Shaun Newman Podcast - #263 - Alexandra Kitty

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

Author of  "The Mind Under Siege: Mechanism of War Propaganda" & "When Journalism Was a Thing", we discuss her research into propaganda. Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500  Support here:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/ShaunNewmanPodcast

This is Zubi. This is Brett Wilson. This is Brian Pectford. This is Keith Morrison. This is Tim McAlloff of Sportsnet. This is Dr. Peter McCullough. This is Daryl Sutter and welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

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or maybe you've got multiple employees, he can host that to give Wade-Gartner a call 780-808-50, 25 and if you're heading into any of these businesses let them know you heard about from the podcast right now into that ram truck rundown brought to you by auto clearing jeep and ram the prairie's trusted source for cries or dodge jeep ramp fiat and all things automotive for over 110 years she's a former journalist and a canadian based author who's written multiple books such as outfox rupert murdoch's war on journalism and the mind under siege mechanisms of war propaganda i'm talking about alexander kitty so buck up. Here we go. Welcome to the John Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Alexander Kitty. So first off, thank you for joining me. And thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Now, there's going to be a lot of people who have never heard of yourself. Maybe just a little background and we'll kick it off from there. I'm a former journalist who went into journalism to conduct empirical studies on the profession. After I did that, I'm the author of 11 books,

including O'Fox, Brup of Murdoch's War and Journalism, when journalism was a thing, mine under siege, mechanisms of war propaganda, and other books, mostly media analyst books, but I've done some others as well over the years. What I find interesting is you say you went into journalism as an experiment. then you end up being in journalism for like 30 years, correct? Well, I was in journalism for about, well, being in journalism is sort of like, as I've said before, like being in the mafia, once you're in, you're always in in some capacity or another.

I studied journalism and I got my master's in it. So I was a journalist, I would say, hardcore journalist for 10 years, got out, did it in different capacities, had my own news website for a while, That was another experiment. But my books are basically me being a journalist, but my medium was books instead of, let's say, a newspaper or magazine. So I guess I've never been out of a, I've never really gotten out in terms of just my medium has changed, but not my methods.

Well, what drew you, what drew you to looking at journalism as like, I want to, I want to do a deep dive into it, not as like, I want to get the real message out, but more I want to tinker around and see what happens. Well, I was a psychology student. It was experimental psychology. My undergraduate thesis was psychoacoustic. So this is me not having anything close to wanting to be a journalist. Then the war in the former Yugoslavia came out, and I had relatives on all sides, either through blood or through marriage. And I noticed that the media coverage was so skewed. And they weren't getting, let's say, the cultural nuances. I mean, you can't parachute people there and understand what's going on. There were so many mixed marriages, which was the reality of my family. And I started to look into it.

And there were PR firms galore sending information to reporters. So I said, this is really, I mean, you have to realize I was 17, 18, and I'm a psychology student. This is really odd. I can find this information through the Foreign Agent Registry Act in the United States, because if you're a foreign country, getting PR from the U.S., you have to register. So how did this happen? So eventually it did cross my mind. Well, you know, if you want to really know,

because I was reading Neil Postman and Chomsky, but they weren't journalists. They were missing a lot of stuff. So I said, I'm going to go into journalism. I'm going to conduct studies into seeing how journalism works. Where are the vulnerabilities and how can you make it better? So then last semester in the last year I decided, okay, I'm going to go into journalism. So that's how I actually got started with trying to a few psychology into journalism,

because so many of the answers I had were in psychology just weren't being applied in journalism. When you say a foreign country getting PR from the United States, they have to register. What do you mean by that? Well, if you're getting a lobbyist, a PR firm, or a lawyer. and you're a foreign entity, you're not an American citizen. You, since 1938, and this was strictly because of the Second World War and the United States didn't want the Nazis to be able to hire PR firms in the United States, they decided to have something called FARA. So if you're a foreign country or you're a foreigner and you want to hire an American PR firm or law firm, you have to register. So if you go in FARA.gov in the States,

everybody who's ever registered for PR or a law firm, you can see from 1938 to today. So it's really an interesting kind of database to look at. If you want to know why certain countries are suddenly getting a certain kind of promotion or coverage in the press, that's a pretty good first step. So I stumbled on this long before the internet. I'm dating myself here. But, you know, I looked at this and I said, this is really fascinating. And so I managed to get my hands on the press releases that a lot of reporters were using trying to pass this office original research.

So, you know, you start going. And, you know, I started, I managed to get my hands on publications that trade publications for the intelligence community. And they were talking about this. They knew about it. So it's like, why is journalism not, let's say, reporting on this? because if I'm a university student with nobody in the profession, and I can find this information, what's wrong with this profession? So that's how I actually kind of got into it because I was one of those keyners in school

who liked to do my research, and I would go and I would see where would this take me. So I found out all sorts of really interesting stuff, heartbreaking stuff. You could see that the coverage of this war was just not nuanced. it was, and it didn't take into consideration a lot of the things. So I said, this, this is not, can't be just one group of people. This has to be, you know, systemic of the profession. And then I devised my theories. I conducted my experiments. And then I wrote my books because those were the results of what I found working as a journalist where I was my own experimenter and test subject. Now, correct me if I'm wrong. The war in Yugoslavia was an early 90s.

to essentially late 90s war, correct? Correct. So I can do simple math here and go, if they were outsourcing PR firms and everything else, you know, another name that's got thrown around lately, has been Nudge units, that type of thing. I can safely assume that they just didn't decide

that was unethical and they're not doing that anymore. I assume they're doing that every single day. And I mean, the last two years, I think would be pretty evident of that, correct? Oh, absolutely. I mean, it didn't go away. I mean, it's been used for decades.

But the thing is now, you know, you're having, it's everywhere. You have nudged units. But a lot of times we forget, even, let's say, C-suite players, they hire former intelligence interrogators to train them. So a lot of this, what we see on is everywhere. We just are not aware that there's, people who get training and, you know, preventing people from questioning them, from spreading propaganda, to using psychology to manipulate people's behavior. And there's a lot of people who

don't see anything wrong with that. Well, if we read an outcome and we, you know, look right and we, quote unquote, win, that's okay. That's good enough for us. And it's not good enough because you don't understand that if you're not working from your own free will, you've been either gaslighted, nudged, or they've flat out been bombarded with propaganda, and your brain is not actually functioning normally. So propaganda is almost like a drug that you're not aware that you have become addicted to, that you've been taking and you have no idea. This is how, because propaganda hits your brain, it's not like other forms of communication. And That was another part of my experiments and studies.

How does propaganda affect the brain, not just the mind, because it has to be effective in the first strike. And you have to, doesn't matter what your background is, your educational level, it has to hit everybody pretty much equally at the same time. It's like throwing a nuclear bomb on somebody's brain. Okay. That was a lot. When you talk about propaganda being just different and affecting the brain, can you just maybe expand on that a little bit? What, like, yeah, just expand on that thought.

Propaganda is basically a method of mass control. It has to hit everybody equally where you, where there's a rigged outcome, where you don't see the obvious ruses and you're, there's misdirections where you think that you're, unless you relinquish your rights and freedoms and you go along with whatever an authority decrees that you are helpless in protecting yourself and that there will be an enemy or some sort of outside threat that will totally destroy you forever. This is what propaganda basically is, where you function from fear, where there's an atmosphere of terror so you can't use your primal thinking. There's a narrative that controls how you use your emotions, and there's sophistry that

gives you bad logic. So propaganda just hits your brain where your cortisol levels are affected, where your prefrontal cortex is so overwhelmed. That's where you make your decision making. That's where your memory is. So you forget that you are capable. You forget all the times that you've been in a scrape and you've gotten yourself out. So propaganda just pretty much overtaks your brain. It's sensory overload meant to control you and alter you with unnatural habits.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, Alexander. You're in Canada, right? Yes. So let's stick to Canada because I can't speak to the rest of the world. All I can understand is what I've lived through. Okay. In the last two plus years, what you just said, all I can think of is, well, that's what we've lived through for the last two years. Would you agree with that?

Well, it's not even a secret. I mean, there are, this has been an open secret. Well, we have Nudge units in Canada, as reported in the Toronto Star. there's that has been going on where the and it's been you know sort of almost like placed in a well this is a really good thing that we're manipulating people because it's for their own good but propaganda is always justified as for the collective good whether it is or not so yes you can see property but it was a kind of very interesting propaganda in that it was a flawed propaganda People were primed, but you can't give any free brain space.

So since we had propaganda with no, let's say, tangible enemy, people had free-based brain space to slot in their own enemy. This was been, I would say, highly effective in many ways because the brain was primed. But it was almost programmed wrong. If we had a certain group of people we could blame, this would have been even more effective as fear-induced behavior modification on that. a on a global scale. Don't you think they tried to give a, well, I mean, they still try to somewhat to give a group to target that on? You know, they tried dividing the population, vaccinated, unvaccinated.

It was pretty clear, at least from my eyes, on how they tried framing it. Wouldn't that be the group? No, that would be after the fact. When we're talking about propaganda, it's first strike, it's a sucker punch. By the time we were talking about, you know, this binary one and zero, the ones are the one group and the zeros are they and the ones are the us. That was already within a couple of years. The first, who's responsible for the first happening of this icon of terror? That was not slotted in where it took off.

So in that case, that first strike, we're still working. Our brains are still primed on 20. 2020 happenings. When we were talking about vaccination, that was so sort of another arc of the story. But by then, things kind of got off the rails in many regards. So this was not as successful in many ways as people think because you had free brain space and you've seen groups, people, even within a group divide. Remember, what was the first jingle?

We're all in this together. That was supposed to have everybody kind of get in together, even if you had disagreements, well, we're all in this together. While we can see in 2022, we're definitely not all in this together. So in many ways, while it was successful in many fronts, and it altered people's lives forever, I mean, what your life would have been without this versus what your life is with this will never be the same.

So there's lots of people who lost their homes. There's lots of people's families who will never speak to each other again. There's lots of rights of passage people have lost because of the fear. They were driven by fear. But that fear was not, I would say, programmed absolutely perfectly. And that's why you're seeing a lot of people saying, no, this isn't right. This isn't fair. This isn't just.

That wasn't what was supposed to happen. Effective propaganda would have been everybody would have agreed on the same remedies, on the same solutions, on the same authority figures. So it was extremely successful. I won't say it was it. But it had unforeseen consequences because it didn't follow traditional propaganda in having saying this group of people is responsible for the world's ills. So do you think then a consequence or maybe, I don't know, is it a positive that comes

out of the last couple of years then is for a guy like myself, I was strongly, I think, in the camp of like everything the government does is good. everybody's got the best interest blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and now I am like I can't help but you know when I listen to you talk with Zuby I was like yep yep yep and I just you just see it more and once you've seen it it's like it's almost impossible to put that back in the bag you can't once see propaganda is extremely effective but only if you don't know what it's involved once you see propaganda you can unsee it That's its fatal flaw itself.

When your brain is primed and prepared to deal with that kind of manipulation, you cannot, people can try. You start actually finding it funny. When you're truly into it, somebody can try something and you're thinking, that sounds silly. And you don't, if you can get mad or you can get, you know, laugh it off, that you inoculate yourself against it and people can try all sorts of scary stories. And it doesn't work. The problem is a lot of people don't see it coming. It's a succor punch. You mind your own business and you can probably think what you were doing or thinking about before 2020 happened. It resembled nothing. And there was no hint that this was going to come. So propaganda works when you're not expecting it. It's as I said, it's like, you know, your walk, it's like Bambi versus Godzilla. You know, if you ever seen the cartoon, Bambi's eating Godzilla.

comes no more Bambi. That's propaganda in a nutshell. That's a visual. I think anyone in my age demographic, well, are probably, I mean, even kids today, I don't know about that. There's Bambi's mom gets shot. So I don't know if they're watching that. But Bambi was a favorite of the, of the Newman household growing up. So I certainly can visualize. Yeah, that. That is something. These nudge units, what is the purpose? That is the purpose of them is to just nudge the entire population is to think and get ahead so that they can create things that will alter a public's movements, essentially, thought process?

It's a simple rig. So why we usually have propaganda is there's been a scandal of incompetence that somebody wants to hike. So there's a misdirection. Nudging sort of saying nothing to see. over here, here's over here, there's the danger over here. So nudging is trying to get somebody's attention away from the problem into something that they have an artificially constructed problem where everybody now is not terrorized. So nudge is a smaller form of propaganda. So when we

nudge somebody, we're trying to manipulate an outcome. We're trying to get them to think and to consider certain things, but not consider things that are more important. So when somebody is nudged, they would normally say, no, that doesn't work for me. Nudging and propaganda, what it's supposed to do is to remove organic plurality. So if everybody agrees that this is an authority and everybody agrees to give resources to the authority, the authority can seem powerful, smart, all-knowing, and you follow the leader, even if that's not, that's going to mean you're going to have unnatural thoughts that are not organic to you, unnatural habits that work against you.

So nudging just simply means to try to rig an outcome to somebody else's favor because if they had something, they could offer a negotiation or a deal and you would maybe say yes to that, but that's sort of a winner take all. We're going to nudge you. We're going to make you think it's your decision that you used logic and you came to that the conclusion, not that you were manipulated into coming up with that conclusion. So, like, when I hear that, I go, like, are the people in media government all just cropped in all, or do they think they know best?

Like, how do you use that and go, like, this is for the, like, I assume they think it's for the betterment of Canada or betterment of the world? Or is there more defarious thought processes to go into that? Like I just hear that and I go, that's a really, I guess I have more faith in people or something. I don't know. Or maybe I'm just so green, Alexandra. I hear that and I go, that seems weird. Well, what, I went into journalism.

So there wasn't any, let's say, secret societies in there. It was the mundane scaffolding of the profession. So when I went to J-School, which was a very prestigious one in Canada, we never talked about propaganda or manipulation or. or any of that. So you come out completely unprepared. And then people are against you. It sort of kind of retreat and insulate yourself. And some offers you some sort of lifeline

and you become grateful. So you take Canada press conferences. They have for actually nothing real, but that's part of the theater and the ritual. And you don't question it. Or you are, you know, you have little resources, But a press release kind of seems like a savior for you. And you take that information.

You don't question it. And there's no treating in psychology and journalism. The reason I could see so much was simply because I had an undergraduate degree in psychology. And my undergraduate thesis was basically how do our perceptions misalign with reality on a much, you know, on a micro-skinned. So the reason I knew was because I had a degree in psychology. but in journalism, there's no classes in spotting propaganda. There's no classes in understanding human frailty and logical fallacies. You don't do any of that. To this day, it's 2022. You don't have J schools doing that. They don't prepare students to saying, okay, you're going to be manipulated.

And most J schools have, you know, they teach not just journalism. They teach public relations. So from day one, this is sort of not even questioned. So sure, there's a lot of people. who do in journalism who are not, you know, they're very conniving and they do things knowing that they're manipulating people. But that's, you know, that group of people. But there's others who actually are, because people are people, journalists are people. They can get manipulated just like anybody else. And if you're not trained to spot manipulation, you are, you know, you're made vulnerable. You're made vulnerable. You're interviewing people who have a former intelligence interrogator, and working with them,

former people who are in charge of manipulating your Nudge units than going out and teaching other people who have a vested interest into doing it. Journalism spends not a single cent on preparing their workforce in spotting propaganda. It's a totally unfair fight. And then you have a public who doesn't, you know, who may or may not know or have an instinct for it.

But that is not something we think about. Well, how do I know that I'm not being, manipulated. In many ways you don't. And actually, there's a lot to be, you know, I'm very optimistic because one thing that came out of 2020 is you have all sorts of people who probably never would have gotten into journalism who saw, you know, this. And now we're talking about propaganda and as a mainstream topic. So this actually had some sort of value for us in the discussion of propaganda because we're actually talking about it even now, which we never did before. It was not, it was a taboo subject.

And it's becoming a mainstream war. It's just not in the legacy media. It's an arise if alternative media where that's happening. And that's actually a very good thing to come out of this. Yeah. I mean, podcast, substack. You just go independent journalism in general. has been on the rise

because people want to hear some open dialogue on some things not be told what to think. I mean, that's become pretty evident as we move along here. You know, with the people inside legacy media, you also have to factor in people

who just want a paycheck, right? That's right. Come in, they're not bad people. They just want, oh, there's the headline, put it through, and they want to get on to, you know, I mean, right now, NHL playoffs. I was certainly up last night watching, excited, boilers one, hello, hello. And you just want to get on with life and you don't want to put in so much thought into it.

The thing about the last two years is it really thrust upon the population. Like, you know, when you mentioned, like, once you see propaganda, you're like, that's silly. that's at the they lit didn't they just contradict themselves like 17 times that's how silly it got and yet there's you know there was people that were caught onto that immediately and there was people that caught onto it two months in eight months in I mean they're still trying to hold up a bunch of different things that makes zero sense at this point and that's where your silly comment is like yeah that that really makes sense to me but that that's the irony because sometimes to times people spend billions of dollars trying to find ways to manipulate people.

Once you see it, it doesn't have to cost you a penny. You don't unsee it. This is when you align your perceptions with reality. It's amazing how lies become so ridiculous. And I'm going to give an example from the Gulf War, the first Gulf War. When we had a 15-year-old teenage girl named Naira crying that she saw Iraqi soldiers take babies out of the incubators and put them on the floor to die. This was the rallying cry for the U.S. to invade Kuwait. And then one reporter found out John MacArthur, who's a publisher of Harper's

magazine, he found out that this was Hillenolton, and this girl did not see this, and there was a whole backstory. But when you listen to the story, while Iraqi soldiers went into the hospital to take incubators, why would they take incubators? Why would the soldiers take babies out of incubators? Why? And they just put them on the floor nicely to die if they wanted to kill them. Wouldn't they throw it out? And if they threw it out, wouldn't she say that? Because she wants to say how bad these people were. And why did they go after the babies and not the bigger threat who were the adults? What were the adults doing? Did they pick the babies up? No, they left them on the floor to die. Well, why would you do that? Once you think about this story, it's totally ridiculous. There's so many plot holes you can drive a Mack truck through.

But when you get caught up in this terror, oh, my goodness, the next generation of these people are going to perish and these other people are going to take over, which is what propaganda's narrative is all about. You believe it until you see how ridiculous it is. After that, you hear stories. First thing you go, okay, does this make sense? Does this make sense? And most times, I mean, 99 times out of 100, propaganda stories don't pass mustard. You're just in a panicked mode. And that's why you don't see it.

Well, that's right there is probably something I certainly need to hear. And I'm sure a lot of people need to hear is like the emotions, right? When a story hits you in the motions and your brain no longer is like dissecting or thinking, right there, that's probably a red flag. Yes. Propaganda, I said, hits three core literacies in three different ways. So we have basically three core literaries. literacies. Primal, which is, and they're all equal. There's not one that's better than another.

Primal is about survival in times of chaos and progress in times of peace. It can be affected with an atmosphere of terror. That's how propaganda works. First, it takes your primal, your oldest part of your brain, and makes it think it's helpless. Then we hit the emotional, which weighs fat. So emotional isn't about being, you know, weak or soppy. It's just about weighing information. Narrative tells you to use wrong scales. And then we have analytical, which is all about just finding facts, one and zero, because we can only make two judgments that two things are same or different or one thing is bigger or better than another. And it makes the logic wonky with sophistry. So propaganda, make sure that the three parts of your brain don't work together

and find information. That's why it's so effective because you get hit and it's almost like your brain kind of gets split into three across the room and they somehow can't communicate with each other properly. So when we're together, when we keep cool and collected and we listen to information and we don't go out of panic and we have self-confidence to know that we can muddle through somehow, it doesn't work. So the more you're self-reliant, the less propaganda works. So the more you think and you give your chance, self a chance to think. So somebody's trying to push a solution on you. You go, I'll get back to you. And you give yourself, and they go, you don't have time. You go, I have time. So if you give yourself space to breathe and you know yourself and you can do research, basic research, can I get through

this? 99 times out of 100, the answer is yes. And sometimes you might need a little help, but you'll still get through it. Propaganda wants you to be infantilized. It wants you to think you're helpless. and there's another concept called cognitive outsourcing. It wants you to not, you want to take that brain, give it to you an authority to do your thinking for you. So propaganda will always say that you need somebody else to do your thinking for you. That's probably the biggest red flag there is. So if it says you're helpless, you don't know how to do anything.

You're going to go, ah, that person wants me to relinquish my thinking because they want to rig an outcome that wouldn't work for me. and can I throw in one other thing possibly? I don't know where this factors into it, but it must certainly is energy level. Like people get worn out by trying to argue against propaganda, right? Like that can be tiring if you don't have the facts or you don't know, you know, I found that people just like, ah, whatever, I'm just going to move on.

And if that's what they're saying, that's what they're saying. I don't really care. This is not really affecting my life or whatever it is. That's probably one of the best ways to handle it because propaganda wants people to have an us versus them. So the people who are primed for propaganda are going to go and attack people who are against it. And then you get dragged on this hamster wheel of trying to explain the people, trying to use facts and logic. And people who are their brains are primed to believe propaganda, they can't hear from. facts or logic. They don't hear anything. So what you do is then you waste time trying to convince

people instead of saying, okay, you go your way, I go mine, and I'm going to come up with my own solution. And then if you come up with your own solution that works, even a person whose prime is going to look while I'm running around in circles and this person is doing so much better, I think I'm going to try their method. So it is supposed to drain your resources, tax your brain, tax your energy levels because people think they can handle anything and you can't. Propaganda wants you to be so overwhelmed and so exhausted. I mean, if you've ever read the prince by Nicola Nicola Macchiabelli, he said to the prince, okay, you take these two sides, make them fight each other, let them be exhausted.

You come in, sweep in all the resources and people will be too tired to challenge you or to be a rival or threat. That's what propaganda does. It wants to pit people against each other. So they're so busy fighting each other. They don't realize there's somebody who's very refreshed, who's not believing the propaganda. Because propaganda is based on a few simple tricks. It's just that most people don't use it because they have emotional literacy.

And most people go on with their lives. They're paying bills. They're raising families. They're not going to do that. This is for people who delegate to other people. Something's got wrong. There's a cleanup. And now they have to engage in propaganda or,

I should say stoop the propaganda to try to clean a mess so that nobody notices that there's a mess that needs addressing because if people found out that person wouldn't be in charge or would not be able to take power because nobody would trust them. Well, here's one thought that I wrote down you shared on a different interview. And you said, propaganda is not a communication of people who are in a position of strength, but weakness. And they're trying to hide the weakness with everything they got because to expose it will show you just how weak they are. and the people, this was the positive thought you had at the end of it. I was listening to that and I was like, who, okay. Here was the positive thought, though, at the end of it that I was like, oh, I like that. You said, the people who stand up to it are going to be the future leaders of tomorrow.

And I thought, oh, that right there is, you know, in the darkest days where things just aren't making sense. There's going to be people who push on that and the people that do that are going to rise up because you're going to see it for what it is. And chances are there are, we don't know how far away they are, better days, but assuming that there are good days ahead kind of thing mentality. The only thing is, is now once they get into position, are they going to use the same tactics if they've been working for everybody else for hundreds of years? Well, if people are primed to see propaganda, the best, you know, remedy is to see it.

So if you have generations of people who are raised to see propaganda, it won't be used because it won't be effective. I mean, because you have to put in a lot of resources. Propaganda is very heavy in resources. It eats resources. But we've never had really generations of people who've talked about propaganda. So if we're talking about a big breakthrough in 2020, and this is about the best intellectual breakthroughs we have had in centuries, is that people now realize that propaganda is a real thing. And now we have people who have not fallen for it.

And they can see it. And they have now the means of communications to tell other people. This is unprecedented. We can be negative in a lot of ways because you see things people fall for it. You've seen people who are casualties of it and it's heartbreaking. But there is such now a rise of people who see it, people who talk about it, people who try different things. This is not something we've ever had. And I've studied propaganda for 30 years. This is, and I've looked at centuries of this, this is not like I've, you know, looked at just recent things or things that were affecting me or I cared about.

I'm talking on a global spigail. We're talking about a huge silent breakthrough. And this will also totally alter the trajectory of many things, where we now think, okay, there are people who are manipulates, do we combat the manipulators? So whatever happens to fallout and usually people who start propaganda are usually arrested or they're thrown out of power because it's a last-ditch effort. And people do eventually come back to their senses. Propaganda doesn't work forever because what happens is almost like a flooding. Once people have been made afraid and then they realize there's nothing to be afraid up, they become less afraid. That's why you saw so many innovations after the Second World War,

because the worst happened to so many people, they survived. So then, you know, you have a totally different class of people who are more willing to take risks and chances. This is what we're seeing now. So there is a lot to be worried and concerned about on one hand, yes. But on the other hand, you have people now who see it, who are talking about it publicly. So we should actually focus on the people who are constructive, who see it, who are talking about it, and move from there. There's things to build. There is rubble, but there is people building even in the rubble, which is, again, unprecedented. And this is really actually, to me, a very exciting times for people who see it and now are building, we're seeing now people with alternative media who have

much bigger audiences than the legacy media who had set, you know, 10 decades, if not over a century ahead of them. This is something big. So let's, you know, look, let's focus on the positive in that regard. Yeah, that's, that's, I enjoy hearing that like that, that, so much of any side of any coin right now is fearmongering. Like just like it's going to be bad. Everything's going to be bad. This, that, the other thing, when I listen to that, I, I go, that's a positive outlook on on on what's happening, right? Like, although there's a lot. Like, although there's a lot. lot of bad going on. There is, and I'm calling it bad and good, but I mean, the opposite effect is happening, like where, I mean, conversations like this 10 years ago weren't happening. Now, they're happening everywhere. And it's, it's kind of, you're right, when, you know, when you talk about the legacy media compared to, and I mean, the big one right now is Joe Rogan, right, where he's just like absolutely demolishing all legacy media.

And he's just, you know, once again, not a guy with this huge background in journalism or anything like that. Just opening up conversations for people to talk. And when you know, people enjoy that. Isn't that odd? Well, a lot of people who weren't journalists went into it as their own independent outlets. So we're seeing actually a rise of organic plurality because different people have different. realities, different experiences, and they're bringing it in to their own product. So we're seeing now such a texture. We're not seeing it in legacy media. It's very monolithic, where we're seeing

the texture is in, and interest is in new media outlets, people who are doing it on their own. And, you know, they have now funding models where they can actually, you know, make a go out of it, which is extremely beneficial. So when you see this, what we're seeing is a changing of a gart from, like we had the dinosaurs. We have yesterday's thinkers clinging on to these old models. And yet we're seeing this whole new, you know, ecosystem of different kind of media that's totally different, totally exciting, new perspectives, new point of views. And, you know, this is something actually, but propagating.

they want you not to see the positive. It wants you to be seeing it as hopeless and that you're helpless. So now that you have more people going into podcasting, having their own medium or substack, all sorts of things, this is actually, you know, we would be nice if other, you know, outlets were, you know, took their page from them, but they probably won't. But I don't see a death of journalism, I see a resurrection. It's just not in the hands of the old guard. And there's a lot of panic in that, that you stuck, you know, 30 years with this media outlet and you're, you're losing ratings, you're losing revenue. And you have somebody who's never been in journalism before, doing it better. And they have an audience. They have, you know, they have a funding model.

And they have audience growth, word of mouth. It's a totally different ballgame. So people, who are negative in that, they're not looking at this whole new ballgame, which I think is absolutely exciting. So I actually am very positive. I was, when I wrote when journalism was a thing, 2018, I was writing about the death of journalism. So from 2018 to 2020, there's a resurrection. So as somebody who's chronicled things very realistically, I can tell you right now, there is nothing to be worried about in terms of the new bar. It's very, very, very encouraging. Well, you just look at the history and just even in my lifetime.

As a kid, we grew up on the farm and you had two channels. So you got your local news and then you got the national news. And I'm being very simplistic, but you get the point. And if you wanted to read something a little broader, you went and picked up a magazine or, you know, there's several papers, that type of thing. you fast forward and even to when I was a young kid then you had satellite then you had satellite radio and it just started to broaden and broaden and now with the smartphone and the ability to literally listen to a podcast from anywhere in the world I'll stick to podcast on any subject and then pick one subject and you can have a thousand 10,000 different perspectives all of a sudden you're right it's it's

blowing up the control of what media was, where one message gets filtered across one country by one organization and they very much control it. And that's why you see a panic and legacy media owners and a lot of other, let's say, people who are old guard authority because they were used to having, you know, what they said went because it was a media was a one way form of communication. So if you were one of the outgroups, you were out of luck. You might have been villainized, seen as a freak, or totally ignored. Now that's why we see a panic, that's why you see Nudge units and propaganda,

trying to actually get people not to relinquish this power of being able to put on their voices, their findings, their research out in the public. So this is a little skirmish where, okay, we're going to scare everybody and we're going to say, These authority figures who screwed up, they're the only people who know what to do. So you should relinquish all your power and control to them because that's the way it used to be. And we should be back there so we can rig the outcome in a certain way. And when people said, no, I'm going to keep my podcast or I'm going to keep my substack and people went there for information, that's not what was supposed to happen.

This, you know, plurality in independent media was supposed to go away. didn't go away, it proliferated, it bloomed, it blossomed. So in a huge way, the propaganda absolutely failed in that regard. So that is something I find absolutely fascinating because I've always studied traditional propaganda. 2020 propaganda and did not have the designated enemy or this is, but once that happens, once you prime a brain, you can't reprim it. This is, you know, it has to play out. People will come back to normal. And a lot of people will feel bad and have regrets, which actually in many ways, if they understand that it wasn't their doing and that they did not have the tools to see it, that they should forgive themselves. And we should just kind of, you know, learn to teach people, you know, how to keep collected, how to keep our three literacies going and make sure that this never happens again where people are, you know, working from fear, working from anger, frustration and pain.

loss. That's how people get manipulated. You might have hard time paying the bills before this all hit. And now you feel helpless and you feel bad. And somebody's taking advantage of that. And that's, you know, why I think propaganda is so insidious. It's so cruel because there are people who have problems and then it's made worse and they think they're doing right, not realizing they're being abused. And it's in propaganda, you have emotional rights. Propaganda wants you to forget that you have emotional rights, wants to violate those emotional rights and wants you to agree that having your rights emotionally violated and denied is a good thing. And this is, I find this just very relevant because at least for my brain, I think a lot in my

audience, just cluing into some things and then starting to ask questions. And I don't know about you, but I think, you know, got to. to keep asking questions. Always ask, ask, ask, like never stop asking. I don't think I have the book on anything. I'm certainly not the smartest guy in the room. And I hope never to be, because then there's always something to learn. And when you're not allowed to ask questions, that's another red flag. Like you're not allowed to, you're not allowed to question the narrative. That is a red flag. Oh, if you're not allowed to ask questions, that's when you have to ask questions. That propaganda doesn't want you to ask questions. They don't want you to waste because

then you'll have a time to think and then maybe you'll see something. And then, well, people ask questions, they're not loyal. No, people ask questions are more loyal than the people who try to stop you. People, censorship is abusive. Censorship wants you to make decisions without knowing the real landscape of reality. So censorship is emotional abuse. The lack of being able to ask questions is a sign of abuse. So propaganda is a very abusive form of communication. When you're not allowed to ask questions, when you're belittled and villainized for asking questions, I don't care whether you agree with someone or not. As soon as somebody's asking questions and another person's trying to shut them down, I will say, ah, that person who's trying to shut them down

has reasons. Now let's take a line of inquiry and see what is it that they're trying to do, what are they trying to rig or hide or gain by, you know, shaming a person for doing something completely natural and organic, which is trying to find out information. You have the right to know what's going on. That is not, you know, people don't have the right. The governments and media should not hide information because people have the right to know the truth.

So you want to live a life. You want to make sure your kids live a good life and that you live a good life. You can't do that if you're not given all the information. And, you know, rigging wants you, you know, when you rig something, questions get in the way. So you have to keep asking questions until you get the answers that satisfy you. And maybe a good question or trail to follow for a lot of, including myself, you can point to anyone, is who's funding, right? Like I think I think that got pointed out real early on when it went not early on. Right now it's getting pointed out a lot, maybe a month ago.

But like with Pfizer and Moderna and I'm on vaccine. I don't know why it's on the top of my brain. I think it's just one of the things I saw. But they were funding, you know, this is brought to you by. And it's like it's like glaringly obvious which way they're going to sway. They're not going to sway on a piece that goes against who's funding their project. And I think that's an easy question for anyone to ask of any media source that is probably pretty easy to attain the information, I would think. Well, I worked as a journalist.

And even when I wrote books, the first question I go is who's funding it? Follow the money. A lot of times people get attacked on social media, not realizing that the government funded those attacking tweets. A lot of times even when I got attacked online, I'll go, well, who's paying you to say that? The person just disconnects their account. And I found that very fascinating. So you go follow the money. Absolutely.

That's why you go, for instance, to the Foreign Agency Registry Act online. Okay, who's funding the coverage? Who's funding? Who's lobbying? Go to lobbyist registries. You'll be surprised. We have United States, Canada, UK and Australia, they have lobbyist registries. So you can, in the federal one in Canada, you can actually see which departments they went to, what were they asking?

And you'll see a lot of corporations asking, mostly asking for a month. So a lot of times who's funding it? It's like, okay, who's asking the taxpayers to fund it? So it's fascinating. So when you're looking between PR and lobbying, you can find it. 90% of the story is right there in the registries. And you can go and you can look and it's fascinating reading. So yes, follow the money.

I always ask, if you've ever watched Keeping Up appearances, that British sitcom where they had the husband and wife and the son only called when he had wanted money and the father would go, okay, how much? How much? So when you're hearing propaganda, the first thing you should be like Richard on keeping up appearances, how much? How much do you want? That's always about the money. Yeah, that's, I know the show. So that's funny. Yeah, I think you hit on some really good points there.

And once again, I've enjoyed this. It's something that was sitting right there for a lot of people to see and continues to sit there for a lot of people to see. And yet, for some reason, you know, you mentioned the different parts of the brain and how it can paralyze it and not make you think and add it up together. It's interesting. if I take it away from media, I've been in positions as a buyer getting sold where they do exactly that.

Right? I mean, buying a car, I think everyone can relate. At times, you're like, I've literally been in that situation where they don't want to give you any time. They don't want to let you ask any questions. And I'm being rough on a car salesman. But that goes across the board. There's a lot of people, not a lot of people, a lot of businesses that are, are, structured on that way, probably because they found success in it. And they've never looked any deeper

than success. Well, when we do it this way, our bottom line goes up, right? Well, let's keep doing that. And it's a tactic. And governments aren't silly. They learn tactics because they want to stay in power, especially in Canada where we don't have a term on how long somebody can be prime minister. And it's, you have to wonder, like the structure is during a different time. we had one form of way of communication and everything else. So we're actually seeing a changing of a guard. And the first place we're seeing it actually is in journalism. So once the dust settles and the dust always settles,

and I would say probably within a decade, we noticed the currency, the rise of crypto and the rise of, I would say, I'm going to call it citizen journalism, which is probably not the best term for it, we're going to be seeing changes in other places as well. So this is just, as I said, a shift. People's brains have been primed and a lot of people are panicked. But for the people who saw it right from the beginning, because they had enough free brain space

to be able to think rationally and calmly and go, this doesn't make any sense. This is ridiculous. This is silly. They're going to say, okay, how far can I go? If you could live a life and start something new within the last couple of years, you should be very proud of yourself. You have done something that was not supposed to be done. You can rise very, you know, and just being your organic self.

So we're going to see a lot of different changes in the way our society is run. We're going to, people think it's globalization. No, it's de-globalization. What we're actually witnessing is de-globalization. We have seen the push for globalization. Now we're seeing the opposite where we're going to see plurality, where we're going to see texture, and what's going to. going to happen next is anyone's guess, but it's not going to be predictable.

You don't think it'll be predictable. No. Predictable means because we were so used to being in a rat. Well, you know, it's a pen. Pop again is like a pendulum. It swings one way. And then by the force of gravity, it swings the other way. It's like when you have too much to drink and you've gotten a hangover, your hangover is a very

different feeling that when you first had, you know, a lot of the yummy drinks. So propaganda is the same way. When people start going, you know, they're going to have a hangover from propaganda, and then they're just going to go totally the opposite way, because that's what it does. You can prime the brain one way.

It's like a holistic. It will snap back the other way. And when a lot of people realized what they've lost or what they could have had, but they were made artificially afraid, that's when people get enraged. So we're going to see different groups behave at different. times. So you had the, you know, the innovators, the visionaries who managed to keep their cool, they started, let's say, podcast, or they started different businesses and they thought of different

ways. They're going to be the vanguard. They're going to be the leaders. And then we're going to see different groups kind of wake up from the slumber or they're, you know, they're artificially induced death of thinking, come back. It's going to be a totally different ballgame. It's not going to be predictable at all now. Well, let's slide into. the final five here, brought to you by Crude Master Transport. Shout out to Heath and Tracy McDonald. They've been supporters of the podcast since the very beginning. It's just a time segment as we slide out and let you get on with your day. But I'm curious what you think of Elon Musk buying Twitter. And I brought this up a few different times over the course of two weeks

because for a lot of people, they're extremely excited of what this could mean for Twitter again. But then I've also heard the other side of, one of the things that a knock on Bill Gates and men like that is one person controls a huge swath of the population. And we're, well, I mean, that's where we got to.

We're billionaires and top of billionaires control so much of what the population can see, can do. I mean, media is a prime example. What's your thoughts on Elon Musk and Twitter? Well, he knows how to get a lot of attention for himself with this. So he's very savvy in getting attention for himself. I think he has a bigger plan in mind, and he will probably be able to monetize Twitter in certain ways.

So what he plans to do, I'm not going to guess at this point. I have theories, but I'm not at the point where I could definitely say with confidence, this is where I think he's going, this is the trajectory for it. He's gotten the right people upset who thought they had rigged and controlled everything and that now they can just tell the little people what to do and they'll do it. So you have to actually, my more interest is the people who are, the people in power who are upset at his getting Twitter than anything. else because you're not to say, okay, why are you upset? What are you trying to hide?

To me, always the more interesting thing is the people who react in panic. That's to me where my interests will go, go. Why are you so upset that he has Twitter? What is going to change because he has it? I mean, you have literally millions of people, you know, posting on Twitter every second of the day that it's like a ocean of information and you're upset that he's going to have it. Why? What are you trying to hide? So to me, it's always more interesting the people who are having meltdowns than the people who are just excited. Because people who are excited, they have things to say.

They can't wait to say it. It's the people who want the other side silenced it. Why? I'm always like, what's the other side worried about? I'm not so worried about that side as I am intrigued about what's going on with that side. Well, here's your final one then. What's something then you're really paying attention to right now, Alexander? What's something that's really caught your attention?

I think it's the de-globalization. Things are sort of getting off the rails. So I'm more interested in scaffoldings than actual world events. So I look at people's emotional reactions. I look at who's funding, who's delegating, what PR firms, what lobbyists, so what former intelligence operatives are doing. So what's happening behind the scene? So to me right now, it's trying to see people who have, for the last,

two years, been trying to rein in control, losing more and more, they're putting on the front where they, like, they're thumping their chest and they know everything and they can have all this power. And they don't seem to be doing very well. So I want to know what's going on with this, you know, this fraying of the old guard and what, why? That's to me the number one reason. Why did we have to go through all of this ring of moral for the last two years? what's what what what's it's it's like almost being like in a Sherlock home story where you have all these unusual threads and when you hear the reason go oh that was so obvious well so far it's not completely obvious but that's where I'm interested in what why the panic on people who supposedly

have power hmm I think there will be a lot of people that will will agree with you and follow along with that well I appreciate you giving me an hour of your time um this certainly has been uh I like to say I'm going to chew on this for a bit because I certainly am. I'm going to have to go back and the propaganda thing I think is something that like you say is getting talked about more and has become really easy to see at times and at the same time now with the rise of an independent media arguing with the legacy media so to speak it's become a little interesting propaganda war both ways of what's actually going on and that's that's a different problem all itself. But I really do appreciate you coming on and giving me some of your time because this has been

an enjoyable hour. It has been here for me too. Thank you so much. Thank you. Hey, thanks for tuning in today, guys. I hope you enjoyed it. If you enjoy the show, make sure to like, subscribe, share, leave a review. If you want to help support financially, of course, the Patreon account is in the show notes. And just appreciate you guys. Tune in. Give me some of your hard-earned time. And go kick some ass today, all right? And we will catch up to you Wednesday. We've got another archive episode. And then, of course, Friday we're back on as well.

Until then.