Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode we discuss the fire hose of falsehood propaganda model that was originally developed, as far as we know, by Russia a decade or two ago and how over the last decade it seems to have come to dominate how we get our information, you know, whether through social media feeds or wherever else. And later on we'll explain why the controversy over the singing of the black national anthem lift every voice and sing at the super bowl illustrates our tendency to see the worst in each other.
Hello, welcome to the Call Like I See it podcast. I'm James Keys and joining me today is a man who when he gets going can drop rapid fire, takes like a drum line. Kunde, Ogunlana Kunde. I got two words for you, man.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Let's go, let's go, let's do it.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Now, before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe and like the show on YouTube or your podcast app, doing so really helps the show out. And we're recording on February 11, 2025. And today we're going to take a closer look at the fire hose of falsehood propaganda model which was development's been attributed to Russia. It was studied extensively by the RAND Corporation almost, almost a decade ago at this point and we took a look at it a few years back. But right now just a lot has happened since then. So we wanted to refresh our kind of our look at this and see what we've learned since then and how even the way that we communicate with each other, particularly through social media, which is where most people get their information, how things have evolved over that time. Now with this propaganda model RAND lays out and we'll have a link in the show notes to where you can look at this. It's a very well done study that they did on this. But the distinctive features of it, it's, it's different than like when we think of propaganda. A lot of times we think of an entity that can control all sources of information and that just doesn't really exist or it is really very difficult to maintain in the modern information ecosystem. When there was state radio or state television, that was much easier to do. Nowadays that's just with the Internet, that's very difficult to do with social media and so forth. There's just a lot of information floating around. So how can you then influence people and execute propaganda and so forth in that type of an environment? Well, this propaganda model is what it was, the solution to that basically. And so the distinctive features of it, one, it has to be high volume and multi channel and Just what that means is, is that there has to be a lot of. Lot of things, a lot of posts, a lot of occurrences, a lot of publications and so forth. And seemingly that they come from multiple different places. Even though if they all source the same place, one of them can be from the Enterprise Institute, one can be from Lakeside Publishing. And so it looks like they're coming from a lot of different places. But it's, it's the same, it's coming from originally the same source. It's also rapid, continuous and repetitive, meaning you see the same thing over and over again, it comes quickly and so forth. Another thing is that it lacks a commitment to objective reality. So it doesn't have to be true. You know, it can be. You can, you can take any information and, and try to publish it in this way and popularize it in this way and it'll make an effect in the same way regardless. And also that it lacks even a consistent to consistency. So once it takes a certain kind of mindset or approach, it doesn't have to stay with that. If the societal winds blow a certain way or if certain messages pick up, they can switch or it has to be willing to switch course and ride with that because ultimately persuasion and influencing people is the ultimate goal. And so you can kind of ride with the wave a little bit, which some of these will be counterintuitive if you think in terms of oh, okay, well, I gotta be consistent or you know, something like that, or I gotta be able to back up things if I want to be able to make claims. And so it really turns a lot on the tech so tunde of these and just, you know, kind of in general, what stands out to you or what kind of is most interesting to you that you'd want to start with here?
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Man. It's all very interesting because it's all psychological kind of attack on our minds. And I really find this topic interesting because it really is about the human mind. I want to point out to something you said because I found it interesting rereading this like you said after, you know, it's been a few years since we, since we approached this subject, that this study came out in 2016. And the language of the study just hit me, I guess since it's been a few years since we looked at it, that at the time this was considered an area, like an experimental area of psychology. It's what they referred to it as. And it just reminded me of this is just such a new branch of study for us as humanity. So I feel like it just made me realize after kind of going through this social media stuff and all, everything that we know of and that we talk about extensively in our various shows that we've been like living in the middle of an experiment.
And I'm not saying that this is some guys in the smoke filled room. I think it's just kind of organically has happened through the proliferation of technology on top of the existing cultural and societal structure that we had. And then you've got the global reach for everything and we've got this connected world and I think it all just kind of came together at the right time over the last 10, 10 to 20 year period due to technology.
So you know, a lot of these things are interesting to me.
I'll say this, the high number of channels, the idea of confusing and overwhelming an audience. Just reading some of my notes here, like you said, the lack of commitment to consistency is interesting to me because what I found interesting was some of these things have, in the study cites this, they're counterintuitive to what we thought kind of traditional governments leadership and all that like effective communication.
Like you're saying the idea of a lack of commitment to consistency. I would have thought prior to this era that the public would notice that and would kind of call out a leader on that. Yeah, we've learned. That's what I mean. Like. Well, reading this study after what we've lived through just in the last five, six years, not even the last 10 years.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: What that is though is how these things, and this is to me the, what really stands out is how these things are interacted and interlocked together. If you are just a radio broadcast and you give people information linearly from a single source, then a lack of commitment to consistency is harmful. It's when you are able to be multi channel, be very repetitive and so forth then being that being able to. You can, you don't have to be committed to consistency then. So it's like the first two of those features kind of enable the second or the, you know, the third or whatever in order to be more effective or to, to be allowed. Like you don't necessarily. And also same thing. If you're, if you're linear and if credibility is what you. Linear meaning you, you, you just, you know, one person or one organization and you just have a information stream going and whether it be television shows or whatever, if, if you aren't committed to reality, so to speak you, if you can't create an alternative reality by, with a multi channel repetitive approach, then people are People are more inclined to ding you for saying stuff that just isn't true, that's not, that doesn't come true in their life. But when it's, when you do it in this other way, when you incorporate all these features, they, you know, this, there's a synergy that's involved. And so it really. And I think in our society, I mean, like, I think we have to be, you know, kind of honest. Like that's one of the features of kind of this modern 21st century world that we live in right now because things move so much faster than they did say 100, 200, 500 years ago. We're constantly living in experiences and experiments. Like our diets are all experiments. You know, what's going to happen in the 80s, what happens when you, when you start giving people trans fat for butter? You know, like, hey, I can't do. Let's just give them transfer trans fat. And then what happens? You know, that's an experiment. That's an experiment. And a bunch of people have heart attacks. We learn and hopefully, you know, society can say, okay, well, maybe this isn't the best way to go about it. You know, artificial sweeteners or whatever. Like there's constantly. And then, you know, again, the drugs, you know, the, the pharmaceuticals and so forth. Like there's all of these different experience experiments that we're running on ourselves in real time. And you try to navigate through that. And so what we're seeing now is kind of this in our information ecosystems. And I do think this goes hand in hand kind of with the rise of the new technology. And like, you've done a good job in previous shows talking about how and when there were changes in the technology of communication 100 years ago, whether it be the radio or something like that, the ways in which to use those for maximum effect, either to inform people or to misinform people or to manipulate people. It was experimental, you know, kind of psychology at that point, like, how do we do this? And so forth. So we're just living through one of those moments where it is the experiments on how to leverage the current technological tools to influence, to inform, to disinform. We're on the cutting edge of that. And these are like some of the early returns of. Okay, well, here's what you can do.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: Well, that's a very interesting way. You finished that point with these are some of the early returns. Because I think that's actually a very good way to look at this, because when you look at the study, they go back to first Russia's incursion into Georgia in 2008. And they really say that Russia learned how to make this very effective during its annexation of Crimea in 2014.
So if you fast forward then and again, this becomes controversial in the American culture right now, which is to discuss Russia's influence on the American political class. So I don't want to get into all that in the sense of relitigating 2016 and all that, but the idea that you made a very interesting point, create an alternate reality when you were just talking now, that I couldn't help but think about the very beginning of the 45th president's administration in 2017, when his top spokesperson immediately about the inauguration and the crowd size, remember, said, we're dealing with alternative facts now when. When challenged by a reporter that said, hey, what. What you're saying didn't actually happen. So what it tells you is whether there was an implicit, you know, sharing of information and techniques between those in the Russian side and some in the American political side, or it was just one copying the other. You know, maybe the Americans saw that the Russians had success with some of this stuff and say, hey, why don't we use it either way?
[00:11:03] Speaker A: But also, Tunde Rand had laid this out in 2016, so by 2017, you could read about this on the Internet.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: That's what I mean. That's why it's fascinating to read that 2016 study today after everything we've lived through. And that's kind of my point of saying, taking away the controversial quote, unquote, maybe conversation about Russia's influence in the United States, dialogue. The fact is that this stuff works and we've been living through it, and we no longer even need to talk about Russia because we have enough American homegrown actors playing in this game that it's just our new way of being as a culture and as a society. And I don't know about you, James, but it kind of doesn't feel good.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, the need to manipulate, like, and I think the. Where it rubs me the wrong way the most is the lack of kind of commitment to objective truth or reality like that we're not doing that like in your example, you know, in terms of a crowd size or something like that. I remember the hurricane path was one, and to me it was just like, well, what are we doing here if, like, we are constantly trying to push against objective reality, at least in terms of the. The what information we're trying to get out, how we're trying to persuade people and so forth. And so, but I think connecting the first two to the second two is really where the action is. Like if you are multi channel and you are repetitive, then you don't have to have a commitment to reality. You can say, okay, well yeah, we can, we can have our own facts and whatever it is and we can change course. We can say that hey, this is what's going on now. And then six months later we can say this is what's going on and not pay the price. Like it ultimately, whether it be, whether it be political leadership or even, you know, like business, commercial kind of interests, they've always wanted to live in a world where they could sell stuff or govern in ways that aren't committed to reality. They can make the facts up as they go and they don't have to say, they don't have to abide by what they said a week ago or two weeks ago. And so this kind of gives them the blueprint on how to do that. You know, they have the multi channel ability and like the way, and what I want to get to in the second part of this conversation is just kind of how this synergizes with, you know, whether this is a chicken and the egg thing, whether the rise of social media led to the discovery of these tactics or social media just specifically enables these type of tactics in ways that just didn't exist before. The way you can so easily, like one of the things like in the. I'll get to the point, but in the multi channel feature, one of the things that a declarative statement that was made is that if a person, this is, you know, to look at how our psychology works, how our brains work. As you pointed out, receiving the same message or a similar message from multiple source sources is more persuasive, period. Like you see the same thing coming from what appears to be multiple different sources.
It's going to persuade you more than it would otherwise. And so you put that together with a social media feed where the same group can have multiple different kind of pages and push out the same information. They can make you think anything is true by just having it come across your feed in multiple different, multiple different times again and again from seemingly multiple different sources, so to speak. And so the way that this can play on our existing psychology, like the wiring that we have is it really opens up the possibilities for anything.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think it's, it's, it's a lot you say there. And I think that you're right, it does open up one of the things that opens up Is the possibility that for the first time probably in human history, because I think you're right, social media has changed it along with, I'll say this, along with the ability to have it on us 24, 7 through our phone, in our pocket, in the palm of our hand.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: But that's a feature of social media as well, though.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: No, but what I'm saying is, had the phone never got to where it is, the smartphone, and we just had.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: You saying like, oh, she had to be on a desktop.
[00:15:06] Speaker B: Social media on the desktop like it was when it was MySpace and Facebook first started. I just don't think people, I mean people. Because you'd have to then switch physically sit at a desk and ignore the rest of your life, which is impossible for a lot of people working and all that. Whereas with the phone, you know, you're driving, you can put on YouTube if you want to play it and listen to it on your car to continue. You know, the algorithm sending you stuff, you. And now in our ecosystem too, like you're saying this multi channel thing, right? The multi channel would be. YouTube is one source. Then I got.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: That's like the same source in YouTube, like, so you'll see a video that says, you know, the hurricane path was going to Alabama from source one. And then you'll scroll down and you'll see from another piece of supposedly another place on YouTube, same app, but it'll say the same thing. And then you'll scroll down and see another one from another appears to be.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: No, I get that. What I'm saying is if I tune my satellite radio, you know, it might send me the type of, you know, podcasters or radio discussions that also fit in with what was going on in YouTube. Because remember, like we did this show on the technology. All this technology is also talking to each other behind the scenes. So the Google, Google from YouTube is telling Sirius, you know what I like, and Sirius is picking it up and saying, okay, let's send them more of that. And then the next thing. So we're bombarded constantly by, let's put it this way, James, like when we did the book Nexus, we're bombarded by information.
But then you have the fire hose of falsehoods, involves those actors that kind of curate that information to form our own individual truths. And this is why.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: That's the repetitive part. That's the rap and continuous and repetitive feature like that.
[00:16:48] Speaker B: And also the persuasion, you know, like sometimes, because this stuff is good. Like, why don't we talk about the thing you sent me from the NFL.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I want to get to that. I want to get to that.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:58] Speaker A: And so, and what that is, because what I've noticed is that when you read this, you're like, okay, wow. This is how certain political actors can create, like just complete bubbles that they're. That their followers or their adherents can live in. And like, we, we talk about Russia. And like, in Russia, you can't say, you can't call the Ukraine war a war. Like, you, you have to. Like, so they control the perception of the people that are in the country in terms of what's happening. But you see, you can do this even, like, you can do this. Firewalls of falsehood in a free society, in society where there's freedom of press, if you can keep your, Your viewer, your.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: Your.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Your adherence seeing the same messages over and over again. And so we can, Our imaginations can, because, you know, we look at all historic propaganda and all that kind of stuff, can see how this could play out politically in political settings. But it goes beyond that and that what I noticed, you know, most recently is in the build up to the Super Bowl, I was shared several messages on Facebook and these several messages talked about. It was. It was presented as a news story. It was. They had breaking in all caps. And then 31 NFL teams petitioned the NFL because the Chiefs, you know, were getting, you know, had bribed the referees or something like that. And this was the. The post. And then it had a picture and all this other stuff. And then, you know, a couple of. A couple of stories down or maybe 10 stories down, there was the same post again from a different source, and wording was, you know, 99% the same. And then again a different picture. And then it was again with the same picture with a different source. And, and so I literally saw the multi channel and you know, meaning it kept looking like, like it's coming from different sources. And the rapid, continuous, you know, repetitive piece, like back to back, what it made me think of was like, okay, well, one, that's something that many people who see that aren't gonna like, like, oh my gosh, like they're gonna be like, okay, wow. But the way in this, that illusory truth is, was one of these, these bias, cognitive biases. Once you see something once, whether you even think about it at all, if you count it again later, you'll believe it more because all you'll remember, you won't remember where you heard it or in what context you heard it, but you'll just go, oh, I've seen That before, that's probably true. So you assign more truth to it because of that. But what political aim is that for, like, that, that this seems to be going into commercial, like persuasion, like what? And it's. So I brought the question you like, so what politics are being served? This is fire hose, a falsehood being done in the name of, I don't know, commercial interest. Is that Facebook's effort to make more money, to keep you more engaged, or. I don't even. I can't even figure out what the end game is for that. So what are your thoughts on, like, are we limiting our imagination too much as far as how this can be deployed? Because ultimately the point is persuasion. That's what they want to do. It's to persuade. So I think a lot of different.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: Contexts, I think it. Well, persuasion is key.
How you persuade and to what end, I think is what we're watching play out. The living experiment is what techniques can be best used to persuade a large population, which we see some maybe attempting to take this global. And I think part of the ability to use these tactics, the fire hose of falsehoods and the means of dissemination through the Internet and everything we've been talking about is really about distracting the public.
And it's about distracting the public so that actors can do what they want at the top level without us, the public being able to be present to complain about whatever they're doing, to push back against it. And so what I'm saying is that we have right now in the United States, we've had a very solid democracy, constitutional republic, but basically representative government that has also, that style of government has flourished around the world after, you know, post World War II, let's say. Right. And, you know, there's. There's some people out there that don't like that. They don't like the idea of large masses of people actually commanding where the country goes, commanding things like where the. The nation's wealth goes, things like that. And they'd like to take control of it. And they think they have a better idea on how to, you know, the world should, should, should be run and how society should be directed than maybe the population does. And so for people with that kind of mindset, any type of distraction helps. And I think that's why the Russian model is so effective, because Russia has over 100 years of history of this kind of, I would say, psychological warfare internally being used to fracture its own population so that certain leaders can be propped up. I mean, the most famous being Stalin with the politburo and things like that. So if you look at someone like Vladimir Putin, who, from his ethos of becoming president of Russia in the late 90s after the Soviet Union had collapsed, was not a democratic type of leader, he didn't want to have the voices of all Russians in there saying what's best for the country. He thought he had the best ideas and him and his oligarch buddies were going to control the wealth of the nation and all that and steered in whatever direction, you know, the Russian Federation was going to go. And I just think that this model now has been taken and used by others and other leaders around the world as a way to throw their populations off. And to your point, something.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: Yeah, it's disorienting. And they talk about this like. Yeah, when you are able to hit people with information, misinformation, disinformation in a certain way, it's very disorienting.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's what I'm saying. Is it just like something that doesn't feel that serious, like lies about the NFL in the end, when you add them up and when you add up Haitians eating pets, like you're saying about making, telling, saying that a hurricane should have gone a different direction than it did, and all these little things on their own individually seem like, okay, that's just a lie, or why would they say that? But over the long period of time, it kind of chips away at the public's ability to kind of sense what's real and what's not. And that way, and I'll say this, James, the bigger effect on effects of this, this is how it leads to the political stuff as well. Think about it. A year ago, I mean, this would have been huge news when we were younger, right in the American story, you and I, 20, 30 years ago, when we were younger people. But today, in the past year, we just had an entire political party in the United States, one of two bring articles of impeachment and the floor of Congress against the sitting president of the United States, which was all based on information derived by a Russian spy and he was arrested by the FBI when all that came out. What more amazes me is not that that happened, because that's pretty amazing that an American congressional folks got duped by a Russian spy. It's the lack of reaction by the public and even by other government officials is that the public is sitting there saying, okay, I guess that's just what happens.
And so it's like.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: Because there's no, like, outrage or feeling of betrayal. I mean, and that's not fair to say the public. It's only a certain segment of the public that was, that was supportive of the impeachment effort. And then when it came to be that it was based on lies fed to people by a Russian intelligence, then there was an outrage like how could you deceive me? Or oh, I can't believe we were deceived. It was kind of like, you know, ho hum, find another way to do it. I think that you're onto something in the sense that this overridingly whether or not the disinformation or whatever is a direct political thing, it's kind of, it is. The point is disorientation is to make people think that what's going on in the world is so overwhelming and so messed up that you're willing to throw your support and your kind of blind loyalty to someone to come save you. You know, like, oh, we, I just need a strong man to come and, and handle all this stuff because truth is no longer knowable and all of these institutions are corrupt anyway. And so if, if somebody needs to, to skirt the laws and skirt the rules, then so be it because everybody is doing all this dirt and so forth. And so it's the idea of it. So there's a distraction piece, but there's also just fermenting distrust and any other source of kind of truth or authority, anything, you know, like anything that someone might put some emotional connection to you form it, distrust in that amongst the population or amongst at least a certain element of the population area of the population. And that then naturally causes the targets of those messages to want to just throw blind loyalty to someone who will, someone strong. Is the kind of the mindset of the strongman politician is that the world is so dangerous, the world is so crazy. Just, just put your faith in me and don't question me, just put your faith in me and I'll, I'll save you. I'll make sure that you're okay. And so it's that kind of emotional connection that you're building by making everything else seem so crazy and so, so scary. And I think we are seeing that. You know, I agree. I can see how this, this effort would play into that. So I mean it can definitely have. The other thing is also just building distrust in an overall system as well. Like if you want to get rid of certain aspects of the American system, whether it be separation of powers or rule of law and so forth. If you want to get, if you want to do that, you have to get people to think that the way things are irrevocably broken, and so therefore it's no big loss to kind of shuffle it all away. I do think that the fire hose and falsehood model, by playing on what it is, is playing on our psychology. I mean, ultimately, it's playing on our psychology in order to persuade us for certain messages. This isn't new, you know, like, I think, like, if you look at just commercial advertising, you know, in old technology and television and radio and so forth, you know, we have a market system. And market systems are like, oh, yeah, there are multiple different products. You know, like the goal then in the market system is having the producers to try to offer the best possible product at the lowest possible price. Then you have informed consumers go around and deciding what's best for them based on factors like that. That's not really how our market system works, though. Like, our market system works on advertising that you see is not based on touting the lower prices and, or the better quality products. It's all driven to try to tap into you emotionally, you know, and so we, we do, we have seen, you know, like a while, a lot of this stuff that we talk about. Oh, you know, like you got rational voters who collect all this information and then decide who they're going to vote for based on, you know, this person's policies or this person's integrity and stuff. We, we, we've left that kind of reservation, at least in significant part or may have never been there, but I also think. So that's a lie. We kind of tell ourselves from a political standpoint that that's what's happening from voting. And I'm not saying that voting is bad, you know, I'm just saying. I'm just pointing out that fact.
I think economically it's been the same kind of a thing of where it's like, no, no, no, we, we want brand loyalty. Brand loyalty has nothing to do with lower prices or better quality. That's like, regardless of what this person, this, you know, with this detergent is, I'm buying this because this is what I buy. And they do commercials that make me tap into my nostalgia and make me feel good about, you know, my, my life or anything like that. And so that's why I like them. So same kind of thing there. I think what we're seeing is just the, these kind of approaches are just in our information ecosystem now, nakedly. Not like hidden, not like, you know, anything like that, but it's just like nakedly, it's all about. We are being acted Upon. And it's not like we are active engaging in the market because we're getting, our emotions are getting tugged on. We're not active participants by and large. Again, not everybody, by and large in the political process. Our emotions are getting tugged at. And so now in the information kind of ecosystem, we're not participants as much as we're being acted on and played on based on our humanity.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: Yeah, let me jump out of here. Well, yeah, you got, you got two things there. One is, I think the second part of what you said with the companies and all that is, is you're right. And we've discussed that about food and kind of this consumer, the psychology, psychological war played on consumers by corporate America, which is real. And I think, you know, it reminded me as you're talking that Microsoft, the IT company, has one of the largest neuroscience research labs in existence right now on the globe. And again, it's that the way that our form, you know, of corporate kind of capitalism has, has kind of structured through the 20th century was about like you're saying, how do we, how do we get consumers to buy the brand?
And that kind of Trump's, no pun intended, the idea of quality, you know what I mean? That like you said, I'm just gonna.
[00:30:07] Speaker A: Go to this brain build this emotional connection to price and, or quality.
[00:30:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And even if the emotional connection is to something that's built on a house of cards or something, you know, it doesn't matter. That's our goal. And so I think that's a very good observation.
The observation I want to make from what you were saying earlier was because there's an interesting concept that I learned called transferism. And the idea is that with something like the fire hose of falsehoods, everything you were saying reminds me of that idea, which is the public becomes nihilistic, they become apathetic in some ways, but in other ways, this is why these kind of, whether we call it fascist or we just call it authoritarian type of regimes, think about it. They always need a foil, they always need a bad guy. And so what do we see before this election, Haitians eating pets or it was this group with that one. Now it's dei. It's always something that is, that is there to disturb people. And what happens is none of that. Everything that Americans say they care about, like the cost of housing, which we've learned kind of part of it is large private equity firms on Wall street buying up, you know, hundreds of thousands of single family homes around the country and pricing out a lot of Americans. That's got nothing to do with the emotional stuff like Haitians eating pets or dei. But what happens is the anger from the public that's ginned up by these firehose of falsehoods instead of addressing those real structural issues, like why are big firms with billions of dollars allowed to buy and compete with individuals trying to buy homes? You know, why do we have a health care system that constantly denies people claims, all that kind of stuff.
That anger at that stuff becomes transferred to these marginal groups by the leadership, by the fire hose of falsehoods. And I think that's the danger that we watch. We're kind of watching ourselves slide into now, which is we just had an election where everybody was expressing their concerns over some of these more structural issues, like I mentioned. But yet we see the attention of leadership tends to be about just focusing on these marginalized issues, like, you know, trans stuff, dei things that I know are important to some people because they've been told it's important, but they have nothing to do with the price of houses due to the fact or the.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: Or the inflation that everybody talked about. All that's my point, you know, like, oh, this is. I gotta punish, you know, the, or.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: Health care or any of the things that we seem to say we care about as Americans, you know.
[00:32:45] Speaker A: Well, but that's, that's the disconnect though, ultimately, is it? The, the. It has been seen and observed amongst those who desire power and desire to use power, that tapping into people intellectually is just not the path. And so you tap into them emotionally. You tap into them.
[00:33:03] Speaker B: It's kind of sad.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: Well, it's just. It is. I mean, it is like while you. Yes, there always needs to be a boogeyman or a villain if you want to use this type of technique to, to, to. To isolate people and to like. But it also could be used to bring people together, you know, like the same techniques can be used to, to. To get people to turn on.
[00:33:26] Speaker B: Man, who would want to do something like that?
[00:33:28] Speaker A: You know, buying up all the houses or, you know, wealth disparity growing by leaps and bounds and the spoils of society not being distributed amongst all the people that are creating the spoils, you know, like that, that and that. We've seen that in history as well, you know, like where the anger is directed that way. So it's almost, I mean, you know what Warren Buffett say. There was a class war in my class one. You know, it's just, you know, kind of an embodiment of that. Like in a Sense the wealth class, the oligarch class has to do this stuff, or else people might look around and realize that from a financial standpoint, they're getting played, you know, so. So they kind of have to keep them constantly on edge with all this other stuff. Otherwise, you know, people might look up. You got to keep people looking around and distracted. Or else they might look forward and say, hey, the reason why I don't have any money is because you have all the money and not this other poor person. You know, So I think that that kind of ultimately goes back to that ultimate haves and have nots thing. And this is just kind of the current iteration of how the few can. Can have and the many can look around and fight amongst each other amongst the stuff they don't have, you know, so. But I think we can wrap it there.
[00:34:38] Speaker B: But I'll finish with this. I'm reminded of the tree of knowledge and that God punished humanity because.
Just because Eve wanted to get a little bit of knowledge.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: So, yeah, so those lessons run deep. Right?
So. But I think. Yeah, we'll wrap this part from there. Yeah, check out second part as well. And we'll talk to you soon.
All right, Tune day. We're recording this a couple days after the super bowl, and we saw a big controversy erupt before the super bowl and leading into the super bowl about the singing of the black, quote, unquote, black national anthem in addition to the singing of the national anthem. And in this, you know, it was brought out, oh, well, why, you know, for example, you know, well, why is there a separate one there? And so forth. And then people took offense and say, oh, this is just racist. Why are you upset about this? And so forth. And so you got as, which happens oftentimes, you know, Americans yelling at each other about something and kind of yelling over each other or at not communicating with each other, but kind of talking past each other. So what did you make of this controversy? And, you know, just kind of how it came up out of nowhere. This. This isn't like the first time this ever happened, you know, but it just seemed to bubble up and people were mad for a little bit. And then, as is kind of the normal thing, that people kind of just move on and get mad about something else. But for a couple of hours there, you know, like, we're hot.
[00:36:02] Speaker B: Good old American culture. Move on about something else and don't solve the initial issue that we were trying to deal with in the first place.
[00:36:10] Speaker A: We just want to feel something, man.
[00:36:12] Speaker B: I know. Listen, man, it didn't escape me that we still have large swaths of this country that can't agree on what the cause of a civil war was that ended literally 160 years ago this year. I think that's better.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: They refuse to agree.
[00:36:29] Speaker B: They might say that we refuse. Right.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: That's my point.
[00:36:32] Speaker B: Like, I think that this.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: They refuse to agree with what, the Civil War. The leaders of the south of the Civil War.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: No, I know. That's my point.
[00:36:41] Speaker A: Let's get to today's topic, though, before we.
[00:36:43] Speaker B: This is one of those where information and truth aren't the same thing, obviously. But. No, but here's the thing. I think this particular discussion around the super bowl and this song specifically, and the calling it of a national anthem, I think we need to. This is where, again, it gets very nuanced in our culture in America with his racial stuff, right. In history, because everybody's emotional about it, and it's, you know, it's important stuff for us Americans.
There is, there is, there is a history around the Lift Every Voice and sing the name of the song, which is called the Black national anthem, which we can discuss.
But there's also the reality that the super bowl represents a cultural moment annually. It's almost like at this point, it's a ritual in the American culture annually, where we all come together as Americans and share that experience. So it's like I see it from the. The different perspectives. Obviously, as a black American, I appreciate what the song Lift Every Voice Sing means and the history and the context of it. Why there is even a discussion about a black national anthem. All that stuff I understand and I appreciate it and I respect it, and it deserves to be part of our story as Americans, not just black people. But I also can appreciate why a lot of people outside the black community kind of don't understand and feel uncomfortable that there is what they might see as a competing anthem with the traditional national anthem of the United States, because most countries only have one national anthem. So again, it goes back to this uniqueness of American culture in the modern world where separate but equal, right. We have these two competing narratives of the American story. And sometimes, like this, they play out in public. And again, because we're not conditioned to discuss these things in public as a culture with each other. Like you said, we talk past each other. So that's.
[00:38:48] Speaker A: I don't. I wouldn't say that they're competing narratives as much as they're concurrent narratives. And what. It's a result of different perspectives of what has happened over the course of American history. And I think this.
It's part of the potential strength of America, but also part of the difficulty Americans have with being unified generally, it's the difficulty in synthesizing our past in the present. And what do we do? Like, there are different perspectives of the Jim Crow south depending on who you are and like your ancestors and so forth. There are different perspectives on Manifest Destiny. There's different perspectives on all these things. And so. So how do you synthesize that in your own mind in present day? How can we all feel good about that or feel good about America's past? To feel good enough about America's past that we can move forward and are we looking at different things to feel good about and so forth? So I think that's part of the difficulty. One of the things that this reminded me, though, is we did the book the Righteous Mind a few years back and we did a show on it, read the book and so forth. And one of the things that was talked about in that is that some people inherently are made more uncomfortable, and this is not something that they're wanting, but this is just who they are.
They receive discomfort. They are just made uncomfortable when things are done to emphasize differences. And some people aren't made uncomfortable about that. And so something like this, which the black. I think it's great that there's a black national anthem. I think that the fact that from the perspective of a group of people that was excluded from the American society for so long, it's difficult to then say, okay, now all of the, you know, the last 200 or something years of American history where you were excluded from everything, let's just put all that to bed. And now we're not going to exclude you anymore. Just get all our stuff and forget everything that you had done before that to build community, to build kind of, you know, your, Your. Your patriotism. And so that's. That's not a reasonable ask. So I can see why there is an attachment to lift every voice and sing. But then I also know psychologically that some people are just going to be made uncomfortable about that. There may be some racist people in that, but that's not a sign of racism. That's a sign of, hey, I thought we were trying to all be together. And they're going to. That's not a intellectual argument. That's something that's coming from them. You know, if you go back to the Righteous Mind, that's coming from the elephant, not the writer, so to speak, saying that, okay, I'm made Uncomfortable by this in my gut. And then I'm trying to explain it away after the fact, but ultimately I made it comfortable. So you have this emotional reaction that some people are going to have, but then from another perspective, it makes all the sense in the world. It's like, well, why are you objecting to a place that I'm able to find pride in my country? You know? And it. But that illustrates the divide and that difficulty.
[00:41:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's where you're very spot on with this idea that some minds, just the way that some people's brain, you know, the way they develop and all that, by pointing something out, they. They tend to see it as something other. But by not pointing it out directly, but pointing to it as an inclusion, as an included, as. As part of the big, bigger fabric of something else, they may see that differently. So what I'm saying here is, to your point, there's a lot of people that aren't necessarily racist, but when they hear that a black national anthem is going to be sung, the fact that it. Now, like, that's what I mean is like you said that the elephant and the rider. For those that haven't read the book the Righteous Mind, it just speaks to kind of the conscious versus the subconscious.
[00:42:28] Speaker A: But with the substance being the elephant, that our conscious minds oftentimes are just simply coming up with explanations for things that our subconscious want to do anyway, you know?
[00:42:38] Speaker B: Yeah, and so. And so. And so that's the thing is that, like. But from a subconscious level, the fact that you're pointing out that that is a black national anthem, to that person, even though they're not racist by the traditional, you know, definition of it, what it does is it reminds them that, hey, this. This group of people is different. And that can create an emotional reaction, like, well, why do they always got to do something different versus, if this. Like, think about it. The national anthem, actually, the American national anthem was sang by a black gentleman. I can't remember his name, but no one complained about that. Right. So. Because the same mind will look at that guy singing the American national anthem and say, yeah, he's one of us. He's an American. And so that's why this makes. This is kind of, I think, the crux of one of the main issues of our American culture that we, you know, we've all been living with post Civil War, really, post the founding of the country, which is there's a group of people, like you said, that have a perspective and an experience that has not yet been acknowledged, really by the mainstream of American culture. Because every time we just saw this in the last three weeks, when they tried to get rid of the contributions of black pilots during World War II in training videos in the Air Force. That's why a lot of black Americans feel that they've had to have. Historically do things for themselves, like have historically black colleges and universities because they were excluded and prevented legally by going to white or just, you know, I would say white institutions, but they were just the only universities that existed at the time. So blacks had to create their own. So, like you just said, there's a. There's a. There's a large history pre the 1960s, of blacks being excluded of the United States experience legally. And so what do you do with that as a nation? Do you not listen to those people and do you keep putting them down whenever they have something to add or something to say? Or do you say, we acknowledge this happened? And that's what I said about the Civil War, is that if we can't agree on Something that happened 160 years ago, I don't think we're gonna. We're not getting anywhere with these arguments about anthems.
[00:44:51] Speaker A: Well, but I think that there's a way to move forward without that. I mean, I think the difficulty, though, is that this person who, you know, again, I'm setting aside that there are people who are racist that are just like, all right, I don't want to see anything that has anything to do with, you know, and like, so. But setting aside that part, that person is not constructive. You know, like, that person is ideally the. That we can isolate that person from the person who's not necessarily racist, but is made uncomfortable by emphasizing differences psychologically like that. That's just in their psychology. Like, that's the goal, ultimately, is to separate those two so that the racist can't influence the person who just has this. This uncomfortableness that they don't even know where it's coming from, but they can be talked down from that ledge.
The. Which is what happened at various times. If you look at the civil rights movement, so to speak, like, that's. That's the kind of thing that happened there with the approach of certain leaders at that time. So you have the situation in this case where you are, you quote, unquote, emphasizing these differences and how you're going to have people with that reaction to that. But as I noted before, it's not the fact that there were so many accommodations that black folks just had to create for themselves over the whole course of most of American history. Like the idea of them not being excluded, whether it be legally or just functionally from pretty much all aspects of American life, has existed for the bulk of American history. And we can't just wipe that away. And that's kind of the thing that I feel like that's the part we have to be able to harmonize, you know, like, that we can't wipe it away. So what do we do with it? You know, like, does it. Does that singing in that black national anthem or. I know you have a great story talking about the National Bar association versus the American Bar Association. What do we do with that? Well, let me go ahead and give that story because I think that's very illustrative.
[00:46:36] Speaker B: Just something I share with you. Yeah. Something I share with you. A little while ago. That was years ago, I was with a. When I was in corporate America, company was sponsoring an event at the National Bar Association's annual.
You know, let me jump in real quick.
[00:46:51] Speaker A: I'm sorry. The American Bar Association. I'm an attorney. An American Bar association is like the bar association national for lawyers and so forth. Just generally speaking. The National Bar association is a similar type of organization, but it's for black lawyers. So you could be a member of both if you're black, you know, so. Yeah, but it's. It's. It was created for black lawyers, you know, hundreds of years ago. And. But go ahead.
[00:47:13] Speaker B: Yeah. And also, let's be clear. The black organizations don't exclude non blacks. I used to be on the board of the national association of Black Accountants, and we had white members, Hispanic members, all that. So, you know, just to be clear.
[00:47:27] Speaker A: With the schools, it's kind of historically black more than black.
[00:47:30] Speaker B: So. Yeah, so. But no, but the thing is. Yeah, so I had someone that was actually. She was Swedish and, you know, lived in the United States and didn't understand, you know, the history of America and our culture. And, you know, we happened to have a conversation and she was as just. I was explaining to her where I'd been at the National Bar. She was asking. She goes, well, how come? See, again, I appreciated the perspective, Right. She's not American coming in here and just seeing things the way they are now. And she's saying, well, how come the black people have all this stuff just for black people? Right? That was her question. And I was like, well, and I explained the history, just like we've been doing, right. That there was a. For a long period of time, blacks were excluded. I think the bar. The National Bar association started. I think in 1912 or something like that. And like you said, so American Bar.
[00:48:18] Speaker A: Association didn't let black lawyers in.
[00:48:20] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So what were black lawyers gonna do if they wanted to congregate and get better at the, you know, and share, you know, the ideas and information they had to create their own association. And so once integration happened, you know, 60 years ago, like you said, there's, There's a cultural lineage, there's history there. You don't just shut down things. Right. And I think this is, this is where it's just a dilemma because the majority group doesn't have an interest in hearing the stories like this from the minority group. And that's kind of it. Like we're still here in America.
[00:48:52] Speaker A: I have to say some in the majority group don't. Or.
[00:48:54] Speaker B: Well, you can't say all of them.
[00:48:56] Speaker A: I mean, because. Well, I wouldn't be where we are now. That was the case.
[00:48:59] Speaker B: Well, I'm just saying this, right? There is enough of a critical mass of people. No, but seriously, James, think about it. This is why in our country we have, like we said in this show last week, we're on this third wave of this first was reconstruction. After slavery. Blacks got some benefits that got kicked back because too many people were nervous about seeing that, you know, black progress.
[00:49:21] Speaker A: Black backlash that followed.
[00:49:23] Speaker B: Then you've got the 60s and you got kind of the morphing of the Dixiecrats and the, the into the Republican, you know, base when. With the Southern Strategy by Nixon. And you know, there's. There was the kind of fits and starts in the 70s and 80s. Then things got smoothed up. People want to forget everything, let's not talk about it. And now here we are again, where there's hostility to ideas like DEI and inclusion, which hasn't really changed. Like the, the scenery hasn't changed much in the last 20 years in American life. Like, meaning the amount of blacks and non whites in corporate America, all that stuff. So what I'm saying is that this becomes a recurring theme in our American culture because we refuse to deal with the original, I guess, the original sin of what. Who is an American, Right? Like, is America an idea where anybody can come here, you could be, look like an Asian, look like an African, look like a European, doesn't matter. But if you conform and you accept this system of American, the Constitution and our form of government and our culture, then you're just American or as American.
[00:50:27] Speaker A: That was kind of the vision articulated by none other than Ronald Reagan.
[00:50:31] Speaker B: Yeah, well, exactly. And the point is, is that, yeah, but that's what I'm saying. But now it's like. Or is the. Or is a white American a white person with blonde. Blue hair, Blonde eyes and blue hair. You know, blue eyes and blonde hair. Sorry. And the rest of us are just visiting and renting. And it's that whole thing of the founding documents. We, the people, all that all men are created equal. And that question of, James, did the founding fathers consider you or I part of that story to be men, or are we subhuman? And because we won't discuss these things as a country, as a nation, and just put it to bed, we keep having these fits and starts where the people like you and I are saying, hey, we're human beings too. We obviously are here. We helped build this country. We got a story. And you got like. Like you said, not everybody, but enough in the majority group to say, we don't want to hear it and we just want to keep moving with the.
[00:51:23] Speaker A: Story that I don't think you should say that we don't discuss it. And we're like, we have discussed it. You know, that was the civil rights movement. There are constitutional amendments dealing with all this stuff. And so those decisions have been made. But I think more of what you're talking about is that there's some in the majority group that won't accept it.
[00:51:37] Speaker B: And like, culturally, that's really what I'm saying.
[00:51:39] Speaker A: Like, they. They just want more of a Confederate States of America set up than a United States of America set up. If you go based on, like, kind of what the Confederate leaders said, the cornerstones, you know, so I think that, that. But that's not going to necessarily go away. There's always going to be that selection of people. The question is really, like, if you consider, you know, in any group, for example, like this. This is a sports thing also, like, you're going to have 60% of the people in the middle, 20% of people pulling one way, 20% of people pulling another way. And the real question is what where that 60% that could kind of go either way goes, you know, and so I think in this instance, you know, like, this is an issue that has touched certain people emotionally. Not. It didn't change their world. Didn't change their world. And so in that majority group that touched them a certain way, the thing that I would push back against is that I felt that it. What, like, there were people trying to insult, but those aren't the people we should be paying attention to. The people that we should be paying attention to are the people who weren't trying to insult. But we recognize there is this level of discomfort. And so maybe it goes to. Instead of you, when the lady asked you, well, why. Why is there a National Bar Association? Instead of you cussing the lady out and calling her a racist, being like, okay, well, here's why, you know, And. And then the person at least walks away with saying, okay, well, I get it. Like, yeah, you shouldn't have to walk away from 100 years of tradition or, you know, whatever. Because now they say, okay, yeah, now you guys can come over here and hang out with us too. You know, so that. But that's. How do you synthesize? That is ultimately. And I don't mean synthesize it from a legal standpoint. I mean synthesize it from a cultural and an emotional standpoint. How can we all look at the American experiment that we're doing and feel good about it, you know, even though it's difficult, James, how can we do that? And. But, yeah, final thoughts, man.
[00:53:22] Speaker B: But that's difficult. Yeah. No final thought will be. That's difficult. Based on. As you're talking, I'm thinking about part one we just did with the fire hose of falsehood. So do you see that person who is not racist and otherwise would be open to saying, look, I'm not comfortable with two national anthems, and I'm not going to be, but I respect the fact that this song exists and I.
[00:53:42] Speaker A: Understand why it's here now.
So now my writer can at least try to calm my elephant.
[00:53:47] Speaker B: Correct? Yeah, exactly.
But what happens is, with the proliferation of all this social media stuff, what happens is they get. They get moved into a silo that just tells them why this is only bad and why these black people are crazy and why they're un American and all this. And one of the things I was. I was. I went and I looked to say, okay, what were all the songs performed outside of the halftime show? Because I know, obviously, the performer there. Did you know a bunch of songs in the halftime show, but just in general, there are three main songs performed at the beginning of the national anthem. Sorry. Beginning of the super bowl national anthem, America the Beautiful and Lift Every Voice and single. My point is, is that because it was. Lift Every Voice and Sing is also referred to as the black national anthem. Again, it brings up race. So a lot of people in this country will immediately just focus on that.
[00:54:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:54:37] Speaker B: And instead of. Because no one. That's what I'm saying. I didn't realize America the Beautiful was sung and it's just because no one's claiming that, and then no one's saying that's the Chinese anthem or this or that. It's just. It's just a nice American song, right? Just like Lift Every Voice and Sing is a Christian hymnal and a nice, you know, song. And so I think that's why I'm saying that this still is showing us that this. This idea of race is. Is the big third rail in American culture. But then if. If we amplify the fire hose of falsehoods, the ability to keep people who are nervous about these things and intimidated by them siloed into a position on their phones and with their social media of always being told this is bad and this is ruining the country. I think that's how we kind of get here, that these things that otherwise shouldn't be a big deal in a conversation like this shouldn't take two or three days of a national dialogue in the media and all that, the idea of a black national anthem being sung next to the national anthem. But it does. And so I think we should just prepare for more of this.
[00:55:41] Speaker A: I wouldn't say that it shouldn't be. I would say that it doesn't have to be. And what you then look at, you know, a person like you or me are looking at is, well, whose interests are served by making this a big deal, you know, because then you can see, okay, well, that's why.
That's why the fire hose, a falsehood might be employed to make. To take that. What may just be a small discomfort, like, whoa, what's that? That's different. You know, why are we. And turn that small discomfort into hostility or into something that then can be molded, manipulated, and so forth. And so that's. Ultimately, you said that's the ultimate third rail. That's kind of the. There is no end to how fruitful for people who want to get power from divisiveness.
[00:56:24] Speaker B: Race in America is turning people against each other.
[00:56:26] Speaker A: There's no end to how fruitful it can be to use the race issue, you know, and that's what society has taught us, that American history has taught us that. But along those same lines, you know, like, it also has told us that we can overcome that. It's just. It's something that is not necessarily. It requires greater effort, greater discipline, you know, greater empathy and reaching out than it does to use those issues to kind of knock people apart. So, I mean, that's kind of the struggle, you know, like, you really got to want it, you know, that's kind of the struggle. We deal with those Americans. And, you know, it's an ongoing thing. This is another one of those things where there is no finish line, you know.
[00:57:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:02] Speaker A: And so. So, yeah. But I think we can wrap this.
[00:57:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'll say this to finish up. I think this is unfair for us, you know, people like us in our position. But I think you made a great point in here in saying that not everybody that's uncomfortable with the idea of let's say the black national anthem is a racist. And I think we.
It's like, it might not be fair to feel like we gotta kinda go an extra mile and acknowledge that, but I think it's something that we should recognize that when it comes to something like a national ritual like this super bowl and the idea of a national anthem, most people want only one anthem for a country. And that's not necessarily a racist thing on its face. You see what I'm saying? There's a lot of mixed nuance in with a lot of this stuff.
[00:57:50] Speaker A: Well, that's why I led, though, with the piece from the Righteous Mind talking about, because that. That was very insightful for me. And it just that there are people who, like. Because I'm not one of these people, so I wouldn't know.
[00:58:01] Speaker B: That's what I'm saying.
[00:58:02] Speaker A: It was explained to me that they, like, emphasizing a difference affects them not in their brain, but in their psychology, like deep in there, you know, like, it affects them deeply and they can be talked off that ledge, but they would have to be talked off that ledge because it very. Would be very easy for them to take that slight discomfort or significant discomfort and take that somewhere else. That's very hostile and unproductive, which, as you pointed out, some people take advantage of. You know, like, there's going to be like, oh, yeah, yeah, I can get this part.
Showing a difference will put this person on a certain edge. And then I can take that and manipulate it the way I want it to go, mold that way I want it to go. So. But yeah, yeah, we'll wrap this up. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode. 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.
[00:58:49] Speaker B: I'm tuned to everyone.
[00:58:50] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you soon.
