Animal Spirits Podcast - Re-Kindled: Amusing Ourselves to Death (EP.99)

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

On this edition of Re-Kindled, Michael and Ben discuss Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Find complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Like us on Facebook And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's Wealth Management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritt Holt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Hey, Ben. Hi. So you know how sometimes you see a tweet pop up? Who would be great on Twitter today? Yes. Mark Twain is a common answer. Yep.

Neil Postman would be amazing. Yeah. He would get a lot of woke retweets. He'd be great. So who is Neil Postman? Neil Postman is the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death and 19 other books. He was a professor at NYU. He wrote more than 200 magazines articles. And I guess he was, he was almost like a philosopher. So this book spoke a lot about a word that whose definition was new to me. I'll admit it. Epistemology. Did I say that right? Sounds right. I've heard the word before, but on its side, that'd be one of the ones that have to look it up to know what it means. So epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge. Okay. Very deep. deep. Why does the book about that? I didn't really pull that out of there. Well, he referenced that

word, I don't know, two dozen times. But so anyway, this book is called Amusing Ourself to Death, public discourse in the age of show business. And it was written in 1985. I could only imagine what his take would be on social media. And we'll get into all of that. He basically, through the lens of television and news in 1985, he basically called society today. I mean, the stuff he wrote in here, you could change some of the words. You could. substitute television for social media, and it would be just as right. So this is a very prescient book about how entertainment has taken over, like he says, serious and rational conversation. It is kind of amazing that this book was written in 85 and how useful it is to understanding

today. So you dunked on me in our podcast, paycheck to paycheck. You said something along the lines of I am a headline something. What did you call me? Well, I mean, you've been paying attention of the headline risks a lot lately. I have my ear to think to the... Yeah, and you said it was a little too. Well, Postman wrote in the first chapter, The Medium is the Metaphor, which is just fantastic. He wrote, The News of the Day is a figment of our technological imagination.

Oh, that's pretty good. He talks about a lot of awe. What would he say to me talking about doubt points? Would he smack me upside the head? Yeah, and the point he makes is that the problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that all subject. matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. That's a perfect way to describe the financial media. The other thing that he talked about when he talked about what the

book is about, he compared and contrasted the 1984 George Orwell book with Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World Revisited, which I've never read The Brave New World before. But he says that in the Brave New World, Huxley said that civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to a post-tirony failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. And so he says, in the Brave New World, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure while Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. And Huxley said feared that our desire will ruin us. And so he said the book is more Huxley than Orwell. And he basically says, we're so easily distracted these days because we have so many entertainment options, which is kind of funny to think about

through 1985 lens, because we've got 10 times more options today than we had back then. He starts way back with the transition from the spoken word to the written word. And this is also pretty good for Twitter where there's a lot of fortune cookie people. So he gave the example of a tribe in Western Africa where the chieftain would hand down a verdict based on sayings, proverbs, if you will. And he wrote, to people like ourselves, any reliance on proverbs and sayings is reserved largely for resolving disputes among or with children. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. First come first served. Haste makes waste. These are forms of speech we pull out in small crises with our young, but would think ridiculous to produce in a courtroom where serious matters are to be decided. Can you imagine a bailiff asking a jury if it has reached a decision and receiving the reply that to air is human, but to forgive is divide? Or even better, let us render unto Caesar that which is Caesar and to God, that which is gods. But don't you think that's how a lot of people invest to, based on rules of thumb? That's just the way people have their whole process.

Selling May and go away? Yeah, it rhymes, and so it kind of sticks. And the trend is your friend and all this stuff. Maybe there's some truth to these things. But the other part he talked about going back was how educated people were who first came over to America back in the day. And the politicians of that day were actually very smart and some of the most well-educated people.

So this, that kind of blew me away. Between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time. And the literacy rate for women in these colonies is estimated to have run as high as 62% in the year 1681 to 1697. Do you think that they took a survey to find these results? Have you been sitting on that one? It just came to me. What can I say? But it's pretty wild. And he talks about the famous debates between Lincoln and Douglas, which you talked about in a post recently and it kind of spurred us to have this. And it is just

insane how long those debates were. Like, it kind of boggles the mind. So he said that the arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first for one hour. Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply, Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln's reply. And it would just keep going on and on like that. And they said there was one time where they were about to give an answer and it was five o'clock. And they told the audience, why don't you go home, have dinner, and come back for four more hours of talk afterwards. And this wasn't even a presidential debate. This was the lead up to their Senate run against each other in Illinois. And so he said that America was truly founded by intellectuals. And they said the founding fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation,

many of them apt in classical learning who used their wide reading and history of politics and law to solve the problems of their time, which doesn't really sound like the politicians of today by any stretch of the imagination. Do you know how debates are settled in 2019? Dunking out someone on Twitter? What? Close. I was going to say with the mute button. Oh, yes. That's pretty true. getting back to the writing versus talking thing. He said, the written word endures, the spoken word disappears. And that is why writing is closer to the truth than speaking. And so his whole point is that, again, he uses television as his medium of choice here to go after. But he's basically saying

television and entertainment is destroying serious and rational public conversation. Now, I will say there is some element of get off my lawn in this book, wouldn't you say? I would say that. But he also said there is a place for there is a place in this world for entertainment yeah you're right he says that towards the end he had cable tv but the point that he was making was let's not confuse entertainment and information with actual news yeah and he says that's part of the problem is people now in the stuff that he talks about in here he basically laid out the whole idea of fake news before that was ever even yes a thing right he just kind of nailed this one he said as a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it. And this is like the biggest point in

the book is that the medium really is the message. And what works in print and radio and TV are totally conflicting. Yeah. So he says if politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity, or honesty, but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether. And I guess you could maybe even make the argument today. A lot of politicians don't even try to appear like they're excellent or honest. You remember on our last podcast, again, paycheck to paycheck. We spoke about, like, social media, which is no longer a new form of communication. So I was thinking like, what's next? And he wrote, anyone who is even slightly familiar with the history of communications knows that every new technology for thinking involves

a tradeoff. It giveth and taketh away, although not quite an equal measure. So I think that we would say that social media on balance has been good, but man, has there been a lot of bad. Yeah. So he says, in America, everyone is in terms of to opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a polter shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from 18th or 19th century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions. That was so good. He says ignorance is always correctable, but what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge, which again is kind of a foreshadowing of what comes in social media these days. This is a good quote. We must be careful in praising

or condemning because the future may hold surprises for us. He kind of called it. So he says, when a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when in short, people become an audience and their public business of Ottawa Act, then a nation finds itself at risk. Cultural death is a clear possibility. I guess in my mind, it's almost like this was inevitable as we became a wealthier nation, don't you think? That this is kind of Keynes' thing about his dream was that in the future, everyone would just work 20 hours a week and put their feet up and have a life of leisure. But haven't we turned instead of leisure,

we've turned to distractions, and that is kind of our leisure in a lot of ways? Relaxation is now scrolling through Instagram and Twitter while on the elevator. Right. It gives you something to do. And I guess I'm not quite as pessimistic about it as some people, but what would the percentage be that you give to social media in terms of doing good versus doing bad? I mean, it depends on the individual in the group, I guess, but do you think it has at least been a net positive in certain ways? Or do you think, again, we're going to look back at this and say this has been a total net negative on society and it's a bad, yeah, I guess. I'm not sure. And I have to think about this.

And there's a line later in the book where he talks about how, like, television is not the appropriate place for thinking. And I'm not sure podcasting is either for some of these things. Well, don't you think podcasting is a better form of thinking through this stuff than entertainment television or something like that? Of course it is. TV segments are three and a half minutes. I actually think podcasting in a lot of ways is a step in the right direction because it is more long form. I completely agree. So in terms of the country being more intellectual and more serious, this sort of reminded me of the line of thinking from nobody wants to read your shit.

Oh, yeah. So he's talking about reading and writing. And he said, it is serious because meaning demands to be understood. A written sentence calls upon its author to say something, upon its reader to, know the import of what is said. And when an author and reader are struggling with semantic meaning, they are engaged in the most serious challenge to the intellect. This is especially the case with the act of reading for authors are not always trustworthy. They lie. They become confused. They overgeneralized. They abuse logic and sometimes common sense. The reader must come armed in a serious state of

intellectual readiness. And so the point is none of this exists on the television screen. And he said in terms of radio, there is a radio station that still exists in New York City called 10-10 Wins. And they say, you give us 22 minutes or I'll give you the world. He wrote something like, they say that without any irony whatsoever. Right. They actually believed it. I mean, it's a good tagline, I guess. So sticking with like the 1700s, he said public figures were known largely by their written words, for example, not by their looks or even their oratory. It is quite likely that most of the 15 presidents of the United States would not have been recognized had they passed the average citizen in the street. And I tweeted that in somebody like a lot of people

actually me saying that there was political cartoons and stuff. But anyway, the point remains, even if that is a bit of a bit hyperbole. He makes the point that he says a continent-wide conversation was not yet possible in the 1840. So he said America was still a composite of regions, each conversing in its own ways, addressing its own interest. So he said information could move only as fast as a human being could carry it, to be precise, only as fast as a train could travel, which, to be even more precise, meant about 35 miles per hour. And so, So the whole national consciousness and national conversation just didn't happen. That was so good.

And today, it moves so fast that it's almost like here and gone before people can even think about it. Well, so in terms of information, and we spoke about this, I guess I interrupted myself in the last podcast when we were talking about why people are freaking out. And you said that 08 broke their brain. And I said it's not, well, I wanted to say, but I cut myself off, that it wasn't 08 that it wasn't. You cut yourself off. it wasn't 08 that broke their brain. It's the media. And there's just so much information that people are just, their senses are hiding and triggered all the time. So he wrote, as Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information

had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed. That is, with any social or intellectual contact in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment. In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use. So his other one was facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit no required evaluation. And this is like the double-edged sword of having so many options today. Back in the 1800s, there was literally nothing else to do. They had no professional sports to watch. They didn't have television. They barely had electricity at that point in most

places, they had nothing else to do but sit there and think and read and probably work most of the time. And so that idea of having a time to like think things through, that's all people had time to do back then was think. And today we probably don't have enough time to sit and really have critical thinking about stuff that we're paying attention to because there's always stuff coming and coming and coming. But I'd still rather have today than back then. Right? How bored were people back then? Maybe they were more well read. smarter, but there was nothing to do. Do you remember this part? He said, being a survey show, we have to talk about voting, which is a form of survey. Voting, we might even say, is the next to

last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then we'll submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions and convert them into what else, another piece of news. Thus, we have here, a great loop of impotence. The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news about which you can do nothing. This was like a 30-year sub-tweet, pre-subtweet of Nate Silver, right? A pre-subtweet. That was very good. The other one that he said, he talked about this Lewis Mumford guy who wrote this book called Technics and Civilization. This one was kind of deep.

So Mumford said that the clock is a piece of power machinery whose product is seconds and minutes. And he talked about in manufacturing such a product, the clock has an effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematical measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception or natures. It is man conversing with himself through a piece of machinery he created. That kind of blew my mind a little bit. That was the, isn't it the John Lennon meme where he does the mind-blown thing? Is that John Lennon? Which one? Mind-blown Giff. John Lennon. Okay. I don't know which one you're talking about.

All right. I'll find it. that one kind of blew my mind and how he's saying that perhaps Moses should have included another commandment that shall not make mechanical representations of time. And he's basically saying by placing these constraints on ourselves, we more or less led to the culture of busyness, I think. Is that the kind of way you took this? Yes. Excellent. Entertainment is the super ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. that is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism

we are urged by the newscasters to quote join them tomorrow what for one would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice his material for a month of sleepless nights yeah he really goes after the newscasters in this and here's your quote about the fact that there's nothing wrong with entertainment he said there's nothing wrong with entertainment as some psychiatrist once put it we all build castles in the air the problem comes when we try to live in them isn't that just the perfect description of instagram like building fake lives that people try to live in them. They're not real. So there was a chapter called now dot, dot, dot, this, where I think he gave an example

if they're talking about a potential nuclear war, and then they switch to a commercial for Burger King, and then they say, now this, and like, just nothing matters. Nothing is sacred anymore. Is that the idea? He said, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well

informed. Yeah, he's not very optimistic. So he said, the result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. But don't you think that he nailed it? This was written in 1985, the year that I was born. Yes. He guessed fake news and social media. He had it pegged. I'm not sure a lot of people put that out there. But hold on. More than guess. This was not a guess. Everything that he said came to pass. It wasn't some sort of, you know, a ridiculous forecast. This wasn't a hot take. This was like, this is the road we're taking. I mean, he very much said in 1985 that this is the inevitability. Yes. And he nailed it. Yes. Yeah. He wasn't really holding back.

One thing that he would be happy with that doesn't exist today anymore are commercials. He said the television commercial. is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumer of products. Images of movie stars and famous athletes, of serene lakes and macho fishing trips, of elegant dinners and romantic interludes, of happy families packing their station wagons for a picnic in our country.

These tell nothing about the products being sold, but they tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might buy them. Yeah, I like this one. What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product, but what is wrong about the buyer. So he basically had this whole behavioral psychology thing figured out again before everyone else, which is kind of what advertisers did as well. So did you read, there was another book of his that I wanted to read. I haven't started yet, and he's written 20 books, but a book called Technopoly, which is subtitled, The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

I wonder what sort of predictions he had in that one. Yeah, I didn't see that one either. This is the only book of his that I've read. And again, just reading it now, I'm sure if you read this back then, you pretty. probably would have thought he was a little bit of a kook, don't you think? Yeah. A lot of this is, would you say it's like serious satire almost? Yes, in a lot of ways.

Again, because he talks about like the 1984 book. So he said most of our daily news is consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. Again, that is describing financial news in a lot of ways, right? Well, did you know that 99% of Barron's readers take action after reading their magazine? That's your favorite one, isn't it? That's pretty good. Not bad. This is so great.

We were speaking about this earlier about how podcasting allows you time to think. Is social media all bad or good? That definitely requires some thought. But imagine that you were asked that on television. You don't have the luxury to be like, hmm. So he wrote, thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television director has discovered long ago. Ah, that's really good. Which kind of comes to the, what's the new Russell Crow show and Showtime you told me to watch?

The loudest voice. A lot of voice. That's kind of what they figured out too. Like, let's use this television medium to really try to control the way people think. can control the narrative. So he also said, this one is sorry down, people will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. So that all the algorithms on Netflix that tell you what to watch and Amazon that tell you what to buy, I'll admit it. I love those things, right? But there are people who are worried that that's going to like undo our ability

to have some sort of free will or whatever because these algorithms are going to control our lives in many ways. Here's the thing, though, if people are really going to be controlled by algorithms, aren't those the people who are going to make dumb decisions anyways like the people who can't see that this is a new

Ben Carlson putting a less than hysterical spin on shit that is probably pretty bad okay because I think honestly on a net basis technology has been

a really good thing for us no doubt about that but he's not talking about necessary technology I guess he is he's talking about new forms of communication specifically

I guess all new forms of communication he would not say social media is a net positive it has turned this into absolute fucking morons weren't people

morons before though you just didn't know it. So you're saying that the people who die taking selfies are just natural selection. Yeah. They would have probably done something stupid without doing that, potentially. They would have done something else dumb. That's what I'm saying is that it's just easier to see dumb people now. You didn't see a lot of them before. They're out there now. Everyone can see. And that's what makes it hard to wrap your brain around for some people as the relative comparisons. People aren't thinking like, oh, man, there's a lot of dumb people out there. Maybe I'm dumb. People are thinking,

oh, there's a lot of smart, good-looking people out there. That's probably me. So let me ask you a question. These people that are exposed morons, who were they in the 1700s? I don't know. They're probably drinking at a pub somewhere out of a wooden glass. I don't know.

They probably were on a farm by themselves working 18 hours a day, so you never heard from them. And today, you see the exposed morons, and guess what? They find other exposed morons that they can talk with online. And they all realize, like, hey, let's be morons together. And there's a lot more of that. And then they go to infowars.com. Yeah, it's easier for them to find each other now.

Maybe that's the problem is it's the lighter fluid that's making it a little bit worse. But I think it's just we've pulled the covers back. So this is Neil Postman deserves a victory lap. This book was, I mean, this was one of those books that I read and I was like, whoa, like a lot. Yes. And just the fact that he wrote it 35 years ago or whatever, it's kind of mind-blowing how prescient it really was. I yeah it kind of blew me away I just heard about this book last year I read through it very fast this one was a quick read all right so ben you got anything else or is that a good place to leave it

no I think that's a good point just the big takeaway from me he said that using visuals to get across our points reduces serious topics to entertainment and that's like that's gifts and memes that's social media all the stats say that using visuals gets across your point way faster than using words and I think that's his whole point that we've gone away from the written word to our detriment maybe as a society. And so I guess he kind of predicted the movie idiocrycy as well, right? Yeah. He laid the groundwork for that.

All right. Thank you for listening. Next time we are going to be doing a Malcolm Gladwell rekindled. I am reading Blink. Ben, which one are you reading? I'm reading Tipping Point, just about done of it. And so we'll do the Malcolm Gladwell rehash of pop cultural. How was it?

It's good. It's good on a reread. So I think there's a lot of good stuff to pull from it. All right. I'm only one chapter into Blink, so I got to catch up. All right. Thanks again for listening. Animal SpiritsPod at gmail.com.