Hey there listeners, Galen here. Before we get started, I wanted to let you in on some big news,

which is that after a two and a half year hiatus, 538 is going to again be hitting the road for

a live show. We're going to be in Washington DC on October 25th. We will be at 6th and I. It's

going to be just before the midterm elections. So come and join us. I'm going to put a link in the

show notes where you can find tickets. Again, that's October 25th at 6th and I in Washington DC.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Hello and welcome to the 538 Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Drouk. What effect is social media having

on our politics? And for that matter, society more broadly. According to critics, we're living

through an unregulated era of social media that will look as quaint as tobacco in its pre-regulation

era. Sigrats, those pleasurable ubiquitous little sticks, turned out to be highly addictive,

detrimental to overall health, and ultimately deadly. It took a decades-long crusade to convince

the public as much and then regulate and punish the industry that promoted them. New York Times

reporter Max Fisher agrees with this view. In his new book, he writes, The Early Conventional

Wisdom that social media promotes sensationalism and outrage while accurate, turned out to drastically

understate things. An ever-growing pool of evidence suggests its impact is far more profound.

This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity and is so

pervasive to our lives that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another.

The effect multiplied across billions of users has been to change society itself. Fisher describes

those changes as contributing to political and social crises. Social media's effect on politics

has been increasingly scrutinized and debated since the 2016 election, and it's again in the spotlight

as we head into the midterms. So that is what we're going to talk about today with Max Fisher himself.

His new book is called The Chaos Machine, The Inside Story of how social media rewired our minds

...