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February 13, 2025 92 mins
A panel discussion on how a once great simulation become, almost overnight, the most schizophrenic spectacle in the history of human society. Is it mere distraction? Is it a war to control our extended nervous system. Should we be worried? 

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:10):
Here we go. Okay, welcome everyone. Welcome you guys. How's
your volume, Victor?

Speaker 2 (00:15):
How is my volume testing? Check?

Speaker 3 (00:17):
Check?

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Check? Maybe a bit.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Works, it works, It works, all right, everyone. We are
so excited to announce hold your applause please, episode two hundred,
which is a special number because it's round.

Speaker 4 (00:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
Congratulations by myself.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
I'm applauding by myself.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
No, we all applaud because we're comrades. We joined the applause.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
So thank you to you guys, thank you to our
past hosts, thank you to our patrons for keeping us going. Unfortunately,
I have to announce that this is the final episode
of the Plastic Pills, Philosophy and Critical Theory podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
Sorry the King, the King is Dead.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Two hundred is the final episode.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Eh, two hundred. It seems like a good place to end.
We've been trying for three or four years to pretend
like philosophy still exists. Philosophy is in our the subtitle
of our podcast. You laugh. I'm done. I'm done. This
is a simulation. I'm done pretending that philosophy is something
I did my research this week. This was my fault.

(01:26):
I guess I thought we would catch up on America
like Current America, and that was a big mistake while
studying philosophy and trying to make content of philosophy. All
of that is based on what the secret truth, the
love of wisdom, and if we look under the surface
where real reality is, then we have it. We have

(01:46):
it on display. Thank you, America. If you understand it,
you can master it.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
We failed cool damn bills.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
I mean it is that new though. I feel like
you've said on this podcast many times, the philosophy is
dead or not real. What's changed?

Speaker 3 (02:01):
When? Did?

Speaker 4 (02:01):
No?

Speaker 1 (02:02):
It's it's just me acknowledging it. I was admitting it
while in denial. Now I admit it. The world is
not made of wisdom, so the love of wisdom?

Speaker 4 (02:11):
What does that get you?

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Now? The world is made of belief and what Diego
likes to call material conditions, whatever those are. But it's
clear you can just believe whatever you want. Now it's
twenty twenty five. Good job we have. We had a
good run philosophy. We're taking it out of the subtitle.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
Really, we're really taking it out.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
We're doing clicks now.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
That's us nice. I like it there. It is one
of my best friends from Spain, which has the most
PhDs and titles in philosophy that I have ever knew,
also retire from philosophy. And now he's just like writing
weird poetry. And the guy stopped and he's he even
participated in a lot of political movement in Spain, and

(02:55):
he's like a young guy that was concerned by every
one in philosophical circles in Spanish speaking worlds as the
next big promise in philosophy. And the guy said something
very similar to what Peel just said. And he said,
like even like specifically talking about politics, he said that
politics is post philosophical, like post ideological. They don't even

(03:17):
need philosophy anymore, as they don't need ideologies anymore.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
Well, what kind of brings this on?

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Is?

Speaker 1 (03:22):
I looked into one of bad or bad do use
second manifesto for philosophy And he's like, guys, we have
to pull it together. It's falling apart. It's being replaced
by pr and yeah, five seconds of the news and
PR is reality. Wisdom is not reality. You can't master
the world right now by understanding it.

Speaker 3 (03:44):
So we're done trying to understand the world. It's time
to change it.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Maybe summer child.

Speaker 4 (03:52):
Oh I saw that movie too.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
Finally Repast Hegel, Oh my god, finally.

Speaker 4 (04:03):
The young Marx. He was I think he was drunk
in an alley when he said that supporting himself with
engeles more solid constitution.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
I had to. I had to. I'm sorry, sorry, it
was just here.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, he said that while he was pissing against the wall.
So what is philosophy except pissing against a wall for.

Speaker 4 (04:25):
A decade, I guess, Or or or getting drunk. I mean,
isn't that the origins of it? The symposiums, so they
would all go get wasted and feast and yell at
each other, and then and then Plato would edit the
text to make it sound good.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
And Plato didn't understand what we know. He thought that
knowledge was the key, like there was a secret in reality,
and if we could unlock that secret, only a few could.
But if they could, they could, they would have mastery
over the secret and over knowledge. But we know everything,

(05:02):
we know everything there is to know, and we just
sit here and blink.

Speaker 3 (05:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
I guess it's a hobby. We can we can keep
doing it as a hobby.

Speaker 4 (05:11):
Yeah, I guess that's why the Romans didn't really make
their own philosophy. They just took all the Greeks that
this is fucking good enough, let's build an army now
and then and then that the rest is history.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
I guess my question would be, why would anybody have
ever thought, I'm just I don't know, I don't know
if this is something you used to believe, pills, But
I guess I never believed that philosophy was like, you know,
I'm here to uncover like special hidden truths or like
you know. I mean, I wouldn't quite say that it
was like a fun It was like a self enriching preoccupation.

(05:42):
Do you feel, and that's what I would call it.
I feel more enriched for it.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
Yeah, I guess that's the difference between us this week.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, I mean, at least I mean, I'm not saying
that that, uh, but I guess, like I never went
into it, so it's just interesting to think. I mean,
I guess I have known some people who have gone
into philosophy, and it's kind of clear that they're there
to try to unlock like some profound mystery. But that's
just never been me. I've never thought. I've never held
philosophy to such a high bar.

Speaker 4 (06:08):
Philosophy definitely gives you practical skills, the same sort of
skills that a literature degree might give you.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
I mean, I would argue, but I would argue better
better than a literature degree.

Speaker 4 (06:22):
But hey, fuck you man.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
Having all these points being like either discussed, sustained, or
detroned by people before this, because like, for example, I
have seen several people do like the burial of philosophy,
you know, like the the how they call intereo the Yeah,
the burial, like when people try to do that. Yeah,
when you go to the cemetery and like people symbolically

(06:48):
they bury books and they say philosophy is dead.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
You know. Yeah, And the philosophers who say that, who
say that we've gone beyond philosophy. This is something new,
This is just therapy. Like Fickenstein said, we're not doing philosophy,
we're just linguistic confusion.

Speaker 4 (07:01):
Yeah, this is Nietzsche, this is Heidegger, this is Vickenstein,
this is Boudriard. It's just a perennial complaint that philosophy.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
I always do anything because I'm like, you guys are
just doing philosophy though, still like you're going but it's
just I don't know. I just think it's funny. It's
just a funny performative gesture.

Speaker 3 (07:20):
Is it performative?

Speaker 2 (07:22):
I think it's performative.

Speaker 1 (07:23):
I can't say it's not performative.

Speaker 4 (07:25):
Well, it's performative. Is not supposed to be something superficial exactly?

Speaker 2 (07:31):
It's not just superficial?

Speaker 3 (07:32):
Yeah, yeah, I understand.

Speaker 4 (07:34):
That shapes the essence of who you are through your performance.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
Performance.

Speaker 4 (07:38):
Yeah, be a philosopher, live in a barrel in the market.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
If someone were doing masturbation against Alexander the Great is
that's the answer?

Speaker 1 (07:47):
That is, if someone were to hit in the middle
of Times Square and a barrel, this would be this
would be value.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
What was the what was what was the news or
the things that you were reading about online that kind
of led you especially to this. Do you have any
examples I think that we could laugh at.

Speaker 4 (08:04):
Or back to Boudriard's manifesto.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah, I think I think Baudryard was far too optimistic.

Speaker 4 (08:12):
He and he's the most nihilistic motherfucker out there.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
I think.

Speaker 4 (08:17):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
I think American politicians are the most nihilistic, both sides,
both sides of the aisle. But we have Trump and
his new I love his picks. I think his picks
are perfect for this because you know what did they
do in the sixties when they gave up on philosophy.
They went to politics. They said politics, that's where the
real action is. Or even Mark says stuff like that.

(08:41):
Not gonna sit in our evory tower. We're gonna go
and do politics. But politics is gone too. Politics is
I and it's not even a simulation anymore. I was
like coming into this before I watched the news, thinking, oh, well,
this is a simulation. It's funny, there's so many characters.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
This is like.

Speaker 1 (08:59):
But it's worse than that. The simulation is over. Two.
We have diluted ourselves into into thinking that thinking would
provide i don't know, some comfort, some project, some plan,
and if that failed, then we can go to politics.
Because philosophers have only sought to understand the world. But

(09:22):
we want to change it. But you can't do that either.
The world is ratings. The world is is information ratings.
And this happened to me, or this happened to yesterday
to me because I saw that I saw that Trump
hired the former CEO of the WWE, who was also

(09:43):
a character in wrestling she was like in a wheelchair
while her husband cheated on her. She's now in charge
of the education.

Speaker 3 (09:51):
Of Yeah, I sent that news to the to the group.
I sent it like a couple of weeks ago. Don't
you remember I said KFA just became canon.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
Oh yeah, I remember that.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
I I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I might have missed that one.
I don't click on all the links in the chat,
I can tell, but that's one. And then doctor Phil
going on the ice raid.

Speaker 4 (10:11):
That was justsane, yes, beautiful.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
But politics being replaced by reality TV is worse than
a simulation because a simulation president, the simulation has to
absorb people's belief, It has to absorb people's faith in
something by resembling something. So this makes like Obama the

(10:36):
perfect He's the perfect simulation president because he's well spoken, competent, promises,
change promises, hopes as this. Oh yeah, he's black. That
also helps because it's like, oh, we're not we're not
racist anymore. So, the perfect simulation president. And this is why.

(10:59):
And he's a must of course, So he's the perfect
He was the perfect simulation president. But when the simulation devolves,
this is a hypothesis. I'm not sure on this. I
only thought of this while I was getting angry at
the television. What the simulation has is discordant belief. It's fractured,
like when you shoot a pane of glass and it

(11:23):
just fractures into Instead of one simulation, it's just literally
whatever you want to believe, that's right. So we have
the re emergence of every kind of cult, and it's
not divided left and right. It's the same across the board.
It's cult, it's publicity, and it's a ratings war. And

(11:43):
the fact that he hired the WWE president and doctor
Phil Or was doctor Phil hired? I don't. I didn't
actually know.

Speaker 3 (11:52):
He was just a consultant. The Minister of Health is
Robert Kennedy Jr.

Speaker 4 (11:57):
Oh, Yeah, the vaccine skeptic guy, the one I interviewed.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
These are people who obviously don't know anything about the world,
but Trump, the apprentice, WWE and doctor Phil What they
do understand is ratings. Ratings is how you explain the world.
You don't understand it through ideas. You don't understand it
through the idea of material conditions because those haven't changed
in a hundred years. You just understand it through media.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
I think Trump's literally said that before too, and I
know that in that there was this movie that I
actually thought wasn't bad. It came out a few years
ago after Trump's first term, and it was about like Komy,
like James Comy, and I think, I don't know, some
Irish actor actually played Trump, and I thought he did
a decent job, and it's like all about his like
and it shows kind of these backroom conversations where Trump
was pressuring Comy, and I remember, like in one of

(12:51):
the scenes, which are based on apparently Kme's notes that
he took like ray after his meetings, Trump was telling him.
He's like, you know who I trust in this world?
It's like these politicians, it's TV people. He's like, because
they got to do ratings. They got to he like
literally said, He's like, because they have to be responsive
to ratings all the time. They have to be like
on top of things, whereas like bureaucrats, it's like, uh,

(13:11):
you know, they're just fucking stuck in their swamp and
don't have to respond to anything.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
That's great. Can I take a jab at it? Because
I'm like biting my nails to take a jab. I want.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
I want you guys to walk me back from the edge.
Is is reality just ratings or is it some deeper
understanding that we developed from reading books.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
I think I think understanding kind of like comes too
late every time, and and it's weird because, like, for example,
for me, since I do new reviews every week, I'm
like bombarded by this infinite amount of bullshit on almost
a daily basis, most of it by by desire, which
is strange, Like I crave, Like I become addicted to

(13:51):
this constant flow of diarrhea coming from everywhere, and like
I find myself like creating meaning to eat a POSTERIORI
like after I become entangled with the reasoning and the
logic in the middle of these things. But one event
that really got me interested was the genocide of Palestinian people,
which I thought, well, this is too raw, this is

(14:14):
too crude, this is too painful, Like the videos we
are getting, the amount of information we are getting, the
intensity of the genocide, the amount of people being killed,
the amount of pain is too much, you know, Like
I didn't really believe people would be able to become
immune to that suffering. And like I was evening being
like a little bit too romantic, too or too hopeful,

(14:36):
thinking that well, maybe some sort of humanity it's going
to be trigger connector or empathized with this harsh reality
that now we are getting from social media, from the
genocide of the Palestinian people. And to I guess, to
my apathy, it's not real. Likeau was just in the
White House, like he was greeted by Trump. Trump was

(14:59):
fixing his chair, like literally there's a video of Trump
fixing Antayahu's chair and almost like patting him on the
back while he signed for like infinite budget support from
the government of the US. And I was reading at
the same time a book from a neuro psychologist called
Nicolas Carr that was a top book from the twenty
twenty four and this guy, Nicolas Carr was relying heavily

(15:22):
on Marshall mcluchan, which is like, I think you guys
know more about Marshall than I do, like a Canadian
philosopher that's studied the relationship between humanity, sociology, and the medium.
And there's a couple of takes from this book mixing
neuropsychology and Marshall mcluchan, which I found really interesting. To
explain our apathy to the suffering of people and to

(15:45):
the way we relate to media, okay, and why media
is the only true language today or media is the
only potential source of truth, direction and rationality, that the
rationality is within media and Marshall look inflame. He said,
this is probably the one quote that everybody remembers is
that the medium is the message. And the take that

(16:07):
the book gives on this notion that the medium is
the message is because the message of the medium is
not important. Is the media is the medium that changes us?
It because it mediates our relation to the world. Is
through media we are related to the world. And what
does the internet, digital media, the algorithm, and today the

(16:30):
cell phone, the smartphones and social media due to us
as as persons as humans. Okay, So a very very
very specific point that I want to focus on is
cognitive load because in a way, one fact is that
we are bombarded by information in a speed, intensity and

(16:52):
diversity that is new to this era. Like before, like
you coundnot carry a TV on your pocket and just
like suddenly come up across a spectacular TV show that
was going on, But today you get notifications, you get
pulled back into into digital media all the time. So
and when you open it, like the density, complexity, and

(17:14):
profoundity of the medium is something we have never seen before.
You have hyperlinks and hyper clicks to every word, you
are provided with videos, clickbait, sounds, and everything is designed
to trigger your attention. Even the choice of colors, the
size of the font, everything is designed to be like
as engaging as possible. Okay, and these neuropsychologists is arguing

(17:37):
that our main problem is not the content of the media, but,
as Marshall mcluchin said, the media itself is the message.
And today we suffer from cognitive load. And a very
basic explanation of how we develop empathy or even moral
judgment is that higher level emotions that include empathy, apathy
or like a compassion or like love or understanding, those

(18:02):
are higher degree emotions that take more time for somebody
to actually develop. And because of cognitive load, something that
is being undermined by media is that clicks are more
important than morals. So the medium itself is designed towards
hyper interaction, hyper speed, and hyper connectivity, and those things

(18:24):
are physically antagonistic with empathy. So what in a way
this helped me understand or what it helped me understand,
or the thesis I want to present to you guys
is that the fact that the media is designed towards
the maximization of clicks and engagement doesn't allow time for
people to develop higher level emotions. And in a way,

(18:45):
we have more access to the suffering of others, but
we just don't have the time because there's too many
cool stuff going on. There's too many things to click,
So I don't have time to care. It's not even
that I care, or I don't care, or my geology care,
or that I be longer now, I don't have time
for it because by the few minutes that it will
take you to empathize with the suffering of the Palestinian people,

(19:08):
you are already entangled in a web of this you know,
simulated or like hyperreality that is just like taking you everywhere,
and you're dispersed everywhere a methy or may crashing nerds
in twenty thirty two, and we're just letting know that
there's a one point five percent that is going to
be the end of the world, And they're hiring the
WWE specialists to become a consultant in healthcare, like, we

(19:30):
don't have time to empathize. So what I wanted to
present is how does this relate to dialectical materialism?

Speaker 1 (19:36):
And god, okay, I'm cutting you off by so much.

Speaker 3 (19:41):
Yeah, you're distracted already.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
So now as soon as you say dialectical materialism, you're
elaborating from an outside position. But I want to deal
with your outside position first, if I may, because if
this were true, then the problem would have started with
social media, which is under twenty years old. But all
of these people who are being hired as the ratings
specialists and the parts of the aspects of the new

(20:05):
Trump regime precede that kind of media. They precede clicks.
Marshall mccluan was writing in the sixties before there was
any such thing as.

Speaker 3 (20:14):
Yeah, he was talking about the media before.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
So how do you how do you fit those two
saying it's gotten worse because of all the things that
he talked about are just worse.

Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (20:24):
He was a prophet, man, Come on, he could see
the future, the global village.

Speaker 3 (20:29):
You don't see you don't see a relation, you like,
you don't see an acceleration of this idea that the
medium itself is changing us.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
No, I don't. I do not associate any of the
problems that exist with with anything that happened in the
last twenty years. I'm not saying what you're saying is wrong.
I'm just saying, if we're going to assign blame to something.

Speaker 3 (20:49):
Is not is not technology.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
Smartphones is what the New Yorker thinks is the problem.
That's not what I think is the problem.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
I mean, I think it's part of the problem.

Speaker 4 (21:01):
You're not a technological determinist, then, which is good.

Speaker 1 (21:04):
Well, they're gonna say that Trump did it, or individualism
did it, or the smartphone did it. These are the
three easy assignments of blame. And I think it's a
lot older than that.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
I mean, I think it's both, but I agree that
it's older. Like I've said for a long time on
the podcast, that you know, we got to look in
the mirror in a little bit.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Like, for example, the smartphone enabled a different response to
the Palestinian genocide than would ever have existed twenty years ago,
way more of a response because there was another There's
been there's been like a them dropping bombs there every
ten years or so, but this was the biggest response

(21:45):
and they almost banned TikTok because of it.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
Nobody haven't stopped, and now they're going into into the
West Bank.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yeah, but I don't know that it's it's stifled empathy.
I think it increased empathy because you get those images
like Unfiltered.

Speaker 4 (22:01):
Well, one of mccluan's points is that we're moving back
into this acoustic space of simultaneity, and we're moving away
from print culture, which is very visual and linear. Right,
it's not acoustic like you'll say. Tribal Man lived in
a very immediate space of acoustic and spatial awareness, where

(22:22):
things are happening simultaneously and most of your interactions are
face to face. And after the Gutenberg Revolution we entered
into a print culture where things became linear and precise,
and we used valued rationality. And that's sort of what

(22:43):
Diego was saying, that that sort of ability to step
back and quietly contemplate something before we have to react
to it, we can plan. And now today we're moving back.
Digital technology is moving it was back towards an acoustic
kind of space of the ancient tribalman, where things again

(23:04):
are happening simultane simultaneity, instant reaction. Yeah, the difference between
news and rumor and all other kinds of ways you
categorize information under the print culture mentality is kind of
they're all falling away and we're entering back into new form.

(23:27):
That's his kind of theory, right, And that set off
a bunch of scholarship afterwards.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
But I even remember it's it's the perfect example is
that is the reaction to the plane crash where they
started blaming DEI like before any of the facts were
out right. It's because like people online need to have
like a take on it right away. It's like these
instant reactions.

Speaker 4 (23:46):
Get your explanation out there before the facts have even arrived, right,
Because again, it's just about clicks. It's about it's about
interactions with people. It's not about sort of arguing out
and getting to the bottom of something. It's about, you know,
just just getting your face out there, getting ahead of things.

Speaker 3 (24:06):
I just want to have your take on these pills.
So so you don't think we are changed by technology
or are we?

Speaker 1 (24:11):
That's an insanely broad question and the answer is, of.

Speaker 4 (24:14):
Course, mmm, a lot of that kind of thing. We
changed the world around us and thereby change ourselves.

Speaker 1 (24:23):
I know, Marshall mccluan pretty well. My one of my
committee members was like his direct student. She studied right
under him. But again, he is so quick, just like
the the New Yorker is we're divided, we're polarized. It's
because of cell phones. But I can an alternative explanation.
He he talks about like print media, and he divides

(24:47):
like the newspaper. The way he talks about the newspaper
is kind of the way we talk about the social media.
You have to react quickly. It comes every day, you
have to read it quickly, and then there's new information
always on its way.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
As Plato talking federal against books.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
Yeah, you know, if you want to go back to
if you want to go back to Fadris, it's two
thousand year old debates saying.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
No, yeah, but I understand, I understand the direction. But
what is that what I didn't understand your criticism? Then?

Speaker 1 (25:12):
Oh that if we're you can't just point and go, oh,
I found the cause. It's right there. It's the thing
that everybody has. This is why the world's fucked up.

Speaker 3 (25:21):
Yeah. No. The specific argument was that we have less
time for app for sympathy since we have cognitive load.

Speaker 1 (25:27):
Okay, what do you do with the fact that way
more especially young people sided with Palestine than in any
of the previous Israel ISRAELI is killing Palestine conflicts?

Speaker 3 (25:39):
Yeah, but like the difference is that probably most of
these people, like you judge, they sympathize with them. Was like,
what sharing a story, like commenting online or like do
we compare like the sitting in front of universities versus
May of sixty eight in front?

Speaker 1 (25:53):
But that didn't happen in what twenty fourteen. The first
time I heard about Israel Palestine was like two thousand
eight when they were dropping bombs of the wall. I
didn't there is no public support. It was like, well, Israel,
they're the good I think, like the opposite seems to
have happened in this case. But I don't know necessarily
want to get bogged down in.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah, and I also I don't I don't equate public
support to actual sympathy fuctual empathy.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
Well, they're they're kids that are watching TikTok. They feel empathy,
otherwise they wouldn't be posting about it.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yeah, there's a there's a difficult question here about what
we also mean by empathy because I think I was
recently working on a paper about phenomenology and empathy in
politics too, And I think also there's a way in
which you can think of empathy as requiring a kind
of immediacy to like the embodiment of the person that
you like, you need to see their gestures otherwise it's
something else. It's some kind of like an intellectual exercise

(26:46):
where you're kind of like imagining, you know, oh, what
would it be like to be this person, which is
kind of different than like if you see someone stub
their toe and it's your buddy and you're like, oh shit,
you almost feel it, right, there's like an embodied response
to it, and like, uh, I mean maybe that's like
a separate case than what you're talking about. Like I
think you're actually talking about something different, which is more
like what Eric was just talking about, of this kind

(27:08):
of like slow like slow down, like process what you heard,
think about it, reflect on it, right, which is different
than a kind of like embodied feeling of oh wow,
that person's in pain, or like you see someone on
the street, like you see a homeless person maybe and
like it's interesting that we are confronted with them embodied,
but we can try to flush them out. But if
you see something really sad, I mean you kind of

(27:28):
feel something compared to if you just hear abstractly on
the news. And now we are being so flooded with
information that we don't actually have time. If you don't
have you don't actually have time to stop and reflect
and think about it, right, because you're just like bombarded
and you have to kind of make a judgment and
you might fall into tribal lines. And now I do
think that you know, kids on TikTok, you know, they're

(27:51):
having some kind of a reaction to it. Some of
it is probably thoughtful, but some of it is probably
just falling into what they already are predisposed to think,
just like, well, that's my team. You know, I'm gonna
be on the you know, because on campus it's you know,
you're supposed to be pro Palestine, So that's what I'm
gonna be. Is it Is it a process of slowing
down and reflecting? You know, maybe in some I'm sure

(28:13):
in some cases it is, but in other cases. Now
I'm always reminded of well, my favorite comedian, Patrese O'Neill
used to have a bit about talking about like, you know,
you ever try to give a fuck about the news, right,
Like you ever try and it's like cause you're so
and it's like, oh, like fifty thousand people died and
you're like, no, I'm going to care about this, and
you're he's kind of like ah, he's like trying to care,

(28:34):
and it's like, you know, I just I can't. I
can't give a fuck. I just there's just too much shit.
I just don't care. And it's like and I think that,
like when you're flooded with so much information, there is
something to the idea that it's it's somehow like an
extra effortful step to take to stop and think about
what does this mean for these people you know.

Speaker 4 (28:53):
Well feeling empathy? I don't know, It's it's an interesting
question because there must be an intellectual component to empathy
because remember mccluan's other point is that the media constitutes
an extension of our nervous system, and when something becomes

(29:14):
massively and suddenly extended, it kind of has an opposite reaction.
We don't sense more, we so less, we become like
it's that narcissist narcosis thing because on the one hand,
the extension of the media. Extensions are an extension of man,

(29:34):
so that's the narcissistic element. And then the sudden extension
produces a kind of narcotic reflex where we become, you know, anesthetized.

Speaker 3 (29:46):
Right.

Speaker 4 (29:46):
So it's actually harder to empathize in a way because
you have this defense mechanism where you know you're in
so much pain, right, you go unconscious. Right, you have
this all most narcosis anesthetizing reaction.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
Right.

Speaker 4 (30:04):
And and we're experiencing this massive extension of our nervous
system through the media, with the electric the electrification of culture. Right,
of information now traveling at the speed of light rather
than the speed of people carrying newspapers. Right, there'd be

(30:24):
a significant delay between event and information, and now event
and information are almost simultaneous. You don't there's no room,
Like Benumine even makes this point, there's no room between
the event and the information for myths, rumors, stories to
emerge that explain this event, and then we can later

(30:46):
compare those with the information. It all comes in at
the same time. Things are explained before they even happen
in a certain way. And and that situation seems to
make us numb too, and more difficult to empathize with,
you know, the human element in these events. Right, So

(31:08):
Palestine or any other traumatic, disastrous thing that's going on, right,
it's it's almost like a it's very difficult to you know,
sort your feelings out about it. You just you just react,
and you compare your reaction to other people, and then
you don't logically evaluate that. You just you look for

(31:32):
similarities in your reactions. Oh, this person's reacting the same
way this group of people. Maybe I belong to this
group of people. Then it becomes much more surface level. Right,
It's just like the transition from radio to television.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
Right.

Speaker 4 (31:44):
We all know the famous example of the debate on
the radio that Nixon wins and the debate on TV
that Nixon loses because he doesn't have that sort of
immediate visual presentation of himself that inspires confidence. He's all
sweaty and kind of gross and not a very good
TV presence. So he loses the debate not because of

(32:05):
what he's saying, but because of the way he's just
sort of presented in the immediacy of his image on
the television, and so we react to that we don't
react to the information in the sense of what the
information is claiming and making arguments and evaluating them. We

(32:25):
don't do that. We react and emotionally, but it becomes
difficult because of that anesthetizing defense mechanism we have.

Speaker 1 (32:36):
It could be true, it could not be. I think
Marshall mccluans significantly overrates the form versus the content, and
he did that to be provocative because he was a
little bit of a provocateur, saying no, actually only the
form matters, not the content. But if we can go
a little bit before that, I guess we're doing a
media studies podcast today and maybe we can, maybe we

(33:00):
can find out how philosophy died this way. But long
before there was Marshall mccluan, there was someone who's known
as the father of public relations. And you may think
I'm bringing out you may think I'm bringing up Edward Burns,
Freud's nephew, but I'm not because he was not the
original father. The original father was a dud Freud, a

(33:21):
dude named Ivy Lee who was who initiated or sent
out the first press release in history, and it was
for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company after there was a giant
accident where a train derailed and killed a bunch of
people by by falling into the river. And it's the
first press release. Right, So this is why I'm stressing

(33:44):
content matters, because Ivy Lee, as the first public relations
expert in history, sets off content. And he used to
write at the New York Times, right, he used to
be a journalist. He switches over. Then his client are
steel companies, train companies, the Rockefellers, Standard Oil, and eventually

(34:08):
then the Nazi company ig Farban that invented Zyklon being
propagated the Holocaust. But this split of content where you
can't trust anything begins in what nineteen oh five, nineteen
oh six, somewhere around there, where you can no longer
trust what you see as something that's being in the

(34:30):
people's interest or the public interest. The public is a mass.
Now you can buy or rich people capitalists can buy
space in the New York Times just by hiring PR
guys to submit the stories to them. Because if you
have a story submitted to you, you don't have to
do your own research. And if we fast forward, I

(34:51):
think this is far more significant than the cell phone.
If you fast forward from nineteen eighty to today. In
nineteen eighty, PR specialists outnumbered journalists by two to one,
and today that ratio is six to one. So if
we're going to talk about why America went schizophrenic, why

(35:14):
America is completely schizophrenic, I'm not gonna say it's because
of the cell phone. I'm going to say it's because
you can literally not trust any of the content. Now form,
I'm willing to have that discussion, but when I'm looking
at the content of the news, I find that to
be far more disturbing than my supposed desire to keep

(35:36):
refreshing my phone, which is not actually something that I
typically do. Maybe it's the new generation. We can blame
them for everything that's going to go wrong, but I
think it's gone wrong in nineteen hundred when Imaginary America began.

Speaker 4 (35:48):
I would only note that, like mccluan's opposition between form
and content, or for him, it would be medium and
content media, a cell phone would be a medium, just
as a car would be a medium, just as the
roads that the car drives on would be a medium,
just as the power lines and satellites that the cell

(36:10):
phone needs to work would be sort of part of.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
That general question. Is the cell phone the medium or
is Internet the medium? Because I think like cell phone
is a tool for the medium, but the medium itself
is the Internet, isn't it.

Speaker 4 (36:22):
Well, technologies are considered mediums in McClue alls, right, So
you look at the cell phone and the Internet and
all of those sort of auxiliary things as part of
the same medium. Right, So the medium includes technology.

Speaker 1 (36:42):
Conceivably, you could have a phone that wasn't connected to
the Internet and play Solitaire on it all day and
mccluan would still say that it's an extension of your
senses because it stretches your thumb, muscle or whatever.

Speaker 4 (36:54):
Right, just as the first person who wrote down the
alphabet started using it created a new medium, right for
externalizing thought, right, And that that's what a cell phone
is also that sort of thing, a medium that externalizes well,
I don't know thought media. You know it's it's connected

(37:14):
to our nervous system.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
If we can switch, Victor, can you present your your
thesis on why America went schizo and we can incorporate
just versus that. Look, we're doing hypotheses today, exactly, Diego,
I I overstated my point. You're my friend I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (37:33):
I know.

Speaker 1 (37:37):
I have heard I've heard this specific argument it's cell phones,
polarization Trump so many times and it drives me insane.

Speaker 3 (37:45):
I mean, yeah, I mean, I think that's that's a
very strong any way of saying what I said.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
Eh, I mean, it's a little bit more sophisticated. It's
a little bit more sophisticated than that, I think, I think.
But I think I think there's I mean, I I
saw both sides, like I think I saw what Diego
was trying to say more than but I also understood
some of the criticisms that you had, and I kind
of had my own, which more had to do with

(38:11):
an ambiguity about like what do we mean by empathy
and stuff. But but yeah, I think there's, you know,
reason to disagree. But I think there's it's it's more
than just that. Just what you said, I think pills
respect respectfully.

Speaker 4 (38:22):
I mean to be fair, to be fair. When as
ensconced as we are or have been in academia and theory, right,
you start to get the sense that there's a difference
between you know, what you're looking at now and what's
hot in the theory world and what it's like cliched, right, So,

(38:44):
like by the two thousands or twenty tens, you know,
like like postmodernism was very cliched and people moved away
from it. That is to say it's not still valuable,
but people just became tired of it, Yes, just like
exhaustion with a certain kind like It's like it's like
Whitehead said, right, you know, metaphysics doesn't go away because

(39:05):
it's argued you know, against and like proven to be wrong.
It just it just goes out of fashion, right, And
the cluein sort of immediately was attacked for his theories,
and I guess I guess they achieved a certain level
of cliche like very quickly. And you know, but I

(39:26):
still think it's very valuable to look at it read
what he had to say, because I think it is
if you can get away from that. But sorry Victor.

Speaker 3 (39:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
So so I have like a kind of half baked
theory that I've been thinking about, I think for a
long time. I think it's come up in the episode
when we talked about subversion, and I guess like the
concept that I sort of want to try to take
a stab at developing is maybe like some kind of
critique of what I perceive as like as like prioritizing

(39:57):
a kind of epistemological populism or something thing like that.
That's kind of a term. I don't know if I
coin that, but I think that's kind of like a
term that I see as sort of pointing to the
idea that that like being anti establishment is better. That
there's like an anti establishment reflex, and I think this
happens on all sides, and it's sort of somehow symbolically organizing,

(40:19):
you know. And we talked about freedom as being a
signifier last week or the week before, and you know,
this isn't really a signifier because I think the reflex
or the pattern that I'm pointing to, I don't think
there's one signifier that organizes it, but more like a
sentiment that it's like it's more correct to be against
those who hold power or those who are perceived to

(40:40):
hold power. Right, the truth of it doesn't really matter.
So I think like there's maybe like a prevailing mode
of legitimation that is now one of opposition, so everyone
seeks to be seen as subversive, and I think, you know,
anti establishment positioning. Paradoxically, I think it's no longer the exception,
but it's sort of becoming the norm in political rhetoric
that it's like the norm is actually to be like, uh,

(41:04):
anti establishment. And I think it shapes not only like
rhetoric but also epistemology, so the ways people claim to
know what they know. So in many cases I think
that like the outsider position is assumed to grant privileged
access to the truth, or at least it seems that way,
and where you know, kind of establish are what are perceived. Again,

(41:26):
this is a game of perception, right, what are perceived
to be establishment perspectives are seen as somehow inherently compromised
or corrupt. So I don't think it's it's only a
right wing tendency right mirror. The mirrors aspects of left
wing standpoint of pistemology, right where marginalized identities are seen
as or assumed to have superior knowledge due to their oppression,

(41:48):
which I think in a way, you know, we can
trace that back to Hegel and the master slave dialectic,
and then the way that Marx took that up. We
don't have to get into that. And in both cases,
I think whether it's on the right or left, positional
is treated as a source of epistemic authority, rather than
engagement some kind of like engagement with what seems right,

(42:10):
you know, doing work. I guess, you know, I don't
want to say I don't want to hold critical reasoning
to some kind of you know, sacred cow position, but
more just like rigor, putting in effort, right, putting in effort,
and I'm going to be agnostic about what that effort entails.
And I guess I have two examples that were in
the news that I think maybe kind of point to this,

(42:32):
so we might, you know, see this dynamic In recent
debates around Trump's plan to take over Gaza right, turn
it into the Gaza Strip mall. His suggestion, you know,
obviously has been you know, condemned. I condemn it myself.
But then I noticed this kind of like side conversation
happening where some commentators criticized leftists who would abstain from

(42:55):
voting for Kamala in the last election, arguing that their
refusal contributed trump Side ability to you know, suggest such
crazy policies. However, a segment I think has rejected this criticism,
insisting that Harris perceived again, I think part of it
is she's perceived as an establishment figure would have been
no better than Trump, Right, So I think that, you know,

(43:19):
we might be maybe we can argue about that, but
I guess I see this reaction as illustrating a reluctance
to acknowledge that the establishment will deeply flawed, might have
still be comparatively better to some you know, anti establishment
buffoon like Trump. Again, I think it creates this kind
of reflex, creates an epistemic environment where acknowledging even relative

(43:41):
advantages of institutional actors feels like complicities. Right, So people
want to say, I would never even admit that Kam
was better, because then I'm going to be be complicit
somehow with the establishment. So there's this like performative reflex
to just be like, I'm always going to be against this.
And then the second example. I was very amuse to
watch Tucker Carlson's recent debate with Piers Morgan. You know,

(44:04):
he kept talking about how he objects to this like
moralizing language used by supporters of Ukraine, right, that you
know it's moral to support Zelenski, And he attempted to
reverse the discourse by labeling Zelensky as a dictator, right,
pointing to his decision to delay elections. I guess I
actually don't know too much about those details. Maybe yeah,

(44:28):
maybe Diego knows more about that. What I don't really
care that much about that, But I think what's interesting
to me is just more Carlson's rhetorical move position support
for Ukraine as the establishment stance right, thereby opening space
for a more sympathetic, at least skeptical stance towards Russia.
So I'm not necessarily saying that he's like loves Russia,
although it kind of seems like he does. But rather

(44:50):
I think his approach exemplifies how right wing anti establishment
discourse often functions epistemically. So if the institutional consensus favors Ukraine,
then skkept towards Ukraine, it becomes the more subversive position.
By rejecting the moralization and emphasizing establishment of hypocrisy, Carlson

(45:10):
can position himself as an outsider with privileged knowledge, right,
someone who sees through the narratives of mainstream, mainstream discourse.
And I guess, you know, and I think this kind
of mirrors the stuff I was talking about with standpoint
of pistemology, right where you know, the rights version sees
anti establishment of pistemology claims authority from exclusion by elites. Right,

(45:33):
so it's like elites don't know anything, they're just stuck
being elites. We know stuff more because we can see
through their nonsense. And I guess this relies on the
assumption that the position of the knower determines the truth. Right,
So the insider is blind or corrupt. Well, the outsider
sees clearly, And I guess I want to be critical
of this, right. I want to say that this kind

(45:54):
of epistemic populism, right, whether right or left, is that
it assumes knowledge derives from who you are, rather than
how you think or the effort that you put in
to kind of like disentangle things. I think the anti
establishment reflex fails to recognize that actually, maybe being an
insider in the establishment provides access to certain forms of knowledge. So,

(46:16):
even if it's also full of blind spots, which it is, right,
institutions accumulate information, research and intelligence that maybe outsiders don't have.
This doesn't mean that they're always right, but it does
mean that they're often more informed than those without institutional access.
So I guess, like I just I want to push
back against the idea that like that I'm noticing that

(46:37):
is maybe connected. Maybe this is just a connection that
I'm making up, but at least it's what i'm seeing
that like, I don't think that like being in an
outsider or a less privileged position, it does give you
a unique perspective that like people in more positions of
power don't have. But I also think that people in
positions of powers or in institutions have information that outsiders don't.

(46:58):
So in a way, I'm actually saying that there's blind
spots all around, right, that there's not one privileged. There's
perspectives that you can get from being in one or
the other. But I think we're making a mistake if
we automatically assume that the outsider has special information that
we should prioritize over other things. Right, only when it's
being used as kind of a hammer to just have

(47:21):
this performative stance where everything establishment is wrong.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
All Right, I'll say my counterposition, and I'll try not
to be an asshole. I hate that I that I
talk like an asshole. I get impassioned, and then I.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
Its ok for you to be an asshole.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
No, I'm not going to be an asshole. I just
don't think that the establishment position actually exists the way
that you're saying it exists.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
Well, I don't think either position exists really.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
Like establishment would be what the New York Times university
professors and Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
It's always relative and slippery. I agree, like it, it's
not this, but I think like both like whenever, like whenever,
people are making this kind of gesture, this reflex towards
being anti establishment. I mean they're naming the things that
they think are the establishment, and I think they often
do it from a perspective of being like, well, those

(48:16):
those elites are corrupt or those are just like privileged
people who you know, don't understand, you know, the position
of outsiders. And I think that like they're kind of
using that as a reason to dismiss or not have
to think. Basically, it's an excuse I think, to like
not think, not to make any effort to think about

(48:36):
the situation in a more nuanced way.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
I mean, we're analyzing the news, which is not material analysis,
and we're we have to just give our Marxist credentials
out there and say, you know this, the elite position exists.
Outside of this critique entirely except for these the corporate
families that have always owned America. They still in America.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
So if you think that Kamala Harris is the is
the elite, you're you're shooting in the wrong direction. But yeah,
I kind of agree with you that I agree while
disagreeing with you that anti establishment politics is the norm.
But I also think that the establishment politics doesn't really

(49:21):
exist anymore because politics had to be pretending to be governing.
And this is this is the Democratic Party. The Democrats
get in power, they pretend to govern, they don't do anything,
but they say, okay, guys, the adults are back in
the room. Politics is long over by the time that happens.

Speaker 2 (49:42):
And they're and they're obviously helping their donors too on
behind the scenes, and they're actually helping the powerful people,
but so is everyone.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
They defend the status quo and they throw a few
more crumbs and then say, also, you have to be woke. Yeah,
but I think that the the Kamala Is brat is equal.
I don't know antist, it's it's a it's own cult
of belief. And the way that you have to picture

(50:09):
America is just fiefdoms rather than establishment versus people.

Speaker 2 (50:15):
I totally agree. Actually, it's it's more just like an
observation about the way the rhetoric online and the way
the rhetoric in the news right now in political rhetoric.
I mean, it's all full of mystification and nonsense. But
I think that there is like an instinct or reflex,
no matter what position you're in, to try to position

(50:36):
yourself as being against something that is more powerful. And
I think that that's like and I think that in
some cases it's truer than other cases. But I just
I just think it's it can be really lazy, and
it's just irritates me.

Speaker 4 (50:51):
I think Pills is right to point to Marxist credentials here.

Speaker 1 (50:58):
I don't know if you know said that for you.

Speaker 4 (51:00):
I knew you'd like that, Thank you. Uh. I think
an interesting addendum to Victor's story too, is that you know,
recently Trump threatened to withhold all support to Ukraine unless
Zelenski gives access privileged access to US companies to their

(51:21):
rare minerals right, and Zelensky agreed, he was saying, okay,
continued support giving US companies access to rare minerals within
UK territory. Okay, so there's capitalism in action, right, Like,

(51:41):
what else is it? I don't understand that this is
just capitalism coming out of its pupa shell of all
the welfare state bullshit, you know, checks and balances that
are imposed on it and just coming into its own.
That's what it's doing. It's shaking off, it's overcoming those barriers.
And and Trump is Trump is delivering on that, right,

(52:04):
He's he's allowing a free market, libertarian kind of mentality
to so no more spending money on on foreign aid, right,
shut down all those all those foreign aid agencies, right,
get rid of the state. That's not capitalist, having this
huge state. Why would you have this huge state when
you can just have a free market, decide everything, you know,

(52:25):
privatize education and hand over all the information to Elon
Musk and let him let him deal with it. He's
a private actor, he's a he's a businessman. He's going
to be able to monetize these things and the market
will redistribute all the value in the way that like that.
This is what is happening, I think, is that we're
just moving away even further from the welfare state. We

(52:47):
thought it was done. But it's actually there's still a
lot of kind of non capitalist mechanisms out there.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
And you know, they're just being.

Speaker 4 (52:56):
Identified and eliminated.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
It's a billionaire welfare state because Elon Musk pretending to
be anti establishment when almost all of his wealth from
carbon credit or whatever the electricity car credits are to
being like the funder of SpaceX is the United States government.
And this guy comes out and he gets to be

(53:20):
anti establishment, and it's true. This is this is my
worry about it, not that it's not true. That it's
true that he gets to be anti establishment while being
pumped full of state money. It's yeah.

Speaker 4 (53:37):
I think Victors identifying the sort of rhetorical dynamics of
this shift and the phenomenological because the rhetoric is the
thing that you see and feel and and respond to,
and and that's what Victor is getting into the.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Perceived value of like that that that's somehow like the
you know, the ideologue, like the way that everyone wants
to be free, like freedom. I think like we're moving
towards this moment where like everyone wants to be anti
anti establishment, right, No one wants to be like, oh,
I'm part of the establishment. Everyone wants to be like, no,
I'm breaking something down, and like that's the shift that
I'm interested in, like noticing it and just being like

(54:15):
it's funny. And the way that I think I'm also
interested in, like the phenomenological as Eric said, or like
the more individual level of like where how that leads
people to be lazy, like because they're just like, well,
I'm just this way this, and they put things into
these boxes which I entirely agree are bullshit, right, Like
there's so much more. And Trump is pretending to be

(54:36):
this populist right anti establishment, but exactly he's fucking He's
obviously there for corporate greed and the donors and all
that shit, just as much, if not more than a
lot of these Democrats were. But it's all about the
rhetorical positioning and the way the values shift, and I
think and at the individual level, I guess I'm always
just interested in the way that, you know, even people,

(54:59):
the way people are seduced into this dynamic of wanting
to be against the system, and how it can kind
of short circuit our way. And I think the thing
that I'm really calling for is that you know, and
maybe this is one of the things that I think
philosophy can be good for is trying to develop some
kind of epistemic humility, right that, Like, you know, I
don't think any position necessarily grants automatic access to truth

(55:22):
or you know, makes you it's it's all, it's always situational,
it's always you know, you have to be careful and
not let yourself think that, oh well, like because I
think that the thing that I have in mind is
just like because what it allows is when you say, oh, well,
that person's just establishment, oh the New York Times bullshit,

(55:43):
like right, automatically, right, automatically just saying that that's wrong
because it comes from that source.

Speaker 4 (55:48):
Right.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
That's the kind of like laziness that I think gets
under my gets gets under my skin a little bit.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
But you still have a standard of truth because you
were comfortable declaring that Trump is a liar and Musk
is a liar. Yeah, so you're still you still believe
in philosophy, I guess, so this makes you, This makes
you a philosophy cultist.

Speaker 2 (56:15):
Well, I mean, but but don't you agree though, Like,
aren't we all talking? Like it's not just me? I mean,
Eric was just pointing out and being like, look, at them.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
This is what I said in my intro is the
distinction that I can't make anymore because Trump is not
performing one of the most powerful people in the world.
He is the most powerful person in the world, and
he's an idiot with respect to everything except ratings. That's
the thing that he knows far better than I will
ever in my.

Speaker 2 (56:40):
Life, and you know I will. I will say, like,
the one thing that I saw online about his the
reactions to the Gaza stuff, was like, you know, I
do think that there are like maybe a lot of
people who were support like I. At least, it doesn't
seem to me that his followers are so I don't know.
I want to be careful about how I say this,
but like, I don't think it's it's it's it's not.

(57:03):
It's not like every single one of his supporters is
just blindly following. Like I actually noticed a lot of
Mega people being pretty mad at him and being like,
what the fuck. I don't want to spend money on Israel.
I don't want to spend money on Gaza. Like that's bullshit.

Speaker 1 (57:14):
That's where you the line.

Speaker 4 (57:16):
Well, what it made me think of, too, is like uh,
during Covid, uh Fauci. Fauci, right, he's clearly like an
establishment expert, and and there's a lot of pushback against
his policies. He was proposing masking and and and social distancing,
and then then then the then the research starts to

(57:36):
come in. Is masking really all that effective? Well? Yeah,
is social distancing really all that effective? Well not really,
but they prop they propounded those policies anyway, And he's
an he's an expert. He has the epistemic positionality that
we should trust him because he's the public health guy,
you know. But but you know, then there's the partisan

(57:58):
angle right where he's sort of beholden to the Democratic
Party because they were in power at the time, and
so you know, you can undermine trust in him and
and be making a political point at the same time,
which is useful if you're a Republican and you don't
like the Democrats.

Speaker 3 (58:14):
But yeah, wasn't wasn't Fauci implied in the latest wikily
connected to us A D I didn't.

Speaker 4 (58:22):
I didn't see it.

Speaker 3 (58:23):
Yeah. So so one of the things Dodge, you know,
the Department of Government Efficiency under masks guidance. It's insane.
One of the things Dodge did under under Trump's guidance,
is that they dismantled U S A D and now like,
especially because the influence in USA D in my region
of the world, it's it's amazing, it's disgusting, you know,

(58:44):
it's they're fucking everywhere. So I was reviewing yesterday all
the Wiki League files that came out of the people
that was receiving money from USA D, and Fauci was
one of them, and he's heavily implied into the creation
of these as in Wuhan in twenty nineteen. It's just
like it's it's a hell hole. Like once you start

(59:05):
like pulling that tread, it never ends. But a lot
of things came out, like, for example, the guy a
famous newspaper journalist, if if we can still say journalists
from Ecuador, wrote a piece on Juliana Sanje a while
back when he was being protected in the embassy of
Ecuador while being persecuted by the US. And most of

(59:26):
the guys that wrote for New York Times against Juliana
Sanche now we can actually see the receipt where they
receive money from USAD, like each article was paid like
sixty thousand dollars for people to speak against the Juliana sanj.

Speaker 4 (59:41):
Yeah, the doach the dirty Oligarcs grab everything Department.

Speaker 3 (59:47):
That's a better acronym. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:49):
Isn't the purpose here just to destroy the federal state,
Like as much as.

Speaker 2 (59:55):
I mean they're trying to, I think with this government
under Trump Yoman.

Speaker 4 (59:59):
Well yeah, yeah, and you'll see if those separations of
the branches can hold it back.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):
No, I don't think they're really libertarian, Like they don't
even care about ideology. It's just like they're in reaching
other friends, you know, Like whoever is in power in
turn is in reaching their friends, and he's doing whatever
benefit them the most. Like we have a different set
of people that are going to get riched. I mean,
as long as you bet on Nancy Palosi's stock portfolio,

(01:00:25):
you're going to do great. You know, Like you don't
even need to be a Democrat or Republican. Just bet
on whatever share Nancy Pelosi is buying. That's it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
This is something that I don't know anything about, but
it's probably where all of the answers are. But instead
we're dealing with media studies.

Speaker 4 (01:00:43):
I was thinking that moving forward, you know, we've been
looking at the news and thinking about the media in general,
and at least the content of it. Let's say we're
gonna put the medium aside for a second, Sorry mccluan.
I think what we're gonna see, as my little doge
joke which I got off the news. I didn't create

(01:01:04):
that acronym is the word oligarchy.

Speaker 3 (01:01:09):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:01:09):
We're gonna see if maybe I predict we probably will
see these claims moving forward from the liberal media, is
that what we're moving towards is an oligarchy, right, And
I think that's an interesting thing to think critically about.
Is that? Okay? So what have we been in? What's
form of what're different archie? Have we been in so far?

(01:01:33):
Has it been an oligarchy? Has it been a or
or is it a crassy? Is it a technocracy? Is
it a democracy?

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
What? Like?

Speaker 4 (01:01:40):
What have we been in?

Speaker 2 (01:01:42):
I think I think this is actually where I just
look back. I think back to the Greeks. I think
about Plato and Aristotle on them sometimes I'm just like God,
they were right about like the way that these the
cookie crumbles when it comes to political regimes because cycles
like actually, I would say that we've been in an oligarchy, okay,
And then What happens is that the people get frustrated
and mad about the oligarchy and they get tired of it,

(01:02:04):
so then they try to take over. They try to
they have like a populist revolt, but then we guess
what happens. They just end up bringing and then it
becomes a.

Speaker 4 (01:02:12):
Tyranny authoritarian yeah, and then authoritarian unrest leads to the
next thing, and it's like a cycle.

Speaker 2 (01:02:18):
So it's just I mean, it's just that classic Greek cycle.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):
I think I don't like the Varuakis take on technofildalism,
and I think this is capegoating capitalism, Like I don't
think is that different, Like why would you justify the
difference is the amount of money they have a mask?
Because today is true that the best way to get
rich is to work with the state, like via the manipula,
the manipulation of power asymmetries is where you get rich faster,

(01:02:45):
just like Trump, just like a lot of like these
oligarchs that we're calling right now is nothing Like it's
just capitalism instrumentalizing the state for their own proliferation reasons.
Like in a way, it's it's weird because what is
what is meaningful? Here is not what people want or
why people explain why they do it. It's the logic

(01:03:05):
is not in human behavior, according to me.

Speaker 1 (01:03:08):
I kind of. I think it's in human belief though,
because we see belief now, you can believe literally whatever
you want that America is run by satanic pedophiles, or
the Russians or the Crystal Fascists are coming for you,
or Curtis Jarvin is a genius puppet master controlling everything.
Whatever brings you comfort means that someone is there in control,

(01:03:29):
and it's never who is in control, because there's no faith.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
In Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 3 (01:03:35):
I agree.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
There's no faith in institutions for good reason because they
always are Sorry I'm being superlative. They often lie the
Iraq War, they lie two thousand and eight. They don't
punish the people responsible, who are probably criminally liable for
what happened in two thousand and eight and had effects everywhere.
So you just give a vote against whatever the current

(01:03:59):
totem is. I think the current totem was Obama. Basically,
I think Obama was the last bastion of America as
a belief project.

Speaker 2 (01:04:11):
Yeah, that's that's actually totally consistent I think with what
I was saying, like I think and I'm not saying
that you're saying it's not consistent, but like I agree
with you. I think that's like, yeah, yeah, that I
think profoundly that like fits exactly because I do think
that there's this shifting back and forth. And yeah, I mean,
and it starts from exactly like I think you're right
that institutions have let us down so many times and
then it's no wonder that people just end up over correcting,

(01:04:32):
right and instead of and now that like because the
mainstream media, for example, has been wrong and has lied before.
Now people are just trusting Tim Poole online or one
of these fucking idiots, right, and they're seeing them as
like always trustworthy, right and and the mainstream media, so
there's like an over correction happening.

Speaker 3 (01:04:51):
Do we even believe that voting matters?

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
I think it matters.

Speaker 5 (01:04:56):
It matters matters marginally, voting matters, like and to be honest,
like to build on to the point, do you think
it makes a difference if you vote Republican or Democrat
at all?

Speaker 3 (01:05:07):
Like? I really don't think so. It probably there's a
marginal difference for some groups that will benefit out of
the decision. But mostly, and I'm gonna say I haven't
said it today, to the material reality of most common people,
it doesn't really matter. It doesn't change, like Bill said,
like minimum salary is stagnant, Like like your lifestyle is

(01:05:28):
fucked up, like you're steal in depth, you cannot afford rent.

Speaker 2 (01:05:31):
It doesn't matter to the fundamental structure, but it matters,
It matters. I think, I think, like you know, one
of my examples was about like the Kamala Harris thing, Like,
I mean, I don't I didn't like Kamala Harris so much.
I didn't think she was a good candidate. I don't
like the Democrats in general. I think they're pretty bad.
But like would have been better right now, like for
the gaza Is. I mean, I think it would have
been slightly better if Kamala was in power than or Gaza.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
Yeah, are you insane? Of course, it's it's.

Speaker 2 (01:05:56):
Actually talking about taking it over and just letting the
Israelis take it over.

Speaker 3 (01:05:59):
That seems way worse. No, no, no, I'm not talking
about talking. I don't care about talking. I'm talking about
how much money went into it.

Speaker 4 (01:06:06):
Yeah, I feel like Biden, we'll see us already that
it wouldn't make much difference. Okay, The point I want
to make about the oligarchy thing it is, you know,
we talked about that ancient Greek cycle of politics, right,
their theories about it, right, And and Greeks were having
the same sort of discussion the democracy, oligarchy, tyranny, all

(01:06:29):
that sort of stuff. But they're capitalist credentials, Marxist credentials.
They were in a slave holding society, right, where at
one point the population of Athens was like forty percent slaves.

Speaker 1 (01:06:43):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:06:43):
We don't have that anymore. We still have slavery, both
sexual and labor oriented, of course, but I don't think
forty percent is the right number for that anymore. We
have the capitalist mode of production now, so we have
these forms still recurring, oligarchy, democracy, not so much monarchy anymore,
a little bit of tyranny though, actually a lot of tyranny.

(01:07:07):
We have these same sorts of forms, but on a
completely different mode of production of livelihoods and social relationships
and all of that stuff that commodity production and capitalism
bring with it. Right, And so the rhetoric we're gonna
hear moving forward is gonna tap into that old deeply

(01:07:27):
held belief. You know, voting and democracy are so connected, right,
and now we're losing faith and voting and therefore into democracy. Right,
And we're going to hear these cries about oligarchy. But
what's the difference between a capitalist oligarchy and an oligarchy

(01:07:48):
in ancient Greece or holding society or a feudal kind
of I don't know if you can say that, are
there feudal? Were their feudal oligarchies? I'm not entirely sure.

Speaker 3 (01:08:00):
That transition probably and then deflate.

Speaker 4 (01:08:03):
I don't have the answer to that question of what
the difference is between a capitalist oligarchy and other kinds
of oligarchies. But that's the rhetoric we're going to hear
moving forward, is oh my god, Trump, like anyone opposition
to Trump. So like maybe the Democrats who aren't going
to capitulate, which some of them already are, they're going
to say, oh my god, we're moving away from democracy

(01:08:26):
into an oligarchy. And now does that matter quite as
much as talking about capitalism and what's going on with capitalism?
Like I said, capitalism is shedding these barriers that had existed, right,
So you know, now we can send Ukraine weapons, not
out of charity or moral righteousness, but just because they're

(01:08:50):
going to give us access to their minerals. We can
send weapons to Israel now, not out of moral support
for you know, the Jewish stass, but so we can
have a nice tourist destination in the Middle East someday
for our oligarchs to visit. Right, So what's the different
what's the difference there?

Speaker 2 (01:09:10):
Right?

Speaker 4 (01:09:11):
And people aren't listening to what Plato are saying, but
today with the news, we are listening to what the
politicians and the news organizations are saying. So that's what's
going to make the difference. Like, right, do you believe
in this narrative about moving away from democracy tolds oligarchy
or do you believe in the friendly narrative of like

(01:09:33):
draining the swamp and making the government more efficient and
moving away from this moralistic, woke ideology and moving into
a more you know, free and society where you can
say whatever you want and think whatever you want and
follow whatever religion you want. Right, those are the two
competing narratives, and they're both fucking complete bullshit. And the

(01:09:55):
real narrative is that this is late capitalism, and these
are things that are happening, and those are the kinds
of beliefs people have, and they're clashing right now.

Speaker 1 (01:10:05):
They're changing the TV show and the TV shows are
fighting for ratings. But the same people still own the
TV station, devstation. We're watching a different show. That's it.
But that's boring to say, how do you make a
podcast about material conditions?

Speaker 3 (01:10:22):
Yeah, Like, for example, Aristotle is the one that said, like,
you can have the government of one, the government of few,
and the government of all. Right, like that those are
the three like most.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
On his there's six, there's exactly, so there's six regimes,
but like, but they're but they're all two our rule
by one, to our rule by few, and to our
rule by the Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:10:44):
Okay, I'm going to propose a new set. There's a
government of system where there is rule by none. Like
this is still humanism, Like placing placing somebody in control
is still humanism. Like if we get a post humanist
analysis of what is happening, who is in control is
the algorithm? Like the necessity of the media itself is
self replication is auto poetic in the sense that it's

(01:11:07):
a matter of promoting the most amount of timing device
and promoting the most amount of cliques. And that logic
doesn't really involve morals or ethics or ideologies or politics.
Like I think all the culte that it comes after,
it doesn't necessarily come to shape the way politics works.

Speaker 2 (01:11:27):
I still think that you could argue that the algorithms
are benefiting someone, right, a group of people, right. I
think that like these regimes that they talk about, right,
the distinction between the two sets of three right is
that like one is oriented toward the common good. That's
why kingship is like a good version of tyranny. Tyranny

(01:11:47):
is like where you have the one ruler who's just
there to enrich himself, right, and it's not interested in
the common good, Whereas the kingship is a version of
rule by one where it's interested in the common good.
And I think, like know, even with algorithms or whatever,
it's like you have these tech these tech entrepreneurs or whatever,
these tech billionaires, and they have these they've deployed these algorithms,

(01:12:08):
but that but they're ultimately there to benefit their bottom
line right themselves. And that's why it's always fun to
hear those stories of you know those tech billionaires who
don't let their kids have cell phones because they know
how fucking horrible they are.

Speaker 3 (01:12:19):
Right, don't blame sale Foles. Bills is going to hold
it against you.

Speaker 1 (01:12:23):
Well everything everything from now on. Who's going to get
their show on the TV?

Speaker 2 (01:12:29):
Well that's why, I mean, this is actually why, like
I think Diego Sorry, well, Diego has a point though
about like Trump. I mean, I know I'm going to
get so much shit for saying that things would have
been better under Kamala for Gaza, Like I already know
I'm going to get so much shit for that, but whatever,
bringing on assholes, I ultimately think, like.

Speaker 3 (01:12:45):
Uh, you, deep inside, I hope you're right, Victor.

Speaker 1 (01:12:50):
I've been siding with Victor lately, but I think he's
probably right on that because Trump will literally say to
net and Yahu, do whatever you want. And Kamala would
have had at least pretended to keep up appearances because
she's a simulation is politician.

Speaker 2 (01:13:03):
So let me just finish what I was saying though quickly.
Where I actually think that Diego does have a good
point though, is like I think you're like, because Trump
is so sensitive to the ratings, right, I'm putting that
in scare quotes, right, like ratings that like if he
does he proposes things, and like because Diego earlier he said, well,
that's just talk, right, It's like talk is not the
same as action, right, What's he actually going to do?

(01:13:24):
And I think that there's actually, like, even though I
still have a hunch that it would be better, there's
also a pretty good chance that like Trump just bullshits
says stuff, and then he and then he and then
he he gets a feel for the ratings, right, and
then he's like, the ratings in this are bad, I'm
not going to he adjust and he adjusts, so, like
I think, and like I said, a lot of his
supporters mega people, the mega ratings aren't that good on

(01:13:47):
this Gaza proposal. Like they're not that good.

Speaker 3 (01:13:50):
Not because of empathy, but because they don't really they
don't want to spend money out there.

Speaker 2 (01:13:53):
It's America first, that's the thing. It's America first. Why
are we spending money on overseas shit? They don't care.

Speaker 3 (01:13:58):
It's America first, you know, Santa Gate, he said. Gaila Off,
the guy that is one of the top actual real
ideologues next to Puttin, said that this notion that America first,
it's exactly like German above all. It's it's it's it's
almost like a new verbatin of Germans above all.

Speaker 2 (01:14:15):
Is that from the Nazies or is that something else?

Speaker 3 (01:14:17):
Yes, of course it's from Hitler.

Speaker 1 (01:14:19):
The first America First in the nineteen thirties was sponsored
by American billionaires who had financial investments in Germany and
didn't want to go to war because they would destroy
their own factories.

Speaker 4 (01:14:31):
Yeah yeah, yeah, for nationalism, right, but then they figured
out that war is actually very profitable to the other side.
But no. The wrench I would throw in that ratings story, though,
is to say, okay, but are we an hour analysis?
Are we fetishizing ratings because Trump's statement about Gaza is

(01:14:55):
deeply unpopular and caused the world wide outcry already.

Speaker 3 (01:15:00):
But it costs.

Speaker 4 (01:15:01):
Maybe that's just what the media is feeding me. Maybe
that's false, but it sounds like he's going to get
pretty bad ratings for that.

Speaker 2 (01:15:07):
Oh yeah, And I don't think he's gonna do it,
actually think but.

Speaker 4 (01:15:10):
To give a shit about saying things that make his
ratings go.

Speaker 3 (01:15:14):
But it's not about moralizing. If I understand what Pills
was trying to say it's not about moralizing ratings because
the machine doesn't care about if the ratings are good
and bad. It doesn't care if you're posting hater love,
So it's just caring about how many cliques you have,
because based on the amount of clicks, the algorithm can
monetize and can use monetization for proliferation. So in that sense,

(01:15:37):
ratings are supreme because as long as they are growing,
it doesn't matter if the growth is based out of
hate and criticism, because growth is still monetizable.

Speaker 1 (01:15:46):
This is what ww F or I guess it was e.
This is what wrestling understood. The the husband of the
current Secretary of Education was willing to be hated for ratings.
And Trump is Trump is like I think, starting with
the lowest approval rating of any president ever, pretty close

(01:16:08):
to that, Like he's not but he knows how to
get the clicks. And then there's the no no news
is bad news. And this is the part of McClue.
And i'd actually agree with any click is better than no.

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
No click, like I was gonna mention it before, but
I have actually been enjoying like some of these Trump
things that he's been saying like, well, I loved it.
When he was asked, for example, he's gonna meet with Trudeau,
it's like, is there anything that Trudeau could do to
like change your mind about the tariffs? And he's like, well,
you know the fifty first state thing, you know, I
was talking about that, like maybe they could be out
of the fifty first state. Yeah, he said that, he said,
and then also like I loved it. Some reporter asked

(01:16:42):
him after that plane crash in Washington, DC. A reporter
was like, yeah, I was like, are you gonna are
you gonna visit? Are you going to visit the crash site?
And he was like visit it? It's like what site?
He's like the water? You want me to go swimming?

Speaker 1 (01:16:54):
Yeah, just like okay, I don't know about Mexico. But
he can't. He can't annex Canada because even the Trump
fans in Canada are the kind of people who like
paint a Canadian flag on their garage door. They're like,
they're hogs for no reason. They don't want to be
a part of America, even if they love it.

Speaker 2 (01:17:15):
Do you know that since this Trump stuff, an interesting
new pole came out of Quebec that for the for
the for the first time in like seventy or sixty years.
Like a majority of Quebecers say that they're proud to
be Canadian, like fifty eight percent. So it's like so,
so it's actually helped to quell like like Quebec nationalism
because because like like this kind of unification against like

(01:17:36):
becoming a fifty first state.

Speaker 3 (01:17:38):
So doesn't want Trump, they want that Canadian Trump.

Speaker 1 (01:17:41):
Yeah, well, this is this is what I was going
to say about politics changing. I never really got to
my my hypothesis, but it's you basically heard it reality TV.
Politics is reality TV more than it's anything that we
read in political philosophy. But what is scary to me
is that if you look to the future, if politics

(01:18:06):
devolves from power and governing into clickbaiters and ratings warriors,
which seems to be the thing that I mean, we
always knew that that's what Trump cared about, but his
new cabinet like confirms that in a different way. Even
Elon Musk is basically a ratings whore. That's he's better
at that than he is running any running his companies,

(01:18:30):
and even he's not very good at that by cheating
at video games. But you know, like, if we see
if this is what politics is, and it's obviously an
American phenomenon at the moment, we don't see that much here.
We see a few people that kind of lean into it.
But if this is what politics politicians I should say
not politics politicians will be from here on, then we're

(01:18:53):
gonna get a scarier breed because most people can't do it.
Hillary couldn't do it, Bernie couldn't do it, was he
was a little closer. Kamala couldn't do it. Most of
the Democratic Party can't. But if we just get a
politician class of clickbaiting ratings warriors, and it spreads from

(01:19:17):
America like the cancer that it is to our neighboring states,
that seems scary to me. And we're lagging right now,
sorry last point, we're lagging twenty years behind because doctor
Phil Wwe, the Apprentice, even Zuckerberg, these are fifteen to
twenty year old clickbait, their clickbait, their twenty year old clickbait.

(01:19:42):
So what happens in the next fifteen years? I think
a mister Beasts presidency is far more likely than any of.

Speaker 6 (01:19:49):
The sun Biker Yeah, I think I do have a
theory that sort of connects to what Pills was just
saying that.

Speaker 4 (01:20:00):
Okay, we started out talking about the media and the
news news media, right, and so okay, you've all heard
the story about, you know, concentration of ownership of media
and all of those things, right, And most of the
information about the world you get comes from the media,

(01:20:21):
and a lot of it is coming from these large
conglomerates that own these news media outlets.

Speaker 1 (01:20:27):
Over fifty of editorial news is written by a pr specialist.

Speaker 4 (01:20:33):
Yeah, so what is a news organization If we're thinking
about capitalism, right, we have to look at it in
two ways. Right. In one way, it is a organ
it produces a commodity that exchanges on the market, right, news,
You buy a newspaper, you subscribe to a television network, whatever.

(01:20:55):
And on the other hand, it is also indirectly an
economic and right it advertises, it advertises for other producers
to help them generate surplus value as well in their
production activities. Right. So, the news, any news corporation has
these sort of two sides. On the one side, it's
a private for profit. Of course, there's state owned media

(01:21:19):
and different kinds of relationships to commodity production. But okay,
let's see private news, corporate owned news makes a product
commodity to sell for and exchange value. Well, that's kind
of collapsing, right. We know that the media is not
really self sustaining anymore. Right, All the new independent news

(01:21:40):
is disappearing, and so it seems like their primary source
of income is just now sort of indirect.

Speaker 2 (01:21:46):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:21:47):
It's not so much the product that they're making and
selling is generating a massive amounts of profit and adding
all this new surplus value to the market. They're just
advertising for the big corporations that are doing this, you know,
and one of the biggest corporations in the world whatever,
tech and oil still, right, So the news media, in

(01:22:10):
so far as it is corporate owned and very the
ownership is very concentrated, is a kind of indirect economic
entity that services these other sectors that often have all
they're all tied together. If you've ever read, like you know,
Lenin on monopoly capital, right, we know that they all
have investments in each other's stuff, and they're all connected.

(01:22:32):
All the boards of governors, they're all just like as
a revolving door. They all have each other in their
phone books, and whatnot. Okay, So that's I mean, that's
that's the way we have to look at what a
news outlet is is it's moving towards this sort of
derivative indirect economic function, right, And so what does that
say about the information that you're getting from these organizations?

(01:22:56):
What is the use value? I mean, the use value
is purely just like again, it goes back to performance.

Speaker 2 (01:23:03):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:23:04):
You know, we read news stories from these corporate media
outlets and now we can talk about them. Right, that's
their use value.

Speaker 3 (01:23:11):
An interesting like adum to your commentary, are it is that,
for example, one of the main indicators that the FANGS
Company and all the Fanks, Facebook, Amazon, Google, FA and
GS like the five top media giants, one of the
top indicators that they measure as a KEYPI as a
key performance indicator is time on device. Like I've heard

(01:23:33):
this like from people that work inside these companies. Time
on device is as important for them as share of market, profitability,
rate of margin. And time on device is literally how
many hours you spend in front of you of your computer.
As long as time on device is growing, market is
going and then profitability can grow because the market grows,

(01:23:53):
so that will that in a way will give us
justification of why it doesn't matter if the conversation is
against or in favor of the current hegemon or the
current establishment. It doesn't really matter because as time on
device growth, they can make more money. But then again,
it doesn't matter what you're reading. The algorithm will choose

(01:24:15):
you and will advertise to you regardless of the topic
you're talking about. Like you can you can be, for example,
in social media, being a virtual activist in favor of
the Palestinian people, and you can get advertisement from ESLE,
which is funding Israel. You know, like it doesn't really matter,
Like you don't even know you're participating, Like your cohersion

(01:24:37):
is no longer a matter of choice or decision or rationality.
Like most of this projects, of these relationships are completely automated.

Speaker 4 (01:24:46):
Yeah, and so looking at the news and the content
of what it's saying and face value and reacting to
it is completely missing the point of what is happening historically,
how things are developing under this current mode of production.
Right capitalism. Right, you could be expressing views that are

(01:25:08):
progressive and also funded by an extreme content organization.

Speaker 3 (01:25:14):
This content itself, it will feed the machine because all
the attention we capture is going to be captured towards
a mode of capitalization that perpetuates the system itself.

Speaker 4 (01:25:27):
Yeah, and that's the behind our backs aspect of Yeah, right,
like the way value is moving, we don't have control
of that.

Speaker 1 (01:25:34):
We knew that when we signed up. This is why
I began with Reality does not have truth underneath it.
Reality has clicks underneath it.

Speaker 3 (01:25:43):
Clicks like look at these.

Speaker 1 (01:25:46):
I say that believing it.

Speaker 3 (01:25:48):
Yeah, right now, I think it's very true.

Speaker 4 (01:25:51):
These non material commodities, these info commodities, are also fueling us. Right,
we're viewer funded whatever you could say that democracy now
has a viewer funded model. Right. Other media outlets, the
big ones, they have more of like a corporate structure
with all the advertising stuff. And like I was saying earlier, right,

(01:26:12):
but we're all on the same issues, right, and the
and and polarization and like widespread discontent is great.

Speaker 3 (01:26:21):
Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 4 (01:26:22):
It is amazing for whatever angle you're coming at those
stories from, doesn't matter if it's progressive or corporate or reactionary, Like,
it's just great for everybody because it creates all this
attention and.

Speaker 1 (01:26:39):
Which can monetized this is all stuff I've read on
the on the New York New Yorker. It's all about attention.
Just get clicked. So are we gonna get clicks or
are we gonna follow the New Yorker? Oh wait, that
is following the New Yorker.

Speaker 2 (01:26:52):
Anyway, there's no outside, you know, there's no way out
of it.

Speaker 1 (01:26:58):
This is why we have to enjoy this. There is
no outside, so we should do it properly. Why do
we only have twelve thousand followers on YouTube? Someone's not
doing their job on this pot.

Speaker 3 (01:27:08):
I'm gonna tree Marvel rivals just after this.

Speaker 1 (01:27:11):
Oh okay, well I'm not doing that. But you know
what makes a lot of capitalists' money anti capitalist content?

Speaker 4 (01:27:22):
Yeah that well that yeah, that's the point of It's like,
it's like the old culture jamming situation in the eighties
and nineties, right, Like it's counterculture, but now it's co opted. Right.
It's just like like Victor was saying earlier right about
being anti establishment, right, like, being anti establishment has been

(01:27:44):
co opted by the establishment, right, and now it's something
you're encouraged to do because it's you know, it gets views.
And since social media has no authority, figures it all
just seems like an open forum between equals, like we
can all be anti establishment together, but what are we
really doing. We're feeding data in. We're commodifying ourselves, right,

(01:28:07):
like the burnout society thing. We're commodifying ourselves now voluntarily
by overworking ourselves, engaging with these systems giving them our data.
We're being commodified as the audience, as the viewers, not
as human beings, but just as like a bunch of
data points that can be sold for as a commodity

(01:28:27):
to whatever marketers who can then feed that back into
their market research and do more targeted ads that generate
more profits. And that cycle is just I mean, I
guess it's not a news cycle, but it's it's ongoing,
and that's that's Being aware of that is just another
way of sort of being critical of the content you're

(01:28:48):
engaging with.

Speaker 1 (01:28:49):
Oh, and being aware of that. No, you're just you're
going back to like pre before the episode started. Being
aware of that is nothing. Being aware of that makes
no difference.

Speaker 4 (01:29:01):
It does, though, because the fact if you know that
the fact of your clicking on a story is the
design of that clickbait title, then maybe you won't click
on it. No, this title is offering some revelation to me,
but it's not real.

Speaker 1 (01:29:17):
I hope to I hope to like head this off
with my introduction, but it seems we're still in the
same place anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:29:24):
Yeah. I also, I also don't believe having awareness about
it changes anything.

Speaker 2 (01:29:29):
Yeah, I mean it could make a small difference, but
not really. Probably.

Speaker 1 (01:29:33):
All Right, I'm depressed, but I'm gonna go watch some
content and it will make me happy momentarily.

Speaker 3 (01:29:39):
So yeah, go go out. What this guy that I
show speed or something or I heard they're great?

Speaker 1 (01:29:46):
What's the guy who's from Canada, the French one? I
put it. I put him in one of my.

Speaker 3 (01:29:53):
Videos content creator because it.

Speaker 1 (01:29:56):
Is like a big streamer anyway, I forget.

Speaker 3 (01:30:00):
Like a Canadian.

Speaker 1 (01:30:01):
No, he talks, he is a he's a Quebecua accident. Anyway,
we need to be clippable, and he clips a good one,
say look at this dipship and then post my face
saying something stupid.

Speaker 2 (01:30:13):
If you master it, all right, lean into it, lean
into it.

Speaker 4 (01:30:18):
I think when the conversation devolves into half remembered anecdotes,
then that's that's the best time.

Speaker 2 (01:30:23):
To clip it.

Speaker 1 (01:30:24):
Yeah, I thought it was relevant because we were talking
about the Quebec WA and we're talking about streamers and
we're talking about attention. And I don't know his name,
but I know he's big.

Speaker 3 (01:30:35):
He is he a gamer?

Speaker 1 (01:30:39):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:30:41):
Oh, I think I know what you're talking about. You're
talking about that he's got like blonde bleach hair. Ninja,
did he bleach blonde hair?

Speaker 1 (01:30:50):
I thought, excuse yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:30:58):
You have to have the Brazilian guy. Remember the name
of the most famous Canadian person alive. He's not the
of course, I'm fucking with you.

Speaker 1 (01:31:06):
We have Jordan Peterson, and don't forget about Jordan Peterson
and Marshall.

Speaker 4 (01:31:11):
McLuhan and Lord.

Speaker 1 (01:31:15):
Cohen, which we got a question about but we didn't
get to.

Speaker 2 (01:31:17):
All right, we didn't get to any questions.

Speaker 3 (01:31:20):
We didn't see any questions.

Speaker 1 (01:31:21):
Authoritarianly, we'll do it on the next one. We're authoritarianly
cutting this off. Thanks everyone, Diego. I'm sorry that I
I doused your mccluan fire.

Speaker 3 (01:31:31):
Absolutely not. I will hold it against you forever. I
will never take criticism from a friend that I.

Speaker 4 (01:31:36):
Don't The whole episode on dialectical materialism next time.

Speaker 1 (01:31:40):
Will continue the debate like mccluan is one of those
who is simultaneously overrated and underrated, but for different reasons. Anyway,
we'll get to it. Thank you, guys, Thanks everyone out there.
Two hundred good for us. I wish I felt better
about it.

Speaker 4 (01:31:55):
Goodbye makes sense to that one.
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