merchant of masks

0:00You are now experiencing the Nectar of Time. There's a Canadian sociologist, Erving Goffman — sociologist, not a psychologist, but same thing — and he wrote a really infamous book back in the '50s, and his whole premise was that, yes, life as we know it, at least in the public eye, it's all a performance. When we're out in the public, when we're at work, when we're grocery shopping, whatever, we're playing these roles, we're wearing these masks, and we are aware that other people are playing these roles, and they're aware that we're playing these roles, and we all just kind of follow the script until we get home and we get to take the mask off and be our true selves. Of course, he wrote that back in the '50s, pre-internet, right? So obviously we're not the first to have this conversation and ask the question

0:47about, well, how's the internet affected these kind of traditional relationships, or these traditional kind of interactions? And in a lot of ways it's amplified these things, but it also means that we're never really fully able to step away from the performance. But that's what is discovered when you discover you are a phony. You see, what is a phony? A phony is a mask, and the masks used, as I've told most of you, in classical drama were megaphones. They had mouthpieces so that the voice would be projected in an open-air

1:33theater. So we get the phony, and the mask was the persona. That's the Latin for "that through which the sound passes." So the persona is the mask, the phony. So to discover that you are a phony through and through and through is to discover that you're a big act, that you're a game. And when you discover that, then you wake up to find out who's the player. Welcome back to another episode of Nectar of Time. I'm your host, Tamir Barzilai, and today we'll be speaking with Logan Macnair. Logan is a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His academic research is focused on radicalization, terrorism,

2:22extremism, and the strategic protocols of extremist organizations in media today. He's also the author of Troll, his latest novel, outlining a man that starts his journey as an aspiring actor, only to somehow find himself top internet provocateur, instigator and cult leader. Logan takes us on a journey through a wide gamut of internet perspectives across the chronology of a social media odyssey, where we learn about what lies under the proverbial mask that each of us wears online. What is under that mask? Is it something sinister? Can we avoid it? Or does it reveal a truth about us, a perennial truth, something so deeply connected to our interpersonal

3:10experiences, something that perhaps we are simply, impossibly bound to? Social media in the modern age is a tumultuous, relentless ocean of interaction. What is our defense if by default we are thrown around on a fragile wooden raft? We must remember the words of Seneca, the famous Stoic philosopher known for his consolations on the human condition. He spoke about another proverbial ocean, that of Fortuna. He says, "No wall is impregnable against Fortune. Let us fortify ourselves from within. If that part is secure, a person can be attacked but not conquered." Deception, sleight of hand, misdirection: these words are synonymous

3:57with media today. Navigating truth and untruth is a treacherous task, even more so when it comes to the truths and untruths about ourselves. In the following conversation, Logan and I investigate these ideas further, and we welcome you to join us. Logan Macnair, thank you very much for being here. My pleasure, I appreciate it. I'm a big fan. I'm a new fan. I didn't really know about your book, but when we got in contact I searched it up, and immediately I loved the premise. For everyone, the book is called Troll. We have it right here. Logan Macnair is the author of Troll. He wrote this

4:46in 2023, or it was published in 2023. Yeah, for the camera, there you go. First of all, amazing cover. It's great. I don't take any credit for that, that's out of my hands, but the people that designed it, I think they nailed it. You had to approve it, though. I saw it. I don't know how much power I had to approve or just— Well, because a lot goes into covers, right? There's a lot of marketing, and there's a lot of research that goes into the perfect cover, that if someone's walking through a bookstore or whatever, that they're actually going to stop and look at it. And I don't know the science behind any of that kind of stuff, but apparently they do. But I like it. I like it. I think they really nailed the vibe. We're going to dive into it today. We'll get into the premise. Full disclosure, I did not finish the book, which you said you were okay

5:33with coming into this, but it is a book that I do want to finish, and I'm probably going to finish it today or tomorrow. It draws you in. It's a page-turner, and we'll get into why it's such a page-turner. You actually draw from these hooks. Like, there are books and studies and research on how to keep people hooked into social media. I find, because your book mirrors social media, you're benefiting from the same effect. Yeah, it's written for people with social media attention spans. That was the idea, right? Like, you know, the way the algorithms or whatever it is, they pull you in and keep you there. I kind of tried to emulate that, so

6:21it does kind of feel like you're just scrolling, an endless scroll on the internet of content, right? So yeah, that was purposely by design, to keep people interested, but also because it kind of lends to the larger sort of theme and setting of the book itself. So yeah. Well, we're going to get into that, and there's a lot to get into, but hey, we cannot start a Nectar of Time podcast without the ritual of drinking the nectar, of course. So here we are. It has steeped for a while, so hopefully— What do we got? It looks like maroonish. Yeah, it's a Purple Rain. Okay. It's a low-caffeine tea. I don't really know what makes it purple, to be honest, but cheers. Cheers. Happy New Year. Thank you. Yeah, Happy New

7:12Year. I want to set the stage for the podcast today, before we do a deep dive into Troll and into the implications and idea of what you're writing. When I read this — or, I mean, I'm 50 pages in, but I did listen to some other interviews that you've done and sort of understood what you were getting at — I mean, I live the world just like you live, okay? And I'm on Twitter, or X. I'm on the recesses of social media, the back channels, the Reddit subreddits or whatever, wherever, place forums that you go and, you know, I don't know, spill your

8:00heart out and say the most horrific things. And I don't do that intentionally, but we're just there if you're immersed in the internet. And I live a life, I run a software company, I'm immersed in the internet. I need to know how people are thinking, of course. Yeah. And something that drew me to your book is the idea of masks, the idea that we are a certain way yet we act in a different way. Some people do it intentionally, but the average person does it unintentionally, and a lot of psychology is around that integration. Can you integrate how you act outside of yourself with how you act and how you are inside of yourself?

8:50Now, your book is about sort of gaming that to a certain degree, and how that can get out of hand and out of control. But how do you feel about the state of social media today, and the state of human nature today, and our ability to have a healthy relationship with these masks? There may be a time and place for them, right? Yeah, it's great. There's a Canadian sociologist, Erving Goffman — sociologist, not a psychologist, but same thing — and he wrote a really infamous book back in the '50s, and his whole premise was that, yes, life as we know it, at least in the public eye, it's all a performance. When we're out in the public, when we're at work, when we're grocery shopping, whatever, we're playing

9:38these roles, we're wearing these masks, and we are aware that other people are playing these roles, and they're aware that we're playing these roles, and we all just kind of follow the script until we get home and we get to take the mask off and be our true selves. Of course, he wrote that back in the '50s, pre-internet, right? So obviously we're not the first to have this conversation and ask the question about, well, how's the internet affected these kind of traditional relationships, or these traditional kind of interactions? And in a lot of ways it's amplified these things, particularly around this idea of roles or performances or masks or what have you, because it allows us not only to be much more selective and much more exaggerated with the type of masks that

10:25we do or do not wear, but it also means that we're never really fully able to step away from the performance. In traditional life, you know, you go home, you close your doors and you're done. Like, I don't have to interact with that world, I don't have to be that person anymore. But now, you know, we're always potentially connected. We're always potentially answering emails or scrolling social media or texting with people, or engaging in those kind of interactions. So in a lot of ways it's harder for us to actually differentiate the performance or the mask from our true authentic selves. And for a lot of people that gets lost in the, kind of, I think, mesh of the internet and of the online world, in ways that can make people kind of forget who they actually are and where they really come

11:12from, in a way that causes them to kind of lose themselves. And, you know, that's an idea that I tried to sort of explore with this: what happens when you lose your sense of self and you have to sort of start resorting to these preconceptions or clichés or ideas or expectations based on what other people expect to see from you in these kind of online environments? Well, those expectations are real. Those expectations have gravity and they carry weight, and it's difficult to conduct yourself without consideration of those expectations. Yeah, these days, for sure. Yeah. You could argue there's an interpretation that we

12:00have a mandate to wear a mask in public, that if we don't, A, you might not be perceived in the way you want to be perceived; people will not understand that. And then B, at worst, you may be ostracized at an unimaginable scale. Not just— in the olden days, it's just your local village, right? I remember playing the game Assassin's Creed, and you just hear the guys in the town square, I mean, you know, whatever they would say. Whether you agreed with it or not, it sticks to the town square and that town's vicinity. Nowadays, I mean, the reach is, if we had a colony on Mars, they would know about it. Yeah, yeah. And it's, I mean, it's a

12:49bit of a double-edged sword, and it can be a scary thing for a lot of people too. You know, as they say, you make one mistake and it's on the internet, and that's going to follow you, and that's going to in some ways come to partially define you, depending on how sort of widespread and egregious it really is. And, right, on the one hand that allows us to, whatever, hold people accountable for silly things that they've done, but on the other hand, I mean, you can see how that can go too far in that direction, and that sort of stigmatization or culture of shame or whatever you want to call it can end up doing a lot more harm than good. But so in the sort of operating system of civilization right now, we've gone through many upgrades, if you will, and we're certainly in a new version of civilization OS. The

13:39question for me, genuinely, is: are these masks a feature or a bug in the system? And, I mean, we spoke earlier in terms of the Kafka reference, and the quote of Kafka — and I don't know if this is a real Kafka quote or a false attribution to Kafka, but you know, he's a legend, so give him the credit either way. It's a good quote: "I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party and I attended with my real face." Now, your answer to that was a quick reference to a Shel Silverstein poem, right, which is also called "Masks," and it goes like this: "She had blue skin, and so did he. He kept it hid, and so did

14:27she. They searched for blue their whole life through, then passed right by and never knew." What are your thoughts? I mean, it's a good representation and sort of example of, you know, like I say, when you're too beholden to those masks or to those roles, and you're not willing to — or maybe not willing is not the right term — but when you're not comfortable taking those off and putting your true authentic self out there, I mean, what are you going to be missing out on? You know, the people that see me in my day-to-day life, at work, in the grocery store, whatever, they interact with a version of me, but they're never seeing, like, you know, the things that really drive me, or the things that really motivate me, or the

15:13things that make me laugh, or my interests or my hobbies or whatever. And, you know, I'm not saying we all need to live that way and be totally open all the time to every stranger that we chat with at the bus stop, but it makes you kind of wonder, specifically with the role that the internet plays, to what extent am I able to actually recognize the difference between the mask-on self and the mask-off self? And, you know, whether you call that self-awareness or whatever, it's important to do. It's always been important to do. It's especially important to do with the sort of online digital age, but probably a lot harder to do, particularly if you're growing up in those kind of environments, right? And you're taught that, like, you know, that has to be on, and

16:00in some cases you're taught that the mask that you're wearing actually is your authentic self, and you can blur those lines to a degree that, you know, makes people confused. And that's one of the reasons why we see so many young people struggling with questions of identity and questions of self-awareness and where they fit in in this modern world and all that sort of thing. I think that's a big reason why we have those questions in the first place. Well, that's a really good point. And today, like, typically on this podcast we don't really dive into the politics of the world, because I think to each their own as far as that is concerned. But what I will say to that, because the book obviously does touch on some politics, is that I find that you could have an

16:47interpretation of why an individual would lean towards one party or another party, or one ideology to another ideology, is because it acts potentially as a channel, at least in their mind, to be closer to their perceived truth internally. And you can see it both on the left and you can see it on the right. For example, on the left, very high in terms of free speech when it comes to arts, and that art can be interpreted in any number of ways, and identity is very important, and there's a myriad of ways to explore your identity. And those at times run into conflict with what the other side, on the right, let's say, seems to deem as viable identities,

17:37viable expressions of art. Whereas the same could be said for people that lean to the right, where their expression of ideas and beliefs and, let's say, moralities and whatnot, that do have origin in, let's say, perhaps ancient history or ancient art, and they're passed down from generation to— tradition, right? Tradition is now a word that's imbued with, like, bias and politics, and has become sort of a focal point of the right. So everyone, to me — and again, I'm not saying one is right or one is wrong, but in an ideal society everyone could do whatever they want and everyone lives in harmony. That of course doesn't exist, but it is interesting

18:26to see the desire manifest, the desire to attach yourself to your— There is an attempt to be authentic. Yeah. But in that, you run into the issue of, well, it's authentic up until this point. Yeah, and all those ideologies kind of serve as, like, you know, prepackaged identities that people, young people in particular, can kind of say, "Hey, I want to try this on." So, like, when you see people discussing these things these days, young people again especially, it's like, you know, there's all these categories, there's all these roles, there's all these ideologies that, you know, if I say that I am this thing, or if I say that I identify with this thing, then that can help define me, that

19:14can help provide me a script, or a series of beliefs, or an ideology that can provide some purpose and some definition to my life and who I am. Yeah. And, you know, it's a good thing. It's good to search for identity and ask those questions, of course, but we also see these things becoming a little bit watered down, and people sort of clinging to these categories in ways that are very nebulous and don't actually provide much of a solid foundation for them to actually anchor their sense of self to, right? So, I mean, a lot of it, it's in the book, but you hear people talking, you know, you see young people — I see 16-, 17-year-olds saying, you know, "I'm an anarcho-crypto-fascist communist vegan," just throwing out all these labels and categories, as a way to sort of help define themselves

20:02and say, "This is what makes me unique," or, "This is what makes me have a sense of self, or identity, is my attachment or my connection to this XYZ category or XYZ ideology," right? And fundamentally they're just looking for questions of self. They're looking for questions of, again, self-awareness, and who am I, and where do I fit in in all this kind of stuff. Yeah, I totally see that. And social media is almost like this shopping cart that you fill with symbols. Yeah, well said. Well said. It is very much like there's all these things on the wall, like, am I going to be— Yeah. And, but we are encouraged in a way to fake it till you make it. And of course, Peter Riley, the protagonist of the novel, I mean, he doesn't really — I don't

20:50think his initial intentions are to fake it till he makes it, but it sort of, one thing leads to another, and he realizes what the possibilities are. But this is real advice, by the way. Like, the "fake it till you make it" is real advice. And it's like vision— like, vision boards can be really good, but then, like, the minute the vision board is all of these things that you wish you were, that you actually aren't, that you think is the right thing for you, it becomes a problem. And it becomes a problem when you take it seriously, when you don't realize the downside, the possibility for— and the fact that it isn't actually you,

21:39and these are masks. So I think perhaps what I'm trying to say is that if you intentionally put a mask on, and there's no net harm to doing so, and there's a net benefit to you and to society, then maybe there is a time and place to wear those masks. For example, good bedside manners for a doctor. Yeah, yeah. It's a really good place to have a mask, right? A pilot not cracking a joke about crashing the plane. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I guess maybe we can agree on that premise, that there maybe is a time and place for some of these masks. Yeah, of course. I mean, that helps society function, that helps society run. Again, like, you know, I don't want to necessarily have to bare my soul to every person, every acquaintance I

22:26run into at the grocery store, right? So there's a time and place for us to sort of maintain these decorums and whatnot. But again, for me the issue is, like, have we gotten to a point where we're unable to actually take that off and say, "All right, I'm going to sit with myself and my true self," whatever that means? Or, I mean, to continue the metaphor, have those masks become, like, grafted to our face in such a way where, like, removing them is not as easy as it used to be in a sort of pre-connected world, right? Well, this is a really good start to our conversation today. I'm really happy about it. I am going to read a short excerpt from your novel. Before I do that, I just wanted

23:15to touch on this book by Osamu Dazai. It's called The Flowers of Buffoonery, and I think that this title— Great title. Yeah, it is a great title. And Dazai is all about what we've just talked about, but the downside of it, the point where you're so insecure about who you are, and so saddened and depressed about who you are and what your life is, that you change yourself entirely for the benefit of others. And you are essentially a martyr for other people's happiness, and the result of that is the flowers of buffoonery. Like, that's what you get, because in his eyes

24:03you are a buffoon, you are a clown. And he calls it clowning: I clown myself, I ridicule myself to excite other people. That's why we've heard of the term the class clown, right? They get attention by making a mockery of themselves and others. But these are some of the most outcasted people in society, and ostracized people, and they become that way because if it's not natural, if you're not actually that comedian and you're doing it from a very difficult place, at some point that's going to reach a precipice, that's going to hit a limit, and something's going to give. And the give is this book. And he basically wakes up after a botched suicide, a double suicide with his wife, and he wakes up in a sanatorium,

24:54and his friends come visit him in the sanatorium. Which is why, again, it's called The Flowers: it is the result of these actions. And so the reason I brought that up is just because eventually, you fake it long enough, you're going to pay the price. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole reason that whole, like, sad clown trope exists, right? And not just in fiction, but we've seen a lot of real-life examples of that. Say more on that. Well, I mean, like, the example that a lot of people will go to is someone like Robin Williams, right? Okay, yes. Like, you know, always on. Whenever he was around people he was always acting that way, and lighting up the room, and high energy, and blah blah blah. But then, you know, behind closed doors he was a fairly sad man. And so, like you said, when

25:42that thing happened with him, people were shocked, people were surprised, because, like, this is the source of this endless wellspring of joy and happiness and all these kind of things. I had no idea that, you know, he was suffering, or that he was having these issues. So yeah, it's a dangerous form of con— Yeah, certainly. And so with that said, we'll get into the excerpt. And the excerpt that I selected here is— let me just find it, because all of my little stickies I left at the office, I didn't have them with me. So this is page 15. And so, by the way, this is for the audience: this book is written almost like a collection. I think we mentioned

26:29this earlier, but it really is like a collection of excerpts, sort of, from the internet, from different lectures. It almost feels like you're reading essays tied together, but they're very short and they're very, I don't know, enthralling. And it really makes you, like, one excerpt leads to the next. Yeah. And yeah, a lot of that was by design, again, written for people with, like, social media attention spans. So, like, most chapters are only a couple of pages, two or three pages. Yeah. The idea being, like, all right, next chapter, I can read that. Oh, well, next one's only two pages, I'll do one more. And then, you know, just like how you're on— you know, you're watching Reels or you're on social media, whatever, it's the same kind of thing, right? It's James Clear's

27:17Atomic Habits book, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So this particular excerpt has— and I'm actually, this is a genuine question for you — but it says no date, and presumably a user called Satisfied Customer. I don't know what that— Yeah, so— Or is that not meant to be revealed? Is that something I have to figure out later? That's fine. There's a couple. Most of the excerpts are dated, so you can put a sort of time and place to them, but there's a few in there where they're not dated, and I guess the idea with those was that they're meant to be kind of just, let's pick a random person who's, you know, on the internet right now and just look inside their head, kind of thing. Yes, okay. That's sort of what I was thinking, and I thought maybe they were a narrator of sorts, but, or to

28:05me it seems like you're just encapsulating the zeitgeist of that particular moment in time. Yeah, in a way. I guess I think that's fair to say. Yeah. So with that said, I found it very apt and very relevant, at least this particular excerpt, so I'm going to read through it. It is not very long, but it might take a minute or so. "Look, pal, I don't know when irony died or when it was set loose or when we pulled it over our eyes so snug that we forgot we left it there. What I do know is that it is possible to glitch yourself through the entire original Super Mario Bros. in less than five minutes, and I've seen it done. That game came out way before I was born, and I never played it myself, but I still listen to remixes of the soundtrack, and it reminds me of

28:53childhood memories that I don't think I ever had. Some egghead tried to explain to me as a subject of desire, but I tuned right out on that nonsense. It's like when they came out with Vanilla Coke and I only got to enjoy it for like a week before someone said something about connections to Colombian death squads. I mean, I kept drinking it, but I just don't know what that guy had to gain by pointing that out to me. One time in class I made some joke about 9/11, and the teacher heard it, and he sent me to the principal, and I had to listen to her go on for like 20 minutes about how there are some things that you just don't joke about, and how I was too young to really understand what that day meant. My mom has a box in the closet with all her old records in it. I think I might have recognized some of the covers from somewhere. I saw a bunch of memes and characters from Seinfeld, which apparently is supposed to be like the

29:39funniest show ever, so I downloaded the whole series, but I honestly had to stop watching after two episodes because the fake laugh track took me right out of it. Sending you a video recommendation: take a bite out of a raw onion every day until a new Shrek movie is released, day 14. The other day I was walking downtown and there was this group of, I guess, university students with a bunch of signs, and they were yelling something about how there are too many billionaires or something. Honest to God, it was so cringe, so I filmed it, but Snapchat wouldn't upload it for some reason, so I didn't get to show it to anyone, and I couldn't even really tell anyone, because who would really care without the video? Ashley was texting me last night and she was going on and on about how her parents are probably going to get divorced or whatever, and she

30:27wanted me to say something, and I swear I searched for the perfect GIF for like ten minutes, but I couldn't find it, and so I just said nothing. I've been ordering a bunch of stuff from Amazon and I get super excited when the packages show up, but lately I feel weird like two minutes after opening them. Like, sad, I guess. Plastic figurines of superheroes and video game characters, and they sell for ten bucks a pop, and I don't even really want them anymore, but I ordered three of them today because I felt like I deserved it. I got Marty McFly, even though I haven't actually seen that movie, and I got Master Chief, and I got Spider-Man. Have you heard of this website that has like pictures and videos of actual dead people that have died in a messed-up way? I'll send you a link, one sec. I haven't told anyone this, because it sounds super cringe, but sometimes when I'm alone at night and

31:14there's that brief silence in between videos, something comes over me and I just feel like crying. Sometimes I do. Maybe someone would listen if I told them, but who cares? I wouldn't mind feeling so sad if I knew how to meme it better. Honestly, I think that's probably why I get so sad in the first place." Dude, brilliant. Thanks, I appreciate that. I haven't revisited the book since I wrote it, so it was a little bit strange hearing that, you know, probably two or three years after I originally wrote it. But yeah, I mean, that was the idea. Like, let's look inside the kind of mentality and mind of, you know, the average connected young person. And, you know, a lot of that stuff is based on

32:01random snippets that I've seen or experienced or whatever, or that people have told me about. But yeah, just trying to capture that kind of sense of malaise, right? And how young people, as we said before, are struggling with questions of identity, and they're latching on to, like, pop culture or products or, you know, consumerism or whatever else, trying to find, like, something to fill that hole. But ultimately, as the narrator there finds out, that hole isn't going to be filled by any of those kind of things, right? To me, what is very interesting, that is imbued in that excerpt, is that they know something is wrong. Yeah. They identify even where it bubbles up, where that

32:49feeling bubbles up, but they don't have a real desire to fix it. Because to me, the feeling that I can relate to personally is like when you have set your alarm, you're waking up in the morning, you know, you hear the alarm, you know you need to get up, you know there are things to do to improve your life at that very moment, yet the weight of sleep just draws you back in, and you say, "Another 15 minutes won't hurt. I'll get up early tomorrow." Yeah. There's a sense of helplessness to that weight of civilization that this particular person is feeling at that time, and they know there's that

33:37sadness there, but that is just a function of the current world that they live in. Yeah, absolutely. And trying to capture a bit of that sadness or that alienation or whatever you want to call it — I mean, that permeates, I think, or at least I tried to make it permeate, through the entirety of the book. I mean, right, most of the characters experience something similar to some extent. At the end of the day, there's, like, something inside them that's missing. Mhm. And for some of them, whatever, they fill that hole with Funko Pops and video games. For some of them, they fill that with darker things and go in much darker directions. But fundamentally they're all kind of driven by that same need to fill that something that's missing from them. And do you think this existed, like, before the internet? I'm

34:26sure it must have. I'm sure it must have. I mean, yeah, of course it has. I mean, people— yeah. You can read literature from hundreds of years ago, and people still are asking the same types of questions. I mean, how they answer them, and the world that they're navigating them in, is obviously different, but I think these are fairly fundamental and fairly universal questions. Now, has the internet made it worse? Has it exacerbated? Has it shone a spotlight on it? Maybe, maybe not. Probably. But, right, at the end of the day, I think these are all very human kind of concerns. TBD on that one. Yeah. And then, like, later— and just actually, before I make my next point, I just want to, like, highlight two lines in here that really spoke to me. And actually, it shed light on a

35:16feeling that I had that I didn't know how to articulate, which is the Amazon line, which I think is just really— "I've been ordering a bunch of stuff from Amazon and I get super excited when the packages show up, but lately I feel weird like two minutes after opening them. Like, sad, I guess." I think a lot of people are going to relate to that. Sure. So what's your take on that? I mean, it's something different than the obvious consumer point of, like, retail therapy. Like, obviously, like, that is part of it, for sure, but it says something, at least for me. Like, we're using this to fill— like, we're expecting something more than what

36:06the thing is, and we're not truthful about it to ourselves. So if I buy something on Amazon, right, it's like, okay, I'm buying this, like, little accessory that I need for my camera or whatever. When I'm buying it, I'm not expecting some, like, crazy feeling. I'm not expecting to feel good out of it. I'm buying basically something with a particular function and utility for my work, right? But when it comes in and I actually get the thing, I'm, like, somewhat disappointed, because you want it to be more than what it actually is. You would— I would love for it to scratch an itch, but unfortunately that itch has a totally different cause, and it's not

36:55Amazon that's going to solve it. So all it does is just highlight this, I don't know, this darkness that is there. Yeah. But it's just weird that it comes from Amazon. Yeah, exactly. And because it is so ubiquitous and everything. So yeah, I think that's well said. And then the other line: "Sometimes when I'm alone at night, there's that brief silence in between videos, and something comes over me and I just feel like crying. Sometimes I do." I mean, yeah, that one is also— I mean, not maybe to the same degree for me, but stillness, quiet, silence, that's one of the scariest things today for a lot of people. Yeah, yeah. That's

37:43that. So yeah, when they catch that glimpse of themselves in the screen between episodes on Netflix or whatever, right, and they just see themselves for just a couple seconds — and maybe not even a couple seconds anymore, 'cause Netflix has, like, pretty much got it to load instantly, but you know, there used to be a couple seconds while they're loading the next episode, and you'd see yourself in the reflection or whatever. And you have a small, like, acute moment of, like, self-awareness, or, like, what am I doing right now? Am I here? Like, whatever. But a lot of people struggle to even sit with a few seconds of that. Yeah. Let alone, you know, minutes or longer at a time. And I struggled with it myself. I mean, I grew up very much in that world, so my brain is also partially fried. But, you know, when I got into doing

38:32meditation stuff a few years ago — okay — the first times I tried it, like, you know, sit there quietly and just close your eyes and be with your thoughts, like, I couldn't last more than a couple minutes, right? 'Cause I'd start getting restless, start getting edgy. And, like, you know, the longer you do it, the easier it becomes, but you do kind of have to practice at it, because, like, our society and our culture is just bombarding us all the time with senses and sensations and images and content, where, like, to be able to just sit with your thoughts in silence is something that sounds a lot harder than it actually is to do for a lot of people, I think. Yeah. And it's likely significantly harder to do today than it was in the past. I think, like, just in terms of, let's say, addiction, where you— whatever addiction it

39:21might be. I mean, there's this pursuit of pleasure, but to the degree that you're pursuing the pleasure, you're pursuing the high or whatever feeling that you're looking for, to the same degree you're going to fall and feel the crash in the aftermath of that, on the comedown. And I think distraction has those same attributes and characteristics of addiction, where to the degree that you distract yourself, you will then feel the existential dread, right, that comes after. And I feel like if we distracted ourselves less, then there would be more of an internal unification of who you are in your place and what this world is. But, yeah, I mean, I feel like the more I distract

40:09myself— and then when you do see, like you said beautifully, the reflection in the mirror and when watching Netflix, I mean, it becomes scary, right? But I want to believe that people that used to live in the outdoors and not spend time on distractions would not have that same shock. Yeah, or just not— yeah, not have the same aversion to, like, stillness and silence and not being so stimulated. And it is similar to addiction. Not, you know, obviously the highs and the lows are not going to be as pronounced, but there is that sort of constant stimulus, like this constant numbness or whatever you want to call it, of, like, I'm here, I'm content, I don't need to think too hard or worry about anything else, as long as, you know, as long as the next video is

40:55loading, or whatever it is. And yeah, it's good, you know, in terms of content and entertainment, it's whatever, it's a golden age. There's more of it than we could ever consume in a lifetime, whatever, that's great. But the dark side of that is, well, yeah, what has that done to people? You know, I'm just talking in terms of, like, attention spans or whatever, but in terms of, like, to actually sit without that sort of constant bombardment, right? And so one manifestation of that is joining other folks in finding meaning, and sometimes those folks can be extremist cults. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, no, for sure. And obviously the book, that's kind of the main— I want to get there, because so far, though, I mean,

41:42everyone will know, because there'll be an intro before this, but you are a professor of criminology, and with this focus on extremism. But maybe you can sort of say more on what you do in your day job. Yeah, that's pretty close to it. So my research specialization is on terrorism and extremism, but specifically the kind of radicalization process, and asking questions as to, like, well, what causes an otherwise, you know, normal person to join one of these extremist movements or a terrorist group or whatever? And I'm not talking about any specific ideology or movement. It can be anything, you know, whatever. But what gets them to that point in the first place? So that's kind of been the question that I've been, through my research, trying to add to, right? I don't want to say answer,

42:30because I don't know if there's ever going to be, like, a satisfying, complete answer to that question, but trying to add to it and provide my own takes and interpretation on that. And that's, you know, part of the book. So yeah, like, for a lot of people that are struggling with that silence, or that sadness, or that hole or whatever, like, they turn to people on the internet, and they say, "Hey, little guy—" it usually is young men, but they'll say, "Hey, young man, I know that you're feeling sad. I know that you feel like there's something missing in your life. Guess what? I have an answer for you. I have a reason as to why you feel this way." And the reason just happens to be, you know, joining this, whatever, political extremist movement or whatever. But, so yeah, there's a lot of people

43:18that are taking advantage of that young generation of people that feel that sense of malaise, and saying, like, these are the perfect recruits. We say, "Hey, we recognize your problems. We recognize these feelings that you have. We know that they're real and that they're valid. But guess what? We're also providing an answer, and providing a collection of people or organizations or whatever that we can now point our fingers at and say these are the people that are responsible for the reason that your life sucks, or for the reason that you feel sad all the time, or for the whatever. So join our movement and help fight the enemy," right? Right. And a lot of them are smart about doing that. Like, they frame their media, their messaging, their propaganda, they frame it in a way that speaks to the very legitimate feelings that a lot of young

44:05people have. Yeah, there's— and we'll get to how that sort of pans out in your book in a second. I have a lot to say about that too, because, I mean, I do exist on Twitter, and I do see everything that's happening, and I have blocked people from time to time, 'cause sometimes the— You got to do it for your own well-being. Yeah. Like, sometimes the things that are said are just so egregious. I'm actually very happy to entertain ideas that are in opposition to what I believe. For sure. I actually prefer to look at that, to just understand and empathize a little bit more with other experiences. But there's just some things that are so horrific to say, and so just ignorant and unnecessary, that, you know, you have to—

44:54you have to block them from time to time. But to me, you know, when you're talking about the cause of this, something that comes to mind is the cause can obviously manifest in a variety of ways. And we see terrorism happening and extremism happening at a large scale, at a global scale, and a lot of times it starts in innocuous ways, ways that are not necessarily— but, you know, they act as gateways to that next level, if you decide to heed that call or whatever. But in my mind, I find that a lot of pe— like, there are a lot of, quote unquote,

45:41terrorists — and I'm going to use it in the non-traditional term and non-traditional meaning — but there are a lot of terrorists that walk amongst us, that are not the terrorists that you see on TV, that you see in the media, but they terrorize people in their own lives. Mhm. They have, like, the wake of their interactions just leaves people, right, in a miserable state. And a lot of times it's the same cause. It's the same cause, it's the same troubled upbringing or misinterpretation of their unconscious nature and so on and so forth that causes them to act. And a lot of times it's also a

46:29missing integration of their shadow, of their repressed side, or faulty integration. And then it can just happen that someone will all of a sudden cause havoc in their family. They'll wreak havoc in their workplace. They will be— and so we see this with, like, I don't know, like, it could be a businessperson, it could be a billionaire. Everybody points the finger at, like, Elon Musk, for example, and they will equate him with so many negative adjectives, because they feel that, you know, he is acting in a certain way that is chaotic and has a negative implication for a lot of people. So the actual act itself is almost like rolling a

47:18dice. You know, it could manifest in so many variety of ways, but the source of it— like, I wonder, and I'm asking you as a question, like, is there— can you distinguish a difference in source for someone that wreaks havoc locally, on a local scale, in their own life, or wreaks havoc in an industry, or wreaks havoc in a sport — like, I don't know, you look at Conor McGregor, just like, you know — and then someone that just has it channeled into a cult or a group or whatever? Like, is there a distinction there? If there is, I wouldn't know how to define it. I think you're right in that a lot of these individuals, their problems stem from, I think, a very similar place.

48:06Now, how they cope with that, or how they sort of respond to that or whatever, that's going to vary very highly individual to individual, based on, you know, whatever. So for somebody, maybe that means those feelings of anger or depression or self-hatred or confusion or frustration, or whatever they are, maybe that means, you know, like you say, they lash out to their immediate family or whatever. For somebody else, maybe they have the same feelings, but they're spending a lot of time on the internet, so, you know, they're lashing out at XYZ social group, because that provides an outlet for their anger. It provides something where they can sort of channel all that negativity towards. So, I mean, yeah, fundamentally I think a lot of that stems from the same place, the types of people that would do those

48:52kind of things. I think that's right on. Right. And so, okay, well, let's go into the book now. And I want to know a little bit more about Peter Riley, or, as he's known in the book by moniker, Petrol, which I thought is quite funny, because petrol is this, visually, inflammatory, flammable, whatever, but you also have the word "troll" in "Petrol," right? So nicely done. Thank you. Tell me more about him and how you constructed him, and maybe who inspired him. He's kind of an amalgam of a lot of people, including myself — not the bad parts, obviously. But I did

49:41have a similar— one of his kind of main genesis points for him embracing this character of Petrol was, like, you know, he was terrified of living a sort of normal nine-to-five life. That was his fear. He felt that he was destined for more, that he deserved more. And I'm not saying I believe that now, but I know I was 19 years old once, and I might have had similar feelings about, like, ugh, I don't want to go to school and then finish school and work some nine-to-five job for the rest of my life, and just, you know, I don't want to have that kind of existence. That was very scary to me. And I realize, saying that now, that's a little bit naive, but at the time it was very real. So, you know, some of his sort of catalyst comes from that. And

50:30then the character that he eventually becomes, and the things that he says, I mean, it's an amalgam of a lot of online personalities that I spent probably too much time sort of watching and studying and researching. And then the whole— I would watch a lot of those people and always be like, you know, when they're yelling about this thing or they're going off about this thing, I would always, like, how much do they really mean it? Are they true believers, or are they just grifters? Are they just saying this stuff because this is what the audience wants, and this is what they know is going to get clicks and engagement? Or are they actual true believers that really believe this kind of stuff, that think that they're doing the mission that they need to do? And I was always like, well, wouldn't it be funny if one of these guys was just totally neutral on the

51:20points, or on the discussions, but was doing this just as a grift, was doing this just as a way to farm engagement, and using that as a kind of shortcut to fame and infamy and money and these kinds of other things? So yeah, that's kind of what the main character was built around, that idea. And then, as I say, his actual vocabulary and ideas, kind of just a mishmash of a lot of the kind of worst people on the internet at the time, right? And so you said part of it is somewhat based on— is it the acting part? Did you ever want to do acting, or is that totally the character? I did take acting classes in university. I had no delusions about me ever being a professional actor. I was

52:07not very good at it. I enjoyed taking the classes. It was fun, it was a nice creative outlet, I enjoyed that. I will say that there's a minor character in the book, which is his drama teacher, and he is pretty much a one-to-one copy of my drama teacher that I had — Wesley, if you're watching. So yeah, his style and his everything was basically lifted straight from that. But no, I never wanted to be an actor myself, but I did always have kind of creative pursuits. There's other things I wanted to do. I mean, for a time I wanted to be a musician, and for a time I wanted to be a filmmaker. Now I'm trying to be a writer. I always had creative pursuits that have guided me ever since I was, like, 14, 15 years old. So I guess

52:57in that we are kindred, so I guess I understand where he's coming from, even if his methods of getting there would not have been my own. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, yeah, I mean, have you come to a conclusion about— I mean, certainly there is a conclusion in the book, I haven't got there yet, but in your regular life, have you determined, like, whether or not a lot of these folks are indeed grifters, or they, you know, just believe what they're saying? On a case-by-case basis, I could give you my personal sort of, right, diagnosis. I think some of them are true believers, and I think some of them are maybe

53:46somewhat convinced of what they're saying but are mostly kind of just playing the game, right? So I think there's a bit of a mix. Yeah, I think, like, I'll give two examples — I'll give maybe, like, three examples. I think, like, the true troll nature, to me, is very reminiscent of, for those of you who remember, @Nero on Twitter, Milo Yiannopoulos, right? Like, yeah, pure troll. Yep. And one of the people that I was watching when I was writing that. So, which is interesting, 'cause for him I actually don't really know. At the time— now I don't really know what's gone on, but at the time I didn't really know, is this a grift? Is this— But I think being articulate, it goes a long way. The British accent. And yeah, people will give you a lot more leverage if you— yeah.

54:34And definitely, like, in terms of, you know, like, his ability to, like, communicate — obviously, like, you got to be a good communicator to be in that business — and he was very much a provocateur, and that was, like, his whole thing. He knew that he was a provocateur. He knew exactly what to say to get people angry and to rile people up. Which is why, like, when you call yourself a provocateur, it does feel like you're just playing the heel. Yeah. And yeah, he was definitely playing that role of, like, yeah, the wrestling villain of, like, "I am the beacon of all your hate, and bring it to me, I love it." And they love— you know, his people loved him for it, because look how angry he makes the other guys. So yeah, I think he was definitely playing that up. How much did he believe in any of that kind of stuff? Like, yeah, that's probably just behind closed doors. There are some people— I'll just name a couple more names, 'cause they're pop culture

55:21figures at this point. So, like, Alex Jones. A lot of Alex in the book. I think Alex believes it. Alex is a unique case, because I think he is a legitimately very talented broadcaster. Yeah. I think he's very good at what he does. Yeah. There's a reason he was able to build up that media empire, which I think he's now subsequently lost because of his legal troubles. But, right, he's a very talented broadcaster. Also probably, you know, not— whatever the politically correct way of saying "not right in the head" is. I think there's, you know— So yeah, I think he probably, if we had to place him, I think he'd be a lot closer to the true believer side of the spectrum as well,

56:09but also one that knows how to do content in a very engaging way. His whole persona of, like, the yelling and the screaming and the impassioned rants and all that kind of stuff, I mean, he knows what he's doing, and he's pretty good at it. Yeah. Well, to me, like, those type of characters, like, there is in your book here a— so there's a forum for those that— and by the way, everyone should pick this book up. I don't know what the best place to buy it is, but you can go on Logan's website, I'll have a link there, and I'm sure he'll direct you. But I want to find that list. You know that list that you made of, like, "These are the 11 things"? Yeah, it's probably pretty close to the beginning. And just, there's a reason why I want to

57:01bring it up, because it's a note that I made. This is— there's, guys, there's so many cool little tidbits in this novel. Where is it? Really? Is it like right at the— no, it can't be. I'm already at the start. Got to be first 25 pages. I think we'll fast-forward in the cut. Oh, here it is. Okay, yeah. So there's this sort of fake, like, whatever, forum, subreddit, 4chan type— It's 4chan, basically.

57:49And for those of you who don't know, 4chan is, like, the more unhinged Reddit, right, basically. And there's this 11 steps, or 10 steps — I think 10 steps. "These 10 guidelines are designed to ensure that you stop living a useless existence in exchange for a life of purpose, clarity and direction." Now, if you read all of these 10 steps, like, I would say half of it actually, like, is good advice. Yes. And see, that's the trick. And it was a trick, because, like, on the one hand, you know, I got to depict bad people, like white supremacists, neo-Nazis. Like, these are bad guys. But I also didn't want to just depict them as completely two-dimensional caricatures,

58:39right? I wanted to be like, look, there's a reason why people get into this stuff. Nobody's just born— you know, decides one day to become, like, a neo-Nazi. You have to get there somehow. And for a lot of people it starts with, like, this journey of, again, asking these questions, self-discovery, self-help. And, you know, a lot of people get into it that way, through that kind of self-help route. It's like, listen, you want to better yourself, you got to start hitting the gym, you got to start doing these things, you got to start, you know— and then eventually you got to start, you know, protecting your race and all that kind of stuff. But that comes later. It starts with a lot of this, as you say, like, legitimately pretty good self-help advice. Yeah. It's take accountability, like, whatever. Like, yeah. And then, like, so— and you're very clever in how you sort of manufacture this, because, like, the first of the guidelines is: "Never accept the

59:27philosophies of fatalism, defeatism or nihilism. The survival of our people is reliant upon your ability to not give up, even against seemingly impossible odds. Your ancestors survived and persevered so that you could be here today. You owe it to the future generations to do the same." I mean, this could be a presidential speech, right? There's nothing wrong with that. The issue is once you start getting into what is the actual people that we're trying to survive, and who the actual enemy is. And then the next one, it goes into, like, "Stop watching porn," right? And, okay, like, maybe that's actually not bad advice, but then it gets into, like, why you should stop. So you slowly, like, escalate these things, and I think it's very— I mean, it definitely mirrors what

1:00:17exists out there in the world. Yeah. And, like I said, there's a reason why a lot of these people, you know, they're always quoting, like, Aristotle or Marcus Aurelius, whoever, right? Because, like, it's just— you know, how they do it is, you know, they take it into some weird directions, but fundamentally, like, they're looking for how do we improve ourselves, how do we improve our condition. Yeah. And that's why a lot of times you listen to one of these people talk, and, you know, you're like, "Oh, okay, like, well, this is fair," but then they cross these lines and you're like, "Why do you need to go there?" And I think the why you need to go there is if they don't go there— and this is the argument for the, like, whatever popularity quotient that they're trying to solve for, is they have to go there, otherwise they're not going to get the

1:01:04views, otherwise they're not going to get the people. They have to create a separation. You can't just say that first line. You can't just quote Marcus Aurelius. There's hundreds of thousands of people quoting Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is now, in the context of what it's— it's like a power— it's like a battery that's powering this idea. And if your batteries are all legitimate, people might think you're legitimate. Yeah. So it's a clever trick that they pull. And the ones that are better at doing it, like, they know. They know, like, you know, how mask-off can we be if we're trying to, like, you know, entice, like, some 16-year-old kid who's, like, having these questions? You don't want to come full bore with, like, you know, the goose-stepping and whatever. You kind of got to ease him into that. It starts with, like, "Hey, here's some things

1:01:51you can do to start taking accountability for your actions, or for your life," whatever. Yeah. And then from that— Yeah. And someone who's really good at that is Andrew Tate, which is the last name that I'm probably going to drop. But he probably came about right towards the end of your writing. Yeah, so there's not much Tate in the book, because, yeah, by the time I was done writing it, you know, that's right around the time he started to, like, really explode. But, you know, people have asked me, like, "Is this guy based on Tate?" So retroactively, like, you know, we could see where these things were going, I guess. Well, I think you nailed the archetype. Yeah, right. Right, or the amalgam of archetypes, if you will. And so Tate can fit in. And I think Tate is one of those guys that is doing it full grift. I

1:02:39think he knows. I think he knows. I think he knows too, I agree. Yeah. But, yeah, but very much playing into that, like, you know, self-made entrepreneurial success story, and, like, you know, again, like, undergirding that, a lot of that stuff is probably a lot of, like, legitimately good stuff about what people can do. But then, you know, tacking on all the misogyny and other stuff. Well, the sad part that I see as a result of all of this is the— I don't know the best way to call it, but let's call it the decimation of decorum, because there is no decorum anymore. Even if you take the sort of benign manifestations of the same issue, which you could augment onto YouTubers. Okay, there's an entire

1:03:29existence of YouTubers. The best guy that highlights all of the grifts with YouTubers is Coffeezilla. I don't know if you've seen any Coffeezilla. So Coffeezilla is great, because he doesn't really go after the very nefarious folks. He goes after the guys that maybe lean more on the reckless side than the full criminal, diabolical side. But even still, he's saying, well, even if you're reckless or not, it's still not right to do what you're doing. And a lot of times it's, like, a crypto scam, and it'd be, like, a Jake Paul or a Logan Paul, and they just don't care at all. I mean, it's almost psychopathic or sociopathic, or whatever, whichever one that lacks the most empathy is, because they don't care. It's like these guys are just numbers. I'm milking them for— and meaning

1:04:17these guys — meaning the audience that they have — I'm milking them for their money. I don't care. That's their fault. They need to do their due diligence, and this is the game that we're playing. And those probably count as the vast majority of— I would say, like, the bulk of the grifting is not happening by the Bernie Madoffs, right? Yeah, no, you're right. It's YouTube bros and that sort of thing. It's people sort of in the middle. It's like a half a grift. It's not a full grift. But I think there's no decorum now. There's no, like— there's no respect, there's no care of reputation. It's like, whatever, the world moves so fast, you'll forget that I scammed you next week. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it does. The news cycles have been getting progressively shorter and

1:05:03shorter and shorter, where it's like, right, you know, I don't know— because I hate myself, I watched the Mike Tyson–Paul fight. It was a big deal, and then, like, you know, a couple days later, it's just like everybody kind of moves on to the next thing and forgets it. So yeah, you're right. Like, they can do these kind of things, and then, you know, it used to be that a scandal or whatever it is, bad PR, bad whatever, it would follow you for a lot longer, but now it seems to wash away much quicker as the news cycles have been perpetually speeding up. And we're going to get into how that affects the state of literature today. But before we do that, I want to give you a chance to, like, not pitch your book per se, but to answer the question, like, why should

1:05:52people read this book? Like, why is it important, and who is the book written for? I used to joke — and I don't know if it's a joke anymore — but I used to say that the book was written for people that haven't read a book in a long time, you know? It's meant to be very punchy. It's meant to be very sort of gripping and engaging, and, as we said before, it's meant to kind of emulate, like, a social media scroll or a feed or whatever. So I wrote it as someone who grew up on social media, with, all right, who's my target audience for this? Well, one, it's people that have also grown up in similar conditions. I mean, my parents, bless them, they tried to read it, and a lot of it was lost on them, because, like, you know, this is not their world. So I understand that the target audience here is probably people that are going

1:06:39to have some familiarity with the internet as, like, a cultural touchstone. But then also, yeah, for, like, you know, if you haven't read a book in a while and you worry that reading is hard because you don't have an attention span anymore, you know, this might be a good way to ease yourself back into that world. And I've had a couple people, friends, that have been like, "Yeah, I don't really read anymore, but I was able to read this fairly easily," just because of how it's kind of structured and written. So, I mean, technically that's kind of who the book is for. But then, on a deeper level, I think it's a book for anybody that has asked these kind of questions about— not just, like, what role does the internet play in life, because that's a fairly tired question by this point that we can't really answer. But, you know, whether you yourself have felt

1:07:28these things, or whether, you know, you've known somebody that has gone down these rabbit holes or whatever. Like, if you've ever had these questions about alienation or identity or where you fit in, or whether you think that you're alone because everybody on the screen seems to be living a life that's different from you, like, there's probably going to be something that resonates with you, I would hope, in this book. Like you mentioned, like, the lines about the Amazon packages, hopefully there's little snippets in there that you're reading, like, "Oh, like, I felt that, and I didn't know that other people also feel that way or have felt that way." Yeah. So, I mean, if you grew up as, like, a millennial, or somebody who's just on the internet a lot, there's probably something in there that I hope will resonate with you and will speak to some feelings that you've had. So that's my broader pitch. Sure. And

1:08:16and the story itself, I mean, like the actual punch of, you know, the troll, Petrol, like, what about— like, why is it important for people to read about him? Is it to be able to identify it in their— I think partially. I think that's partially it, especially today, when there is so much, you know— not just, like, is this person grifting me or not, but even larger than that, just, like, so much content, and amongst that content, so much misinformation and disinformation and whatever. Like, it's really— I can only imagine how hard it would be for, like, a young person that's trying to make sense of, like, the news today when they're on social media and they're getting bombarded from different people with different agendas that are spinning

1:09:05things in different ways. Like, what am I supposed to believe here? So part of that is, like, reading the book, it's just like, can I potentially be more, like, media literate? Can I be more aware of, like, what I'm consuming, and what messages I'm supposed to be getting from the stuff that I'm consuming? Because, you know, a lot of people don't necessarily ask those kind of questions. And then just, yeah, to ask, or to broach, a larger topic of, like, questioning your own kind of internet usage. And, like, you know, some people have read it and said— you know, this is not— I don't know if they did it or not, but some people have said, like, "Oh, this has kind of caused me to maybe, like, step away from my phone maybe a bit longer per day than I normally would." And I'm not saying that— I didn't write it

1:09:53with the point of, like, we should give up social media or stop using our phones or whatever, but just to have that question or that conversation with yourself about, like, what are my own habits? Like, could they be better? Could they be more aware? Could they be, you know, more conducive to living in more sane times? And in the book there is, I mean, like, a sort of constant thread of a confession. Mm. The confession of Peter Riley. And I found that to be very instructive, because we look— and again, I haven't finished the book, but I'm sort of, like, working off where I think it's going — but we look at these grifters, we look at these trolls, as other and not as self, right? That cannot

1:10:43possibly be me. But it is useful, even if it's just an exercise, to think of all the ways that you should confess, that you should look in the mirror and have that honest conversation about the implications of your actions. Right out of the gate, someone gets shot outside one of his events, one of his speaking gigs. An innocent person gets shot. And, you know, how many innocent people were metaphorically shot in your— you know, because of your actions, because of actions that you did or did not take? I mean, there's a funny thing. So I showed this

1:11:31to you earlier, but I found this gag, I found this little gag at London Drugs, and it's basically a mini confession booth. It even has the curtains and everything, and the seats. And the cool thing is, if you hold down this button — I'm going to put it up to the mic — but if you hold down this button: "Tell me your sins." Oh, so it says here, "Tell me your sins." So, okay, now you have to tell your sins. So, you know, whatever I have. "You are forgiven." Boom. It's very cute, honestly. I'm going to buy it for a couple people as just, like, gag gifts. But the funny thing is, it came with a little booklet — and I'm going somewhere with this — but it came with a little

1:12:19booklet that said, "Let's confess." And you would think it's, like, a very religious thing, and, you know, obviously that's where it's from, but there's, like, this idea of— like, there's something about being honest, as a practice, that is incredible for self-growth and understanding yourself. And I just sort of found it a coincidence that confession is part of this book. But, I mean, it's really important for us to not just assume that the bad things that occur are all a result of environment and conditions and things outside of our control. We definitely have the capacity, and we definitely have, on an individual scale, caused chaos, and, you know, even at just a

1:13:09small level, just throughout our lives. So if we can even just look in, as a result of this, and say, okay, we're not as extreme as Petrol, but maybe on some scale, you know, we need to be honest. And having that confession is almost like a self-absolution, allowing you to move on and saying it's okay. Yeah, and I think that's great. And it's something that— I preface this by saying that, like, the art of, like, the public confession and the public apology has become, like, its own thing in the last few years, I think. So for a lot of people, it's like, you know, they get caught doing something bad or stupid or whatever, and they have to issue, like, the public apology, and there's all this sort of characteristics that go into that. And I think, you know, the truer confession, the one

1:13:57you're talking about, is maybe the one that nobody sees. It's the one that you're writing for yourself. Mm. It's the one that, you know, he's writing in the book. He's not intending to show it to anybody, necessarily. But that self-confession that you're not writing for the eyes of other people, or to fulfill certain expectations or whatever, is going to be a lot more genuine, obviously, because, like, you're able to say how you truly feel without the worry of how other people are going to interpret it. So, again, it's just one of those things that has maybe become harder to do, 'cause we're so used to, like, putting so much of ourselves out there that for people to step back and say, like, "I'm just going to be with myself for a minute, and my thoughts and my confessions or whatever, totally detached from everybody else," is not something that a lot of people even see the purpose in doing.

1:14:45It's like, if it's not on the internet, it doesn't exist, right? So there's that kind of underlying thread to that idea of the confession that's in there as well, I think. And was that, like, intentional, or just, like, a— I mean, a useful byproduct of the book, for people to have that self-reflection? Was it intentional for people to do that, or it's just, you can take it there if you want? I think it's more of a byproduct. I don't think it's something that I was thinking too much about as I wrote it. It did become apparent later, right, as we get toward the end of his confession. Like, you know, what is this actually challenging the reader to do? I think it's in the last one, where— I won't spoil it, but that's where he actually issues what, in my mind, is a fairly direct challenge to, like, the reader, to be like, "Hey, like, what was the point of all this, and how does this affect you?" or whatever. That came later, though. Right. And

1:15:34yeah, because, I mean, I think people bear some responsibility for sharing the content. Yeah. And we've seen, like, I mean, the last year we've had wars, we've had an election, we've had, like, all sorts of craziness that has gone on. And, like, the social media feed has become— I mean, a lot of people will share on their personal feed or stories different, very polarizing political statements that are difficult sometimes to stay friends with. Like, a lot of people that I know have blocked each other and whatnot. But, like, we have to take respon— like, what happens when you realize after a year that you actually don't believe in that? Like, maybe you come to a realization, and then you've just cut ties with people for no reason. Like,

1:16:25I feel like it does require— yeah, it does require work, like, and responsibility. Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. It's funny to mention that, because we've all had that. You know, anybody around our age has all had that moment where it's like, oh, here's something that popped up that I wrote on social media 10 years ago, and you go, "Oh, I can't believe I wrote that," or, "I can't believe I said that, or did this, or felt that," or whatever. Like, but yeah, growth, accountability, it's all good, all the good stuff. Yeah. So yeah, let's transition back to the literary world. And, you know, we mentioned, I guess in our email communication, correspondence, about the state of literature today. What do you have to say about it? And I have my opinions.

1:17:14I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are. Sure. I would say that when it comes to, like, fiction — going to be careful how I word this — but by and large, there's very little, I guess, contemporary fiction, I mean, like, new stuff, that excites me that much. There's obviously exceptions. I don't want to paint with a giant brush there. But I find myself drawn more toward, like, the classics and the stuff that came before. And I was thinking as to, like, why that's the case. Why is there, like, you know, modern fiction that doesn't seem to grip me, or seem to hold my interest? And I think a lot of it has to do with, like, the experiences that people have. I was thinking about this on the drive over. Like, someone like Hemingway, who, you know,

1:18:03drove an ambulance in the World War, right? Someone like Herman Melville, who actually worked on a whaling ship before he wrote Moby-Dick. Someone like Tolkien, right? The Lord of the Rings. I mean, yes, it's based on his love of language and mythology and history, and probably his Catholic faith, and all that kind of other stuff, but it's also heavily based on his experience, like, in the trenches of World War I. And it's these kind of experiences that informed, I think, a lot of their work. And I'm not lamenting the fact that there's not more wars that modern writers are fighting in, like, obviously. But for a lot of them, the result is like, okay, I haven't worked on a whaling ship, I haven't fought in the trenches, I haven't done these kind of things. I've lived a fairly comfortable life. You know, if they've

1:18:51grown up here in the West, they, you know, comparatively, they've lived a pretty comfortable life, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's probably something that most people want. But the result of that is, well, what experiences can we really write about? Well, I can write about myself as, like, a young millennial man living in the city or whatever. But for me, it's like, what does that say about the larger questions? What does that say about questions of life and death? What does that say about, like, God, in, like, the capital-G and the small-g sense of the word? Like, these big issues that you see in a lot of, like, the classic fiction, I think, are largely absent from a lot of contemporary fiction. And for a lot of people, they're fine with that, whatever, but for me,

1:19:39that's kind of one of the reasons why I find myself less drawn to it. So the book I'm working on now — like, I don't need to get into it, but I am trying to, like, bring it back to a time of, like, let's ask these big universal questions about life and death and all these kind of other things. And I'm not so arrogant as to think that I'm going to do it better than anybody else, whatever, but I am trying to do it. It's an attempt at a modern take on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a desire, for sure, to— for me, personally, for me, like, I love the big questions. I think the other questions are derivative, and so it's useful to go in. And, like, there's this idea that— my qualm with, like, religion, for example, not to take it

1:20:26to a totally different direction, but I won't take it too far. My qualm with religion is that these are books that have decided what the future is. Mm. And I really don't like that, because I like the idea of exploration, of discovery. I like the fact that when we look up into the stars, there are basically an unlimited number of places to explore, ideas and things that we don't know. Physics, even going into the micro level, where you're just going smaller and smaller and smaller, that is also to some degree infinite. Like, we don't really know what the makeup of all this stuff is. To suggest that we now have, like, multiple blueprints on how everything works— Yeah, so the holy books kind of spoil the ending for— Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I

1:21:13actually am for them as conduits of truth, but not as total, perfect truth. Yeah. But if you ask, like, where those books come from in the first place, I mean, it's people asking the big questions. That's where they come from. That's, like, some of the first questions that people ask, and those are universal questions. Yeah. That are worth revisiting. And, like, that's why, like, you know, I'm not particularly religious, but I often turn to, like, the holy books and just read through them, because I think it's like there's good stuff in there. There's big questions that, you know, we have maybe kind of gotten away from a little bit in a lot of contemporary fiction. Yeah. If it's perennial, it's perennial for a reason. Yeah. Like, it's not by accident, right? Right. As much criticism as it gets, but

1:22:01it gets criticism to the degree of the fact that it's still relevant today. So it's important to learn that. And so, yeah, in terms of thematic issues, that makes sense. It's good to have the variety, I would say, today. And, you know, it's up to the artists and the writers of today to figure out, you know, what are we going to write about. So good on you for moving in that direction. And yeah, I hope, in my own kind of way— I think a lot of it also— I mean, I noticed this a lot with more younger writers, because I belong to a few groups, and sometimes people, you know, I'll read their stuff or whatever. And for a lot of the younger writers, yes, it's a lack of life experience, whatever. But, you know, I'm not saying that's the only thing that stops

1:22:48people from writing a great book, but— and it ties back to what we were saying earlier about the internet. For a lot of them, like, they say, "All right, I'm 17, I'm 18, I want to tell the story, I want to be a writer." They're not basing it on experience, or based on their interpretation of their, or their investigation of, these bigger questions. But it's like, all right, what do I know about stories? Well, it's going to be based on the content I've consumed. We also know that a lot of young people, young men in particular, don't read a lot of fiction, or read a lot less than they used to. Yeah. So they say, how do I frame a story? Well, they're getting it from, whatever, video games or anime or whatever else. I'm not saying that those aren't good mediums that can't tell good stories, but it is very different. So their sense of how they tell a story is

1:23:35kind of warped by the content that they consume. So they're not reading, like, you know, enough fiction, in my opinion, enough literature. And then they're kind of combining that with, like, all right, what boxes am I going to check? What I mean by that is, like, you know TV Tropes, the website? You know it? I don't know the website. Oh, okay. Well, you'll visit it later and you'll waste an hour there, because it's pretty fascinating. TV Tropes, like, tvtropes.com. And I myself have, like, lost afternoons on it, because it's really fascinating. But they catalog and, like, archive, like, pretty much every— any decently popular piece of media you can think of, books, music, video games, whatever, and they break everything down into, like, a list of tropes, and each trope has, like, an entry. So, and there's, like, thousands of them.

1:24:25And that's great. It's, you know, you can archive these kind of things. But for a lot of young writers, they get into their head, like, okay, what tropes is my story going to have? And they even market them that way, where it's like, you know, "These are the tropes that this book contains." And so I'm not saying you can't tell a good story, but at the end of the day, it's kind of like a paint by numbers, right? Like, you're creating this picture, but it doesn't really have your signature on it. You can't really go outside the lines of the kind of parameters that you're being boxed into. So yeah, that's always my kind of main advice to younger writers, is, one, read a lot more than you're reading now, for sure, and just, like, think about your voice and what story you can tell. And that doesn't mean you have to tell it in a unique way, because there's only so many stories at the end of the day,

1:25:12like, there's, you know— Yeah. But think about how you can put your kind of signature on it, right? And you can't get that out of the blue. You get that by reading a lot and writing a lot. Yeah. It's the only way it comes. Yeah. And I think there's something to be learned from and taken from the music industry, where you have remixes, where you take, okay, there's this idea and that idea, they should not go together, and then you put them together, now you have something fresh, something interesting. There's this new band, and they're, like, Middle Eastern, Israeli style from, like, the '60s, '70s, and they feature— they have an entire album with a Japanese singer. So imagine Middle Eastern-sounding music with Japanese singing, and you'd never put

1:26:01those two together, yet it's impressive, it's beautiful, it's so good. I love when an author does that. I really, really enjoy when an author does that. One author that does it, or that did it for me in one particular case — a lot of them do, but in one particular case — is the second book of The Three-Body Problem trilogy. I don't know if you've gotten to that sci-fi yet, but it's written by Liu Cixin. He's a Chinese sci-fi writer. Very cool. Even the fact that we now have Chinese sci-fi translated into English is incredible, because we've just heard basically, like, American sci-fi. Yeah, yeah. Forever. The entire 20th century, for sure. Yeah. So just that is already great. And then what he does in his second book is it starts off as, like, a romance novel. And the first book was not that at all. I mean, the first book

1:26:49barely had any character depth. It was fully plot-driven. By the time you get to the second book, it focuses on one character. That character is a writer. He's writing his ideal partner. He's writing his ideal woman that he wants in his life, and he has this relationship with the character that he's writing, to the point where he imagines her. And I'm not going to spoil the book, but it becomes an existential science fiction thriller right after that. Those two should not be in the same book. Yeah, that's good fusion. I like that. Right. So yeah, fusion is a really good way to put it. And I think, like, the more we can create fusion, the more original

1:27:37ideas there are. And maybe it's taking something that the new writers want— take your trope, whatever, and then connect it to something that is, like you said, that maybe the classics were hitting on more, and do something there. That could be interesting. But of course, it's all personal preference at the end of the day. My qualms with the current state of literature is that not enough people are reading it. That too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely a problem. Yeah. And I think, like, it doesn't really matter what people are reading. I mean, I've called in the past fiction to be a tonic for empathy. And the more you're in the non-fiction world, I think the more you're in a critical world. You're in a world where it's great for self-growth, because you need that criticism, that self-criticism, for self-growth, and just learn

1:28:27things about your work and your job and whatever. But it's always— non-fiction is teaching you things that you don't know. Typically it's trying to close the gap between where you are and where you need to be. But it lives most of the time in the knowledge realm. You have to then take it into the empathy, emotional realm yourself. Even if it's a book about emotion, it's still, like, academic. Still intellectual, exactly. And then you take it and you imbue it into your emotional life. But with fiction specifically, it lives in the emotions. And I think that's the part that, you know, if we're in an era where empathy is lacking, because of the constant, "Oh, look at your profile. Look what you— why would you post that? Why would you do that? Why

1:29:14do you have this thing?" then fiction perhaps is the antidote for that. Yeah, I would agree. And we mentioned, you know, before, you mentioned, like, the breakdown of decorum and all these other things. Yeah, I think a lot of that is the result of not only just a general lessening of empathy, or even understanding of other people, but a lot of that is probably related to the fact that people read less, right? But particularly fiction. They read fiction less. And maybe it's not, like, a one-to-one causation, but I think somewhere in the mix, that is one of the reasons. So yeah, I would also encourage young people to read more— And, you know, going back to what we said earlier, like, across the board, across pretty much every age demographic — I've been picking on men a lot here, but

1:30:00men tend to read less fiction than women at pretty much every age group. Someone else might extrapolate from that and say, well, is it women in our society that tend to be more empathetic? And if you were to ask that question of why, well, again, maybe not a one-to-one causation, but hey, maybe the fact that they're reading more of these stories and experiencing more of these things has something to do with that, in addition to probably many other things. But yeah, but I agree. I mean, there's a funny coincidence there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, I guess, like, the last thought for me is just, like, the— I don't know, and maybe you know this because you're closer in contact with publishers, but there just seems like there's too much long-form, big novels that are coming out, huge novels that only a select few, like,

1:30:47minority of people that are readers can even get through anymore. Like, if you want to bring more readers in, wouldn't you just produce shorter novels, or novellas, or short stories, or collections? You'd think so. You'd think so. I mean, like, do what you're doing, essentially. I mean, that was the idea, was to, yeah, again, like we said before, make it appealable to people that maybe, right, don't read that much. But yeah, I mean, they have ways of doing things, and I can't understand, like, a marketer's brain, because they've done their homework, they know what sells or whatever. But I assume they're chasing trends. But on the other hand, like, yeah, oftentimes they're kind of reactive rather than proactive on a lot of that kind of stuff. Yeah. Well, I'll

1:31:33give you an example, because so there's this book by Madeline Miller. She does a lot of, like, modern Greek mythology. So she has a book on Galatea, and it's quite short, so maybe, like, a 50-page short story, and about yay big. Okay. It's like a pocketbook, but it's tiny, but it's a hardcover. So it has some substance to it. It doesn't feel like— normal pocketbooks are kind of, like, almost a novelty. This is not. It does feel real, but it just feels convenient. And that caught my eye, 'cause I was like, wow, this is such a good gift. I can give this to someone, I can gift it to them, and they will actually read it. Yeah, yeah. And it's one short story. And so what I have done lately, when I want to share fiction with people, I do not

1:32:22give them full books anymore. Mhm. Very rarely do I do that, and even when I do that, it's very rare that anyone actually follows through and reads it. Okay. So what I do is I just send them a PDF or a link to a short story from a short story collection of that author that I think they'll enjoy, and the read rates on that, the completion rates, are 100%. Yeah. Everyone reads the short stories. So I'm just thinking, like, is this, like, an Airbnb–Marriott situation, where they're just sort of stuck in the mud and not realizing? I mean, these are, like, objective facts that you can go— you can run a study, you'll see, you'll just see it. So I think there might be an opportunity there for more short form in order to bring people in. I agree. And, as you say, to bring people in, especially, like, again, for younger people that want

1:33:08to get back into reading, or, say, want to challenge themselves to, you know, read more books this year than they read last year or whatever: don't start with War and Peace. You know, start with something that you can get through in, like, an afternoon or two, right? So a short story or a novella or something like that, where it's like, "Hey, I can do this." 'Cause reading is hard, and I don't mean— like, I mean, reading is a hard muscle. It is, yeah. And, like, you know, I have students where they say, like, "I don't read books. I can't read books, because I read and, like, my eyes glaze over and I got to check my phone," or, "I can't get past two pages." You got to practice. It comes, but you got to work at it. So maybe, like, you know, a nice, concise 40-pager or whatever is a lot more realistic than, like, a 300-page novel.

1:33:54Yeah, yeah. And I don't want to put the onus on, you know, the author. Like, I do think it's the publisher that needs to be, you know, instructing this. Again, yeah, like, they're chasing things that come after the fact, where they could, in my opinion, be a bit more proactive in helping actually set those things up in the first place. Yeah. Well, listen, we could talk about this, you know, for a long time, so I think we should wrap up. But for everyone listening, definitely go and buy Troll by Logan Macnair. I think it is on Amazon, but there might be some better ways to buy it if you go to his website. And listen, I've read 50 pages. It's amazing. I love it, and I'm looking forward to finishing it. It gives you an idea of the state of— or, I guess, like, the online zeitgeist, and even political

1:34:42zeitgeist, of how we consume information and how we consume misinformation, and maybe it'll give you tools to act as a defense against getting bamboozled. So don't get bamboozled, don't join a cult, read a book. Your life will be better. Yep. Good advice for 2025. Any closing words on your end? No, I think that's all great. Read more, for sure. Yeah. Thanks for being here, Logan. Thanks for having me. Really enjoyed it.