The Gatekeepers of Information

I think you said it also very good point, which is who has the time. That's a big one. I mean, because it does take me three times longer to read a news article. Yeah. Because I got a vet. I don't have to. I could be like a lot of other, probably most people, but... They're counting on it. If I read this and something doesn't vibe with me, I sit there and I go look up and I do research. We don't all have a Jamie right next to us checking everything that we say and calling us out if I was wrong. It's like the idea that forever for this whole time, I thought that Jay-Z said that quote, and then you got who I was. I was like, well, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. But, bloop. But it's like, most people don't take that time. If somebody else would have corrected me on the bus, I don't know if anybody would have taken the time to Google that and make sure. Well, that's not even important, right? That's not even important. Right. But what I was talking about. Important shit that people have to look up and try to figure out why are we in Afghanistan or why is this happening or why is that important or why is this law being passed or what's the real motivation behind this drug being pushed? What the fuck is going on with that guy who's... There's so much of that in this world that you could lose yourself. If you didn't have a job and your entire day was sifting through the news and trying to find truthful narratives versus propaganda, you would lose your fucking mind. How much do you think is that? How much do you think right now the exaggeration of it is because of that? Because that people have a chance to now consume so much of this information? I think that locking people in their house where they just have access to the internet. I thought about it this way when I remember we were in the beginnings of our first quarantine kind of lockdown thing and I was like, I still had Netflix and I still had FaceTime and I still had... I mean, it didn't... I was like, this is fine. Like, I really... It wasn't that bad. I wasn't going crazy, but I was like, imagine if this happened in 1985. Right. Right. I mean, and you had to wait till the next morning to get a newspaper. Well, maybe the newspaper wouldn't even be printed because nobody worked in the newspaper and imagine if the newspaper was as full of shit as CNN is and then you got it, you're lost. You really don't know what's true or what's lies. What's propaganda. You only have to have that one thing. And so I was thinking like, man, how difficult would it have been? How much more isolated would it have been if we just can only get the information twice a day, once a day? And we have one channel, two or three channels, local news or whatever it was. We didn't even have that kind of... Whatever. Well, there was so much propaganda back then that just slipped through the cracks. It took forever before something hit the light of day. Right. Right. Something was obvious, like especially the government shit, like golf a tonkin incident that led us into Vietnam. I mean, there's a bunch of those instances where... There's a lot of gatekeepers back there. Yeah. Oh my God. And there was agreements with the news. The news had agreements with politicians and government agencies and they followed the narrative. Yeah. So I think that maybe us now with access to all this information and all this content and all this data and all these people, all these voices of somebody that used to do 10 minutes of Twitter, now doing four hours of Twitter and just sitting there and getting in these little rabbit holes. I mean, it's got to be damaging. Like we said, a lot of it is junk food. I'd treat a lot of it like junk food. I love a potato chip every once in a while, but if I ate it for eight hours a day, I think it would probably be pretty unhealthy. And so it's like consuming this kind of garbage. Yeah. There's a guy named Alan Levinovich and he's looked at it in the same way you look at processed food. That's how he described it. He's like, you can't eat all processed food and you can't eat all processed information. And that's what it is. Like this social media version of information is just processed information and you're getting it in these weird sort of bursts and it's all boiled down with preservatives on it and filled with nonsense. It has an agenda. It's like, I think that there's a monetization of human suffering I think is difficult. Anytime you have that opportunity to wear, because it's more interesting and it's more, you want eyeballs onto your content. So it's a very simple algorithm. We just need eyeballs. So whatever got people to watch it, then let's get more of that instead of stuff that's not interesting. That might be just very boring data. And so I think you just tend to lean towards that kind of stuff a little bit. I think it's tough. Yeah. That's the stuff that always fascinates me a little bit. It's just because I think it takes us... I don't think we have... A lot of people have that kind of thing. I think that a lot of people are just like, oh, I don't bother with that. I don't take the time to think about it. No, they don't have the time. They don't take the time. And that's oddly enough where podcasts have sort of come in to fill that void. Because in podcasts, you can have two intelligent people just sitting down talking about stuff in a way like, well, maybe that's not true. Maybe this is true. Let's find out. Let's discuss this and let's figure out why people are saying this thing that is clearly untrue and saying it across multiple platforms. What's the motivation behind this? That's a thing that didn't exist before. First of all, in the past, we didn't think of the news as being this thing that was lying to us. That's a real recent thing. And I think a lot of that was exacerbated during the time that Trump was president because the media was so upset that Trump had become the president and so upset that this... What they thought, this con man was now running the entire government that it's time to fight fire with fire. And so they started attacking in the same way that they felt like he was attacking, the way he would call people by a nickname, Lion Ted or fucking Lion Hillary or Crooked Hillary or have all these nicknames for people. Call the news the fake news and like, God, we have to fight fire with fire. We have to attack the same way he's attacking. But in doing so, they've undermined their credibility to an almost irreparable way. And that's what's scary. What's scary is that the amount of people that actually trust the news now is fucking lower than ever. Lower than ever. And I think it's because we all believe that people have an agenda. Even with science, people think we are so used to people having an agenda that people think that there's an agenda with everything. And there might be, I mean, not to say that there isn't. I think that that's the balance of it all to sit there and say, again, I'm even victim of what we're talking about right now, which is to say that while I believe that we probably lean this way, we're not to say that it's a purified, like that it's no such thing, that it's not possible that there's some puppet master out there that's really kind of affecting this this way without the third. But I'm just saying that at the end of the day, not everything has such a mastermind of full type of thought process behind it. I think some of it is a lot more simple. I think it's a lot simpler. Sometimes it's about just money. Sometimes it's about just- Most of it's about money. That's most of it's about narratives, narratives that are set up in order to have people extract money from a system. And that's what's really scary is that you follow the money and it's right there. And many people have talked for years about getting money out of politics and getting money out of, to make it so that these people that make these huge decisions that affect policy, affect the way we're allowed to live our lives, that there should be no money being exchanged in these decisions. There should be no motivation. No one should profit from these things. No one who wants to be a politician should ever get exorbitantly wealthy from being a politician. But yet that's the case over and over and over again. That's dirty. That's dirty. And that is what affects these people. And that's what affects the way they behave and the way they communicate and the things they talk about and the things they won't talk about. Maybe sometimes it is as important. Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.