The Numlock Podcast Walter Hickey

By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to my friend Neil Paine, a sportswriter at FiveThirtyEight who can also be found at . I’ve been following some recent spat going on in NASCAR between ownership and the different charters; here’s a recent thing I covered about it:
NASCAR team owners collectively boycotted a quarterly meeting with NASCAR leadership over a kerfuffle over the sport’s business model, which they argue pays track owners considerably more than it pays the racing team owners. The $8.2 billion media rights deal inked prior to the 2015 season splits the money 65 percent to the racetracks, 25 percent to the teams, and 10 percent to NASCAR itself, though there are just two track operators: Speedway Motorsports and, well, NASCAR, which owns most of the tracks on the Cup Series. Team owners don’t like this arrangement, and argue that they have to spend a great deal of time trying to recruit sponsors in order to make their money, saying that sponsorships are 60 percent to 80 percent of the budgets of the 16 chartered teams.
Fascinating! It’s a corporate battle with billions on the line! What’s not to love here! I knew Neil was into NASCAR and I wanted to talk to him about how the sport got into this mess and what the heck happened to it.
Neil can be found at FiveThirtyEight and . Incidentally we can also be found out our hockey-related friend podcast .
This interview has been condensed and edited.
All right. Hey Neil, how's it going?
Hey, Walt. Good to be here.
People know you from many different places, primarily FiveThirtyEight, where you're a sports writer. But I wanted to talk to you today about a thing that I think is going to be very off-topic for a lot of readers in my newsletter and maybe even some reviews in your work, which is some extremely fascinating stuff that's happening in NASCAR, a league that has long existed but has diminished in notoriety.
You and I have been talking a little bit about this on the side and I am just endlessly fascinated by some of the machinations going on in it. I just wanted to have you on to talk all about it. Do you want to talk a little bit about your experience with NASCAR and what drew your attention to it?
Yeah, so I'm from the South. I'm from Atlanta and grew up watching the races and following the sport as a child. I think that that was something that was a lot more common at that time. We're talking about the '90s and the early 2000s being the heyday of not just my fan interest but also a lot of people's fan interest in the sport.
I've recently gotten back into it over the past couple seasons, I don't really know why. I've definitely gotten more into motor sports in general with Formula One also coming back on my radar. That has actually been very popular among American audiences, I think, since you saw the Netflix series Drive To Survive and just people getting into the dramatic aspects of that, not necessarily maybe the on-track drama, but the personalities and the soap opera between the drivers and the teams, and all of the different backstabbing. Machinations is a good word for it that you used earlier.
You see that in pretty much every motor sport though. I think that people, if they wanted to expand their horizons to a sport like NASCAR, there are so many beefs between drivers in NASCAR. The great thing about NASCAR is in Formula One, you do see sometimes drivers, they will wreck each other in the sense that they won't give someone space around a turn or something and they might touch wheels, or they might run into someone. But when you run into someone, it's the end of their day because the open wheel cars are pretty fragile, comparatively speaking.
Whereas in NASCAR, these are big freaking tanks of vehicles that can hit each other. Often, there’s this term, "rubbing is racing," where basically if you're not bumping people while you're out on the track, you're not really fighting for position. You can hit someone a

By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Abraham Josephine Riesman who wrote the explosive new book out this week Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. I have been looking to this one for a while, I was a massive fan of her 2021 book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee.
The subject matter of this one will be of interest not just to wrestling fans but among anyone who has felt the reverberations across pop culture, sports and politics of one extremely complicated family and their very influential “sports entertainment” business.
The book is out this week and can be found wherever books are sold. Riesman can be found at her website and on Twitter.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Josie, thank you so much for coming on.
Hey, I'm so glad to be back. Fire away.
You are out with the new book Ringmaster this week. I have been looking forward to this all year, honestly, since I heard you announced it. Folks might know you from your Stan Lee biography. Both of these stories are about complicated men who worked in the entertainment industry and how it kind of destroyed them, I guess. What drew you to Vince McMahon?
I was a teenage wrestling fan from the ages of about 13 to 16. I was very obsessively involved in Vince McMahon's product, the World Wrestling Federation, as it was known then. And three years isn't all that long a period of time in adult human years, but in teenager years, those are a century each. It was a time when I was very impressionable, and wrestling made a big impression on me. And after I gave up on it around 2001, I stopped watching for like 20 years. And then when I was done with my biography of Stan Lee, True Believer, I had to come up with something else to write. And I was having a conversation with my wonderful spouse, who ended up being my frontline editor on this, but was not at the time, S.I. Rosenbaum, and we were just chatting about what could the next book be.
And one of us said, what about a biography of Vince McMahon? Now, she'd reported on wrestling in the past as a local news reporter. Not on the WWF, but on the wrestling world, so she was familiar with him. And I obviously was familiar with him, had a lot of distinctive memories of him, had some knowledge of his real life. But it was, as is true of most people's knowledge of Vince McMahon's real life, ill-informed, because he's very good at deliberately altering your perception of him. So it just seemed like a natural idea. He is this amazing individual whose story had not really been told in the particular way that I wanted to tell it.
It's a fascinating business story, it's a fascinating cultural story, and we'll kind of touch on each of those elements in a bit. I guess to give folks a little perspective who might not be totally familiar with wrestling, what role does Vince McMahon play in the evolution of it, and what it's become today versus what it was maybe 50 years ago?
Sure, yeah. Vince is the singular man of professional wrestling right now. There's no one more powerful or influential than him, both in the present and also in the recent past. Of the living people in wrestling, no one has had more of an influence than Vince McMahon. He took over the company from his father, who was a wrestling promoter, like his father before him, in 1982 and 1983. He, over the course of that year, purchased the company from his father and some minority shareholders.
And after that, Vince sort of went on a war of conquest. Up until then, wrestling had been this largely regional phenomenon. You had regional territories where local bosses, who operated not unlike mob bosses, would dictate what pro wrestling was in that geographic territory. And it was an oligarchy. It wasn't a democracy, but it was an oligarchy. It was not unlike the English nobility circa Magna Carta, where it's like it could have been the beginnings of democracy, but democracy it wasn't. But the fact was that

By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Megan Garber who wrote the new essay collection On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics from The Atlantic.
Megan is a writer at The Atlantic, and the magazine has compiled a number of her essays into the new book. It’s a great read, an exploration into the ways that American political actors have parlayed the techniques of entertainment to their own ends. Today, we talked about amusing ourselves to death, what happens to a country when politics becomes entertainment, and Dwight Schrute. 
Megan can be found at The Atlantic and the book, as well as several other new compilations of essays from the magazine, is available wherever books are sold. 
This interview has been condensed and edited.

Megan Garber, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
You have a new book, it's a collection of a lot of your essays at The Atlantic, it's called On Misdirection. What prompted you to figure out this beat and tease out that you were covering misdirection over the past couple years?
A lot of the things that have really interested me about politics and political discourse, let's say, over the past few years are the ways that we are trained to see each other and then also to not see each other. It seems like so many things, so many of the big political stories, particularly at the beginning of the presidency of Donald Trump, and then up till now, so much has come down to are we seeing what we should be seeing, or are we in fact looking away from what we should be seeing?
Ideas about vision is actually one of the main drivers of all of these essays, which are very different other than that. I'm a political junkie, I love to follow politics and all of that, but I kept feeling for myself just as a news consumer, "Is this really the most important thing right now?" All these shiny distractions, daily outrages that come and go, and I know I myself, as a news consumer, often feel very addled, almost, and just in a constant state of distraction.
So these essays really do try to figure out what happens to that form of distraction on a mass scale. If I'm not the only one feeling this, but if a lot of people are feeling this, what are the consequences of that?
I loved how also you kept it in some of the more conventional forms of media as well, too. I know that a lot of our conversation about distraction has been related to social media and algorithms and kind of blamed on Silicon Valley ghosts that are destroying our brains.
But a lot of what you talk about is just super day to day. It's the way people talk about other people, whether it's on television or radio or things like that. Do you want to expand on how it's not just necessarily what we're doing online?
The first essay, actually, is a look-back at the scholar Neil Postman, who's one of my favorite thinkers, critics, et cetera. He wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985 that was looking at the impact of television, essentially, on American culture. And as you might guess from the title, making an argument that the entertainment has slipped the bonds of mere fun and mere escapism and distraction and has actually come into our lives and come to infiltrate lives in a lot of ways.
Looking at him in retrospect is the first essay in the collection. We chose that specifically because I think one of the other arguments underlining a lot that's in the book is that entertainment, as much as I love it, and I am an inveterate lover of entertainment of all kinds, but it can, I think, also become fairly pernicious when it becomes our standard of judging things in the political realm.
One example that's in another essay in there is the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The talking points, it seemed to me, among Trump's allies had nothing to do with the facts at hand. This was a legal proceeding, conducted by lawyers, by Meta lawyers, in fact, in Congress. Yet the arguments were n

By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Eric Vilas-Boas who wrote If Rotoscoping Isn’t Animation, Nothing Is for Vulture. Here's what I wrote about it:
This year director Richard Linklater released the film Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, which is animated through rotoscoping. Essentially, live-action footage is painstakingly animated over using a technique that harkens back to the dawn of animation, a process that required a suite of about 200 2D animators for costs upwards of $20 million. The animated film, however, has been rejected by the animation committee of the Academy Awards, arguing it relies on live-action footage even though the film clearly surpasses the requirement 75 percent of running time must be animated. Linklater and company are ticked off, claiming that the branch has been captured by corporations and aimed at children, with 19 of the past 21 awards for Best Animated Feature going to CG-animated kids movies, and with just two independent studies winning.
Eric is brilliant on the topic of animation, he was one of the founders of The Dot and Line animation blog and is one of the most plugged-in writers on the topic these days.
We spoke about why the awards scene around animated film is chaotic, why it’s a demoralizing moment to be in the field, and how streaming has upended the industry.
Eric can be found at @e_vb_ and at Vulture.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
You wrote a really fascinating story about a new film that's coming out from director Richard Linklater. Before we dive into the whole concept of rotoscoping and whatnot, do you want to tell folks a little about your history with animation? You're currently at Vulture, you've got a long history of working in this space. What's been your journey in covering animation so far?
I've been interested in this area of coverage for a long time. I always wanted to be an entertainment journalist. I always wanted to angle my career in that direction. A buddy of mine and I looked around at the space of magazine journalism a few years ago and we noticed, "Oh, there's no The New Yorker for animation coverage." No one covers cartoons with what we thought was a level of both consistency and seriousness.
We started this website called The Dot and Line based off an iconic Chuck Jones short cartoon; that was in 2016. My friend and I, John Maher, started that site. That site was just our way of covering animation from a fan perspective and a magaziney perspective, a bloggy perspective, and also covering the business through the same lens.
We never made any money. The Dot and Line shut down, we gave it a viking funeral in 2020, in the beginning of the pandemic, very lovingly.
I always really loved cartoons and animation. I wanted to cover it more deeply and make sure that it had a place in the media ecosystem that I was working in. These days I've parleyed that experience into writing about animation for Vulture, for Thrillist in the past, for Hyperallergic, for The Observer. Now I'm currently in Vulture where I edit most of our streaming coverage, and then also work on the occasional animation and cartoons piece, which brings me to this topic today.
I just wanted to make sure that we got that set up, because there's this idea that you've always been reporting on how there's tension in animation, how there aren’t a lot of people who treat it seriously, that there's a tremendous amount of effort and art that goes into it but that mainstream sources oftentimes don't necessarily understand what some of the power and appeal of it is. That all really comes to a head in the story. Do you want to talk a little bit about Apollo 10 ½ and how it was made?
It definitely hits a lot of points for me. Apollo 10 ½ is a rotoscoped movie directed by Richard Linklater, a very well-regarded indie filmmaker who has done both animated movies like A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life as well as live-action movies like the Before

By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week in another special podcast edition of the newsletter, I spoke to Max Fisher, author of the new book The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.
It’s a fascinating book that looks at the science — the neurology, the social science, the psychology — of what social media usage does to us. It’s riveting and provocative and will definitely change the way you view social media apps.
The book can be found wherever books are sold, online and IRL and at independent bookstores. Max is on Twitter at @max_fisher
This interview has been condensed and edited.
You are the author of a new book called The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. I thought this was a really interesting topic for you, because normally you're a national security reporter. You cover a lot of different international events. I was really struck by why you were drawn to social media, but the more that I learned about it, the more it made sense. Do you want to talk about how you fell into this?
Like you said, my background for years has been international reporting, so reporting on global politics and conflicts and wars. I did not think of social media as a story that was for me, or something that I frankly paid a lot of attention to. I thought these are just websites, it's just apps on your phone. How significant can it really be other than as a tech or business story? And that started to change for me, the way that I think it did for a lot of us, after the 2016 election, where there was kind of this sense that social media had something to do with Trump's election, but nobody was really quite sure what it was. It was with the platforms, they're very polarizing and there's a lot of misinformation on them. There are all of these weird, crazy groups and online subcultures on them that all seem to be converging on Trumpism.
I, like most people, still thought, well, these platforms are just reflections of what's already happening in the world, or at most their experience, like any website that you would read or any publication you would read, and maybe there's just a little extra amount of misinformation or garbage in them than other places.
That really started to more significantly change for me about a year after Trump's election when I went to Myanmar to report on the genocide there, which of course was this horrible and very sudden explosion of just complete societal violence between the majority Buddhist group and the Muslim minority.
When I was there, I had the same experience that everyone who was reporting on the genocide there at the time had, which is that social media seemed to be just everywhere in the story. I don't just mean everywhere in that everyone you would talk to would be citing things back to social media, things they'd seen there, groups they organized there, social media being involved, although that was also a big part of it. But also in the sense that it was just very clear, although in this way that was really hard to define, that social media was playing a much more active role in what was happening.
A lot of the hate speech and a lot of the incitement and this general sense of a societal movement to destroy an entire minority population was something that had emerged on the platforms, and in the way that people were using the platforms. They were experiencing on Facebook, especially, but also WhatsApp and Twitter, that it was pulling something out in them that had not been there just a few years before when social media had been completely absent from the country. Due to sanctions before like 2016, you couldn't get a cell phone, you couldn't get social media. And then all of a sudden social media was everywhere and then society took this huge shift.
Shortly after I was there, even the United Nations had concluded that social media had played such an enormous role, that one of th

By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week I spoke to Kaitlyn Tiffany, the author of the new book Everything I Need I Get From You, out this week.
The book is a deep dive into the nature of fandom, and how fangirls have been instrumental in the design, growth and evolution of the internet and social media. It’s a great look that combines digital culture and pop culture.
The book can be found wherever books are sold, and Tiffany can be found at The Atlantic and on Twitter.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
You are the author of the brand new book Everything I Need I Get From You. It is all about the intersection of fandom and internet culture, and how they each feed one another. What got you interested in this topic?I was part of fandom myself, which is very obvious in the book and not a secret. I spent a lot of time on Tumblr when I was 19 and 20 and 21. Then I moved to New York to start working in journalism, and I started working at a tech website that was getting into internet culture coverage. It was sort of the only thing I felt I could contribute; I didn't know anything about tech, and as soon as they were talking about expanding their cultural coverage, I was like, "well, I can do Tumblr, that's tech, right?" That was how I started reporting on fandom professionally.Later on, I knew that I wanted to do a book about fandom because there was a lot of academic work about fandom already, but there hadn't really been, I felt, a satisfying, non-academic popular press explanation of how fandom and internet culture were intertwined. It just made sense to do it through the lens of One Direction, because that was where my personal experience was, and it's really hard to parachute into a fandom that you aren't a part of at the length and level of detail that I wanted to do.I love that you took it from the point of One Direction because I feel like boy bands have this habit of really dominating an entire conversation on fandom for a while. You can almost follow different eras with them, and the era where One Direction was phenomenally popular was a super transformational one for the internet as a whole. Do you want to kind of talk about One Direction, their run, and their role in the internet's fandom history?One of the academics I talked to for the book, Allison McCracken, I actually asked her, "When did fandom start on Tumblr? How did Tumblr become the fandom platform?" And she said it's three things that happened all the same time: Harry Potter, Glee and One Direction. Those three fandoms were huge in the early days of Tumblr, and I think really Glee and One Direction in particular, really solidified the visual culture of fandom, the tradition of making really elaborate gif sets and also of shipping. Shipping was huge. Anybody who doesn't know what that is, it's fan fiction, imaginative relationship pairings between characters.
I want to get into that a little bit later, too, cause that's a huge part of this, but yeah, go on.Totally. That was huge with Glee fandom and it was also big with One Direction fandom. Numerous famous pairings in One Direction fandom. Then with Twitter, I think One Direction just kind of coincidentally came along at the same moment when teenagers and younger than teenagers were joining Twitter. Those were really the first big years of Twitter having a youth culture. I think it was the combination of those two things, and then also sort of an underlooked part of the One Direction history, I think, is how much the YouTube algorithm was driving people to One Direction. I heard that from so many people that I interviewed who started out as just watching whatever pop music videos, and getting recommended the One Direction videos.
Then, crucially with One Direction, there was just so much content that it was really easy to fall down a rabbit hole, if you will. Once you got done watching all their music videos, with another pop star, you'd be like, "Oh, well that was