Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign hello, welcome. Call It Like I See it presented by Disruption. Now, I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to take a look at some recent stories coming out of Russia and Ukraine which illustrate how powerful media persuasion and propaganda can be in controlling the perception of large masses or even an entire population.
And we'll also discuss the way the American system is not really designed to stop the use of propaganda, but more so to limit its reach and its ability to be just pervasive throughout a society.
And later on, we're going to weigh in on the never ending debate over whether breakfast is or what breakfast is. Is breakfast the most important meal of the day or something that's completely unnecessary? And there are men and women of science on both sides, so it should be a fun time.
Joining me today is a man who's carrying that water, Bobby Boucher, Baby Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde. Are you ready to share with the people some of your wild thoughts?
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Of course.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: All right.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: I'm excited. I just realized as you're doing the intro that we can figure out if there's a propaganda behind breakfast.
Hey, hey, maybe we just have magical tie in here. I bet you there is.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: There's money to be made, so there probably is.
Now, we're recording this on March 7, 2022, and there was a story that caught our eye this past week which talked about how there are people in Ukraine that are in cities that are being attacked or bombed, but they have parents or family members in Russia.
And it's not uncommon in that part of the world for families to be across that border.
But the people that are in Ukraine, the ones in the story, have been unable to convince their parents that they're holed up in shelters and their cities being bombed by Russia while bombs are going off and so forth.
Now, this really illustrates the power of propaganda that parents, for example, who know their adult kid lives in a zone where there's at minimum an armed conflict going on, can be conditioned to not believe their kid, their adult kid when they say that they're being bombed and where the bombs are coming from. So, Tunde, what was your reaction to this story and more generally, how strong persuasion, you know, media persuasion can be in light of people's ability, almost a superpower. We have to put on blinders, so to speak, and believe only what we want to believe?
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Yeah, this is this topic's right up our alley. For anyone that's listening to our show in the last two years, this kind of combines every gem of psychological, you know, biases and all these things that we can come up with. But no, this is all fascinating to me actually just on a truly like level of just interest in looking at it and how we all relate to it. Because I think that number one, this is really one of those offshoots of humanity kind of our psychology and how we deal with processing information.
And then the biases that I was joking about, I mean, we could go through a couple of them, right? Confirmation bias, if any bias, other things that are all part of this intellectual and psychological ecosystem that's in our brains and how we're wired as humans. But as we've discussed on.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: And by the way, things that most propaganda, especially modern propaganda, are designed to exploit, Correct?
[00:03:50] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's what I was going to get at is we've discussed on different shows and discussions about how our mind is triggered by certain things. And kind of at the basic level of as humans, right. We still respond to flight or fight type of emotional cues and there's triggers and there's responses for each of us.
What triggers a fight or flight response may be different. But to your point, I would say the current media ecosystem, and I mean media, I'm saying it all, tv, digital, print, everything, has had decades of experience with top level psychologists on how to manipulate us emotionally to get us to view things so that they can sell ads. So I think that in the age of the information wars through the Internet and all that, the topic that you're kind of bringing this up in, under this Ukraine crisis and war really is interesting because for the first time we have what looks like is now becoming a global or at least a regional conflict that could go global in the age of the Internet. And so it's really about who is going to get, I don't even wanna say the truth. Cause that's why we're doing propaganda. Who's gonna get information out to people first that they then grab onto and becomes the truth.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And how they present it is going to matter in terms of whether or not it's grasped as the truth or bought, so to speak. Who's being targeted, how they're being targeted. And so all that stuff, what amazes me about this is how this stuff is boiled down to a science. We actually in two episodes in the previous two years, one back in September of 2021 and then also in August of 2020 we mentioned and in 2020 we actually did a good amount of discussion on it. The Russia fire hose of falsehood propaganda Model which discuss or which really goes into how. And this is broken down by the RAND Corporation the way to do propaganda kind of in the Internet age. And you know, like when you can't just have one television station or whatever.
And so I look at it and you know how this stuff is broken down to a science in terms of the way repetition matters and the way things are presented and is really something that, as kind of, as I mentioned before, it's something that's built on how our brains work and how our brains can be influenced. We also know from social media.
Then when we did one of the shows on social media and talk about how what social media aims to do or is able to do is create imperceptible, slight imperceptible changes in behavior in people. And so it's the same kind of thing. It's influencing. And I thought you were correct in saying this is all media. This is how we are influenced as human beings. And so to see something like this, I think it strikes a chord because most parents, like, I'm a parent, you know, my kids aren't adults. But most parents are like, man, if my kid tells me something's going on and they're saying, hey, this is what they're seeing, it'd be something pretty substantial for me to be like, yeah, right, that's the Ukrainians doing that. I know that the tank that did it had a Russian flag flying, but that's the Ukrainians that did it.
But it's something that we've seen. We've seen people oftentimes, whether it be in the United States or wherever, saying, okay, that stuff you're seeing right there, that's not real. What actually is happening is something else. Here's what it is. And we've seen people buy it. And so it's just. It's amazing to me though, because we. People look at themselves as rational, thoughtful, you know, all that kind of stuff. But we really are just kind of at the. At the mercy of these certain. The certain ways our mind works. And there are people who study and know how to manipulate how our minds work.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: Yeah, it's very interesting. Cause you say a lot there. And pack one. No, this is.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: Yeah, on that one.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: No, but it's amazing to me, like you're saying. Because as you're saying it, you're right. Like the article specifically was about a daughter who's trying to tell her mother what she's seeing in the ground.
And her mother doesn't believe her because.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: No, no, they're not Dropping any bombs in the city. That's all, you know.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: But, but this is where, like I was watching something over the weekend about the Second World War and kind of the lead up to it, and it's interesting because we're back at one of these periods in world history where now it, you know, information is the greatest commodity right now. And, and it's interesting because I. Preparing for today, I saw a famous quote that I heard before. I can't remember who said who, who, who, who. To equate it to. I just know I'll say I didn't create this. But it's. The quote is truth is the first casualty in war.
And you and I were talking about whether it's the Gulf of Tonkin, whether it's weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whether it's, you know, Putin lying about, you know, the, the, the, the, the Nazis.
Yeah. It's all the lies that we know of in different wars in history that got them started.
It's then once the lie is set right, then that side that told a lie to justify their action has to keep that lie perpetuated.
[00:09:05] Speaker A: So what happens has to bring people on board to it and then keep them on board with it. Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: And that's where the interesting thing is. If you look at somewhere like one of the greatest propagandists in the history of the world, I guess recorded history, was Joseph Goebbels of the Nazi party in the 30s and into the 40s. But what's interesting is he was so good and created such a delusion of reality that once you saw. Once they started really losing the war and it was evident, and Berlin was being bombed and the Russians and Americans are closing in, he's still going at it. And what happens is they have to twist the lies more and more. And it's interesting, and you kind of see it.
In other words, respects. It got me thinking of, Remember when we invaded Iraq and there was that guy they made fun of all the time on the news here, the general called Baghdad Bob.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: Because I remember one time he was like, now the Americans aren't here. And there was a big plume of smoke in the back of the day, like our tanks were already on the way. And it's just like. So it's not even about the good side versus the bad side and all that. It's like every side does this once they're in the battle for information, because they got to keep at least whoever they perceive as on their side to stay on their side. And so what I think is interesting about this moment is getting back to specifically this Ukraine stuff right now with Russia is this is a very, I would say maybe more of an extreme example with a daughter telling her mom that she's getting bombed and the mom's not believing it. But it's not unbelievable once you understand the nature of propaganda and what it can do to people.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: Yeah, the famous or old timey quote that came to my mind with this is the pen is mightier than the sword. You know, in a sense, the either information, if it's Pearl harbor, then it's like, okay, yeah, it's information. This is vital to our war effort. We have to get as many people to know about this as possible. Or if it's disinformation, the persuasion part is a big part of mobilizing a society to do something big, whether it be war or something like that, particularly war or something like that. So it's almost whatever side you're on, however flimsy, your actual justification is like, we just don't have a world that's full of examples of leadership leveling with society. That's not how it works. It's like, okay, we need to come up with a reason that either can be a legitimate reason or it can be a reason that we make up. But once we come up with that reason, we have to ride with it. And like you said, we're going to keep riding with it until the wheels fall off. We're not going to then, oh, this one looks bad now. So I guess we're going to just admit defeat. We'll just keep making up.
It's always from the outside. You know, you look at it and almost smile in a sense when they, when the explanations keep getting more and more fanciful and like, oh my goodness, it's like, to what end will they take this? And there is no end.
And the end is once the effort is over, so to speak, is the information or misinformation pushing will continue. And so I thought, well, let me.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: Say this though, what's interesting just real quick to finish up specifically on this Russia, Ukraine thing. What's interesting is because, because Russia has already, first of all, just for the audience for history, Russia has been about 100 years or so perfecting propaganda in this way, in this really aggressive way.
The revolution is actually 100 years right now. It was 1922 with the Lenin and the Trotskyites and all that stuff.
The revolution and that was one of the big offshoots of the revolution was this constant propaganda. Because Russia, if you look at Russia as a country. It's the largest country in the world, Landmass wise. So you think on the western side it borders countries like Ukraine and Finland, so very kind of Nordic type of people.
On its eastern side is bordering China, which is all Asia. So in order to keep a large and vast cultural, kind of very culturally diverse group of people somehow on the same message, unfortunately, the way that they chose to do it and I guess was effective was through propaganda and having.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: To kind of historically lean to more of a repressive culture.
We're in charge, everybody follow us. Single party rule, things like that.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Correct. And also the divide and conquer. So if you can pit people internally against each other, then they're not looking at the leadership of the country, you know, they're too busy squabbling with each other.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's really an approach that you see. And I'll say just to touch on this topic a little bit more before we jump, the other piece about this that we've seen and this was what we'll have an article in the show Notes on this as well, talking about how Russia, right now, Russia had apparently a couple of fledgling non state media organizations that were operating one of them since the fall of the Soviets and a couple other newer ones. And those have all been shuttered basically in the last week or two.
And because what they were doing, like part of the game, so to speak, or however you want to term it, part of the operation is in Russia. You're not allowed to call it a war. It's a special military operation. There are certain things that always have to be said with it. If you're going to talk about it in terms of like, yeah, part of the justification Russia's giving is that there's Nazis there and they have to go get the Nazis out or that anybody who disagrees with them over there or anywhere is an agent of the west and so forth. It's all common tactics really like that. Anybody who says anything different is a traitor or anything like that. It's stuff that you see, you can see that anywhere you. And we'll get in even talking about our own country, how you can see the same kind of tactic or mentality will rise up from time to time. But the way that we see what's happening now in terms of for whatever reason, whether it's because what they're doing requires, they believe, requires more concert or they feel threatened that everybody is not on the same page enough that they, the Russia, the powers that be in Russia have shown, have said hey, all of this stuff that they were allowing that weren't always trumpeting the company line five years ago, 10 years ago, or whatever, right now, they said, look, you guys are done, and you either shut down or we shut you down. And in pretty violent terms. And so that was interesting to me as well, that we're seeing the shutdown of anyone who's not riding the company line as far as media organizations in Russia.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And just to finish my thought on the. Because I don't want to come back to that in a second on why this moment, to me, from the outside, let's say that specifically is interesting with the propaganda, because you can see how the truth always is bent with these things.
And again, from the outside, it's kind of almost comical, but from the inside, because there's not the same level of transparency. It doesn't appear, obviously, from, from what we're hearing from the outside in Russia, like you said earlier, one of the reasons giving internally to the Russian population to do this excursion in Ukraine was to denazify Ukraine and stating that they were having camps and putting ethnic Russians in concentration camps and all that. And they were all Nazis. And since come out that Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, is Jewish, and I've seen pictures of him at like the Wailing Wall in Israel with a yarmulke on. And it's just. That's what I mean. It's almost comical because you're looking at him like, all right, you could have picked any other thing to call this guy, but it's almost like such a absurdity to call a practicing Jew a Nazi.
But the propaganda in Russia is so strong that that kind of truth won't permeate that ecosystem.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: And that's part of the game, so to speak. The propaganda game is that the truth doesn't matter at all. Like, inconsistency doesn't matter. That's part of the. Again, the fight is called the fire hose of falsehood that we specifically looked at that was analyzed. And yeah, like, it's actually amazing when you look at that in particular. Like, yeah, it's. They can take almost anything and turn it into whatever they want if you're in their grasp, so to speak. If you're only getting information from them, which is always. That's always. That's why only getting information from one place is always a concern. If you're only getting information from one place or one direction, so to speak, that always puts you at risk for being at greater risk, I should say, from, from taking a position or being led to a place that is more so serving somebody's benefit than actually reflecting reality, to put. Put it nicely.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, you know, because I definitely want to come back to kind of maybe some of the guardrails we have.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: Well, that's.
Let's go to that real quick.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Well, I wanted to touch real quick on it because you said something that this all ties in, because I think it's easy. Part of what I've been doing this last couple of weeks since the Ukraine thing is really internalizing with myself how do we get information in this country? Because who's to say we're not getting propagandized about what's going on in Russia right now? Right. So we gotta be kind of honest about that. But I started thinking about it, made me think when we talk about how absurd it seems to have Zelensky be called a Nazi when he's a Jew. Right. Like that's just absurd on his face. But enough people in Russia believe it that the government has the support to do this. And it reminds me of birtherism. Right. Because on its face in 2007, during the height of the war on terror and with Bush and Cheney in office and all that, for people that rationally believed that a guy was going to become president, United States who's not born in America and who's some kind of sleeper terrorists seemed absurd on its face to many people.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: But it's interesting. Probably about a third of this country believed that the President United States was illegitimate. And I think the dangers of this type of. What we don't recognize here is that we've been propagandized a lot in this country for years. I mean, first of all, let's not go back to what we talked about with like, Birth of a Nation and the way that the media in the early 20th century racially propagandized against blacks.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: Like every week in the newspaper, there was some black man that raped a white woman and deserved to be lynched for it. And it was all lies.
And so let's be honest about that. And that has created the polarization. Racially, I shouldn't say created, but it helped to maintain it over the past century or so.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: Stoked it further.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And stoked it. And so then we get Back to post 911 and the advent of kind of this nativism was the first time I remember in America that I saw in American media this attitude of, remember, you're either with us or against us.
[00:19:38] Speaker A: I never heard that just in our lifetime, though. Because I was.
Obviously we don't have time to hit it all, but like the civil rights movement, you know, a lot of like we are propagandized. And what I wanted to actually get to with this is that the American system doesn't prevent us, you know, American citizens from receiving or being subjected to propaganda. What it does, like what the system we have in place here with freedom of speech, which is a restriction on the government as far as what the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press that restricts the government the meaning, you know, like the Justice Department, the military, whoever, any type of leadership in the government from putting restraints on or attempting to control by force or other means of coercion the media and what people can say. And so it's the opposite of that. But by that it also means that people can get out there with false narratives and push them really hard, like birtherism or anything like that. People can push false narratives as well as true narratives in a society where speech and the media is protected. And so it doesn't protect us from us as a society from receiving information that could be considered propaganda or it could be misleading or false, as we've seen over the last, we've seen this acutely over the last five, six, seven, eight years. But what it does is it prevents there from only being one voice. Because I think where this becomes very, very, very dangerous, and as you, this is what Russia is realized they needed to do right now, even though they had been lax on it previously, is when you only have the one media voice, the one person with the megaphone and nobody else can speak. That's when the propaganda can envelop an entire society or more or less the entire society. And so the fact that we always have multiple voices here prevents it from taking over everything. Because no matter what with birtherism, there wasn't, if there was only one media source here and that was, that was all they were saying, it would have been a lot more than 30% of Americans that would, that would have believed that. So that also goes back to the point I was saying where you got to be careful. If all of your information is coming from one place or one area, you know, only from like minded people or like minded companies, then you got to be real careful because you could easily be led astray then because all of your information source is going to have potentially can take you places and you're never seeing any type of competing opinion or thought. But I know you wanted to get.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: Into that real quick as you said that I'm starting to think about religion.
[00:22:06] Speaker A: But the question I wanted to ask you, and I'll let you get into what appreciate does this make you appreciate? You know, like what the Founding Fathers did with the Constitution by building such strong protections in which cause, you know, they experienced or they, you know, when you get into it as far as.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I just want to finish my thought about the birtherism, because what I want to get at is about leadership, really and why leadership is so important, because the type of leadership one has will dictate exactly what we're talking about. Either you have the type of leaders who are really about just power and not about having any levels of transparency or honesty. I would say that's usually insecure. People that are worried about their own position versus people that tend to be more secure and less threatened by kind of others would be, you know, tend to be more transparent and open. And here's what I believe.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: But that's that statement, though is dependent on our or a system of government like ours. Like an open government. If you're in an autocratic system, you kind of have to be a certain way or else.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: But that's what I'm getting at is the fact that it's autocratic means that there's a natural insecurity.
[00:23:14] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: Because, you know, so that's my whole point. But what I'm getting at is I want to go to the example of John McCain in the 2008 campaign, the famous moment that many people remember when he was doing a town hall and he gave the microphone to some lady and she said that Obama was an Arab and a Muslim and he grabbed the microphone from her and he said, no, ma', am, that's incorrect. He's an American citizen. He's a good person. I just disagree with him politically. That was the last time that I saw a national kind of at the top Republican actually stand up for the truth in that way.
[00:23:48] Speaker A: In no uncertain terms. Yeah.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: Here's the danger.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: Oh, I don't know.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I'm at his word and all that stuff. Because here's the danger. This is what I'm getting at. This isn't to kiss Barack Obama's butt or to say no one should criticize him or all that. I don't care about the politics of it. The whole point of politics is debate. But what the danger became is that because like you're saying, the ecosystem and the media that many people in this country watched, thankfully it wasn't the only source, but it was enough that if we got 30% of the country believe in this. The danger that that then created was that we had a high enough percentage of the population that truly believed that the system was rigged, that a guy got into the White House illegitimately. And so for that large block of Americans, they kind of gave up on the project of politics. Right? And then when the next guy came in and said, all those people are there are illegitimate. They don't even have a right to debate against you because they're illegitimate. There was enough people primed already to believe that.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: Because they've been told for four or five years that the guy, or, sorry, eight years, that the guy who was in office basically was there somehow by an illegitimate way. So I say this again very clearly. I'm not here to defend Barack Obama as a president or a Democrat or anything. What I'm saying is we've never seen that in American politics where truly people went after the legitimacy of the President, United States in a way that enough Americans believed it and attainted like the Americans population to actually want to be governed by somebody. I mean, it's a very.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: I mean, I'd say we at least never seen it in our lifetime.
[00:25:26] Speaker B: Like say we haven't seen it since people, since the Civil War.
[00:25:28] Speaker A: I was going to say people probably did that to Lincoln, you know, and you saw how that worked out.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: But yeah, that's my point is that if we don't want to have that happen, we should get off the link.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: I think the key point though, that you said there, the key term that you use is primed and that people were primed to that. Because there's something here, actually that is very interesting to me. And that's the. We've talked about this before and that's kind of the thing of whether people who are like the Russians in this instance, this mother whose daughters in a city in Ukraine, are they marks? Are they people that are being targeted? Because whatever powers the beast finds them susceptible to certain messages or certain triggers. Like, oh, if we just mention race to this person, we can get them to do whatever we want to do or whatever. Like, are they marks or are they. Is it a symbiotic thing? And that's always, you know, you and I always kick that back and forth. Like how much of it is we did a show on it?
[00:26:19] Speaker B: I think it's symbiotic, man.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: Well, hold on, hold on. Remember, we did a show on this. Whether fake news was supply or demand driven, you know, whether people were demanding it. And that's why it was being provided or whether it was supply side type of thing. And I think that, like, that's still something that, you know, like is. You can argue it either way. But one thing with being primed or the concept of people are primed to believe these things is that it's intentional. It is intentional to either not actually Russia. With the 2016 election, one of the things they want, they were. They wanted to undermine Americans belief in the government. They saw that people's beliefs in the government and had been undermined during the Obama administration, that people thought there was an illegitimacy going on there and so forth. And so there's not. But I'm sure it's not just them, but there is.
It's not passive, so to speak. Like, there is an effort to not only persuade, but then to prime people, use propaganda to prime people for whatever comes next. And so that part about it, like, you can't lose either one. You can't say, okay, well, these people are just, you know, they're just their marks because they have this whatever trigger issue or trigger word that gets them to, you know, fall in the line. It gets them hypnotized. If you say one word, it hypnotizes them. They'll do whatever you say. But because there's also a pull there too. And you know, it. It.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: No, you're right.
[00:27:42] Speaker A: No, go ahead.
[00:27:42] Speaker B: Because I was saying is that I think it is symbiotic. And look, it's, you know, certain things are anecdotal. Right. I've only been myself in this lifetime, so I don't know what it's like to be someone else.
But what I'm going to say is, remember, you know, I've been off social media for a few years now. And remember one of the reasons why I told you I got off Facebook specifically was because it started changing my perception of other people.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: I started getting, you know, nervous around police. I never had an issue with police before, but I see enough videos of black guys getting hurt by cops is going to naturally take its toll on me. So that's what I feel like I started.
[00:28:17] Speaker A: Well, that's what you and I know, but apparently Facebook doesn't know that.
At least we listen to them.
But go ahead.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: Yeah, that's another show.
But the idea is that, see, that's what I'm saying. Like I'm myself and I could see this doing something to me, the imperceptible kind of slow changes that was happening. And I decided this isn't who I am. I don't distrust other people. I don't hate other groups of people. I don't want to be a part of this. And I left social media, so I feel like there is a part of.
Like, you're right. It's one thing if you grew up in a. Like, if you grew up in North Korea, I can appreciate that you don't know much else.
[00:28:58] Speaker A: Right. That.
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Because that seems like such a closed system that I don't fault those people for maybe not getting enlightened by some outside thing. But in a. In a society like ours where you have.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: Opportunity to learn and to explore without hurting yourself, you know, you can easily change a channel, you can easily go to another website, just look at something.
[00:29:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:17] Speaker B: Then. Then I do think that part of it is that some people, like, you know, the joke I have. Sometimes misery loves company, you know, that just some people are just. They want to continue to.
It seems either they're addicted to something. Like they're addicted to a certain emotional situation.
[00:29:36] Speaker A: That's the point of making the. Making it all turn into emotions is that it becomes something that is almost craved in that sense.
[00:29:43] Speaker B: It's almost like it's kind of like religion, like the Bible. Like there's good and evil, you know, and it's this constant. Like a reality show, but ongoing. And it's real. Right. Like, oh, this politician this. That, you know, and it's all this heroes and villains, like the MCU or like Star wars, you know, I mean.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: And considering the Bible is, you know, probably the best selling book of all time, I mean, you can see why people may have taken that approach in terms of trying to influence minds and.
[00:30:06] Speaker B: Yeah, like politics.
[00:30:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's something that you can get. I mean, in the why is like. The why is very interesting to me also, though, in the sense that one of the. And in the piece talking about how or about why Russia's cracking down on these media organizations that hadn't been doing the party line this whole time, but then there's very few of them. It's not like they let anybody talk, but they let these few.
They were operating and there's this effort from the Kremlin and from the leadership in Russia.
There's a concern, I should say, that Russians find out too much. They may not have pride or they may not, you know, like, look at their. They want their. They want the people to fawn over the country and think that the country's always right. And, you know, what that reminded me of was the effort that's happening Right now, actually, in our home state, you know, where the Desantis, the governor, and, you know, some of the legislature, they're trying to pass laws that go directly to this point, basically. But it's about history. It's about what you're teaching, not necessarily what you're telling people about. What right now.
Some of it's about right now, but it's essentially, there's a law that they're trying to pass right now that is supposed to prevent schools and businesses, private businesses, by the way, from making people feel guilt about the country's racist past. And it's like, wow, like that. That's a. That's pretty. That's quite an effort to go through to all type to try to maintain this perception of how I want people to look at their country, like. And so I have to control the flow of information to make sure that the population, or at least the segments of the population I'm concerned about, have this think a certain way about the thing. I want them to think about that. And so it's. It's very interesting to me, like, again, how intentional this is and how the. It's something that is viewed. And, like, it didn't occur to me, but it's viewed by many people and people that, you know, have gone to high places, that it's vital to the functioning of the state, apparently.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and I think that's right, because if you. Look, let's take it back to the long arc of history, right? We've talked about this on other shows. I mean, this idea of democracy is pretty new, and it's not that common in the world. In the world history.
[00:32:13] Speaker A: So it's pretty fragile.
[00:32:14] Speaker B: I mean, this is the way that, you know, people ruled. Right. I mean, it's. I'm pretty sure the pharaohs back in the day had their own way of propaganda. I mean, the old hieroglyph stuff. And we've seen the hieroglyphs where they, you know, etch somebody's face out because they wanted everyone to forget who that was. You know, I'm sure all that stuff happened back then. And then we got the propaganda that we know about, well documented in the founding of our country from both sides, from the colonists, revolutionaries, and from King George. Right.
And so if we look at it, you know, let's not go back to the pharaoh days, but go a little bit more recent to the founding of the country. We've got King George the authoritarian.
And you had a group of people, men generally, that were founding a new system in the United States and had the direct experience of dealing with the ultimate authoritarian, which is a monarch. You know, a guy that's a king that was born into his position and is going to serve it for life, no matter how good or bad a job they do.
So typically, a king is going to have a very insecure feeling about their place and power because they're probably getting challenged constantly from within. The old Game of Thrones stuff.
And there's a need to control the narrative and a need to keep the population in order.
And remember, that's why, again, the modern system, let's say we're not now the only country that does it. But to talk about our system of, let's say, having a president serve only two terms for a total of eight years, it naturally forces the leader to understand that they're only there temporarily. So they don't try and do all these things generally unless.
Unless it's a recent president, on a serious note, because I'll get into that in a second, which is they don't do all these machinations to try and stay in power. Again, it's this insecurity that usually leads to the machinations. It's good.
[00:34:04] Speaker A: It's because it's either structural insecurity, like you pointed out, if you're a monarch, if you're just birthright, or, you know, some other reason you're at the top of the hill, or it's personality insecurity.
[00:34:15] Speaker B: Correct. Yeah. The Big Lie is a great example of that, because the former president, you know, President Trump. And again, not to be partisan, but just to point out the facts. Right. He was insecure from the time, actually in 2016, when he was already setting up that if he would have lost that election, that it was fake, it was all rigged. Right. So, yeah, he was insecure. And then he pulled and he won. And then he was still insecure because he had to say he lost the popular vote to illegal immigrants. And he was insecure about the size of his crowd for the inauguration. So it was this constant insecurity about his position.
So then he had to set it up prior to even the election that it was all gonna be rigged again. And then when he lost, it was the lie. And then what happens is think about what that's done to our country.
[00:34:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: That divided us further for no reason other than one man's insecurity about his own position.
Got enough Americans to believe in a big lie. And then we've had, you know, all the stuff that we know over the last year. Plus. Right. Audits and all this stuff.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: Yeah, all this waste of time. Energy.
[00:35:12] Speaker B: Yeah, waste time and energy. And also just the national discourse. I mean, that's kind of the sad part too. So that's an example where again, propaganda isn't something that's relegated to foreign countries and other environments.
[00:35:26] Speaker A: Yeah. This isn't something that Americans, like I said, we get it. It's just so far, because of the structural setup of our system and you don't have the government going around shutting down media organizations or whatever. Is that. It is. It's. It's amongst. It's one of many voices, so to speak. And so ultimately, and now just to say that's not to say media organizations deciding what they're going to say and so forth, that's something that, that's private businesses doing what private businesses do. I'm talking about the government saying, okay, you can't say this or you can't say that, which doesn't happen here, which allows a plurality of voices, so to speak. But this is something that's tied to human condition, man. We can't escape that. And actually, your example about how the British used it and the colonists used it even though they were fighting for freedom illustrates how it's tied to human condition. And that just as there's a battle for territory, there is a battle for the narrative. And that battle for the narrative is equally as important in order to keep morale up, in order to keep people going in whatever conflict or disagreement that's going on. And so we see that that's what's happening now. Like the battle for the narrative internally in Russia has the Russian government shutting down media organizations. We're seeing that. You've talked about this actually for the past couple of weeks. We're seeing it all over the world where there's a battle for the narrative. You got the US dropping, oh, Russia might do a false flag event, you know, like before the fighting started, like really like there's a battle for this narrative. And the US Seemed to do a pretty good job with this. Actually, in hindsight, it looked like the world seemed to see this was coming and see Russia as an aggressor, which Russia wasn't trying to. Russia was trying to set it up that they weren't the aggressive. But think about it, it's very interesting from that standpoint.
[00:37:07] Speaker B: Well, the majority of kind of, I would say the mainstream American media maybe was toting the American line. Right. But it's interesting how effective the Russian influence campaign has been in our country over the last. Let's say, 15 years or so, because there was a healthy amount in certain conservative circles of sympathy for Russia and wanting to make it look like Russia was just defending its borders and they were being strong, like borders. Yeah. And all that stuff, and comparing it to our border issues here. And so it's almost like.
It's interesting how these things twist and turn. It's almost like Putin's aggressiveness in this last just 10 days or so since, as we're recording, that his absence, his invasion, I think, has helped to destroy at least his propaganda message in the west, let's put it that way. It's very difficult, I think, you know, the images are not matching up with the propaganda that happened before this invade.
[00:38:04] Speaker A: The reason being is that over in the west, he can't control the images that are shown.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:38:09] Speaker A: And so that's what. Like, if he could still control the images that are shown before those images were shown, he was able to influence and get some auxiliary mouthpieces in the American media. But once the images start being shown, those.
Those. Basically, there was a lot of backtracking and retreating from that standpoint, but I wanted to move on. But did you have any. Anything else that you wanted to add on this before we jump to the next topic?
[00:38:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to point out, because I think a lot of times we forget how, you know, the importance of the founding of our country, our founding documents, and why, kind of the real why as to. To why all this. Why was the United States created? Yeah, in a sense.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: And why did they set up the things like that we're talking about now? Like, why did they set it up like that?
[00:38:52] Speaker B: So I want to read the First Amendment. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the. Prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances?
That's one of the most beautiful passages that I've ever read in my life when it talks about organizing a system of, you know, a society of large. Large society of people.
[00:39:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:24] Speaker B: Because you think about, like we discussed earlier, these men's experience. Was King George, you know, a monarch, the ultimate authoritarian. So what do we have here? Remember, they're coming off, too, in the 1700s, the Catholic and the Protestant wars in England and in Europe.
So that. And remember, the King of England is the head of the Anglican Church.
So that's why there was always an issue with Catholics in England.
So the New country of the United States was going to be a place where the Congress who makes laws cannot make a law about religion. So that tells anybody who wants to say this is a Christian nation or anything like that is wrong. This is a secular nation that happens to be populated by majority Christians. But for the purpose of the propaganda that you can't prohibit the freedom of speech or the freedom of the press. And that goes back to what you said about in the text. And that's why, like you said, we outside of Russia have such a different view because we have the ability to have transparency. We're seeing the images, we're seeing what's really happening on the ground in a way that the people inside of Russia aren't seeing.
And I would say that as much as we've been propagandized, let's say, for example, our excursions in the Middle east. Because I had a friend challenge me recently and asked me how is what Kuroshi is doing in Ukraine no different than Iraq? What we did in Iraq, I could point out to some subtle difference, but I had to acknowledge to him is that in the end it's not that different going into.
[00:41:00] Speaker A: And you're talking post 911 around.
[00:41:04] Speaker B: Correct.
And so we can all look back and acknowledge that there was no WMD in Iraq and there was no real tie into Iraq and Saddam Hussein's involvement with 9 11. And it seems that all the intelligence that we were told, like Colin Powell showing us drawings of anthrax labs and all that was all false. And so kind of like the big lie.
It's false, but enough of the country believes it that we just do it and then you kind of move on.
[00:41:32] Speaker A: Well, I would say even that was even more pervasive than the big lie, though, because most media organization did take that information uncritically initially. It wasn't until years later that you started seeing more critical coverage.
[00:41:43] Speaker B: And again, from the integrity standpoint, they lost some moral high ground, which allowed then, let's say 15 years later, a leader to come in and call news fake. And a lot of Americans could kind of be let into that because the news did lie to us about what was going on in Iraq. And so it's very difficult because you have to maintain a certain level of integrity from the top at all times if you want to combat this.
And there's always people who are willing to go down kind of in the mud and use propaganda to gain their own power. And that's why these, these kind of. We always go as societies through these ebbs and flows every few decades with this stuff. Because no matter how kind of transparent and open one set of leadership wants to be, there's going to be someone picking at them like birtherism, right?
[00:42:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:30] Speaker B: People just throwing out lies and it's like, okay, well, what am I supposed to do? You know, do I spend all day fighting this or do I got to still work? And they take advantage kind of of the situation.
[00:42:40] Speaker A: But that's why the having multitude of voices is supposed to. It's, again, it's not going to be perfect. You know, the Iraq war is an example of that where basically you go to the old saying, you can fool all the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. And you know that's going to be something that, that's real, you know, like. And so ideally you can keep enough voices out there. And I mean, that's when you read the First Amendment. There was one thing I wanted to add to that, or look, point out about that if you look at that text, as far as what it said about preserving religion and anybody's exercise of their religion, speech, press, assembly, those are all of the things that the natural inclination, so to speak, or the first thing people who want unfettered or unquestioned powered, the first things they go for are always those things. So, like, they didn't pull those out of a hat. They knew that was the stuff that if an autocrat or somebody wants to try to take control of the messaging or take control of people's hearts and minds from a very pervasive throughout society point of view, those are the places they were going to go. And so ultimately, you know, like, we are in a system that tries to protect us, but ultimately, as in any democratic system, it always does come back to the people, you know, like. And like you said, leadership is very important, but what the people accept from their leadership also is very important at all times. Because if the people's standards lower, then, you know what, what passes for leadership can also lower.
[00:44:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm just laughing because when you're saying that whole tongue twister about fooling some of the people, I couldn't help but think of George Bush when he was like, fool me once and then he forgot it halfway through and he's.
[00:44:21] Speaker A: Like, fool me, you can't fool. I messed that up in another show previously, so I was ready this time.
[00:44:27] Speaker B: So hold on, I got one last thing and then we can jump to the second topic, which is I'm gonna read you a quote and I want you to guess who it is. This is for the audience. Oh, man, we got Trivia day. Yeah, this is trivia day.
So this is about the kind of passions that can be stoked through propaganda, right? So I say here, quote, one of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations.
They tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound by fraternal affection.
Oh, boy. Now if you take the whole old English way of talking.
[00:45:14] Speaker A: Yeah, that narrows it down a little bit.
Like. Well, no, I have no idea. Who's that?
[00:45:20] Speaker B: That was George Washington.
[00:45:21] Speaker A: Oh, really?
[00:45:22] Speaker B: And his farewell address to the nation after he stepped down. And he saw this is why George Washington was very against political parties for this reason.
He felt that it would drive too many of these patterns. Why Levy says that they tend to be render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.
It's like, wow. Like, think about how we look at now, cities like Portland and Seattle and California is being made fun of when they have a forest fire. And you know, this idea that Americans are being pitted against each other and you know, he saw it 200 plus years ago. It's amazing.
[00:46:01] Speaker A: Well, because it's part of the human condition. And so he saw it and he, you know, had the ability, but also to pick it out and to be able to articulate it. Because that's one thing. One thing to be able to see something is another thing to be able to articulate it and to, you know, pick it out and articulate it.
[00:46:14] Speaker B: So the people don't like hearing that stuff.
[00:46:17] Speaker A: No, no, no. But no, I think from there we can, we can jump to the second topic. Now, obviously there's no easy transition because we're talking about war, we're talking about, you know, stuff that's, that's real life and death stuff. The second topic we want to get to is lighter breakfast. And now again, it's lighter. It's something that we all, well, many of us do on a day to day basis. But there's a, there's a healthy debate and there has been, it really shows a conflict, honestly, amongst experts that, you know, dietitians, things like that. People who study this all the time, where you have some that say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, you have some that say that you like breakfast, you should never do it unless you're like a manual labor or something like that. And so, and then there's various, you know, variations in between and so forth. But it just struck us, not in relation again to the previous topic, but just that this is for everybody here to be basing their opinions or their recommendations on facts. This is a pretty widespread. And it touches on everybody, Everybody. Like again, it makes the decision at least every day whether they're going to eat breakfast or not. And so what was your, what's your thought process in looking at this healthy debate that we have over. Over whether breakfast is, you know, what breakfast is?
[00:47:26] Speaker B: You know, like a lot of things when we do these kind of topics, you know, I find it interesting to find out how this stuff all started.
You know, this is, you know, I never thought about it like when did humanity just start having breakfast as a normal thing? Because I guess I never thought about it until kind of literally now preparing for the show. Like, I guess, yeah, if you're a hunter gatherer living, you know, 5,000, 10,000 years ago, you know, it's not like you had just, you know, a stove and enough and you wake up and you come out of your teepee or your cave and then just breakfast is there.
So, you know, it says, you know, just how breakfast became institutionalized. I just find all this stuff kind of cool, the history of it. So I'll just quote here from the artist article. In England, for example, The act of 1515 mandated that craftsmen and other laborers start their workday at 5am and continue to 7 or 8pm so forget about a 40 hour workweek with half hour for breakfast and 90 minutes for lunch. Increasingly, Europeans saw breakfast as essential to well being. So it's just interesting that I guess it's funny, the act of 1515, like all these laws back in the day of just regulating work and schedules and all that. So again, going back to. Even the first part of our show just shows you how long as we've been trying to manage humans and societies. Right?
[00:48:47] Speaker A: Yeah. Figuring out like people want their workers fed.
[00:48:50] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:48:51] Speaker A: So it's like, yeah, we're gonna put this, we'll put this on the books.
[00:48:53] Speaker B: Well, and there was another one that was similar to that. I'm not gonna get in. Try and find the exact quote. But it was, it was that this society didn't have breakfast. But for a certain class of laborers, they made sure that they ate breakfast correct in order that they had enough energy to go in the.
And Keep, you know, and work hard, basically.
[00:49:10] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I remember reading that part because it was about how like kind of the, the aristocracy or the intellectual workers kind of in that, in that society were pushing back on breakfast. Like, oh yeah, breakfast, you know, we don't need that. Our brains work better when we don't have breakfast and so forth. Which. You hear that now, but like, yeah, I thought I was very interested with that part which said, like where it comes from. I mean, just looking at the word break fast, you know, like fast overnight, you break the fast. So conceivably based on the word, your breakfast is whenever you eat, you know, but first, you know, from waking up in the morning. But we associate it with the morning and the whole idea. There were two parts about it that really stood out to me. One is the physiological aspect of it because we're talking about whether breakfast helps or hurts in terms of maintaining physical fitness and mental fitness, you know, whether it be in terms of what it's doing for your hormones and things like that. And then the other piece is the commercial interests that got involved, at least in modern times, in terms of like the people who sell.
The first, like people that were really pushing hard for breakfast was a guy named Kellogg and a guy named Post.
So I was like, oh yeah, yeah, what a surprise. Yeah, of course that'd be. But then later on, you know, the bacon industry and then the egg industry was like, no, no, no, breakfast is very important. And so how science and how the expertise of people, you know, it's almost like, okay, we want to show that this works and so therefore we're going to do some kind of study and then it shows that it works. But ultimately it seems like with human beings a lot of times, almost like we were talking about before, where you can believe kind of anything you want. And a lot of these studies and a lot of ways that they're able to come up with justifications for whatever recommendation that it is.
It's not necessarily self serving, but it's almost like you can find a study to support whatever it is that you're looking for. So stuff like this, I try to, to the best of my ability, just go with based on how my body feels when I do certain things and that's whether you eat, when you eat and then what type of stuff that you eat, which is another piece of this which wasn't gotten into as much in the things that. And we'll have it on the show. Note the particular piece that we're talking about, it wasn't gone into as much. But what you eat actually for breakfast matters. Whether you're eating, you know, a bunch of protein or a bunch of carbs or, you know, whatever.
Like that changes how you're going to, how breakfast is going to, what it's going to do for you and how you're going to feel afterwards also.
[00:51:34] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's funny because as you're saying, thinking about a part of the article, they do talk about the bacon and eggs.
[00:51:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:41] Speaker B: And, and one thing it's interesting is to learn and this explains a lot because for a while, you know, I would just have smoothies and that's it. And I would always be like really hungry by 10 or 11 in the morning again.
So the idea of making sure you have enough protein in the morning with your breakfast actually makes sense because it helps, you know, slows metabolism and you don't get as hungry that quickly.
[00:52:01] Speaker A: Yeah, but it's just, it gets your metabolism going, but it slows down the digestion. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's what, yeah.
[00:52:08] Speaker B: And so the. But that's what I'm saying. It's interesting because they talked about like kind of how the breakfast, sorry, bacon and eggs got started. It's just like, you know, again like how work, you know, but that's, it goes back to again. I mean it's interesting. That's not propaganda. But what it, what it. You know, to tie back into the first conversation. Because it makes me think of that though, like obviously it's not propaganda because it's food, but it's that we're conditioned to then behave a certain way. Right. Like I, I mean now we know that you can go to Denny's at IHOP 24 hours and get your bacon and eggs at, you know, 11 o' clock at night if you wanted to. But generally most of us don't think about eating certain things at certain parts of the day.
[00:52:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:48] Speaker B: So like for example, I mean, I know there's steak and eggs. I never thought to have a filet mignon at 8 in the morning.
It just, no matter how good, I love steak and I love dipping it at A one sauce and all that stuff. A nice steak two day man.
[00:53:00] Speaker A: That's a failure of imagination.
[00:53:02] Speaker B: It is, clearly. And that's what I'm saying. I never at home, I never really thought to cook scrambled eggs and have some French toast at 9 o' clock at night. It's just interesting. Like, okay, somebody made a decision to start making these certain meals for certain times of the day and then we all got conditioned to it. And we don't really ask.
[00:53:20] Speaker A: That's the fascina, actually. That's the fascinating part, because this actually, like, you could get into a whole philosophical discussion about this because what that is is cultural conditioning and, like, the status quo that evolves kind of just with culture. Because all of the things you're saying right now, those don't necessarily apply everywhere in the world. That's in our culture that, like. Because we all have that same cultural conditioning. And so how that thing evolves. And we actually did a show when we were talking about the roots of conservatism, you know, like modern conservatism, we talked about how one of the tenets of that, of the philosophical conservatism, not the stuff that's happening now, but, like, the philosophical is a deference to these cultural kind of things that have developed organically.
Some kind of deference to say, okay, this stuff developed for a reason. You know, unless we have a good reason to change it. Let's, you know, let's kind of show some deference to it. And so that. But that pervades every part of our life. Like, a lot of things that we do kind of on autopilot every day are a result of cultural conditioning. And so I only say that to push back. I don't think somebody sat around and made that up one day, but I would say more. So people just started doing it and then it just spread, you know, like. And then maybe they didn't have a reason necessarily for doing it. That can get. That's why I can get you into trouble is people might do stuff for no reason, and then there may be better ways to do it and then also get you into trouble when people do things for very bad reasons and it becomes part of the culture and so forth, which we, you know, we've seen all that. But the aspect of cultural conditioning with breakfast, because as you pointed out, the article did a good job discussing, like, over time, how different cultures and societies have done different things with breakfast. But it's still something people are trying to figure out good ways to do. And that, to me, was the interesting thing about it. Everybody's trying to solve breakfast. We don't have these debates over, at least to the same degree, over lunch and dinner. You might have some societies where they eat a big lunch and a small dinner, but they're still eating at that same time, you know, so, like, breakfast is just this hotly debated piece. Like, oh, yeah, it's so important, or it's terrible, or you know, whatever.
[00:55:19] Speaker B: Yeah. It's like at the end of the day, we all got to feed our furnace.
So how you do it and how you do it and when you do it, I guess, you know, at some point you got to eat food, but.
[00:55:33] Speaker A: At some point, you got to eat food. True words, Tunde. True words have never been spoken.
[00:55:37] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's kind of like sometimes people are human beings, too.
[00:55:41] Speaker A: Sometimes.
[00:55:41] Speaker B: Sometimes I just come up with. With gems.
[00:55:45] Speaker A: Insight.
[00:55:45] Speaker B: That means. That means I'm probably done for the show, though, coming up with those kind of gems. No, I feel you.
[00:55:51] Speaker A: I feel you, man.
I think. I think we can wrap on this. And so, you know, we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call It Like I See It. Subscribe to the podcast, rate us, review us. You remember, you can get us wherever you get your podcast. Podcast. And until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:56:05] Speaker B: I'm Tundeguana.
[00:56:07] Speaker A: All right, and we'll talk to you next time.
