It’s Going To Take A While, So You Need To Do This | Ask DS

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2:33Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording but thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you

3:08it's going to take a while so you need to do this it takes a lot of flying time to become a certified pilot it takes years on stage for a comedian to learn how to command an audience It takes time to get sober, time in therapy to heal a marriage. No book is written overnight and few fortunes are made in one swoop. No, they start small and accumulate. The power of compounding interests working on them. All great things take time. You know this. You know where you want to end up. And yet, and yet, still you have not started the clock. The Stoics say it is foolish to expect figs in winter. More foolish is expecting outputs without the inputs.

3:46Final results without the basic beginnings. The Stoics say that if you don't know what port you're sailing for, no wind is favorable. Well, if you never get on the boat, if you never leave the harbor, no port is possible. It's going to take a while to lose weight, to acquire mastery, to turn things around. It's probably going to take longer than you'd like it to. You don't control that. You do control whether you add one more day to the tally. You control whether you push the ETA back unnecessarily. You control whether you start the clock today. whether you stop putting stuff off and get after it.

4:33When I wrote my first book, Trust Me, Blimey, I had, honestly, there's a part of me that thought it was early. I was writing about media manipulation and fake news and how the ideas that we take for granted in our culture, where they come from and the forces that marketing and public relations exert on that information. And I wasn't sure how the book would do. I just knew it was a book that I had to write. I was very much influenced by this wonderful book from Upton Sinclair. He wrote The Brass Check. After The Jungle, he wrote this expose of media in the early 1900s. And that's what I was trying to do it and trust me, I'm lying.

5:13Show what's really happening behind the scenes, warts and all, including my own screwed up role in it. Now, this isn't exactly a stoic book, although I felt like I was coming from a stoic place and that I'd seen something, I'd been part of something, I didn't like it, and I knew it wasn't right, and I wanted to talk about it. I didn't know how controversial the book would be. I didn't know how many people it would upset. I didn't even know how right I would turn out to be about a lot of things. And I certainly didn't think that 10 years later, I'd be talking to West Point in the midst of an information war with Russia about how these ideas, how cyber war and this information spreads and can be used as a weapon.

5:53And how I just, I had no conception of any of that, but that's what I'm doing today. It's going to be a Q &A between me and this class of cadets at West Point. And I thought I'd share some of that with you. here we go so we we talk every class obviously is probably not surprising um about the situation in ukraine sure and one of the things obviously this is a mass media class we've been talking about is sort of the different um actors on the information side and so i wonder as i know as i watch it watch what's unfolding sometimes i think oh that's something we talked about in the book but i wonder as you're watching that unfold um have you seen things that you're like you know wow, that's kind of straight out of chapter whatever.

6:34There's definitely that. I would say one of the weird things I've been noticing about the conflict is as some of the social media companies have cracked down on misinformation, specifically in light of what's happening. And I've seen a few memes that have pointed it out. And I think anyone that has a public platform that's talked about political issues is noticing this. But the effect of the meme was something like, Ever since Twitter and Facebook cracked down on Russian misinformation, there's been a lot fewer true American patriots tweeting things at you, meaning that so much of the people or the pushback that you get as a public figure if you talk about what's happening in the world, you think you're hearing from real people, but you're really interacting with bots or you're interacting with internet trolls that are paid for or supported by foreign powers.

7:29So it's been interesting to watch as the stakes of this crisis have grown. Some real basic steps have changed the tenor and tone of the conversation that I think we were taking for granted before. So, you know, obviously the book is primarily about much less harmful forms of marketing and misinformation. But the reason I wrote the book and the reason I thought it was important to talk about is that if someone can use this to market T-shirts or books or movies, much more powerful people with much more insidious motivations can use a lot of those same techniques and tools. And so I think we watched Russia try to use a lot of its sort of cyber methodologies in the run up to Ukraine.

8:22I think a decent amount of credit goes to Biden for how he's navigated that, his use of, you know, the platform of the U.S. presidency to sort of call a spade a spade, to lay out what's going to happen, to use American intelligence to sort of preempt and counteract that misinformation. I think what obviously what's so different between this all out invasion of Ukraine and the 2014 invasion of Crimea is that one, we were gaslit about. Right. It was never fully owned. There was a lot of misinformation about what was happening and who was doing it. And I do think it looks like the other actors and some credit to Ukraine as well, I think, masterfully pushed back and spread its own narratives throughout this.

9:12You know, we've watched we've watched people push back against that disinformation. So we have at least a somewhat better picture of what's actually happening, at least from the perspective of the the average person on the watching on TV or whatever. Sir, that's changing topics a little bit. So to focus on the 2020 presidential election, there's been a lot of discussion over how much censorship companies like Twitter or Facebook should have over the content they put out. So to use an example from my own state of Arizona, it's like during the election, you saw a couple of tweets go out about Sharpies invalidating ballots in Arizona.

9:53And obviously it's not like a causal relationship. Like this directly led to the insurrection on the Capitol. But things like that did fuel that type of narrative and that type of response. So where do you see the line between companies like Twitter being able to police their own platform, but then also the First Amendment coming into play as well? Yeah, it's really tricky. I was at a dinner with some officials a few months ago, and they were sort of lamenting that social media platforms had taken the drastic step of deplatforming the president or now the former president of the United States.

10:35And I sort of pointed out that I agree that's an alarming precedent, right? That's not something we should like to see. But what I was saying was that part of the reason things only had to get that bad is because at every other step of the political process, people who had the ability to sort of police their own side of the street had failed to do that. And so I think there's a couple of different equations. There's ultimately what is the role of the platforms in this, but then there's also the role of parties and public figures and people of influence to police and maintain themselves. So just as an example, like the movement to, you know, either cancel or pull Joe Rogan from Spotify.

11:34And I happen to know some of the people involved in that. India Arie, as it happens, has read my books and she and I were talking about this. It is interesting, right, like what role Spotify's what obligation Spotify has in this as far as, you know, misinformation as far as the pandemic goes. But Joe Rogan could also just decide not to have fucking quacks on his show. Right. Like Joe Rogan could also say, hey, I'm the most I have the largest show in the world. and that comes with it a certain amount of responsibilities. And I'm not going to give Alex Jones three hours of uninterrupted direct access into millions of people's brains, right?

12:22And so I think we can tackle this problem from both ends, but it seems to be that everyone's got to sort of voice the responsibility onto the platforms when any number of people could have intervened before it got that bad. So going along with that same vein with Joe Rogan, doesn't the nature of the Interimedia platform, like Joe Rogan's not necessarily a news source. The nature of his show is to provide a voice for everybody. That's why a lot of people watch him. Does the nature of his show sort of change what level of responsibility he might have as far as information being produced, especially since he is not a news source himself?

13:05Yeah, I push back on that for a couple of reasons. So number one, there's something we call in the internet world jacking off. J-A-Q, just asking questions, right? And this is what Holocaust deniers do. This is what vaccines deniers do. This is what misinformation spreaders do, is they just ask questions, right? And they hide behind this idea of I'm just asking questions. But then when they get the answers, they don't like to that question, right? They don't change their mind or stop. They just continue to ask other ridiculous questions, right? The science on vaccines is like overwhelmingly settled.

13:48But what Rogan has done, I think, consistently is repeatedly find the quackiest, weirdest, most fringe figures to come in and allow him to just to ask questions, which spreads doubt or false ideas or bad information. So look, I agree, Joe Rogan is not NBC News. His obligations are different. But as a human being in the middle of a crisis that's killed a million Americans, let alone, you know, millions more internationally, one I think has an obligation to not put on a legitimate crazy person like Alex Jones or, Or, you know, let's say you're going to have Robert Malone on to talk, who's a vaccine skeptic.

14:33It's a deliberate choice that Rogan makes to call him the father of mRNA research, which he's emphatically not. He was like a grad student tangentially involved to it. So there's deliberate choices that are made. And then when those choices have consequences, I think what we see is people try to make excuses for why they're not responsible for that. Does that make sense? Yes, thanks. Excuse me. Good afternoon, Ted Elton. Hi. So, question. And well, it's kind of just a quote from this without me from your book. So, you said in your book that due to the work of media manipulators, marketers now write the news, opinion masterminds as fact.

15:24Algorithms run everything to the extremes and no one is accountable for any of it. So my question is, we saw a lot of the effects of that in the Trump era and the pinnacle of it in January 6th. So do you think that the Trump era or the fallout and lash out after January 6th is going to change any of those factors? I unfortunately I don't I mean I think I think we're pretty much in the same in the same place we were then you could argue there was there was it did seem like there was a brief awakening on January 6th where where and we've seen that the January 6th commission has revealed you know a number of like let's say Fox News hosts were texting people in the Trump administration like call this off, like you've got to stop this, etc.

16:12So there was a sense that, oh, hey, these things that I'm saying, this information that I'm spreading out in the world, people are taking real action on this. It's having real effects. There was this sort of brief moment of that. But then it strikes me that there was probably the understanding that actually reckoning with that and changing that would have real political consequences and probably real viewership consequences. And so we've now gone back to this sort of spreading of lies and misinformation. The right has largely told themselves a totally fake story about what happened on January 6th, largely, again, so they don't have to accept the consequences for that.

16:52I don't want to say that it's only the right that has proverbial blood on their hands here. I think, obviously, we saw this in the riots after the murder of George Floyd. You know, people think that what they talk about on the internet stays on the internet, but it spills over. It has real world consequences. And, you know, political violence is the most dangerous thing there is in a democracy. And I think both sides have fomented that, you know, pretending that these sort of tweets they send or these articles they write or these videos they make, that it's like a video game. And it's not a video game.

17:36It's very real. And the consequences of it make it increasingly hard to have a functioning civil society.

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