Episode 54 - Fake News & Media Literacy

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welcome fellow liturgists if you listen to the last episode you'll know that this is the collapsing set of probability waves known to some egos that are illusions within the universe as michael gunger i just have a quick couple of announcements for you lisa and i are going to be out on tour if you don't know we have a band called gunger and this is going to be like a special acoustic broken down tour that's going to be focused on sharing some stories taking some questions playing some of the music from our one wildlife series acoustically and just kind of hanging out and getting to meet a bunch of you so please do come out and check out one of these tour stops we'd love to meet you march 18th seattle washington march 19th we're gonna be up in vancouver canada march 21st ames iowa march 22nd fluorescent missouri march 23rd memphis tennessee march 26 new york city march 27th catonsville maryland march 28th pittsburgh pennsylvania march 30th spring harbor michigan march 31st toronto canada for ticket information for any of these just go to gunger music g-u-n-g-o-r dot com slash tour gongermusic.com tour we look forward to seeing you also this month science mike is going to be in athens georgia on march 20th at the interdisciplinary research and idea symposium and march 24th he's going to be at the blue conference and i think that's it for now so enjoy today's show my craziest conspiracy theory that i actually leave for about three days was some guy on youtube who had all sorts of evidence air quotes about how it was the u.s government who made the world trade center buildings collapse on september 11th he had all sorts of brilliant evidence i recently found a conspiracy that states that interstellar lizards are running the government dressed as people epistemological the government is putting chemicals in the water that create the reflected rainbow that you see in sprinklers okay so everybody remembers that the berenstein bear books was berenstein s-t-e-i-n but if you look at the books it says baron stain s-t-a-i-n but everyone knows that it's been changed so there's this big conspiracy theory about what happened and why it's been changed the best conspiracy theory i ever heard was that if you fold the dollar bill in just the right way it will reveal the twin towers and this was of course evidence that george bush orchestrated 9 11. i heard a theory once that humans don't actually need water to survive but the government tells us that we need to drink water and has simultaneously been poisoning the water with some sort of drug-like substance and so if we don't drink water after three days we start to go through withdrawals but the thing is is that if we didn't have this drug in our system in the first place then humans would never die and so it's the key to immortality to not drink water but we can't because if we don't we'll die from withdrawals who doesn't secretly enjoy a good conspiracy theory they're exciting full of secret intrigue and diabolical villains some of these stories are harmless enough the vast city under denver airport for example and those kind of stories don't directly harm anybody but there are some conspiracy theories that are quite harmful holocaust deniers for example or the people alive today who actually believe that the sandy hook shooting was a hoax they believe that that horrifying event where a 20 year old gunman stormed into an elementary school and fatally shot twenty six and seven year olds as well as six of their teachers it was just a story the government made up to take people's gun rights away or something the horrid thing about a conspiracy theory like that is it's not simply that it gets the facts drastically and uncontrovertibly wrong it's that the conspiracy theory does real damage to people's lives in this case people who have already gone through unspeakable suffering i mean i'm a parent i'm a six-year-old i can't imagine what it'd be like to lose my little girl to a school shooting and then have somebody accuse me of lying about it some of these parents have been harassed with unspeakable insults even death threats [Music] for reasons like this people would do well to doubt stories that they hear where there are grand scale conspiracies involved unless there's sufficient evidence but what is evidence if you're on a jury in the united states you are instructed on what counts as evidence and what does not there is testimony documentary evidence and physical evidence motive for instance may be important as an aspect of the case but it cannot be counted as direct evidence you can't convict someone of murder for just wanting to kill someone [Music] this is the kind of scrutiny that the court of law demands and this is the kind of scrutiny that you should bring to a conspiracy theory when you hear it because it actually can have consequences in people's lives thankfully conspiracy theories have rarely become entirely mainstream because big mainstream media outlets have editorial review boards and cannot post unsubstantiated claims without possible serious financial consequences if you are cnn abc cbs fox news any of the other huge media conglomerates if you post false claims you can get sued you can be sued for millions of dollars if you publish false information that affects people's livelihoods but then the internet happened and suddenly everyone in the world with a laptop or a phone had the opportunity to become a news agency and as one might expect what were before fringe conspiracy theories evolved into what is now called [Music] fake news fake news fake news fake news fake news or fake news actually it's just fake fake news so-called fake news fake news fake news the place we have to begin to even talk about fake news is to acknowledge that there is a war happening over what fake news means and a co-option of a term this is like the pinnacle of uh media spinsters and political double speak this is the whirlwind we are reaping as a culture for not engaging more critical thinking sooner in our culture especially as mass media took over the world i actually i googled this morning examples of fake news the first result that came up is five examples of cnn's fake news i admittedly have the cnn app and get cnn alerts and i hear the accusations of cnn being fake news and i don't have any stake in cnn being not fake news so i click the link and five examples of fake news here we go here they are so number one is it says they kicked bernie sanders off the air here's the sort of the dialogue that happened he says he knows nothing about it hasn't seen any of these reports um is that a problem well i don't know maybe he was watching cnn fake news what do you think you don't like a joke i i know it was a joke i'm saying you don't you don't buy what he said obviously aaron yes i'm sorry senator i'm saying you obviously don't buy what he said you you believe that that he has seen these reports i mean to your people are we on uh it looks like we've lost okay connection with senator sanders so let's just try to get that back up yeah so they just like read oh man they just read into what is quite obviously a technical difficulty and and make it all about that they kicked bernie off first for making the joke about cnn fake news but even if that was real that doesn't prove that cnn is fake news so and you know what the other four are not even worth mentioning on this article anyway but this is like the number one article in google about what is fake news at first the term fake news was applying to something very specific and that was news that someone made up with false information that was typically polarizing or exciting and they would make that information up to drive traffic to get advertising revenue to make money so fake news has targeted the political left and the political right heavily during the election season and both sides fall for it but it was designed information designed by typically people with an advertising background to excite people to get them to share without scrutiny and we found it made people believe things with no basis in fact that was fake news but what's happened now is politicians are starting to call legitimate news media fake news if it in any way counteracts their political goals or messaging and it's even more of a problem because so often legitimate and trustworthy news media really does make mistakes or expresses a bias without disclosing it and that's a completely different thing but it allows people to turn this fake news label against legitimate sources of information and create this strange media nihilism where the determination we make for something's real news or fake news is whether we agree with it or not i mean the president of the united states tweeted all negative polls are fake news i think it's worth thinking about the game that's being played the fact that there is a fight about what fake news is is something to notice in itself uh 1984 the george orwell novel 1984 shot up to the best sellers list in january um which is a fascinating fascinating thing it's not meant to be an instruction manual that's the problem if you haven't read 1984 there's this thing it's called newspeak so there's this dystopian future you know dystopian world where it's uh it's called oceana and and it's completely fascist and state-ruled and this one of the ways that they control the people is with language and they have this language called newspeak that basically eliminates nuance and ambiguity from from language for the purpose of thought control and so like for instance in newspeak there's no need for the word thought because the word think is already a noun and a verb so let's just get rid of the excess vocabulary is the idea for the government and so their speech becomes very short and staccato and limited in vocabulary let's get rid of all the unnecessary words in order to simplify but really in order to limit and therefore control thought so orthodoxy in oceania becomes not needing to think thinking gets you in trouble and so the phrases of the government are like war is peace freedom is slavery ignorance is strength and when you start playing with word and and let's be fair this is not just something that's new that trump is just inventing this is a this is a pattern that has been happening in our culture you can go back to george bush and and think about how things were changing language wise bills used to be called really boring names like people's names um and then they started naming things like the patriot act how are you gonna argue against the patriot act without being seen as like unpatriotic right so calling it the patriarch is like this propaganda move um calling torture enhanced interrogation document documents were no longer censored they were being redacted and there's all sorts of these like and now here we are in a world where a term like alternative facts can be uttered in full sincerity well at least seems like full sincerity and what's happening is you're tearing apart language in a way that it doesn't mean anything anymore and when power is doing that in order to it's being done in order to control thought when you say something like all negative polls are fake news what you're doing is actually taking what is a very devastating and dangerous medium in our society which is actually creating news articles that are false so that people believe it and sort of pulling the rug out of its meaning and saying you know whatever is negative against the powers that be is fake news and so what is truth and what is it becomes this nihilistic meaningless world where people just pick tribes and when is that ever ended well [Music] what we're really talking about here is well first like what is truth right and that's the reason our last episode was on epistemology if you haven't heard our last podcast episode we definitely encourage you to go back and dig through that to figure out like how can we decide what a real truth claim is how do we know what's happening and what's not but in the context of understanding fake news and media there's really two skills that we need to develop one is the ability how to discern legitimate news media or real news from fake news but the other thing we've got to learn to do is how to uncover bias in media and also that will enable us to catch media when it makes mistakes or sometimes when it intentionally misleads us so how do you do this how do you do the work of seeing what's true and what's not every every news article you read you got to go through all this i mean are people going to want to do this work i always do the work always the way i'm able to do that is i have a intentional written out methodology for testing news claims of course you do this was a really easy thing for me to prepare for because i already have this i just put it in an outline so one thing is legitimate news media will name the author and contributors to any post or article that they publish to create accountability so if you come onto a website and there's not an author listed go ahead and dramatically lower the confidence you put in the quality of that article or the truthfulness of its claims the second thing you would want to look for where was this published have i ever heard of this publishing institution or organization that's not to say that i've heard of every legitimate media organization in the world but if it's the first time i've heard of a site i want to know more about them before i believe their claims if i've heard of them or i haven't what is the reputation of this institution does the institution have an editorial review board that's one thing that separates serious news organizations from fake news is there's a editorial review board that holds journalists and authors accountable for the words they write that fact check their claims before they'll publish another sign this is all under the where was it published does this institution publish corrections retractions or letters to the editor is there some means for their readership to hold the institution accountable publicly and then the last thing i kind of look for in this where was it published is who owns the publication admittedly most of our media is controlled by just a handful of corporations but you want to see if you're reading a piece on climate change and it turns out it's by america's for a cleaner environment and americans for a cleaner environment is owned by the oil and gas industry then we were going to go ahead and reduce the credibility of the claims this publication would have the third thing you want to look for is a date of publication that's a big thing to keep their articles fresh to keep the share rate up fake news sites generally don't put a date of publication so people don't realize this has been out for three months or six months or 18 months and often they'll they'll actually report on factual information that happened two years ago and kind of massage the language as if it's happening today this is something i've seen a lot on fake news on the left he's pulling out comments that people in the trump administration have said a couple of years ago and sort of waving a wand as if it happened this week right so data publication is essential the fourth thing i look at is trustworthy media cites specific sources it names people by name it names the people who worked on a study and the institution the study was done in and often tells you approximately when the study was published it will reference organizations and institutions that provide reports or commentary by name now this isn't always true on occasion legitimate news media will run stories that have to do with very sensitive matters that are from anonymous sources so they'll say maybe where these people work and in approximately what capacity but they will try to protect their sources and when you have a claim like that it's important to understand that you cannot fully substantiate any of the claims in the article so if we talk about for example things have been running recently in the new york times with people in the intelligence community commenting on ongoing investigations regarding president trump and russia the fact that they cannot name those sources yet means this is something we should continue to be alert about but we shouldn't draw conclusions about or even make specific actions you wouldn't impeach a president based on an ongoing investigation you would impeach a president based on the outcome of the investigation or perjury committed in the act of investigation or obstruction of justice so immediately right we're already at an edge case are the specific sources named or unnamed people are saying is an immediate indicator of fake news studies say without citing a study or institution that's a huge red flag for fake news yeah when people hear a new study or studies show and you just just accept that oh well if a study shows it without seeing what the study is how rigorous the environment for the study was what were the outliers of the you know like and then people think like well i mean there was a study i can't remember the exact nature of the study but that should be a word that should perk up uh just remind your your prefrontal cortex hey get into the conversation here just you know just be aware and that includes us by the way you know if we we've on this show we've said i think i saw a study you should be more skeptical of what we say following those words yes you should google it you should see if you can find it because we're fallible human instruments like anyone else you shouldn't even take this podcast with skepticism in fact you should approach this podcast with more skepticism than some institutions with editorial review boards and fact checkers things we don't have oh man i even i was having a dinner with a librarian recently which if you want to talk about media literacy talk to a librarian right and she told me that she almost threw my book away because she got to a paragraph and i said some studies show and she didn't see a footnote and so she was like well this book is trash wow uh and then she she said wait he's not writing academically let me check and she flipped to the back and then saw i had a note section where i referenced you know every study that i i i say some studies show it's in the book just not with a footnote and so then she continued to read the book and my respect for her in that moment yeah elevated i wasn't angry i was like yeah you get it that's you're the hope for our species because you saw a sentence that said some studies show with no attribution and we're like well this is trash i saw a morning program the other day talking about how a new study says that chocolate is actually good for you and i thought that was a really strange claim and so i looked up the study in question and what the what the study actually said was that chocolate wasn't found to cause diabetes in the third trimester of pregnancy wow and so so to get a great story at the top of the morning news hour they oversimplified and sessationalized real science which is it happens all the time yep and then the other thing that like tells me is anytime they show graphs or charts or statistics there's a huge potential for foul play because we tend to accept numbers as an authority and impartial and so you'll get like a pie chart that adds up to more than a hundred percent yeah which is not you can't do that or you'll see like uh someone will talk about the crime rate and you'll see this huge jump in the crime rate uh at the end of the graph and what they've actually done is compress the time frame towards one end of that axis yeah so the growth in crime rate is actually flat but they make it look steep which is not lying the numbers are real but if you don't pay attention to the graph then you get like screwed yeah between between the hours of 12 a.m and 3 a.m crime crime spiked right and then like you test statistics for plausibility you can do this like with your gut if you're careful about it so if someone's like you know the sales for this product are up a thousand percent in the first month well where did the sales start did they sell one or two items last month if so you could pretty easily have a thousand percent growth another thing this is a real statistic this is not false but you could say on average humans have one breast and that's true yeah that's that's that's true but the intuitive conclusion you might draw from that fact that most people in the world have one breast would not be true right so we have to like that doesn't sound plausible i might need to dig deeper so you really want to get a little bit better relationship with numbers so that with intention or on accident governments and news media and people on the internet don't use numbers to destroy your grasp on reality the fifth thing i look at is this article well written typos grammar mistakes poor punctuation and all caps are huge red flags that you're not dealing with a trustworthy piece of content that may be not coming from a republican institution so that's kind of the things i look out for to see if media is trustworthy and then there's one last branch i look out for that are less tangible uh but still give you a good idea of trustworthy media does anything in the piece make me angry or afraid and if so i have an obligation to dig deeper before i accept the information or share it because my emotions aren't really good at analytical decisions and this is essential so many people accept the headline and don't read the article and even the most trustworthy institutions in the world in our capitalistic media market write very sensationalistic headlines so you might find that on reading the piece it's not as exciting or outrageous as you thought it was just on the headline also look out for satire a lot of people share not fake news but satire as if it's real at which point satire becomes fake news i think of conservative friends used to share stephen colbert monologues who viewed them without irony it's really incredible and basically the more you agree with something the more you need to be intentionally skeptical because confirmation bias is one hell of a drug the more you agree with it the less likely you are to be skeptical which means you have to intentionally test more vigorously pieces of content you agree with to see if they're fake news and one way to do that is to cross-reference via fact-checking organizations like politifact snopes and factcheck.org so that was a brilliant little rant you had there i'm wondering if we could figure out a way to get this information to stick in people's heads so that it's not just a lisp maybe a 90s hip-hop song like an old school jam like an old-school jam i think we could maybe spice it up i'm down do you have like a fat beet i'm gonna drop that beet one who wrote this shit two who would publish it do they have an editorial review board three there's no date you see four you're this bitch can't write so you better make it right and say it's [Music] again fake who wrote this shit two who would publish it dude they have an editorial review board three there's no date you see four you're gonna cite that source five [Music] that's the dumbest thing we've ever done i hate to that will be very popular it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists [Music] let's do this with a real life example so that article that lisa sent us the other day so lisa sent us this article and says and astronomers discover humongous structure 1 9 the size of the observable universe and it's like a really crazy article i was surprised i never heard of it i will admit when i first saw it like a ninth the size of the observable universe immediately struck me is not something possible but then it says it's five billion light years across but that it's nine sort of galaxies structured together but i'm like if there's two trillion galaxies how could nine be anywhere close to a ninth of the size so for as fast as our first test it has brian nelson who wrote it it has a publication date august 6 2015. great it's taken from a press release by the royal astronomical society that's cited within the article which seems like a pretty legit organization uh i mean maybe maybe do a quick search on royal astronomical society and you might find some famous mathematicians and astronomers among its members yeah if you were to do so yeah okay um i googled is the story about the structure 1 9 the size of the observable universe true nice nice which is a start you can do that and honestly there wasn't a lot of like i didn't find any nasa right websites saying anything about it i didn't find any major news outlets saying anything about it i looked up this mother nature network is where this story was released it looked like they've got a board of trustees and it's a pretty big company but then i also looked and they've had some stories in the past that looked a little dubious mm-hmm so it didn't look like a straight up horrible fake news site but it also didn't look like i'm just going to take this for its word and going through these steps i'm not sure which step to get stuck at and i still don't know yeah so uh and that's because that article's not fake news there we go so it passes all those tests because it's not fake but it is as is so typical for science journalism highly sensationalized accounts of a real event so one thing you have to look out in the press reporting on science especially is scientists often use a term we use in a different way so when we say structure we mean like a building or some kind of physical structure and scientists especially astronomers can use structure to mean organization of things with no physical attachment that are maybe even hundreds of millions of light years apart from each other and so this is talking about we've seen an organization of galaxies potentially a ninth the size of the universe it's a very early finding that hasn't been peer-reviewed and so this should tell you as someone who follows the science press is this could lead to interesting knowledge in the future or it could pan out to be nothing but that doesn't sell ad impressions so they take real news and sensationalize the headline and then people share that and so i think it passes the the test against fake news for good reason it's not but like so much of news that's driven by corporate media it is sensationalized and you don't learn that difference if i recall correctly the difference in how an astronomer uses structure and how we use structure until the final two paragraphs of the piece so if you don't read the entire piece and digest carefully you will be misled by that real news hmm it's tricky it's really tricky actual fake news is not that tricky no actual fake news tends to lay it out pretty bare pretty fast yeah but that means this is why media literacy is so important the fact that it's not fake news is simply your first bar but doesn't mean you abandon skepticism and build a whole new world view and build a whole new world view based on it exactly you still want to hold that very loosely anything that says we're fundamentally upending our understanding of the physical universe the physical laws political order anything that says it's making systemic changes to how humanity views the world or operates deserves intense prolonged scrutiny as many many empiricists and skeptics would say the bigger the claim the more evidence required to support it yeah it demonstrates how important empirical rigorous scientific thinking can be certainly there's there's limitations of empiricism it doesn't work well for faith necessarily always or music or art you know empiricism may not be the lens that you want to try to watch the star wars movie with [Music] [Laughter] but as far as conspiracy fake news determining what is true historically what has happened uh empiricism is the best we have i'm reading this book by this guy carlo rovelli and i found this little quote in there that i really liked he said it's the awareness of our ignorance that gives science its reliability and the thing about science is it's always questioning itself and you can never just arrive with science where it's like well that's it it's settled because if something comes along with better evidence it replaces it um so science is for certain things is by far the best way that we have of determining what is true you know because people when they when they dis on science that's their kind of thing like science doesn't know everything they're wrong all the time and it's precisely the awareness of their ignorance that gives science its reliability because you can keep going back even if cnn makes mistakes which it does and msnbc or abc or any of these major even fox has to like they can't afford to print conspiracy level stories where they're gonna like make up something that obama said about like you can't they can't do that at that level and empiricism is is helpful in even finding where to look how to look how to see yeah when we talk about the new york times and the wall street journal or fox news and msnbc we're no longer talking about fake news now we're talking about media bias and what people have professed to desire in the age of modernism is objective and unbiased media and there's a small problem with that desire there is absolutely no such thing there is no every media institution even if they report facts accurately they have an editorial bias about which facts they report and what emphasis they place on different stories the choice of what makes the first page versus the fifth what gets the big bold headline at the top of the web page versus small print farther in the paper or lower past the fold and scrolling on a web page is an editorial decision and i saw an example of this very recently when george w bush was on the today show and they grilled him about president trump and it was amazing msnbc had breaking news as did the new york times saying that george w bush says we need answers on russia which is true and factual that happened fox news says george w bush says that being the president is a hard job of those things are true neither of them are fake news but they definitely reveal the respective editorial biases yeah of those organizations and in my opinion it's far better to have a disclosed bias than a claim of no bias whatsoever so my primary problem with fox news is not that they lean right in their editorial bias my problem with fox news is that their slogan is fair and balanced oh yeah and that is not fake news but that is an attempt to mislead regarding media bias and i would argue excessively normalize their perspective so the way we want to counter media bias is one to view all media with skepticism and two to cross check with other media that has different biases so yes i read the new york times every morning but i also read the wall street journal i read the new yorker and i read the economist and i try to read magazines that span the political spectrum with thoughtful coverage from reputable organizations and this is really important you'll typically find bias is easier to understand and less extreme with your local news media we've had this national conversation but nobody talks about their local paper anymore and local media is vital in helping you understand the issues that are most relevant to your life and you have an incredible advantage with local media you can fact check their articles with your feet you can drive downtown and talk to the politician or their office you can go look at a school if there's been a claim about construction or something like that you have the ability to test claims with your own eyes which is the most high quality evidence evidence you can get as a skeptic we call the liturgist a collective for a reason you know we consider everyone who participates in this conversation and this production of thoughtful evocative spiritual work to be a liturgist that means you listening right now you are the liturgists and some people partner with us even more in that effort over 1500 people now are donating to this program via patreon every month which is incredible and generous and beautiful and we want that to change we don't want any more donations on patreon because those people who've led the way sending us money every month with no return or benefit really have enabled us to change the way 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about what my local school board is doing this is clay johnson yes you should care who the president of the united states is but build that from where you are out that donald trump and hillary clinton and barack obama and whomever else should be on your list of of priorities to care about your list of literacy but you should be able to name the chair of your local school board and that chair of your local school board is having a much more profound effect on the lives of your kids and your family and the crime in your neighborhood and the justice in your neighborhood and the income inequality in your neighborhood than the president of the united states is clay johnson is best known as the co-founder of blue state digital the firm that built and managed barack obama's online campaign for the presidency in 2008. after leaving blue state he wrote the information diet in 2012 today clay works for george h.w bush's points of light foundation helping to equip and scale social innovation just as much of a health issue as working out every every day or you know eating the right food you have to be a conscious consumer of of this information and say you know what i've got to get up and make the right choices i think most people as they're consuming any form of media aren't really doing it proactively right you know i watch people they they hop on facebook they lose track of time they're just they just sort of scroll through the things as the feed is presented to them and is tuned for them by the billion dollar media companies that are that are tuning those systems um to captivate their attention but those systems aren't tuned for them to stay healthy just as our food system is not tuned to create the most optimally healthy public it's tuned for us to have the cheapest calories for the dollar and the most delicious calories for the dollar and the first step of that is just to turn on your mindful brain it is to say hey wait a minute there is a motivation of the organizations that are providing me with media that i need to be aware of that i need to be cognizant of and that motivation is to capture my full attention for me to spend the most amount of time looking at this website so that i am exposed to the advertisers and other projects of this site that expose me to more advertisers to view this stuff and we have to take responsibility for our own consumption we have to say no you know what like that is great that they are doing that they are creating jobs they are doing innovative stuff and it's really cool a lot of the stuff is really cool our media environment is doing a great example of that in food is the domino's meat lovers pizza is if you really think about it a miracle of science right like art yeah and beauty i mean think about the supply chain logistics a cow is milked a wheat plant is turned into flour and uh you know a pig is turned into sausage and pepperoni and then you know cheese is made in some kind of laboratory that tastes delicious and all of this at scale is put into these local outlets and then you know you can order it on the internet now and there's a pizza tracker that flashes and takes you through i mean this is this is real science fiction stuff here guys right and the same thing is happening with our media that doesn't necessarily make domino's pizza particularly good for you or reading facebook as fact particularly good for you as well so kind of looking at that food analogy which i really love because it unpacks that difference in incentive between what a media company or the food industry needs versus what might be healthy or beneficial for individuals after you've kind of achieved this mindful awareness that there is that difference in incentive how do you discern what is like a healthy information calorie versus an empty information calorie well you know i've been i've been reading a book about parenting lately it's called mindsight they talk about teaching your children the difference between their upstairs brain um which uh you know is where you do your sort of your cerebral cortex your your frontal lobe thinking your logical rational uh thinking mind and your your high order processing and your downstairs brain which is basically your amygdala which is where your fight or flight stuff is coming from there are a couple of ways that you can think through this and figure out a healthy diet the first one is paying attention to your downstairs brain and whether or not it's getting turned on by the media that you're consuming may be an indicator that you need to take a break or you need to take a deep breath or you need to consume something else in particular if it's not immediately observable to you i think what media companies have learned is that you know fear and disgust and anger sell a lot more advertisements those downstairs brain emotions sell a lot more advertisements than your upstairs brain emotions and feelings do and so that's being promoted that's being given to us i mean i remember back in 2013 maybe it was 2014 facebook ran an experiment on people's moods where um they actually promoted angry posts in a subset of people's news feeds that made you more exposed to anger facebook actually did this and if you think about it it's outrageous that they did it and they found that the people who were exposed to those angry posts then went on to make more angry posts themselves right and that had a chain reaction right they're actually upfront about messing with people's emotions and using your emotional experience during the day as a lab experiment the issue there is not that they're doing that in my mind the issue is that you consent to it the joke is on you the joke is that we are willing participants in that and that we are accepting that as mindless consumers if we instead say we are going to be mindful of this and understand that the motivations of my media are not are not motivations of my health then we're in a good spot to answer your specific question though about like what's a good calorie and what's a bad calorie i don't know that there's a clear and fast rule for that i think instead you need to be thinking of priorities what i always try and point people to and why i stress local local local so much is because local is more observable and more actionable you don't need as many intermediaries between you and the local mayor or the local chair of the school board or you know your police chief you don't need as many intermediaries between those people as you do the president of the united states and the actions of the executive branch of government and so focusing on that and focusing on having an impact on your community to me seems like a much better deal and a much better way to spend your cognitive energy than spending all of this time and all of this energy worrying about what's happening far away i really love the upstairs brain downstairs brain thing i think in thinking of all this i've had the tendency to be frustrated with people and come on people just think just think most of this media consumption that we're having it's not that you have faulty prefrontal cortex this is not even in the room it's you're you're downstairs you're dealing with emotions in a way that is pre-rational it's great to be in touch with your emotions and be present to them and understand that this thing is making you upset but taking a breath and saying hey this might be making me a little bit too upset is something a little bit different or i'm so upset about this how many advertisements is my upsetness causing me to consume right like thinking about it that way yeah well i mean the whole the whole rage sharing phenomenon people will be outraged at something someone wrote and then they share it into their networks and their friends get outraged and they all click the link which means they create ad impressions which means they financially incentivize the thing that they hate the other thing that they do this is way out there so maybe it'll be great but you know hebb's law talks in the brain about how neurons that fire together wire together right and that we have basically the more that we think um the more that we affirm ourselves the harder it is for that affirmation to go away because we're literally wiring our brains to be to act and respond in a particular way every time that happens which is why part of the central question of my book is who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they're right but if you think of yourself as an individual as a as a neuron there might be a hebb's law for society too right is that when you share that outrage and other people catch it you become closer bound in that outrage with the people who have identified and agreed with you right and so it's like people that people that outrage together wire together as well and what happens when that happens is that there is a there's not only a mental cost to you finding out that you are wrong but there's also a huge social cost right because now you've you've gotten other people outraged about something if you've had an original thought and now you are wrong and you don't no one likes to admit that they're wrong especially not in front of their peers or their friends and especially not on facebook where the the people that were right the whole time will in fact sneer at you and and you know tell you hahaha i told you so so maybe there you know there there are a lot of people i've heard saying like the internet is helping us build a global consciousness and a global brain and that's what the internet really is and i don't know whether i buy that or not but i think the metaphor may apply there where my friend eli paris wrote a book called the the filter bubble which kind of speaks to that but maybe there is a long-term social cost to that kind of sharing as well which is becomes very hard for you to to have an independent or skeptical thought of yourself if you've built a social environment around you that prohibits you from doing so i think another another approach to think of especially when it comes to complicated large-scale problems like our government and politics um and you know the education of every child and inequality and our ecosystem and some of the big big problems that we are facing as a society let's accept that they may be more complicated than a picture with big fonts on them um that there are no simple solutions to some of these things that there's not a quick just like there's not a quick fix diet show me the people that that um took the 30 minute weight loss challenge and you know lost lost 50 pounds in 30 minutes you know it's never gonna happen doesn't stop people from buying cheesy diet books and it doesn't stop people from selling them but um accepting that problems might be complicated and that there are not simple solutions and that we might not have to be experts on everything is another i think definition of humility right to say like i am never gonna understand transportation i've been the chairman of the board for a charter school for two and a half years i am just getting aware of my unqualifications for the field of education now compared to when i took over that charter school board right i'm just now discovering the vastness of what it is that i don't know it's taken me two years just to get there so when we think about our our larger problems and the problems that society faces let's accept for a moment that not all of us are climate scientists or education phd's or economists we don't necessarily have to trust everybody but let's accept the fact that we may not be able to explain it and again a picture with a large font on it [Music] yeah something in the analogy between the diet and information i don't know for me it's it's easier to see like my animal self physically and with food and it's setting boundaries for myself and really being careful with what you know that that seems like an easier thing when you think intellectually it's so easy to think of yourself as an objective pure computing machine or something that you don't you don't need to be careful with you know i'll just i'll see if it's true or not and all but it's it's far easier for me i think a lot of people to not see the animal instincts that we have intellectually right with information and with their thought processes to just assume that we're going to be able to figure it out because i'm a smart guy and you know and just kind of go on automatic mode where i i know if i just go on automatic mode at the grocery store that's not going to be good for me why do you think that is such a difficult leap for people to see that instinct of their own intellectual mind people don't understand how complicated they are they don't understand how complex they're most people don't understand how complex their minds are and that their minds are just as worthy of care as their bodies are i think one thing that's different between you know an information diet and a food diet is it's pretty easy to tell when you're fat we don't have that for information yet we don't have that for the consumption habits of our media yet we don't have a mirror we don't have a culture that promotes any form of model for information if anything right now i think it promotes sort of an anti-intel intellectual level of um contempt for those that are well educated we call them elitists or by coastal liberals or something like that but we tend to have i think a more proud embrace of ignorance than we do of um of intellect right now i think that's really dangerous but we don't have any form of exterior diagnosis except you know like hey you know you just gave yourself a stroke reading too many blog posts or something like that i suppose there's an independent analysis there but there's not a mirror there are no mirrors um for for our um media diets which is a problem like is this problem just still getting worse and worse where are we going is there what do you what does your future telling say right uh so that's a great question i don't know i'm hopeful for the trump administration and i'm hopeful for the country uh because i want us all to do well we are all in the same boat we were born into it this is the boat that we're in and whether or not you really like barack obama or really like donald trump or really like hillary clinton that doesn't mean that you get to live in a separate boat it means you have the choice to ignore the other passengers of that boat if you want to but i think you do that at your own peril and right now there are some some passengers on the boat who want donald trump to to run it and that's fine and i think all americans need to be hopeful for our future hope is independent of who the captain of the boat is or who whether or not you like the other passengers on the boat whether or not you hated you know barack obama or hate donald trump today you know as as as dr king said um only only love beats hate he can't beat hate i'm terrible at quoting dr king but forget what i'm saying he he talked gooder than me there are a couple of ways for us in our media culture to go i think that where we're at and the level of contempt that in particular americans but throughout the world this is happening have for their neighbors is really at a tipping point and you know what i'm doing what i can tell you what i'm doing to fix it is i recently took some time off after my kids were born to have be a full-time dad and and enjoy my family for a little bit and then recently i felt a call to help people volunteer i feel like in the wake of this climate that we're in today more people should be of service to one another so now i'm the senior vice president of digital at organization called the points of light foundation um or just points of light we are the largest volunteering organization in the world we've got hundreds of affiliates worldwide and your local volunteer center wherever you're at and my job is to help use technology to help make it easier for for people to volunteer because my thought is you should be of service to your neighbor whether you love them or not but you should probably just love them you should be of service to someone who needs food because they're hungry not because they agree with you or disagree with you the world could stand i think right now for everyone to just go out and volunteer and be a force of good in their community worry about your friends and neighbors if to the donald trump hater if you believe that the world is in jeopardy and that there are people that are going to go hungry because donald trump is president then the right answer is not to elect a new president right now because you can't do that the right answer is to feed the people whom donald trump is making hungry if you believe that donald trump is great and he's going to solve the problems in your backyard then you have a moral responsibility to help him solve the problems in your backyard by helping your neighbors whether they disagree with you or not by helping your neighbors by being of service to them and if we can get past this and get towards being of service to one another then that's the only way that i can think of where we're going to build a better stronger media culture because we will be working on the problems in our backyard and democracy because we'll have a tighter better grip of the problems that we need to solve [Music] well we hope you've enjoyed this episode talking about media literacy and how we can be more informed in our choices in what media we consume and how we can tell when media is being honest and trustworthy if you'd like to learn more about this topic just go to the liturgist.com and click on podcast where you can find the show notes for this episode to connect with people who've appeared on the program as well as discuss the show with other listeners in the comment section if you'd like to connect to the liturgists via social media go to facebook.com slash the liturgists or at the liturgist on twitter and of course we've completely reimagined our patreon system with all new benefit tiers and resources available to our listeners to learn more go to theliturgist.com and look at the donate now button in the upper right hand corner please do remember to check out the tour dates both the gunger tour and sciencemike thanks so much to greg nordine corey pig madison chandler for help with the production of this program and of course our guest clay johnson michael gunger and i science mike we're happy to host you in this conversation this week thanks for listening everybody whoa i mean wait a second i think maybe the people might want to hear science mike wrap us out one who wrote this shit two who would publish it do they have an editorial review board three there's no date you see four you're gonna cite that source five this bitch can't write so you better make it right and say it's fake do it [Music] this bitch can't write so you better make it right and say it's fake i mean bitch in gender neutral terms it's fake yeah