Podcasts: Sticking to Your Ideals, Not Ideology

 

Last week, I wrote about my personal experience with social media.  While there have been benefits to its emergence, there are so many aspects of it that have been destructive to society and that have contributed to the polarization: mobs, doxxing, censorship, trolling, and the undue influence on our electoral system both by shadow banning and other algorithmic influencing and, in Zuckerberg’s case, direct meddling in the election.

I also worry a great deal about being siloed, about being insulated from divergent points of view. By  following people that think exactly the way we do, to garner more “likes” that make us feel smart and witty, like Pavlov’s dog, I worry about becoming intellectually ossified.  Much of our intellectual growth comes from being challenged by facts and evidence and supported arguments that counter our views.  Making one uncomfortable and erasing one’s smugness is often the best favor someone can bestow upon you.

Douglas Murray’s latest column in the Spectator, “The art of changing your mind” was perfectly timed to address some of my concerns.  (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-art-of-changing-your-mind).  I have often thought of John Maynard Keynes’s famous response when a critic accused him of being inconsistent, “When the facts change, I change my mind.  What do you do, sir?”

Which brings me around to podcasts.  While social media has generally operated to harden us into tribes, created mobs, and often has permitted people to demonstrate some of their most impulsive and darker aspects of their personalities, podcasts have been, in my view, like throwing open a window on the first delightful spring day.   Of the millions of tweets posted each day, I highly doubt that anyone has been persuaded to alter their views on anything as a result.  But podcasts are different.  They are a happy development in a world of media propagandizing, trolling, doxxing, and impulsivity.

If you are intellectually curious, podcasts accomplish a number of positive things.  Most importantly, they allow for discourse that is more complex and nuanced than you can possibly get on legacy media OR social media.  On legacy media, segments are 7-10 minutes long, at most.  Twitter is even worse.  At 160 characters, it is impossible to put together a coherent view supported by facts, which is why most of these exchanges involve uniformed opinions, often with snarky, equally uniformed retorts.  The forced brevity facilitates polarization and we sometimes see otherwise  public intellectuals with some level of expertise spitting at each other like schoolyard children.  They allow a longer, more informed discussion and back and forth than is available on other platforms.

Podcasts allow for respectful discourse and exchange of views, especially if the podcaster is open-minded.  Joe Rogan is one.  Bari Weiss’s Honestly is another.   Bret Weinstein has also entertained lengthy discussions with individuals that have perspectives that are quite different than his.   These discussions have allowed me to rethink and reframe issues.   I often come away from some of these podcasts thinking, “Gee, I never thought about that in quite that way.”   It is healthy, and necessary if you are serious about reaching the truth of a matter.

Secondly, because of their length, podcasts reveal much more about the podcasters personalities.  We see the tartness and “mother bear” instincts of Megyn Kelly, the natural intelligence and inquisitiveness of Bari Weiss, and the wisdom and deep historical perspective of Victor Davis Hanson.  Glenn Loury has revealed much about his personal life, his highly indirect route to becoming a public intellectual, a route that took him through the ‘hood and rehab—it adds to his genuineness and humanity.

To be sure, there are drawbacks.  Legacy media constrains broadcasters to 30 or 60 minute segments.  The podcasters can go on for much too long, and sometimes take weird detours.  Good writers have good editors that keep them disciplined.   Podcasters have no such constraints.  James Lindsey’s New Discourses podcasts, for instance, can run for 2 hours or more, much longer than my attention span.  Tighten it up.

In a world of acute hyperpartisanship, I am making an earnest effort to both ignore pure propaganda, especially of the Woke kind, but at the same time, I am seeking out media outlets that foster honest and open-minded diversity of views.  While rejecting Wokeness in its entirety, I also do not want to get trapped in an intellectual cul-de-sac.  That can be as poisonous to one’s mind as buying the propaganda grist. 

Some of my favorite podcasts?   The Dark Horse Podcast with environmental biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, New Discourses with James Lindsey, The Glenn Show with Glenn Loury (especially when he has conversations with John McWhorter—the  “Black Guys”), The Saad Truth with Gad Saad, and, of course, the two best interviewers in media Bari Weiss on Honestly and Megyn Kelly on The Megyn Kelly Show.   The Victor Davis Hanson Show is a weekly staple for me.

It is no small irony that, as someone who has spent much of his adult life as a Reagan Republican, I find that when it gets right down to it, the most interesting people and people with real insights in this new media are traditional liberals- Bret Weinstein, Bari Weiss and Abigail Shrier.   The first step to ending the emerging tribalism is to recognize the common ground you have with the people from other tribes.  Podcasts help get you there.

Social Media- A Personal Assessment

 Writing is a humbling activity.  Writing for public consumption over time is even more humbling.  You expose yourself to others, allowing them to see your reasoning, your intellect, and your ability to organize and convey an argument.  But even worse, you expose yourself to being wrong, irrefutably wrong in your judgments, especially if someone drags out your old essays that widely missed the mark.

So, I have to ‘fess up.

A few years ago, I wrote a post extolling the virtues of Facebook.  Among other benefits, I mistakenly claimed it was free to the user (It’s not, you pay dearly with your personal data, and, probably, your mental health).  Tongue firmly planted in cheek, I also claimed that the real benefit was to be able to stay current and connected with your dysfunctional family and not actually have to be there.  But it seems that, despite my training,  I vastly underestimated the hidden costs of social media was exacting on our Republic and our culture.   Bari Weiss’s interview with Jonathan Haidt is well worth listening to and I will not attempt to summarize it here  (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-the-past-10-years-of-american-life-have/id1570872415?i=1000557220618)  but it is noteworthy that within a few days of this interview, we learn that Elon Musk has launched a takeover bid for Twitter, causing a cacophony of wailing and howling the likes of which we haven’t heard since Donald Trump’s election in 2016.  We can only hope that the takeover attempt, whether successful or not, represents an inflection point and a curtailment of the excesses of these platforms.  The libertarians exclaimed, “It’s a free market.  Go start your own platform.”  That is very difficult but maybe if someone else buys one, the momentum will start to shift.

My post today is simply to provide a brief summary of my own experience and impressions of a few of the major platforms.  My thinking about them has evolved over the past few years, and so has my use of them.   And they have evolved, too, and mostly not in a positive direction.

Facebook
At first, I enjoyed Facebook.  It was a painless and easy way to keep up with family members and old classmates and teammates.  It afforded me an opportunity to reconnect with some people that I had lost contact with.  The absolute best part was reconnecting with an old boyhood friend with whom I had spent several wonderful summers trouncing around the woods and fields of rural Wisconsin during the summer as little boys.  More than fifty years later, we got together and seamlessly picked up our friendship, memories and connections.  Without Facebook, this would likely not have occurred.

But then I saw the dark side of Facebook.  The frame-up of the Covington kids in 2019 was a turning point for me.  Posts which depicted a smug teen harassing this poor Native American veteran turned out to be a complete and utter falsehood and misrepresentation.  Worse, I saw posts of people I knew become part of a mob that was ready to pillory young Nicholas Sandmann in the public square.  It was my first hand experience with a social media mob with participants that were known to me.  Then came the Zuckerberg involvement in the 2020 presidential election, which undoubtedly influenced the election and the banning of Donald Trump just days after Michelle Obama called upon Zuckerberg to boot him.   I decided that I would no longer be part of this empire and deleted my account late last year.

Twitter
I have waivered on Twitter.  I have many of the same reservations about Twitter as I had with Facebook.  The abrogation of free speech principles by de-platforming of people whose views don’t conform to Twitter orthodoxy.  The Twitter mobs that destroyed people’s lives and careers.  The ugly exchanges between people that reflect poorly on them that exposed their underlying hubris and nastiness.  The personal attacks by Nassim Taleb on Cliff Asness and by Claire Lehmann on Bret Weinstein have colored my views of Taleb and Lehmann.   I have seen others say things on Twitter that they would never dare to say to a person’s face.   And then there is whole matter of  the shield of anonymity, as went coward Mitt Romney went under the Twitter alias Pierre Delecto.  Twitter also permits reckless impulsivity.  If we are honest with ourselves, most of us can think of instances when we ripped off a tweet that put our own thoughtlessness out there for the world to see, and almost immediately regretted it.  I’m amazed that even more people have not had their careers ruined and reputations sullied with self-destructive tweets.  Many of us have to work hard at not looking empty-headed and banal from time to time.  Twitter invites it.

Still, I have not disengaged.   I get some of my news from Twitter and over time, I learned who is reliable and who is not.  Despite its filtering, you do see some thing that would never get through the MSM.  And then there is the humor.  There are some truly funny people that sometimes tweet spit-up-your coffee comments.  I have also made some good relationships through Twitter—a few overseas, including a young man in Venezuela with whom I correspond.  In the old days, we would call them pen pals.  I reconnected with one of my college professors through Twitter and that has been an enriching experience. But I worry about two things.  First, I am concerned that Twitter in the age of COVID is being relied upon too heavily as a substitute social life.  As Kindle does for reading, Twitterverse is  inadequate for experiencing the fullness and rich texture and complexity of human interaction.  One cannot see the facial expressions of the other person, touch them, and cannot build memories with them.  It's quite antiseptic.  I have a few Italian friends that would be stymied.  They simply cannot communicate effectively unless their arm is around you and their nose is inches from your face. Second, I am worried about becoming siloed, about only being exposed to points of view that conform to my own and about being manipulated by the algorithms.   I also worry that its rapid-fire feeds are eating away at my powers of concentration.  There are days when it depresses me, as it seems that I am watching Western Civilization collapse in real time.   Depending on the outcome with Elon Musk’s run at it, the answer is probably to severely reduce my time and interaction with it.

LinkedIn
I reserve my harshest comments for LinkedIn.  It is the platform with which I have the least amount of engagement and whose feed has the least interesting content.  If it was not a sine qua non of modern professional life, I would delete my profile as I did with Facebook.  Posts are generally benign and vacuous.   They tend to fall in four categories.   First is the brown nose post, announcing to the world how wonderful your organization is and how blessed you feel to be part of the team (gag!).   Since I know many of these posters personally, I know this to be untrue.  The second type is the congratulatory one on a promotion or job move.   Third, is the virtue-signaling type—posting about a mentally challenged person that accomplished something, or how they assisted a women’s shelter or something else along those lines, announcing to the world what an empathetic, caring image they wish to project, rather than the ruthless, cutthroat capitalists they really are (many would happily trample right over that mentally challenged person if he stood in the way of a profitable sale).   Remember, some of these folks are known to me.  

Much is made of “networking” in business.  LinkedIn has gotten me started on de-networking, and I reserve that for the people that post the fourth type—political.  Political posts have no place on LinkedIn and it is made worse by the lack of reciprocity.  The same people that gushed about Kamala breaking the glass ceiling even though she cannot put two coherent sentences together would shriek in horror if you posted ANYTHING positive about Donald Trump or Mike Pence.  Political posters get immediately bounced off my LinkedIn feed, either by muting or disconnecting entirely.  So there.  Flick them off like a bug off your shoulder.

My thinking on social media will likely evolve and the platforms will likely evolve as well.  The emergence of podcasts and substack are another aspect of this but I will save that for another day.  The evidence is that the effect of these platforms on our society has darkened considerably in the last 4-5 years or so, and maybe if I reassess them in another few years, the essay will read quite differently.

One can only hope.

Mouse Trap

 I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the past couple of years attempting to educate myself about the Woke movement.  I’ve read James Lindsay’s book, Cynical Theories, Gad Saad’s book, The Parasitic Mind, and Counter Wokecraft by Charles Pincourt and James Lindsay, and I have listened to Linday’s podcasts, as well as Bret Weinstein’s and Bari Weiss’s.  I have been taken aback by how quickly Wokeness has swept through the country.

The wildfire of Woke burning through academia and not-for-profits was not so surprising.  The professionals that inhabit these environments are sometimes  insulated and removed from the demands of the marketplace, at least in the short term.  Oberlin College could absorb a $31 million hit for waging a false campaign against the innocent bakery.  Harvard doesn’t give a passing thought to denting its elite status by admitting the supremely unqualified David Hogg.  Columbia University is fine with hiring radical Cathy Boudin, unrepentant murderer and member of the Weather Underground.  I suppose that their endowments are so large that in the cost/benefit analysis, these things actually enhance their brand by adding to their Woke bona fides.

But corporate America is different, or at least I thought so.  While there is some renewed debate over Milton Friedman’s assertion that the social responsibility of a business is to its shareholders, profit maximization mostly carries the day.  And as a practical matter, public companies remain under pressure to produce quarterly profits and please Wall Street.  For most companies, managing brand and image is an important aspect of that function.  They spent millions on trademark and copyright protection, promotion, focus groups, advertising, and on and on.   Even individuals will wage war to protect their brand.  A few years ago, Michael Jordan won a multimillion dollar lawsuit against Dominic’s grocery chain for using his image on a simply flyer without permission.

But this week, we saw companies that were willing to do incredible damage to their brand while chasing the holy grail of Wokeness instead of profits.  As I write this, there are protests in front of Disney headquarters, the park is virtually empty and the Disney plus channel has lost over 350,000 subscribers, and the stock tanked, losing some $2.4 billion in value.  This inexplicable act of brand self-immolation arose because of Disney’s opposition to the Florida bill passed to stop the teaching of matters of sexuality (read: gender ideology) up to 3^rd  grade.  Tarred with the falsely titled “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the act correctly prohibits teachers from introducing these matters with children that are too young to handle them.   Disney has doubled down, vowing to put more gay and trans characters in their films.  Boycotts are being organized and Republicans are even talking about not renewing the copyright on Mickey Mouse.

As someone who has spent a career analyzing, financing and helping to salvage businesses, it has been difficult to comprehend a corporate decision to commit brand suicide.  It flies in the face of management guru Peter Drucker’s famous quote that “the purpose of a business is to create a customer.”  Without even seeing any market research, we know that these actions will drive away a large swath of its core customer base—families with small children.

Sure, there have been other instances of bringing brands into Woke compliance—the removal of Aunt Jemimah, the Land O’ Lakes Indian woman, and the Cream of Wheat Chef.  The Land O’ Lakes action triggered a sarcastic response to the packaging which kept the wooded background, “Do they realize that, in an effort to be Woke, they removed the Indian but kept the land?” 

Of course, there was the NFL and Colin Kaepernick kneeling and Nike’s decision to halt the introduction of the Betsy Ross shoes (I immediately ordered a Betsy Ross flag patch and had it sewn over the “swoosh” emblem of my only Nike golf shirt).   But I assumed that the NFL decided that fans would drift back after some period of outrage.

Disney represents a real departure and aggressive implementation of Woke, going at the heart of its customer base.  Disney management is making a statement.  Its customers and shareholders are subordinate to Wokeness, and the most twisted and dark aspect of it-Milton Friedman and Peter Drucker be damned.

In the same week, GEICO insurance suffered a bloody nose when it used radical antisemite Linda Sarsour to promote its Middle Eastern and North African Heritage Month Celebration.  Sarsour is so vile that the Women’s March disconnected from her.  GEICO reacted quickly to what I assume was a flurry of objections.  It’s one thing for the thoroughly Woke Ben & Jerry’s to use Sarsour to promote its products but GEICO kicked a hornet’s nest with her.  To its credit, GEICO cancelled her and the event and issued a public apology.  But it’s still very troubling that featuring Sarsour made it through GEICO’s marketing department.  It’s department is clever, innovative and has great brand recognition with its silly ads featuring the lizard.  Someone very senior in the GEICO organization thought it was a splendid idea to replace the lizard mascot with a snake.

I was not shocked when academia and other not-for-profits swallowed the Woke poison early.  They tend to be somewhat disconnected from the realities of the marketplace.   I even bought into the rationale of organizations like the NFL and Nike because their brand might have been strong enough to take a short term hit and still bounce back.  But the actions of Disney are quantitatively different.  It is incontrovertible evidence that companies are willing to sacrifice their shareholders and customers on the altar of Wokeness, and that it is not isolated.  It is significant that GEICO initially was prepared to associate with Linda Sarsour.   This tells us how powerful this movement is, and how we can no longer be passive in opposing it.