Get on your cult-leader grindset
Psycho visionaries, declining NYC coolness, the TikTok-to-Soho cycle and more with writer Ezra Marcus
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The young, gifted & cool writer Ezra Marcus specializes in gripping stories about crime — specifically, crime so unhinged, jaw-dropping, and weirdly American that, in aggregate, his pieces paint a vivid picture of the Contemporary National Soul at its most Strange & Twisted.
Ezra lives in New York and writes mostly for New York. He broke through in 2019 with a fantastic feature about a supposed-ex-CIA operative who turned a group of students at the elite liberal-arts school Sarah Lawrence into a sex cult. In 2023, Ezra put out another blockbuster, this time unearthing tales of stomach-turning insanity (including feline-cruelty allegations I’ve done my best to block out) at the buzzy Hollywood restaurant Horses.
Just last week he put out a new piece about “Two Vegan Lovers, an A.I. ‘Cult,’ and a Trail of Dead Bodies.” The story has its roots here in the Bay Area, where Ezra’s originally from, and where Blackbird Spyplane is based.
The other day I (Jonah) hit him up for some patented “Spyplane Big-Brained Turbo Talk” about what entrepreneurs have in common with cult leaders, bizarre manifestations of human darkness, the art of writing features at a high level, the declining coolness of NYC, and other topics.
Blackbird Spyplane: A recurring theme in your stories is cults. I’d imagine there’s no shortage of domineering, would-be cult leaders, but some reach a level of viability others don’t. What sets a successful cult apart from one that can’t quite cut it in the marketplace?
Ezra Marcus: “Well, first of all, there’s a difference between cults that are successful in getting people to throw their lives away, cut off their families and join up with some guy, versus cults that, once they do that, are also successful at becoming lucrative enterprises. So take Larry Ray, the Sarah Lawrence cult leader I wrote about. He was incredibly effective at getting a small number of people to devote themselves entirely to his beliefs, and he managed to extract a fair amount of money from them, but he also got caught and went to jail and was incredibly stupid about the way he approached it. He left a huge trail of obvious evidence where the behavior was blatantly criminal.
“Whereas, with something like Scientology that’s immensely sophisticated, it’s not only about having this internal belief system that draws people in and has layers they need to reach. They’ve also amassed huge real-estate holdings and real businesses and turned into an effective enterprise.
“I think the most successful cults combine both. On the one hand there’s the aura-crafting of the leader, the ‘world-building.’ And typically, the better you are at doing that, the crazier you are, and the worse you are at the self-preservation business side of it. But sometimes you can strike a balance where you develop a set of fringe ideas that attract vulnerable people you can manipulate, but you also have the wherewithal to not end up in jail for life for sex trafficking, or what-have-you.”
Blackbird Spyplane: When you’re reporting a story about sinister freaks who do nasty shit, and you’re really in deep, do you feel things start to warp and darken around you? Or are you able to keep it at a remove?
Ezra Marcus: “You know, I hate horror movies. I can’t watch them. I’m afraid of them. But when it comes to this stuff in real life, I just find it so compelling. It’s like it breaks through to this other level of reality that makes me feel super alive, just thinking about this sick, nasty stuff. It cuts against the feeling that life is boring. The feeling that our society has become this deadened, monotonous, social-media-regulated, beige, Sweetgreen purgatory. It’s like, ‘No, there’s still some freaks out there, and they’re getting down and dirty.’ It makes me feel excited, even though the behavior is reprehensible.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Your newest story came out last week, about the Zizians, a group of people who love Harry Potter and hung out on Discord in the orbit of a writer named Ziz. They believe that A.I. is going to rule over us, and that if we’re not careful it’s gonna treat us the same cruel way we treat animals on factory farms — so, to avoid that fate, we need to become vegan and adhere to strict definitions of good and evil. And they’ve been charged with murdering a bunch of people in the name of that worldview. There’s something so Old Testament about it, updated for the internet era. Righteous violence in the name of a merciless God, except the God is A.I.
Ezra Marcus: “It’s basically the oldest example of world building there is: ‘There’s a God, we’re going to build it, it’s going to turn us into the chosen people, we’re going to live in paradise with our animal friends, and everyone else is gonna burn.’”
Blackbird Spyplane: I like that you use the phrase “world building.” It’s become one of these LinkedIn-style terms, like “storytelling,” that we encounter in entrepreneurial / motivational / grindset contexts. That makes me think about another story you wrote, about these guys the Amor brothers, who opened a chain of smoke shops and got rich making and selling highly addictive yet legal tanks of blueberry-flavor nitrous oxide, which they marketed as Galaxy Gas — despite the fact that huffing it can destroy people’s spines and wreck their neurological functioning. When I think about that kind of entrepreneurial mindset in relation to the mindset of a cult leader, they seem like extremely similar psychologies: both reflect a desire to inflate your own wealth and power in direct proportion to the debilitating level of control you assert over other people, whether it’s customers or addicts or disciples.
Ezra Marcus: “If you imagine a sliding scale, where on one side you have arcane world-building, and on the other side you have profit motive and savviness, maybe it’s like you can slide the slider one way or the other: As it goes toward the world-building side, the profits go down, but the intensity of the beliefs go up. And vice versa. I don’t wanna ascribe too many motives to the Amor brothers, but you might say they were relatively cynical about pursuing a product line, compared to a true believer, like Ziz, who is willing to sacrifice everything.
“But I think they all have a certain visionary quality — an ability to see something, and come up with something new, even if it’s an iteration on something that came before it. I think that’s what attracts me to these stories in general. You can see the shape of something new inside of them. You see the image of people stumbling out of these smoke shops, getting into their cars and hitting tanks of flavored gas and getting into a fatal car accident. That gives me the same feeling of novelty as a group of people walking around the woods in North Carolina with Sith robes and guns, living in box trucks. It’s dark, but these people are certainly innovating on ways you can live your life, and what life can look like. In terms of the way you build a brand or the way you build a cult, yeah, I do think it’s essentially the same. It is world building, on some level.”
Blackbird Spyplane: One of your biggest stories came out a couple years ago, about a bunch of horrible shit behind the scenes at Horses, which was an extremely popping L.A. restaurant at the time. That’s a scoop you got because you just overheard someone talking about it at a party and walked over, like, ‘Come again?’ It’s fascinating how much of being a good journalist can boil down to just being in the right place at the right time, with your antenna up.
Ezra Marcus: “Yeah, it was a friend of a friend, just sort of yapping about this crazy gossip she heard about the cats and the strangling. I took it to my editor and said, ‘I just have a feeling.’ They were like, ‘No way,’ but I thought it was too baroque to not be true, at least on some level. So I do think it’s about luck, and about being in a position to exploit luck. There’s so much gossip flying around constantly — it’s about hearing something that activates your radar in a way that’s almost indescribable. I get this sense of ‘I need to know more,’ and I just trust it.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I’m curious to ask you about the New York media community circa 2025. When I was in the early part of my career, I often found it hard to hang out with other writers. This is probably true of any industry town, but I’d go to media parties or whatever and leave feeling bad about myself, because there was this jittery energy of competition, unhappiness and envy in the air — so much status anxiety packed into the room. I’d say that maybe I brought some of that anxiety to the table myself, except I’ve always been very chill, ego-free, talented and successful. Does that description resonate with your experience of New York media these days?
Ezra Marcus: “I think about this a lot. The media landscape as it relates to social life now, compared to even 10 years ago, is so stripped-down and lacking — it’s almost like, What media parties? It doesn’t feel like there’s much of an interesting social scene I could be a part of if I wanted to. When I was younger, I had this thing of, ‘I’m gonna have all these cool media friends and it’ll be like Graydon Carter in the ‘90s,’ and now there’s so much less of it, and what is there, I’m just like, ‘These parties suck.’ I’d rather hang out with people that aren’t dorks who all write for the same publications talking about whatever boring gossip they have about other writers, like, ‘Can you believe this person got a byline somewhere?’
“I do like talking to people who do what I do. But I think when you’re a writer there’s a lot more value in having a social group that doesn’t include a lot of writers, because then we’re all just talking about the same stuff. I get interesting leads from talking to people with completely different sets of cultural references. The party where I got the Horses thing, there were no other writers at that party.”
“Also at this point our industry is so small, it almost feels like a guild of artisans talking about, ‘Oh, we have this amazing new way to make horseshoes,’ and we’re sitting next to the highway. No one else cares!”
Blackbird Spyplane: When you invoke that ‘90s Graydon Carter moment, the time I’m describing, in the late 2000s, early 2010s, was probably the last gasp where that sort of career was even imaginable.
Ezra Marcus: “I’ve got friends in the art world, or in film — industries that have their problems but don’t feel like this dessicated shell the way media does. And I think there’s way more interesting information floating around those spheres, where you still have real rich people putting real interest into things. And that’s often where stories come from: the collision between novelty and wealth.
“That’s basically what Vanity Fair was all about in the ‘90s. I’m reading Graydon Carter’s autobiography now, which is why he’s so front of mind. It’s fascinating to think about how the media used to be an equivalent cultural tentpole to film or the art world. Like, Graydon Carter kind of ran the world. And now the media is clearly two or three rungs below, in terms of significance.”
Blackbird Spyplane: That segues perfectly into my last question. We do live in a time of great change. The old verities are crumbling. You’re from the East Bay, and you live in New York, which is interesting to me because I’m from New York and live in the East Bay. And on the topic of laws of physics turning on their heads, I feel like the materials are there for the Bay to surpass New York City in coolness, maybe sooner than we think. We’re not there yet, a few things need to shake out, and the Bay has some definite issues coolness-wise — but I think we might be closer than we’ve ever been. Unless you reject the premise entirely, what do you think it’s gonna take to seal the deal?
Ezra Marcus: “I do not reject the premise. I don’t know that New York is necessarily cool in the same way anymore. I think New York is clearly still the place where you can see trends from the Internet manifest the quickest. Where you can see teenagers wearing their pants cut in particular ways, and identify how and why they’re doing it, in a way that you’re not gonna see as sharply in other cities. But it’s become so saturated and so expensive, and the quality of almost everything about it feels really degraded relative to price point. The only thing that New York is still the apex city for is getting f**ked-up with your friends in shitty bars in a really convenient way. And, unfortunately, that is still the best thing for me to do at this stage of my life.
“But in terms of restaurants and culture, it feels torched. There’s this tap dance with social-media trends, and it’s so fast-moving that nothing sticks. There’s no regionality. It just feels like this rapid churn of TikTok to Soho to TikTok to Soho — it doesn’t feel like it means that much.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Mamma mia.
Ezra Marcus: “There’s this William Gibson passage in All Tomorrow’s Parties where he describes how subculture is gonna be laid waste to by technology.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Shout out to Spyfriend William Gibson, I hope he’s reading this.
Ezra Marcus: “Let me look it up, it’s a little long, but it’s great:
“Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies. Each one would have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expression, a substance or substances of choice, and a set of sexual values at odds with those of the culture at large. And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct.” “Extinct?” “We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters. They went the way of geography in general.”
“I think we really do have too much surveillance and taste awareness in New York for novelty to emerge. And I think the Bay Area gives you a lot more breathing room. In New York it’s so much more mediated, and at the same time hyper-social, which I love, but I think it’s hard for people to escape the rat-race feeling and come up with something exciting.
“Whereas, whenever I’m home in the East Bay and I go for a hike or something, I feel like Kanye. I feel, like, psychotically, manically up. Like I have actually good ideas. I can embody that mindset of, ‘Wow — I just wanna get in the lab and do something.’”
Ezra Marcus is on Instagram here and on Twitter here. His writing for New York and The New York Times, among other places, is here.
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Great interview! I have an antidote to the last bit about too much surveillance and taste awareness in NY - or the East Bay, or anywhere, really - for novelty to emerge. It’s simple and free! Get off Insta. Look up for gods sake! Use your own eyes. Make your own observations. Have IRL interactions with actual people, whether you know them or not. Take a walk. Take the subway. Ride a ferry. Ride a citibike! It’s MAGICAL. And inspiring. And it never, ever gets old.
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