Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we'll discuss some things that stood out to us in the book amusing ourselves to death, which is from 1985, written by Neil Postman. And it looks at what it calls the show business based culture that we currently live in and how that affects public discourse and ultimately our ability to engage in the functions of self governance.
Hello. Welcome to the call like I see it, podcast.
I'm James Keys, and rolling with me today is a man who loves podcasting. Like all kids love Kate Kunde yoga and Lana Kunde. You ready to hit us with all of those 21 questions?
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Yeah, man, I gotta put on some weight, too.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: All right, all right.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: I'm gonna be a fat kid that loves cake.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: There you go. There you go. Now, before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe hit like and all that with YouTube or your podcast platform. Doing so really helps the show out.
Now, we're recording this on July 23, 2024, and we continue our culture series today by doing some reading between the lines in the 1985 book amusing ourselves to death, public discourse in the age of show business. And that's by Neil Postman. In the book, Postman looks at how changes in mediums of communication that are used by cultures affect the people in the cultures and also, and how they interact with and perceive what's going on in the culture, in the society.
Tunde, I want you to get us started with this, and, you know, we'll kind of just jump right in. You know, just your thoughts on the book and its main premise and the way that television is being the current medium of communication and, you know, which can be extrapolated out, the video in general, and how that presents contact content as entertainment and as a result, may handicap our ability to engage in serious matters.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think, first of all, profound book, you've done a great job. This is another one in the series that you've recommended. So thank you for that. And I say the word profound in nothing lightly. It was, it really, really helped me understand, actually, just kind of just how we as a society consume things and how it affects the discourse in society. And I was even reminded in parts of the book, like, they talked about things like Sesame street as an example of the first time to try and use television as a way to educate kids. And then, you know, I'm 46, so I can remember watching Sesame street in the early eighties in kindergarten. And so it kind of made me think about, okay, well, I guess, yeah, 300 years ago, it would have been a totally different experience just being alive and without the influence of the screen, like you said, and whatever the screen is influencing you about. And so I don't know we can get into that. But to me, that was the most kind of profound thing, is that how immersed we all are not only now in television, but also in the Internet and everything else, but the idea of screens and how much of our life we spend in front of them and how much they influence us. And so I thought it was a great, a great book for many reasons.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: And I think, you know, for the purposes of the book now, the book was written in 1985. Parts of it read like it was written last year, you know, just in terms of what the, when he's talking about that. But what you have to do is extrapolate and understand that when he's talking television, it's really video content, you know, is really the cause that's defining. At that time in the eighties, video content was, you know, television, movies and things like that. But now video content can be on our phone, can be on a tablet or anything like that. YouTube is full of video content, but that's not, we don't necessarily consider that television in the same sense, but it's the same kind of thing. And the, the primacy of entertainment is in this medium was really what stood out to me in this, because he actually starts the book by going back and talking about your previous times, when the printing press being another big change in medium of communication and the media that's being used from the standpoint of you then have mass distribution of written word and how that he goes back and talks about the history of that, how that affect, for example, the american colonies and, you know, and so forth and with books everywhere and so forth, and how you have a more literate society than you might had in previous generations. Of course, when there were very much less books in circulation, how that affected public discourse, how that affected how people looked at issues, how that affected how people got their entertainment. You know, whether, you know, when you're talking about video, you might have a much shorter time frame that you're willing to deal with or engage with something from an entertainment standpoint. But when, if you're look to a more print based society, you're, you're, you have a longer kind of run up that you're willing to give. Talking about, you know, you mentioned the Lincoln Douglas debates that people went to for entertainment and they're like hours long. And it's like, man, I can't imagine masses of people going somewhere than watching debates for hours long, right? Now, because with the video, it's a higher stimulation, but likely not something where you'll watch the same thing for overly long period of time. So just going, I think the ability where the book going back to start and kind of taking you through that and then saying, okay, well, now that we're here in the quote unquote modern age, again, he's writing from the 1980s, it shows when you put entertainment first in terms of. More, when a medium puts entertainment first in terms of, okay, here's how we're going to get this engagement. It's not about, it's not well suited to explain things that take a long time to explain. It's well suited for images. It's well suited for immediacy. And so that part about it, I thought, led a real good groundwork, really, to start understanding some of the things that we are observing today.
There are a lot of concepts in this book that we've talked about observing things today, but this is 40 years ago, kind of introducing these things and saying, hey, this is the kind of thing you have to watch out for. And it's like, oh, yeah, we were just talking about how that is something that affects us now.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it's a great point you make that parts of the book read like it was written a year ago.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Cause I think what he identifies is really, and you put it a good way, the medium of which television brings us entertainment and the way that television itself and videos themselves operate and the way we respond, our brains, it's actually a very human thing. Right? So that's why this, as long as video continues to exist in our existence 100 years from now, some of those things from the book that was written in 1985 will still be relevant because it's just how we relate and how we respond to it. And that's, to me, part of what I just found really actually intriguing in the book. And you went there when you talked about kind of the literacy within the colonies when the country was founded around that period and all that. I mean, that was pretty, to me, just eye opening. I didn't realize how literate, you know, they said men were around, you know, 90% literate in the New England colonies, women, you know, in the high sixties, maybe 70%. And at that time, that was the most literate region in the entire world. And so it's, again, and this is, we're talking 300 years ago, you know, 200, 5300 years ago. So even the idea of literacy, I was reminded, we just take that for granted in our modern society. That most people can read and kind of just comprehend things in that way. And so the other thing that, to me really stuck out, which. Which I found interesting, was how technology advanced all this. And he kind of goes back to. He starts about the printing presses and all that. And I looked it up. The first printing press was in Germany in 1440, but I wanted to look up, when did they get, like, popular in the US? It was about the late 1630s, it looks like. Then you had the telegraph and the next big jump.
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Telegraph, yeah, big jump. Just to set it up real quick. Like the telegraph being a big innovation, because prior to the telegraph, information could only travel as fast as humans. You know, so, you know, you had trains, but that's as far. What do you say 30 miles an hour was as far as information could travel. So, you know, word could not spread very quickly about things. Something happened in New York. It would be 30 miles an hour before it would get to Chicago or, you know, Philadelphia or whatever.
[00:08:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: Versus telegraph. It's instantaneous.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Was instant. Yeah. And the whole thing with Morse code and, you know, Mister Morse was the one that invented, you know, the way to communicate that way. And so that was the first time where a concept was developed, which, I'll hand it back to you. Cause you'll have fun with this, the idea of news of the day.
Cause I never thought of that. There was a time, obviously, before this that you couldn't know what was going on more than outside your town, like, in a given day, because there's just no way to get that information out to people.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Well, it's news of the day. It's very interesting because it's news of the day in the context of most of the things in the news of the day don't really affect your day to day life. Like, it's like, things that are very abstract. And so he talks about, you know, like, this is the first time you start having context free information, meaning, hey, you live in upstate New York. Hey, did you know what happened in Baltimore? It's like, oh, great, you know, now I know what happened in Baltimore. But besides things like maybe a weather kind of event that's coming to you, like, none of that stuff really affects your day. You're not making plans in your. You don't learn something in the news and say, oh, well, let me change my plans for the day, so to speak. It's just kind of like extra stuff that you're being hit with. And, you know, so the telegraph being good for that, and that became an industry, basically. Is let's spread this news around and people will pay for it. And a lot of it, as, you know, as humans will be. A lot of it was gossip based and stuff like that.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Was how fast? Like, it's invented. And like, after the first few times it gets tested out that this thing works. I almost admit, I think it was like two newspapers just started having like a gossip column. Yeah. In Morse code, though. And it got popular. That's how people had to figure out, you know, just how to translate the Morse code and be all into it.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Well, no, that happens on the back end. Once they get, they get it to the new destination. They print it in regular.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: Good point. Yeah. So, but it's just like, because then I started looking at, okay, then I thought about the radio kind of invented in the early 19 hundreds, but then it, by 1920s, it became kind of, you know, more regular in people's homes. And it's the same thing, the technology of, you know, kind of creating a transmitter that can harvest a radio wave and translate it, you know, so you can hear it. But then people use it to tell stories and gossip, right? Things like the brave new world or FDR's fireside chats. And then, of course, television comes by the 1940s and fifties. So it's just before you get too.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: Far away, the other big technological advancement that he pointed to that really set the stage, it was he had the telegraph on one hand and then the photograph and the ability to take images, to capture images, and then you translate those around or whatever. And so, but the capture actual still images, those two combined. And you can imagine how he's putting those together and saying, okay, yeah. When you can, you can transmit information far away and then also you can get visual cap. You can capture visual impressions of that. Of things and then send those. Then that's really the, where he points to as far as this distinct thing, that distinct path we're going on, because ultimately the radio is not much different. And you could look at this as like the difference between podcasts and video shows. You know, podcasts, the form, it's a longer form. You'll sit there and you listen to something for 20 or 30 minutes. You're just hearing people talk. The level of stimulation is lower. And so it engages you in a different way than video, whereas your average video will be much shorter a lot of times with whether it be if you compare, like, audio podcasts versus stuff on YouTube or whatever. And so all of that stuff, to his point, is built into, it's baked into the nature of the medium and the nature of the medium. We kind of, as human beings, as we experiment with these things and see how people react to them, we find the level, so to speak, on how these mediums, or what these mediums are best suited for. And with television, it's best suited for entertainment, stimulation and so forth, in a different way than exposition, written word and reading or hearing and so forth, is suited for explanation and things like that, which is just, it's a different type of thing, which, again, it's kind of the main premise that he then takes from there and shows how that has affected so many things, you know, again, as of 1985 in his mind. But you can see the echoes of that to this day. And then some of the stuff we remember, you know, like, I know you were, you were impressed by, or you noted the televangelist piece. We talked about how the televangelist and how that was a different thing in religion, so to speak. But I do want to keep us moving. But if you add one more thing you want.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: Yeah, no, just the. We can keep them moving. Just the idea, like, what I found just. And then we'll move on. What I found interesting was because I just think we can't relate to this in this, in today's world. How he said, he was kind of guessing that the first 15 presidents of the United States probably would not be recognized if they just walked down some random street. And he talked about, you know, famous literary people like Harriet Beecher Stowe or Charles Dickens or Mark Twain, that, like, if they just walked down this, some random street and got off a train and walked down, no one would bother them because no one would know who they were. And I was just thinking, like, yeah, the idea of celebrity is so different now with the television and all this, because we all see people. So now today, celebrities can't leave their house without getting mobbed.
[00:13:53] Speaker A: The contrast being, if somebody would have said Mark Twain, then everybody would have rushed them. But without the, without hearing, they would have known the name. But the name, they wouldn't have had a face with the name, or they wouldn't have had an image with the name necessarily at that time, until photographs start being accompanying everything as well. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting point, man. And that's just, again, that's how the medium, you know, defines a lot of these interactions that we have.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: And that's where if and I know, we'll do this on the back end of the discussion and just to finish off here. That's why the book being written in 1985. And listen and reading it now is very interesting because he talks, he goes into the trajectory of, he's like, yeah, now we have an ex former movie star as a president at the time was Ronald Reagan. And he had all these examples, and he even said how, like, I guess Ronald Reagan's 1984 opponent had been on, like, tv show, like the Dick Cavett show or something. So he went into all this kind of thing of like the prior, let's say, 2030 years prior to 1985. He was kind of demonstrating how even the politicians now had to play the game and get into entertainment and go on the late night talk shows and all that. So I just found it interesting that, yeah. Society kind of bent to the direction of the television.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
Being, you know, how the medium then, you know, the television as the medium influenced the society so. Well, one of the really interesting things about the book was his contrast of and kind of laying out the dystopian view of Orwell in 1984, which is one that most people are familiar with, you know, like, just this oppressive state that comes in and takes away books and all this other kind of stuff. And I know, is basically sets up, you know, this kind of what we all fear, this oppressive state, you know, and so forth, versus the. The book brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which was dystopian, but in a different way, where people were kind of in, you know, kind of in the context of the book, were amused. They, they were distracted, and they kind of welcomed, you know, because they weren't, they weren't mentally engaged. They kind of welcomed their, you know, they're changed, so to speak. They were not, you know, like, they didn't recognize it as a prison because they were entertained and, you know, and so forth. And so he, and he pointed out that what we're seeing is that the way our current medium, you know, television, real video, you know, you again, extrapolate television out to mean video is, is set up. We're much less likely to end up in some kind of 1984 Orwell type of situation and where we. What we should be watching out for more. So is the brave new world huxley type of situation. And that's really the kind of risk we're looking at in a video based society, because it is easy to distract or to disinform and so forth to where people don't know right from wrong. And one of the quotes, I think, that really stood out in that part to me, he quoted Walter Lippmann, and it was once people are unable to tell, tell apart the truth from the lies, then you can't have, and I'm paraphrasing right now, but you can't have a free society. You can't have a society of self governance because being able to tell truth from lies is kind of vital in that. But so, tunde, what did you think about, you know, this this contrast with brave new World in 1984?
[00:17:16] Speaker B: I thought it was great. And real quick, because I just wrote this note of disinformation versus misinformation. And I think just he made it.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: Careful to define which was good.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Where you were just finishing off with the idea that this is where it's dangerous. And I think when we finish off, we can have this conversation of where we think we are now. But this idea of disinformation is very, I think, key to what the medium of video can bring to because because it can be very convincing in a much different way than, I think, print or audio. And so, but no, but back to your original, you know, and this precise.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Quote, by the way, just real quick, was society cannot have liberty if it loses the ability to detect lies. And that was the quote I paraphrased before from liberty.
[00:18:07] Speaker B: And I think, yeah, let's definitely save that for when you talk about what we've seen in the last 40 years up to now. I think that that speaks a lot to where we are today with things like social media and all that. But just just to get back on the point of kind of the the Orwell versus Huxley, you know, the 1984 totalitarian, authoritarian kind of state versus the brave new world where it's the kind of soma coma. It's funny books I was forced to read in, like, high school actually being used. Now, this is interesting.
I remember being so bored with a brave new world. But when I saw the movie, I got it. I was like, okay, now I get it.
[00:18:44] Speaker A: But it's interesting, actually, that's you're who Postman was writing about this.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: Yeah. No, you're right.
And no, you're absolutely right. I mean, I find out what a lot of things, that the video is a lot easier.
But it is interesting that I agree with his premise if you look at just where we've come. Because if you think about the Orwellian fears were genuine, especially at the time Orwell was alive in the middle to late 20th century. And we really saw that. I mean, people were worried about the Nazi Germany style, not only authoritarianism, but how it comes about with a propaganda minister like Joseph Goebbels or, you know, the real once Soviet Union was under Stalin and you had the politburo and, you know, and this real authoritarian, I mean, that was the true authority in the world. We've seen that in the world. And so, obviously, if we've seen it before in the world and we're a free society, quote, unquote, we wouldn't want that. So it's understandable that that would have dominated the american mind of concern. And then you had people like Ayn Rand with Atlas Shrugged and all these people at, you know, during the 20th century that wrote books. And it wasn't just Orwell about, about the risks of allowing a totalitarian dictator, dictator to take over. But I think, just like with many things in life, you know, we're staring at one thing and not noticing something else creeping up. And I think that's what really, to me, this book made the great point of the kind of profound nature of seeing it that way, that, you know, the soma coma today, you know, could be alcohol, drugs, you know, all that kind of stuff that we kind of numb ourselves with to forget about our stresses of today. But then the other thing I found interesting in comparison were things I remember in the book, you know, just the story of a brave new world. The idea of aging was a very, like, frowned upon. Like, if you looked old, you were, like, at the bottom cast. And I just felt like, yeah, that's true. Look how much money is spent in our economy of facelifts and boob jobs. And now everyone's excited about Ozempic, and it's kind of the same thing. Like, we're prisoners in this world we created. And television and all these screens help to get us there, and we don't realize it. And I think a lot of people in our society are just unhappy at all times now. And they're anxious. And we talk about things like the news of the day. Well, everyone's getting news from everywhere. That freaks them out. I mean, look at what we did a show about the whole protests of the palace in the, you know, the colleges about Gaza and Palestine and Israel.
Those kids in a United States college campus has never even been to Israel and Gaza. So how do they know about it? They know about it by watching screens. And that creates an actual physical result, which is them being stressed out enough to go cause the chaos they cause. So, yeah, to me, is a profound, just way to contrast the orwellian fears of that, of going down that road versus the Huxley fears. And to me, the Huxley is the one we're already in. And we don't realize it. And it's.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I think the one, I mean, he noted in the book how 1984 was really a fear in the context of a print based culture, you know, burning books and so forth.
And then, whereas Huxley and I think we have to acknowledge that from a visual, visual stimulation affects us a lot. You know, so, like, what we see, you got to see it to believe it, so to speak and all that. And that as far as what we think, what we believe, all that, we can be influenced to a more greater extent from the visual. And so I think that's really the power. When we're talking about video, we're talking about television or video and so forth. That we're talking about is that if the same type of thing was done without the video cues, so to speak, it may not be something that is as persuasive or whatever, particularly when it's not put into a quote, unquote, video entertainment context. But one of the point that he made that I think really ties to the brave new world piece is that television alters the meaning of being informed. And so, and what I took that as is that being informed in kind of a television, video based society is really more about a surface level familiarity than really an understanding. And a lot of times that surface level familiarity is one that will only conform to what it is that you already believe or like your kind of core belief anyway. So, because if something challenges that, you're liable to just go somewhere else. And if it's, if there's a menu and it's, hey, I can tell. I can tell me I'm already right. And so what it actually reminds me of is the Roger Ailes kind of quote that people don't want to be informed. They want to feel informed. And feel, I think, is a key part of that. And so if you have the ability to generate video, which is, again, kind of really directly taps into us and give people surface level understanding of whatever it is, and again, surface level understanding that conforms to what it is that they already want to believe, then what you end up having is he defined disinformation. I didn't take that definition definition down, but he defined that. And you end up having a situation where people can be put in a mindset to be their own prison, basically. You're in your own prison. It's not bars and all that kind of stuff. We would resist somebody putting us in chains and putting us behind bars. But you putting your mind in it by kind of lulling you to sleep with disinformation and so forth, to me, does seem like, in many respects, the objective, because whether it be for commercial reasons, to be able to sell you more stuff, or whether it be for political reasons or whatever, it's like the approach that we have, the way that video is used within our society a lot of times is kind of like going down this road already. So I thought the ability to contrast the two, I think, was really the very insightful piece, because you can see how, on one hand, while we're more worried about the orwellian kind of dystopia and that's what's creeping up from behind, is kind of like what you said is something that is much more subtle and something that we would almost welcome, but that takes a. That we don't end up in a situation where we have liberty anymore after that.
[00:25:19] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and you're right. And that's the interesting thing, is we welcome it and we don't realize it. And I think that says a lot. I mean, one of the things that you're reminding me as you're talking of the book that I found interesting as well, is he talked about the difference.
When you're in a culture that's only dealing with print as an individual, you come to a book alone, and so you're processing it alone.
Your mind is figuring things out alone. But when you go to the television, you're no longer really alone. Someone is presenting to you, and in a different way. And the interesting thing, I wrote it down here, said the discontinuity of television doesn't allow for contradiction and meaning. And I would say that even speeds up now even more in the age of TikTok, which is if you got these videos constantly coming at you, first of all, you gotta process it. But you don't really have the time to ask and critically think like you might with a book, because a book you're reading at your own pace, not the pace that, you know someone else is going. And you may develop thoughts and be able to say, well, hold on, let me. Let me go look this up over here, or let me go see if this is actually factual. Whereas with the television, and as it's gotten faster and faster in recent decades, in terms of our discourse and how we consume things, there's not much ability to go back and contradict and check sources and facts and all that.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: Well, think about it. The pacing is a key piece of it. And then combined with the fact that it's not just what you're hearing, there's a visual element as well. So it also doesn't allow your brain to go as deep into, you don't have time to go as deep because the video doesn't stop, but also because there's also the visual aspect. You don't have time to. Or, you know, you're also following that as well. And remember, automatically as people, when we're watching something, we're evaluating it at an unconscious level anyway. You know, like, one of the funnier things to me was when he was talking, he talked about Nixon, you know, and how, you know, even, you know, Nixon, you know, had stuff that, you know, he did that was wrong, so to speak, and got held accountable for it. He was like, but the biggest problem Nixon had probably wasn't that he lied, was probably that he looked like a liar. And so people just saw him like, you know, like, oh, man, who's this dude? And which there's, you can support that pretty easily because even in, when Nixon ran against Kennedy, the biggest issue he had was he was looking bad at the debate. You know, he had the debate. Kennedy, Kennedy's all sharp and cool and Nixon's all sweaty and all this, like, yo, who's this? I'm not voting for this dude. And so that visual piece, we're doing other stuff in addition to, hopefully in addition to. But it could be in the alternative to processing intellectually what's being said, whereas in the context of, if it's just what's being said or what's being read, you focus on that more and there's less going on. I'm not even saying it. Like, distract is the wrong word because when you are talking to somebody one on one and you're in front of that person, it's good to read nonverbal cues and try to pick up on more. So I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it, it happens. You know, if we're doing that in the, in the context of a video, that happens automatically and it can actually make it make us easier to mislead. So. Yeah, but, yeah, I do want to keep us moving the piece on or the premise on the book, you know, being what it is. And like I said, looking at it, the book's talking about tv. But right now, I think we have to look at it just from the context of video in general, regardless of whether it comes in on a, on a television box or flat screen or whatever, or whether it's coming to you right now on whatever device you're using. But a video, now we're 40 years into the future, essentially, you know, 39 years into the future, we got the Internet. We have, you know, again, endless video. We have algorithms presenting video to us. And, you know, so, like, do you see these things? Like, how do you see these things? Taking the concepts in the book further, you know, in either a way that's not alarming or that is alarming.
[00:29:28] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think it's taken it further in ways. I mean, I don't even know if I can use the word alarming anymore because it is normal for us now in the way we discourse, if you look at places.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: How about notable? Yeah, notable.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so, no, but notable. That's a good middle ground. I'm just thinking, like, I mean, look, it's funny to even to have this conversation with you because, what, personally, two weeks ago, I told you I logged into my Facebook account for the first time since 2019, and it's 2024. So I literally was off of social media for five years. And I took a look in that, and I took a look in our Twitter, Twitter account, x account, whatever you want to call it. And I was really like, man, this is a cesspool. I'm glad I was off this stuff and I'm going to shut it back off.
And so. And it's just. Because all it is is just people flying off the handle, just saying stuff randomly that is usually negative.
You know, there's some positive stuff. I saw. I'm a member of the chocolate Lab lovers group on Facebook, so I saw that pop up, and that was cute. But, you know, for every one of the chocolate lab puppies that looks cute, there's ten posts that are, you know, vulgar and vile on something else. So. So it's just, I think, yeah, I think it's played out.
I think the book, without realizing it, already called out where society was heading. Because.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: But how do you say that relates to video? You know, because I wouldn't say, like, just social media in the abstract, because.
[00:30:58] Speaker B: A lot of what I would say in general and video content, I would say this. Like, I mentioned earlier that he called out the fact that at the time that book was written in 1985, we had a movie star actor as the president of the United States. So I couldn't not help think about the era we're in now where we have a guy that was a reality tv star that became president and through, obviously, his own power and will, but through the power of video and the medium of television and the Internet, with.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: The algorithm, no one had to really use those things, too.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: Correct? And being very adept at it. And you mentioned I, you know, corporations like News Corp. With Fox. Right.
And what happened? They paid almost $800 million to settle a lawsuit about their own disinformation about the results of the 2020 election. And so using, that's what I mean. Like, it's almost like it's representative of an, of a coalition that figured out how to use the medium of video to perfection to, you know, just moving up country to ascend to power and almost try and take it, you know, by force in a sense. So, and then convince half the country that what they saw, let's say on a day like January 6, where people did try and take it by force, that that actually is not what they saw. And that's what I mean. Like, like, I don't know if that could have been done in prior decades without the technology in the palm of our hand type of thing, but it speaks to the power of video and disinformation combined, and that it really does.
People can be convinced of realities that are different than their neighbor. And I'm not sure we had that.
[00:32:46] Speaker A: I'm sure that could have existed, though, because that would just matter. Like, if, for example, if you look back in history, people didn't have equal access to information. And so I think what's distinct there is that we all saw something, and then you have an effort after we all saw it, to then convince people that that's not what you saw, so to speak. To me, though, the, the piece that, like, I think this book anticipates the rise of cable news for sure. You know, like, in terms of this kind of thing, of, hey, let's go in and let's use video to kind of create the impressions that people will have on events broadly, you know, which that can be, you know, how people think about this, or I think people think about that also. Where I really would like to see and where, I mean, we're still in the middle of the storm here would be how with algorithms, social media algorithms, which decide the videos that we see. And they do it with the nature of machine learning and all that, where it's constantly getting better in terms of recommending things based on the things you've already watched or the things that you've liked and so forth like that. To me, that piece combined with what we're talking about here, seems like it would accelerate this, like, beyond belief.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:06] Speaker A: Because not only is it just, okay, now we have, we have one video, or we might have videos sequentially, maybe organized chronologically or maybe organized by subject matter broadly. But now it's like, okay, no, no, we're gonna. You can be walked down a path to end up somewhere that's unrecognizable to you. So what it. What it. It reminds me of is the social media quote, the quote about social media, that it imperceptibly changes behavior. And so that I. That's what I think you can see. Like, somebody can start off looking in a Facebook group about chocolate labs, and we've heard reports about this. When you start, you're. You're in a Facebook chocolate labs. Next thing you know, you're, you know, like, you're.
[00:34:47] Speaker B: You're an anti vaxter.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: The next thing you know, you're like. All because these videos were presented to you in a way that slowly walked you down to some other place, and you were. You were nowhere near that before. So I think that's the piece about it that I think, like I said, we're still in the middle of the storm. But how video can incrementally and imperceptibly take us places and convince us of things, disinform us, or whatever it would be in ways. And the ultimate measure of success remains in all of these platforms, whether it be television ratings or, you know, views and, like, whatever is the entertainment value, the, you know, the accuracy is not the measure. The. The truth, you know, like, whatever the fairness, none of that's the measure. And so it's. It's alarming to me because the metric that is judged by is something that would conceivably take us further in this direction.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a good example of the creep of almost something you could. Akin. Akin to, like, a virus. That's what I mean. Like, or something like, let's say having heart disease or something internal where you might be worrying about putting your seatbelt on every day and all these external threats that might hit you as a human being. But if your artery is.
Your coronary artery is 80% blocked, you got no idea. That's actually the biggest thing in your way that can hurt you, but you just don't see it because it's inside. You don't feel it's done as damage over years. And I feel like.
[00:36:18] Speaker A: And it's. That's kind of the, you know, it's not connecticut.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:21] Speaker A: It's not like.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: And even the thing, like, you know, calcified plaques and all that. Like, think about it. Like you said, the. The changes that video, through algorithms and all that has done already to our society, let's hope it doesn't calcify and harden it like a plaque in the artery, because that will. That is kind of like the silent, uh, threat creeping for our own, like, discord. Like we've seen it already pulling us all apart. Yeah, it's tearing us apart. So I don't know how, obviously, how you remedy that, but it's just an interesting observation and a reality that I think we just need to figure out how to address as a society.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: And I think we could extrapolate things like that because I'm thinking now of recently, you know, Terrence Howard, the actor, has been in the news and certain social media things for his scientific work and all that. But then I saw recently he came up against Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is a well known astrophysicist, and it didn't go too well for Terrence Howard. And my point is that some people I've seen online are all offended and giving heat to the astrophysicists. And I'm thinking, like, well, yeah, astrophysics, you can't really break these things down in a 32nd TikTok clip.
You. You need to go deeper to really get these concepts. So the people that just want to get that surface level information to Terrence Howard sounds great.
[00:37:49] Speaker A: Yeah, well, because. Yeah, and you go deeper is not as entertaining, so therefore it's not as suited for the video medium.
[00:37:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And as I said, maybe we should look back just two, three years ago to a pandemic that happened and, yeah, the superficial and simplistic ways that some people were dealing with it in terms of explanations and all that, versus the idea that this was a new pathogen as a virus that was spreading through the world and the medical and scientific community had yet to catch up with understanding it.
And that, like, you're saying that doesn't sound sexy and exciting. It sounds more exciting that maybe nanobots are going to be in the vaccine and the 5G technology on the phone is going to be used to control me like a marionette, puppethe no, I mean, this doesn't look like it's gonna go well.
[00:38:39] Speaker A: That goes to that primacy of entertaining. You know, it's entertaining if it takes too long to explain. The video medium is it's not well suited for the video medium if it does. If you can't have images and so forth that can, you know, kind of walk someone down that path and keep their brain engaged while the mind and then tie in and so forth. So, yeah, it's going to be, I mean, I guess the best way to say it is. We're entering a brave new world, and hopefully we'll be able to get a handle on it some way or will evolve as humans to be able to continue to appreciate information and not just entertainment. And like I said, the hurdles on that are very high when it comes to as we.
As we're dealing with video is basically.
[00:39:31] Speaker B: We'Re not gonna be probably attacked by terminators or by, you know, robots like in the matrix that harvest us for our energy and all that. It's gonna be ones and zeros, and that's just. That's not as exciting as, you know, it's gonna be binary code that gets us, not. Not some.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: I mean, I think us. Yeah, it's gonna be us. You know, this is gonna be somebody looking good on a video telling you to go ahead and drink that. It's a yemenite.
[00:39:57] Speaker B: Drink that.
[00:39:58] Speaker A: Bleach.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: Maybe ignorance is bliss, though, you know? Like, that's the way.
[00:40:03] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, let's close. But that was one of the interesting things that I'll leave on the book that he said. One of the very insightful points that he made was that, you know, ignorance itself is not actually as big of a worry because ignorance can be corrected. But the biggest problem you have is when ignorance is taken as knowledge.
[00:40:23] Speaker B: And so I think that's a mic drop, dude.
[00:40:26] Speaker A: Be careful on social media. Be careful in this media environment.
[00:40:30] Speaker B: Just ended.
[00:40:31] Speaker A: That was good, but I think we can end this show from there. We appreciate everybody, for joining us on this episode of call. Like I see it. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:40:42] Speaker B: I'm Tyndale Grenlana.
[00:40:44] Speaker A: So we'll talk to you soon.
I'm.
