Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
Speaker 2: name is Noah.
Speaker 3: They called me Bed. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: superproducer Paul Mission Control Decat most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3: You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
Speaker 3: don't want you to know. Tonight's episode is going to
Speaker 3: be a little bit different. It's a meditation, an extended
Speaker 3: conversation about themes we had explored in earlier evenings. You know,
Speaker 3: the future of censorship. We did that a few years ago,
Speaker 3: and then the idea of whether any book should be banned.
Speaker 3: And I believe in that conversation all three of us
Speaker 3: walked way saying, well, we're against censorship, but yeah, maybe
Speaker 3: some books shouldn't be out there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like you know, a list of procedures in assassinating
Speaker 4: somebody and disposing of a body, you know, things like that,
Speaker 4: probably not great, or just recipes for bombs.
Speaker 5: Maybe not the best.
Speaker 4: But also you can argue that it's just like it's
Speaker 4: just it's sort of like we have the old rules
Speaker 4: of the head shops back in the day. This is
Speaker 4: only for tobacco use, right, It's all on how you
Speaker 4: use it well.
Speaker 2: And today we're talking about the dangers of books, words, concepts,
Speaker 2: and ideas that are written that are potentially very dangerous
Speaker 2: for the future. But they're mostly written about the past.
Speaker 3: That's correct. We are exploring something related. It's a consequence
Speaker 3: of what you can call narrative control. Companning books help
Speaker 3: people empower control the past. Is it possible that powerful
Speaker 3: forces in the modern day can literally erase history, rewriting
Speaker 3: it to suit their own ends. As George Orwell famously said,
Speaker 3: who controls the past controls the future in nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 3: and you know, maybe nineteen eighty four isn't so long ago,
Speaker 3: and maybe nineteen eighty four is or Well saw it
Speaker 3: is on the way as we record. Here are the facts. Look,
Speaker 3: there's another great book that's kind of about this or
Speaker 3: involves this, by the legendary author Neil Stephenson. It's called Anathem.
Speaker 3: In both of those books, these very shadowy, very potent
Speaker 3: forces conspire to control everything the public knows about the past.
Speaker 3: We've always been at war with East Asia. We've also
Speaker 3: always been at war with Eurasia. And you know, you'll
Speaker 3: just have the double think your way around it in
Speaker 3: anathem without spoiling it too much. A renegade or secretive
Speaker 3: cabal of monks. They're a little less sinister, they're greater
Speaker 3: good type dudes, but they're no less powerful. And it's
Speaker 3: strange because these are both works of fiction for now,
Speaker 3: but they point toward a very real thing, this ongoing
Speaker 3: debate about history and who owns it.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 5: I think it's interesting too.
Speaker 4: We've been doing a lot of these kind of book
Speaker 4: and media recommendations on the Instagram and youtubes and stuff,
Speaker 4: and I think one thing that I think we all
Speaker 4: probably think about when we're recommending a book, whether it's
Speaker 4: fiction or nonfiction, is whether or not it gives you
Speaker 4: It empowers you as a reader to kind of reset
Speaker 4: your thinking around these types of questions. You know, who
Speaker 4: controls the narrative? You know, nineteen eighty four is a
Speaker 4: work of fiction, but more prescient now than ever. You
Speaker 4: could argue that in some ways works of fiction can
Speaker 4: be just as dangerous, if not more so, as works
Speaker 4: of nonfiction. For those in power, because they do have
Speaker 4: the ability to kind of change minds, even if it's
Speaker 4: just a little bit over time.
Speaker 3: Sure, same reason music gets banned pretty often. It's weird. Okay.
Speaker 3: So our word for the day or word for the
Speaker 3: evening is such a very English language word. Historiography history, graphy, history,
Speaker 3: history of history. It's the study of history and the
Speaker 3: methodology of history as a discipline. So it's like it's
Speaker 3: like studying the tech. It's like not studying the symbolism
Speaker 3: of tarot cards, but studying the margins of printing that
Speaker 3: were used on tarot cards throughout history.
Speaker 5: It's very tough.
Speaker 2: Oh, very nice. Hey you guys. I just learned the
Speaker 2: collective noun for historians. Ooh, and I'm just going to
Speaker 2: shout out before I even say what it is. I
Speaker 2: want to shout out James M. Banner Junior, who wrote
Speaker 2: a book titled The Ever Changing Past why all history
Speaker 2: is revisionist history? But he states the collective down for
Speaker 2: historians is an argumentation.
Speaker 6: Ooh, well, see it's my perspective, right.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, we all see things and experience
Speaker 4: things and process things differently. Something that isn't happening right
Speaker 4: now that we're not looking at as it occurs. There
Speaker 4: is inherently within the retelling a bias, and I guess
Speaker 4: you could argue that the best historian sort of throw
Speaker 4: that are better at, you know, contending with that bias.
Speaker 4: But I love that. I think that actually is the
Speaker 4: best way I've heard it described. That it is sort
Speaker 4: of like, well, here's this school of thought, here's this
Speaker 4: school of thought, here's the way we think.
Speaker 5: It went down.
Speaker 4: But it's not even about an argument over event, it's
Speaker 4: about what they mean.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it also reminds me. I try not to quote
Speaker 3: it too often, but it also reminds me of that
Speaker 3: William Faulkner quote the past is never dead, it's not
Speaker 3: even the past. Something like that. It's true. And we
Speaker 3: have to love the English language other you know, it
Speaker 3: feels like peak English to have a word heard about
Speaker 3: historian studying history. And as meta and weirdly extra as
Speaker 3: that sounds, it's extremely important now more than ever to
Speaker 3: steal the line from Fox News. Understanding the objective truth
Speaker 3: of the past. It's a pretty tricky thing and it
Speaker 3: always has been, I mean for thousands of years, right,
Speaker 3: basically since people started peopling. They've disagreed on various narratives,
Speaker 3: various aspects of origin, stories, explanations of the natural world,
Speaker 3: what happens when object A meets object B, all kinds
Speaker 3: of stuff, and increasingly some members of humanity started to
Speaker 3: lie about some facts, to bend some truths for agendas
Speaker 3: of their own. And it didn't start out, it didn't
Speaker 3: start out as a purposeful conspiracy. There was no malevolence.
Speaker 3: I mean, we talk about this some ridiculous history. We've
Speaker 3: talked about it here. Back in the day, people disagreed
Speaker 3: about what we consider objective facts at this point. And
Speaker 3: they weren't stupid, they weren't evil. They just didn't have
Speaker 3: access to the same kind of information we have access
Speaker 3: to today.
Speaker 4: You mean, like in terms of religious explanations for history
Speaker 4: and religious explanations for the way the world works.
Speaker 3: Yeah, man like, And that might be a hot take
Speaker 3: for some folks, but let's explore it together. Imagine way
Speaker 3: way back, thousands of years ago, just hypothetical tribes. There's
Speaker 3: a tribe in one part of the world, say they're
Speaker 3: way up in the mountains. They have a completely different
Speaker 3: understanding of the past than another tribe hundreds of miles
Speaker 3: away in the plains in the valleys. To your point,
Speaker 3: they have very different religious beliefs, different socioeconomic practices. And
Speaker 3: imagine now they meet for the first time. This is
Speaker 3: for them, this is like meeting aliens, and they're trying
Speaker 3: to communicate, right, they have their best intentions. They're telling
Speaker 3: each other the fundamental, inarguable truth of the world as
Speaker 3: they see it. And each person in that conversation, each
Speaker 3: side they think the other one is crazy. Yeah, of course,
Speaker 3: there are lots of gods. The sun is the main god.
Speaker 3: People always came from mud mixed with water, and the
Speaker 3: other guys like you, ding bat. Yeah, sure, the sun
Speaker 3: is a god, it is not the main, dude, by
Speaker 3: any stretch. And if you don't know that you come
Speaker 3: from corn, then you must not be human. As a
Speaker 3: matter of fact, this lake belongs to us, now wow.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, well, And then imagine that escalates into those
Speaker 2: two tribes fighting and essentially obliterating each other. Right, so
Speaker 2: there's not much left of either one. Then imagine, you know,
Speaker 2: an historian or an anthropologist or somebody stumbles upon this scene,
Speaker 2: let's say a thousand years later, maybe just one hundred
Speaker 2: years later, and sees what's left on that battlefield, what's
Speaker 2: left of the houses, the writing that's in the houses,
Speaker 2: and you know, then has to interpret what happened because
Speaker 2: nobody's there to say, oh, this group and this group
Speaker 2: they disagreed over some stuff and they all died. The
Speaker 2: historian or the anthropologist has to make stuff up basically
Speaker 2: or interpret the signs, read the tea leaves that are there,
Speaker 2: and also is applying their own understanding of the world
Speaker 2: to that situation.
Speaker 3: Right, absolutely well put, because then and where these are
Speaker 3: all hypotheticals. But then imagine in that case, the historian
Speaker 3: looking into this or the archaeologists looking into this, they say, well,
Speaker 3: I study arrowheads, and so my paper is going to
Speaker 3: be about the tremendous role that arrowheads played in both
Speaker 3: of these civilizations. Now that's not wrong, but that might
Speaker 3: be making the wrong thing the main character. If that
Speaker 3: makes sense. Sure, so it happens, and it happens again
Speaker 3: with good intentions. Histories not set in stone as we record.
Speaker 3: It's true, governments have suppressed archaeological digs in the past.
Speaker 3: Humanity has lost entire cities. Concepts like phantom time still
Speaker 3: get a lot of attention, which I absolutely love.
Speaker 2: You're living in the seventeen hundreds right now. I saw
Speaker 2: that on Instagram's reels like yesterday.
Speaker 4: Wasn't that in the plot of an m Night Shaymalan
Speaker 4: movie too? Or maybe that was a little different.
Speaker 3: It's village similar. Yeah, I like the village.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's fine. And I also liked his new one,
Speaker 5: The What the Cabin at the End of the World.
Speaker 3: I preferred the book much more like the I think
Speaker 3: the film missed some things.
Speaker 4: It sort of romanticized some things and did a little
Speaker 4: bit of an easier to digest ending but by Paul Tremblay,
Speaker 4: who apparently listens to the show and reposted a video
Speaker 4: that we we posted about one of his books, which
Speaker 4: was very sweet. I wanted to mention too, Ben, how
Speaker 4: do you feel that this figures into like and I
Speaker 4: know we'll probably get into this in terms of the
Speaker 4: history of it, like you know, the South, the perspective
Speaker 4: of you know, who won the war and all that.
Speaker 4: I mean, we know who won the war, but in
Speaker 4: certain parts of the country there are things in history
Speaker 4: books that might be soft pedaled a little bit. But
Speaker 4: what about that whole debate over like should evolution be
Speaker 4: included in science books? You know, in places that are
Speaker 4: maybe governed a little bit more by more religious kind
Speaker 4: of thinking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we're going to get to that in depth.
Speaker 3: I think, like the crazy thing here is, for thousands
Speaker 3: of thousands of years, people didn't really know what the
Speaker 3: heck was going on scientifically, so you had to have
Speaker 3: a cultural framework, usually religious. And now after millennia, human
Speaker 3: beings today do have a little bit better idea of
Speaker 3: what happened in the past, a little bit better and
Speaker 3: a big part of that success, yeah, it came from
Speaker 3: advances in technology. But I would pause it to your
Speaker 3: question that perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle
Speaker 3: was the removal of religion and ideology from the realm
Speaker 3: of science. Now, all of a sudden, you don't have
Speaker 3: to bend objective discoveries to suit the narratives of people
Speaker 3: or institutions and power. Now you can just tell the truth.
Speaker 3: You can be like, hey, Earth orbits the sun, and
Speaker 3: people won't execute you, which is a big win.
Speaker 4: People won't execute you just for like expressing that, right right, Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 5: But isn't that interesting, though, Ben?
Speaker 4: I mean, I think it goes without saying that We've
Speaker 4: talked about it a lot, that that kind of perspective.
Speaker 4: Just speaking it into the world is such a threat
Speaker 4: to the powers that be, you know, in a time
Speaker 4: where we were living, you know, in a heliocentric view
Speaker 4: of the world or whatever, or like flat Earth or whatever.
Speaker 4: I like, when someone breaks those norms and speaks out
Speaker 4: and has credibility behind them, that is dangerous.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's weird. It makes me guys. I just recently
Speaker 2: watched the twenty sixteen movie Arrival.
Speaker 5: Academy very very good, yea beautiful.
Speaker 2: Super good. And I'm gonna throw a spoiler in right here,
Speaker 2: So if you have not seen the movie Arrival, do
Speaker 2: yourself a favor and skip forward fifteen seconds. That movie
Speaker 2: is amazing because in the end, the weapon that the
Speaker 2: extraterrestrials are attempting to give to humanity is a language,
Speaker 2: a language that allows the mind whoever can wield that
Speaker 2: language to see time differently, right, And so it's literally
Speaker 2: I'm just thinking. The reason I'm thinking about this is
Speaker 2: just language as a weapon when wielded. When when you
Speaker 2: use history as your like medium, or I don't know
Speaker 2: your battle your battlefield, I.
Speaker 5: Guess this, Felu. No, No, you're right, you're right.
Speaker 2: It just feels like that. I don't know, I don't
Speaker 2: know why I got one of those visions. Amy Adams
Speaker 2: gets visions right.
Speaker 6: You hit it right in the head.
Speaker 4: I mean, that is exactly what that movie is trying
Speaker 4: to express. I think, is that the biggest, the greatest
Speaker 4: weapon of all can be language. There's even like a
Speaker 4: dumb money Python sketch about like this weaponized joke that's
Speaker 4: so funny that at any time it's used, it kills
Speaker 4: anyone that hears it, and they have to like keep
Speaker 4: it in parts, and one time accidentally someone got both
Speaker 4: parts and it killed a whole room of generals or whatever.
Speaker 4: I just think that's great satire, and you know, and
Speaker 4: the Villanov movie is just taking that to the next
Speaker 4: level and making it about like time and space and
Speaker 4: our place in the universe.
Speaker 3: And without sounding like a broken record. The short story
Speaker 3: it's based on is also really good, and the Arrival
Speaker 3: is really faithful adaptation of it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think in a previous episode we may mention that
Speaker 3: language is technology. Language is one of the oldest technologies,
Speaker 3: quite possibly predating fire right, which is still pretty popular.
Speaker 3: So our idea is that you don't ideally you no
Speaker 3: longer have to bend the truth. You no longer have
Speaker 3: to dilute the objective veracity of a thing to please
Speaker 3: a power structure, or do you The question tonight is
Speaker 3: could powerful people or institutions in the present day, could
Speaker 3: they control narratives such that they alter the public's understanding
Speaker 3: of history? And if they are doing that, if that
Speaker 3: is the case, then why at this point maybe we
Speaker 3: pause for a word from our sponsors and get into
Speaker 3: some deep water that will be edited years later. Here's
Speaker 3: where it gets crazy. Okay, so what do you think?
Speaker 3: And people still rewrite the past.
Speaker 6: It's happening all the time before our very eyes.
Speaker 4: People rewrite last week, people rewrite yesterday. It's it's it's rhetoric.
Speaker 4: It's absolutely happening now more than ever, and it's easier
Speaker 4: to do because of the Internet. And people just kind
Speaker 4: of believe the take that they see when they see it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I In writing for The New York Times, Max
Speaker 2: Fisher back in January of this year, he talked about
Speaker 2: right now, there are a bunch of leaders, both autocratic
Speaker 2: and democratic alike, who are attempting to shift narratives in
Speaker 2: the public sphere of actual historical events right to and
Speaker 2: they're doing this to benefit themselves, whether it's in an
Speaker 2: election or whether it's in you know, keeping their own
Speaker 2: power in a country. And it's happening more and more
Speaker 2: and more, and it seems to be more and more effective,
Speaker 2: you know, at a way to sway a populace.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah. And then go to this this real
Speaker 3: banger of a scholarly paper called Power, Freedom and the
Speaker 3: Censorship of History, which aligns with the New York Times
Speaker 3: article you side of Matt. It's by a guy named
Speaker 3: Professor Antune Debates from the Netherlands. And this guy also says,
Speaker 3: you know, you can't be too precious about your current
Speaker 3: ideological identifications because quote censorship of history has been practiced
Speaker 3: in all modes, genres, fields, categories, and periods of history,
Speaker 3: and in all countries. To begin with, it ranges over
Speaker 3: all modes of the historiographical operation. All right, Well, lost
Speaker 3: the translation at the end, but there's the end.
Speaker 2: Well, it's true that that guy I mentioned earlier who
Speaker 2: wrote a book, James M. Banner Junior. One of the
Speaker 2: first points he makes in his book and he wrote
Speaker 2: a really great piece you can find right now for
Speaker 2: the National Endowment for the Humanities he talks about the
Speaker 2: first historical revisionism literally occurred the first time a couple
Speaker 2: of guys in ancient Greece got around to figure out
Speaker 2: what history is and like basically define it and change
Speaker 2: just the past, you know, things that happened, to the
Speaker 2: stories of the things that happened.
Speaker 3: It was wild man. Oh, that must have been such
Speaker 3: a time being in historian back then, because you could
Speaker 3: just say I heard about it, and you know, none
Speaker 3: of you reading this are going to leave thirty miles
Speaker 3: from where you were born. So this is what a
Speaker 3: hippo looks like, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and this is my interpretation of what is
Speaker 2: actually in the Iliad and the historical events surrounding the
Speaker 2: myth that is that thing, Right.
Speaker 4: Ben, you brought a really incredible book that I'd heard
Speaker 4: talked about for years but it never actually seen it
Speaker 4: to one of these video shoots we did the other day,
Speaker 4: the Codex Sarafineous. I believe it's called right, yeah, you're.
Speaker 2: A weird pronunciation, Sarah.
Speaker 4: Point is it's this completely legit looking tomb of presumably history, science, drawings.
Speaker 6: All of this, but it's but it's all Bolt.
Speaker 5: Beautiful Bolt it's all art man, it's.
Speaker 4: But my point is, like I think there was a
Speaker 4: time even where some people were like the thought it
Speaker 4: was some kind of artifact or whatever.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: I don't know if that was the intent, like Blair
Speaker 4: witch marketing style or whatever, but I think the point
Speaker 4: is with any kind of retelling, if you say it
Speaker 4: with enough authority, and you say it enough times and
Speaker 4: you make it feel legitimate enough enough people are gonna
Speaker 4: believe it. They're gonna repeat it, sure, and then then
Speaker 4: it's just gonna keep carrying on. And then you have
Speaker 4: these conflicting narratives. But now, because it's so easy to
Speaker 4: proliferate false narratives, there's so many one of them floating
Speaker 4: out around there, and you really have to do your
Speaker 4: due diligence to figure out which one's at least somewhat
Speaker 4: close to the truth.
Speaker 3: And that is quickly becoming a full time profession. This
Speaker 3: paper from eight, just like the Banner junior book that
Speaker 3: you're citing there, met this paper is pretty fascinating because
Speaker 3: it's like an insult comic. It's no holds barred, it's
Speaker 3: not married to any particular political ideology. This guy looks
Speaker 3: at different regimes power structures to determine what people are
Speaker 3: allowed to know about their past. And of course we
Speaker 3: all know dictators, autocrats, demagogues, they're going to be big,
Speaker 3: big fans of censorship and control. But we cannot make
Speaker 3: the mistake in assuming that democracies are necessarily better. He
Speaker 3: breaks down the process of how this stuff happens. And
Speaker 3: these are two rough categories. There's pre censorship, which is
Speaker 3: one of the Well, that's the one. I think that's
Speaker 3: the sleeper hit. Maybe we describe what we mean by
Speaker 3: pre censorship.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'll tell you what the in my head, what
Speaker 2: I see the movie Good Morning Vietnam, And there are
Speaker 2: twins that work in the censorship room where any and
Speaker 2: all intel that's coming into the radio station or the
Speaker 2: base where the radio station is. They decide what can
Speaker 2: or cannot be told right as news. And for me,
Speaker 2: that's true, that's all real. I mean, it's based on
Speaker 2: real events. Yeah, I mean it's a it's a telling.
Speaker 2: It's historical revisionism about the actual people like Adrian Cronauer.
Speaker 2: But still what I'm what I mean is I see
Speaker 2: those two guys in my head, like deciding what can
Speaker 2: go out there. But I guess that's just censorship. What
Speaker 2: is pre censorship?
Speaker 4: That's more like having your work pre tweaked before it
Speaker 4: even is released. It's not banning books. It's augmenting things
Speaker 4: like manuscripts or like a press releases or public statements.
Speaker 5: And this really happens. We know, this happens, you know,
Speaker 5: I mean less so with books.
Speaker 4: But you might have a situation where you're writing a
Speaker 4: tell all and you've got some source and it's a
Speaker 4: real risk to include that source in a certain way.
Speaker 4: So your public might be pre censoring.
Speaker 5: Some of that.
Speaker 4: But that's not quite the same, But that is an
Speaker 4: example that could happen in real life.
Speaker 3: No, I think it's very much the same, you know,
Speaker 3: because pre censorship, when successful, is invisible to the public.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 3: It's also not just cutting off at the past a
Speaker 3: paper written before it publishes, also cutting off at the
Speaker 3: past a direction of research. These are very interesting ideas,
Speaker 3: but I am under the impression you would like to
Speaker 3: continue your career at the university.
Speaker 2: So we're really that your research, but we are going
Speaker 2: to take that research pop it over here to our
Speaker 2: Darbale I mean our secret government.
Speaker 3: Vintion Secrecy Act. Yeah, cough cough. So this and like
Speaker 3: you said, it gets tweaked. Things are kept secret, maybe
Speaker 3: they're destroyed, maybe the authors are threatened. That makes total
Speaker 3: sense for dictatorships. But also to that point you made
Speaker 3: before anybody in the US gets on our high horse
Speaker 3: about this, we have to remember that if you're a
Speaker 3: former intelligence agent in the United States, you have to
Speaker 3: jump through a lot of hoops before you make a
Speaker 3: public statement, before you publish a book, like Jake Hanrahan said,
Speaker 3: or Pal Jake, I don't know if those people really retire,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean. So then there's the other one. Obviously,
Speaker 3: this is the more famous of the two. Post censorship.
Speaker 3: Something comes out, it gets banned because it's either it's
Speaker 3: dangerous for some reason, whether that's threatening the status quo,
Speaker 3: whether that is putting a group of people in a
Speaker 3: community at risk, you know, or it might just be changed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think about just restricting access to certain websites
Speaker 2: or search key terms or you know, things that you
Speaker 2: could do to control the Internet nowadays as a way
Speaker 2: to take part in post censorship.
Speaker 4: Or like what happened with that Goofy seth Rogen movie
Speaker 4: where they had the you know, Kim jong Il's face
Speaker 4: being melted off. Remember, there was some presensorship involved in
Speaker 4: that because they didn't want it to cause an international incident.
Speaker 4: But then the movie ended up being just so much
Speaker 4: less remarkable and offensive than anyone might have thought. And
Speaker 4: and then it got more boost probably from all the
Speaker 4: talk of censorship than about anything that was actually in
Speaker 4: the movie.
Speaker 2: But there was post censorship too, right, Like.
Speaker 4: There was, but maybe I'm misremembering, but I do feel
Speaker 4: like there was some demand to like, you know, censor
Speaker 4: what was in there before it came out. And also,
Speaker 4: by the way, I mean, we know this happens all
Speaker 4: the time in other countries with American films, like I believe,
Speaker 4: like in the Barbie movie, there's a map that was
Speaker 4: showing some ben you're nodding, I think, you know, you know,
Speaker 4: this is the geopolitical thing, but it was like a
Speaker 4: territory that was in dispute Vietnam. Perhaps it was showing
Speaker 4: this thing, this body of land as part of a
Speaker 4: country that that was in dispute or something like that.
Speaker 4: And to that point, they were like, you know, enraged,
Speaker 4: and they insisted they wouldn't release it unless that was
Speaker 4: taken out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the map controversies there. There's also a standing policy,
Speaker 3: going back to our episode on the Chinese film industry,
Speaker 3: there's a standing policy not to depict other countries' landmarks
Speaker 3: or there are a lot of rules around it. So
Speaker 3: if the statue of liberty is in a film, then
Speaker 3: that gets worked around.
Speaker 5: Don't they have a policy against ghosts? Yes? Two? Is
Speaker 5: that a thing that I means? Okay, that's wild? Any
Speaker 5: more specific?
Speaker 3: Uh, that's in the in the episode. What we talk
Speaker 3: about there is sort of their reasoning behind these things. Right,
Speaker 3: we'd have to get back into it, but if you're
Speaker 3: interested in learning more, please do check out our episode
Speaker 3: on the Chinese film industry. It's a eye opening and
Speaker 3: here's hoping we can still clear customs.
Speaker 2: By the way, if you're interested in that Barbie map thing,
Speaker 2: look up nine dash line. That is a very specific thing.
Speaker 3: And it was Vietnam who bannit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, apparently the movie Crimson Peak didn't get released in
Speaker 4: China because it had too many spooky ghosts in it,
Speaker 4: and like Ghostbusters, never got released in China. It's a
Speaker 4: long standing party line, the communist party line not to depict.
Speaker 4: I think it must have to do with ancestor worship
Speaker 4: kind of stuff that they.
Speaker 3: Say it's disrespectful, Yeah, ancestor warship. And then tamping down
Speaker 3: religion in favor of atheism, because what was it? Was
Speaker 3: it old old Mao. Uncle Mao said that religion is
Speaker 3: opiate for the masses, or his administration did. So if
Speaker 3: if something is supernatural that see, that might be a
Speaker 3: little too close to the line of religion. But anyway,
Speaker 3: this this kind of stuff post censorship, pre censorship, it
Speaker 3: makes sense for dictators.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: And I do want to point out poor Ghostbusters too.
Speaker 3: It's an amazing film, but it has two strikes against it.
Speaker 3: First it's got ghost and then spoilers. The statue of
Speaker 3: liberty plays a huge role. Oh no, how is the
Speaker 3: policy on ooze okay? With I think they're I think
Speaker 3: they're fine with Oo's. I think they're Ooh's neutral. So
Speaker 3: here's the way to put it. And I was up
Speaker 3: late when I was thinking of this, so it might
Speaker 3: wax a little poetic. But if you were a dick
Speaker 3: natorial regime, then propaganda is kind of your loud gun
Speaker 3: and censorship is your knife. It's silent, but they are
Speaker 3: both dangerous and they're both used to keep people in line.
Speaker 3: And while you might not see academics popping Kalishnikov's or
Speaker 3: aks in the trenches, make no mistake, they are always
Speaker 3: going to be some of the first people targeted in
Speaker 3: a coup, in a military coup, especially for good reason,
Speaker 3: along with journalists, along with authors. I mean, shout out
Speaker 3: to the numerous If you don't think nerds can throw down,
Speaker 3: shout out to the numerous Central and Latin American academics
Speaker 3: who became revolutionaries to fight fascism and to fight honestly,
Speaker 3: a lot of US supported forces. You don't hear their
Speaker 3: stories often because those are, to quote Al Gore inconvenient truths.
Speaker 3: He help, I'm being suppressed exactly.
Speaker 2: We did a lot of study on Fidel Castro up
Speaker 2: a while ago, but honestly, I didn't learn a ton
Speaker 2: about his personal history, and that's just making me think
Speaker 2: I want to learn more about that and learn more
Speaker 2: about FARK and some of these other groups. It's like
Speaker 2: the history of the individual leaders because I do not
Speaker 2: know that stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, well, I wish luck on your journey, Matt.
Speaker 3: They're not perfect people, oh.
Speaker 2: Who is right? But again, like there's not a single
Speaker 2: human being on this planet. It's perfect. Sorry, that's how
Speaker 2: we're that's how we're born.
Speaker 6: It was a perfect phone call.
Speaker 4: It was.
Speaker 1: Me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, mister Rogers probably like haunted somewhat in traffic.
Speaker 3: So I guess because we all got to aim for something.
Speaker 3: We'll see if the Rico lass stands up now that
Speaker 3: itself is being eroded.
Speaker 4: So of your theory there, but maybe not the time,
Speaker 4: but immediately interesting what better time.
Speaker 5: I mean, just a quick sidebar. There's a Rico case
Speaker 5: being against a lot.
Speaker 4: Of the opposition to this whole cop city movement here
Speaker 4: in Atlanta, and it's I don't even understand how they're
Speaker 4: using it, but.
Speaker 3: There it's a clearly egregious use of Rico law. To
Speaker 3: be absolutely transparent about this, I think we can speak
Speaker 3: as a unified show here we support the stop cop
Speaker 3: City movement. Militarization of police has led to many, many
Speaker 3: things in the past, and none of those things have
Speaker 3: been good.
Speaker 4: That's what's kind off we're talking about here too, that
Speaker 4: that militarizerization of the police is what allows nineteen eighty
Speaker 4: four totalitarian type situations to flourish. And what's happening is
Speaker 4: these people are being targeted literally for spreading information, for
Speaker 4: trying to protest a thing, for you know, activating people
Speaker 4: resigning a petition. So Ben's theory is, though that they're
Speaker 4: using this, that it may well be such an egregious
Speaker 4: misuse that another very prominent use of RICO law might
Speaker 4: be called into.
Speaker 3: Ques right erode the credibility of RICO and we'll see
Speaker 3: how that works out. Look forward to your thoughts on that.
Speaker 3: Just objectively would that work anyway? There are tons of
Speaker 3: examples of people controlling history as we record. To your point, Matt,
Speaker 3: ask Cuba what they think led to those US embargoes,
Speaker 3: you know, get their side of the story. Read the
Speaker 3: North Korean version of what the US calls the Korean War.
Speaker 3: In DPRK they call it the Fatherland Liberation War. So
Speaker 3: you can already see there's some dividing narratives. You'll hear
Speaker 3: a very different version of that than the one you
Speaker 3: hear in South Korea. Are okay or the or the
Speaker 3: rest of the world. And to that question all about
Speaker 3: the Civil War, this trend applies to pretty much any
Speaker 3: war in history then and tonight. That's why we did
Speaker 3: that episode on textbooks.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, that's why in Britain the Revolutionary War is
Speaker 2: titled the Peasant Uprising the pesky Peasants seventeen hundreds.
Speaker 4: So inconvenient those peasants with their needs for bread and water,
Speaker 4: ab sustenance and shelter.
Speaker 3: Ough, And it goes so small too. Just to light
Speaker 3: in the mood a little bit, you can go to
Speaker 3: almost any historical article about the Middle East ernie, oh
Speaker 3: god forbid, any geopolitical article about the Middle East. You
Speaker 3: can go to the Wikipedia entry and click on the
Speaker 3: talk tab and just bring some popcorn because people are
Speaker 3: still fighting over that. And then even it goes even
Speaker 3: unto food, because food is a huge part of culture.
Speaker 3: Ask people who invented what particular dish? Who can claim hummus?
Speaker 3: Who is the first to knock that lemon in those
Speaker 3: chickpeas together?
Speaker 4: Oh man, I can't remember who it was, but it
Speaker 4: was somebody like a food historian, or maybe it was
Speaker 4: literally just like a chef on the Splendid Table or
Speaker 4: Milk Street or one of those NPR shows, and they
Speaker 4: were talking about that exact thing, about how like there
Speaker 4: it's impossible because these things are part of the oral tradition.
Speaker 4: They're carried around you know, and they're they're made, they're
Speaker 4: improved and changed and by the time it gets to
Speaker 4: the final form, like whatever that even is. You know,
Speaker 4: no one knows who actually really truly invented the thing.
Speaker 5: Not to mention like that.
Speaker 4: You know, chicken tika masala is the national dish of
Speaker 4: the UK.
Speaker 3: That's just that's freaking imperialism.
Speaker 2: It's so good to me. Well, that makes me think.
Speaker 3: Of like who won colonialism. I was talking with a
Speaker 3: I was talking with an Indian American friend of mine
Speaker 3: about this. She was in town recently, and uh, and
Speaker 3: you know, we had to point it out. She spent
Speaker 3: some time in the UK as well. We had to
Speaker 3: point out, what does it say about regional British cuisine
Speaker 3: that your national dish is from India? You know what
Speaker 3: I mean. It's it's a statement, no offense. One of
Speaker 3: my favorite restaurants does kind of reimagine British cuisine, Saint
Speaker 3: John's out in London.
Speaker 5: Someone imagining it kind of terrible on itself.
Speaker 3: Shout out to Fergus Henderson. Also, he's an awesome writer.
Speaker 2: You can either have chicken tacon masala or spotted dick
Speaker 2: you chuse, Yeah, I think.
Speaker 3: They shot themselves in the foot a little bit with
Speaker 3: the names you know what I mean, barley water, what
Speaker 3: did I do wrong? Bangers and or mash So another
Speaker 3: example would be palm free, don't call them French fries
Speaker 3: in Belgium. And these things might seem innocuous, but it
Speaker 3: goes much much further into much more dangerous waters of
Speaker 3: cultural erasure. Humans have only ever been the sum of
Speaker 3: the stories they tell themselves, and as a result, those
Speaker 3: stories are extremely important. They're mission critical to any government
Speaker 3: from the ancient past to the modern day. A government
Speaker 3: is just made up of humans so far, and so
Speaker 3: also in a large part, it is a story it
Speaker 3: tells its collective self. Shout out to the American dream, right,
Speaker 3: That's one of the most popular narratives around here. And
Speaker 3: this makes us think about the historical trends. We've only
Speaker 3: name checked a few examples, but there are many, many, many,
Speaker 3: many other examples, virtually countless because this is so common,
Speaker 3: and why should we care? Why should we care? In
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three, we'll take a pause for a word
Speaker 3: from our sponsor and we'll tell you. And we have
Speaker 3: returned these examples, Like we said, they're part of a larger,
Speaker 3: sadly recurrent trend through all cultures, all civilizations, all time periods.
Speaker 3: No single country has gotten away clean. Everyone, every force
Speaker 3: at some point has told you a story that they
Speaker 3: prefer you to believe. And it used to be much simpler.
Speaker 3: You know, if you wanted to retroactively edit history, you
Speaker 3: just had to kill the people who were there when
Speaker 3: it happened, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, pretty simple, Just eradicate a bunch of people, or
Speaker 2: it's not maybe it's not that many people, maybe it's
Speaker 2: just one.
Speaker 3: And when the written word arrived, things got a little
Speaker 3: more complicated. You had to create a class system and
Speaker 3: restrict access to literacy, right, A priestly class, a noble class,
Speaker 3: a monastic class, or something like that. And the problem
Speaker 3: is that never works, because literacy is a cognitive virus.
Speaker 3: People will inevitably learn to read, and if they are
Speaker 3: prevented from learning the language of the in class, they'll
Speaker 3: find a workaround. They'll make something that they can.
Speaker 2: Understand, yeah, and use it as a weapon to fight back.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, you know you could talk about the Vulgate Bible,
Speaker 3: why that was controversial, right, or there are modern examples
Speaker 3: that we don't have to get into.
Speaker 2: But okay, well, maintaining how about maintaining a language in
Speaker 2: a like a smaller community or in an uprising, you
Speaker 2: know group, you maintain a specific language that you can
Speaker 2: communicate in that you know your oppressors or the person
Speaker 2: you're fighting against cannot speak or read.
Speaker 5: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a huge part of it, a barrier to access.
Speaker 3: And then let's say, you know, because literacy will inevitably
Speaker 3: arise in some form, that means books or something like
Speaker 3: books will begin to exist. So now it's complicated. You
Speaker 3: can't just kill the people. You have to somehow destroy
Speaker 3: the note in the books, so burn them, prevent them
Speaker 3: from being written, ban them, et cetera. And then at
Speaker 3: the same time you propagate the version of the truth
Speaker 3: that you want out there, like building an urban legend.
Speaker 5: It's exactly like that, Ben, I think that's spot on.
Speaker 4: It also makes me think of how another important technology
Speaker 4: I guess of warfare is cracking codes. You know, what
Speaker 4: was it the operation that actually won US World War One?
Speaker 3: I think it was touring cracking the Enigma codes, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because again there was they were you know, using language,
Speaker 4: using information, siloing information, and then transmitting it over publicly
Speaker 4: available channels, disguising it right, and then once you have
Speaker 4: that cipher, then you have the upper hand, you know,
Speaker 4: I mean, language in so many ways.
Speaker 5: Is such a weapon in and of itself.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think it's you know, not to belabor
Speaker 4: the point, but I just I find it fascinating.
Speaker 3: I think we all do agreed, agreed. So you've got
Speaker 3: you've got your state approved version of the truth. You're
Speaker 3: getting rid of any alternative or revisionist viewpoints, and you
Speaker 3: can reward the people who fall in line by not
Speaker 3: murdering them mainly. And so back when the average person
Speaker 3: lived and died within what around thirty miles of where
Speaker 3: they were born, they had very little chance of seeing
Speaker 3: the wider world unless they were a merchant, unless they
Speaker 3: were sent to war, or they went on a religious pilgrimage. Right,
Speaker 3: otherwise they're going to be pretty local. And this was
Speaker 3: a very this was a nearly full proof proposition. It
Speaker 3: was easier to change the past. There were fewer people
Speaker 3: and they had fewer avenues of access to knowledge. So
Speaker 3: now it wouldn't be crazy to assume that the dawn
Speaker 3: of the information age would end this grift. Right like now,
Speaker 3: everybody with a phone can read any.
Speaker 2: Yay, it's so weird. It's so weird. Okay, guys, I'm thinking,
Speaker 2: I don't want to politicize this, but just I want
Speaker 2: to use this as an example because I think it's
Speaker 2: pretty prescient. That same article that I meant I mentioned
Speaker 2: Max Fisher before writing for The New York Times. It's
Speaker 2: titled in a Race to shape the future, history is
Speaker 2: under new pressure, and he cites the January sixth thing
Speaker 2: and the election of current President Joe Biden as like
Speaker 2: one of these flashpoints where historical revisionism is like occurring
Speaker 2: in real time. Yes, where there are fact there are
Speaker 2: As an individual, you have to decide who to believe
Speaker 2: about what actually occurred, Like you have to make the
Speaker 2: decision to believe in something, and whichever one you believe
Speaker 2: is the objective truth for you, right, and everybody else
Speaker 2: is lying or has a motivation to tell you that lies.
Speaker 4: But doesn't it also depend on like your belief in
Speaker 4: the people's intent. I mean, we know that people broke
Speaker 4: into the Capitol, We know that people did some bad things.
Speaker 4: The question then becomes were they justified in doing that?
Speaker 4: Or were they acting as terrorists?
Speaker 2: Domestic terrorists because it goes back to was the election false, right,
Speaker 2: and it was it stolen? Or was there freed someone
Speaker 2: messing with it?
Speaker 5: Right? Terrorists?
Speaker 2: So I mean, but but we as individuals now face
Speaker 2: this in so many avenues, so many moments in history
Speaker 2: as we go along, Ben, you're talking about just like
Speaker 2: when you get to the age of the internet and
Speaker 2: you can read literally anything. We are now we're having
Speaker 2: to make a choice to believe everything. There is no
Speaker 2: ministry of truth. There is no like somebody who's telling
Speaker 2: the you know, humanity or an uber historian who's like, ah, yes,
Speaker 2: this is what this is the consensus we've all come
Speaker 2: to about what has happened and what has not happened, things.
Speaker 3: That are past, have passed or yet to come.
Speaker 4: And there's no like way to you know, we're talking
Speaker 4: about use of deep fake video for example, like what
Speaker 4: to even believe with your eyes and how can we
Speaker 4: get around that? There would have to be some sort
Speaker 4: of watermark or way to authenticate, you know, to to
Speaker 4: prove positive that what you're seeing is real footage. Such
Speaker 4: things do not exist for text and facts, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the only way that I will not assume something
Speaker 3: is a deep fake is if I see the person
Speaker 3: in the video choosing fire hydrants from a selection of
Speaker 3: nine pictures, right, because robots can't do that.
Speaker 4: But there's no way to attach any kind of authentication
Speaker 4: methods to truth because it's so much more complex than that.
Speaker 4: Like you can even say it, no, that's not a
Speaker 4: lie and believe it. And if you believe it enough
Speaker 4: and say it with enough authority, as far as you're concerned,
Speaker 4: it's not a lie. I think there are even arguments
Speaker 4: being made, you know, in terms of the charges against
Speaker 4: former President Trump, that if he really believed the election
Speaker 4: was stolen from him, then he didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker 4: It's about the nature of belief and objective truth, and
Speaker 4: it's becoming harder and harder to decide what is objectively.
Speaker 3: True right the so called post truth world. Here's the
Speaker 3: thing about the information age. Everybody got so excited, very
Speaker 3: few people read the fine print. The reality is that
Speaker 3: not all information is good, by which we mean not
Speaker 3: all information is created equal. People have not really changed
Speaker 3: in terms of motivation. I think that's what we're all
Speaker 3: three talking about here. You can see concerted efforts to
Speaker 3: rewrite history all around the world. Not just on the
Speaker 3: macro level. It's not just Russian propaganda. It's not just
Speaker 3: Ira and the KSA beefing over the history of Islam.
Speaker 3: And it's not just America's selling movies every summer about
Speaker 3: World War II. The micro level happens. You've seen it
Speaker 3: with your loved ones. They're telling themselves a narrative of
Speaker 3: the past. It's not even necessarily related to divisive political ideology.
Speaker 3: They just maybe they have a different memory of who
Speaker 3: broke the cookie jar in nineteen seventy two, Right, And
Speaker 3: they are ten toes down on that opinion because to
Speaker 3: them it is a fact and Uncle Roy is a flyer. Right,
Speaker 3: couldn't be right?
Speaker 5: This was Uncle Roy.
Speaker 3: Uncle Roy is the guy who broke the cookie to
Speaker 3: I don't know, poor family. I hope they work it
Speaker 3: out so that leads us to the future. Right, And
Speaker 3: we are on the cusp of witnessing I would pause
Speaker 3: it unprecedented events in the attempt to rewrite history. More
Speaker 3: and more people get their news from this global font
Speaker 3: the Internet. It's the oasis in the desert, right, and
Speaker 3: that means that there are tons of new tools that
Speaker 3: can be leveraged and are being leveraged to control any
Speaker 3: even narrative. I mean, think about the show over vaccines.
Speaker 3: It immediately became a thematic football from the big dogs
Speaker 3: of world powers. Right did Russia, China and the US
Speaker 3: when they made statements about other countries vaccination or COVID efforts?
Speaker 3: How much of their motivation was purely well intentioned and
Speaker 3: how much of their motivation was ulterior? Right, was propagandistic
Speaker 3: or some sort of hearts and minds attack? Fortunately, we
Speaker 3: have to ask those questions. And again we've got to think.
Speaker 3: Local Florida just cracked down on how black history is
Speaker 3: taught in public colleges and universities. And remember the academics
Speaker 3: were always the first ones targeted, just like the priests
Speaker 3: thousands of years back.
Speaker 4: So yeah, let's take a minute to talk about this law.
Speaker 4: I think it's a great example of what we're talking
Speaker 4: about here. SB two sixty six forbids teachers to teach
Speaker 4: that systematic racism is quote inherent in.
Speaker 5: The institutions of the United States.
Speaker 4: They also can't teach that it was designed to quote
Speaker 4: maintain social, political, and economic inequities. Now this is interesting
Speaker 4: to me because that is again an example of how
Speaker 4: do you interpret like some people might argue that we've
Speaker 4: gotten past that, that it is no longer that. Sure
Speaker 4: it was established when this was a thing, and these
Speaker 4: laws were written with these things in mind, but that
Speaker 4: as a country we've moved past that we're living in
Speaker 4: a post racial society. So you could argue from a
Speaker 4: law making level that to teach that systematic racism is
Speaker 4: inherent in the institutions of the United States is false
Speaker 4: because that's making a judgment saying that we have failed
Speaker 4: in trying to.
Speaker 5: Shed these mistakes of the past.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's well put. And again, of course people are
Speaker 3: going to be sensitive about this because there is a
Speaker 3: primal identification for some people that can feel like an
Speaker 3: attack to tell ugly truth about history and less this
Speaker 3: sound like partisan winging. Got to shout out these two
Speaker 3: great historians who aree this article for the Conversation, professors
Speaker 3: Rochelle and Davis and Eileen Kin. They said, look, we're professors.
Speaker 3: We teach modern history of the Middle East and Eastern Europe,
Speaker 3: so not even Florida. They're not even teaching Florida Floridian history.
Speaker 3: They said, we know even democratically elected governments will suppress
Speaker 3: histories of their own nations that don't fit their ideology totally. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and they go on. It is very much worth reading,
Speaker 3: you know, even if you don't live in Florida, because
Speaker 3: the point they're making is control of the past has
Speaker 3: never been the sole domain of dictatorships. It's not about
Speaker 3: right or left ideologies. It never has been controlling the past.
Speaker 3: Basically gas lighting the public to make them more docile.
Speaker 3: It's an age old practice because it works just like
Speaker 3: assassination or excuse me, targeted killing. Whatever the thing is now.
Speaker 2: Guys, I'm jumping back to Max Fisher one more time.
Speaker 2: He is saying the same thing talking about this is
Speaker 2: what he's saying. I'm going to give you a quote
Speaker 2: from him. The goals are sweeping to re engineer society,
Speaker 2: starting at its most basic understanding of its collective heritage.
Speaker 2: It's collective heritage, right, So it's exactly what you're talking about, Ben,
Speaker 2: the idea of needing to have your history reflect in
Speaker 2: the identity that you feel, reflect feeling of identity rather
Speaker 2: than actual identity.
Speaker 3: Right to include people. The American experiment has done something
Speaker 3: quite impressive, and not a lot of other countries have
Speaker 3: been successful throughout history. In this maybe the Roman Empire,
Speaker 3: maybe the Ottomans, but not really the United States. The
Speaker 3: proposal on paper was you were unified not by your biology,
Speaker 3: not by your geography necessarily, not by your religion, your creed, whatever.
Speaker 3: You are instead unified by the concept of being part
Speaker 3: of this story, this story called the United States. And
Speaker 3: that's a tall order. It's pretty impressive. I don't know
Speaker 3: if you could pull it off today, if i'm If
Speaker 3: I'm being honest, it's.
Speaker 2: More than a modest proposal, you know what I mean,
Speaker 2: You're going to start talking about eating babies there.
Speaker 3: I don't know if we're at that point. I hope not.
Speaker 3: So there's another way to think about this. If you
Speaker 3: are editing the past to control a populace, and if
Speaker 3: governments and people are to arch degree just the stories
Speaker 3: they tell themselves. And when you do this, you're not
Speaker 3: killing a single person, you're killing an entire version of
Speaker 3: the past, and you're replacing it with a doppelganger, right,
Speaker 3: with a change link that is just so, And it's
Speaker 3: usually going to be a story where in your group
Speaker 3: for some reason looks like the hero. Why would you
Speaker 3: do this? You do this to justify the current power structure,
Speaker 3: or you do it to rationalize something you're about to
Speaker 3: do or something.
Speaker 5: You just did.
Speaker 3: We blew up, yeah, we blew up. You know this
Speaker 3: clearly civilian gathering and insert country here, but we did
Speaker 3: it because of insert reasons.
Speaker 4: Do you guys might if I read a quick quote
Speaker 4: from a song that's just been basing my brain, please,
Speaker 4: it's I think it's a Elvis Costello song is the
Speaker 4: first track off of his nineteen eighty two album Imperial Bedroom.
Speaker 5: It's called Beyond Belief.
Speaker 4: And I just think this is some incredible wordplay, and
Speaker 4: it is kind of sums up some of the stuff
Speaker 4: to me, at least a little bit. History repeats, the
Speaker 4: old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats, keep your
Speaker 4: finger on important issues with crocodile tears and a pocket
Speaker 4: full of tissues. I'm just the oily slick on the
Speaker 4: wind up world of the nervous tick in a very
Speaker 4: fashionable hovel. It kind of makes me weep. It's so
Speaker 4: good like the wordplay. Man, I was gonna tell you.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna be honest with you.
Speaker 3: He's my second favorite Elvis, my first favorite el No
Speaker 3: My first favorite Elvis is a guy in a remote
Speaker 3: town in East Tennessee.
Speaker 5: Cool.
Speaker 3: They got weird names. But yeah, that's I think that's
Speaker 3: quite apropos nol. I think that's a really good thing
Speaker 3: for us to take with us because the results are in.
Speaker 3: It is true, the democratization of information and technology, it
Speaker 3: could have led to a better, more universally honest interpretation
Speaker 3: of the past, but it didn't. There's a paradox. Feels
Speaker 3: like there are more voices out there, but not maybe
Speaker 3: not as many as we'd like to think. It's the
Speaker 3: grocery store paradox. That's what I would call it. We
Speaker 3: talked about it before. Right, you go to a grocery store.
Speaker 3: You're in the cereal aisle. It looks like there are
Speaker 3: thirty different kinds of cereal.
Speaker 4: All the choices. We have, the choice information. We must
Speaker 4: be smarter, right, Yeah, this is.
Speaker 3: The reason why Matt says, I insist on pretending to
Speaker 3: like Raisin Brand.
Speaker 5: I love Raising Brand. Dude, are you serious? Out of town?
Speaker 5: I love it?
Speaker 4: Mean, guy, you chase it with some grape nuts?
Speaker 5: Really?
Speaker 2: Do you have a box of just the original r
Speaker 2: B downstairs scoops? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Is it two?
Speaker 2: Scoops always scoops to scoop.
Speaker 6: First of all, I want to I want a number.
Speaker 6: I want to number you.
Speaker 2: They show you on the box, there's a here's a scoop,
Speaker 2: here's another.
Speaker 3: B free. But the idea here, even though it seems
Speaker 3: as small as your grocery store, those serial brands are
Speaker 3: ultimately owned by a much smaller handful of holding companies.
Speaker 3: And that's kind of what happens with the Internet. And
Speaker 3: they keep those brands alive from the grocery store to
Speaker 3: the Internet because they know you dig the illusion of choice.
Speaker 3: People are sensitive to the stories told about themselves. To
Speaker 3: your point, Matt, people want to feel that they are
Speaker 3: choosing the correct narrative, that they are doing so for
Speaker 3: objective reasons. History is not just riddled with conspiracy. It's
Speaker 3: chock full of some profoundly disgusting truths, way more than
Speaker 3: two scoops. And the question is similar to that old
Speaker 3: story from Plato and the allegory of the Cave. It's
Speaker 3: the choice in the matrix. Do you want to know
Speaker 3: what really happened? Or do you prefer the tales told
Speaker 3: to you by the authorities.
Speaker 4: Guys, do you think there's a meme opportunity and like photoshopping,
Speaker 4: like a little plastic container of playto but having it
Speaker 4: have plato on it. I'm trying to think of that. That
Speaker 4: has to be an additional twist. Enough.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good starting point at point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let us know what you think if there's a
Speaker 4: good way to push that into the over the top
Speaker 4: and the mimisphere.
Speaker 3: And while you're thinking about that, let's end tonight's journey
Speaker 3: with this. We talked a little bit about modern politics.
Speaker 3: Modern politics are ephemeral, to be quite honest with you,
Speaker 3: regardless of religion, regardless of creed, personal ideological leanings, and
Speaker 3: so on, we have to ask ourselves, doesn't everyone at
Speaker 3: least deserve a choice matrix style between the truth and
Speaker 3: convenient lies. Shouldn't every human being, by the virtue of
Speaker 3: their humanity, be able to choose for themselves between an
Speaker 3: ugly truth and you know, a smoothed up deception.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 2: It sounds nice, right, It sounds nice that we should
Speaker 2: be able to have that. I just don't think I
Speaker 2: don't think every and I don't think anybody's ever going
Speaker 2: to get that.
Speaker 6: I think we're no one you're going to agree on
Speaker 6: what it is.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, yeah, yeah, Oh my god, you got to
Speaker 2: get on the same page to figure that out.
Speaker 4: First, totally, God, to weigh the things. I mean again,
Speaker 4: that's just you started it off so beautifully.
Speaker 5: Ben.
Speaker 4: It's just the nature of discourse. It's the nature of
Speaker 4: history as a storytelling mechanism. It is a storytelling enterprise.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: It's not the same as science. You're not gathering data
Speaker 4: per se. You're not gathering vials of things and analyzing them.
Speaker 4: It's all about context. It's all about the eye of
Speaker 4: the beholder.
Speaker 3: It's I thought that was a Dungeons and Dragons reference
Speaker 3: for just the second, nol and I want to thank
Speaker 3: you for that.
Speaker 5: I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2: That is definitely a reference to a beholder.
Speaker 6: Come come on, dude, the eye of the beholder. Yeah,
Speaker 6: the single eyes is super cool.
Speaker 2: Of the beholder.
Speaker 5: We did a super cool reference.
Speaker 2: Good. It's got really powerful magic. Be careful of it.
Speaker 2: Can I give a quote from a UC Berkeley's associate
Speaker 2: professor named Andrew Little quote, We want to believe. We
Speaker 2: want to believe that we are capable and decent, and
Speaker 2: that our friends and our favorite relatives share the same
Speaker 2: traits and that the groups we belong to are on
Speaker 2: the right side of conflicts. And that's just that's the
Speaker 2: quote here. So if there is a narrative being sold
Speaker 2: to us, whether it's about the future, about what's happening
Speaker 2: right now, or something that happened in the past, that
Speaker 2: makes us feel all of those things, that we are decent,
Speaker 2: good people, that our friends, our groups are decent, good people,
Speaker 2: and we didn't do anything bad in the past, we
Speaker 2: are going to buy that story more often than not.
Speaker 3: Sure, we want to build consensus. It's very difficult to
Speaker 3: be the tenth person in the conversation who contradicts a
Speaker 3: lie that everyone has chosen to believe. And that's that's
Speaker 3: a question. You know that everyone is going to quarrel with.
Speaker 3: We would love to hear your thoughts. We would love
Speaker 3: to We'd love to get your take on this.
Speaker 5: Folks.
Speaker 3: Are we being overly alarmist about this idea of rewriting history?
Speaker 3: Is it less possible now or is it more possible now?
Speaker 3: What do you think? Let us know. We try to
Speaker 3: be easy to find on the internets.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 4: You can find us at the handle conspiracy stuff on YouTube, Facebook,
Speaker 4: and Twitter, nay X. I don't know if I'm using
Speaker 4: nay right there, but I'm gonna keep it up. I
Speaker 4: sed toll call Twitter. You know what. I actually saw
Speaker 4: a post form Elon must the other day where he
Speaker 4: referred to it as x fka Twitter, So.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, I think I think it would be
Speaker 3: x nay.
Speaker 4: N twitterh yeah, yeah that I hate putting X first,
Speaker 4: but it is what it is again, conspiracy stuff on
Speaker 4: those platforms, Conspiracy stuff show on Instagram and TikTok, where
Speaker 4: we've got a ton of fun stuff popping pretty much
Speaker 4: a couple times a week, I think, right.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Did you guys see the rumor
Speaker 2: that Elon Musk prevented nuclear war? Yeah?
Speaker 3: He uh, that explained some of those texts he was
Speaker 3: sending me.
Speaker 2: No, but for real, the he allegedly turned off the
Speaker 2: Starlink system.
Speaker 4: Yes, oh but that but just as a petty like
Speaker 4: penny pinching maneuver, right, because he was supposed to give
Speaker 4: them like free internet, and then they were not paying
Speaker 4: him or something, and then he basically just said, you
Speaker 4: know what, we're cutting this off. And yes, it did
Speaker 4: lead to some issues on the battlefield, but he wasn't
Speaker 4: doing it benevolently.
Speaker 3: He also had again recently spoken with Vlad.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, so this is the week again. This is
Speaker 2: like the revisionist history thing that's occurring in real time
Speaker 2: at all times nowadays. Like the one story is that
Speaker 2: he got some intel from from Russia basically and prevented
Speaker 2: an attack on some military naval vessels.
Speaker 3: Russian naval vessels.
Speaker 2: Yes, and that preventing that attack prevented tactical nukes from
Speaker 2: being deployed.
Speaker 7: That's a lot, it's crazy, but it also goes to
Speaker 7: show just how somebody doing something completely self serving and
Speaker 7: petty could ultimately lead to you know, if you're operating
Speaker 7: at such a high level, ultimately lead to something like that.
Speaker 5: And then it just becomes about the narrative twist.
Speaker 3: It's the butterfly effect, you know, because I used because
Speaker 3: I used Cheddar in my casadia. The red panda is
Speaker 3: no longer endangered. Whatever. It's a you could if then
Speaker 3: your way on all sa sorts of interesting limbs, not
Speaker 3: saying it's not true, but to your point, it's definitely
Speaker 3: an interpretation. What about your interpretation, folks? Why didn't give
Speaker 3: us a phone call?
Speaker 2: Our number is one eight three three, STDWYT and K.
Speaker 2: That's our number.
Speaker 5: Call it.
Speaker 2: It's a voicemail system. You've got three minutes. Say whatever
Speaker 2: you'd like, Give yourself a cool nickname, and let us
Speaker 2: know if we can use your name and message on
Speaker 2: the air. If you've got more to say than can
Speaker 2: fit in those three minutes, why not instead send us
Speaker 2: a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3: We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production
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