What's Behind the Internet's Fascination with Luigi Mangione? | Pivot

Anyway, let's get to our first big story. One of the biggest stories this week, obviously, Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old man charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Bryan Thompson. There's a lot of information out there about his online presence. Everyone's digging for clues. There's been stories about whether that means anything or not. I think one of the best story I read was about him being kind of a typical tech bro. If- if he hadn't shot this guy, he would have seemed relatively normal in his interests. What was your first reaction when you started hearing about this guy? He stopped communicating with friends and family about six months ago and really went offline. He was quite an active online person, like a lot of people his age in his sector, in the tech sector. I think he was... He worked for TrueCar. I think he was a video game aficionado. Um, he did have health issue over the last years on Reddit. He talked about this back problem he had and struggled with brain fog. John Hermon wrote in New York Magazine, "What's most striking about the... Mangione's, uh, extensive online dossier is that had it been studied before the shooting took place, it wouldn't have raised much alarm." Uh, very difficult to characterize. Um, what do you... Ta- talk about that first, then we'll talk about the reaction from people.

Well, okay, so first reaction is, in my opinion, and, you know, let me be arrogant here, I think the correct reaction is to feel, um, sympathy for the family of this man who was murdered. And then, and then what I immediately registered was everybody decided that they would use this event to speculate on what happened to confirm their current beliefs. So, people immediately went to, um, this is justified, uh, because this is an uprising or this is... You know, the most shocking thing about this isn't about the murderer. I mean, that's a tragedy 'cause when you're a young high school valedictorian with an engineering and computer science degree and master's degree, respectively, from an Ivy League university and you're handsome and in great shape, your li- and, and your life is over, that's a tragedy as well. But the reality is, any speculation around what was going through his head, you're just getting lost in the soup.

That's right.

We have no fucking idea.

No idea.

We don't know if he had a schizophrenic break. We don't know if he was a Ted Kaczynski-like character who was a genius, but came off the rail. We don't know. And you know what? It, it doesn't really matter, in my opinion, as much. What matters, or the most interesting thing here, is how society has responded. And I, I can tell you how someone feels about this based on, with 70 or 80% accuracy, based on one thing. Can you afford, pretty easily, health insurance? Because here's some data. Um, 60% of bankruptcies are related to medical debt, and the largest source of bankruptcy is medical debt. We pay $1,500 per person for pharmaceuticals versus $500 elsewhere, despite the fact that we manufacture and distribute them. We spend $13,000 a year on healthcare, despite the fact that everyone else pays $6,500 and we have lower health expectancies. People, people oftentimes compare healthcare to how I would describe San Francisco, expensive but bad, in the US, or healthcare in the US. And you have, you have essentially, again, going back to the prison system, when we have injected a for-profit motive, where the largest lobbying groups in Washington aren't big tech, they aren't the defense industry, they are the healthcare industry, which spends three quarters of a billion dollars. And what you end up with is, despite the fact that 70% of America supports price caps and universal healthcare, it doesn't happen.