The Drift

Notes On Losing a Friend to the Rabbit Hole

The other day I saw an old friend that I’ve known for almost 30 years. Let’s call him Bob. We met in tech in the late 90s, when we were both young and enthusiastic and thought the industry was universally a force for good.

Bob was a really bright and super thoughtful guy. He read lots of books, loved films and always had a take on cool new music. He seemed to read everything and had opinions on things most of us had never considered. For example, he used to rail on stuff like the Federal Reserve before most of us knew that was even a thing. Bob was someone you’d have dinner with and you knew you weren’t up for an evening of small talk. He’d push back against your takes, though he always did it with kindness and empathy and he’d make you sharper for it.

I don’t know exactly when he started slipping. Like a lot of people, he seemed to have a particularly hard time with the pandemic. We all did, but Bob had a harder one than most. From my vantage point, he came out the other side a completely different person.

The change seemed to happen right when he stopped trusting the public health guidance, then the people giving it, then the institutions behind them. By the time the mRNA shots came around he was sending me long posts from writers, scientists and other ‘experts’ I’d never heard of, and I’d check the sources, and most of them had Wikipedia pages explicitly identifying them as purveyors of medical misinformation. When I shared that counterpoint with him, Bob wrote back that Wikipedia is controlled by the intelligence community. I don’t even know what to do with a sentence like that. I just told him that I cared about him and eventually stopped responding.

A while later, I tried again. I sent him a New York Times piece about the dangers of doing your own research, hoping it might land. The Times had finally put into words what I’d been trying to explain to him - that just because you can find information online doesn’t mean you’re equipped to evaluate it, and that there’s no shame in deferring to people who have spent their careers studying these questions. Bob wrote back that the article was making his point for him - that an institution telling people to stop looking into things and trust the experts was exactly the dynamic he'd been describing. He said the framing assumed the experts were neutral, when the whole question was whether they were. I thought it was a piece any reasonable person would find compelling. Of course he didn’t get there but I think that says more about his frame of mind than the piece itself.

I bring this up now because I went to a party last week hosted by the one guy I know who still talks to Bob. I’ll admit I was curious to see him, in part because I wondered how far gone he was. He came up to say hello, and I was in a conversation with someone talking about the hantavirus. The guy I was speaking with told me there were three deaths in New Mexico. Bob chimed in to suggest how the timing was suspicious, how nobody was asking the right questions. As I suspected and right on cue.

I talked to Bob for a little while. When I asked him about his kids, he told me they were doing great and that he homeschools both of them now. He talks about it the way someone talks about a moral position rather than a logistical choice. I knew his kids when they were younger, and they were really good kids. My recollection is that they were polite, curious, and playful, and like their dad, very bright. They went to private school with my kids and always got stellar grades. After hearing that he pulled them from school, I mostly feel sad for them. They’re going to grow up in a sealed world, and one day they’re going to walk out of it and discover how much of life they missed.

Bob was early on Bitcoin and made real money. It came up in our conversation at the party, and he told me he now buys gold and silver too. He told me he keeps all of these assets tucked away in a safe hidden at his house. He described the dollar as an ice cube sitting outside on a hot summer day. He pulled out of equities in 2022 and has missed every gain since. When I mentioned that my retirement accounts had a strong year, he smiled at me the way you smile at a child.

At face value, Bob seemed to be the same. He wasn’t ranting like a madman or foaming at the mouth, as I might expect. He was still witty, though during the course of the discussion I came to terms with the fact that the guy I used to hang with is never coming back. There’s a difference between being skeptical of institutions and believing every institution is captured, and I don’t know when or why he eventually crossed that line, but he is well past it. I was within earshot of another discussion he was having and heard him utter the phrase “false flag” to a group of people. He said it the way you’d name a show on Netflix, with no awareness of how it landed. I walked over to the person he was talking to after they split apart and explained that this is actually a really good guy and that he just has some issues.

My wife has had Long COVID for almost three years now. When I told that to Bob, he started getting into this rant about how it might have been the 5 Pfizer shots she took. I thought he sounded like a complete lunatic, but I just nodded along and changed the subject. The top-notch doctors my wife has seen have all agreed it’s post-viral. I would never mention any of this to my wife, as I know she would tell me I’m not allowed to speak to him ever again.

What worries me most is the radicalization. I don't use that word lightly, but I don't know what else to call it. Every algorithm he's on is feeding him the next thing. I don't ever engage, but I follow all of his posts on social media, and they've gotten weirder and weirder. He seems to question the authenticity of elections, life-saving medicines, and every single geopolitical conflict. He's also convinced the climate risks are overblown and a way for who he calls "the globalists" to control us. At this point, I've stopped asking him to be more specific. The last time we spoke before this party, I learned my lesson when I told him he was sounding like Marjorie Taylor Greene. He just laughed. He says he's not MAGA but at this point I don't know what else to call it.

A mutual friend with training in this area told me she thinks Bob might benefit from talking to a professional and very likely medication. There’s absolutely no shame in it. Half the people I know are on something. It’s how we get through. But I know Bob won’t even consider it. I didn’t ask explicitly, but I’ve read posts of his where he talks about how the pharmaceutical companies have a financial interest in his diagnosis. I suppose every system has incentives if you zoom out far enough. But he is suffering, and there is help, and he refuses to take it.

He’s also a danger, and I hate to say that about a friend. Not to me, but to his kids, who aren’t vaccinated (that was part of his rationale for homeschooling). To his elderly mother, to everyone in his orbit who has to decide whether to keep seeing him.

It was good to see Bob. I sent him a text after telling him as much. He texted back with a very kind note. I’d like to have a relationship, but I won’t try to engage him on anything of substance ever again. The last time I tried, really tried, sat down with him in his kitchen and asked him what had happened to him, he told me he was the same person he’d always been. That I was the one who’d changed. That I’d stopped paying attention. That I was the one in the dream.

Candidly, I think he genuinely believes that. Which is part of what worries me.

I hope he comes back. I don't know if that's even possible at this point. But if he won't see a doctor, maybe something else gets through to him. His kids deserve better than this. Not for nothing, but I deserve my friend back. Not this version of Bob but the one I used to know.