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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Episode 39: The Gawker Sex-Tape Blowup, and George Saunders on Trump
00:56:00
The founder of Gawker on the “karmic justice” of the Hulk Hogan lawsuit; George Saunders on what makes Trump supporters tick; and Parker Posey on a camper from hell.
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Grace Eldridge
Floor 38.
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Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
It's really exciting to be having a conversation with someone when they have that revelation.
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David Remnick
Packer seems to be interested that. John McPhee has brought this up from.
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Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
One World Trade center in Manhattan. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
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David Remnick
I'm David Remnick, and thanks for tuning into the New Yorker Radio Hour. We've got a lot lined up for you this hour. The writer George Saunders talks about his time on the Trump campaign trail and it gets really weird. And I'll talk with Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, about that website's remarkable rise and the lawsuit that's put its existence in jeopardy. But first, summer is here and maybe, if you're really lucky, you pack the kids off to camp for a few weeks. And here's Parker Posey, who has a few words about Elliot.
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Grace Eldridge
Dear Camp Counselor, hello. My name is Grace Eldridge. I'm Elliot's mother. Elliot's father and I are thrilled that he will be spending his summer with you at Camp Chautauqua. As this is Elliot's first time at sleepaway camp, I wanted to let you know a few things about him so that you will be prepared to look after him properly. For starters, Elliot does not like to be called El or Ellie. He prefers Elliot. He may insist that you refer to him as Claude Death or the Nightcrawler. Don't. That conversation won't end well. Elliot loves the outdoors and animals. Feel free to let him near any animal that is larger than his mouth. Generally, it is best to avoid making eye contact with Elliot. If you look directly at him, he will take it as a sign of aggression and charge at you. It is best not to let Elliot smell you. Elliot does not like to be surprised. Do not surprise him under any circumstances. If you do, he will be sure to surprise you later when you're sleeping. You don't want that. Trust me, I know. Elliot will really love being a camper. Having said that, you should know that he has a pretty severe aversion to team sports, hiking, arts, crafts and other children. On the other hand, he loves chanting. Once he starts, he can't seem to stop. Elliot may bite you, but probably not. But he might. If he does happen to bite you, do not be alarmed. Just ignore him. Let your body go limp and wait it out. Whatever you do, do not resist. If you resist, he will bite down harder and start shaking his head from side to side in order to rip off as much flesh as but probably not, but he might. If Elliot wants a hug, give it to him, but end it before he can really start grinding on you. Morning is a particularly difficult time for Elliot. He tends to wake up at dawn, whereupon he usually launches directly into his morning rampage. Not my term. Doctor's term. That is why we always tie Elliot down at night. Finally, Elliot does not know that we are leaving him here today. When you are finished reading this note, please let me know that you understand by nodding to me. Great. Once I get your signal, I will nod slightly and then slowly start to back away. At that point, I want you to reach into the bag and pull out the candy bar that is inside it. Show the candy bar to Elliot. Wave it around. While he is distracted by the candy bar, I am going to make a run for it. If Elliot starts to run for me, I'll need you to tackle him so I can have a chance to get to my car. Okay, Great. We are very excited for Elliot and Camp Chautauqua. He can be a handful. He's a sweet kid. We know you'll really like him once you get to know him. Sincerely, Grace Eldridge. P.S. if you have any problems, please do not hesitate to contact the local police. That usually scares them pretty good.
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Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
Bonnie doesn't have to work tomorrow Bonnie has tail Bunny doesn't have to work tomorrow Bunny has a day IV IV.
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David Remnick
IV I Bunny has a tail Bunny.
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Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
Doesn'T have to work to.
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David Remnick
A Few Words about Elliot, performed by Parker Posey. That's a story by the comedian and writer Demetri Martin, whose movie Dean, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this year. Now, you don't have to be an avid media nut to know that the lawsuit Balea vs. Gawker Media, is a case that's fascinating in a kind of a salacious way, but also genuinely important. Terry Jean Bollea, the plaintiff, is also known as Hulk Hogan, the former pro wrestler and the defendant. Gawker Media is the parent company of Gawker.com, which ran an article accompanied by a video of Hulk Hogan in bed with his friend's wife, Heather Clem. The case pitted the rights of a free press against the privacy rights of of a public figure. And the judgment of $140 million against Gawker stunned everybody, even Gawker's fiercest critics. Nick Denton is the founder of Gawker Media, and he's not a typical American suit. Without any apology, he modeled Gawker from the start after the British tabloids with all their rudeness and half truths. And sarcasm. And in the process, he antagonized a lot of people in politics, in Silicon Valley and in the media itself. And he seemed to relish doing it. There was this aspect of Nick Denton as a Persona. And one of your close colleagues, AJ Delorio, in a piece in the New Yorker was quoted saying, the villain, public Persona is not 100% true. It's probably 80% true. How much and to what degree did you cultivate a pretty daunting and even scary Persona?
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Nick Denton
That's a good question. First of all, I think that's. I'm not sure whether the 100% is a joke or the 80% is a joke. AJ Delario has gotten himself into a considerable amount of trouble with his humor over the years. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. It tends to be misinterpreted, but I think there was certainly some truth. We all take on roles and characters. Somebody called me in a blog post Dark Lord Balthazar, because I, I suppose I was a dark Lord.
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David Remnick
And you hang out at Balthazar downtown.
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Nick Denton
Restaurant, at least used to hang out in Balthazar in soho. And I think probably a little unwisely, I accepted or even embraced some of that role. Makes it a little bit easier to deal with the inevitable criticism of articles, especially from people you know or people who know people you know. If you have that reputation of somebody who puts the story first. Our impetus was always, when in doubt, put it out.
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David Remnick
Well, let's drill on that for a second. When in doubt, put it out. Whereas at places like mine or the New York Times or the Washington Post, we've all made mistakes, God knows. But there's. That's not the rule of the road. When in doubt, put it out. It's something different. But if you rush things out into the ecosystem, there's another kind of price to pay. You're wrong or you've hurt somebody's reputation very badly. Was that the right rule of the road? How do you feel about that now that It's, I guess, 14 years on since the rise of Gawker?
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Nick Denton
Look, the example I always think of is the example of the British press and the US Press during and after the invasion of Iraq, where you had the British press in its usual sloppy, one source, anonymous, half guessing that there.
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David Remnick
Might not be weapons of mass destruction.
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Nick Denton
The British press got to the truth in its own way. I'd say about six to 12 months before the American president.
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David Remnick
But by and large, Gawker was not writing about weapons of mass destruction as a day to day matter.
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Nick Denton
Sometimes it was just writing about Conde Nast internal politics.
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David Remnick
There you go.
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Rafi Khachaturian
There you go.
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Nick Denton
But I think in a healthy media ecosystem you need range of approaches. And we made a unique thing, an independent media company which grew to scale. We have nearly 100 million people coming to the sites each month.
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David Remnick
How many sites are there now, Nick?
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Nick Denton
Seven sites. We write freely. It's a journalist led organization and we write stories regardless of whether an advertiser or a source or a subject will be pleased. There is a place for independent journalism. Independent, spiky, sometimes unpopular, sometimes controversial. And you know, I'm glad that we did something different. I'm glad that we allowed that journalistic aid.
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David Remnick
Would you include in those adjectives sometimes also mean spirited, sometimes damaging to people's reputations in a way that you regret. Would you add that to the litany?
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Nick Denton
I would say absolutely that the. Under the guise of the truth and the whole truth that can. It's incredibly empowering. Sometimes a journalist can hide behind that and the snark or criticism can go over the line towards something that seems mean spirited. But it's a more general phenomenon that when you let everybody speak freely and whether you're talking about a Gorka blogger or a commenter on a Gorka article, or whether you're talking about somebody on an anonymous person on Twitter, you know, somebody on Facebook, even under their own name, that we exist in a world of an explosion of free expression and not all of it is going to be what you like.
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David Remnick
You were asked what drives you at one point. I think it was by Time magazine and you said, maybe it was because I was gay and I grew up hating open secrets. Usually if someone's gay, it's a pretty open secret. Their friends know, their family knows, but out of some misplaced sense of decency, nobody talks about it. Generally my view is that let's just have it out. The truth will set you free. That's what I believe. Let's start with the question of outing people. The common liberal notion of this is that it should be an individual choice. And when someone self identifies, then that's what that's. It's their business. You think about it in a radically different way.
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Nick Denton
I don't think actually really that radically, but here's what I know. The people who complain most about outing or are most concerned about outing tend to be straight people. I think the thing that always offended me the most was the double standard. The double standard that a newspaper or a magazine would quite happily write about someone's girlfriend on page Six. They'd quite happily write about somebody's affair in a heterosexual context. But that same standard was not applied to gay people. As if their sex life was somehow shameful.
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David Remnick
All the same, though, why does Nick Denton get to decide?
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Nick Denton
I don't think I do, but if information is traveling around. Tim Cook, for instance, the CEO of Apple, widely known amongst his colleagues that he was gay, but there was a certain kind of hesitation of writing about it. Now he's obviously extremely out.
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David Remnick
He took to Businessweek and wrote a piece declaring this.
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Nick Denton
Yeah, and we did a piece, I think, a couple of years beforehand, celebrating the fact that the.
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David Remnick
But who should do the coming out? Should the press do it for someone has agency to do it. You think it's the fact? Is the fact, like anyone, like anything else, I'm wearing a blue sweater.
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Nick Denton
Yes, it's part of somebody's biography. And I think the world is a lot healthier. With Silicon Valley's most successful venture capitalist being gay and known to be gay, and with the CEO of the most powerful tech company on the planet being gay. And for it to be clear to gay people growing up that there are other paths than becoming a hairdresser or a fashion designer, great. Those career paths, maybe.
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David Remnick
So one person who does disagree with you became your nemesis, and that's Peter Thiel, who's a venture capitalist. And in 2006, Gawker started writing about Thiel. And in 2007, there was a post with the headline, peter Thiel is totally gay, people.
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Sarah Larson
And.
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David Remnick
And it might not have outed him. I think, as you say, a lot of people around him, apparently his friends and family knew quite well that he was gay, but it certainly broadcast his sexuality in a way like never before, and in a way that, without a question, that we now know infuriated him no end. Thus began, I don't know, known to you or not, a relationship or an antagonism that would be fateful. What was your awareness of Peter Thiel's fury at Gawker Media from the start?
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Nick Denton
Well, first of all, I actually don't think that that piece about his sexuality was particularly impactful. If you read the piece, it's a positive piece which ends with, okay, so Silicon Valley's most successful venture capitalist is gay. Fair enough, but more power to him. He was annoyed, I believe, about mockery of his political opinions.
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David Remnick
He's a libertarian and is going to be a delegate for Trump in the coming years.
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Nick Denton
He's a strange sort of Nietzschean libertarian who believes that mass democracy is incompatible with liberty and that society Started going downhill when women and welfare recipients got the vote. That's a slight caricature of his views, but not too far from that. And he has what he considers to be serious political ideas, and we didn't treat them with a huge amount of respect. And then we covered business dealings that were inconvenient for him.
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David Remnick
So, Nick, in 2012, Gawker runs the short clip of the Hulk Hogan sex tape, and Gawker refuses to take it down. Then you get a lawsuit, which you lost to the tune of $140 million against the company. After some speculation, Peter Thiel comes along and he admits he has a hand in this.
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Sarah Larson
And.
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David Remnick
And he bankrolls Hulk Hogan's lawsuit. In Thiel's view, he's got a beef with you and he's within his rights to go after Gawker. This way. It's perfectly legal. A lot of other people, including everyone who's written about it for the New Yorker, are of the feeling that a billionaire financing secret lawsuits against a media company, no matter what it's done, is an extremely dangerous trend. I get that. We get that. But how do you go about defending the Hulk Hogan sex tape in the first place?
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Nick Denton
I believe that the Hulk Hogan story is a newsworthy story. Federal judge found it newsworthy. The appeals court found it newsworthy. We've had a significant. A massive reverse in the Florida trial court under Judge Campbell. But it's not the end of the day.
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David Remnick
Why do you think it went the way it did in.
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Nick Denton
We certainly didn't do ourselves too many favors. There was an awkward quote, joke in a deposition that hurt us. Do I have to repeat it? I guess I do. AJ Delario, who was the editor of Gorka.com at the time, at the end of a long day of his deposition, was asked what sex tapes would he not publish and made a dark New York blogger joke that a tape of a four year old would clearly not be acceptable. And that was. That was everywhere it was everywhere it was taken. You know, there's a certain amount of kind of karmic justice that journalists who are often accused of taking quotes out of context and portraying people unfairly by doing so. There's a certain amount of comic justice that a quote by AJ Would similarly be taken out of context, used in the trial, and used by the New York Post and others to hang us.
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David Remnick
So what is the circumstance that Gawker Media finds itself in now? Where are you in terms you're now in chapter 11? It seems that you're going to be sold how is this going to play out? Do you think.
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Nick Denton
It'S likely that the sale will go through? We have a binding agreement with Ziff Davis, but under this process, another bidder could come in on top of the price that they've. Ziff Davis has offered $90 million for the company's business and that transaction should close in August and that will preserve the brands. There's a question about Gorka.com, but I think most of the jobs will be safeguarded and that's my top priority right now.
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David Remnick
But new owners always say that they're going to safeguard. Rupert Murdoch said it when he bought the Village Voice. What's the insurance policy that that will be the case and what will that mean?
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Nick Denton
What will profitability? That's what the insurance policy is. The Gork Media Group is legal fees put aside. One of the only profitable digital media companies with about 100 people. We attract an audience which is equivalent to that of major newspaper groups. So the company is efficient. We've got one of the most successful e commerce businesses, so we're not even solely dependent on advertising.
- [18:27]
David Remnick
And tell me this, what will happen with you if there's a sale? Do you stay? Do you go off to another venture?
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Nick Denton
I will work as a consultant for Ziff Davis if their bid is successful. And I'd like to write a little. If you're going to be in the middle of a story as juicy, epic as this, this story, every single time it's had a, had a choice as to which turn to take, it's always taken the more interesting turn. What more interesting billionaire secret backer could you imagine than Peter Thiel? Somebody who is trying to free himself of terrestrial government but supports Trump in the meantime, and somebody who's pursuing immortality and who has a vision that he finds intoxicating. Some others would find dystopic of the future.
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David Remnick
How do you come out of this long, complicated narrative feeling that you've won in some sense? Can you.
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Nick Denton
I think Gorkha blogs, Internet journalism has. It's shaken things up even though right now the mood and media is dark because it seems that celebrities and sources and the power is bypassing them. The business model looks highly questionable, but journalism is now, even with these threats to the First Amendment and free expression, journalism now is more vibrant and more diverse and everything is being discussed. Everything does eventually come out.
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David Remnick
Nick Den, the founder and CEO of Gawker Media. Gawker is in the process of contesting the court's damage award. Coming up in a minute. A Buddhist tries to Figure out how much compassion is really appropriate for Donald Trump. That's next on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Foreign welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. George Saunders has written some of the great short stories of our time. They reflect a dark, weird sense of humor, a willingness to play with the fantastical, but at the same time, they have a very realistic sense of America as seen by people often on the margins. Middle managers at unprofitable companies, struggling war veterans, workers at failing theme parks. They're people who. Who in real life might very well be supporters of Donald Trump and his message that America is losing out or leaving them behind. So he sent George Saunders, a fiction writer on a reporting trip to follow the Trump campaign and to talk to supporters and protesters about what they're feeling. And he taped some of those encounters and he talked about them with the New Yorker's Deborah Treesman.
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George Saunders
Trump is racist.
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Grace Eldridge
So are you.
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Sarah Larson
Trump is racist. So are you.
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George Saunders
Trump is racist.
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Sarah Larson
So are you.
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Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
So, George, that clip we just heard came from a video you took at one of the Trump rallies you attended. Can you set the scene for us a little?
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George Saunders
Yeah, I'm just having a flashback. I have to take a little moment. Yeah. No, this was, I think, outside the convention center in Tucson, and that's the rally where the guy in the Klan robe got punched in the head. So I think that was as the rally was letting out. And the game is kind of that the protesters will set up as close as they can around a doorway so that as the Trump people come out, there's this kind of river and riverbank sort of confrontation that happens. So I think that's what we're hearing there. But I think it becomes a bit of performance art. If I can provoke you into saying something really rude to me or pushing me or hitting me, then I have a sense that that's going to go on the news that night. So to a certain extent, it's performance. And when you actually look at it, you know, if you could sort of pan out, 85% of the people are sitting there checking their phones or making plans for lunch. And then somewhere over here, two people are suddenly fighting. And then the whole rally goes over there and everybody's filming everybody filming everybody else.
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Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
So initially, we talked about this piece and you agreed to take it on.
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George Saunders
Big mistake.
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Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
You were a fiction writer.
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George Saunders
Yeah.
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Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
And what was the motive for you there?
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George Saunders
Well, really, I just finished a novel, and I was kind of feeling happy and celebratory, and I thought it'd be fun. Take a shot at this. And so, yeah, so I agreed to it. And then almost immediately saw that I was, you know, over my head. I'm not really that political of a person. And, you know, had been kind of following it loosely. And then I would say, the first rally I went to, I realized that this was going to be a huge undertaking. And I think early on in a couple drafts I did, I was trying so hard to be fairer to the Trump supporters that I was kind of missing the element of danger in it.
- [24:10]
Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
Well, you know, in your fiction, you often are writing about sort of social underdogs and people in dire straits economically or with work or all of these things. Do you think that that helped you kind of find a point of sympathy or compassion?
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George Saunders
Well, at first it hurt me because I think what I learned about myself personally was that I tend to do empathy pretty well. You know, the kind of habitual moves that I do in fiction where I will make somebody who's kind of a dope and then spend a year or so looking closer to see if I can find any redeeming virtues. That's a good approach for, I'd say, some large percentage of human beings. But in this story, it got into the place where what do you do when someone has an idea that's hurtful to other people and dangerous? You take your natural empathy into that, and the danger is that you'll do what the Buddhists call idiot compassion, you know, which is to be so anxious to be empathetic that you don't push back or you don't call a spade a spade. If someone is doing something reprehensible, sometimes you just have to say, that sucks. Cut it out. So in a way, all those bad drafts are me trying to not confront that issue. But it was really challenging because Trump, you know, the thing about Trump is he's. If you want to write about race or gender or class or the media, almost anything you want to write about. Trump is kind of this incredible, like, locus of all these weird American energies.
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Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
And yet everything that he spouts is kind of a black and white one liner.
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George Saunders
Yeah. You know, in teaching creative writing, you notice that a student will often critique a piece very broadly. You know, your piece sucks, Leonard, and it's boring. Well, that's not any good as a critique. It's hurtful, it's vague. But as we become better critics, we improve in specificity. So in the end, the thing is more detailed and less hurtful and more actionable. So that helped me break the Code a little bit. Essentially, Trump's thing is a rhetorical wrongness. There's a vagueness in his proposals that I think has to do with bad projection on his part. You know, when you get the sense that when a Trump supporter says undocumented person or illegal, there's something coming up there that doesn't match reality. You know, in reality, the number of border crossings into the US Or Mexico have decreased over the last few years. The immigrant population commits less crime than the native population, but there's a bad projection. So we could call that bad literary imagining.
- [26:48]
Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
Now, you yourself grew up in a relatively working class environment. You've lived in some red states. You, even at the rallies, you were sometimes mistaken for a Trump supporter based on your looks. And one guy accused you of belonging to the kkk. What do you think it is? If there is something that separates you sort of politically or ethically from these people that you are writing about?
- [27:10]
George Saunders
You know, for me, the challenge of this piece was to try to see, well, is there some essential difference between us and them? So if you can occupy the mind of the Trump supporters, you see that they're not stupid, and it's not to them at all an irrational position. It's actually quite rational. And when they talk to you about their lives over the last five or 10 years, you see that the liberal idea that they're dummies or they're just misinformed isn't quite complicated enough. The other thing I think a lot of Trump supporters are feeling is a kind of a racial nostalgia, you know, a kind of feeling that the demographics of the country are shifting. A lot of things that used to come to them pretty easily are now not. Or they have this sense that they're being usurped in some way, and that causes a lot of anxiety. That was maybe the hardest thing to talk about in this piece, because you can't deny that there's a racial element to the anxiety that they feel on the other side. It's very easy to call it. They're all racists. That didn't seem quite true to me. I had an interesting moment. There's a woman named Marian Mendoza, whose son Brandon was a. A police officer in Mesa. And it sounds like just a wonderful guy, you know, like really involved in the community and kind of a dream police officer. And he was killed by an undocumented Mexican guy who was wasted. And they. They both died in this car accident. And so she gave a speech at this, at the Fountain Hills rally, and it was such a moving speech. And you could just, you know, feel her pain in her voice. And there was a moment where I was sitting there going, oh, my God, I'm becoming a convert. This woman makes total sense to me. Maybe I've been wrong all along. So it was an interesting thing to kind of be pushed out of your liberal comfort zone. When you get out of there, it's kind of terrifying because you see that the opposing mindset is just as sure of itself as we're sure of ourselves. You become less hopeful that real communication could happen.
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Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
Did you find you changed your mind about anything in the course of doing this?
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George Saunders
I'm afraid to say no.
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David Remnick
No, I didn't.
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George Saunders
I think. Well, I'll tell you what I became convinced of was, and this might be a little corny, but it's true that I became convinced of the existential value of gentleness. Meaning when you engage in a political discussion, the importance of having some baseline curiosity, some intention of maintaining affection for the person, some sense that their views are as valid as yours, that they're just as real as a human being as you are, and of the kind of the sacred quality of whatever institutional things protect that space. So I guess we call it civility. That I think was the biggest thing. That there are ways for people across the divide to talk, but we're forgetting them pretty quickly, I think. And then also I think in a certain way, from a novelistic perspective, what was kind of sublime, I don't know if I call it beautiful, but is the way that this one guy who to me seems like he's had an incredibly privileged, strange, wealthy life that most of us can't even imagine. I mean, the kind of distortion reality field he must live in, the mysterious means by which that person is now giving off energy that's rippling through every place in our culture. That's a really interesting dynamic. And it has something to do with, of course, big media, you know, reality tv. But that sort of idea of action at a distance was really interesting and kind of frightening. And I think our understanding of it is way behind the pace at which it's being enacted.
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Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
So many of the people that you encountered probably register a kind of chip on their shoulders about the sort of liberal media and this kind of left wing liberal mindset that's prevalent in mainstream media. You know, what Trump often decries. Do you feel that you were seen as representing that? Do you feel that you were maybe sort of turning that whole attitude around and that the same thing could be said of you?
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George Saunders
My idea was to kind of Go in incognito and just hang out. But invariably there'd be somebody standing next to you at a rally and you start talking. And my impulse was always to kind of confess and say, you know, I have to say I'm a liberal. And even that would get such a funny reaction. It was almost like, I'm a Martian, you know? And so that was actually a great way to kick off. You'd say, yeah, I'm a liberal. I'm kind of, you know, I'm left of Gandhi. And they would kind of, you know, look at me in a little disbelief and start laughing. And then we'd have a great conversation based on that fact that, you know, okay, I'm a liberal. Let's see, you know, what we can talk about. And I had a great conversation with these guys in Wisconsin. The rally was being held in a convention center that was kind of hooked into this mall. So we were standing in line, and it was clear we weren't going to get in. And actually we were in front of a bridal shop. So we had this big, long mansplainy conversation between the four or five of us. And there were these three mannequins in prom dresses that were kind of looking at us the whole time. But we had this really kind of wonderful discussion about kind of. They were sort of like libertarians more than Trump supporters, but they were there kind of out of curiosity, and they were all about over regulation. That was their thing. And so it was a really wide ranging goofy conversation with lots of kind of mock fighting and stuff. But there were moments in these conversations where suddenly you'd find yourself having burned through all the bs. You would say, you know, I actually don't know that. Do you guys know about that statistic? No, we don't know. Huh. Interesting. It'd be good to know this factoid. Or you would come to some place where you'd be talking about immigration, for example, and I happen to have a couple of particular stories about particular immigrants that you could drop. And at that point, you could see the conversation would become suddenly serious. It would become more respectful because there was an actual human being that was being discussed. And it would become more befuddled, which I came to see as a sign of authenticity. When people say, yeah, that's a tough one. I really don't know. That moment seemed to me really promising. But it doesn't happen without hours of kind of pointless discussion.
- [33:54]
Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
People think they know for hours and then reach the point of not know.
- [33:58]
George Saunders
Yeah, it takes a long time to burn that stuff off.
- [34:05]
David Remnick
George Saunders talking with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman. You can find Saunders article about the Trump campaign as well as some of his stories@newyorkerradio.org this is the New Yorker Radio Hour now on the program, the past few months we've been featuring the unusual campaign reporting of Michael Friedman. Friedman is a songwriter and a composer working on and off Broadway, but he traveled the country during primary season talking to voters about what's on their minds in this truly weird and unprecedented election. He uses his interviews, taken verbatim, to make a song for each state he's visited. Last month, Friedman was in California for the primary and he's been speaking with the New Yorker, Sarah Larson.
- [34:55]
Rafi Khachaturian
Hello, Michael.
- [34:56]
Sarah Larson
Hi, Sarah. How are you?
- [34:58]
Rafi Khachaturian
I'm good. How are you?
- [34:59]
Sarah Larson
I'm pretty good.
- [35:00]
David Remnick
So, Michael, last time we spoke, you.
- [35:02]
Rafi Khachaturian
Were about to go to California.
- [35:04]
Sarah Larson
Exactly. And I spent some time in Los Angeles and in the Los Angeles area, California, you know, it's been a very Democratic state in the way it falls. And so I think the feelings for Hillary and the feelings for Bernie were both very strong there in the Los Angeles area, I ran into a bunch of Trump supporters. I ventured a little bit down into the Orange county area, which is a real Trump stalwart. So it's going to be interesting there, I think, how California will go, it seems inevitably as Democratic, but it will be interesting to see how this affects some of the down ballot stuff.
- [35:37]
Rafi Khachaturian
Yeah. So tell us about the person who you sing about today.
- [35:42]
Sarah Larson
With all the people I was interviewing, I realized that I was really interested in the media and in the fact that Los Angeles is the entertainment capital of America in many ways, certainly in television. And I got connected with a woman who works in network news and got to talk to her about just how network news has covered the election, how network news has changed, how it is currently changing, what is the future of television news. And some really interesting insights into just sort of the weirdness of this year. I think this is her fifth election cycle.
- [36:16]
Rafi Khachaturian
Wow.
- [36:16]
Sarah Larson
Somebody who really has been through a lot of.
- [36:18]
Rafi Khachaturian
Should we listen to this song?
- [36:20]
Sarah Larson
Yeah.
- [36:21]
Unnamed Network News Worker
Covering the election here in California, it's a lot like how we cover all these wildfires. It's always like visually stunning, but you could almost air the same story each time and like the same language, like the burned out homes or the same speech again and again, the story about Hillary flipping pancakes again. It's easy to get jaded. Since I started as a fact checker, a job that doesn't exist anymore, I wanted to do stories that would make my mom cry in Chicago at the end of the day, like 9 11, Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Asia, how to show death and devastation on that level when I'd never even seen a dead body before. I don't do those kind of stories anymore. Like this week I'm interviewing JLO in Las Vegas at the Billboard Awards. I know people have always been hemming and hawing about the decline of network news. And it's true, there's still a legal team, but their main concern is inaccuracy. It's not getting sued. We have all these brilliant 22 year olds and we pitched them like an interview with Carol Burnett and they're like, who is that? But they're good at Snapchat and demographics and what women want to see. And they love, they love weather for some reason, those women in the Midwest between 54 and 70 and things caught on tape. And 911 calls, like those terrible tornadoes in Oklahoma. They released the 911 tapes. They don't really move the story forward, but they love 911 calls. So we pitch them because they drive up the ratings. So when Trump showed up with his Mar A Lago ratings juggernaut of tackiness at the debates, it was the first time I'd ever seen the entertainment shows like Entertainment Tonight show up for the Republican debates. Like paparazzi and like pushing and shoving. I'd never seen anything like it in the spin room before. And one girl who worked with us covering Jeb Bushy was like, literally run over by like the fanatic craziness when Trump was came in the room. And now the conventions, we're anticipating so much protest. We've added a whole team in case stuff gets really crazy. And it's funny to think how like those debates the last time around with Mitt Romney, how quaint it all seems. Like, how can we ever go back to someone like that? Who am I voting for? I mean, we're just so trained, not to mention make our feelings known. But I'm for, I'm for the practical. I'm for Hillary. And I mean, I appreciate Bernie Sanders and I would vote for him if he were the nominee.
- [39:13]
David Remnick
But I think that I am.
- [39:16]
Unnamed Network News Worker
I am for Hillary. And Hillary is not so good. She needs help. I'm in news, so I have to appear impartial. But when a friend posts on Facebook, I for one am excited to see a female president. And everyone, you know, gets in line and starts skewering that person on their computers and phone. I mean, now even the idea that people could sit down at 6:30 every day to watch the stories that made my mom cry in Chicago seems pretty antiquarian. When 911 happened, I wanted to hear Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw. I wanted a voice, a voice of God. When are we going to come together? I thought we'd come together together by now. But, you know, for better or worse, Trump's made people watch and participate and think and talk. Water cooler moments. I mean, I don't think there were any water cooler moments after Rick Santorum had a zinger. And it's scary, but the only thing you see as a beacon of hope is at least people are paying attention.
- [40:45]
Rafi Khachaturian
Oh, man, Michael, the end of that is just so beautiful and chilling to me.
- [40:51]
Sarah Larson
Yeah, a series. I mean, I think her talking about 911 and then connecting it to her wanting to make stories that would make her mom cry in Chicago is just. And that seems antiquated now.
- [41:03]
Rafi Khachaturian
Michael, did you feel that the woman that you interviewed for this song, is she optimistic at all? Is she. I mean, it sounded to me as if she is. Despite everything she describes, I think she.
- [41:16]
Sarah Larson
Is in a kind of. And maybe this is my way out of this election to find some kernel of. I found her that she had, because of her work in the media, a real clarity of vision about how rough things are, but also an idea of, like, what I do and who I am maybe is of value still.
- [41:33]
Rafi Khachaturian
Yeah. Thanks, Michael.
- [41:35]
Sarah Larson
Thanks, Sarah. Always great talking to you.
- [41:37]
Rafi Khachaturian
Great talking to you. Good luck on the road.
- [41:40]
Sarah Larson
Thanks. Bye.
- [41:41]
Rafi Khachaturian
Bye.
- [41:42]
David Remnick
Composer Michael Friedman talking with the New Yorker's Sarah Larson. Friedman is headed this week to Cleveland, God bless him, for the Republican convention. We're gonna switch gears. Enough with the politics. We're gonna talk about something maybe even grosser, depending on your bacteria. A report from the frontline of exploration of the microbial world. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. I'm David Remnick and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us. We're going to finish up this hour with staff writer Rafi Khach Dorian, who spent a lot of time this spring with a scientist named Slava Epstein, who is dedicated to the search for new forms of life. So, Rafi, you've done this big article about bacteria, and I was surprised to learn from you that bacteria on Earth. Wait for it, weighs much more than all the people on the Earth. Hundreds of billions of pounds, which is, I have to say, kind of gross.
- [43:02]
Rafi Khachaturian
Well, it's gross if you think about it. But, you know, bacteria Are we think of them as being like kind of the archetype of the horror movie. They invade our body and they cause us to be ill. But if you set that aside and the sense of grossness really begins to vanish. Because bacteria were here for 2 billion years before macroscopic life emerged, our own sort of multicellular life. And they very much set the conditions of life on this planet. And yet, at the same time, we know incredibly little about them. They have eluded systematic scientific study to a surprising extent. And a couple months ago, I went to go visit a scientist who's been obsessed with this problem. And his name is Slava Epstein, and he is a professor at Northeastern University.
- [43:49]
Slava Epstein
An illustration of our ignorance is this. If you take a textbook and you eliminate 99% of the words and you leave 1% of randomly distributed words on the page, how much will that book tells you? Well, that's about how much we know about the microorganisms on our planet, about 1%. We're wonderfully ignorant. And I'm saying wonderfully because it gives you not only a challenge, but also an immense opportunity.
- [44:23]
David Remnick
So Slava Epstein is at Northeastern University. But Rafi, I don't think that's a.
- [44:26]
Rafi Khachaturian
Boston accent, not unless there's a city in the former Soviet Union that's called Boston. Now, he's from Russia, and he grew up in Moscow at a time when the space race was very active between the United States and the Soviet Union. And he was very passionate about going into astronomy. But Slava is half Jewish, and at that time, there were quotas limiting Jews in academia. And so his family and teachers really discouraged him from pursuing that dream.
- [44:55]
Slava Epstein
I was told when I was a kid that under no circumstances I was supposed to follow a career in anything related to physics or math. Physics and math were perceived as closer to national secrets or whatever, stupid as it might have been. But that's the way it was perceived. And the quota on Jews in those areas was much more strict than in some other fields like biology.
- [45:31]
Rafi Khachaturian
So, David, in fact, he did take up biology. And here, for me, was a very poignant part of the story. Because he had switched careers, but because his social milieu was filled with sort of dissident students, he was once again told that he wouldn't really be able to advance in that career. And so he basically eventually was able to find a job 10 time zones away in Kamchatka, and ultimately, as the Soviet Union was falling to pieces, was able to emigrate to the United States. He sort of had a typical immigrant story he didn't really speak the language and he didn't really know many people. But Slava is a charismatic guy and he found some people to support him and eventually landed at Northeastern University.
- [46:12]
David Remnick
And he dives into a particular problem, right?
- [46:15]
Rafi Khachaturian
Yes. He becomes curious about this problem called the great plate count anomaly.
- [46:20]
David Remnick
What is that?
- [46:21]
Rafi Khachaturian
Yeah, it's a mouthful. It almost sounds like a geological problem. Basically, if you want to study microbes, what you need to do is you need to get a pure colony in a petri dish. They're incredibly small, and the way microbes reproduce is that they kind of divide and replicate. And so you need to get enough of them so you can figure out how they behave. And almost since sort of the dawn of microbiology, scientists have realized that if you do this, if you put them in some kind of nutrient rich medium, only a tiny fraction, some say even maybe less than 1%, will grow. These are basically the microbial versions of weeds. For more than a century, it's been a baffling problem. Scientists have not been able to figure out how to get the rest of microbial life to grow, particularly bacteria.
- [47:11]
David Remnick
What are the implications of that? Why would we want that to happen? And what would it possibly indicate of great practical and scientific use?
- [47:19]
Rafi Khachaturian
So since humanity has been cultivating bacteria, there have been huge, huge benefits, especially in antibiotics. Almost every antibiotic in modern medicine is derived from bacteria. But here's the thing. Beginning in the 1980s, scientists began to realize that the 1% of bacterial life that had been such a bountiful resource for medicines, they had basically tapped it out. And so, as a resource for antibiotic discovery, the rest of the microbial world was closed off to them, inaccessible, Inaccessible. And this is at a time when they're also noticing the rise of superbugs, of pathogens that are resistant to the medical arsenal that we already have.
- [48:00]
David Remnick
Biologists have known about this problem for a hell of a long time. How did Slava Epstein approach it differently than everybody else?
- [48:07]
Rafi Khachaturian
Slava is a microbial ecologist, and ecologists tend to view the biological world as a kind of system of interdependence. And I think once you start looking at especially microbial life in that way, you come to realize that the conventional method to cultivate bacteria, to take one organism, isolate it, put it on a petri dish, and see if it will grow, just begins to look a little odd. And what Slava realized was that if you could shift your perspective a little bit, if you could try and grow bacteria where they are, you could do that anywhere. You could do it in Greenland and Antarctica or even in his own backyard.
- [48:53]
Slava Epstein
It's a backyard like any other backyard, a few thousand square feet of land. There is nothing particular about it. So I'm holding this, what amounts to a few grams of soil. And this is a few billion cells, tens of thousands, if not millions of species, all involved into fighting, collaborating, copywriting, signaling, talking with each other. And as they do so, they produce compounds we find very useful in our life because at concentrations high enough, they become new antibiotics. And it's all in these couple of grams of soil. So if we knew how to grow all the organisms from. Would probably keep the drug industry going for years just from a couple of grams.
- [49:48]
Rafi Khachaturian
Slava began this effort to try and cultivate bacteria in the soil in the 1990s with a colleague. His name is Kim Lewis. And their first plan, David, was a disaster. The basic problem was that they had put the microbes into these little containers that had kind of these porous membranes, and it turned out that the microbes loved to eat that porous membrane, and they were breaking out of jail, essentially.
- [50:12]
David Remnick
Damnable microbes, right?
- [50:16]
Rafi Khachaturian
And so eventually, in a moment of frustration, after choosing a new membrane but being unable to sort of build an appropriate container for them, Slava went to go see Kim Lewis at his office, which was then at Tufts University, and they vowed to figure out the solution to the problem. That evening.
- [50:36]
Slava Epstein
I remember in his office, he stands up, closes the door, and says, slava, we're not leaving. Really. We're not leaving until we come up with something, because we have to. I agreed with him, but the problem was that I only had 40 minutes, because in 40 minutes, I had to go. I had to go because I was supposed to meet in the evening for a night out with my wife, who would not tolerate my being late. That was the challenge. I had 40 minutes, and we had to come up with something.
- [51:14]
Rafi Khachaturian
Because you had a date.
- [51:15]
Slava Epstein
Because I had a date with my wife. And that refuge worked when you have to. You do.
- [51:30]
Rafi Khachaturian
Now, David, I don't know if you've seen the movie Hudsucker Proxy, but in that movie, there's a running gag where different innovations are being designed, and the blueprints for those are basically just a circle on graph paper. So one is the hula hoop and another is the straw. And the thing that Slava and Kim Lewis Lewis came up with could have just been one of those items, because it was basically just a metal washer, and they glued their membranes to either side of the metal washer and the Space in the middle was a perfect little container for bacteria to thrive in.
- [52:03]
David Remnick
And they got it done in 40 minutes. And he had his date with his wife.
- [52:06]
Rafi Khachaturian
And he had his date for his wife. Yeah. So basically within a week of inventing this device, Slava was out on the Massachusetts Bay, testing it out in marine sediment on the shore, and they were able to cultivate new forms of life.
- [52:21]
David Remnick
That's amazing. That's a number of years ago now. What's happened Since?
- [52:24]
Rafi Khachaturian
Well, in 2003, Slava and Kim formed a company. It's called Novabiotic. And it was basically a way to channel their efforts to use this kind of technology to discover medications, primarily antibiotics. And in that time, I should say, Slava tinkered with the technology and kind of really advanced it. One form which has gotten some attention is called the iChip, but they're really just iterations of the same idea. A container for microbes that allows chemicals to flow in and out of the environment. So bacteria basically stay in their native soil, completely unaware that they're being studied.
- [52:59]
David Remnick
So these new antibiotics, what do they fight against? How are they helping us out?
- [53:04]
Rafi Khachaturian
They have found about 30 promising candidate drugs, let's call them. And last year they announced two with very unique properties. One of those drugs, called Texobactin, interferes with the cell wall of many sort of well known pathogens, multidrug resistant tuberculosis, staph infections, and basically causes the pathogen to explode.
- [53:27]
David Remnick
And we're still in the research stage?
- [53:28]
Rafi Khachaturian
Yes, we are still in the research stage. It's sort of the early drug development stage. They have a peer reviewed paper on it and they have proven efficacy in small animals. And now they've kind of got to take the next series of steps to get to clinical trials.
- [53:40]
David Remnick
So in a way, this is a guy who started out wanting to see the stars and he ends up discovering this whole new microscopic world.
- [53:49]
Rafi Khachaturian
Yeah, Slava has a wonderful wandering intellect. And one afternoon during my visit to see him, he kind of gleefully put in front of me a raft of papers that contained designs for a device that he calls Gulliver, which would be a sort of mobile robotic lab that could isolate and study bacteria all on its own. It's an upgrade to the iChip idea, and it's still theoretical, but he's got big plans for it.
- [54:18]
Slava Epstein
My true hope is that if that device pans out, and I have no reason to believe it won't, when it does, we may be able to use it at the bottom of the ocean. We may be able to use it under ice in Greenland, but even more so, we will be able to use it and study microbial life on Mars or on Europa, where microbiologists are not going to be anytime soon. But Gulliver hopefully will.
- [54:54]
David Remnick
Slava Epstein of Northeastern University. He spoke with the New Yorker's Rafi Khachtorin. And you can find Rafi's article the unseen@newyorkerradio.org all right, that's it. Time's up. Next week, we'll be bringing you coverage of the Republican Convention in Cleveland. Keep up with us till then on twitter@New Yorkerradio. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining me today and have a great week.
- [55:22]
Interviewer/Host (possibly David Remnick or a producer)
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed, composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music this week from Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Emily Botin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfiel and Steven Valentino, with help from Owen Agnew, Alex Barron, Becky Cooper, Johnny Vincevans and Matt Fiddler. Special thanks this week to Parker Posey, Dimitri Martin, Susan Morrison and Emma Allen. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Churina Endowment Fund.