because he was so deep. You see, at least he came a little more self-aware. And another subject I knew actually created a meme

of a river flowing, which is anti-Semitism and the dam is Daniel. The Daniels, the one stopping the river flowing. And I think, I'm not trying to pound myself on the back. I'm just saying there's a lot of, it's becoming increasingly rare, but there's a lot of power in just sitting with someone and talking to them and being empathetic, even if you completely disagree with where they

come from. Yeah, it's like you get this infection of conspiratorial sort of radicalism, but then it leads to this other infection of sort of like callousness, right? To me, that's been striking about the pandemic, right? It's like, look, if you want to believe that like, is a Chinese hoax or whatever, like, you know, it doesn't, sure, you can believe whatever you want. But what's interesting is how quickly that descends into oftentimes, it's like, look, if you believe it's a Chinese hoax, or it was a weapon employed against us by the Chinese, you'd

think you'd also be a person who's then taking it very seriously, right? But somehow, you're not. But what's right, I think what saddens me most about it is it's like, okay, so you believe this extreme thing, and then this is also the person who's expressing sort of deeply callous indifference to the suffering or the pain of others. And so it's like, like, look, like I totally get having a strong, let's say you have strong views on immigration or something. And then, but then you get to a place where suddenly that view is now, and maybe this is

how it works, you know, you bring up the Holocaust, it's almost like a process of heartening or closing one's self off. So then you don't have to wrestle with the horrors that naturally come from what you're talking about. I don't know. It's just the meanness of it, I think, is so striking. I think that's a good way to put it. You know, Trumpism is something that's impossible to define. Yeah, I saw a shirt recently that people are buying

that I think encapsulates it really well. It says Trump 2020 fuck your feelings. Fuck your feelings. And I think that is Adam Surwer, who's a great writer at the Atlantic wrote a piece called The Cruelty Is the Point. And he's one of the best pieces of the last four years, I feel like.

It's amazing. And that phrase has been picked up by the Biden campaign and others. And it's true. I mean, the cruelty is the point. The meanness is the point. It's a lot of people who feel like liberals and progressives have been telling them what to think forever and now fuck you were in control. We won.

We won, you lose. I mean, it's a zero-sum mindset. And I get that it can feel fun and celebratory and great, but it's just kind of mean and awful. And like, who wants to live in a world where you say, fuck your feelings to your neighbors or your friends or your family members? I have a lot of conservative family members and friends

who are actually voting for Trump. And I don't think fuck your feelings. I don't agree with their political ideology and I try to talk to them about it. But the kind of fuck your feelings mentality is just so deep in our politics now and in our ethos. And I think Trump is kind of the cheerleader and the avatar for that.

And you just see a trickle down onto social media and into everyday life. And for me, that's actually the most upsetting I've ever said. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. There y'all. I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur,

and a Virgo, just the name of you. Now, I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me, Kiki Keep a Bag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bag, love. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started and there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer podcast.

I'm putting my friends, family and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I wanna know. So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night.

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Download the Amazon Music app today. Well, this is where what you're talking about overlaps with what I talk about now, because I think, and I think people think that Stoicism is about not having emotions and not caring about emotions, right? So you might think like Stoicism is this sort of tough, you know, stiff upper lip philosophy

is sort of simpatico with like the fuck your feelings idea. And I think to me that fundamentally misses the point. For me, stoicism is best encapsulated in this idea of like tolerant with others strict with yourself. So I think a stoke would say like, fuck my feelings. Like, I'm not going to go around being easily offended. I'm not going to be incredibly sensitive. I'm not going to be a snowflake that things like, no one can disagree with me and, you know, no one can challenge me, so on and so forth, because that's what I control. That's me. But I actually think as a good person, your obligation is to be really sensitive to other people's feelings, right? So it's like, you go through the world going like, hey, there's nothing you can say that

can offend me. But I'm still going to try hard not to offend you because I don't want to do that. That's cruel and unnecessary and unpleasant. Yeah. I don't know a ton about stoicism to be honest, but I actually am curious. My impression has always been just taking a bunch of like philosophy. was a polycymaidger in philosophy 101, is yeah, like you said, like really appealing to the mind, to human rationality, and kind of my kind of cartoonish image, like you said, is not allowing emotions to guide you,

but you're saying that that's not, that there is room for positive emotions or for, yeah. It's not allowing your emotions to rule your life, but that doesn't mean that you then get to project this on that. Well, first off, like being crappy to other people and trying to hurt them, like, is you can't say that's like being an even keel kind of a person. But I think, I think it's the idea that there's a great line from Mark's story that he says, to be free of passion, but full of love. And I think that's the idea. So it's like, I'm not going to be extreme. I'm not going to be jerked around my emotions.

But I am going to go through the world sort of radiating a care and empathy for other people and not want to, if I can, not hurt them. So I think like for instance, free speech is really important and we shouldn't censor ourselves just because other people might disagree, but there's still a difference between that and say deliberately trying to hurt someone's feelings, which is weirdly where I think we veered towards as a society. Yeah, I think that's well put. All of our discourse is shaped around emotion and being aggressive

and hurting each other's feelings. And I hope that we can move towards a place where it's coming from a place of compassion and less emotionality, I would say, is a good thing. As little as I know about stoicism, that if we're coming from a place where we think first before we say, if we take the time to process information, just the thing that comes to mind for me is on Twitter. I mean, this is beyond obviously the alt-right. People are so reactive and it almost feels like high school at times where there's just hordes of people attacking someone for something that maybe was just misconstrued.

I mean, there's such, there's such little emphasis placed on intentions now. And, and, you know, someone might have intended for something to be a positive and just worded it imprecisely. And it was a, you know, a completely sincere gap. Like it just, it wasn't meant to come out that way, but it did. And I see that happening more and more where people who I know who are good people who are committed to the right things might unintentionally say the wrong thing or imply the wrong thing. And people jump on it,

and I think it can feel exciting and powerful. And you see these online clicks really kind of swarming them. But I don't think it's good for the discourse. I don't think it's good for anyone's mental health. And it doesn't really help us get any closer to the answers. So I do hope we can kind of return to a pose where you think and lead with empathy, like you said. I think this is another place where stoicism comes in,

which is like, yeah, people make mistakes, they say things that it's not representative of who they are as a whole person, so on and so forth. But it's also like, hey, you know, you can have a thought and not tell everyone who follows you on social media, right? Like, you know, you can just sit alone in your house, Mike Surnamesh, and not periscope it, and just, you know, say everything that comes into your mind,

right? Like what seems to be getting a lot of people in trouble is this sort of unfiltered, sort of vomiting of feeling and emotion and thought. Like the line from Cato was, you know, I only speak when what I believe that what I have to say is better said than left unsaid. It seems like also people have really taken social media

as an excuse to just a moat, you know, or just to riff when we'd probably be better, you know, being a little bit more deliberate because we don't always have the best impulses. I think that's true. And there's never really been a medium to my knowledge before in history that allows you to just seamlessly pour out a stream of

consciousness into the mainstream, into the world and people with a tremendous platform basically being able to share what they're thinking, what they're feeling every moment of the day in 200 characters. And I think that does incentivize, like you said, a lot of thoughtless responses, a lot of thoughtless takes. In a way, it rewires your brain. I mean, even just me going through this experience, promoting a film for the past two and a half weeks, I'm spending so much of my time just like refreshing Twitter, checking to see what people are saying about the film. It's become like, I'm not someone who's ever cared much about reception.

I really love the work I do. I love reporting. I love engaging with the world. And now I've become obsessed with what people are saying and how they're saying it and where they're saying it and the number of people who are watching. And there are so many people who have that. And I'm done with it.

I'm actually going to California next week because I just want to kind of take a break. And it blows my mind that people, for years and years and years can be doing this grind and trying to grow their audience, grow their following. And to use Cernivich again as an example, I mean, the guy is tweeting 20, 30, 40, 50 times an hour. I mean, when you're sitting with him, he is constantly on his phone. He's constantly checking his mentions.

And like like he struggles and gets anxiety when he's not near it. Lauren in particular gets a tremendous amount of anxiety when her phone is dying or there's not a Wi-Fi connection. I mean, it's this insane dependence that the alt-right is an extreme example of, but I think many of us feel in our day-to-day lives and for me, I already feel like it's being something that's personally destructive. Yeah, it's like when you get an article that really pops and then it's it's I already feel it is being something that's personally destructive. Yeah it's like when you get an article that really pops and then you know it's like your whole day is wasted because you're just like you want to see how it's doing. I've really tried to build

my life as a writer like sort of independent of the metrics as possible and that's probably a sort of hampered my career in in some sense right? Because like, there are probably like things that were really going that I could have, you know, thrown fuel on the fire. But to me, it also keeps you out of that feedback loop we were talking about, which is like, once you see what's working, it's like becomes impossible to do anything but that thing. And that's a very corruptive place to be. Absolutely. And it's something you hear with celebrities all the time, is that they have that one hit

and then every show for the rest of their lives, they're at MSG and people are cheering for them to play that one song. And I think, you know, but you see that in a kind of a funny or more repulsive way with these alt-right figures, is they had their mic had, you know, pizza gate, this really destructive myth that basically morphed into QAnon that there was a child pedophilia ring in the basement of comic pizza in DC. There's actually not even a basement ad comic pizza,

my friend was a waitress there. But you know, he felt like he had impact. It went mainstream of someone. Where the Hillary Parkinson's thing is an even better example. I mean, he said Hillary was sick after she fainted a few days later. It ended up on Hannity a few days after that came out of the president's mouth. And I think once you feel that sensation, that intoxication of being powerful, of shaping the discourse of being a meme maker, it really changes your psychology and you're chasing it constantly. You're chasing the addiction and with Mike and with Lauren

I just saw that constantly where you know, they would think back to their you know quote unquote triumphs and kind of We're constantly hunting for that next triumph and you know that that that pursuit just never ends and and the grind We'll just wear you down eventually and of course they very rarely stop back to think you know What am I actually putting out in the world? Is it making the world a better place? They're thinking much more about how many people will tweet and how many people will like it, how many of my friends will be impressed

with the kind of work that I'm doing. It's very, very short term too, right? It's not, it's like, you know, it is possible to make, it's not that hard to make good work that has real impact that people like. It's just hard to defer gratification long enough to do that, right? Like you worked on this film for four years, you know, or my, my, my books, they take a year or two years and then, you know, even then, that's not the end of it. It's like, I think what people,

people want this fantasy of like, oh, you can have impact on an election by tweeting. What they don't want to do is go like, hey, how could I really make like a strong sort of lasting, significant argument or, you know, like, like, like, we're, I think we buy into the idea that like, oh, just throwing stuff up on YouTube is like, the way to have cultural impact.

Yeah, and delayed gratification is hard. I mean, it's really hard to just trust in yourself, trust what you're doing. If you're laboring away at a book for two years, like you do or a film for several years, like I do, there's just an immense amount of trust that you're putting in yourself. You're hoping that one day it will be received well. Every time you open your phone, you see that a friend or a colleague or a competitor came out with something new that's better and is being received well and getting all these write-ups.

And I think it takes a tremendous amount of trust and patience especially and it can be hard to do that. And I think for the key for me, like this is my first feature, but I made short docs for years and years at the Atlantic. I think the key for me, and it's a lesson I'm really still learning, is to just to love the work and to let the work be its own reward. And you never, you never know how something is going to be received. I mean, it's, it's the new cycle. It's the marketing budget. I mean, there's a million things that dictate

that. But if you love the work, it, it makes it worthwhile. And, you know, when I eventually embark on my next feature, I think I need to do a better job of that, actually, because if you think about reception constantly, then you end up as someone like Mike Ralorin, who, or like many of the other, you know, influencers, the influencer culture that we live in now, where you're just constantly looking for that next hit, but those hits aren't satisfying. They don't really build you a legacy. They don't last. They just feel good for that moment, like any drug.

Yeah, no. Ultimately, all these people are doing very forgettable work, even as toxic as it is. It's very ephemeral. And it takes, I think the idea of the effort being enough, which is like a really core stoic idea, is critical too, because with your movie, it's like you knew that what you were doing had meaning and purpose, and whether it was seen by one person or a million people, that was worthwhile. I think the trouble is when you know that you're like, you're a charlatan deep down,

or you know that you're just cashing in on something or riding a wave becomes much harder to delay gratification because you don't have the faith in the purpose of what you're doing, because you don't actually mean it. And if the culture suddenly shifted as it may after the election, a lot of these people are going to go to a different niche, you know, because the one that they're in will have been all mined out.

That's a great point and Cernovich encapsulates that. At the top of the film, you see him proudly using the label alt-right, which he was espousing around 2016. When people started breaking out into Nazi salutes and a girl with a golden Charlottesville, the brand became more problematic and you see him kind of shift towards the center right and say, fuck Richard Spencer, I'm not him on my own guy. You know, purely from a branding and PR perspective,

not from an ideological perspective. And then over the course of my reporting and across the film, you see eventually who moves on to supplements, he's selling facial scissorums and skincare products, he's giving workshops to men. And I think a part of his calculation was that there was a time where racism sold.

I mean, it was a tremendous commodity around 2016. Then people started to get tired of it to some extent. The social media networks started to crack down to some limited extent. Either way, the brand became corrupted and he had to pivot. And I think with someone like Mike, he's a shapeshifter and you see that he's constantly using his platform to cash in on kind of the dominant feeling

of the time. And as that changes his shift. So he, you know, when alt-right was positive, he used it, but later on, he uses the brand he built to cash in and to make some money. All of this stuff is ephemeral. It might help you in the moment to build a little bit of celebrity, but it's not selling facial skincare products.

It's not necessarily a legacy that I don't think he or anyone else wants to have on their time scale. How much money are we actually talking about with these people? Because I mean, Richard Spencer lives with his mom, right? And there seems to be, they seem to have a real vested interest in making themselves look much more successful than they are, but maybe the closer threadbare and the cabinets are empty, or are they actually breaking it in? Richard is independently wealthy. He's never had a source of income in his life. I mean, he's relied on donations to his so-called down profit, but he mostly has leaned on his family's wealth, who are independently wealthy. They're actually plantation owners dating back

to Louisiana and the deep south. That's fitting. Yeah, yeah. Lauren and Mike are able to raise funds. Lauren crowd funds, most of her documentaries. I've seen her raise thousands of dollars in front of my eyes, and she pretty mindlessly just blows money I mean she would when I was in France with her when she was shooting her racist propaganda film borderless

I was shooting on the Atlantic's best equipment, which was a very basic GH what we have an effort it's called an F-7, but we were shooting on our kind of a B camera called the GH5 her crew kind of her B camera called the GH5. Her crew rented the most decked out FC300, which is a great camera with Sina lenses and a shoulder rig. And then we found out that one of the crew members flew a drone into a mountain and lost it, like a $5,000, $10,000 drone. And she just laughed it off and said,

oh shit, how am I going to explain that to whoever? It's the type of thing that if I ever happened to me and I had to go back to the Atlantic, I would be freaking out for days and trying to figure out the best story, but for her, it was something she could laugh off. So there was always a pretty steady stream of funding. It became harder over time as Patreon and others crack down on them. But I think it is important to know and acknowledge that like, there are a lot of important to know and acknowledge that like there are a lot of people, a lot of wealthy people who are attracted to these ideas. A lot of people

in Silicon Valley in particular and in the gaming community who like Mike, who like Lauren, who probably won't fuck with, you know, real neo-Nazi Richard Spencer stuff, but are attracted to kind of the dog whistle messaging. And Lauren actually told me and would show me a few of them, you know, prominent people would DM her and say, you know, I'm this board member, I'm this CEO, I'm this gaming executive and I could never say it publicly, but I want you to know that I love, I love your work and I love what you're doing. And I really do think it is important that even if these are broken people, people who are confused, that we understand how much they resonate publicly and really in the halls of power and even

among people of influence. Yeah, no, and I mean, obviously I know some of these people, right? Not because I'm a fan of their work, but because our work's intersected, right? And what's weird about it is you're like, you're having a normal conversation as if they are not also producing a porn work. Like I think that, to me that, like I remember when I was writing my Peter Teo book, I went back through my emails

and I found this conversation that I'd had with AJ D'Alerio when Gawker had written something horrible about one of my clients and he was like, you know, it's all professional wrestling. And I think there's an element of that with these figures as well, which to me is the most damning. It's like obviously it's horrible what they're saying and what they're doing. But if you believe it, there's at least some level of sincerity to it. I think there's also an element where it's like, these are actually just opportunities. Opportunists. yeah, exactly.

And they don't give a shit about it. And they are deliberately profiting off of it. But no one thinks less of their audience than they do. I think that's true. All of them believe it enough to propagate it, but I think in their drones, they're all contrarians. I think if we lived in the fourth Reich, if we lived in a fascistic dictatorship, they might be BLM marching liberals.

I think Lauren, in particular, her kind of founding myth, which is honestly, we talked to the teacher and the teacher denies it ever happened. But she claims in high school that she was separated by race and gender, you know, women on one side, men on the other side, people of color on one side, white people on the other side. And she claims that she was, she was really isolated and called out as a white woman and that radicalized her. And she claims that she realized in that moment, again, the teacher denies it ever happened, that she could push back and fight. And she started basically saying the most explosive thing possible in her high school class.

So she gave an anti-climate change presentation. For another presentation, she dressed up as Hitler and Mussolini with a friend. She basically realized at the age of 15 or 16 that if you say the contrary thing to popular belief, you can really get a rise out of people and succeed in the world. And that's, if you think about Lauren in particular, this is the young YouTuber who's 19 when she got famous in 25 now, sure, she's sympathetic to white nationalism, sure she's unleashed all sorts of things. But in her bone, the most fundamental thing

is that she's a contrarian and she believes the opposite of what everyone else around her believes. And in this moment in time where at least mainstream society as of now still somewhat believes in liberal values and they claim that the press and universities are progressive or liberal bastions, they feel like it's fine and it's rock and roll and it's and it's countercultural to be a far right extremist and and for Lauren, you know, that lesson that she learned in high school, she's brought with her the rest of her life. Well, that's where the empathy you're talking about is really so important because it is easy to think like, oh, you know, I would never fall for

these things. Well, that's because you're, you know, you're a fully formed adult, right, with friends and a job and some sense of what's happening in the world. I sort of shudder to think like, you know, if I was 14 years old right now, instead of getting into heavy metal as I did or instead of getting into Maddox or some of the other, you know, on funny online writers that I was into, it's like, I remember when you could go on something awful and there was just funny, ridiculous, you know, somewhat inappropriate content. There was no white supremacists were not trying to recruit you on these websites

that the way they are now. And so it is sobering to think of if you were a 13 year old boy or girl who wanted to have an identity that was different than what everyone else was doing, you know, these are the kinds of things that you might gravitate towards. I think that's the right way to think about it. That this, it's destructive, yes, but it's also a powerful subculture with its own code of communication, its own dress, its own way of interacting. And it basically gives you a feeling like you're part of something bigger

that you're part of a community like being a metal fan might be like any sort of subculture, you know. One of the weirdest and most surreal things about reporting inside this world is you can forget at times. I mean, it feels like you're part of a clique, like you're part of a cult even, and you have to really stop and think and listen to realize what they're saying because they're using so many dog whistles and they're kind of just casually talking and communicating, but all of them feel like they've kind of found some personal identity through the group identity, much like the way I lost 14 year old who might discover metal

music, goes to his first Metallica show, meets all of his new friends, would feel like he discovered something in that community. It's totally surreal to feel those parallels because I've done a lot of work in my career beyond this on penetrating different sub-cultures in insular communities, and this was kind of a very eerie parallel to many of the other ones who didn't have nefarious intentions but kind of shared those, I guess, kind of cultural affinities or ways of communicating. So, last question. One of the things that I tend to find as a reaction, like let's say I say something

about this stuff or like I was involved in getting this Confederate monument taken down in the town that I live in or, you know, if you say like, hey, like, if you sort of come out and go, okay, this is not okay. This is not okay. This is wrong. You know, I don't want to be, I don't want this to happen. There's this sort of response that I feel like it's really been weaponized in the community that you profile in the film.

Is this sort of like, oh, that's just virtue signaling, right? And virtue signaling is a thing and there's a reason that that word sort of that concept bubbled up, you know, several years ago, but it does seem like what the alt-right community has managed to figure out is sort of turn the case against virtue signaling into almost an argument for like nihilism. You know what I mean? Like, nothing matters. Everyone's phony. This is all bullshit. And like, you don't actually care. Do you know what I mean? I do know what you mean? I mean, they're all nihilist to the bone. I think Mike, Mike, most of all, Mike is kind of a postmodernist who believes that words have no meaning and that there

is no objective truth in the end, that you can't prove anything, that everyone he has a line in the film, that there are parallel truths, that you can never, everyone can create and inhabit their own reality, and it doesn't matter if you think something is a fact because I have my own facts. And I think that Kelly and Conway cl clip from a few years ago, of course, was played to death. But there's a lot of truth in that that when she said, you know, you might have your facts,

but us in the Trump administration, we have our own facts. We have alternative facts. We have alternative facts, exactly. And I think that is how they operate it is how they believe the world works at some sort of intrinsic level. And one of the kind of weird ironies and all of this

is they're constantly attacking the kind of cultural Marxist set universities who are indoctrinating our kids in postmodernism. But there are a few people I know who live in an habit postmodernism more than these far right figures who believe that truth is totally flexible. Everything is plastic and the world can basically be bent to whatever reality you're trying to construct. So they've basically come to inhabit the world that

they despise, which I think is an irony that they don't even realize. No, that's beautifully said. Yeah, it's very sad. There's that line for General Mattis, published it in the Atlantic, I think, where he said, you know, cynicism is cowardice. And what I've taken away from your film, and the reading I've done and the people I've met, is that actually it's all rooted in, that the nihilism and the cruelty and the awfulness, it's all rooted in a kind of fear and pain and sadness that really stems from their own colossal failures as human beings that instead

of accepting they've decided to project out at the world. I think that's true. I think unfortunately that's true. And I just hope we can move to a place where people are able to fill that void with different things, with civic engagement or community or family or friends or church or job or anything. I mean there are so many ways to create meaning in your life and you know I'm still figuring it out but for me it's documentary filmmaking for me it's my family for me it's it's being Jewish to some extent and you know for a lot of other people it's it's

hate it's conspiracy it's it's white nationalism And I just hope we can move to a place where that becomes a little bit less prominent. Daniel, thanks so much. I'm glad we bridged this gap and we're able to chat. That was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for having me. If you're liking this podcast,

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