#128 - Data Overload, Our Storytelling Paradox, The Everyman Tyrant

Can you tell it's been seven months first thing i do is clear my throat into the microphone how you doing welcome to episode number 128 escaping the cave tonsil expat i'm your friendly and congenital host, Todd. Record on this date. Record on this episode. Record date on this one. We're off to a rip-roaring start. Early morning hours of April 1st, 2024. Happy April Fool's Day. Probably a bunch of you. Probably think I was playing a joke on you when I posted this stupid thing. It's for real.

Seven months later. I really hope you've been well. Springtime's here. Baseball season's underway. The Detroit Tigers are 3-0. Three one-run victories in Chicago. Two come from behind wins. First time in their history they've started 3-0 with three one-run victories against the lowly Chicago White Sox, of course.

Why am I talking about baseball? ball because everything else sucks sunday was not only easter it was a transgender day of visibility. Really? They've been pretty much omnipotent for the last five or six years, haven't they? They needed a day of visibility? So the just happy Easter, Dementia Joe and Kamala of Color decided to release these melodramatic, heartfelt statements. Oh, Twitter was a glow yesterday. Probably still is today.

So yeah, I'm very happy baseball season's here because it gives me something else to focus on. Instead of just CNN and Fox News, I don't watch MSNBC. You got to be a certain kind of masochist to watch that. Or Ronald McDaniel, find out. I was going to call her Ronald McDonald or Ronna McDonald. Whatever. I'm going to have to endure the dungeon that is, what is it, Microsoft MSNBC? Microsoft NBC is what that meant when they launched it, right?

Because it was a, wasn't it a cut, like a sort of a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC? I'm just full of all sorts of little fun facts.

Now some more for you. Do a little housekeeping before I get started on this beast. And it might be a beast today, believe it or not. A lot of stuff. Heard that before? We're going to go back to this thing that I did about four or five years ago. And every time I said, I got a pile of stuff, I got a lot of stuff, I want you to play along at home and take a drink. Something light. I don't want to hurt you. Yeah, just take a shot of something gentle. Maybe a shot of wine.

Maybe a shot of Bud Light. Anyway. Yeah, we'll see how this goes today. The housekeeping stuff. stuff. I mentioned this on the Substack page back in December when I thought I was going to record something, but I have created a video page on Substack. Now, you can still get this stuff over at YouTube, TanzillaX over at YouTube. I've got a bunch of playlists set up over there. If you want to get the video clips, you can get them there, but you can also now get them on Substack.

I invite you to check it out. Go ahead and subscribe. I'm not charging anything at this point in time because, well, there's really no point. But at some point, maybe down the road, if you're already signed up, I'll grandfather you in if that happens to change. Ah, get in on the ground floor, right? Yeah, I've been in hibernation for seven months. I've apologized for this repeatedly. I've tried to explain it. I've tried to rationalize it away. I'm not going to do that again.

This is apparently how Tanzila rolls. Yes, I referred to myself in the third person. I've been doing this on and off for this iteration of the podcast since 2018. 18. I also did this back in 2014 for the better part of a year. It's always been this way. And no matter what I do, no matter how I psych myself up, no matter how many proclamations and promises I make, I tend to have a sort of manic and then isolation cycle.

I do a bunch of podcasts, do a lot of work on this silly thing, and then I sort of inhale, like an inhale-exhale. I've talked about this in various places over the years.

Creative process where you got to inhale, exhale, you know, the creation of content, the writing of things, producing things, painting, maybe recording music, whatever. That's the exhalation, right? But there also has to be an inhalation period where you bring stuff in, you bring new material into process and turn into, well, I don't know, maybe that's what I'm doing. I have no idea. I'm just sick and tired of having to come back here or feeling

like I have. I don't have to do anything. You're not paying me. Nobody's paying me for this thing. I'm not making a fucking dime. So I really don't owe anybody an explanation, but I feel bad because I've had a few people that are like, where the fuck you at? Where you been? What are you doing? You got any more of these stupid things coming out? I feel bad because, you know, if they're interested, maybe I make them think. I feel bad.

But this is just how it apparently goes, and it's probably not going to change. So this may be another one of those five-episode ejaculations followed by me rolling over on you and going to sleep for a few months. Who paints a picture like your friendly neighborhood Donzella, huh? Huh? Anyway, some of the things that I was thinking about doing, I had touched on in that post, the agitation prop material that I've sort of threatened to unleash upon you again.

I was stuff I was talking about back 2018, 2019. In addition to that, I found out that Matt Taibbi and the website Public Substack site have unearthed yet more evidence. Now, this is our this has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. I haven't seen a ruling on this yet. I think it's in the state of Missouri is involved or something.

But this is about the government trying to sidestep the First Amendment by influencing Twitter and Facebook to suppress political speech, to censor political speech. Technically, it's not the government doing it. But if the government is going in and putting pressure upon a private company, it's just basically skirting your way around the First Amendment. It's the government that's performing the action. I don't care whose hand is up where.

If you've got the federal government's hand up Mark Zuckerberg's butt and it's his hand moving his mouth, ban them. Who's responsible? Almost like some organized crime shit. This is something Trump would do. Anyway, that, I believe, is in the Supreme Court. Twitter files sort of blew all of this wide open when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, I guess a year ago. And Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, a few other people really did some great work on this. A little controversy with Musk and Taibbi.

But thank God, because this is going on. You know this is going on everywhere else. It's going on. It has to be going on at Facebook. It's not going on a TikTok because that's run by the Chinese. They're the ones that get to write the algorithm and tell TikTok what sort of political and sociological information they're getting. Maybe TikTok is immune from the U.S. government, but you know it's being hit by the Chinese.

Talk about that at some point, I'm sure. but a lot of the stuff that came out here or some of the stuff that came out had to do with some people that I had really at least a few years ago I had come I was thrilled to run into this stuff when I was really heavily into the social media disease stuff and I still kind of am but man Facebook's changed it has changed something has happened over there it's not the same as it was again, something for a later date.

But basically what's happening with the social media companies and with this organization or this movement, this anti-disinformation movement, is there are people who I respected, who I was thrilled to see digging into this topic a few years ago, who are setting themselves up in influential positions in what's becoming a ministry of truth. I'm talking about Well, people like Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology, the Center for Woke Technology.

Every piece of disinformation and propaganda that Tristan Harris targets or talks about or even mentions comes from the right. He has never, to my knowledge... Turn that microscope to the left. The work that he does is fantastic, as far as it goes, but he seems to think and is under the impression that this is only a problem that exists on the right-hand side of the informational ecosystem. Bullshit. You and I know it. Few other names. Rene Duresta Jonathan Height.

This guy. I may have to do an episode just on him, because he's still one of my guys. I was talking in glowing terms about Mr. Haidt a few years ago. The Righteous Mind, a couple of his other books that I've got that really, I mean, Haidt's elephant. I've mentioned that a thousand times on this show. The post hoc reasoning, emotive judgments, emotive conclusions that we come to, these snap conclusions that we come to and then use our powers of reason to rationalize the initial snap judgment.

That's what we mistake for reason most of the time the writer on heights elephant is basically the litigator that rationalizes this big gigantic ginormous emotional elephant his snap conclusions snap judgments i got i have gotten a lot from mr height and he's doing great work as far as the effects of social media on teenagers a new book out i forget the name of it now the coddling of of the American Mind. He wrote that with Lukyanov a few years ago. Epic book.

Now, another complaint I have about Haidt is that he's only focusing on the mental health of teenagers, teenage girls in particular. Now, I saw him, I think, on Joe Rogan's podcast. I forget when he was on there. I didn't watch it. I never watch Rogan's stuff immediately. I don't know when the episode dropped. But he admitted that the reason that he's using the children, teenagers, teenage girls primary example is because everybody cares about the children.

He's using the same tactic that your local news uses. Is there something under your sink that could kill your kids? Better watch at six. You know, that kind of thing for the children. I'm going to tell you something right now. Trust me, I know about these things. The effects of social media, the psychological and emotional effects, the detrimental psychological and emotional effects run way past teenagers. This is not just a kid problem. Now, Mr. Haidt has, in his words, libertarian leanings.

He doesn't think that adults should be told what to do with their time and with their devices and all. And to a point, I agree with him. So cigarettes are cool, right? He said on X that he thought that social media was the worst consumer product ever conceived. And I thought to myself, what are you talking about? You mean worse than cigarettes? Really? Categories. I don't think so. I don't know. I'm not saying either way.

I just don't like the fact that he's holding this double standard, this manipulative double standard of holding children up as something to be protected. But then again, you know what? It's not really fucking with anybody over the age of 18, because when you turn 18, hey, nothing happens. Everything's just different.

Human psychology is completely different After this arbitrary date on a calendar, Sorry, I have a new microphone You're going to hear that a couple of times Until I get used to using it Sorry I have kind of a complex relationship with Mr. Height I respect and value a lot of his work But this man And being on this disinformation panel Yeah, I don't know what to do with that I'm sure we'll be talking about that much, much more. Music.

I got to thinking about a podcast I did maybe back in 2020, maybe toward the end of the COVID year. And I was really heavy, I think, into, who was I reading then? I was reading a lot of Mencken, a lot of Lipman. There's somebody else I forget right now. This would have been Walter Lippmann's anti-democratic or his democratic skeptic phase right around World War I. And he saw the effects of propaganda and how it turned public opinion to lead us into World War I.

A lot of people saw this. I've talked about this a lot. He saw that. And he wondered if democracy was workable, attainable, especially as far as information goes. How do you construct a knowledgeable, enlightened citizenry, somebody who knows how to gather information, knows how to make a reasonable, rational decision about leadership, who to vote for, who and what to vote for? And when we started running into this informational anarchy surrounding COVID, I saw where he was coming from.

But I was thinking to myself then, I can see how this informational anarchy is going to go, that at some point it's going to get so bad. The informational sewage is going to be running through the streets so deep that some sort of a crackdown is coming. The gatekeepers are coming. The gatekeepers are going to return, and they're going to return in force because of the informational anarchy that we ourselves were bringing on ourselves because of our inability or refusal.

Either one, whichever one it is, does not matter. The effect is the same because of our inability or unwillingness to see things as they are. Everybody, all of us, want to consider ourselves rational human beings. Now, we're just looking for the truth. We're just good old, good timey truth seekers, right? That isn't the case. This podcast started talking about propaganda back in 2018 because I, myself, believed that, to a large degree, that at our core we were truth-seekers.

And this podcast, I know, I've said it a hundred times. If you've been listening the last few years, I know I keep repeating myself. Deal with it. The thing that knocked me off course was when I realized that is not the case. We are not rational truth seekers. We are storytellers. We are, repeat it with me, storytellers and not truth seekers. At our core, out of the box, that's who and what we are.

Now, is it possible for some of us to get to the point where we are actually interested in truth, where, you know, rational, well, obviously it is. If that wasn't the case, we would have never gotten off the ground. We would never have built airplanes. We would have never certainly flown to the moon. We wouldn't have been able to navigate the seas in wooden leaky boats If the only thing that we could possibly be driven by were emotions, science would crumble.

So it is possible to build, craft, and manufacture those kinds of people with a lot of work, generally in the realms of physical science. If people were rational out of the box, we wouldn't need things like the scientific method. We wouldn't need peer review. you. We wouldn't need people to check.

The scientists, we know the scientists would not need people to check their work, to reproduce experiments, because even scientists, even these people who are heavily, highly trained in their field, who are supposedly seeking truth, discoveries. Knowledge, enlightenment, they get attached to their ideas too. They have a pet theory, a pet hypothesis that they end up identifying with, and they desperately want to see it proven.

So they start fudging evidence, looking, you know, engaging in, what's the word, the bias, whatever, bias, bias. I forgot the term. I see it everywhere. But they desperately want these things, these ideas, these things that they put so much effort into. To. They want these things to be. And to some degree, they identify so closely with it that they are terrified that they're going to be proven wrong because it not only, Affects their status professionally, but also how they perceive themselves.

It's who they are as human beings once they get to a point. And what if it's proven wrong? What if you've got 25 years put into this thing? And ultimately, it's shown to be worthless. Then what? Is it really any confirmation bias? That's the word I'm looking for. Or is there any question as to why confirmation bias would be so powerful, even in people who are trained to be scientifically minded?

It's even there. Now, if these people with all of this training and all of this awareness about confirmation bias and about the human inability or the problem human beings have with seeing things as they are and how to get around them, with the problem that even scientists sometimes have with this. How prevalent do you think this is in run-of-the-mill people who have never even thought about it?

Again, I know I'm being redundant for old listeners, but I think I figured it out when I read The Need for Propaganda by Jacques Ellul in that book, Propaganda. The Need for It. And there's another line in there about what happens when one side deploys propaganda while the other side decides to play it straight and noble and doesn't, just gives information. You know what happens? The side that's hamstrung itself only with truth gets obliterated, obliterated, obliterated.

I'll find the sweet spot on this, Mike. Eventually, it gets obliterated. There we go. So you got a choice to make, right? You can run around with your self-righteous thumb up your ass. And get destroyed, or you've got to play the game. This isn't a game. This isn't a game about, you know what, let's start another segment. Music.

You're listening to the Escaping the Cave podcast. I'm your friendly host, Todd. I keep saying that. Kind of convinced myself that I'm friendly. I used to be. I think I'm getting a little friendlier. The last few months. Anyway, I decided to bail out of that last segment because I think I need to get into this a little bit deeper. For a couple of different reasons. In case there's some new listeners out there.

To give a little background on this. Also, to kind of reinforce maybe to myself and some of you older listeners, we haven't done anything together. We haven't hung out in seven months. And I'm still, again, I don't want to be that guy that always sits here and complains about how he's got it rough. But I'm really having a hard time trying to figure out how to proceed forward with this podcast. Because the original premise of this podcast has been blown up.

I thought I was going to help inoculate people, help teach people how to avoid the pitfalls of those evil propagandists. It's the people. That's where we wound up. Yeah, I started this podcast when the traveling ended in 2018. And while I had suspicions, again reiterating here, I still inherently believed in people as a species, the core of who and what we are, believing we could evolve and change.

Back then, it made me friendlier and, comparatively speaking, at least far more patient with folks. Also meant, once again, it meant that I was being critically naive. Wanting to believe the best in us. Only the best. And as I sort of alluded to in the last segment, there have been several horrifying and hope-crushing realizations along the way in the last six years.

As I mentioned, the first was that propaganda is not and never has been exclusively a psychological weapon wielded by the elite, the bad guys, to control the poor, defenseless people. That's the externalization game. That's the poor me victim game. It's always somebody else's fault game that people love to play. I understand. Makes you feel good when you're not the one to blame. It's always somebody else's fault. This is not a rare trait in people. Now, it can be that in situations.

It can be a psychological weapon wielded against the poor, defenseless people who don't know any better or can't know any better. Or who may be living in a totalitarian state where only propaganda makes its way through to them. It's happened. But in this society, especially in this day and age, we have more access to more kinds of information than ever. There is a theory and a philosophy that too much information is just as effective as isolated, one-directional, manipulative information.

Because if you have so much information, there's so much to sort through. I think I had a term for this. That it serves the same purpose. Nobody knows what the fuck to believe. There's so much out there, so many different angles, so many attacks, so much spin that, And people have no idea how to sort through that informational overload. There it is. There is a philosophy, a theory down that line.

But at its core, most people think of propaganda as a weapon, as a tool being wielded for control to manipulate the poor, innocent, unassuming masses. My realization, it's not really just my conclusion. Conclusion, I think this is etched in granite, is that that is not, by and large, the case, especially in this country. A lot of people talk about the corporate media, and I have the Media 101 podcast I produced, one of the very first ones I did in 2018. The corporate for-profit media.

They're not propagating. Well, they are, but the Media 101 podcast, the premise of that is it's our fault because they are a for-profit business. They are in business of making money. And if people actually wanted the truth from their news sources, these companies would fall all over themselves to give it to us because it would sell. It's a marketplace. And what sells is not the truth. We are storytellers, not truth seekers. Therefore, we get the political story, the propaganda, that we demand.

That's why the media looks the way it does fox news exists to appeal to people from a certain political bent cnn does the same thing msnbc oh bitch please maddow please that's why they exist to make money. And when you've got this political binary, an evenly split country based on the hate incorporated model Taibbi wrote about, a country that's increasingly at each other's throats, dehumanizing one another, dehumanizing themselves to some degree.

These news outlets are competing for eyeballs. balls. So as the population radicalizes and moves apart, the news media has to act in kind or else your eyeballs, you will leave their trough and go find another trough filled with the slop you need. That is the media model. Probably four or five years ago, I lost, I just lost all patience with that. Oh, it's the media's fault. We're like we are. No, it's not. The media is how it is because Because of how we are.

Nice message of hope, isn't it? Anyway, yeah, information control and manipulation and psychological warfare, it's part of the human condition. It's always been there. These things are as old as speech itself. People have always been trying to control, impose their will on someone else with words. Deceit. Manipulation. Achieve status control. Usually status. You've got a nice book I can turn you on to if you're interested in that stuff.

But these things, these psychological warfare tools, they exist in everyone's tool chest, everyone's life on a daily basis. We don't even notice them. They're just an integral part of relationship dynamics. Pay attention to how you interact with people on a daily basis, especially when you're not thinking about it, when you're just sort of acting and reacting. Pay attention to the little deceits, the little manipulation. Don't tell me about them. You don't have to tell anybody about them.

I want you to pay attention to them for yourself. Watch how you subconsciously or consciously manipulate someone so they think of you in a certain way to increase your status, to decrease their status, to make yourself look good, to make them love you. To conceal something about yourself that you don't want anybody else to see. Start paying attention to it. And understand, it's not a point of shame here. I'm not here to indict you. Everybody does this.

This is ingrained into us. This is part of our primate brain. Except the difference being that we have speech. speech. This is propaganda at work on an interpersonal level. It is second nature to us. It has always been there. It's so second nature. It's so a part of us that we don't even realize we are oblivious, even though we're doing it all the time. Second nature. Again, informational Informational manipulation is in the literal sense second nature.

Drive that point home. Interpersonal politics, group politics, tribal politics, intertribal politics, informational manipulation, status chasing, competition. That's how we roll. Now, there's a different kind, a second kind of informational manipulation, and that's the malignant shadow self manipulation. What's that, you ask? Go ahead. That's invisible, and that's the kind that goes on in your own mind. The little chatter that goes on in your brain, nobody else sees it.

That means nobody else can hold you accountable except you. Rationalizing who you are to yourself. Rationalizing your behavior to yourself i wish that i could say ourselves more see i was taught in radio to pretend that i'm talking to one person so i'm talking to you talking to you, i'm saying you but really this is all of us we all do this that's the internal voice the little the chatter that goes on in your mind and also the chatter that goes on subconsciously that you you never hear.

It makes you feel a certain way. It triggers certain emotions, even certain actions based on these emotions. I'm amazed. I shouldn't be, but I am amazed that most people have no idea that any of this is going on. The self-deceit. The self-deceit. If we're so good at deceiving ourselves and hiding our self-deceit? How can we possibly hope to be straight with one another? How can we possibly expect that propaganda is not going to be second nature is in the species, species-wide?

We are deceptive, deceitful by nature because that's how we navigate the social Social system, the social structure, it's been that way for eons. Hunter-gatherer shit. But not only are people unaware of it, most people lack both the willingness and ability, willingness and ability to cut through the protective, egocentric firewall to observe Dr. Goebbels at work in themselves. But yet, of course, it's easier to see it coming the other way, isn't it?

It's easy to find these sort of self-deceptions and rationalizations, delusions, manipulations, revelations. Really, it's a lot easier to see it coming at you. See it in somebody else, right? Of course it is. You see that in the propaganda ecosystem all the time. You take an MSNBC viewer or a CNN viewer and you put them in front of Fox News at eight o'clock at night.

They may not survive the experience. You take Hannity or Tucker viewer, put them in front of Rachel Maddow or Joy Reid for 10 minutes, you may have spontaneous combustion inferno in front of the television. It's really easy to see it coming from the other side, because the natural skeptic, we've also, that's a very important point here because we have dealt with this, interacted with people trying to deceive us, trying to trick us.

You know, We understand it subconsciously in our mind. So if we don't like somebody, if we consider someone an adversary, the useful skeptic turns itself on and we start analyzing everything they say. If you don't like me, if you personally do not like me, if you want to see me fail or I've pissed you off and you want a little revenge, you're not going to listen. You're not going to be receptive to pretty much anything I have to say.

That is hugely important. I've talked about this a hundred times. It's so interesting how if you personally dislike Kid Rock's politics, how often it is that you happen to hate his music. I don't know how many people I know that love Eric Clapton, love classic rock, guitar rock, but they've been offended by Ted Nugent, therefore think that Stranglehold is a piece of shit song. Oh my God, he wrote Cascade Fever. That's such a pile of shit. Oh my God. Let's listen to Layla. Ever notice that?

If you don't like somebody, if you don't like a comedian, did you notice how when Louis C.K. Was canceled, he went from being one of the funniest motherfuckers on the planet, he's just not funny anymore. Dave Chappelle had his little moment of transgender transgressions, and all of a sudden he's just not funny. Bill Maher. I can't believe I used to think he was funny. Well, duh. He's come out as sort of an anti-woke avatar. He started calling you on your shit. You're offended.

You're pissed off. You think he's a traitor, so he's no longer funny.

We're wonderfully skeptical when it comes to somebody we either dislike or disagree with or see as a threat however terribly gullible terribly inefficient at discovering those same inconsistencies those same biases in people we do agree with people we do like or just the general in group that is tribalism at play what are you supposed to do with that now my thinking was raise awareness i have a an episode back there with the the the phrase the lone

chimp in it go check that out if you want to find out what happens, when you start sort of trying to navigate out on your own being an independent thinker somebody who's not really affiliated with this tribe or that tribe you know what happens to you go google what happens to the lone chimp on youtube that was another mistake i made years ago was I thought that assumed just naively, stupidly, ignorantly. I took people at their word that they actually appreciated independent thought.

Now, it's loyalty. And that's what people value. Loyalty to the tribe. Loyalty to the group. Loyalty to the individual, even. Far more than independent thought. I'll give you a little leeway on that independent thought, as long as you're not too blasphemous or heretical in your thinking. Boy, once you get outside of those boundaries, usually, oh boy, you don't want to hear about it. You're done. Start to lose respect. Right? Music.

The one thing to take away from this, I think, is that human beings are storytellers, not truth seekers. I thought about renaming this podcast something down that line. I couldn't think of anything clever, though. I mean, storytellers, not truth seekers. It sounds weird, right? But I thought about it because this storytelling idea, this whole storytelling thing, I keep dancing around it because I am afraid to really dive into this in some weird way.

I mean, I've got, I have sort of, if diving in, if that's the analogy, I'm about knee deep. And it's so profound. I think it's the Rosetta Stone. There are people like William Storr, S-T-O-R-R. Boy, he has, he might have, he probably has eclipsed height on my list of favorite current authors right now, but also Gottschall. Well, I've got some quotes from him I'll probably be using, if not today, very, very soon.

But they started to explain the evolutionary history and utility of storytelling, why it is that we evolved as storytellers. You put it in the context of religion, cults, the stories that go on in our heads that put us in a certain position within society, within the universe even.

The story of the afterlife, about what happens when we die It protects us from the despair of knowing that maybe, just maybe, this is all just a circle jerk With an infantile sense of consciousness, how are you supposed to figure out what to do with the possibility Or even the fact that this is all useless Isn't it easier, wouldn't it be easier just to create a fairy tale that can never be proven false? So we can get through our day.

Yeah. Is that so bad? I mean, is there really anything worse about doing something like that than making up some fictitious narrative, some internal fiction in your head to rationalize and justify your own probably deceptive, vile behavior? What's the difference? The ability to get through your day, to get through your life without falling into a pit of emotional depression, to be able to function on a daily basis.

Keep your resources, keep your cognitive resources, the cognitive, internal, mental ram from overloading. It makes sense. It makes a whole shitload of sense. But when it comes to the context of propaganda, disinformation, self-deception, all of that stuff, oh boy. It blew my battleship out of the water. My Bismarck sank. Quickly. Well, no, it took a little while. It took a little while for me to actually accept this.

I didn't like it. I mean, I put a lot of, I put a lot of importance, a lot of my identity on it. Again, I get it. I understand it. I can, I can, I have a pretty rare ability to be able to analyze myself. I don't typically do it on this show or anywhere in public because, you know, people suck. Internet sucks. I'm going to put that shit out there publicly, but I do it. I'm my own best example half the time. Again, you're not ever going to hear about that.

But I get this. I understand how when you have a hypothesis, as I was mentioning earlier with scientists, how difficult it is to give it up when it's proven wrong. And that's exactly what happened when I thought people could be inoculated from the harms of propaganda, just become these perfectly perfectly rational human beings that we were all destined to be.

I wish I had my little fart sounder up. When it slowly but surely, nah, it was quickly, when it suddenly became obvious that that was wrong, oh my fucking God, it took me a long time. I knew where I was headed. It wasn't just something that I could just stop on a dime, change my underwear, wipe my ass, and start over again. How do I integrate this? Is there an integration? Is there a reason to even bother to investigate the rest of this stuff or to share it with anybody?

What are you supposed to do with that? I've used this analogy, I think, before on the show. I felt like, well, if I keep beating this horse, this dead horse, keep kicking it, not only am I going to break my foot, but it's also almost like walking into a hospice center and talking to someone, a cancer patient, and giving them sort of a history of their cancer. What's the point? What is the point of all this? What is the point of all this?

I'm not sure I know. To a large degree, it's why I take so much time off. Last year, I think it was last year, about this time, no, it was a little over a year, about a year and a half ago, I came out, came out as anti-woke. I planted my flag. In fact, there's an episode back there that says, the one where Todd plants his flag, he is anti-woke.

And I am, still, vehemently. but there's a problem here because knowing what i know about this stuff i know that there's a significant danger of becoming so anti-woke that i become the photo negative version of that which i fight right it's one of the characteristics of someone who's been propagandized that they They turn so heavily against that which they once supported. Religious people, I've got a good example of this.

Religious people, when they're excommunicated or they give up or turn on their religions, they become vehemently anti-religious, especially against their former group. And they're in danger of becoming just as fanatical in their atheism or any other newfound ideology, substitute religion.

Whatever it is they're substituting for that old religion, there's a significant danger that they're going to become just as radicalized in that direction because they need that substitute, that assuredness, that certainty, that moral certainty of who they are, where they're going, and that they are on the right side of God. However, however they define God now. Ideology. I have a perfect example of this. That's for me. So yeah, what am I supposed to do with this?

My fear was not only fallen off the edge and ended up somewhere next to Matt Walsh, whom I can't stand. but basically turning into a propagandist myself. And I had another problem in that. All of my new allies, if I could call them that, the people that I was politically aligned with, at least against wokeism, inevitably led me to be Trump adjacent or at least exist around people who are Trumpists or Trump adjacent. The enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing.

I addressed this last year. I was like, OK, you know what? You and I, we can form a little coalition here as far as the wokeism goes. But at some point, yeah, we're probably not going to be comradely anymore. more. Once this woke flight bullshit is dispensed, dispatched off into the historical hinterlands where it belongs, then we'll have to readdress things because I can't. I understand how Trump can win this election. I understand it perfectly well. I myself, I cannot ever.

I just can't be Be a Trump supporter. I know who and what he is. He's the alternative. He's not a good one. He's never been a good one. The fact that he, and again, I'm not going to turn this into, we're not going politics here. But this is what I was, this is kind of where I need to, how, where I've drawn the line. But the fact that he was dispatched before Super on Super Tuesday in March, there really isn't a Republican primary season. The fact that he is that potent.

I heard the Nikki Haley conspiracies that she was a Democratic plant. The Democrats planted her to knock off Trump and secretly have another Democrat in the office. Come on. But she couldn't get anywhere. I would have felt better about my new companions, my new anti-woke political activists, had she been able to actually get even a little bit. She couldn't do it. Trump is just too powerful. He has too much support. He's an ideologue, not an ideologue. He is, what's the word I'm looking for?

A, oh, God damn it. It's right on the tip of my tongue. I can't remember what it is. A demagogue. So where are you supposed to go? I mean, I understand propaganda. I understand where I sit as far as the wokest stuff goes, as far as the the far left extremists trying to hijack democracy however they can. This is a Marxist movement. But in order to fight the Marxists, I have to side with Trump.

There's something better but i can't keep my dignity keep my self-respect and call myself, pretend to be a trump supporter i just can't but what are you supposed to do what are you supposed to do i do understand as i alluded to in the last uh segment i have to do something i'm not going to going to be able to inoculate masses of people. I am not the propaganda whisperer. I'm not going to be able to cure anybody. With my dulcet tones, as sweet as they are, they're not going to solve anything.

I also know that just going out and telling the truth and trying to say it like it is without taking a side isn't going to work either. Tribalism runs too deeply. I also know that the the side that doesn't deploy propaganda, chooses not to play the game, gets steamrolled because everybody else is still playing, is still exploiting, still manipulating this human weakness, this very deeply ingrained human trait. So, that's what I've been trying to figure out. What is my role here, if any?

Anyway stop me if you've heard me say it before we are uh storytellers not truth seekers tell story to friends we tell story to family enemies strangers and even more often as i said before we tell them to ourselves we rely on both adopted and self-written narratives and explain the world our place in it yep tell self-interested stories to build and maintain that social status A narcissistic self-image when it comes to useful fiction like religion, mythology.

They're the greatest stories ever told. But political and ideological scriptures spring from the same place. Political and ideological scripture springs from the same place as the religious kind. The theological kind. They are all essentially products of the religious mind. While religion is at its best personal and private, super society ideologies are quite literally fantasy-driven social religions intended to be imposed upon the heretical non-believing minority.

Propaganda is using the storyteller backdoor. Both build political theocracies and fight against the undesirable kind. Undesirable being relative. Again, say it one more time. The horrifying realization that I had was that a propaganda is an evil to be destroyed. That evil is us. It's the people. That little nugget eventually led me to the second horrifying revelation.

What's that? that? Well, any faction who stubbornly ignores a storyteller to take the principled high road and ignore the dark arts of propaganda be quickly annihilated on the informational battlefield. Talked about it earlier. We all like to believe and millions are obviously eager to announce. Oh, sure. Make those pronouncements every day, don't you? Don't we? Eager to announce how they're They're so very John Stuart Mill rational. I am only speaking the truth.

The credible hawk. You remember that stupid meme that was kicking around on Facebook years ago? I always think about that when I think about John Stuart Mill. Loudest proclamations always come from, and this is important. This next piece is really important to remember. This has been, I've seen this thought come up in multiple places.

This next part's huge. The loudest proclamations of rationality always come from the most quote-unquote educated. They're the ones that always raise that rationality flag because they can wrap their post-hoc fuckery inside layers of ostentatious obfuscation and hide behind purchased paper credentials. I'm smart. I got a degree. There it is. I paid $300,000 for that. I'm an expert. These folks are typically the worst rationality offenders.

Education and vulnerability to informational manipulation are not mutually exclusive. Not by a damn sight. You can't study your way out of your own mind. You certainly can't doctrinaire your way out of it. You can't scripture your way out of it. In fact, the more educated are more likely to fall into the in-group propaganda snare because with credentials usually come that familiar self-assured hubris and an unwillingness to even consider the possibility that they themselves could be hoodwinked.

Self-deluded. Bloody fact is that out of the box and without years of self-aware insight and cognitive scientific training or scientific-like training, people are powerless against informational manipulation, especially if they lack previously mentioned self-awareness, metacognition, being aware of one's own thought processes.

Processes now believe it or not i sometimes have a problem with tone when i'm doing this thing but believe it or not this is not a criticism nor is it an indictment the masses are hamstrung not by the propagandists not by the elites by demands on their time and the same limited first person perspective as our ancestors the first person perspective hasn't changed with technology. We're still limited by line of sight, our senses. We can watch things on TV, but we're not there experiencing them.

It's always subject to someone else's interpretation, presentation, how they frame it, how they frame the camera shot, how they spin it, the commentary. You can't go and and experience these things yourself. You have no idea really what's going on in Gaza right now. You can't go see for yourself. So you've got to decide who it is you believe to decide how you're going to interpret what you see there.

Or you walk out your front door and you limit your scope of experience to your immediate surroundings. That part has not changed. We see the pictures maybe from Gaza, but we can't experience that unless we go any more than our ancestors could. When we regurgitate these things, we're regurgitating someone else's inseminated perspective. We're at the mercy of someone else's presentation.

So yeah, the same limited first-person perspective as our ancestors, but what's changed in the last hundred years is that we're now simultaneously and increasingly drowning in disconnected, out-of-context, and agenda-driven data, informational overload. When it comes to perceiving the world as it is, ordinary people are even more helpless than previous generations, regardless of even the best of intentions, because there's more static, smothering, objective truth.

That's the propaganda of inundation, I guess. I'm just termed that myself.

Coined that phrase right here in front of you. Impressed? more static smothering objective truth we have no way of really knowing firsthand again what's happening in the next town let alone washington palestine paris and the damn moon we all depend on electronic eyes for these things and more importantly their secondhand interpretations to build that worldview with which we use to club the enemies He's next to us across town, wherever.

Build this worldview so we can decide who's good and who's evil. Who's the in-group, who's the out-group? The one consistently accurate trait in the quote-unquote news is that the reports are called stories. That's accurate because that's exactly what they are. Because what are we? We are storytellers, not truth-seekers. They are news stories. Written and crafted to appeal to either your emotions, your sympathies, your outrage, your shock, your horror, your fears.

Do with objective truth. They're truth-based. Maybe they're factual-based. Maybe. So are lifetime movies. Sometimes. By their very nature, every news story ever chirped over the telegraph, pecked into a typewriter, belched into a microphone like this pretty one, or acted out on camera has been, at its core, a single perspective story generated in accordance with the organizations Organizations and the reporters and the reporters' bias and agenda.

Ed Murrow, when he attacked McCarthy, had a bias and an agenda. We agree with it, by and large, but he had an agenda. He had just as much of an agenda, right or wrong, as McCarthy did. He took to the airwaves with that agenda in tow. No, Walter Cronkite, when he came out against Vietnam, had an agenda in tow.

That was a striking moment. Because up until then, network news worked very hard, unless it was in the commentary or editorial section, clearly marked on television, of avoiding that sort of editorializing. You know, sort of a watershed moment when he came out and said the Vietnam War, what did he say, it was unwinnable? Something down that line. A big deal then. But yeah, he had an agenda. He wasn't just giving the objective news. He was putting his spin on it.

He was framing it for the audience. Trying to influence the public in some way, shape, or fashion.

Just as the Department of Defense was doing. I mean, yeah. Again, I'm not making a judgment on Cronkite. I love Cronkite, too. Wait till I start talking about outer space, the space exploration and all that. I'm a big Walter Cronkite fan. I'm just saying, when he came out and did that on CBS, it was a watershed moment, and he brought his agenda and put it forth. In a revolutionary act for network news. Sort of the beginning of where we wound up, right?

You want objective news, that would have never happened. If you want objective truth, that kind of thing will never happen. You don't. Again, the messenger's point of view is as much a part of the story as whatever actual facts make their way into the narrative. It's a matter of degrees, but every story with a point of view is, literally, by definition, propaganda. Pretty much every documentary ever made. Every documentary on Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime.

Find me a documentary, watch it with clear eyes, you're going to see a piece of longer form propaganda. propaganda. Inconvenient truth. That one always comes to mind. You think that's not propaganda? Of course it is. Michael Moore is a propagandist. He is not a documentary filmmaker. Fact that anyone thinks otherwise is laughable and ridiculous.

He's the perfect example. CNN, now, if you notice, if you watch what they're doing on Sundays, they have all sorts of documentaries on their network. They all have some agenda attached to them. Each and every journalist out there holding an abstract opinion is literally a propagandist. Now, we all get that by now because that's been on display for decades. What hasn't changed is that we can only see it in the other guy, in the out group, in the enemy propaganda. You can never see it in our own.

Very rarely. Get uncomfortable with it every now and then, but probably quickly, almost immediately, gloss it over, rationalize it, do that post-hoc thing in your head, and explain it away and move. People like to say that the world has gotten smaller. The world is just as huge and, with exploding communications technology and networks, infinitely more complex than it's ever been. It's not getting smaller. And with the Internet, the illusion of knowledge plague has exploded. loaded.

What has shrunk is the humility to say, I don't know. For far too long, we've mistaken regurgitated second, third, 50th hand interpretation for knowledge and wisdom with predictable results. Music.

I realize this storytelling angle thing, it really, really needs to be finished. It needs to be attacked and finished well. Mentioned earlier, I'm only knee-deep in this. Haven't fully committed to studying it as of, yeah, there's other things that I'm still looking into. This Will Store guy, he's got a couple of wonderful books. One's called Selfie. I didn't really expect to like that so much. Science of Storytelling is another one of his. The Status game.

Another excellent book. And all of this stuff plays into propaganda. It plays into... Basically, it is. It is the status game. Individual, group, whatever. Trying to increase that.

Influence. How people perceive you. I've got a podcast coming up. I'm going to delve into this I made some serious mistakes some significant fundamental basic mistakes 15-18 years ago I'm not going to dig too deeply into that tonight, but I need to at some point, I didn't realize how essential and how basic some of these things were, arrogantly thought maybe I was above it Well, maybe I was deluding myself, kidding myself in some deep, dark, concealed ways.

Even for myself. But back to the storytelling. This has got to be addressed. Like I said, I think it is the Rosetta Stone here. The storytelling mind, the religious mind. The religious mind is, at its core, a storytelling mind. Rosetta Stone, yeah. It all resides in evolutionary and social psychology. We are tribal by nature. These are symptoms, not of a disease, but of a flawed, really imperfect biological design. But it's there for a reason. It has served a purpose.

It continues to serve a purpose. Otherwise, we wouldn't have held on to it. If being rational served a purpose more than storytelling does, we would all have evolved like Mr. Spock. The question then becomes one of how to manage and live with this, this trait that we all have. Whether we're aware of it or not does not matter.

The first step, of course, is recognizing the imperfect state of reason and then understanding that the defect is both, as I said, fundamental and universal in everybody, all of us. This, of course, presupposes the goal is a solution. I'm not sure that's worthwhile. Acceptance in playing the game may, I'm still batting this around in my head, but acceptance and playing the game, the human game, the status game, the propaganda game, the information game may be a far better better use of time.

From my perspective, am I, the guy who calls himself a tonzilla, who used to sleep in ditches while out hitchhiking, am I? I don't have a messianic complex. Also, another angle to be integrated is the staggering ignorance and lack of basic self-awareness. This has to be integrated. What do I mean by that? My personal lack of patience and empathy.

Things have been my shortcoming, historically, and also the spring of my bubbling frustration and general contempt that bleeds through this podcast, has bled through this podcast since 2018, even further back, 2014. I think everything that I'm talking about, all of this stuff that I'm talking about tonight, I think it's all self-evident, clear, obvious. And because I think it's so obvious and so self-evident because I can see it so clearly, absolutely everywhere.

I wrongly expect everyone else to see it just as clearly also. I always lose sight of one thing. I've been given a gift of time and perspective, my opportunity to think, to read, to observe, to get out in the world, to see things with my own eyes, think for myself, in the first person, not using only solely electronic eyes to interpret the world with. This has been a gift. Everybody doesn't have that opportunity.

It has been a gift. Most of you, unlike me, are weighed down by the burden of basic survival. You don't have time to do the things that I've done. You have other things to worry about that I don't. I'm not saying that's better. I'm not saying my life is better than anybody else's. I have more time to look into stuff, to research and actually study this stuff. I have more time, more opportunity to do that than almost anybody I know. That's a gift. Now, I don't always take that into account.

I've been able to do this for so long. Yeah, I take it for granted. And I don't consider myself to be that smart. Believe it or not. I graduated high school with something like a 1.27 GPA. I do not have a college degree. I used to do rock radio and ran a camera. A couple of ballparks, major league ballparks, than the Navy for a little while. I'm not one of those highly educated credentialed people. I'm self-conscious about that. I do not consider myself all that smart.

So what happens is when I see these things so clearly, so self-evidently, I assume that if I can see it, 1.27 GPA Todd, everybody else should be able to see this shit. That's the source. I think, of this frustration and this contempt that kind of comes bleeding through this podcast.

So what is it that I'm supposed to do? I sometimes, quite often, and historically, I assume that you people can do all of the things that I have been given an opportunity to do, even though, rationally speaking, I know better. And finally, I think I've internalized that. There's this whole concept of gratitude. I know this sounds elementary. tree. It sounds kind of hokey, really.

But this ties into something that I was talking about last year when I was traveling down in Mexico with my friend, and I was telling the story about sitting at this hostel with this friend of mine, and him and all these other European backpackers, these little 20-year-old kids were just sitting there just bashing the United States. My friend, who I went down there to see, was among them sitting there as an American bashing the United States.

It really bothered me and then when I came home after that trip I was thrilled, to be in a US airport after spending three months traipsing around Mexico not being able to find half the shit that I wanted. Quality stuff, shitty roads. I was really happy to be back in the United States. Gratitude set in. I didn't realize, I didn't understand the whole concept about how to really apply this in multiple ways in different directions.

I didn't understand that then, but I felt it and I saw what it did. I appreciated where I live. That started to set in. That is starting to set, it has started to set in slowly, incrementally since 2018. That's one of the reasons I stopped traveling.

I began to appreciate how good I had it here and seen enough. I'm in a better position now to go traipsing around Latin America or any part of the world than I have ever been. I could go hitchhike indefinitely, not have to worry about money. I'm not doing it. I know what's out there. I know what to expect.

There's no mystery out there anymore. And I appreciate what What I have here, what I have failed to do up until recently is to take that appreciation and apply that to you, toward you, toward normal people who do not have the opportunity to do the things that I've done. Because they're so busy trying to stay afloat, trying to make a living, trying to raise their kids. They don't have the fucking time to do the stuff that I do.

They don't have time to sit and write for two hours in a journal sorting out ideas. They don't have time to spend reading four or five hours every night. They sure as hell don't have the time or energy. I'm coming up on two hours recording this podcast. It's not going to be that long when I upload it. But who has the time or energy to do all that after going to work for eight or ten hours a fucking day? This is really basic shit, right? I get it now.

Starting to. I still kind of, every now and then, I think it kind of came out maybe even in one of these other segments I did today.

I do miss it. I do fall back into that. But again, it's not so much that I think I'm so much better or so much smarter than anyone. It's because I don't. But I have been given opportunities that other people don't have and more time to refine it. I think that's it. And my task is to further blaze that path to empathy for myself, I think. Have, I am very insecure about my education level. I always will be. I could go get a master's degree right now.

And I would still be insecure about it because of my history when I was a kid, how I behaved in school, how little I paid attention. I mean, I tried to be a writer for a while. I was doing some writing and I still like to write, but I, because I have almost zero fundamental foundational background in English. English was my worst subject. I had my English teacher in my Facebook page for a long time.

She'll never admit it, but I had to pass a test in her English class in order to be able to graduate. I am not convinced I passed that test. I was not convinced I passed that test that day. Somehow I graduated. Anyway, I hated English. One of my English teachers, I hated it so much. You folks down in LA, you'll remember this. Remember Remember Mrs. Weber? I think she's gone now. But boy, she hated me. And believe me, the feeling was mutual.

I would walk into her class tardy. It was like 58 straight days. I'd just walk in five minutes late, make a scene out of myself, go flop down, not do anything, just fail the class. The universe has a sense of humor. I have no English background whatsoever. Whatever writing I did, I wrote for the spoken word because of radio. And then, here's the sense of humor part. I tried taking up writing.

I used to spell, like, whether or not, when I was writing this, like, early on, like, whenever I would use that phrase, whether or not, or something like that, I would say rather or not, R-A-T-H-E-R. Repeatedly, over and over and over and over and over again, finally Chris is like, you know that spell W-H-E-T-H-E-R, right? Like, ugh. So I'm always a little paranoid. that I've got these holes in my education. I'm an autodidact.

Uneducated. That means that I don't have anybody that's really grading me or holding me to account or really challenging me or there's no barometer. So I'm always going to be a little self-conscious about it. I had a conversation with Brian. You remember the guy that I was doing the podcast with back in 2020, the psychologist guy.

Send him a message because I was trying to figure out, you know, because of this insecurity I have for my education, I'm like, you know what, But I could go take classes. I mean, I could get a degree of some sort. Not like I'm doing it myself. And I asked him, OK, well, is there any field of study about where psychology and propaganda, evolutionary biology or psychology and propaganda interface? Is there any way to really get a degree in understanding this stuff?

And he said the closest thing that he could think of and the closest thing he knew of was like advertising psychology, which does apply, but it's not really the same thing. Finally, about a month ago, he basically just said, it's like I stumbled into a new field of psychology. There is nowhere to go.

There is nowhere to go to get credentialed, to learn from the experts in some weird way. And I say this with all humility.

There's nobody that i know of that knows any more about this shit than me i say that with humility there isn't nobody really is interested in it or we don't have any idea we're so awash and immersed and propagated that we don't know it when we see it or maybe it's just that human nature thing that we can't see the difference between informational manipulation the kind of shit the same stuff we've been doing for the last two

thousand three thousand ten thousand years we We can't see that make the distinction between that and propaganda, because maybe there is no distinction to be made. So if that's the case, therefore, why do we have a term for it? Really, I don't know where to go. Who was it I was watching? There were two podcasts. There were two people I watched. Adam Carolla was watching his podcast. I forget who it was with.

And then there was a Bill Maher, I think was on. I think I checked his Rogan podcast out. Now, from my perspective, OK, but they both were saying some really incredibly ignorant shit. Adam Carolla and Bill fucking Marr, when it comes to talking about how people perceive reality and what's going on in the world, it's just I'm sitting here dumbfounded that they have not made these very basic connections that I've been talking about for four or five years.

Really fundamental misses. I didn't write them down. Maybe I'll go look them up. I can record the audio. Maybe I'll play it for you next time. But I don't understand how people can't see. That was one of them. That was, I think, Corolla. I don't understand how people can't see this really basic shit. You don't? You don't have any concept of tribalism, self-deception. You got nothing down. It's not a mainstream course of study. It's not a mainstream field of interest.

So maybe I have. Maybe I have stumbled into something. Maybe I am, by default, becoming a kind of authority on this. It makes me uncomfortable to even say that and suggest it, again, because of the insecurity.

But maybe, who else knows more about this? If you know of somebody that knows more about this shit, you let me know, and please, who can I learn from that still, when it comes to the direct interface of propaganda, informational manipulation, the psychology of informational manipulation, propaganda, disinformation, and the tendency for human beings to self-delude?

Please pass it along. There are little pieces and parts, you know, Jonathan Haidt, the post-hoc rationalization, the elephant, Jacques Ellul, that book is incredible, but it's incomplete. Edward Bernays understood a lot of it 100 years ago. There are other people. I think that Gachon's got it. As far as the storytelling angle, also Will Storr, as I mentioned earlier, he gets it. But it's all little pieces. It's all these sort of diffuse, separated, separate points of information.

Nothing has been congealed together to really make this a comprehensible field of study. Nobody's done it. So yeah, I am, historically, just innately self-conscious about my lack of formal education beyond high school. I went to a trade school, learned how to broadcast, learned how to run a stadium camera. All of my real education has been done in my easy chair downstairs, maybe in bed at night before I go to sleep, and in my notebooks.

I've collected a lot of books, read a lot of books in the last 10 years, particularly since 2018. But again, who do I ask? You know, I really hope my friend Brian would have, my hope for him was that he would have been one of those guys that could check me, that I could use as a barometer as far as a psychologist, you know, he's a practicing psychologist. He works for somebody. Can't say where. But that didn't work. He was too agreeable.

I didn't believe him. He never really corrected me on anything. I begged him to. Where am I wrong here? I have to be wrong about something.

You could never get that. Difficult to believe. Well, one thing that I was definitely wrong about was agreeing with the fact that there was going to be the gatekeepers were coming back after COVID. I just posted something about this, but the memory came up. I posted it four years ago, I guess today. I personally support this crackdown on information on Facebook and Twitter. I was definitely wrong about that. Well, clearly I'm not right about everything, but really, if you know of anybody

else, I don't want no ideologues, all right? Don't send me anything from Sean Hannity. Don't send me, you know, I'm aware of Chris Ruffo, but that's more of the anti-woke stuff. If you know of somebody who really understands the interface of evolutionary biology and propaganda, beyond the storytelling aspect of it, I've got that pretty well in hand. If you know, please let me know, tonzillax at gmail.com.

I'm not going to add you to Facebook. point sorry but now i i i don't know who it is not being able to find it maybe it's me a little cringe worthy to say but really if it's not me who who the fuck is it i'd go get the goddamn degree it ain't out there anyway yeah i was talking about gratitude wasn't i yeah Again. The average person lacks the time and energy required to engage in real observation, analysis, and introspection.

The gift that I've been given, I have called it the gift, privately in my own notebooks. I've been doing that for a number of years. Without any of that, how can people connect dots for themselves? If they don't have the time to sit there and process, to be introspective, to observe, think deeply on things, how can they be expected to do that? How can they be expected to connect the dots for themselves?

Empathy. Now, when I get frustrated, I make unreasonable demands, set outrageous expectations for people, unreasonably outrageous expectations for people who do not have the same opportunities that I've had since 2008. I base those expectations on my virtually unheard of first-person perspective and lifestyle. I know of no one else. I'm going to mention the Adam Carolla-Bill Maher thing again. Again, just the basic ignorance of these two people. I mean, I love Bill Maher.

His program is the one show that I watch outside of baseball every single week. I do not miss it. He is the North Star for Democrats outside of the extremist swamp. He gets it. But my God, these are two of the biggest social commentators in the country, and they still lack this basic. It's hard to be empathetic for these guys. They're paid for this. They're paid to be.

But yeah, I was just flabbergasted. They're asking these questions. Girl on his podcast, Mar, on the Rogan's show. Rogan couldn't answer them. Didn't hear it in myself. Almost screaming. I'm like screaming in my own head. Ask me, God damn it. I know the answer to this. Brian, I think Brian was right. I think no one has really connected all the psychological and all the emotional tissue together. Maybe I have. Maybe I've stumbled into the propaganda and psychology frontier accidentally.

Started stepping in it in Port Townsend, 2009. Coyote. This thing's getting long. I'm going to wrap it up, I suppose. But I do want to say, I'm going to reiterate another point here. We are so awash in propaganda now that it's become indistinguishable from reality, I think. I don't think that people, most people would know propaganda if it smacked them in the face because it's everywhere. If everything's propaganda, is anything propaganda?

Opinion spin agenda for profit manipulation has blacked out and smothered whatever objectivity ever existed.

That's a debate in and of itself right informational anarchy has completely eclipsed whatever shared reality we can perceive even with already defective tools of observation that's another one the brain in a vat kind of thing will store again i don't like where he took my brain with that i don't know should i should i take this tangent it's late i'm getting a little tired but he brought up in a couple of his books that everything we see everything we experience experience is being

experienced inside of a completely black skull. All of the information being processed, every emotion, everything we see is being taken in by instruments of perception. Instruments. Sort of like the instruments on Voyager. And being sent to a central computer, locked inside, shut inside a hermetically sealed skull. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know if it's are medically sealed, but it's in there, your brain. Everything is constructed, constructed inside of the skull.

Everything else is stimuli, input. How we perceive things, our attitude towards them, it's all done in here. I don't like that idea. I refuse to let go of the external reality notion. There is an external reality, but what this means, the question that's begged, then, is there any way that human beings with these very defective instruments of perception, is there any way to really experience reality, the external reality, as it is?

And if not, is it really just a battle of stories, battle of interpretations? And if that's the case, is that what we're seeing here? Storytellers. Telling stories to ourselves to make sense of of this input, this data coming in through our senses.

A really neat example he uses again more than once it's been in more than one of his books but they have these people that they've done sort of experiments on right not really experiments but they've studied these people where they've had the left and right side of their brains you know the communication has been severed so that these two sides of their brain don't communicate with each other i forget what sides what anyway one side they will show like a scary picture

or like an axe murder or something like that, maybe a scary scene in a movie. And then the other side will experience somehow the emotion, but it doesn't know why because it couldn't see it. It didn't get the input from the eyeball, right? So it feels that it's reacting to what happened with the information input. But then it starts to craft why it feels that way. It starts to tell itself a story. It doesn't just say, I don't know why I'm suddenly afraid.

It starts to craft a narrative. Isn't that fascinating? Will Storr, this guy is, he's another guy, he's a journalist, runs around and has talked to a lot of really interesting people and has a very interesting way of writing his, matter of fact, Joe Rogan had an episode with Will Storr. Now, far be it from me to criticize the biggest media guy in the world, but this is one of those episodes where Rogan likes to talk too much. A lot of stuff that Will Storr was going to be talking about.

I was familiar because I read his stuff. He was heading in a certain direction and Rogan would sidetrack him. You got to kind of cut through that at least at first. But that episode of the Joe Rogan experience, Will Storr, pretty recent. Go check it out. And if you want to read his stuff, he's only got a few books, but it's all fantastic. The science of storytelling, I think it's him. It's either him or Gottschall. But he's got a, I think it's a science of storytelling.

I think that was the first one. That's how I found him. But it's excellent stuff. Defective tools of observation. I don't like this idea that everything we're experiencing is subjective because it's being crafted and interpreted and put together in our minds.

And it's really hard to argue it, but it also raises, again, that question about whether or not human beings can even possibly ever really interpret the world as it is. But one of the things that I'm going to talk about a lot, I guess, as the podcast moves forward to space exploration, if we can't, how do we get to the moon? We can.

We have done it. We have to go from the religious mind, I guess, to the scientific mind Or move in that direction or know how to separate things And if we're going to survive, I think, as a super society, as a super social species, We have to understand, further understand the difference And understand the religious mind, the tribal mind. Called Our Inner Ape. I forget the guy's name. He just died. He's a primatologist, one of the leading primatologists in the world.

And he wrote a book called Our Inner Ape. I found him through Storr. Storr mentioned him in one of his books. So I went looking for him, bought this book. It talks about how 95% of our DNA, most people know 95% came from chimps, but we also We've also got about the same amount of DNA from bonobos, right? Chimps and bonobos are two very, very different primates. One's matriarchal, one's patriarchal, obviously. Chimps are very, very aggressive, mean.

Bonobos, not so much. They have a lot of sex. A lot of gay sex. Fascinating shit. it. But if we're going to survive as a species, we've got to understand who and what we are, and we've got to be able to put it in its place. That's why I get to think about when I talk about the God-devil parable, like the good and the evil within us, you know?

Like, how can a species who will have a 16-year-old girl jump into a lake to save kids, thereby killing herself to save some other kids, and also have somebody who's going to take a gun to an elementary school, who's going to paraglide into Israel. And yeah, how is it possible? Well, maybe we're not schizophrenic. Maybe we have dueling influences in our rearview mirror.

And we've got to understand this shit. And we've got to understand how to move away from that toxic tribalism, that toxic tribalism that I've talked about, more toward the scientific mind. Dan Carlin called it the Spock-Kirk comparison. He likes to talk about his Spock mind and his Mr. Kirk mind. He's talking about the emotional mind, the post-Hogginbottom Heights elephant mind, and this rational, cold, analyzing Spock mind.

We're residing firmly within Captain Kirk's kingdom. A few people have made their way over to Mr. Spock's Hamlet. Scientists mostly. It's got us to the moon. It's got us in a lot of other things.

But I think en masse, we have to move a little more in that direction. And at the same time, understand what's happening over here in Kirk kingdom. Self-awareness. Metacognition. Again, if you understand it, you can see it within yourself. Self. That's the first step, right? Awareness. You're an alcoholic. The first thing you have to do is admit you have a problem.

Doesn't mean you're going to solve it, but you're definitely not going to solve it if you don't at least acknowledge that there is a problem or something wrong or something imperfect, however you want to phrase it. Anyway, I was talking about these defective tools of observation. Beyond that, the agitation flood.

That's everywhere. Agitation flood has clouded our minds and emotion to a point where inherent primitive simian chimp rage has rendered cooperation quaint and truth irrelevant we're uninterested mostly in compromise we've seen this in congress for how many years now people are uninterested in compromise it's all about owning the other side defeating subjugating the other side people don't really don't care what's true anymore.

This is on both sides. Truth doesn't matter. It's all about winning. Winning what? Arguments. We all want satisfaction. We want it in the form of real and or metaphorical blood. Any and all information, including naked propaganda and disinformation, will be deployed to that end. Truth, cooperation, even collective survival, perhaps be damned. Enter the tyrant. The everyman tyrant. Man-tyrant rationalized with the religious mind. A prolific storyteller residing inside every tribal skull.

I'm convinced that tribalism is as much about destroying the other, the enemy, the outsider, the outlander, the interloper, the neighbor, as it is about in-group unity. I mean, what do you need in-group unity for if you don't have the outsider or on which to blame all your problems and protect yourself. What do you need in-group unity for if there's no external threat? Again, the tyrant, the tribal mind, these may be two sides of the same coin.

All that's required to provoke these things is that target, an enemy, agitprop. Dominance, dominance is what's for dinner. In that context, the oppressor-oppressed dialectic makes little sense. The Marxist victim crutch. It's effective, though, right? It's often based on half-truths. They're not just making shit up. They're exploiting half-truths. Agitation propaganda weaponizes one truth while concealing the other. The tyrant also resides, however, within the oppressed.

They have an unquenchable urge to become the oppressors themselves. They burn with an appetite for revenge disguised as, air quotes, justice, social vengeance, warriors. Lurks inside all of us and is always clawing to get free. The everyman tyrant. He's eager to assert its supremacy and impose its will on the deplorable horde just over the hill. I guess Planet of the Apes would come to mind. These types of flicks are, at their core, revenge porn, right?

Spun as justice for past sins against the righteous but oppressed. Revenge porn is popular because it it appeals to that cage tyrant who craves not abstract noble justice, oh no, but simply his turn. He wants custom-made jackboots, and he wants to wield the baton himself. Proletarian tyrant? Still a tyrant. It's the noun that matters, not the adjective. I think it's an H.L. Mencken quote that comes to mind here.

I don't remember the book or the the article, but it basically says that the urge to save the world is usually a cover for the urge to rule it. Dominance, tribal dominance, status, geographical status, global status, social status, societal status. Really, we never left high school. Just brought those traits. Into adulthood on the larger global scale. I'm tired. You know what? My voice held the fuck up. I'm happy about that. ToddzillaX over at Substack. You can check out the YouTube channel.

Got some videos up there. Got the videos over at Substack as well. We'll see how this goes. As far as video goes, I think I'll have some clips. It may not be up right away. What else? got more stuff. I only got about half way through what I was going to do tonight. So hopefully, maybe later on this week I'm not going to make any more promises. If I do start making promises, I want you to I don't know get like a voodoo doll. Music.