The Exchanges

Q to him because I wanted to explore some of the ways that we are shaped by technology and also the ways that we're shaping technology. As you can imagine, we talk about media, culture, misinformation, and technology. I don't always agree with him, but we have a pretty good conversation. It's time to listen and learn. Well, first I want to start with, what are you obsessed with right now?

A I'm obsessed with what feels like a, a totalizing, polarizing, fascistic environment, right? Politics aside, whatever people's views, I feel like they're getting so bizarrely entrenched that everyone's, everyone, you know, has this sort of, uh, almost this might makes right things. Uh, enforcement of values and ideologies. There's a, a stiffness to everybody's approaches, and whether it's their business plans, or their social agendas, or I, I used to think, oh, you know, when, when, when I'm kind of on this side of things, I look at, oh, look at that other side, they're being all stiff. Or if I'm on that side, then I look at this side and go, oh, they're being all stiff. Then when I get Kind of more McLuhan-esque about it. You know, McLuhan used to write a lot about media environments that we kind of live, Neil Postman did too, the idea that culture is like the, the medium on which the bacteria grows, that somehow we're in an atmosphere of this kind of extremism and polarization, and then I'm obsessed with how do we engender a more human, softer, more flexible, uh, Empathetic approach to living when we're in an environment that's this rigid, and whether or not we'll be able to do that, or whether humanity itself is just going to succumb to this, to this kind of bizarre operating system.

AI assessment note: “I'm obsessed with what feels like a, a totalizing, polarizing, fascistic environment”

Q In an email to me before this, you said you were sort of in an anti-business, anti-self-optimization mood these days. Why?

A Because I feel like we're trying to auto-tune ourselves. You know, we're living in a digital media environment where everything is quantized. You know, it's, it's either here or there. You're on this, this node or that node. And, uh, our value system accordingly is to get people either, you know, up to the C or down to the B, but not in that weird, squishy place in between. You know, fuzzy logic is about reducing. It's not about maintaining the fuzziness. You know, it's about you're here, Or you're there, and you've got, you need more granularity? Ok, we'll give you a half step. You're here, here, or here. Here, here, or here. Alright, you don't like that? We'll give you sixths. We'll give you eighths. But you're still always on the mark, and what we do by doing that is, is We make a judgment as to what is signal and what is noise. You know, if you're going to auto tune James Brown, right? James Brown reaching up for the note or coming down in over the note. No, no. You're going to auto tune him. He's not reaching. He's on the note on the note. What have you done? You filed off the soul, the signal in a James Brown recording. The actual signal is the, is his soul reaching up for that note. That's why they call it soul. It's that reaching. That we're hearing. That's what makes his interpretation of the song different than Britney's, different than Ariana's. We auto-tune everybod…

AI assessment note: “Because I feel like we're trying to auto-tune ourselves.”

Q What do you know about decision making that most people miss?

A I took Est in the seventies. Remember Est? It was like Werner Earhart did this thing. They call it Landmark Forum now. It was one of the first kind of culty self-help things that came out of California. And, you know, you do these long seminars and whatever, and like Tony Robbins kind of stuff. And what they said in it that stuck, it's the only thing that I remembered from it was they, they distinguish between a decision and a choice. And I really, that, that, that, like a decision is the process of, I have this decision to make. It's the unresolved thing. The decision is more like the question, the, the weighing for this decision, but choice is what you autonomously choose to do.

AI assessment note: “they distinguish between a decision and a choice”

Q Talk to me about that extreme polarization. Like, is technology creating that, or is it amplifying something already within us, or how is that happening?

A You know, it's hard to know whether the, the, the media and technologies that emerge, uh, emerge and, and are successful because of a preexisting cultural affordance for that thing, or whether the new technology or medium comes and then makes us all like that. So you could say the printing press and the book led to All the sorts of, uh, individual perspectives and individualism that then characterized the Renaissance. Or you could say people were kind of getting into the idea of being individuals, and they made things like the book and the printing press and perspective painting popular because that's what they were ready for. Or you could say television was a global medium and brought everyone together, and that's why we got that kind of Oprah Winfrey-like, hands across the world, crashing of the Berlin Wall. Or today, you could say digital technology is a one-zero, yes, no, you know, right, wrong, uh, uh, choose one of the above cookie-cutter, uh, medium, so, uh, people's lives and politics and approaches end up getting that way. Or, Were we already kind of in a technocratic, scientistic culture that had killed God since Nietzsche, and the computer comes along, and of course, there we are. There's the realization of that, of that worldview. So I would say it's like both kind of affect each other, but what you have to do then is like, so you get, we get what we asked for, righ…

AI assessment note: “So I would say it's like both kind of affect each other”

Q Well, it used to be that we held up organizations like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal as arbiters of sort of fact from fiction, and that seems to be coming increasingly hard as the media landscape for how we tell stories and the attention culture, um, sort of pervades. How do you think about that?

A I mean, as a, uh, someone who's been traditionally, um, progressive, I get really upset when I see the way MSNBC or CNN will even slightly slant or misrepresent a story in order to get the most impact. Because once they or the times are doing it, then where are you supposed to turn? You know, so when I see a piece In the New York Times that, you know, the headline and the first few paragraphs are arguing that, oh, you know, when Israel opened up its schools, its elementary schools, uh, COVID rates went up. And then you finally read all the way down, and you go to the links and find the studies, and it's like, okay, when Israel opened its bars, its restaurants, its theaters, and its public schools, COVID rates went up. Like, because they're playing into the schools open, schools closed, schools masks, schools not. That's a bigger headline. It gets more clicks. But you've ended up, for whatever reason, whether it's your politics or your need to get clicks, you've misrepresented a story. And once you do that once, How do I trust them? No. Does it mean that I'm going to go to, you know, Rand Paul or whoever's his, you know, or, or Alex Jones site about, you know, and I can read about there's, there's one website that was talking about these doctors were talking about how the COVID vaccines have these eggs in them that hatch aluminum parasites that replicate. And they had, they held…

AI assessment note: “Because once they or the times are doing it, then where are you supposed to turn?”

Q Go deeper on that about the CDC and sort of like their sort of maybe institutional bias in terms of how they're communicating. And they were wrong at the start, right? Like they were quick and wrong.

A Well, they were right. What they were right about was they looked, so the CDC's job is to reduce the transmission of a virus through a community by whatever means necessary. And they looked at the situation at the early moments of COVID and thought, you know, masks may or may not be of some minimal help in, uh, the general population. Who may or may not be even coming into contact with any COVID. There's like, you know, 300 cases or a thousand cases in the whole country where, meanwhile, there are health care workers who can't get the equipment that they need. So if health workers are exposed, they have a higher likelihood of getting the thing. If they get the thing, then our hospitals are crippled And can't take care of people, and the virus becomes more rampant. What we have to do is let people know, look, the general public right now, you don't need masks. Who does need masks right now are these healthcare providers. So don't use masks. You should be okay, and these people will use masks. They're managing the disease. It is true. If you're wealthy, if you're Steve Jobs, and you've got all the money in the world, and you could live an ideal life, Wear a mask, of course, right now, you know, because who are you coming to contact?

AI assessment note: “Well, they were right. What they were right about was they looked”

Q Like, how do you, as a, an average citizen, how do you trust, uh, them to give you proper information based on what you just said? I, I don't disagree with you.

A I'm just saying, like, now. It was proper. It was proper information. What they should have said was, right now, we're in a mask triage situation. And just like you're running to the store for toilet paper, you could be running to the hardware store and taking all the masks, but that would be a really bad thing to do. That would be really bad for the community. You've got to right now think of this disease and the whole country rather than this disease and you right now. Um, we want you to have resilience and have water in your house and food and be able to live for a week or two, but We really need these masks. If you've got them, get them to the hospitals. We're going to produce more. And hopefully by the time this disease is rampant in the country, if it gets that way, we'll have upped the production on masks. So then you can have them when you need them.

AI assessment note: “It was proper. It was proper information. What they should have said was”

Q And what do you think would have happened if they did that?

A Do you think everyone would have panicked and run out and bought the masks? Of course. So what are they looking at? So then they have to think, all right, we have to manage masks. This disease. It goes all the way back to the first public relations people. It was like, um, Walter Lippmann and Ed Bernays and those folks around World War I. And when they came up with the idea of public relations, basically of, in some ways, manufacturing consent for certain things, using whatever means and stories you have, what they believed was, you know, there's, they, they, they, Their ideal government was there would be this kind of council of experts and scientists who would be in a big building next to the White House somewhere, and they would figure out, what is it that we need America to do? And they would say, okay, the scientists go, look, we've only got 30,000 masks, and we've got thirty million people. We've got to make Americans give the masks to the hospitals, because that's, and we know, that's what's right, right now. How do we do that? Then they hire Bernays, or Lipman, or public relations people to come up with, what's the very best way to do that? The CDC didn't have the very best people, right? They were thinking like a doctor. How does the doctor talk to the patient? What do we have to say? And, you know, uh, what do you do if you miss a dose? And why do you have to take thi…

AI assessment note: “Do you think everyone would have panicked and run out and bought the masks? Of course.”

Q in terms of delegitimizing when you have one Party sort of interested in that, perhaps, but you also have organizations that are, um, you know, arguably making that a bit easier, too, with, with what you just talked about, right? Not giving accurate information because you're trying to create a behavior, so maybe you're withholding some information that you shouldn't be withholding, which feeds into this sort of, like, delegitimization.

A Right. I mean, the question is, does fake news Genuinely derive more traction from each error made by government or major news media. In other words, when there are real gotchas, does it work or would they still, I mean, would it still be that the COVID vaccine put something in you that then five G towers activates and that's why you can't see it when you look in the vaccine, but once it's in you and they put a spoon on your head and everything's going to get magnetic attention basically to the right. Once they're doing that, does that story Gain more power because the New York Times has slightly misrepresented, um, the real takeaway of an Israel COVID study? Ultimately, yes. Once you start playing that game, You're going to lose to whoever plays that game more ruthlessly. You know, if you're going to be on the side of supposedly factual evidence-based reality, you got to stick with that. And it doesn't mean you can't believe in the soul and astrology and everything else that you want to, you know what I mean? You could, I'm not saying you, you've got to be a staunch atheist, scientistic, uh, uh, extremist, but you know, you're reporting that, You know, it has to be news that's fit to print, you know, that if you're the paper of record and you want to stay the paper of record, you got to be, you got to be careful about that. You know, shit happens, right? The Gulf War and bad r…

AI assessment note: “Ultimately, yes. Once you start playing that game, You're going to lose”

Q What habits are you trying to break right now?

A I'm trying to break, uh, email, which is a hard habit, um, because I get, like, a thousand of these things a day, and what am I supposed to do, you know, and I'm, I feel really guilty if I don't answer them all, and I feel like some kind of an asshole that it's like, oh, I get a thousand, so I don't have to, um, because they're real human beings who read, maybe read something or spent time, and, and, um, On the other hand, a lot of the emails will be like, oh, I'm in high school, and they assigned me your book Team Human for a book report. Please tell me, what is your book about? I'm like, oh, fuck you, kid. You know? No, you don't. You don't get that. Um, I, I've decided I'm entitled to food and drink before email. You know, I'm aware, and I'm not, you know, all Tim Ferriss-y about stuff, but I know that, like, when someone says something bad, or there's more stress in an email, I know it's activating hormones and endocrine systems and all that, that need Calories and, and food and water and buffers. There's probably not enough oxygen or hydrogen or molybdenum or whatever it is that I need in my bloodstream to absorb all that. So I'm, I'm trying to, to limit that. Emails, emails my, my bad thing. I have no problem with the social media. You know what I mean? It's not like, oh, I got to check my, my thing. I don't have those kind of, um, those kind of habits. So it's, it's that…

AI assessment note: “I'm trying to break, uh, email, which is a hard habit”

Q reporting something and they're reporting through their lens, uh, you know, without sort of any training and obviously bias and we're existing in this world of sort of, I would say misinformation. Uh, which is intentionally possibly misleading, but there's also all of this information out there that is sort of, uh, generally irrelevant or high noise to signal. How do we filter that? How do we think through that?

A One way to filter it is to filter ourselves and our own expression. You know, I, I remember when Blogger came out, and Blogger was like the first, one of the first web blogging platforms. Evan, Evan Williams, later of Twitter, did it. And I was taught, I was at a conference talking to Evan about it. It was just a baby platform. And he was like, oh, are you going to use this? And I was like, well, I don't think I should use it. I'm already A journalist. I've got, you know, I'm on the New York Times syndicate. It wouldn't be fair for me to go in there. This is a play space. You know, it's for, it's for, you know, amateurs in the best sense of the word, for them to do it and talk. It's a social network. It's not for some professional journalist to be, you know, I have a platform. It's not right. And he was like, no, no, it's for everybody. It's for everybody. You could use it the way you use it. And, you know, I, I played around with it some, and I mean, I ended up with a blog somewhere on my, on my website, I guess. But what I started to feel like was, yes, it's great for everyone to be able to type what they're feeling and stuff, but just because you can type doesn't mean you can write, right? And just because you can write doesn't mean you should write. You know, it was like in the old days, in the old days of the late eighties, early nineties, the only people who could write a…

AI assessment note: “One way to filter it is to filter ourselves and our own expression.”

Q There's sort of three thoughts I have out of that. One, one is a question, I guess, about why we think what we think about foreign policy matters. Is it just because we have access to platforms now?

A I think we always cared about these foreign matters, but we weren't, uh, as immersed in them, and we weren't expected to have something to say about them. At least Walter Cronkite was like, he was this journalist guy. He went all the way over there and saw the war and talked to the soldiers, and they had people talking to the generals, and then this whole sort of news agency kind of went, ah, This is really awful. And, and, and their approach to it did seep out to America, but there were others. There was NBC news. There was ABC news. There was, you know, the New York times. There was a lot. And, but yeah, the Cronkite might've had influence, but yes, it was a different media environment, but one in which we weren't being trained to respond in a moment to moment way to every issue. Ebb and flow in the news to everything that was happening. That's not just the internet. I remember I wrote this piece back when, when, um, remember Britney Spears? I mean, there's the current story with her now, but I remember there was this Moment when she had some kind of a breakdown and like shaved her head and they took her to the hospital and all, and all the news channels had it. Everyone had it. You know, the, even the tiny little TMZ kind of news channels, whatever they were. But I saw this picture from far of her mansion and there, and I counted, and this is just in what I could count. Ther…

AI assessment note: “we weren't, uh, as immersed in them, and we weren't expected to have something to say”

Q But that's saying Twitter's not real media. Is that?

A No, we contaminated Twitter, the internet. We contaminated the internet. We shouldn't have put banking on the internet either. These were fun places. These were social media. These were play spaces. This is where a guy could pretend he's a girl, and a girl could pretend she's a robot, and These were play spaces. You know, they, they built the internet. Yeah. For scientists to be able to communicate with each other. What did the scientists do with it? They ended up telling like fantasy Star Trek episodes and sharing recipes and telling what we used to call blonde jokes. And like people did with fax machines. It was not, and it's not even secure for business. That's why all these companies are getting hacked and frozen and, and ransomware and all that. You took a network. Where every note is going, hello, who are you? Let's play.

AI assessment note: “No, we contaminated Twitter, the internet. We contaminated the internet.”

Q Talk to me a little bit about that. What do you think the role of religion and culture has been in sort of curbing human behavior?

A I mean, it depends. Uh, I feel like most religions have these, it's almost like most bands, they have this period after their emergence when, right, shortly after their emergence, where they're trying to really do the right thing. You know, I mean, I know Judaism better than, than most of the others, but, you know, Judaism really emerged as a, a, System of thought and behavior for the recovering cult addicts of the Egyptian death cults, where they come out in the desert. They're like, oh shoot, that didn't work. What do we do? And say, okay, let's not worry about so much about believing in God and having an idol and all that. Let's focus on community and law and labor and have a Sabbath. And let's try that, you know, and it kind of worked for a while. And then, you know, Eventually, you know, they get persecuted, they get a piece of land, and they're fighting for survival, and they go, okay, you know, and it all deteriorates, and then people become, you know, worshiping at a wall, and one, one God, and one God alone, and God gave us this piece of land, and we're special, ah, and all this stuff happens, and it's like, oh no, you became a religion too, you know, and it wasn't, it wasn't Judaism until way late in its career, and I feel like, you know, and, and, and Christianity had that too, this sort of insight of Um, all right, there's all these laws, and you're getting ever mor…

AI assessment note: “Judaism really emerged as a, a, System of thought and behavior”