#412 Ashley Rindsberg - Who Controls What You Know

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[SPEAKER_00]: What's up ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the real talk with Zubi podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On today's episode I'm going to be having a conversation with investigative journalist Ashley Rinsberg, welcome to the show.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Zubi.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Happy to have you here, Ashley.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So for my listeners who are not familiar with you and your work please introduce yourself to my audience.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I am an investigative journalist, like you said.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm also the founder and chief investigative officer of NPOV, and it stands for a neutral point of view, where we investigate all sorts of narrative influence campaigns online on social media, on platforms like Wikipedia and AI, CHPT and Gemini.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we do that in an effort to help shed light on what's actually going on inside of our information ecosystem.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Got that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And how do you get into this line of work?
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[SPEAKER_00]: What interested you to get into this?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I wish, originally, wrote a book about the New York Times back in 2021, we talked about that, I forgot, must have been around around 2021, maybe 2022.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, it was a question of, like, how the New York Times misreporting or fabrications distortions shaped the course of history over the last 100 years.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it was kind of, in the same vein, I started to do a lot more reporting about media and social media.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And some of the big topics that were fed into these spaces, including COVID, like the lab leak origin and how that kind of all got distorted by platforms that were just flat out manipulating the conversation, sometimes in the behest of government.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So as I kind of pushed further into the space, I started to look at Wikipedia, a colleague of mine named David Rosado, who's a machine learning researcher in New Zealand.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Did a interesting study where he compared how figures from the left and from the right in politics are portrayed on Wikipedia.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And his study found that figures on the right and this was like US senators, congressmen,
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[SPEAKER_01]: Supreme Court justices were more likely to be associated with negative terms with negative sentiment on Wikipedia and figures on the left were more likely to be associated with positive sentiment on Wikipedia and that even extended to journalists who are discussed in articles on Wikipedia and that just kind of seemed like a really strange thing to be happening.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a general sense that Wikipedia has tilted left and started out more left.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's like roots in the Bay area and the culture is kind of on the left, but to have it so starkly laid out like this was a real surprise to me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I started to do a bit of investigation into what's going on on the site, how it actually works.
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[SPEAKER_01]: how things really shifted and pivoted in 2016, 2017, which is when all this kind of like censorship machinery was laid down in large part by the Democratic Party and that transferred over directly into Wikipedia, which like filled this gap that opened up right in that space.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So from that point on, I started just doing a lot more investigation to Wikipedia and the reason is, because it plays such a unique role in the information ecosystem.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like, you know, acts or Instagram or Facebook where they're highly influential of course, but we all kind of go in there knowing that this is other people's opinions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We are fighting for facts on these platforms, but Wikipedia is treated by so much of the internet and the broader world, and of course AI systems as ground truth as knowledge.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So this is why it's got this disproportionate effect on all the information that we consume and the AI that are shaping our future.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that's how I dove into it and it's just the more I discovered, the more I started to understand that I wasn't really even scratching the surface.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Got it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's something you said there which I'd love for you to explain a little bit more because you kind of mentioned it very briefly but you talked about the US Democratic Party playing a role in how Wikipedia is shaped.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Can you drill into that a little bit more?
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[SPEAKER_01]: definitely.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So what happened in 2016 in November, as we know, Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And this was something that was just not supposed to happen in anybody's mind.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they thought Trump was a joke.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They thought this election was in the bag.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The New York Times was reporting 92% chance that the
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[SPEAKER_01]: Hillary would win, this was on the evil election, and then we have Trump winning, and the only possible explanation that the DNC and Clinton herself could put forward into the world was that it was a byproduct of a disinformation campaign and a misinformation on the internet.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So the disinformation campaign supposedly
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[SPEAKER_01]: was the Russian government, the Kremlin working in collusion with the Trump campaign.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This was shown to be false.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This was never corroborated.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We now know this today as Russia gate.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The other piece of this was what was happening online, according to the DNC, according to Hillary Clinton.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, literally weeks after the election, she goes in front of Congress and declares a fake news epidemic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And weeks after that, Obama pushes through some final legislation, which stood up a bunch of new regulations about how the State Department and associated agencies were now going to be geared up to fight disinformation online.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This was sort of a purview that they had never had before.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So you have this kind of shift, this crack opening up in information.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We've never seen information treated this way by the United States government, at least not in our lifetimes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe like during a stream, like war or war or two or something like that, maybe they put in place censorship measures in this kind of thing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But this was totally new for the online space where we'd been used to the notion of freedom.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and being able to say what you want.
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[SPEAKER_01]: All these kinds of things, especially under Section 230, which protects platforms from being held liable from anything that people say on it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This was very deliberate by Congress to make sure people could have their say on the internet.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So in Hillary Clinton and the DNC go through this motion to really fundamentally shift the way we understand information.
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[SPEAKER_01]: At that same time, Wikipedia was going through its own crisis.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It had a, it was trying to like do the silly thing where they were trying to start up a search engine to challenge Google, which is a very bad idea, especially since Google had given a lot of money over the years.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it resulted in the Alster of the CEO at the time of the executive director, she was called, and a new executive director stepped into the frame.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's Catherine Maher.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we have seen clips of this woman, yours might remember the Wikipedia woman on stage saying that Wikipedia is mostly a white Western male, construct, and truth is getting in the way of these things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So like all this kind of crazy stuff.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So this is the person who was actually put in charge of Wikipedia in that moment and she's a long time
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[SPEAKER_01]: Accolade of George Soros, she was a student of Soros.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I would say a disciple of his and Soros's main political ally throughout the decades has been Hillary Clinton.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So when it came time to figure out what comes next for Wikipedia, Catherine Maher in this new role of executive director, she taps one of
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[SPEAKER_01]: Hillary Clinton's senior AIDS from her days in the White House to lead this complete reimagining of Wikipedia from a mission of pursuing it being an online encyclopedia where they're just trying to add more and more information to a social justice movement.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Something that they described as knowledge equity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That was going to be their new mission.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The person who performed this kind of, she did a PR audit right before putting this new plan in place and the new plan is called the movement strategy or Wikipedia 2030.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The person who did this PR audit for them who said, this is the shift that we need to precipitate was their head of communication.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, he was the PR agency that Wikipedia Foundation had employed at the time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He, at that same moment in time, was the chief marketing officer for Clinton Global Initiative.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was working directly for the Clinton's while working for Wikipedia and the person who's saying, we need to shift towards a message of this open knowledge and that term open is very loaded.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It comes from Soros again, the Open Society.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So all this kind of shifted around that period, and suddenly in 2017 we have Wikipedia now pursuing a social justice mission, something it had never done previously, and it's all happening at this moment in time where we have Hillary Clinton declaring the fake news epidemic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and Soros then starts donating a lot of money to Wikimedia Foundation for this project.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we start to see Wikimedia serving this role of becoming what it calls knowledge infrastructure.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They want to be what connects the mainstream media to the rest of the internet to ensure that the knowledge that we're getting online is sort of verified or approved of by some kind of an unelected establishment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for watching this video.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to the channel for more full real talk with Zubi podcasts and clips.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, okay, there's a lot going on here.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A question I have.
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[SPEAKER_00]: is it's always interesting doing these types of podcasts because I know obviously you've done lots of in-depth research on this and this is a subject, you know, a lot about, but for someone who hasn't thought about this, it can sound sort of conspiratorial, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: It can sound like, you know, we're just saying, you know, this is happening and this is happening.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So what's the best way, well, first question actually.
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[SPEAKER_00]: First question is, how transparent all the stuff you've said,
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[SPEAKER_00]: How transparent and available to the public is that information and these various steps that Wikipedia has gone through?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's all there, all available.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is one of the benefits of covering Wikipedia is that almost by definition, everything has to be public, everything even the archives, all their hiring decisions, when they hire a PR agency,
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[SPEAKER_01]: It has to be very clear, not just because they're a charity, there are 511C3, but also because the ethos of Wikipedia is all about transparency, so they try to keep everything like as much as they can in the public domain.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So everything I said, you know, from the PR agency that was hired to do this critical audit in 2016, that's Minasin Media, Craig Minasin was the Chief Marketing Officer Clinton Global Initiative at that time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The woman who was hired to design the new strategy, her name was Whitney Williams, who ran a firm called.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, Wikipedia is a huge organization.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They have a $200 million annual budget.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And generally an organization of that size, when doing some kind of massive brand reshifter or strategic reshifter, they would go to like one of the big consulting agencies like McKinsey.
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[SPEAKER_01]: or bane, or something like a Boston consulting group.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They chose this tiny little agency in the middle of Montana, which makes no sense.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that was run by Whitney Williams.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And Whitney Williams was Hillary Clinton's.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She basically ran Clinton's, like her scheduling, her planning when Clinton, Hillary Clinton was first lady.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And this was the woman that was chosen to reshape Wikipedia's mission
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[SPEAKER_01]: uh... the source stuff is also there source gave them two million dollars it's on record wiki um... wiki pdl wiki media foundation was very
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[SPEAKER_01]: They celebrated this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This was not something for them to hide.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This was something for them to really trump it and be open about.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They don't see anything wrong with it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe there's not, but it remains a fact.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So every single step of the way these things are documented.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Wikimedia, you can viewers out there can Google this themselves.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They can look up the Wikipedia 2030 strategy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Otherwise known as the movement strategy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: all the verbiage, all the messaging about what they call knowledge equity, this included a $9 million fund for DEI programming at Wikipedia.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That was actually one thing that the foundation tried to hide from the public.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't succeed, obviously, it came out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But they're allocating, I mean, that's a lot of money for charity to give $9 million to DEI.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Especially if this is Wikipedia, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like that you're not supposed to be ideologically motivated, it's supposed to be about
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[SPEAKER_01]: objective knowledge and truth and not about the I, not about things that have a social justice mission to them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that's all there, all the other stuff about like they're running DEI software processes within Wikimedia Foundation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And again, these are not things that they're ashamed of, they're not things that these are things that they are very proud of, at least they were at the time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Katherine Maher was extremely influential in this entire space of promoting which called knowledge equity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She was on the press release with George Sorrows when he gave $2 million to the credit a new fund called the Wikimedia Endowment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They were trying to raise $100 million.
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[SPEAKER_01]: in six years, they did it in three.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So this is a lot of money, a lot of institutional money, a lot of people from the political world are involved.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's a whole lot more to it, and my reporting have a lot of also people from sources own organizations that's from open society foundations and his other charities started coming over in a massive wave, taking key positions at Wikimedia foundations that
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[SPEAKER_01]: that included the general council, that included their chief advancement officer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So this is like a real stitching into this sort of left progressive establishment of the entire Wikipedia project.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And by all means fact check it, I hope you do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if I have found something incorrectly, which I really at this point don't think I did, I would love to know.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So for someone who wants to sort of check and verify this, they can do this just by typing stuff into Google and it'll just be there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to ask, I think I understand this given the area that I'm in and all the podcasts that I do and so on, but I think for a lot of people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: out there, just talking about general everyday people, not people who are hyper into politics or who are journalists or media figures or let alone politicians, what is the danger or risk of Wikipedia having this left-leaning or progressive bias?
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[SPEAKER_00]: What's your primary concern there?
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[SPEAKER_01]: The concern is that we are reshaping reality through this mechanism, because Wikipedia, a lot of people say to me, I don't go to Wikipedia, so I don't, you know, what does this matter?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And my answer to them is always, that's fine, but Wikipedia comes to you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You just don't know it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So if you're doing a chatchipi-t search or doing a search in Gemini, if you're using Siri or Alexa to ask a question about something in the world,
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[SPEAKER_01]: Often times more often than not, you're going to get an answer that comes straight from Wikipedia.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I did this experiment, I gave a talk at a free speech conference last year, and I did this little experiment where I typed in the term free speech into Google.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And every single piece of the search result page from AI overview generated by Google's own AI to the first search result to the knowledge panel that Google puts on the side of a search.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Down below to the very bottom of the page, it was Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Wikipedia.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if you're not looking for that specifically, you won't see it what you're going to see as how Wikipedia itself defines free speech.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And now if we sort of come back to this notion that it's being shaped disproportionately by people on the progressive left.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not talking like center-left or like sort of classical liberal.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, like academic left.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like people are really pushing the discourse as far as they can toward the left for political and ideological reasons.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You are then ingesting a concept free speech that's been shaped by these people behind the scenes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I did a couple of big stories about how Wikipedia framed Donald Trump as a fascist or an authoritarian, but they did both.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a very important concept for us to understand in a democracy to say, hold on a second, is this individual leading the country a fascist, like an out now fascist?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's one thing to say that in a protest, right, where we understand, like they're trying to score points, they're trying to damage him because they don't like him, okay, fine.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But to say that in a factual context, in a source like Wikipedia, which is treated as verified by Google and by AI systems that are shaping our future, is an entirely different matter.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It changes our understanding of what fascist is completely, and it's something that we end up associating with...
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[SPEAKER_01]: the right and the conservative wing of American politics and not at all with any other part of the spectrum.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it's warping the politics in America and it's literally just in some cases three guys.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean literally three guys, three editors behind the scenes where you can't see them are linking to radical Marxist sources.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And because these are academic sources, they're journals, so it'd be like a mark, it's two out of the three big sources where Marxist journals, but you don't see that there are Marxist journals that are being used to make this point.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You just see the outcome, which is that pointing to Wikipedia, Donald Trump is a fascist.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This can go on and on and on and talk about how Wikipedia frame Charlie Kirk as an extremist, as a radical, as a hard-line Christian.
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[SPEAKER_01]: as a promoter of antisemitism and conspiracy theories.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And again, it comes down to two or three editors working on each individual page to totally distort or misconstrued what we take to be fact in our lives, in our world, what law enforcement, what the DOJ, what Congress, what AI, what journalists, what parents and teachers understand about a given topic is shaped in some cases by literally three to four people working
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[SPEAKER_01]: with an agenda and using these tactics, these sort of like ideological warfare tactics to make these kinds of shifts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And what are the global repercussions of this?
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[SPEAKER_01]: The global repercussions are significant.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's because people on the left are not the only ones who discovered this hack.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I've done a lot of reporting, for example, on how Iranian sources, so Iranian state media.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And these are people.
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[SPEAKER_01]: These are sources that are directly linked to the IRGC, that's the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the hardcore of the Islamic regime in Iran.
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[SPEAKER_01]: are being used as sources across Wikipedia in more than 20,000 instances.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I found in January that, after there was these big protests movement in Iran, tens of thousand people were killed by the Iranian government for protesting there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And when you went to go and Wikipedia on search for images or video related to these protests, what you got were hundreds and hundreds of images produced by Iranian state media, with Iranian state media watermarks on them, many of them calling for the death to America and these images, death to Israel and these images.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Some of them calling for retribution vengeance on the protesters.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And this is the stuff, again, that Wikipedia treats as factual, the rest of the world treats us as factual.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is the kinds of things that filter down into AI to AI systems, including quad we found this stuff, we found this stuff in chatGPT, and in Gemini.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When you say, when you say you've found it in these LLMs, what exactly do you mean by that?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You will ask it a question, so for example, I found a one instance where there was a Wikipedia page about a Palestinian Islamic Jihad that's a US-designated terror group, an operative commander from the group who had been in the US-designated terror group.
20:59.210 --> 21:04.979
[SPEAKER_01]: who had been killed in 2006, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is linked as well as to the Iranian regime.
21:05.319 --> 21:09.666
[SPEAKER_01]: They have a website where they list their quote unquote martyrs, their operatives who have been killed.
21:10.407 --> 21:17.598
[SPEAKER_01]: And that much of that page from the PIJ website was copy-pasted into a Wikipedia article.
21:18.239 --> 21:25.791
[SPEAKER_01]: So now it's on Wikipedia, but when you go to chat, GPT and ask questions about this individual, this terrorist who was killed,
21:25.771 --> 21:48.920
[SPEAKER_01]: by these rallies, and you say whatever question you want to ask about, you're getting information that's pulled from the Wikipedia article, and that Wikipedia article is shaped by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad article, that article is created by a terrorist group itself, so it's a laundering of information from a terror group through to AI via Wikipedia.
21:49.360 --> 21:49.701
[SPEAKER_00]: Understood.
21:49.741 --> 21:51.643
[SPEAKER_00]: Now this is a...
21:53.108 --> 22:05.722
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a question that's like kind of going up a level, but it's something that I find myself wondering more and more these days, because there's just so much information out there about everything.
22:07.103 --> 22:18.415
[SPEAKER_00]: I've seen it myself very much firsthand, even within the last couple of weeks of us recording this video, because as you know, I live in the UAE, and lots of the world is talking about the UAE right now.
22:18.676 --> 22:20.938
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm here, I'm on the ground, I'm living here.
22:20.918 --> 22:44.918
[SPEAKER_00]: And the amount of stuff that I have seen, which is just completely fabricated, or completely wrong, or even AI generated, and so on, and then it's being, I don't know, it's hard to even know who's a human, who's a bot, what's real, what's not, we used to be able to sort of trust our eyes and ears more, and now with all the AI stuff happening.
22:45.370 --> 22:50.380
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like you would think that with all this information, it would be easier to get to the truth.
22:51.041 --> 22:57.313
[SPEAKER_00]: But it seems like it's getting harder and harder to even discern what's reality and what's not.
22:57.413 --> 23:03.565
[SPEAKER_00]: And I find people who I know for a fact are very intelligent and generally well-informed and well-meaning.
23:03.545 --> 23:18.837
[SPEAKER_00]: who are getting caught up in sometimes obvious propaganda sometimes not so obvious and they're resharing things and reacting to things and I'm hearing these conversations and sometimes I just sort of shake my head and I like jeez how are we even meant to
23:18.817 --> 23:19.938
[SPEAKER_00]: work out what's true.
23:20.699 --> 23:29.130
[SPEAKER_00]: And the sort of root of this conversation is Wikipedia for a long time to many people, certainly for millions of people around the world.
23:29.791 --> 23:39.603
[SPEAKER_00]: It is this sort of, I don't know the correct word, repository of what is supposed to be truth, what is supposed to be facts, a sort of crowdsourced information.
23:40.485 --> 23:48.655
[SPEAKER_00]: And if that itself can't even sort of be counted on,
23:49.597 --> 23:54.303
[SPEAKER_00]: How are we even supposed to know what's true, especially when it comes to things that are happening around the world?
23:56.225 --> 23:59.990
[SPEAKER_01]: It's super difficult today, and it's definitely getting worse.
24:00.350 --> 24:02.693
[SPEAKER_01]: It's AI, obviously, please a big role in this.
24:02.713 --> 24:06.598
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the botnet works on X as an example.
24:06.978 --> 24:16.330
[SPEAKER_01]: They're very sophisticated because they can reply in a way that sounds human and sounds intelligent, so it's even hard to like catch them out.
24:16.310 --> 24:19.419
[SPEAKER_01]: The way to understand what's true and false.
24:20.020 --> 24:23.710
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you have to be super skeptical of every claim that you hear.
24:23.730 --> 24:26.117
[SPEAKER_01]: I also think that generally speaking
24:26.502 --> 24:32.290
[SPEAKER_01]: The less time you spend on social media, the better and the more intentional you are about it's use.
24:32.411 --> 24:42.725
[SPEAKER_01]: I would say the same thing about the traditional media, by the way, I would say that we tend to over consume media because we're always on our phones and we have to do something on our phones.
24:42.745 --> 24:47.552
[SPEAKER_01]: So we end up on naturally on Instagram or X, whatever app is installed.
24:48.233 --> 24:54.923
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is what makes us a target of this kind of propaganda, basically what it is.
24:54.903 --> 25:05.761
[SPEAKER_01]: Billings of dollars are being spent, especially now with concurrent wars going on, to influence people's minds, and not just our minds, the goal is to influence our political echelon.
25:05.781 --> 25:21.366
[SPEAKER_01]: It's to get decision makers and Washington to change policies to, in some cases, divide in some cases, to weaken various factions within our own government in order to achieve the geopolitical aims of other countries.
25:21.346 --> 25:27.894
[SPEAKER_01]: In some cases, or in some cases, within the country to achieve political aims of ideological groups.
25:28.034 --> 25:30.277
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we're seeing this across the board.
25:30.758 --> 25:39.729
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw it with early on last year with some of the Tesla stuff targeting Elon, because he had been started to work in the administration.
25:40.069 --> 25:40.750
[SPEAKER_01]: It was successful.
25:40.830 --> 25:41.491
[SPEAKER_01]: They pushed him out.
25:41.631 --> 25:48.720
[SPEAKER_01]: They deliberately worked to push the Tesla stock down to a point where it became untenable for him to continue.
25:48.700 --> 25:52.888
[SPEAKER_01]: And he, it was maybe not the only pressure point, but it was certainly one of them.
25:53.288 --> 26:01.703
[SPEAKER_01]: He eventually, Elon eventually left the administration and the Tesla is called Tesla take down this played out mostly online.
26:02.144 --> 26:05.751
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, small number of people with hugely disproportionate effect.
26:06.171 --> 26:08.756
[SPEAKER_01]: They're changing politics, the changing geopolitics.
26:09.157 --> 26:10.700
[SPEAKER_01]: And in this case, they achieved their outcome.
26:10.720 --> 26:12.042
[SPEAKER_01]: They declared success.
26:12.022 --> 26:17.789
[SPEAKER_01]: They disbanded, they moved on to other issues, and this is happening across the board.
26:17.809 --> 26:25.659
[SPEAKER_01]: We're seeing it in terms of the sort of astro-terft protests in various places around the country.
26:25.699 --> 26:28.202
[SPEAKER_01]: We're seeing it on every single social media platform.
26:28.703 --> 26:30.765
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, it's also in the media.
26:30.926 --> 26:40.898
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just a little more subtle in the media and it has to like jump through more hoops in order to get to the kind of positioning and needs to have an effect when it's within the mainstream media.
26:40.878 --> 26:46.067
[SPEAKER_01]: So, to answer the question, I think less is more in a lot of ways.
26:46.207 --> 27:00.152
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the less you consume of social media, traditional media, the less susceptible you are to being sort of manipulated, to having your mind hijacked by someone else's campaign.
27:00.432 --> 27:04.219
[SPEAKER_01]: Because there's so much of this stuff happening all the time.
27:04.199 --> 27:11.313
[SPEAKER_01]: and your brain is moving so quickly through so many cycles of these campaigns that you become overwhelmed.
27:11.413 --> 27:15.963
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like a defense system, a missile defense system gets overwhelmed by too much incoming.
27:16.383 --> 27:21.634
[SPEAKER_01]: This is exactly what's happening with our minds on all these different information platforms.
27:21.614 --> 27:43.386
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think the best defense is just kind of a withdrawal partially, deliberately, from these platforms and use them very, very deliberately and try to really structure them in a way that you know that you're maybe it's just an interest group that you're sort of like train your feet if you're interested in whatever might be like it might be financial stuff or it might be
27:43.366 --> 27:49.722
[SPEAKER_01]: stuff that's not like, it might be technology, it might be like learning how to use agents on claw or something like that.
27:49.742 --> 27:59.367
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like really train your feed to give you that kind of information by being disciplined about what you like or what you engage with, what you consume.
27:59.347 --> 28:00.909
[SPEAKER_01]: And it'll be self reinforcing.
28:01.010 --> 28:11.065
[SPEAKER_01]: But the problem is that we tend to just kind of fall back into this like default state of consumption and really being reactive to the kind of posts that we see and that get us going, get our juices flowing.
28:11.406 --> 28:15.052
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we're retraining the feed to deliver more of that content.
28:15.072 --> 28:17.415
[SPEAKER_01]: We sort of all know that the dynamic works this way.
28:17.836 --> 28:21.642
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just that if you want to enoculate yourself against the,
28:21.622 --> 28:33.960
[SPEAKER_01]: the campaigning, the propaganda work that's going on on these platforms you have to be extremely vigilant and then at the end of the day it's like just touch grass type thing to keep saying.
28:35.729 --> 28:40.437
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, 100% I agree with that, and I've practiced much of it for many years.
28:40.898 --> 28:52.978
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess I wonder for the people who feel like it's particularly important to stay informed how what's the best way to do that.
28:52.958 --> 29:00.607
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, there's that kind of quote where, you know, if you follow, if you don't follow the news, then you're uninformed and if you do follow it, then you're misinformed.
29:01.168 --> 29:02.549
[SPEAKER_00]: And that seems to be very much true.
29:03.691 --> 29:05.433
[SPEAKER_00]: Social media as well.
29:05.913 --> 29:10.238
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems like regardless of the type of media, you're always going to be pushed in some way.
29:10.358 --> 29:16.806
[SPEAKER_00]: And I guess from my perspective, you know, I think things have changed and become more sophisticated, but
29:16.786 --> 29:26.607
[SPEAKER_00]: perhaps for much of human history, at least modern history, there have always been forms of information we're going on on different levels.
29:27.509 --> 29:35.807
[SPEAKER_00]: Each nation has always had its own interests and forms of propaganda, whether they explicitly call it that or not.
29:35.787 --> 29:41.672
[SPEAKER_00]: There's always been obviously the entire world of marketing and advertising.
29:41.732 --> 29:46.236
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all designed to sway people's opinions in some way.
29:46.276 --> 29:48.639
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I have a social media following.
29:49.039 --> 29:49.940
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a podcast.
29:50.020 --> 29:50.660
[SPEAKER_00]: I write books.
29:51.241 --> 30:05.794
[SPEAKER_00]: All of us, even on an individual level, if you're in the public sphere, where all trying to influence or nudge people in some way shape or form, I would like to think that I'm certainly trying to do that towards positivity and towards truth.
30:05.774 --> 30:23.952
[SPEAKER_00]: But I guess everyone is trying to do that and with the more noise we have in the more people out there and with all the billions of social media accounts, whether real or fake Lord knows how many billions of social media accounts even exist these days.
30:23.932 --> 30:48.319
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all kind of this battle for attention and influence, and people are going to be pushed in some direction, so there's always that concern of, well, if I just disengage, then there's not as much of a sort of counterbalance, just like, you're yourself, you're an investigative journalist, you could just be like, you know what,
30:48.299 --> 30:49.361
[SPEAKER_00]: This is stressful.
30:49.421 --> 30:50.222
[SPEAKER_00]: This is tiring.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just going to sit back and let this ride out.
30:53.087 --> 31:11.860
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you do that, you know that there's no counterweight and the lies and genuine disinformation or misinformation is just getting out there and people are being nudged in a way which I would assume you think is not overall healthy or good for society or for a nation.
31:11.840 --> 31:24.938
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, I'm kind of just thinking out loud here of the best way that people, whether their public figures or just an everyday person, the sort of best way that everyone can kind of manage their
31:26.386 --> 31:34.595
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just their information diet, but just this battle of influence because there's no vacuum.
31:34.795 --> 31:35.836
[SPEAKER_00]: There's not really a neutral.
31:36.117 --> 31:40.942
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we all kind of wish that there was, but it just doesn't really exist where there's just okay cool.
31:40.962 --> 31:45.147
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's just the objective, neutral, new source for everything going on in the world.
31:45.607 --> 31:48.791
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we want to know what's true, we can just go here and we can find it.
31:48.931 --> 31:50.132
[SPEAKER_00]: That does not exist.
31:51.209 --> 31:52.531
[SPEAKER_01]: It does not, you're right.
31:53.192 --> 32:07.674
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's what, you know, why people got so excited about Wikipedia in the early days, like in the early 2000s because they presented, they told this great story about the sort of myth making story about, we can crowdsource knowledge.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if we crowdsource knowledge, what we do is we flatten out the noise and we elevate the signals, sort of the wisdom of crowds,
32:16.167 --> 32:19.291
[SPEAKER_01]: Thinking behind that and it was like, oh, finally we did it.
32:19.392 --> 32:45.128
[SPEAKER_01]: We solved knowledge and obviously that wasn't true I think when it comes to information diet and thinking about What how we can go about finding information that's important to us part of it is about this kind of unbundling of Information from its source so back in the day you used to be a New York Times subscriber or maybe you were a
32:45.108 --> 32:50.636
[SPEAKER_01]: Subscriber to a conservative newspaper regionally or in your city, and that's what you read.
32:50.756 --> 32:57.186
[SPEAKER_01]: You read every article in there about every given topic, whether it was sports, politics, metro stuff or anything else.
32:58.047 --> 33:04.577
[SPEAKER_01]: Today, just kind of like how Spotify unbundled the track from the album.
33:05.718 --> 33:09.444
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't need to buy a whole album to listen to a great track.
33:09.464 --> 33:11.587
[SPEAKER_01]: You might even hate the rest of the album.
33:11.607 --> 33:14.912
[SPEAKER_01]: You might even not like the artist, but you like that one song.
33:15.213 --> 33:21.925
[SPEAKER_01]: and you can consume that one song individually, and you can make a playlist out of all the different kinds of songs that you like tailored to you.
33:22.245 --> 33:27.114
[SPEAKER_01]: We have that ability to do exactly this today in the information space.
33:27.134 --> 33:31.541
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to just grab a New York Times article because it happens to be in the New York Times.
33:31.561 --> 33:34.386
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to trust it or distrust it.
33:34.366 --> 33:35.768
[SPEAKER_01]: because it's from the New York Times.
33:35.788 --> 33:38.291
[SPEAKER_01]: So you could be like, oh, I know this guy's name.
33:38.591 --> 33:40.894
[SPEAKER_01]: They've done some great reporting in the past.
33:41.154 --> 33:41.995
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to read this article.
33:42.015 --> 33:43.257
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you don't even know the name.
33:43.297 --> 33:45.379
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you're just like, this is interesting to me.
33:45.419 --> 33:47.021
[SPEAKER_01]: I like the perspective.
33:47.402 --> 33:50.626
[SPEAKER_01]: I like the fact that they're telling me who the sources are in this article.
33:51.006 --> 33:52.027
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm going to read this article.
33:52.048 --> 33:58.015
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to believe everything else the New York Times tells me about a given topic or any other new source for that matter.
33:58.335 --> 34:01.079
[SPEAKER_01]: But in this one particular topic, I think that's interesting.
34:01.359 --> 34:03.141
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this worked best.
34:03.323 --> 34:09.199
[SPEAKER_01]: if you try to adopt a search mentality rather than browse mentality and browse.
34:09.483 --> 34:38.865
[SPEAKER_01]: a such modality for news and information in general to say all right I've got limited time Limited cognitive resources these are the three end topics that are the most important to me in my life Or at the moment let's say for the next two three months like I really want to know about how Prediction markets work and how it's all unfolding really interesting and how Agents work and where this is all going and I need to know something about like their and war because it might actually impact
34:38.845 --> 34:57.546
[SPEAKER_01]: oil prices in my family so like if you then start with this top level less than you say I'm gonna start scouting around looking at a range of sources every day that I search for not would get served up to me not would X pushes to me or Instagram pushes to me and what happens to be trending
34:57.526 --> 35:14.895
[SPEAKER_01]: What I'm going out to look for, and I think this is a great use case for AI to go to chat you to hear whatever you use and just start asking questions about these topics and see what sources come up and interrogate the AI about why that source might be biased or be more neutral on a given story.
35:14.955 --> 35:16.918
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's about being
35:16.898 --> 35:29.355
[SPEAKER_01]: extremely, extremely active, being a hunter for information rather than kind of like a berry picker, like you're just foraging, and being very circumstance.
35:29.375 --> 35:42.113
[SPEAKER_01]: But also giving yourself enough space to say that, all right, this article came from a source I generally associate with not my kind of politics or not my kind of ideological take on things that
35:42.363 --> 35:44.345
[SPEAKER_01]: However, this is actually a good story.
35:44.365 --> 35:51.412
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to read it, consume it, and I'm going to interrogate the story and possibly absorb pieces of it as information.
35:51.472 --> 36:10.851
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think this is just, it's a, it sounds hard and it sounds tiring, but it's much less difficult and much less resource demanding than just being, that have like this dilated state that we're all in where we're just being drowned in information from all sources at all hours, which to me is the most exhausting,
36:10.831 --> 36:13.596
[SPEAKER_01]: demoralizing thing that I do in my life.
36:15.580 --> 36:20.169
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, actually I agree with you completely, but do you know the big problem?
36:20.811 --> 36:21.512
[SPEAKER_00]: What is it?
36:23.035 --> 36:27.363
[SPEAKER_00]: We both know that the vast vast majority of people are not going to do that.
36:27.383 --> 36:28.786
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
36:28.806 --> 36:31.331
[SPEAKER_01]: Not even the vast majority.
36:31.351 --> 36:32.333
[SPEAKER_01]: 99.9%.
36:32.313 --> 36:33.034
[SPEAKER_01]: That's true.
36:34.036 --> 36:37.022
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that can choose to be the point one percent.
36:37.042 --> 36:54.034
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the real key to understanding this is like a productivity life hack, like unlock kind of thing where you say, if I can reduce this, this basically toxic sludge that I ingest through my eyeballs and my ears every day, my, my
36:54.014 --> 37:00.787
[SPEAKER_01]: my life will get better, not just because I'll feel better, but because you're opening up so much cognitive resources to do other things in better ways.
37:01.529 --> 37:13.693
[SPEAKER_01]: And remember hearing Cal Newport talk about this once in one of his podcasts, where he's talking about Ryan Holiday and how Holiday wrote of these great books and built this little miniature empire of his, um,
37:14.703 --> 37:18.289
[SPEAKER_01]: in large part because he wasn't staring at his phone all day long.
37:18.369 --> 37:21.054
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like these two things are mutually exclusive.
37:21.174 --> 37:33.977
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think this is a big piece of his like, we tend to get so wrapped up in the abstract hypothetical about what's happening out there in the world and the warfare and the values and setter of it.
37:33.957 --> 37:49.007
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but your life is kind of mostly the same, and your job is to do a good job in your life, act locally, make an impact on those around you, and you can't do that when you're being spun around in the propaganda vortex.
37:50.270 --> 37:52.153
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's absolutely true, man.
37:52.274 --> 37:54.919
[SPEAKER_00]: I agree 100%.
37:55.996 --> 37:57.358
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a tough one.
37:57.478 --> 38:03.426
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think the challenge of the world and humanity has always just been human nature.
38:04.487 --> 38:16.063
[SPEAKER_00]: And people who are in positions of power or people who have influenced to any degree in the public's fear, including ourselves,
38:16.043 --> 38:26.016
[SPEAKER_00]: We all know to varying degrees how the sort of human psyche operates and how we can take advantage of it.
38:26.136 --> 38:29.481
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I say that, I don't necessarily even mean it in a various way, right?
38:29.821 --> 38:31.223
[SPEAKER_00]: We're recording this podcast.
38:32.485 --> 38:35.930
[SPEAKER_00]: When it comes to putting it out, we're going to have to pick a thumbnail.
38:36.190 --> 38:39.334
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to have to pick a title, which is a attention grabbing.
38:39.655 --> 38:45.983
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to have to try to, you know, make sure that people click.
38:45.963 --> 38:57.937
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, sell anything nefarious or misinformed them in any way, but because, you know, there are billions of videos out on YouTube and millions of podcast episodes out there.
38:58.297 --> 38:59.939
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do want people to listen to this one.
38:59.999 --> 39:12.674
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's kind of strange because even if you don't want to sort of play the game just by being on social media, just by writing and publishing and article, just by recording a podcast, I'm a musician.
39:12.714 --> 39:14.957
[SPEAKER_00]: If I make music, I want people to listen to what I need to.
39:14.937 --> 39:16.801
[SPEAKER_00]: promote it in some way.
39:16.841 --> 39:34.093
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't just put it out to the ether and expect magic to happen and You know, and I think that's that that's the tricky thing like as when I look at human history Something that seems to strike me is you know, obviously, I'm not the first to make this observation but just how
39:34.073 --> 39:36.818
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, how, as people say history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.
39:36.938 --> 39:41.346
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's because human nature fundamentally doesn't really change.
39:41.807 --> 39:49.821
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's why you can look at something from 100 years ago, 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, and on a root level,
39:49.801 --> 39:58.436
[SPEAKER_00]: people's desires and their proclivities and their sins and the existence of various things.
39:58.476 --> 40:05.569
[SPEAKER_00]: It hasn't sure the proportions have changed and the details around things have changed, but it's kind of like men.
40:05.769 --> 40:07.472
[SPEAKER_00]: Humanity has been,
40:07.452 --> 40:19.347
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of just repeating this loop over and over and over the technology changes, the access to information changes, but we're not sort of fundamentally different beings to our ancestors.
40:19.908 --> 40:25.755
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think because of that, you know, the ability to hijack the limbic system will always exist, right?
40:25.775 --> 40:28.178
[SPEAKER_00]: Humans are always going to be drawn towards
40:28.158 --> 40:32.765
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, sweet, tasty, delicious foods that probably aren't that good for you.
40:33.205 --> 40:37.431
[SPEAKER_00]: People are going to be drawn towards a sexual imagery and sexuality.
40:37.472 --> 40:45.523
[SPEAKER_00]: People are going to be drawn towards literally just like shiny objects, whether it's jewelry or it's gold or it's a shiny rock.
40:46.244 --> 40:55.077
[SPEAKER_00]: And people also like drama, people like gossip, people like drama, people like talking about things that are happening and other people,
40:55.057 --> 41:21.013
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think social media has kind of put this on steroids, as they say, and given everyone a little supercomputer in their pocket and interconnecting all of us, it's sort of put it into, I don't know, it's taken it to a whole different level, but as much as I lament some of it, I see the positives for sure, I've been on social media for 20 years, I see a lot of the positives.
41:21.736 --> 41:27.629
[SPEAKER_00]: I just don't really know it's scale what some of the solutions for these things are.
41:28.331 --> 41:39.677
[SPEAKER_00]: We've both talked about the individual solution of managing your consumption diet and unplugging when necessary, but how does that scale across billions of people, I don't know.
41:40.366 --> 41:44.632
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know that one either, and that is the question that really matters.
41:44.952 --> 41:50.299
[SPEAKER_01]: I just don't know where this all is headed, it doesn't feel like a good place.
41:51.501 --> 42:00.012
[SPEAKER_01]: I think part of what we're seeing online and what makes all this so different is that a it's constant, you know, like when I grew up.
41:59.992 --> 42:06.584
[SPEAKER_01]: In the 90s, we didn't have access to the internet until I was like 12 or something.
42:07.205 --> 42:15.981
[SPEAKER_01]: And even then, I didn't watch, like there was no, as a teenager, I wasn't exposed to the news on daily basis at all.
42:16.522 --> 42:21.831
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if I wanted to know the news, you waited to like 10 o'clock to the 10 o'clock nightly news.
42:21.811 --> 42:27.520
[SPEAKER_01]: or you bought a newspaper which no teenager or even someone in their 20s was going to do.
42:27.620 --> 42:39.518
[SPEAKER_01]: So like this is a fundamentally different information environment for everybody, and it also put everyone in the same space at the same time, which is just the most unnatural thing.
42:39.538 --> 42:45.186
[SPEAKER_01]: Like we were never supposed to care about every single conflict that ever erupted on earth.
42:45.166 --> 43:04.592
[SPEAKER_01]: And what someone did to someone else on some street in some place we've never heard of and how that becomes an emblem for whatever other conflict, whatever other political or racial or whatever other kind of conflict that someone wants us to have a stake in even though we completely don't have a stake in that conflict.
43:05.281 --> 43:07.565
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know where it all goes.
43:07.585 --> 43:11.272
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it increasingly doesn't look like a good place.
43:13.576 --> 43:25.298
[SPEAKER_01]: The more I'm online, you know, there's the tendency, especially someone who's as a journalist, like you said, you want your work to be seen, you want it to be consumed, you want to have the profiles so that you have better access.
43:25.278 --> 43:30.686
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that makes you want to engage and like you want the virality, et cetera, et cetera.
43:30.706 --> 43:36.315
[SPEAKER_01]: But the more it's a flywheel, so like if you, as you know, you're like, you're, you're an expert.
43:36.676 --> 43:45.750
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you, if you stop feeding the flywheel, if you stop pulling on, on the cable, the flywheel stops.
43:45.730 --> 43:57.859
[SPEAKER_01]: What that means is you have to be constantly engaged, constantly pushing, constantly surfing every next new cycle in trend, and it consumes your brain at the end of the day.
43:58.280 --> 44:00.506
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's this decision to be made.
44:00.526 --> 44:01.849
[SPEAKER_01]: I really do believe it.
44:01.829 --> 44:12.151
[SPEAKER_01]: When I look at some of the great shit posters out there or whoever they might be, I always ask myself, at what cost are they maintaining that profile?
44:12.251 --> 44:21.070
[SPEAKER_01]: What cost is it to have a post on X with 10 to 20,000 likes almost every day?
44:21.050 --> 44:27.698
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's not, we see that the 10,000 likes on a poster we say, oh, wow, like I must be amazing at this stuff.
44:27.718 --> 44:32.344
[SPEAKER_01]: But they're posting dozens of times a day or hundreds of times a week.
44:32.884 --> 44:35.207
[SPEAKER_01]: And that means you're not doing other things, basically.
44:35.227 --> 44:36.929
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you can't do everything in life.
44:36.969 --> 44:38.571
[SPEAKER_01]: It means you're not doing the deeper stuff.
44:38.891 --> 44:49.504
[SPEAKER_01]: It means you're not doing the stuff that might last or have a more lasting impact on the field that you've chosen, not just on your own life or in the lives of people around you, but in your field.
44:49.484 --> 45:02.953
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a cost benefit to assess that I think gets underplayed because we're so used to seeing successful people in social media who are extremely, extremely successful, in some cases wildly wealthy.
45:03.322 --> 45:25.448
[SPEAKER_01]: The top podcasters, you know, and the top postures and like they project this image of wild success and we think to ourselves We want that and if we try hard enough we can get it But I think what we tend to underestimate is how rare those few people are in the space It's so it's definitely a winner takes all a economy inside the attention economy
45:25.428 --> 45:30.235
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the cost of other things, we don't fully take that into account.
45:30.375 --> 45:32.198
[SPEAKER_01]: What are they sacrificed?
45:32.558 --> 45:34.982
[SPEAKER_01]: What are their opportunities have been sacrificed?
45:35.002 --> 45:40.090
[SPEAKER_01]: And all the great things have been created and are still being created that have nothing to do with social media.
45:40.530 --> 45:42.733
[SPEAKER_01]: People are doing amazing spectacular things.
45:43.094 --> 45:44.236
[SPEAKER_01]: They're building businesses.
45:44.636 --> 45:47.200
[SPEAKER_01]: They're creating mind-blowing products.
45:47.581 --> 45:49.984
[SPEAKER_01]: They're writing books that are fantastically great.
45:49.964 --> 46:08.563
[SPEAKER_01]: And they just don't have a social media presence that's not important to them, but they're still doing the great things and achieving these things in their lives And we just we don't but win doing to that because it's not what's being represented on social media So there's a little bit of a tangent away from like my particular expertise, but as someone who's just as involved in social media as anybody else
46:08.898 --> 46:15.869
[SPEAKER_01]: And also like you, you know, I remember my first AOL experience on a chat and just being completely wild and floored by it.
46:17.952 --> 46:29.048
[SPEAKER_01]: But looking where it's come all these years later, and I can't, you know, a huge part of me thinks that the best way is still something like the digital minimalism that Cal Newport has outlined.
46:29.089 --> 46:32.053
[SPEAKER_01]: It's hard for me to find a better example, but
46:32.033 --> 46:43.866
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, someone like you who has the kind of platform that you do have, you can probably have a very different experience of it in a different perspective on it than I do, because I don't have that platform that I haven't built of it.
46:45.049 --> 46:48.017
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm actually curious to hear what you have to say.
46:48.824 --> 46:54.531
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, man, it's a tricky balance, you know, I've been on social media for over 20 years now.
46:55.513 --> 46:58.737
[SPEAKER_00]: I joined Facebook in October 2004.
47:00.099 --> 47:02.041
[SPEAKER_00]: I was on my space a little bit before that.
47:03.383 --> 47:12.655
[SPEAKER_00]: My YouTube channel started 2006, 20 years ago, which isn't saying, I wasn't actively posting stuff regularly all throughout that time.
47:12.635 --> 47:26.048
[SPEAKER_00]: I started my Twitter account now ex June 2009, so coming up on 17 years, I think I've been on Instagram for about 15 years, something like that.
47:26.289 --> 47:29.892
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I've seen all of these different platforms through these different iterations.
47:30.012 --> 47:39.722
[SPEAKER_00]: And as a musician and now podcaster, occasional cultural commentator, writer,
47:39.702 --> 47:41.844
[SPEAKER_00]: I've sort of used them in all sorts of different ways.
47:41.904 --> 47:52.755
[SPEAKER_00]: I can say one thing I'm certainly proud of after the 20 years is never spiraling out or having some sort of massive mental breakdown publicly or privately, like the vast majority.
47:53.656 --> 48:02.205
[SPEAKER_00]: The most people I know who have very big social media followings have had some type of very public crash out over the years because I think it's hard for people to stay sane.
48:02.946 --> 48:09.152
[SPEAKER_00]: I know for me personally and maybe this will be a benefit to someone out there is
48:09.959 --> 48:25.470
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I always, I like to say, I say this about life in general, but I think it's also true of social media, and I say, take it seriously enough to succeed, but not so seriously that you become depressed anxious or just go crazy.
48:25.450 --> 48:26.051
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
48:26.252 --> 48:44.387
[SPEAKER_00]: So with me, I'm like very, very firmly rooted in the real world and with my family and my friends and every day activities and going outside and just living a real life and then yes, I do use social media quite a lot, but I would say,
48:44.367 --> 48:48.131
[SPEAKER_00]: I think my actual screen time would probably be, in fact, no, not probably.
48:48.271 --> 48:53.275
[SPEAKER_00]: I know for a fact, my screen time is actually lower to then the average person, right?
48:53.295 --> 48:59.261
[SPEAKER_00]: And not even the average content creator, just like the average person, I actually use social media less.
48:59.301 --> 49:10.111
[SPEAKER_00]: So while, yeah, so while you see lots of stuff going out from my accounts, it doesn't mean that I'm sort of sitting there for eight hours a day, constantly posting, it means cool.
49:10.612 --> 49:13.935
[SPEAKER_00]: When it's time to log in and do something, I go in, I do it.
49:13.915 --> 49:21.782
[SPEAKER_00]: and then I'm back out in the real world and then two hours later, maybe I'm back in for ten minutes, five minutes, come in, check, reply to a few things.
49:22.983 --> 49:43.602
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, I tried to balance it, but there's something you touched on there earlier, because it kind of resonated with me, because especially in the last few years, I've actually had multiple opportunities to go full time into political or social commentary and I know quite a lot of people in that space that I know
49:43.683 --> 49:54.374
[SPEAKER_00]: of, you know, made millions of pounds and dollars from doing that and, you know, they're running, putting out YouTube videos or podcasts, whether it's on a daily basis, multiple times a day in some cases and so on.
49:55.155 --> 49:57.557
[SPEAKER_00]: And I knew early on, I was just like, I don't want to do that.
49:57.998 --> 49:59.259
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure it could be lucrative.
49:59.279 --> 50:06.526
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure I could have a much bigger following if I was posting stuff every single day, like putting out videos, hour long video every day.
50:07.107 --> 50:11.952
[SPEAKER_00]: I know, I've seen, I've seen how that can build and how it can scale.
50:11.932 --> 50:17.041
[SPEAKER_00]: But I just know myself well enough to just be like, that's just not, that's not what I want to do.
50:17.101 --> 50:19.044
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to have a daily political show.
50:19.485 --> 50:32.346
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to be having to keep up with the current thing, 24, 7, 7 every single day, just being locked into whatever nonsense is going on in my country, other countries.
50:32.587 --> 50:36.994
[SPEAKER_00]: So on, just like being on that flywheel, like you said, because once you commit to that,
50:38.003 --> 50:40.487
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, it's very hard to step off, right?
50:40.527 --> 50:48.419
[SPEAKER_00]: Like if you've built your whole thing off of like, I'm a political commentator and I constantly every single day, I show up to comments on the news of the day.
50:48.479 --> 50:51.384
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a lot, that's very hard to step away from.
50:51.444 --> 50:53.307
[SPEAKER_00]: With this podcast, I do one interview a week.
50:53.627 --> 50:56.772
[SPEAKER_00]: I've done one interview a week for over 70 years.
50:56.752 --> 51:00.460
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, the this podcast doesn't have to come out tomorrow.
51:00.881 --> 51:03.326
[SPEAKER_00]: I could put it out a couple weeks from now and it's still relevant.
51:03.988 --> 51:10.963
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I've personally just been very conscious about the way I approach these things so that I don't get.
51:12.142 --> 51:27.383
[SPEAKER_00]: How what's the best way to put it so so that I use the platforms and I'm not owned by them I don't feel like oh my gosh, I'm tired and I'm sick, but you know what I've got to make another video about
51:27.363 --> 51:33.351
[SPEAKER_00]: the stupidity of America today, or the silliness going on in the UK, and I don't know.
51:33.551 --> 51:38.297
[SPEAKER_00]: I see people in that world that I know people who do it and they do it well, but I'm just like, man, this looks draining.
51:38.457 --> 51:42.923
[SPEAKER_00]: This looks like really, really, really exhausting, because the news never stops.
51:43.303 --> 51:44.525
[SPEAKER_00]: There's always something going on.
51:45.006 --> 51:46.808
[SPEAKER_00]: Very rarely is it positive.
51:47.188 --> 51:49.051
[SPEAKER_00]: It's normally something that's going to make you angry.
51:49.111 --> 51:50.953
[SPEAKER_00]: It's normally something that's outrageous.
51:51.334 --> 51:53.877
[SPEAKER_00]: And certainly, if you want the views and you want the clicks,
51:53.857 --> 51:58.603
[SPEAKER_00]: you're going to have to focus on the stuff that is most outrageous and is most annoying.
51:59.424 --> 52:16.907
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, if people want to pick that path God bless them, but I would recommend people kind of think about it quite carefully before hopping onto that because it's, yeah, it doesn't because those individuals, those people become, they become the brand, they become the service themselves.
52:17.067 --> 52:17.928
[SPEAKER_01]: So they can't scale.
52:18.109 --> 52:23.796
[SPEAKER_01]: Like every single piece of activity, they need their face to be on it,
52:23.776 --> 52:32.056
[SPEAKER_01]: And it comes with a lot of rewards, financial, the prestige and the status, the influence.
52:32.637 --> 52:41.278
[SPEAKER_01]: But sort of like you, I've seen some of these people who have gone from like, I've known them before the fame and after the fame.
52:42.743 --> 52:47.989
[SPEAKER_01]: They change, you know, they change and not to say that in a way that blames them for anything.
52:48.049 --> 52:54.856
[SPEAKER_01]: I just, they change, I know, a couple people who went from very happy before the fame hit.
52:54.877 --> 53:02.325
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were trying to pursue this mission in a really happy way and a really kind of, in a way that made you feel like they were doing something that looked fun.
53:02.925 --> 53:06.890
[SPEAKER_01]: And then after the fame hits, that's the thing you get that you were working so hard for.
53:07.030 --> 53:12.396
[SPEAKER_01]: And the money and everything afterwards, the look on the face is completely different.
53:12.376 --> 53:26.816
[SPEAKER_01]: the circles under the eyes, the look of exhaustion, they look haggard, they look afraid, which of course they are because the flywheel eventually you stop pulling it and it starts pulling you.
53:26.836 --> 53:34.727
[SPEAKER_01]: The cable runs then the other direction at some point and I think at that point like you're saying, you can't really get off.
53:34.808 --> 53:40.155
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you have to walk away from the entire thing to get off.
53:40.135 --> 54:03.527
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, when I think about people out there thinking like I have for many years, you know, I was, I was a, I still am a writer, but I was primarily a writer until the point where I realized, you know, it's a hard thing to do in today's world and to make a good living on and I had to go through that kind of evolution to think how, where is my future really going to be?
54:03.507 --> 54:19.390
[SPEAKER_01]: And you go through these options of maybe this, maybe that, maybe that, and I think one thing that people need to really think about is that there's just so many great opportunities that might benefit from an online presence, but are not primarily rooted in you having an online presence.
54:19.410 --> 54:30.426
[SPEAKER_01]: You might get a lot of gain from doing some content marketer and making yourself into a face of a brand that's powerful, but I don't think that means you need to just be,
54:30.406 --> 54:36.263
[SPEAKER_01]: rooted to this machine and sort of absorbed by ingested by it.
54:36.524 --> 54:39.994
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if that goes in a good direction for most people.
54:41.273 --> 54:42.835
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a tough one.
54:43.035 --> 54:57.155
[SPEAKER_00]: And another thing I've observed with many, many people in that world or this world is people become kind of a slave to analytics and algorithms to the point that it dictates their mood, right?
54:57.235 --> 55:10.032
[SPEAKER_00]: So I've had many times where the algorithm is not on my side, or I'm clearly being suppressed or stuff I'm putting out there, whether it's podcasts, or it's just social media posts,
55:10.012 --> 55:13.998
[SPEAKER_00]: getting the distribution that they used to for whatever reason.
55:14.779 --> 55:16.701
[SPEAKER_00]: And sure, it can be annoying, right?
55:16.721 --> 55:27.396
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to pretend that it never annoys me, but I know people who, like, multiple times a day, you know, they're in their analytics, and they're checking this, and checking that, and chasing this trend, and chasing that.
55:27.436 --> 55:29.219
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you know, and I get it sometimes.
55:29.239 --> 55:32.543
[SPEAKER_00]: I get people, of course, who message me, or DM me, and they're like, hey, hey, you should cover this.
55:32.583 --> 55:35.327
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, this is getting lots of traction right now, where this is,
55:35.307 --> 55:37.410
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm just like, yeah, but it doesn't really interest me.
55:37.450 --> 55:42.095
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I'm sure, I'm sure if I put out a video on this topic right now, it would get plenty of views.
55:42.176 --> 55:48.564
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll tell you when it went crazy for me was with, um, just like with various conflicts.
55:49.004 --> 55:54.391
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, so, for example, um, you, I mean, you, you've probably see it.
55:54.411 --> 55:54.871
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
55:55.192 --> 56:01.720
[SPEAKER_00]: You've probably never seen or heard me post or talk about the Israel Palestine conflicts.
56:01.700 --> 56:05.924
[SPEAKER_00]: You probably never heard me talk or post about the Russia Ukraine conflict.
56:05.944 --> 56:13.112
[SPEAKER_00]: You probably right now have not seen me putting out stuff about this war which is now going on between US, Israel, Iran.
56:13.492 --> 56:18.037
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though I live in the UAE, the country which Iran has launched most of its retaliation against.
56:18.097 --> 56:28.247
[SPEAKER_00]: I've made some posts about what life is like in the UAE right now, but when it comes to sort of the politics and the conflict and so on, a number one, that's not my wheelhouse.
56:28.227 --> 56:45.868
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that I could put out like super ignorant and aggressive like hot takes in whichever direction and get tons of views and get tons of clicks and all of that, but and it's weird because you get people who are outside who want you to do that.
56:45.928 --> 56:52.716
[SPEAKER_00]: This is something I've noticed because what when you do have a large platform, one of the strangest things is
56:53.000 --> 57:01.221
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of people, I'm not going to say most people, but a lot of people don't necessarily want to hear your opinion, but they want to hear their opinion coming out of your mouth.
57:01.707 --> 57:28.305
[SPEAKER_00]: right so if you get someone who is like super pro Palestine then they want all of their favorite accounts people you know people they follow they want them all not posting their take but posting like that same individuals opinion even if they you know made may have a more nuanced or different perspective and then even on the other side right you'll get people who are
57:28.285 --> 57:28.686
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
57:28.986 --> 57:32.051
[SPEAKER_00]: People are mad that, you know, Zubi, why haven't you posted anything in support of Israel?
57:32.111 --> 57:34.675
[SPEAKER_00]: Why haven't you know, are you and and they'll even accuse you, right?
57:34.895 --> 57:35.976
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, are you being anti-Semitic?
57:35.996 --> 57:36.938
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, bro, like what?
57:37.158 --> 57:42.166
[SPEAKER_00]: And then like two seconds later, you're getting someone in who's like, hey, how come you haven't posted support for the people in Gaza?
57:42.206 --> 57:46.412
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, you're as you're controlled by the Zionists, this and this and you're just like,
57:46.392 --> 57:48.636
[SPEAKER_00]: Dude, like, I'm a rapper, man.
57:48.676 --> 57:50.719
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I'm a rapper, man.
57:50.739 --> 57:56.528
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, why, this has been going on for many centuries before I came into existence.
57:56.849 --> 58:00.615
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't think it's happening because I haven't given my take.
58:01.136 --> 58:03.760
[SPEAKER_00]: And by the way, my take is not particularly...
58:03.740 --> 58:10.252
[SPEAKER_00]: interesting like I don't want innocent people dying regardless of their nationality or their color or where they're from or whatever.
58:10.313 --> 58:14.340
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I'm generally not a fan of I'm not a fan of war.
58:14.380 --> 58:17.326
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not a fan of violence if I must you know explicitly say that.
58:18.168 --> 58:19.470
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, it's a
58:19.670 --> 58:21.011
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very, very strange world.
58:22.733 --> 58:25.616
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on.
58:25.676 --> 58:29.380
[SPEAKER_00]: None of us have a crystal ball, but how do you see this?
58:30.021 --> 58:32.444
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you see this developing over the next?
58:33.645 --> 58:35.066
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, decade or two.
58:35.647 --> 58:36.848
[SPEAKER_01]: I've thought a lot about that.
58:37.028 --> 58:45.497
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think I had a better perspective on it when a decade ago, we were like, OK, this is, the social media stuff is taking off.
58:45.577 --> 58:48.040
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not going to stop.
58:48.425 --> 58:55.360
[SPEAKER_01]: the ability for people to connect with each other and create little sort of cordoned off sections of the internet seems like it's just a good model for this kind of thing.
58:55.901 --> 59:03.497
[SPEAKER_01]: I think what the AI piece of this just throws everything into complete confusion because we just don't know
59:03.477 --> 59:10.106
[SPEAKER_01]: What's going to be happening in the AI space within six months or a year, let alone in ten years?
59:11.348 --> 59:25.088
[SPEAKER_01]: The progression, the progress, the progress that agents are making right now is the AI agents that can actually go out onto the Internet and do things for you like buy stuff and analyze things and do research and contact people, email people, DM people.
59:26.790 --> 59:28.152
[SPEAKER_01]: That's all happening.
59:28.570 --> 59:41.902
[SPEAKER_01]: So fast that, you know, it's some point you've to imagine that just as previous forms of communication and connection were disrupted by social media, social media will be disrupted at some point by AI.
59:42.884 --> 59:45.651
[SPEAKER_01]: How exactly it happens, it's unclear.
59:45.631 --> 01:00:00.417
[SPEAKER_01]: I think, you know, I keep hearing these ideas that, you know, Facebook is no longer useful to people because whatever, because they're just getting, they're not getting their friends anymore, they're just getting this kind of like messaging about conflict or whatever it is.
01:00:01.940 --> 01:00:03.763
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's truth to that kind of thing.
01:00:03.843 --> 01:00:07.690
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think it's going to, like, disappear tomorrow next year or five years, but
01:00:07.670 --> 01:00:17.044
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a point where we all just kind of, you know, it becomes old news and we want the new thing, whatever that new thing is.
01:00:17.064 --> 01:00:25.796
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the question we need to try to understand is what need the social media fill for us?
01:00:26.037 --> 01:00:29.121
[SPEAKER_01]: What is it actually giving us that we couldn't get without it?
01:00:29.101 --> 01:00:36.173
[SPEAKER_01]: And what does AI provide, how does AI provide a better solution to that need?
01:00:36.253 --> 01:00:40.000
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's eventually where things are going to get going.
01:00:40.781 --> 01:00:43.706
[SPEAKER_01]: But in the meantime, I don't know.
01:00:44.487 --> 01:00:52.982
[SPEAKER_01]: What I do believe to be true is we are all going to become much more enmeshed in propaganda war.
01:00:52.962 --> 01:00:54.885
[SPEAKER_01]: of some kind, we already are.
01:00:55.746 --> 01:00:58.190
[SPEAKER_01]: I think people are becoming more and more aware of that fact.
01:00:58.610 --> 01:01:05.801
[SPEAKER_01]: They're starting to be more aware of the fact that so much of what they're seeing on their platform of choice is not real.
01:01:07.364 --> 01:01:12.351
[SPEAKER_01]: It particularly when it relates to conflict, it's just out and out fake.
01:01:12.371 --> 01:01:13.713
[SPEAKER_01]: It looks real, it sounds real.
01:01:13.773 --> 01:01:15.696
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it's even a real account.
01:01:15.676 --> 01:01:21.685
[SPEAKER_01]: but it's being fed information one way or the other on a given conflict.
01:01:21.725 --> 01:01:23.695
[SPEAKER_01]: So that awareness is increasing.
01:01:24.316 --> 01:01:46.239
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is the kind of thing that we're trying to really shine more light on at NPOV, which is to like show how this works, so you can see it in action, and also to show what are the accounts that are doing this and how are they doing it and what are the narratives that are being built and give people more tools to understand these kinds of things in a more precise manner.
01:01:46.299 --> 01:01:52.365
[SPEAKER_01]: So once you actually see the mechanism of a propaganda campaign online,
01:01:52.345 --> 01:02:03.148
[SPEAKER_01]: It changes your view of things because you're like, oh, whoa, I didn't like I never would have thought, especially when it's an account you recognize or or like a narrative that you've been subject to.
01:02:03.685 --> 01:02:12.753
[SPEAKER_01]: Once you see how it works, once you see how the sausage is made, it really changes your mind on what these things are actually doing, and you really start to see it.
01:02:13.434 --> 01:02:23.924
[SPEAKER_01]: And you have to remind yourself because it is very convincing this stuff, and it's a fire hose all the time, so you really have to kind of remind yourself, like, I do this too, where I'm like, oh, this is not real.
01:02:24.344 --> 01:02:32.612
[SPEAKER_01]: This is designed to achieve an outcome, or achieve an aim that has nothing to do with me, people that I even know.
01:02:33.318 --> 01:02:39.050
[SPEAKER_01]: So at some point we're all going to like, this will just become more and more of our awareness about propaganda.
01:02:39.070 --> 01:02:40.052
[SPEAKER_01]: What comes after this?
01:02:40.072 --> 01:02:52.879
[SPEAKER_01]: I, you know, I really wish I knew, but I suspect it's going to involve the AI agents are going to play a bigger role in it than we can possibly understand today.
01:02:53.264 --> 01:02:59.018
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, all the more importance to get out there and touch grass and engage in the real world.
01:02:59.238 --> 01:03:06.135
[SPEAKER_00]: And hopefully we'll see perhaps an increase in real world socialization and community building.
01:03:06.175 --> 01:03:07.839
[SPEAKER_00]: I could see that as one potential future.
01:03:07.899 --> 01:03:09.383
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that would be good.
01:03:10.375 --> 01:03:21.820
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, or, you know, if you, there is a kind of version of touching grass online, which is like build something, like you can literally just go into cloud and like build anything you can think of.
01:03:21.880 --> 01:03:25.909
[SPEAKER_01]: Like that app you thought of five years ago that would be so cool, but you could never build it because you're not technical.
01:03:25.929 --> 01:03:29.397
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like you can literally just tell the machine to build it and it'll build it.
01:03:29.377 --> 01:03:32.303
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I think there are ways to be constructive.
01:03:32.343 --> 01:03:34.448
[SPEAKER_01]: There are ways to do things that are amazingly cool.
01:03:35.670 --> 01:03:42.284
[SPEAKER_01]: The story from a couple weeks ago about this guy who's dog had cancer and the veterinarians has had no idea how to treat the cancer.
01:03:42.344 --> 01:03:46.272
[SPEAKER_01]: He just worked with an AI system for like a year.
01:03:46.589 --> 01:03:51.234
[SPEAKER_01]: and cured the dog's cancer, which I think is just the most awesome thing.
01:03:51.314 --> 01:03:53.557
[SPEAKER_01]: So, this is just a regular dude.
01:03:53.997 --> 01:03:56.620
[SPEAKER_01]: He wasn't a doctor, he's not a scientist, like it's just a guy.
01:03:57.141 --> 01:04:07.973
[SPEAKER_01]: So, they're building for you to like use these tools and as a means of learning, growing, expanding, making an impact, building something, even if it doesn't work.
01:04:08.133 --> 01:04:11.517
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't matter as long as you figure out that it can be done.
01:04:11.497 --> 01:04:23.808
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's where so much of the potential lies rather than to be fretting about, or, you know, oh my God, what's going to happen to jobs, what's going to, like, our robots are going to take over and blah, blah, blah, which might happen.
01:04:23.888 --> 01:04:27.871
[SPEAKER_01]: But in the meantime, there's a lot of opportunity for people.
01:04:27.931 --> 01:04:33.216
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, it may not necessarily be about making a fortune, maybe it is.
01:04:33.756 --> 01:04:41.503
[SPEAKER_01]: But in the meantime, I think about learning and growth, exploring these tools that
01:04:41.483 --> 01:04:44.126
[SPEAKER_01]: 10 years ago, no one could have dreamt of.
01:04:44.947 --> 01:04:47.709
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think the optimism is important.
01:04:49.211 --> 01:04:49.631
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
01:04:49.771 --> 01:04:51.834
[SPEAKER_00]: People always control the things that you can.
01:04:52.414 --> 01:04:55.177
[SPEAKER_00]: The lot of stuff in the world that we can't control, so control what we can.
01:04:56.038 --> 01:04:58.540
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, he's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you, man.
01:04:59.621 --> 01:05:01.323
[SPEAKER_00]: Where can people find and follow you online?
01:05:02.625 --> 01:05:04.126
[SPEAKER_00]: Which sounds funny to say, I have to tell you.
01:05:04.146 --> 01:05:04.687
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, stay away.
01:05:05.968 --> 01:05:07.069
[SPEAKER_01]: You can write me a letter.
01:05:07.049 --> 01:05:21.852
[SPEAKER_01]: If on X, Ashley Brinsburg on X, or NPOV media, also on X, or Instagram, generally where I am, we're doing whatever we're doing that day.
01:05:21.972 --> 01:05:25.698
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's, yeah, find me on X.
01:05:25.798 --> 01:05:26.199
[SPEAKER_01]: Awesome.
01:05:26.219 --> 01:05:27.721
[SPEAKER_00]: Ashley, thanks for the gift of your time, man.
01:05:27.741 --> 01:05:28.382
[SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate it.