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

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

It takes a lot of flying time to become a certified pilot. It takes years on stage for a comedian to learn how to command an audience. It takes time to get sober, time in therapy to heal a ma...rriage. No book is written overnight, and few fortunes are made in one swoop. No, they start small and accumulate, the power of compounding interest working on them.All great things take time. You know this. You know where you want to end up, and yet, and yet still you have not started the clock.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions from cadets as part of a media and philosophy course at West Point about how to identify and deal with misinformation in the media, the gray areas of censorship on social media platforms, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from zoom sessions that we do with daily stoic life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have
Starting point is 00:00:31 on the street when there happen to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening. And we hope this is of use to you. It's going to take a while, so you need to do this. It takes a lot of flying time to become a certified pilot. It takes years on stage for a comedian to learn how to command an audience. It takes time to get sober, time in therapy to heal a marriage. No book is written overnight and few fortunes are made in one swoop. No they start small and accumulate.
Starting point is 00:01:06 The power of compounding interests working on them. All great things take time. You know this. You know where you want to end up, and yet, and yet, still you have not started the clock. The Stoics say it is foolish to expect figs and winter. More foolish is expecting outputs without the inputs, final results without the basic beginnings. The stoics say that if you don't know what port you're sailing for, no wind is favorable.
Starting point is 00:01:30 Well, if you never get on the boat, if you never leave the harbor, no port is possible. It's going to take a while to lose weight, to acquire mastery, to turn things around. It's probably going to take longer than you'd like it to. You don't control that. You do control whether you add one more day to the tally. You control whether you push the ETA back unnecessarily. You control whether you start the clock today. Whether you stop putting stuff off and get after it. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast Business Wars.
Starting point is 00:02:09 And in our new season, two of the world's leading hotel brands, Hilton and Marriott, stare down family drama and financial disasters. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. When I wrote my first book, Trust My Blind, I had, honestly, there's a part of me that thought it was earlier, right, I was writing about medium manipulation and fake news and how the ideas that we take for granted are a culture where they come from and the forces that marketing and public relations exert on that information. And I wasn't sure how the book would do. I just knew it was a book like that I had to write.
Starting point is 00:02:52 And then if I, I was very much influenced by this wonderful book from up in Simclary wrote the brass check after the jungle, he wrote this exposé of media in the early 1900s. And that's what I was trying to do in Trust Me, I'm Like, show what's really happening behind the scenes. Words and all, including my own screwed up role in it. Now, this isn't exactly a stoke book,
Starting point is 00:03:13 although I felt like I was coming from a stoke place and that I'd seen something I'd been part of something. I didn't like it. I knew it wasn't right. I wanted to talk about it. I didn't know how controversial the book would be. I didn't know how controversial the book would be. I didn't know how many people it would upset. I didn't even know how right I would turn out to be about a lot of things. And I certainly didn't think that 10 years later I'd be talking to West Point
Starting point is 00:03:34 in the midst of an information war with Russia about how these ideas, how cyber war and this information spreads and can be used as a weapon and how I just had no conception of any of that. But that's what I'm doing today. It's going to be a Q&A between me and this class cadets at West Point. And I thought I'd share some of that with you. Here we go. So we talk every class obviously is prize amounts of pricing about the situation in Ukraine. Sure.
Starting point is 00:04:06 And one of the things that I've seen in the past, we've been talking about is sort of the different actors on the information side. And so I wonder, I know it's not a watch, what's unfolding. Sometimes I think, oh, that's something we talked about. But I wonder, as you're watching that in full, have you seen things that you're like, you know, wow, that's kind of straight out of chapter, whatever? There's definitely that. I would say one of the weird things that I've been noticing about the conflict is as some of the social media companies have cracked down on
Starting point is 00:04:36 misinformation, you know, specifically in light of what's happening. And I've seen a few memes that have pointed it out. And I think anyone that has a public platform that's talked about political issues is noticing this. But the effect of the meme was something like, ever since Twitter and Facebook cracked down on Russian misinformation, there's been a lot of true, there's been a lot fewer true American patriots
Starting point is 00:05:02 tweeting things at you, meaning that so much of the people or the pushback that you get as a public figure, if you talk about what's happening in the world, you think you're hearing from real people, but you're really interacting with bots or you're interacting with internet trolls that are paid for or supported by foreign powers. So it's been interesting to watch as the stakes of this crisis have grown, some real basic steps have changed the tenor and tone of the conversation that I think we were taking for granted before.
Starting point is 00:05:37 So obviously the book is primarily about much less harmful forms of marketing and misinformation. But the reason I wrote the book and the reason I thought it was important to talk about is that if someone can use this to market t-shirts or books or movies, much more powerful people with much more insidious motivations can use a lot of those same techniques and tools. And so I think we watched Russia try to use a lot of its sort of cyber methodologies in the run up to Ukraine.
Starting point is 00:06:16 I think decent amount of credit goes to Biden for how he's navigated that, his use of the platform of the US presidency to sort of call a spade a spade to lay out what's going to happen to use American intelligence to sort of preempt and counteract that misinformation. I think what obviously was so different
Starting point is 00:06:38 between this all out invasion of Ukraine and the 2014 invasion of Crimea is that one, we were gaslit about, right? It was never fully owned. There's a lot of misinformation about what was happening and who was doing it. And I do think it looks like the other actors and some credit to Ukraine as well, I think masterfully pushed back and spread its own narratives throughout this. We've watched people push back against that disinformation, so we have at least a somewhat better picture of what's actually happening, at least from the perspective of the average
Starting point is 00:07:18 person on the watching on TV or whatever. Thank you, sir. We had talk as he is changed into a little bit. So, to focus on like a 20-20 presidential election, there's a lot of discussion over like how much censorship companies like Twitter or Facebook should have over the content they put out. So, you use an example from like my own state, they're fairies on it. During the election, you saw a couple of foods go on about sharpies, invalidating ballots in Arizona.
Starting point is 00:07:47 And obviously, it's not like a causal relationship. Like this directly led into insurrection, not a capital, but like things like that did fuel a type of narrative and that type of response. So where do you see the line between companies like Twitter being able to police their own platform, but then also the first man coming in the place? Well, yeah, it's really tricky. I was at a dinner with some officials a few months ago and they were sort of lamenting that social media platforms had taken the drastic step of de-platforming the president or now the former president of the United States.
Starting point is 00:08:28 And I sort of pointed out that I agree, that's an alarming precedent, right? That's not something we should like to see. But what I was saying was that part of the reason things only had to get that bad is because at every other step of the reason things only have to get that bad is because at every other step of the political process, people who have the ability to sort of police their own side of the street had failed to do that.
Starting point is 00:08:57 And so I think there's a couple different equations. There's ultimately what is the role of the platforms in this, but then there's also the role of parties and public figures and people of influence to police and maintain themselves. So I'll just as an example, like the movement to either cancel or pull Joe Rogan from Spotify. And I happen to know some of the people involved in that, India R.R.E. as it happens is read my books. And she and I were talking about this.
Starting point is 00:09:37 It is interesting, right? What role Spotify has in this as far as misinformation as far as the pandemic goes. But Joe Rogan could also just decide not to have fucking quacks on his show, right? Like Joe Rogan could also say, hey, I'm the largest show in the world and that comes with it a certain amount of responsibilities. And I'm not going to have Alex, I'm not going to give Alex Jones three hours of uninterrupted direct access into millions of people's brains, right?
Starting point is 00:10:15 And so I think we can tackle this problem from both ends, but it seems to be that everyone's got sort of voice the responsibility onto the platforms when, you know, any number of people could have intervened before it got that bad. So, they're going along with that same thing with Joe Roe. It doesn't mean nature leads to a media platform. Like Joe Roe guys, it's literally a new source. He's the nature of his show. He needs to provide voice for everybody. That's why a lot of people watch him. This is the nature of his show needs to provide voice for everybody that's why a lot of people watch him. This is the nature of his show sort of change what no responsibility you might have,
Starting point is 00:10:53 why his information being produced, especially since he is not in human-salescence. Yeah, I push back on that for a couple of reasons. So number one, there's something we call in the internet world jacking off, J-A-Q, just asking questions, right? And this is what Holocaust deniers do, this is what vaccines deniers do, this is what misinformation spreaders do, is they just ask questions, right? And they hide behind this idea of I'm just asking questions.
Starting point is 00:11:29 But then when they get the answers, they don't like to that question, right? They don't change their mind or stop. They just continue to ask other ridiculous questions, right? The science on vaccines is like overwhelmingly settled. But what Rogan has done, I think consistently, is repeatedly find the quackiest, weirdest, most fringe figures to come in and allow him to just ask questions, which spreads doubt or false ideas or bad information. So, look, I agree. Joe Rogan is not NBC news. His obligations are different, but as a human being in the middle of a crisis
Starting point is 00:12:05 that's killed a million Americans, let alone, you know, millions more internationally, one, one I think has an obligation to not put on a legitimate crazy person like Alex Jones or, you know, let's say you're going to have Robert Malone on to talk, who's a, who's a vaccine skeptic. It's a deliberate choice that Rogan makes to call him the father of mRNA research, which he's emphatically not. He was like a grad student tangentially involved to it. So there's deliberate choices that are made.
Starting point is 00:12:42 And then when those choices have consequences, I think what we see is people try to make excuses for why they're not responsible for that. Does that make sense? Yes, please. Excuse me. You have your name, Jack Elton. Hi.
Starting point is 00:13:02 Question. It was kind of just a quote from this without me from your close. So, I'm just going to give a look at due to the work of the E.M. manipulators, Marker's now writing news, opinion has raised back, and back, I was going to have everything to be trained to know as a panelist for any of it. So, my question is, we saw a lot of the effects of that in the Trump era and the medical other of January 6th. So you think that the Trump era will fall out and last show after
Starting point is 00:13:33 January 6th, will it change any of those factors? I unfortunately, I don't. I mean, I think we're pretty much in the same place we were then. You could argue there was, it did seem like there was a brief awakening on January 6th, and we've seen that the January 6th commission is revealed, a number of let's say Fox News hosts, we're texting people in the Trump administration
Starting point is 00:14:02 like call this off, like you gotta stop this, et cetera. So there was a sense the Trump administration, like, call this off, like, you've got to stop this, etc. So there was a sense that, oh, hey, these things that I'm saying, this information that I'm spreading out in the world, people are taking real action on this, it's having real effects. There was this sort of brief moment of that, but then it strikes me that there was probably the understanding that actually reckoning with that and changing that would have real political consequences and probably real viewership consequences. And so we've now gone back to this sort of spreading of lies and misinformation.
Starting point is 00:14:34 The right has largely told themselves a totally fake story about what happened on January 6th. Largely again, so they don't have to accept the consequences for that. It's a, I don't want to say that it's only the right that has, you know, proverbial blood on their hands here. I think obviously we saw this in the riots after the murder of George Floyd. You know, people think that what they talk about on the internet stays
Starting point is 00:15:05 on the internet, but it spills over, it has real world consequences. And political violence is the most dangerous thing there is in a democracy. And I think both sides have fomented that pretending that these tweets they send or these articles they write or these videos they make that they're that it's like a video game and it's not a video game. It's very real and the consequences of it make it increasingly hard to have a like a functioning civil society. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon
Starting point is 00:15:57 Music App today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. When we think of sports stories, we tend to think of tales of epic on the field glory. But the new podcast Sports Explains the World brings you some of the wildest and most surprising sports stories you've never heard, like the teenager who wrote a fake Wikipedia page for a young athlete and then watched as a real team fell for his prank. Diving into his Wikipedia page we turned three career goals into 11. Added 20 new assists for good measure. Figures that nobody would, should, have believed.
Starting point is 00:16:33 And the mysterious secret of a US Olympic superstar killed at the peak of his career. Was it an accident? Did the police screw up the investigation? It was also nebulous. Each week, Sports Explains the World goes beyond leagues and stats to share stories that will redefine your understanding of sports and their impact on the world. Listen to Sports Explains the World on the Wondering app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Sports Explains the World early and ad-free on Wondering Plus.
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