like, some of what they're doing is interesting to me as a media consumer...another part of it is like....oh man these guys are so addicted to X that they have to make an ESPN/CNBC for it bc it is their whole world

part of me that is jealous of how these new streaming shows like TBPN & the new a16z 'monitoring' show are able to match form w/ the way some ppl experience getting information. the other part is like these ppl are so wildly addicted to their niche info environment they need to externalize it

Breaking Free From Alex Jones A former Infowars employee on radicalization, lies, and getting out

I say this a lot but today’s pod is worth your time. It’s with Josh Owens who worked for Alex Jones/Infowars for 4 years in the 2010s. It’s a conversation about how the conspiracy machine works from inside, about radicalization and, crucially, about the hard, unscalable work of deradicalization

(as always if you liked this…i think you might enjoy what we are making week to week. a like/subscribe would go a long way! thanks so much!)

ty! (and this sounds lame as hell but if you wanna support the show, liking/subscribing on your app/platform of choice really helps!)

Josh is a really rare example of somebody who got involved with something terrible, did inexcusable things…and seems genuinely committed to honestly owning up to it and explaining his experience to help others understand and be an example. I’ve found his self-reflection valuable

Breaking Free From Alex Jones A former Infowars employee on radicalization, lies, and getting out

I say this a lot but today’s pod is worth your time. It’s with Josh Owens who worked for Alex Jones/Infowars for 4 years in the 2010s. It’s a conversation about how the conspiracy machine works from inside, about radicalization and, crucially, about the hard, unscalable work of deradicalization

i think this take (good at tasks, bad at answers) is very much correct. and a lot of this is on the big labs for how they’ve bought into their own hype and messaged what they’re selling

“It’s a couple of things that work beautifully in concert. First: no music. Audiences are so sophisticated, but what they’re not accustomed to is not being told how to feel,” Wyle says. “You take all that out and it forces a level of engagement where you’re now looking for clues within the frame of the screen, which forces you to look up from your phone. And I think that is extremely engaging, especially to young viewers who aren’t accustomed to being asked to participate in a nonpassive way in the viewing experience.

“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”

Wyle makes eye contact for his next point, delivering it with a Robby-esque matter-of-factness. “Fourth point: The election went the other way,” he says with a shrug. “We could have been a really good show with a lot of nice things to say in a perfectly normal Kamala Harris universe. And instead we became almost a beacon of hope and humanity in an alternative universe. But in the midst of that, fifth point—this is essentially competence porn. You’re watching really smart, dedicated people do what only they know how to do at a level that you don’t know how to do it, and you’re so fucking glad that they’re there doing it, and compartmentalizing their own stuff to put your broken pieces back together. You’re so reassured by knowing that there are people out there that laugh and joke and have the ability to lock in like that.”

this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...

well this is sort of what i'm saying. it's not about convincing people to like a band. what this company is selling is just an artificial way to try to appeal to an algorithm, not like...persuasion (fwiw i do like the band and think most of the popularity is pretty organic)

i think you might be reading into this a bit! this was just me describing the landscape of attention right now which is very fractured, to the point that these are tactics people are trying to employ

(if it's not clear i think that this is kind of a bummer online world we've created here with bummer incentives all around)

yeah, in a perfect world...yes! and it can still happen this way...but also have to reckon with the fact that attention is mediated much much differently now than it used to be (not saying this is a good thing!)

?

right! this is what i'm sayin. i don't think it's a good thing the internet has been constructed this way.

What matters on online right now, I think, is volume. Discovery is so hard/fucked. There's too much content. The hardest thing is finding a way to rise above that. Even if you're good it's so hard. So the problem Chaotic Good solves is creating noise that acts as a signal. not to ppl but to algos.

Really liked this piece. Do think there's a big thing missing from all this discourse which is that the astroturfing stuff isn't about persuasion or about the comments/commenters seeming real or believable. It's about *discovery.* The audience for the astroturfing isn't listeners, it's the algorithm

oh..

i feel like a lesson from the economy these days is that you can just say things and then you will make money

the real lesson is to never, even for one second, remove your eyes from the feed

the conventional wisdom is that you take a few days off to recharge and supposedly you come back refreshed. but every time i do that now and blissfully remove myself from the garbage fire of news, the first 3 days back my defenses are lowered and it feels like i get the bends from reentry

yep, the extreme fragmentation of the info environment and how absolutely ridiculously hard it is to get attention on almost anything, paired with what that system rewards (doom, resentment, negativity, extreme simplicity) makes it very hard to spread news about incremental positive change

the psyop framework reminds me a lil of the Cambridge Analytica panic where psychographic profiling stuff (not new) was paired with data collection at platform level (newer) and was framed implicitly as a kind of mind-control level of persuasion. but attention capture (important) is not persuasion

i'm very fascinated by the clipping phenomenon and the way it seems to power virality online now. Look at this stat from yay about Clavicular getting 2.2 billion views via clippers in one month. it's wild and also...not exactly 'authentic' in any traditional sense

yes i agree with you

One of the most interesting things I read last year was Matthew Stasoff's 2025 'Social Signals' slide deck about the state of the attention economy/marketing. This stuff is happening everywhere. It is the state of play rn for so many brands/artists/influencers docs.google.com/presentation...

thoughts on this:
- this is just an interesting look at how marketing works now when attention is so fragmented & algorithmically mediated
- it adds some pretty interesting context to how a track from Winter's solo album rather inexplicably blew up as tiktok audio
- psyop is prob not a helpful term

Claude Mythos knows when it's breaking the rules — and tries to hide it Anthropic’s new model is its “best-aligned” yet. But when it does misbehave, things get weird

what are some of the best things you’ve read about the mythos stuff? thought this was a p good recap but what’s out there that’s good? www.transformernews.ai/p/claude-myt...

this point is so real. the other thing establishment media seems to fight at their own peril is the idea of being a volume game. legacy media loves to keep pods, streams, and all content to be very digestible but a big part of building the relationships they want is being in your eyes/ears all day

what a glorious time capsule of this broken moment we are in