July 7, 2025 • 35 mins
Actor and director Ben McKenzie details his upcoming film Everyone Is Lying to You for Money and breaks down the scams in the crypto world. Professor Dannagal Young, author of Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation, examines the state of American media and the spread of misinformation.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean
we don't have a great show for you today. Professor
Danigo Young, the author of Wrong, How Media, politics and
identity drive our appetite for Misinformation, stops by to talk
(00:22):
about the state of American media and misinformation. But first
we have actor director Ben McKenzie, who will talk about
his upcoming film Everyone Is Lying to You for Money.
You'll break down the schemes in the crypto world. Welcome
to Fast Politics.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Ben mckenzy, Mollie, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
So let's talk about crypto. You know, it's funny because,
as we were just talking about, you're an actor, but
you're also a writer. You've written a bunch about crypto,
and crypto is so interesting in the fact that it
is both scammy and also scammy. So talk to me
about where we are right now with crypto. I want
you first to start with how you got involved did
writing that quick? Now?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Sure? So? It was the pandemic and my profession, showbiz
was on ice. There was really no way to act
if you had needed to be six feet apart from
people at all times. Obviously, So I was really bored.
I was really really bored and spiraling, as so many
of us were. I saw the markets go down and
go back up, and I was like, oh, that's interesting.
I'd never really paid much attention to them. I have
(01:22):
a degree in economics from UVA, but I heavily used
it because I decided to become a knucker, so whatever.
I started looking at the market. So I was like, oh,
maybe I should invest didn't know what to invest in.
And a buddy of mine came to me, my buddy
Dave from UVA, so I've known him for twenty years.
He said, you got to buy bitcoin. A lot of
people have had this experience of a friend or someone
(01:43):
telling mess but it The difference with me was that
David given me terrible financial advice before he had encouraged
me to invest in it. What I think was a
penny stock pump and dump where we invested in a
company that had supposedly invented synthetic blood. This wasn't there
on noose. It was like a precursor. Anyway. We lost money,
He lost money. He wasn't scamming me. But when Dave
(02:04):
came back and said I sho buy a bit coin,
I was like, I'm not going to do it, but
I am going to look at it. And that led
me down a rabbit hole and it reached out to
a journalist, Jacob Silverman. We wrote a bunch of articles,
as you said, about it, and then sold a book
and wrote a book about it that came out in
July of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
I love that you knew when you got the advice
from this friend that it was going to be better.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, you know, we all have that for I love
him to death, but like, I'm not going to rely
on day for financial advice. The joke I make is
that it's the books about crypto, but it's really about
money and lying. And I know about money because of
becon and about lying because I'm an actor and I
do it for a living.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
These guys were just full of shit, you know, Like
that's that's the bottom line is that, Mike, you know
you have a pretty good BS. You can probably relate
to this. You have a pretty good BS radar in politics,
but also in show this, everyone's lying to you. In
Showbaz all the time, it's like, that's just the currency
of the place. It's just like, what's the what's the degree,
what's the intention. You know, there's a lot of lies.
(03:00):
These guys were lying about financial products, which you know
is a little scary. So I felt like I needed
to kind of speak out about it because I was
afraid that a lot of people could lose money, and
you know, it's kind of amusing. I did, and I
was right, But of course it didn't matter, like a
ton of people lot lost money anyway. But it has
been a fun journey.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
It's funny because it's not none of this is funny.
It's disturbing, but it's also super interesting. I actually had
your co author on and I remember a moment where
I was, you know, crypto is just a scam, right,
it is a scam, but it's also really bad for
the environment.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, we went to the biggest crypto mine in the country, supposedly,
which is outside of my hometown of Austin. This is in
the book. It's called Windstone, and it took over a
former Alco aluminum smelting plant that shuttered around the subprime crisis.
And yes, and so the reason that they they bought
it was it has a big transformer or a connection
to the power grid where it can handle it like
(03:56):
a really high load. And so it's just football field
after football field of these computers stacked Florida ceiling, you know,
one hundred feet in the fifty feet in the air,
running endlessly and consuming all of this energy. I think
I think the sales pitch of crypto is the positive side,
right that the pitch is, Hey, do you hate the banks?
Everyone raises their hand. Crypto will fix everything. Vague vague
(04:20):
stories about how I'll fix everything. The reality is most
people are going to lose money. The money that is
made goes to people who I don't have a lot
of respect for, either people that are in jail or
people that have made money in ways that I don't rate.
And Trump coins a good example, right, like Trump I
think the Times reported this like something an eight hundred
(04:41):
thousand people are negative on their down on their money
as of a few weeks ago, and like fifty people
made ten million or more. It's a market set up
to be manipulated and to have all those things that
shouldn't happen in a regulated market, like insider trading and
front running and wash trading and all this stuff. So
it's pretty bad. I think the assumption was, oh, all
(05:03):
these guys have gone to jail, this thing will go away.
Even I I think was too cocky about it. But
Trump's reelection and his embraceive crypto, I mean everyone sees
it now. Now it's just like a free for all. Again,
what could possibly go wrong?
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Yeah, it seems like a lot of going wrong. So
you have trump Coin. The thing that I think is
interesting trump coin is somehow sponsored by Liberty Financial. Liberty
Financial I remember from part one of this whole apocalypse
when I went to cepac in the early twenty sixteen
(05:38):
ish seventeen ish era, they were not a crypto company.
Then they were some other kind of sketchy financial services company.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah. I don't know much about the history of it.
What I do think is interesting is that the you know,
one of my kind of dorky arguments, But what I'm
really passionate about was one of the problems with crypto
is it says we're going to replace that evil government
that's sprinting the money, which, by the way, we do
live in a representative democracy, like at least supposedly so,
Like the people, these evil people that are running the
(06:08):
government like we did put them in power, but we
don't want the money from the government. So you asked, well,
where's the money going to come from? And they don't
like to admit it, but the answer is corporations, private money,
right money. We've tried this before. It was the nineteenth century.
It was called the free banking era or the wildcat
banking era. Banks were allowed to issue their own notes,
their own currency because we were trying to expand west
(06:30):
and provide all this economic activity, and basically it was
right for the fraud is the short or the wildcat
banks were called wildcat banks because you would only allowed
one branch of your bank. You'd set it up as
far away from your depositors as possible, wildcats roamed and
then once the other money you could run off with it.
So private money should just like I mean, anyone on
the left should be able to see why private money
(06:50):
is a bad idea, like instantaneously, but just in general,
like historically it's also a bad idea. Like we have
tried it. It didn't work very well. Facebook has tried
to meta with Hell they call themselves down has tried
their own currency before it got stopped, but they really
wanted to try their own currency. And now that Trump
is in office, I fear that that may happen again,
or it may happen for real. They may actually get
(07:12):
it through Congress and get private money out there.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
One of the things that I think is super interesting
about this is these are like my beliefs a little bit.
But one of the things that we saw from twenty
twenty twenty four was that they weren't able to regulate crypto.
We all saw it coming as a disaster, like it
must be the run up to the I mean, I
(07:34):
don't remember thinking this during the run up to the
credit crisis in two thousand and eight, but clearly the
subprime mortgages, somebody, I'm sure there were people out there
being like, you know, this is going to be bad.
Like we're giving people money to buy houses that clearly
can't afford the mortgage payments. So this is a similar thing.
We're using money that's not regulated. There's just not enough
(07:57):
there there. People don't understand. There's just not regulation. And
one of the biggest problems with crypto, and you tell
me if I'm right, is crypto has just like TikTok
has become very involved in labby and politicians. And one
of the things they do, and this is reported in
the New reported in the New York Times, which I
thought was really interesting, they run ads against an opponent.
(08:19):
So if you are a crypto, you know, and this
is on the left and the right, they will campaign
against your opponent, and they will, you know, run ads.
You know, it won't say they love crypto, it'll say
they're great for this or that or whatever constituents want.
This is all pressure just to not be regulator.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Absolutely, or to be regulated in a favorable way. I
part one hundred and thirty five million dollars into the
Lost Cycle, and crypto and the people associated with the
industry apparently accounted for almost half of all corporate donations
of the entire corporate Then don't think how much much
corporate money is in our politics. So it's an enormous amount.
(08:58):
And to your point about targeting people, Yeah, Katie Porter,
they spent a super pac pro crypto. Super Pac spent
ten million attacking Katie Porter. They spent forty million making
sure that Shared Brown could not get re elected in Ohio,
which was particularly sad for me. Because ale of shared Brown,
but also when I testified to the Senate Banking Committee
(09:19):
in December twenty two after Sam Bateman free you know
everything with Kabluly, Brown was the chair of the committee,
and he was like holding the line against this nonsense.
It's not like he's particularly anti crypto, you know. I
think he's a much more of a working class guy.
But he was skeptical of what was going on, and
he and his staff were great and put together that hearing,
(09:39):
and then you know, a few years later he's out
forty million, has a lot of money for one race
with the Porter race. I think was this in the Times?
I think it was the NOS. The New Yorker did
an article about this, and someone connected with that superpack
was anonymous, but went on the record saying this is
to intimidate you. This is and intimidate people. I'm paraphrasing,
(10:02):
but like, if you're anti crypto, we're going to come
after you. And all of that actually makes a perfect
kind of sense because if you think about crypto, so
the interesting thing about crypto as a quote unquote asset
is that there is no product. There isn't anything right,
There isn't a good or a service. There's bits of
computer code stored on these ledgers, a couple blockchains. So
it's the old saying like if you don't know the product,
(10:23):
then you're the product. So the product is the consumer
getting duped out of their money. The way to keep
that thing going is to get much like the Ponzi
scheme that it is, is just to keep getting more
people in the door so you can keep you know,
pretending like this thing has value. The way to do
that is through marketing and and or political influence, and
(10:45):
so they've put a ton of money in there. The
Republican Party is obviously already on board with this, or
at least a lot of them are. But the Democrats,
they've bought off a number of Democrats, I would argue,
or certainly influence them, so they're probably crypto legislation. Signing
to law this year would be my bet, right.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
And there is crypto legislation. The legislation is what you
would expect it to be, so talk about that.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah, it's called the Genius Act, so no stupid. Yeah, yeah.
I'm not an expert on banking regulation or any of
this stuff, so I may be you know, touch vague here,
just to like not please misspeak. But the gist is,
and I've gotten this from people that I respect, like
Hillary Allen, who's a professor of law at American University.
(11:29):
She and I testified, and instead of Banking Committee that
hearing I mentioned, she's written about crypto and all that
similarities of subprime and all of the mistakes we're making
again that we've made before. And the gist of the
legislation is that it will allow stable coins to get
into our bank. Stable Coins are cryptocurrency that's pegged one
to one with an actual currency. Supposedly the main ones tether.
(11:52):
One tether's treated as one dollar in the crypto casinos,
the crypto exchanges where people gamble on crypto. If that's
separate from the banking sector, then you know, people are
playing games and they're losing them and this is ours.
All this money that's flowing around. It's not that bad.
But but if that money is treated as real money
that can be parked in a bank, you know, you're
(12:12):
basically recreating the conditions for the subprime crisis and the
sense of money market funds. You know, where you would
have you'd get a return on your investment, and that
was a problem in two thousand and eight. I was
one of contributing factors of subprime. There's also a problem
in twenty twenty that thankfully got dealt with. But you're
basically introducing systemic risk into the banking system where if
(12:35):
there is a recession, and of course recessions are inevitable,
so at some point there will be a recession, people
are going to risk off. Right, Investors are going to
want to decrease their risks, so they're going to try
to cash out of this crypto Crypto the market is
notoriously illiquid. There'sn't actually anywhere near as much actual money
backing these things as they say there are, And so
they go to get their money and they can't get
(12:56):
it out because it's gone. And again, if that's set
writ from the banking system, it's one thing like FTX
blew up, and it didn't immediately take down our banking system,
but it did actually only less than six months later.
This is the gist of the article that I wrote
for Slate. It contributed directly to the Silvergate, Silicon Valley
(13:17):
and Signatures implosion. They were all three crypto banks, They
all had heavy exposure to crypto. It's not a coincidence.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Yeah, I wonder if you could talk about their story
going right now, So another suspect is arrested in the
bitcoin kidnapping and torture case. Right, this was Tuesday Morning authority.
So the victim was an Italian man who was tortured
in a luxury townhouse for weeks. This is to get
his It's a token, right.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
As keys, right, these keys.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Yeah, this has always been a danger of crypto. Can
you explain it to us?
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Sure, I mean the basic way to look at it,
the simplest way to look at it is you're creating
a gray or black market for something of value. Right,
There's these coins that can be traded back and forth
and can be sent instantaneously all over the world while
avoitting banks. So who would find that appealing criminals obviously.
So when people have accumulated crypto there, they can become targets,
(14:11):
right and quite frankly, in order to cash out of
the crypto and to not arouse suspicion from the authorities
and to avoid you know, the banks, because you mightn't
want to pay taxes, or you might not have gotten
directly or whatever you're putting yourself in a place. I'm
not talking about the regular person who's got like one
hundred bucks on coinbase. I'm talking about people, the whales,
the people with lots and lots of bitcoin. What's stopping
(14:33):
people from like doing what unfortunately seems to have happened
to this guy and just you know, torturing him to
get it out. There's lots of crime that happens in
crypto where people just you know, fall out of balconies,
and you know, there's some pretty horrible stories. Ask some
guy who's dismembered and stuffed in a trunk of a car,
and it's all pretty bad stuff. But the point I
think I come back to is like, well, that's the
reason you don't want that stuff is you know, you
(14:56):
want the monetary system to be something that we all
benefit from, We all sort of have some buy in.
Our failures to actually create this sort of better version
of our regulated system has led people to crypto. But
that's works. Just because different doesn't mean it's better. This
is works even when you win, you could end up torture.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Almost as if crypto seems like it's like Philt Morris right,
or old school cigarette companies or you know the companies
that were working so hard, or the oil and gas
companies working so hard to influence regulation for years and
years and years.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Again, to my point, crypto doesn't have a product, so
it's very ironic. The crypto advocates will tell you bitcoin
has no marketing department, right, like it was just dropped online.
But actually, if you think about it, because crypto has
no part of crypto is only marketing. It's only the
ability to convince other people to buy it or to influence,
and that's or to convince people to legalize it. So
(15:54):
it has to spend, or it ought to spend. It's
smart of it to spend as much money as they
need to buy off as many legislators as they need to.
And I think they've done that. I think they've done
it with certain numbers of the Democratic Party. I think
Senator Gillibrand in New York here is unfortunately not on
the right side of this issue. I don't know her personally,
but that's just a fact. And she spent sponsorble legislation
(16:17):
with Senator Loomis of Wyoming. They were talking about letting
people invest their four oh one ks and irais into
Crypto before the crash, you know, and it's like, imagine
if that had happened. It happened a little bit. The
Ontario Teacher's pension fund invested in a thing called Celsia
Ponzi scheme that blew up. So yeah, I mean it's
really bad stuff. I'm hoping. Well, actually, I'll be honest
(16:38):
with you, Molly, I don't have a ton of hope
that the Congress is going to do the right thing.
So I'm hoping that maybe we can fix it before
it crashes later. But I'm not even sure that's possible.
It's really great, and it's like looking at this iceberg
in the distance and like, at some point we're going
to head it. I don't know how fast the boat's moving.
I don't know what's going to happen, but at some
point it's gonna blow up again.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Thank you, Ben Kinsey, Thank you for having me for sure.
Danago Young is a professor of communications and political science
at the University of Delaware and the author of Wrong,
How Media, politics and identity drive our appetite for misinformation.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Danna.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
Thanks for having me on, Molly.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
So you're an academic and This book is called Wrong,
How media, politics and identity drive our appetite for misinformation
an incredibly important and interesting take, So talk us through
how you got here.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
I was seeing so much research in my field around
sort of the nature of misinformation, and you know, this
was especially during COVID. There's lots of COVID misinformation about
vaccines and masks, and then there was of course misinformation
about the twenty twenty election that you know, led us
to January sixth, and I just kept thinking, there's all
(17:57):
this research on the supply of misinformation and what the
content is and all of these lies people believe in,
but there's not as much of a focus on the
demand side, that is, why do we want it? Not
why do we want to be lied to? But why
do we embrace fictions? And it's clear that that's there's
a real opportunity for social scientists like myself to dig
(18:20):
in a little bit too. Are what are the needs
that are being satisfied by holding belief and misperceptions? Because
if there wasn't an appetite for it, there wouldn't be
so much bullshit. That's just the reality. And so I
was kind of inspired by some inquiries that I was
getting early on in COVID. I don't know if you remember,
(18:41):
and I know we block it out because it was awful.
But in the spring of twenty twenty, when we didn't
really know what the hell was going on and we
weren't sure do we mask do we not mask? And
then there was this weird documentary that came out called Plandemic.
Oh yes, yeah, it was all lies, like Fauci is
benefiting and the thing was planned and all of this stuff.
(19:04):
I had some really thoughtful friends who were asking me like, oh,
have you seen this. It's kind of interesting, like maybe
COVID is a lie, and maybe maybe this and maybe that.
When I realized that these are well meaning people who
are just trying to make sense of chaos and they're
still uncertain, and I was reminded of a time when
I had the same impulse, and that time was when
(19:28):
my late husband was sick with a brain tumor, and
I went down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory beliefs
for fundamental reasons that drive all of us, and that is,
you want to understand what's going on, you want to
have control over what's going on, and you want to
feel a part of a community of people who can
support you. So in the book, I talk about these
(19:49):
three c's, comprehension, control, and community. That are the fundamental
needs that drive us. And if there's information out there
that makes us feel like we get it and we
have agency and we're together with like minded people, it
doesn't matter if that information is true or false. It
is satisfying primal needs and that's what we're going to
(20:10):
go with.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Yeah, it's so interesting, And you know, I have this
book coming out called How to Lose Your Mother about
how when my husband got diagnosed with cancer, how it
worked out for us now he had amass since pancreas
turned out to be the good short answer has turned
out to be the good cancer, right, the neuroendocrine. But
we went through that period of like what is it?
(20:31):
You know, how long do we all have? What is
this going to look like? What is our lives going
to look like? So I know that period quite well
because I just went through it, and I feel like
it is a very vulnerable period. So you can absolutely
draw the line from being vulnerable like that to trying
to make sense of the world, to how we were
(20:53):
as a culture right after COVID, So say more about that.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah, I think that it still applies now, Molly. I mean,
we're all vulnerable and life is actually really hard, and
many of us experience hardships sort of at ebbs and flows, right,
you're like waiting for the other shoe to drop, when's
the next crisis? But for many people, life is a
series of painful crises and a lot of suffering. And
(21:21):
if you do not feel like you have mechanisms of control,
you're going to do whatever jiu jitsu you need to
do in your own mind to make you feel like
you have control. And for me, what's been interesting about
the response of the book is that it's kind of
just shifted for people how they think about their loved
ones who believe things that are untrue, and rather than
(21:42):
like judging them or being like, oh, what idiots, what morons,
it gets to the heart of something that we all share,
which is we're all just trying to get by, and
part of getting by is needing to feel hope. And
if the world itself does not provide you with hope,
you're going to find your own mechanisms for hope, and
unfortunately a lot of those are being exploited by some
(22:04):
really nefarious entities who are creating hope among certain groups
of people through the demonization of other groups of people.
That where it gets dangerous.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
What does that look like?
Speaker 3 (22:18):
What that looks like is is sort of offering people comprehension, control,
and community by creating false narratives of threat. So the
easiest one would be the great replacement theory. So the
conspiracy theory that says, for example, that Democrats are trying
to replace white people in the United States and bring in,
(22:41):
you know, racial and ethnic minorities to try to replace
white voters to win election time.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
The reason that that is an attractive fiction to believe in.
If you are someone who feels like you lack agency
and power, you feel like you're voicesn't heard. You are
a white, middle class, working class person who feels like
the job opportunities that you thought were going to be
there aren't there for you. You feel like culturally and
so bad almost the above, right, Rather than thinking in
(23:14):
terms of the complex systems and the way that the
administrative state could actually serve you, it is far more
attractive to be like, those people are doing something against me,
to try to sabotage my power in society. So complex
systems are really we're not great at wanting to grapple
(23:36):
with them and how they work. What we are really
good at is identifying human cause and effect, very simple, like,
this is a bad entity doing this action that's causing
this outcome. There are these powerful people who are trying
to orchestrate this bad thing and it's hurting me. That's
how these things get weaponized. But the needs underlying them
(23:58):
are not inherently bad, They're inherently human.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
I want you to talk about take it a step further,
so the Pandemic documentary. I remember when that came out.
I was in a group chat with a lot of
pretty affluent young women who were like, I have seen
this video and it makes a lot of sense to me.
(24:22):
And I was like what. I couldn't believe it. And
one of the things during the twenty twenty four cycle,
one of the many things I got wrong during the
twenty twenty four cycle was I thought Trump wasn't reaching
out to women at all, and I was like, why
isn't he reaching out to women? That's odd, that is
very strange. But now what I realized is that Maha
(24:44):
was his woman outreach. I would love you to talk
about MAHA Make America Healthy Again, which is meant to
be ironic ultimately, and RFK Junior.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
This is something that I've been grappling with even more
recently in the you know, the book came out less year,
but I feel like this piece is so irrelevant right now.
What is the appeal of MAHA.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
What is the.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Appeal of RFK Junior? The answer is kind of simple.
It is about individual agency in your physical health and
well being. Right that you don't need to rely on science.
You don't need to rely on like controlled trials and
meta analyzes conducted by people who have dedicated their life
(25:28):
to this study. That you, as a human can trust
your own experiences, your own intuition, and your own observations
of the world to make yourself healthy. How attractive is that, Molly?
I love that, and I think, right, I think that
we all want it, and I think that it's the
weaponization of it that's been dangerous against science, because if
(25:48):
we're all being honest, we all rely on intuition and
our gut a little bit. I don't know about you,
but I'm not like in a lab conducting studies in
a lab coat with a peatree dish. I trust scientists, right,
But that's because my social norms around me suggest to
me that science is to be trusted. But I also
my gut tells me that sciences are to be trusted.
(26:11):
Other people's thatts tell them science is not to be trusted,
and you should take ivermectin. Well, So what separates those two,
What separates those two is the sort of voices in
their ears that they're putting faith in. And I think
that if the folks who really care about science and
medicine and getting closer to truth allow for regular people
(26:31):
to have a little more agency and be a little
more open to the idea that, like, we get it.
Your intuition is telling you this or that, and as
long as it's not bad for you, then go ahead
and do that, right, go ahead and drink apple cider vinegar.
If it's not bad for you, go ahead, like, because
there are certain psychological benefits of allowing yourself to feel
(26:52):
that power. And you know, I take a stupid number
of vitamins every day, and I have a lot of
very science y friends who are like those actually aren't
doing anything. The empirical evidence is not suggesting they're working,
but they do something for me. They make me feel
like it's part of my morning routine of self care.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Right, So let's talk this through. How we got here
is through COVID. Right, was a pandemic. It was very
scary for a lot of people, including me. I found
it quite scary. People did not know what to do.
The doctors did not know what to do because it
was a once in a lifetime hopefully though who knows pandemic,
(27:30):
And I think that there was a feeling that doctors
got things wrong, which is what happens in a pandemic, right,
liken't you don't know what the virus is, you know,
like masking kids probably a mistake, but we didn't know
until we knew. That was the sort of moment I
think that we tipped over into unrealities. So talk us
(27:52):
through kind of what happened there with people taking advantage
of the culture of people.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Sure, so what should have happened in an ideal world
is that in that moment of uncertainty, in that moment
when we're all desperate to try to protect ourselves, what
should have happened is that we should have identified the
virus as the external threat, not each other. Yeah, not
each other, and not political parties as the expert. Unfortunately,
(28:19):
our polarization runs so deep, and we do know that
this trait called psychological reactants, which is feeling really angry
when you feel as though your autonomy is being constrained,
that tends to cluster more on the cultural right, and
they're probably genetic and social reasons for that. What that
(28:42):
means is that when there were mandates that came down,
those mandates were disproportionately hated by the right. Obviously also
were of course weaponized by political pundits in our media
environment who are like, how dare they tell us what
to do?
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Et cetera, and the RFP, the people who sell supplements
and vitamins and.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
Multi level marketing. Yeah, yeah, well, because there's so much
money to be made by a snake oil salesmen when
everyone's freaking out right and taking advantage of the fact
that the real science, the true science, was changing, that
the scientists were saying different things over time, but that's
because the information was changing. But that created increased uncertainty
(29:25):
and increased distrust in science. I also think that the
medical community is dealing with a bit of blowback because
while they were so focused on containing the virus right
like they were thinking in terms of virology epidemiology, they
weren't thinking about societal health and the need for social
contact and community. Our adolescents, who were probably needing more
(29:51):
than ever to be connecting with one another, were stuck
into their rooms on their phones, which we're still dealing
with what the hell happened, both academically and in terms
of mental health. So I think a lot of parents
and communities are rightfully angry, and the anger, though I
think the anger is a bit misplaced because so much
(30:12):
of it is aimed at the scientists, when really it
shouldn't be aimed at the scientists. It should be aimed
at the sort of disconnect between science and public policy.
Right with the scientists didn't say here's what has to happen,
everyone needs to stay in their houses, right, wasn't scientists
who said that. It was our public officials who did
(30:32):
the best they could with the information they had and
said we're going to come up with these rules. Unfortunately,
I think that the trickle down effect of that has
been devastating for faith in science. I also think that
you can draw a straight line from the blowback against
COVID to the Trump administration's cuts to Higher ed A
(30:53):
and Harvard. Oh yeah right, It's like, oh, these are
the same people who wanted to keep me and my
kids in my house for two years.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
I would rephrase because I would say, I think Trump's
more on high right is from the Orbon playbook. It's authoritarianism.
But I think the support for it is from the
Maha crowd who said scientists never did anything good for
us anyway, They kept my kid out of school, which
is why he's getting away with it. I would love
you to talk about RFK Junior because I think he's
(31:20):
a critical part. You would never have gotten RFK Junior
running healthcare in this country were it not for COVID,
like a slow motion car accident. So I wonder if
you could talk us through what RFK Junior does in
this moment that is a function of this happy talk.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Let's think back to the fact that we had this
kind of wonderful partnership public private partnership. Trump administration really
so much credit to that administration. Trump won for getting
the vaccine out to the public, forgetting the vaccine produced right. However,
you have, you're still operating in this climate where you
(32:00):
have this new clustering of anti vaxers that is skewing
on the cultural right. OURFK Junior has made an entire
career out of drawing a false connection between vaccines and
autism and talking about the harms of vaccines. He has
an entire enterprise based on this, and he's made a
ton of money speaking over the years based on these lies. Now,
(32:25):
for folks who are nervous about the COVID vaccine because
it came to market so fast, because that was the
big thing, right, it came so fast. It's mRNA, which
is a new technology, and we don't really know what
this is.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
What is there's a regular one that works less well too.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Right, But the idea that RFK Junior is already an
established voice in the anti vaxx space, just he is
the natural spokesperson to kind of push back against the vaccine,
and that the notion that you have these folks who
are so desperate to want to feel some sense of control.
(33:03):
Trump now was in a weird situation, right because he
fast tracked this vaccine to make it available. But he
also can't be the pro vax guy, because he's got
all of these supporters who are in this sort of
rear holistic right wing space. So he's like, you know,
the vaccine is here, weird people to take it, but
if you don't want it, don't get it. But I
think that it's the legacy because he was already in
(33:25):
that space for so many years that he became the
natural spokesperson for this sort of anti vax pushback. Something
really totally freaked me out when he became named head
of the HHS, And it was a trend on TikTok.
Trends on TikTok never fail to.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Scare the shit out of me as well they should.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
A trend of nurses who had worked in the ers
during COVID and after the fact, young nurses singing these
songs about how excited they were that RFK Junior was
now head of the HHS and he was going to
break the juggernaut that was big science, big pharma, big
(34:12):
medicine so that they, the nurses would finally be able
to deliver the real kind of care that they want
to deliver to their patients. And it was some like
country western song that they were singing Asleep Black Baby
basically like, now the RFK jr Is going to be
heading up. Hhs. I'm going to sleep like a baby.
And I was like, these are nurses. Something big is
(34:35):
going on here. And I saw dozens and dozens of these.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
I was like, okay, yeah, so cripplingly, terrifying, just so scary.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Thanks Molly, thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics makes sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean
we don't have a great show for you today. Professor
Danigo Young, the author of Wrong, How Media, politics and
identity drive our appetite for Misinformation, stops by to talk
(00:22):
about the state of American media and misinformation. But first
we have actor director Ben McKenzie, who will talk about
his upcoming film Everyone Is Lying to You for Money.
You'll break down the schemes in the crypto world. Welcome
to Fast Politics.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Ben mckenzy, Mollie, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
So let's talk about crypto. You know, it's funny because,
as we were just talking about, you're an actor, but
you're also a writer. You've written a bunch about crypto,
and crypto is so interesting in the fact that it
is both scammy and also scammy. So talk to me
about where we are right now with crypto. I want
you first to start with how you got involved did
writing that quick? Now?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Sure? So? It was the pandemic and my profession, showbiz
was on ice. There was really no way to act
if you had needed to be six feet apart from
people at all times. Obviously, So I was really bored.
I was really really bored and spiraling, as so many
of us were. I saw the markets go down and
go back up, and I was like, oh, that's interesting.
I'd never really paid much attention to them. I have
(01:22):
a degree in economics from UVA, but I heavily used
it because I decided to become a knucker, so whatever.
I started looking at the market. So I was like, oh,
maybe I should invest didn't know what to invest in.
And a buddy of mine came to me, my buddy
Dave from UVA, so I've known him for twenty years.
He said, you got to buy bitcoin. A lot of
people have had this experience of a friend or someone
(01:43):
telling mess but it The difference with me was that
David given me terrible financial advice before he had encouraged
me to invest in it. What I think was a
penny stock pump and dump where we invested in a
company that had supposedly invented synthetic blood. This wasn't there
on noose. It was like a precursor. Anyway. We lost money,
He lost money. He wasn't scamming me. But when Dave
(02:04):
came back and said I sho buy a bit coin,
I was like, I'm not going to do it, but
I am going to look at it. And that led
me down a rabbit hole and it reached out to
a journalist, Jacob Silverman. We wrote a bunch of articles,
as you said, about it, and then sold a book
and wrote a book about it that came out in
July of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
I love that you knew when you got the advice
from this friend that it was going to be better.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, you know, we all have that for I love
him to death, but like, I'm not going to rely
on day for financial advice. The joke I make is
that it's the books about crypto, but it's really about
money and lying. And I know about money because of
becon and about lying because I'm an actor and I
do it for a living.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
These guys were just full of shit, you know, Like
that's that's the bottom line is that, Mike, you know
you have a pretty good BS. You can probably relate
to this. You have a pretty good BS radar in politics,
but also in show this, everyone's lying to you. In
Showbaz all the time, it's like, that's just the currency
of the place. It's just like, what's the what's the degree,
what's the intention. You know, there's a lot of lies.
(03:00):
These guys were lying about financial products, which you know
is a little scary. So I felt like I needed
to kind of speak out about it because I was
afraid that a lot of people could lose money, and
you know, it's kind of amusing. I did, and I
was right, But of course it didn't matter, like a
ton of people lot lost money anyway. But it has
been a fun journey.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
It's funny because it's not none of this is funny.
It's disturbing, but it's also super interesting. I actually had
your co author on and I remember a moment where
I was, you know, crypto is just a scam, right,
it is a scam, but it's also really bad for
the environment.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, we went to the biggest crypto mine in the country, supposedly,
which is outside of my hometown of Austin. This is in
the book. It's called Windstone, and it took over a
former Alco aluminum smelting plant that shuttered around the subprime crisis.
And yes, and so the reason that they they bought
it was it has a big transformer or a connection
to the power grid where it can handle it like
(03:56):
a really high load. And so it's just football field
after football field of these computers stacked Florida ceiling, you know,
one hundred feet in the fifty feet in the air,
running endlessly and consuming all of this energy. I think
I think the sales pitch of crypto is the positive side,
right that the pitch is, Hey, do you hate the banks?
Everyone raises their hand. Crypto will fix everything. Vague vague
(04:20):
stories about how I'll fix everything. The reality is most
people are going to lose money. The money that is
made goes to people who I don't have a lot
of respect for, either people that are in jail or
people that have made money in ways that I don't rate.
And Trump coins a good example, right, like Trump I
think the Times reported this like something an eight hundred
(04:41):
thousand people are negative on their down on their money
as of a few weeks ago, and like fifty people
made ten million or more. It's a market set up
to be manipulated and to have all those things that
shouldn't happen in a regulated market, like insider trading and
front running and wash trading and all this stuff. So
it's pretty bad. I think the assumption was, oh, all
(05:03):
these guys have gone to jail, this thing will go away.
Even I I think was too cocky about it. But
Trump's reelection and his embraceive crypto, I mean everyone sees
it now. Now it's just like a free for all. Again,
what could possibly go wrong?
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Yeah, it seems like a lot of going wrong. So
you have trump Coin. The thing that I think is
interesting trump coin is somehow sponsored by Liberty Financial. Liberty
Financial I remember from part one of this whole apocalypse
when I went to cepac in the early twenty sixteen
(05:38):
ish seventeen ish era, they were not a crypto company.
Then they were some other kind of sketchy financial services company.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah. I don't know much about the history of it.
What I do think is interesting is that the you know,
one of my kind of dorky arguments, But what I'm
really passionate about was one of the problems with crypto
is it says we're going to replace that evil government
that's sprinting the money, which, by the way, we do
live in a representative democracy, like at least supposedly so,
Like the people, these evil people that are running the
(06:08):
government like we did put them in power, but we
don't want the money from the government. So you asked, well,
where's the money going to come from? And they don't
like to admit it, but the answer is corporations, private money,
right money. We've tried this before. It was the nineteenth century.
It was called the free banking era or the wildcat
banking era. Banks were allowed to issue their own notes,
their own currency because we were trying to expand west
(06:30):
and provide all this economic activity, and basically it was
right for the fraud is the short or the wildcat
banks were called wildcat banks because you would only allowed
one branch of your bank. You'd set it up as
far away from your depositors as possible, wildcats roamed and
then once the other money you could run off with it.
So private money should just like I mean, anyone on
the left should be able to see why private money
(06:50):
is a bad idea, like instantaneously, but just in general,
like historically it's also a bad idea. Like we have
tried it. It didn't work very well. Facebook has tried
to meta with Hell they call themselves down has tried
their own currency before it got stopped, but they really
wanted to try their own currency. And now that Trump
is in office, I fear that that may happen again,
or it may happen for real. They may actually get
(07:12):
it through Congress and get private money out there.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
One of the things that I think is super interesting
about this is these are like my beliefs a little bit.
But one of the things that we saw from twenty
twenty twenty four was that they weren't able to regulate crypto.
We all saw it coming as a disaster, like it
must be the run up to the I mean, I
(07:34):
don't remember thinking this during the run up to the
credit crisis in two thousand and eight, but clearly the
subprime mortgages, somebody, I'm sure there were people out there
being like, you know, this is going to be bad.
Like we're giving people money to buy houses that clearly
can't afford the mortgage payments. So this is a similar thing.
We're using money that's not regulated. There's just not enough
(07:57):
there there. People don't understand. There's just not regulation. And
one of the biggest problems with crypto, and you tell
me if I'm right, is crypto has just like TikTok
has become very involved in labby and politicians. And one
of the things they do, and this is reported in
the New reported in the New York Times, which I
thought was really interesting, they run ads against an opponent.
(08:19):
So if you are a crypto, you know, and this
is on the left and the right, they will campaign
against your opponent, and they will, you know, run ads.
You know, it won't say they love crypto, it'll say
they're great for this or that or whatever constituents want.
This is all pressure just to not be regulator.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Absolutely, or to be regulated in a favorable way. I
part one hundred and thirty five million dollars into the
Lost Cycle, and crypto and the people associated with the
industry apparently accounted for almost half of all corporate donations
of the entire corporate Then don't think how much much
corporate money is in our politics. So it's an enormous amount.
(08:58):
And to your point about targeting people, Yeah, Katie Porter,
they spent a super pac pro crypto. Super Pac spent
ten million attacking Katie Porter. They spent forty million making
sure that Shared Brown could not get re elected in Ohio,
which was particularly sad for me. Because ale of shared Brown,
but also when I testified to the Senate Banking Committee
(09:19):
in December twenty two after Sam Bateman free you know
everything with Kabluly, Brown was the chair of the committee,
and he was like holding the line against this nonsense.
It's not like he's particularly anti crypto, you know. I
think he's a much more of a working class guy.
But he was skeptical of what was going on, and
he and his staff were great and put together that hearing,
(09:39):
and then you know, a few years later he's out
forty million, has a lot of money for one race
with the Porter race. I think was this in the Times?
I think it was the NOS. The New Yorker did
an article about this, and someone connected with that superpack
was anonymous, but went on the record saying this is
to intimidate you. This is and intimidate people. I'm paraphrasing,
(10:02):
but like, if you're anti crypto, we're going to come
after you. And all of that actually makes a perfect
kind of sense because if you think about crypto, so
the interesting thing about crypto as a quote unquote asset
is that there is no product. There isn't anything right,
There isn't a good or a service. There's bits of
computer code stored on these ledgers, a couple blockchains. So
it's the old saying like if you don't know the product,
(10:23):
then you're the product. So the product is the consumer
getting duped out of their money. The way to keep
that thing going is to get much like the Ponzi
scheme that it is, is just to keep getting more
people in the door so you can keep you know,
pretending like this thing has value. The way to do
that is through marketing and and or political influence, and
(10:45):
so they've put a ton of money in there. The
Republican Party is obviously already on board with this, or
at least a lot of them are. But the Democrats,
they've bought off a number of Democrats, I would argue,
or certainly influence them, so they're probably crypto legislation. Signing
to law this year would be my bet, right.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
And there is crypto legislation. The legislation is what you
would expect it to be, so talk about that.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah, it's called the Genius Act, so no stupid. Yeah, yeah.
I'm not an expert on banking regulation or any of
this stuff, so I may be you know, touch vague here,
just to like not please misspeak. But the gist is,
and I've gotten this from people that I respect, like
Hillary Allen, who's a professor of law at American University.
(11:29):
She and I testified, and instead of Banking Committee that
hearing I mentioned, she's written about crypto and all that
similarities of subprime and all of the mistakes we're making
again that we've made before. And the gist of the
legislation is that it will allow stable coins to get
into our bank. Stable Coins are cryptocurrency that's pegged one
to one with an actual currency. Supposedly the main ones tether.
(11:52):
One tether's treated as one dollar in the crypto casinos,
the crypto exchanges where people gamble on crypto. If that's
separate from the banking sector, then you know, people are
playing games and they're losing them and this is ours.
All this money that's flowing around. It's not that bad.
But but if that money is treated as real money
that can be parked in a bank, you know, you're
(12:12):
basically recreating the conditions for the subprime crisis and the
sense of money market funds. You know, where you would
have you'd get a return on your investment, and that
was a problem in two thousand and eight. I was
one of contributing factors of subprime. There's also a problem
in twenty twenty that thankfully got dealt with. But you're
basically introducing systemic risk into the banking system where if
(12:35):
there is a recession, and of course recessions are inevitable,
so at some point there will be a recession, people
are going to risk off. Right, Investors are going to
want to decrease their risks, so they're going to try
to cash out of this crypto Crypto the market is
notoriously illiquid. There'sn't actually anywhere near as much actual money
backing these things as they say there are, And so
they go to get their money and they can't get
(12:56):
it out because it's gone. And again, if that's set
writ from the banking system, it's one thing like FTX
blew up, and it didn't immediately take down our banking system,
but it did actually only less than six months later.
This is the gist of the article that I wrote
for Slate. It contributed directly to the Silvergate, Silicon Valley
(13:17):
and Signatures implosion. They were all three crypto banks, They
all had heavy exposure to crypto. It's not a coincidence.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Yeah, I wonder if you could talk about their story
going right now, So another suspect is arrested in the
bitcoin kidnapping and torture case. Right, this was Tuesday Morning authority.
So the victim was an Italian man who was tortured
in a luxury townhouse for weeks. This is to get
his It's a token, right.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
As keys, right, these keys.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Yeah, this has always been a danger of crypto. Can
you explain it to us?
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Sure, I mean the basic way to look at it,
the simplest way to look at it is you're creating
a gray or black market for something of value. Right,
There's these coins that can be traded back and forth
and can be sent instantaneously all over the world while
avoitting banks. So who would find that appealing criminals obviously.
So when people have accumulated crypto there, they can become targets,
(14:11):
right and quite frankly, in order to cash out of
the crypto and to not arouse suspicion from the authorities
and to avoid you know, the banks, because you mightn't
want to pay taxes, or you might not have gotten
directly or whatever you're putting yourself in a place. I'm
not talking about the regular person who's got like one
hundred bucks on coinbase. I'm talking about people, the whales,
the people with lots and lots of bitcoin. What's stopping
(14:33):
people from like doing what unfortunately seems to have happened
to this guy and just you know, torturing him to
get it out. There's lots of crime that happens in
crypto where people just you know, fall out of balconies,
and you know, there's some pretty horrible stories. Ask some
guy who's dismembered and stuffed in a trunk of a car,
and it's all pretty bad stuff. But the point I
think I come back to is like, well, that's the
reason you don't want that stuff is you know, you
(14:56):
want the monetary system to be something that we all
benefit from, We all sort of have some buy in.
Our failures to actually create this sort of better version
of our regulated system has led people to crypto. But
that's works. Just because different doesn't mean it's better. This
is works even when you win, you could end up torture.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Almost as if crypto seems like it's like Philt Morris right,
or old school cigarette companies or you know the companies
that were working so hard, or the oil and gas
companies working so hard to influence regulation for years and
years and years.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Again, to my point, crypto doesn't have a product, so
it's very ironic. The crypto advocates will tell you bitcoin
has no marketing department, right, like it was just dropped online.
But actually, if you think about it, because crypto has
no part of crypto is only marketing. It's only the
ability to convince other people to buy it or to influence,
and that's or to convince people to legalize it. So
(15:54):
it has to spend, or it ought to spend. It's
smart of it to spend as much money as they
need to buy off as many legislators as they need to.
And I think they've done that. I think they've done
it with certain numbers of the Democratic Party. I think
Senator Gillibrand in New York here is unfortunately not on
the right side of this issue. I don't know her personally,
but that's just a fact. And she spent sponsorble legislation
(16:17):
with Senator Loomis of Wyoming. They were talking about letting
people invest their four oh one ks and irais into
Crypto before the crash, you know, and it's like, imagine
if that had happened. It happened a little bit. The
Ontario Teacher's pension fund invested in a thing called Celsia
Ponzi scheme that blew up. So yeah, I mean it's
really bad stuff. I'm hoping. Well, actually, I'll be honest
(16:38):
with you, Molly, I don't have a ton of hope
that the Congress is going to do the right thing.
So I'm hoping that maybe we can fix it before
it crashes later. But I'm not even sure that's possible.
It's really great, and it's like looking at this iceberg
in the distance and like, at some point we're going
to head it. I don't know how fast the boat's moving.
I don't know what's going to happen, but at some
point it's gonna blow up again.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Thank you, Ben Kinsey, Thank you for having me for sure.
Danago Young is a professor of communications and political science
at the University of Delaware and the author of Wrong,
How Media, politics and identity drive our appetite for misinformation.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Danna.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
Thanks for having me on, Molly.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
So you're an academic and This book is called Wrong,
How media, politics and identity drive our appetite for misinformation
an incredibly important and interesting take, So talk us through
how you got here.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
I was seeing so much research in my field around
sort of the nature of misinformation, and you know, this
was especially during COVID. There's lots of COVID misinformation about
vaccines and masks, and then there was of course misinformation
about the twenty twenty election that you know, led us
to January sixth, and I just kept thinking, there's all
(17:57):
this research on the supply of misinformation and what the
content is and all of these lies people believe in,
but there's not as much of a focus on the
demand side, that is, why do we want it? Not
why do we want to be lied to? But why
do we embrace fictions? And it's clear that that's there's
a real opportunity for social scientists like myself to dig
(18:20):
in a little bit too. Are what are the needs
that are being satisfied by holding belief and misperceptions? Because
if there wasn't an appetite for it, there wouldn't be
so much bullshit. That's just the reality. And so I
was kind of inspired by some inquiries that I was
getting early on in COVID. I don't know if you remember,
(18:41):
and I know we block it out because it was awful.
But in the spring of twenty twenty, when we didn't
really know what the hell was going on and we
weren't sure do we mask do we not mask? And
then there was this weird documentary that came out called Plandemic.
Oh yes, yeah, it was all lies, like Fauci is
benefiting and the thing was planned and all of this stuff.
(19:04):
I had some really thoughtful friends who were asking me like, oh,
have you seen this. It's kind of interesting, like maybe
COVID is a lie, and maybe maybe this and maybe that.
When I realized that these are well meaning people who
are just trying to make sense of chaos and they're
still uncertain, and I was reminded of a time when
I had the same impulse, and that time was when
(19:28):
my late husband was sick with a brain tumor, and
I went down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory beliefs
for fundamental reasons that drive all of us, and that is,
you want to understand what's going on, you want to
have control over what's going on, and you want to
feel a part of a community of people who can
support you. So in the book, I talk about these
(19:49):
three c's, comprehension, control, and community. That are the fundamental
needs that drive us. And if there's information out there
that makes us feel like we get it and we
have agency and we're together with like minded people, it
doesn't matter if that information is true or false. It
is satisfying primal needs and that's what we're going to
(20:10):
go with.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Yeah, it's so interesting, And you know, I have this
book coming out called How to Lose Your Mother about
how when my husband got diagnosed with cancer, how it
worked out for us now he had amass since pancreas
turned out to be the good short answer has turned
out to be the good cancer, right, the neuroendocrine. But
we went through that period of like what is it?
(20:31):
You know, how long do we all have? What is
this going to look like? What is our lives going
to look like? So I know that period quite well
because I just went through it, and I feel like
it is a very vulnerable period. So you can absolutely
draw the line from being vulnerable like that to trying
to make sense of the world, to how we were
(20:53):
as a culture right after COVID, So say more about that.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah, I think that it still applies now, Molly. I mean,
we're all vulnerable and life is actually really hard, and
many of us experience hardships sort of at ebbs and flows, right,
you're like waiting for the other shoe to drop, when's
the next crisis? But for many people, life is a
series of painful crises and a lot of suffering. And
(21:21):
if you do not feel like you have mechanisms of control,
you're going to do whatever jiu jitsu you need to
do in your own mind to make you feel like
you have control. And for me, what's been interesting about
the response of the book is that it's kind of
just shifted for people how they think about their loved
ones who believe things that are untrue, and rather than
(21:42):
like judging them or being like, oh, what idiots, what morons,
it gets to the heart of something that we all share,
which is we're all just trying to get by, and
part of getting by is needing to feel hope. And
if the world itself does not provide you with hope,
you're going to find your own mechanisms for hope, and
unfortunately a lot of those are being exploited by some
(22:04):
really nefarious entities who are creating hope among certain groups
of people through the demonization of other groups of people.
That where it gets dangerous.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
What does that look like?
Speaker 3 (22:18):
What that looks like is is sort of offering people comprehension, control,
and community by creating false narratives of threat. So the
easiest one would be the great replacement theory. So the
conspiracy theory that says, for example, that Democrats are trying
to replace white people in the United States and bring in,
(22:41):
you know, racial and ethnic minorities to try to replace
white voters to win election time.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
The reason that that is an attractive fiction to believe in.
If you are someone who feels like you lack agency
and power, you feel like you're voicesn't heard. You are
a white, middle class, working class person who feels like
the job opportunities that you thought were going to be
there aren't there for you. You feel like culturally and
so bad almost the above, right, Rather than thinking in
(23:14):
terms of the complex systems and the way that the
administrative state could actually serve you, it is far more
attractive to be like, those people are doing something against me,
to try to sabotage my power in society. So complex
systems are really we're not great at wanting to grapple
(23:36):
with them and how they work. What we are really
good at is identifying human cause and effect, very simple, like,
this is a bad entity doing this action that's causing
this outcome. There are these powerful people who are trying
to orchestrate this bad thing and it's hurting me. That's
how these things get weaponized. But the needs underlying them
(23:58):
are not inherently bad, They're inherently human.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
I want you to talk about take it a step further,
so the Pandemic documentary. I remember when that came out.
I was in a group chat with a lot of
pretty affluent young women who were like, I have seen
this video and it makes a lot of sense to me.
(24:22):
And I was like what. I couldn't believe it. And
one of the things during the twenty twenty four cycle,
one of the many things I got wrong during the
twenty twenty four cycle was I thought Trump wasn't reaching
out to women at all, and I was like, why
isn't he reaching out to women? That's odd, that is
very strange. But now what I realized is that Maha
(24:44):
was his woman outreach. I would love you to talk
about MAHA Make America Healthy Again, which is meant to
be ironic ultimately, and RFK Junior.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
This is something that I've been grappling with even more
recently in the you know, the book came out less year,
but I feel like this piece is so irrelevant right now.
What is the appeal of MAHA.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
What is the.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Appeal of RFK Junior? The answer is kind of simple.
It is about individual agency in your physical health and
well being. Right that you don't need to rely on science.
You don't need to rely on like controlled trials and
meta analyzes conducted by people who have dedicated their life
(25:28):
to this study. That you, as a human can trust
your own experiences, your own intuition, and your own observations
of the world to make yourself healthy. How attractive is that, Molly?
I love that, and I think, right, I think that
we all want it, and I think that it's the
weaponization of it that's been dangerous against science, because if
(25:48):
we're all being honest, we all rely on intuition and
our gut a little bit. I don't know about you,
but I'm not like in a lab conducting studies in
a lab coat with a peatree dish. I trust scientists, right,
But that's because my social norms around me suggest to
me that science is to be trusted. But I also
my gut tells me that sciences are to be trusted.
(26:11):
Other people's thatts tell them science is not to be trusted,
and you should take ivermectin. Well, So what separates those two,
What separates those two is the sort of voices in
their ears that they're putting faith in. And I think
that if the folks who really care about science and
medicine and getting closer to truth allow for regular people
(26:31):
to have a little more agency and be a little
more open to the idea that, like, we get it.
Your intuition is telling you this or that, and as
long as it's not bad for you, then go ahead
and do that, right, go ahead and drink apple cider vinegar.
If it's not bad for you, go ahead, like, because
there are certain psychological benefits of allowing yourself to feel
(26:52):
that power. And you know, I take a stupid number
of vitamins every day, and I have a lot of
very science y friends who are like those actually aren't
doing anything. The empirical evidence is not suggesting they're working,
but they do something for me. They make me feel
like it's part of my morning routine of self care.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Right, So let's talk this through. How we got here
is through COVID. Right, was a pandemic. It was very
scary for a lot of people, including me. I found
it quite scary. People did not know what to do.
The doctors did not know what to do because it
was a once in a lifetime hopefully though who knows pandemic,
(27:30):
And I think that there was a feeling that doctors
got things wrong, which is what happens in a pandemic, right,
liken't you don't know what the virus is, you know,
like masking kids probably a mistake, but we didn't know
until we knew. That was the sort of moment I
think that we tipped over into unrealities. So talk us
(27:52):
through kind of what happened there with people taking advantage
of the culture of people.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Sure, so what should have happened in an ideal world
is that in that moment of uncertainty, in that moment
when we're all desperate to try to protect ourselves, what
should have happened is that we should have identified the
virus as the external threat, not each other. Yeah, not
each other, and not political parties as the expert. Unfortunately,
(28:19):
our polarization runs so deep, and we do know that
this trait called psychological reactants, which is feeling really angry
when you feel as though your autonomy is being constrained,
that tends to cluster more on the cultural right, and
they're probably genetic and social reasons for that. What that
(28:42):
means is that when there were mandates that came down,
those mandates were disproportionately hated by the right. Obviously also
were of course weaponized by political pundits in our media
environment who are like, how dare they tell us what
to do?
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Et cetera, and the RFP, the people who sell supplements
and vitamins and.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
Multi level marketing. Yeah, yeah, well, because there's so much
money to be made by a snake oil salesmen when
everyone's freaking out right and taking advantage of the fact
that the real science, the true science, was changing, that
the scientists were saying different things over time, but that's
because the information was changing. But that created increased uncertainty
(29:25):
and increased distrust in science. I also think that the
medical community is dealing with a bit of blowback because
while they were so focused on containing the virus right
like they were thinking in terms of virology epidemiology, they
weren't thinking about societal health and the need for social
contact and community. Our adolescents, who were probably needing more
(29:51):
than ever to be connecting with one another, were stuck
into their rooms on their phones, which we're still dealing
with what the hell happened, both academically and in terms
of mental health. So I think a lot of parents
and communities are rightfully angry, and the anger, though I
think the anger is a bit misplaced because so much
(30:12):
of it is aimed at the scientists, when really it
shouldn't be aimed at the scientists. It should be aimed
at the sort of disconnect between science and public policy.
Right with the scientists didn't say here's what has to happen,
everyone needs to stay in their houses, right, wasn't scientists
who said that. It was our public officials who did
(30:32):
the best they could with the information they had and
said we're going to come up with these rules. Unfortunately,
I think that the trickle down effect of that has
been devastating for faith in science. I also think that
you can draw a straight line from the blowback against
COVID to the Trump administration's cuts to Higher ed A
(30:53):
and Harvard. Oh yeah right, It's like, oh, these are
the same people who wanted to keep me and my
kids in my house for two years.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
I would rephrase because I would say, I think Trump's
more on high right is from the Orbon playbook. It's authoritarianism.
But I think the support for it is from the
Maha crowd who said scientists never did anything good for
us anyway, They kept my kid out of school, which
is why he's getting away with it. I would love
you to talk about RFK Junior because I think he's
(31:20):
a critical part. You would never have gotten RFK Junior
running healthcare in this country were it not for COVID,
like a slow motion car accident. So I wonder if
you could talk us through what RFK Junior does in
this moment that is a function of this happy talk.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Let's think back to the fact that we had this
kind of wonderful partnership public private partnership. Trump administration really
so much credit to that administration. Trump won for getting
the vaccine out to the public, forgetting the vaccine produced right. However,
you have, you're still operating in this climate where you
(32:00):
have this new clustering of anti vaxers that is skewing
on the cultural right. OURFK Junior has made an entire
career out of drawing a false connection between vaccines and
autism and talking about the harms of vaccines. He has
an entire enterprise based on this, and he's made a
ton of money speaking over the years based on these lies. Now,
(32:25):
for folks who are nervous about the COVID vaccine because
it came to market so fast, because that was the
big thing, right, it came so fast. It's mRNA, which
is a new technology, and we don't really know what
this is.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
What is there's a regular one that works less well too.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Right, But the idea that RFK Junior is already an
established voice in the anti vaxx space, just he is
the natural spokesperson to kind of push back against the vaccine,
and that the notion that you have these folks who
are so desperate to want to feel some sense of control.
(33:03):
Trump now was in a weird situation, right because he
fast tracked this vaccine to make it available. But he
also can't be the pro vax guy, because he's got
all of these supporters who are in this sort of
rear holistic right wing space. So he's like, you know,
the vaccine is here, weird people to take it, but
if you don't want it, don't get it. But I
think that it's the legacy because he was already in
(33:25):
that space for so many years that he became the
natural spokesperson for this sort of anti vax pushback. Something
really totally freaked me out when he became named head
of the HHS, And it was a trend on TikTok.
Trends on TikTok never fail to.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Scare the shit out of me as well they should.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
A trend of nurses who had worked in the ers
during COVID and after the fact, young nurses singing these
songs about how excited they were that RFK Junior was
now head of the HHS and he was going to
break the juggernaut that was big science, big pharma, big
(34:12):
medicine so that they, the nurses would finally be able
to deliver the real kind of care that they want
to deliver to their patients. And it was some like
country western song that they were singing Asleep Black Baby
basically like, now the RFK jr Is going to be
heading up. Hhs. I'm going to sleep like a baby.
And I was like, these are nurses. Something big is
(34:35):
going on here. And I saw dozens and dozens of these.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
I was like, okay, yeah, so cripplingly, terrifying, just so scary.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Thanks Molly, thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics makes sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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