The Paikin Podcast - World on Edge: Why Too Much Information is Driving Us Mad

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

Dan Dunsky joins Janice Stein to discuss why the news seems to be driving us crazy, how our brains are being hijacked, how digital media has created a "constitution of confusion,” the erosion of institutional trust, the collapse of the post-war liberal world order, and how exactly we can stay informed without going mad. Follow The Paikin Podcast: YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@ThePaikinPodcastX: x.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKY: bsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.socialEmail us at: [e-mail]

Hi, everybody. Steve Paken here, and we're happy to welcome you back to another edition of the Paken podcast. This week, World on Edge. You know, in this segment, we tend to look at a different region around the world and talk about why the world is on such edge in that particular place and what impact it may be having on us here in Canada. We're going to take a different approach this week. Not so much a problem with a region in the world, but the problem of just being inundated by media from myriad sources. Maybe few of which, maybe none of which, are very constructive to our overall, let's say, mental health, let's say understanding of the world. How are we dealing with this bombardment?

We've got a special guest on that coming right up on the Pagan podcast. Well, this is going to be a rare treat today. we're going to welcome back Janice Stein from the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Hello, Janice. Good to see you again. Hello, C. Do you know this guy that we're on with today, Janice? Or about how many years, Steve, would you say, 30, 35? Yeah, I would say that's getting up there. So let me give a more formal introduction for our pal here. This is Dun Dunnski. Dunn and I sat in my backyard in 2006 and, and, uh,

kind of blue-skied the idea for a new show nightly current affairs on TVO called The Agenda. And I think we had a pretty happy run doing that show together. Dunn was the executive producer of it. I got to host it for 19 years. And Donna, maybe I'll just get you to start by, I mean, the reason we've invited you on here today, besides the fact that we just kind of love the idea of getting the gang back together again, you did a speech not too long ago. You gave a speech in which you kind of laid out some of the ideas that I teased in the introduction of this segment. Why don't you just start by laying out a bit of a

thesis and then Janice and I'll dive in. First of all, can I say hello? That's allowed. It's nice to see you, Steve, and it's great to be on with you, Janice. And likewise with you, Steve, and I appreciate the kind words. And yes, it's hard to believe that it was coming up on 20 years ago that we sat in your backyard and started figuring out what was to become the agenda. And those were fun times. That was a lot of fun. So I did give a speech. About a year ago, I was approached by somebody who asked me if I had any thoughts about media, the state of media, how to stay informed. How many times have I been hearing people say, I can't follow the news anymore. I'm going crazy. The news is driving me crazy. People are talking about things like digital

detoxes. By the time I spoke with this woman, I had had this thought about a speech called how to stay informed without driving yourself crazy. I'm talking about being informed as a citizen. That is, cultivating a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the issues that shape our lives as public individuals as citizens. For example, it's really important that people who want to be informed, have some understanding of how governments set policy and why they do so. It's important that people who want to cultivate a reasonable sense of understanding or being informed understand how global events affect our domestic economy. We're living through a great example of that right now. We also should have a reasonably sophisticated understanding of what's at

stake in questions of justice or public health, just to name a few things that have been coming up over the past few years. So that's what really started me, Steve, in terms of coming up with the ideas for that speech. Janice, let me get you to weigh in from this standpoint. I know, I mean, you and I are voracious news consumers, and obviously we love to dive into newspapers, either real or digital or watch the news or current affairs on television, whatever. Listen to the radio. I find myself, and of course, I want to be very informed because, A, like Dunn just says, it makes you a better citizen, but B, it's part of my job as well, and I suspect you feel the same way about those things. But every now and then, Janice, I have to turn it off because it just makes me crazy. And I know Dunn uses this expression in his speech.

And I wonder whether you get yourself to a point where, and I'll just pluck an example out of nowhere here, you know, the president of the United States as an example has just said an exponentially insane thing and I just can't listen to any more a talk on CNN about it anymore. Does that happen to you? Not really, to be honest. Not really. Now. You've got a bigger appetite than me for it then. You know, it is all fundamental to my work, and I love my work that that really, I feel outraged a lot of times, but not I've got to shut this off. But part of it may be what I read. So I spent very little time on social media, right? Almost none. Good.

Very, very little. But I read a lot of other things. but let's I want to go back to Dunn's point for one minute Steve because it's so important you know you can't really have a democracy most of political theory has been about what do you need what kind of citizens do you need in order to sustain democracy and there would be widespread agreement with what done just said except we've never had this person never and that is so and the reason I make this point done, that's not a social media problem. That's not a, yeah, that's not a function of the crazy volatility of the stuff that's

bombarding us. That's not a function of the current news. You know, if we go back to broadsheets in early 20th century London, people didn't have an understanding of how public policy was made or the big issues about, you know, it was a big pandemic. It was a flu pandemic a hundred years ago. So I think it's sometimes really important to separate out what we think we need. And we all say we need these things. And I wouldn't be in the field of education. I didn't agree with you 1,000 percent. But I am aware of the fact that we never had it. And as Steve knows,

from your work, Steve, vote for all kinds of reasons. And they don't have much to do with what we would describe as thoughtful, informed, reasoned, and that knows. And they don't need to explain to us their vote. I mean, they're entitled to vote

for whatever reason they want. They always have, though. I mean, they've always had idiosyncratic reasons for vote. Yeah, and just to be clear, I'm not making the point that, that, which I did not say, and I do not go on to say, and I hope we'll get to this, but I am not making the point to not do, to not follow the news, to take active steps to be less informed about certain things.

No, no. I know. Despite what you've said, though, Janice, it still doesn't, what you said doesn't prove that you should still not try to be well-informed, right? Just the fact that the absence of something doesn't mean that we shouldn't still be taking steps to... No, but there is a tendency then, and you hear it all the time. Social media has turned into ignorant people with limited span of attention, and they blame media over and over and over. You hear it all the time. Yeah.

And when I hear that, I actually think that there are a few things going on. I think that there are a few things. going on that can explain why increasingly, to Steve's point, people are turning off. There's the sheer volume of information. Can't keep up. You cannot. And that does create a sense of anxiety, right? And the point that I make in this speech and that I think is really important to remember,

because I do think that a lot of people feel this, that sense of being overwhelmed is not a failing. It's not a personal weakness. It's actually a pretty rational response, and here's what I was going to get to, to three kind of overlapping phenomena that are going on. One is the real-world shifts that we're living through, right? So, Janice, we can talk a lot about this, the geopolitical, the economic, the cultural shifts that have destabilized the kind of post-world order. that we once took for granted. Yep. The second that I think is contributing a lot to this sense of feeling, you know, anxious all the

time is a sense of institutional decay that has eroded kind of trust and common frames of reference. Where I do think that social media and digital media, I should say, more widely, not just social media does play a role, is that, and this is not, I'm not an expert in this, right? This is just through my reading and talking to a lot of experts in this, is that digital media right now are pushing up against our own biological limits, like the ancient wiring of our brains, right, are not able to keep up with this new media environment. And it is making us kind of uniquely vulnerable to some of what's going on out there.

And I think if you put those three things together, that's what I think is causing this sense of feeling crazy. So I actually think it's the first two. And I think it's these incredibly volatile changes in the world, which will come to which. And that's what people are really trying to flee when that's how I have to turn it off. They don't want to think about a world which can go so badly wrong. That doesn't mean it will go so badly wrong.

by the way, but it's clear to people, it could go so badly wrong. You know, the brain argument, how are our human brain wires? And it's really interesting, again, because I'm not sure that that's the whole picture done. Let me put it that way. There's a tremendous amount of really good neuroscientific research now, which tells us two things. We have great brain filters. We filter out what we don't want to hear. you know, you can literally say it to somebody

and they will shift to or they will tell you you said something different from what you said. It is, brains are unbelievably efficient machines at filtering out something that is inconsistent with your fundamental beliefs. Well, that's a problem. Well, this is the real, you see, that's really interesting.

So social media actually sometimes, looks a lot like the human brain because humans are biased and we talk about the bias in social media that actually and then i thank you in that speech which and thank you for sending it to me i really enjoyed reading anyways great thanks you talk about emotion right and social media runs on emotion but the negative emotions yeah anger fear and the higher up the skill you are the word of the year year is rage bait. Rage bait. Oxford Dictionary's word of the year.

Rage bait. Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage and we are swimming neck deep in it every day of our lives now. And we know this. By the way, just on that point, sorry Janice, but let me just say that on that point, we know quite a few studies in cognitive science and social media and digital media more generally have shown that due to a quirk in our evolution, we take greater, stronger cues from negative stimuli than we do from positive stimuli.

And so the negative information that's coming to us off of social media tends to stick around longer. We tend to share it more. It elicits a stronger reaction. But Janice, that's really important because the algorithm is actually prioritizing those things. Again, I'm not here to say that social media or digital media is the only reason that we're feeling crazy. I do think, though, that we're making a mistake if we dismiss how different this is. I know that there were the yellow journalism of the past. I know that broad sheets were

designed to elicit reactions as well. There's something about the digital, the algorithmically driven digital media that prioritizes negative, that prioritizes emotion, that is video-based. So is as opposed to words is actually designed to elicit an emotional response rather than another kind of response. Yeah. So I'm not going to do on that. We ignore these things at our peril. I think that's entirely true.

Let me just put that a slightly larger frame done. There's really great research over the last decade. There is no reasoning without emotion. Right. And that whole divide between reason and emotion. Yeah, that's what the Enlightenment thought is 2,000 years. It's just wrong. It's not how the brain works.

And if you actually think about it for a second, where do we get our information, our information from? Because we like something or we don't like something. And so emotion is the fastest carrier of information to the human brain. So what you're seeing, and the reason there's a negativity bias in you. humans on a social meeting. You know why? Because when we were on the tundra, if the lion was staring at it and we made a mistake, it was, oh, that's a nice friendly cat. Our kids aren't around to tell the tail. Yeah. If you ignore good news, if you ignore good news, you don't die. You don't know bad, bad news. That's right. That's a problem. So there's a bias built into our thinking long

before media and all this just to say that then I think it's so important when we have these debates and these debates the media precede social media I remember hearing debate about the biased newspapers in Canada that rigged the public discussion actually what happens I think media becomes an unfair whipping boy or a scapego or a scapego or the way we as human beings have evolved, the way we're wired, and the biased ways we make a lot of very important. It's very,

can I jump in, Steve? Or did you want to say something? No, no, no. It's very interesting, though, that the two people who were in, whose career were in media are actually a little more down on the media than Janice's.

But I will say, though, Janice, that I agree with everything you're saying. I don't think that the. media is the first cause for what's going on. What I am saying, though, is that the ubiquity of modern digital media is definitely increasing the negatives that come with what we're talking about. Do you know how I describe it done? Would you be comfortable?

Would you be comfortable? Would you say media are amplified? That's how I describe it. Or another way to think about it. I think amplifiers is good. I tend to think about it as a thermostat, right? So, and what's happening right now. Good gauge of the temperature.

Well, except that what modern contemporary media is very good at is turning it all the way up to high and leaving it there. Right. And so, you know, it's not just amplifying. It's actually overheating us if I could torture the metaphor a little bit, you know. So that's what I, but I suspect, I suspect, I actually don't think. that in the current incarnation of blame the media, social media, or digital media to blame, I would place more blame, frankly, at 24-hour cable news when news actually had to fill so much space. And there ended up, there's a direct line from that to media as to news as entertainment

because of just the sheer amount of time that needed to be filled, number one. Can I, let me jump on that if I could for a second down because it, look, if you watch the world unfold from the time that you and I were kids, and I'm, I guess I'm almost 10 years older than you, if we watched how the world unfolded, you could come away with the impression, again, some of our childhood had taken up in the ad, there was no anti-social media when we were kids, there was no 24-7 news, at least there wasn't when I was a kid, maybe just, it was just, it was just, sort of coming on stream when you were a teenager. The world was actually inexorably getting better. Every year, right? We saw the Berlin Wall came down. Apartheid came to an end. The Soviet Union came to an end.

Nuclear missiles started to be decommissioned. Civil rights were improving. The world seemed, you know, the world seemed to be becoming a better place. There are 100 million Chinese, you know, lifted out of poverty. and and you know when I don't want to sound like an old fogy here but the fact is when there were sort of three main American news network channels telling you what the world was like that day you know you you had an impression that while there were troubles in the world things actually could potentially improve

nowadays I think it's impossible to come away with that conclusion now maybe because the world really is getting awful which it seems to be these days but maybe it's because we are are so monetizing outrage and anger and negativity that it's impossible to get an accurate impression of anything progressing out there. Talk about that if you would. And I really do want to get to the kind of part of the conversation where we talk about the real world changes. So the real world changes in the institutions, which I agree with Janice, are probably more of what's driving this sense of going crazy right now. But I will say, yeah, none of us ever thought that the movie network was a documentary. But having said that, and here's where I'm going to put another hat on,

I also recognize that in a world where there were just three people speaking from the podium, the voice of God, giving us the news, it left an awful lot out, number one. And it also did not reflect the experiences of a lot of people. And I'm not advocating we go back to those. You couldn't go back anyway. But between that and 24-hour news cycle, which tends to flatten everything out, gives everything the same relative importance, right? It is very difficult to kind of have a sense of proportion, a sense of context, and a sense

of discernment as to help you identify what actually is important for me to know. or at least to pay attention to. You know, that's what's changed. So, you know, if that was perhaps not enough or it was also a very different time, Steve, you were talking to an adult generation that had been through two or three, very formative experiences that a lot of people went through in the Depression, the world wars. Right. So there was a lot of homogeneity in terms of people's approach to life.

And we're talking about a different economic system. There, I do understand why media changed as our society did. And I'm not lamenting that past so much as I'm just pointing out some of the challenges that we're living through right now. But I suspect that we want to get to the global issues. But go ahead, John, sorry. Just before we leave this subject, sort of off to think how we covered wars right before there were. were digital media. So newspapers and TV would invest

all the resources in a war scene but never covered negotiations or peacemating got almost no attention, right? Soon as the gun stopped, everybody left the Bureau's closed. So there's a lot that's new, and I agree that the outrage is being amplified. It's very worrying. There's no question about it.

Because it actually, we haven't talked about this, you consume this stuff, but not that it makes you crazy and you want to shut it off. It can make you crazy in the sense you go and do crazy things. Yes. Because you're so overstimulated by it all the time. Oh, that's a good point. Like taking a shotgun to a pizza parlor in Washington in hopes of breaking up Hillary Clinton's child pornography ring. Yeah.

Insane. Yeah. And the outrage, especially where guns are widely available. Oh, if you're watching, you're consuming this all the time. And most shooters are consuming this all the time. And they're so wired up and overstimulated and over-stimulated or anything. So I take it very seriously. But I say there is a deeper problem underneath here, which is where I think done is really, you know, spot on when you go to the changes in the work that are driving.

So thank you, Janice, you just teed that up for me. I mean, it's like she's good, eh? Yeah, that was really quite something. Well, the second, actually long before I talked about social media, and I did prioritize them. I did say that in the speech, that, you know, for those of us who came of age in the second half of the 20th century, there was a certain shape to the world that we knew, or at least we thought we knew. You know, it was the world that was forged after 1945. It was broadly speaking. It was broadly liberal, broadly rules-based, broadly globalizing.

It certainly wasn't perfect, but importantly, it wasn't inevitable. It was a human construction. It was born from the memory of two catastrophic world wars, one great depression. It was underwritten by American military and economic power. And it was built on this really remarkable consensus that it turns out was perhaps more fragile than we had thought. And that consensus was that the belief, that open societies, open markets, and open institutions offered all of us better futures than closed markets, closed societies, and they're coercive and coercive societies. And it's quite remarkable, although I have to say, I do recall Janice saying this probably about 15 years ago, long before Trump came to office, Janice, you said that we were watching the disintegration of that world. I don't remember what the issue was. It may have been in the follow-up to the Iraq war.

It may have been the 2008 financial crisis. I'm sorry, I can't remember. But I do remember you saying that we were witnessing the beginning of the end of that. It's also important to realize, though, that so why do people, I think, feel the anxiety of the disappearance of this world? Well, number one, just basic familiarity. It's what we all grew up with. But also, it's because there were incredible successes in this world, right? Like, just, if you don't mind, I'm going to, I just have a few that I highlighted from the speech that I gave.

In 1950, roughly one in five children around the, children around the world died before the age of five. Today, it's fewer than one in 20. Global literacy was about 55% in 1950. It's 86% today. Deaths from interstate war were 300 deaths per million people annually in the 1950s, it's fewer than 10 today. And extreme poverty, you referenced before, Steve, people, hundreds of millions in China that have been lifted out of poverty. That was the condition for nearly half of the world's population. Now it's the condition of fewer than 10% of the world's population. And I will point something else out.

For women in particular, this world order was extraordinary. And with historic gains, in 1970, only about half of the girls worldwide completed primary school. Today, it's over 90%. Right. And you can go on and on and on. Unambiguously, positive developments, positive metrics. metrics. Measurable. And if you watch the media, measurable. And if you watch the media today and ask people about each of these individual metrics, my hunches, tons of people would be saying

it's worse today than it was. You're right, Steve. That's exactly what they would say we know from public opinion surveys. And that's why I said the problem of not being informed is not new. Now, let me throw something else on the table here, which is to say, I remember, I bet you two remember this as well. This was during the time of, oh, I think. I think it's the first Gulf War. So this would be George Herbert Walker Bush's Gulf War. And, you know, America was very successful. 91, Bush.

Yeah. 1999, yes, yes. And I thought you, you said 91. And the first thing I thought of was that was his approval rating as well. He hit 91% approval rating. That's true. Right. After that Gulf War, because it was so successful.

But you know what I said it? And still lost the election. And you know what I said it? Because most of our listeners don't know what or what. I know from people I teach. They don't know. It's ancient history. Well, they weren't alive for it for the younger ones.

Yeah. But the point I wanted to make was that David Brinkley, who, again, for the younger people watching us, was an icon in American journalism at the time. He sort of got famous in the 50s and 60s as the co-anchor of NBC's Huntley Brinkley Report, and he became a big name at ABC News. They brought him before Congress to testify about. Mr. Brinkley, what is news? And David Brinkley's answer to that question was, news is what I say it is. And it sounded arrogant, but that's true, though. I mean, David Brinkley was paid to make judgments about what was newsworthy and what wasn't. So that was the kind of America. A lot of people grew up in in the 50s, 60, 70s, 80s, 80s, and 90s. And now that we're in the 21st century

done, we have a much more democratized, there's no bar to entry anymore. News is what anybody with an iPhone says it is nowadays. And thanks to anti-social media, you know, you don't have to be a legend like David Brinkley to have a microphone and tell the world what news is. Anybody can do it. And I'm thinking, Now, you tell me here, the problem for me with that is I actually like somebody with a few gray hairs to tell me what's important, what's relevant, what I need to keep into perspective. And maybe the person who just bought an iPhone from a store and is 14 years old and doesn't necessarily know anything should not be held up to the same standard as David Brinkley. That's my bias showing.

Discuss. You want to go first, Janice? You go ahead. Well, you're touching on the third element here, Steve, which is this disruption of institutional trust or disruption of institutions that we relied on as kind of anchors and signposts in our world, right? And it's, I'll tell you a story. I remember going to a conference in Boston and probably around 2008, just a couple of years after we started the agenda. And there was like, there was the Berkman School of Something, Something at Harvard.

And it was one of the first schools that was going to look at digital technologies and democracy, right? And it was an orgy of positivity. I'm sorry to, you know, to use that term, but I can't think of anything else. It was all talk about the democratization of information and how the, democratization of information was only going to have good outcomes. And I remember thinking to myself, these people have never read a single book of history in their lives. If they actually think that a change of technology can only have unambiguously good ends,

they honestly, they have, first of all, they have no business being at a university or teaching anybody or anything. And second of all, they have no clue. They don't know the first thing about history. All you have to do is have some passing knowledge of what happened when the printing press and the direct relationship between the printing press and the religious wars in Europe to know that it was not an unambiguously good thing when information technologies change. So there was always this voice at the back of my head that understood, look, that Melvin Kranzberg was a historian,

a social scientist and a historian of technology, and he had these things called Cranzberg's laws. And the first law of Melvin Cranzberg's laws is technology is neither good nor bad, but it is not neutral, right? And it is going to have an effect. It is going to change things, right? And so what you're talking about, though, Steve, very specifically, I think, has to do with this accelerated process of digital technologies first eroding and then destroying the institutions that helped us figure out what was credible, what is fair, what is real, the institutions that actually help us as bridges between our personal opinion and our shared reality. And so, you know, this is actually the thing that has taken the most of my thinking over the past 10 years is frankly

the erosion of these institutions. And I am 100% certain that Janice has not only thought about this, but has experienced it in her role. Experience it how, Janice. Well, you've done it very, because what you're both talking about in the way is a distrust of expert.

That's what it really... You said, I would rather let Brinkley make a decision about what is news, than some 14-year-old who just bought an iPhone. So that's your saying. And that's not to say there's not a place for that 14-year-old in the eco-landscape that is media today. There is. And I'm glad that the bar two entry is lower and that we've democratized this.

But in doing so, we seem to have lost the fact that some expertise and knowledge is a good thing. There's no doubt. But if that were what the problem was, I think we don't be okay. If it was, expertise is not the only voice that you have to listen to. There are other voices, but you still could distinguish an expert from an on expert. We'd all be fine. That's not the problem. Actually, I think it goes much, much deeper.

What we're seeing is deliberate attack on expert knowledge and fabrication, right? And going to conspiracy theories, frankly, around some of them. look at the vaccine debate, right? It's gone way beyond science, whereas you might disagree with David Brinkley, and you might want an expert who thought differently about the world than David Brinkley, and therefore would structure the top of the news differently, but at least the debate would have been about, where's the evidence? Where's the evidence?

Absolutely. And that's, to me, the biggest issue. Now, I'm going to make a comment. I agree. Which some of you, some of our listeners are, experts partly did it to themselves. They partly did it to themselves. You can, you know, I'm really hyper careful about this because if I don't know something and I get asked in public, I will say. Don't get out over your skis on it.

Don't. Say you don't know. I've got to go check. I don't know. Because it can take years to build trust. But if you fake it and you get caught out, it destroys confidence and experts. No, no, I'm just going to say this. No accident that this distrust of expertise really takes off.

It's not social media. It was COVID. And there were a lot of mistakes made by experts because they wanted to get to a certain place and they were less than truthful with the public. Can I say something to you, Janice, though? If you come on here, and I know this, we weren't meant to speak just about media, but I know we keep on coming back there.

But let me tell you something. If you go on any show as a talking head, as an expert, and you say, I don't know the answer to that, you'll never get invited back again. Yeah, they won't book you again. That's a mistake. It's a terrible mistake. But what you're talking about, I think actually, expertise is one part of it that you guys know who Jonathan Rouch is, right?

The American author, the journalist. He had this book came out last year called The Constitution of Knowledge. And I think it's a really important book. And it's basically an understanding of our epistemology and how it's being eroded. And he is basically talking about the system of epistemology that we've had for really since the Enlightenment. right and and which is incredibly successful and what Janice was talking about is that what made it successful is that it's this kind of decentralized but structured like social order of academia journalism law etc all these kind of channels of experts yeah that channeled intellectual

conflict into productive pathways and it the whole point was that that it was a systemic approach to forcing ideas to be vetted, to be challenged, and falsified with evidence, right? And so the first important point about it was that you needed the evidence. And the second important point about it, which drove all the religious people crazy, is that it belonged to no one in particular. Right? And that system was maintained by, you can call it experts. I prefer to call it the reality-based community. community, right? But it's people who are all committed to those same norms. And what Janice is talking about is it's under attack. And Steve, you mentioned, it's under attack right now, and I

don't want to make this a political debate, but it's basically that system is under attack from both sides, right? On the right, it's under attack from disinformation, which is a concerted effort to destroy that kind of epistemology. And on the left, it's under attack by what we call cancel culture, right? This forced conformity, right? And although that's a more right wing phenomenon now as well. It is. It is increasingly so. But both of those things have in their sites that epistemology that really is a product of the Enlightenment. And that is what Janice is talking about, of which the expertise is a very important point. A very important point. Let me just let me circle back to something Janice was saying a second ago, which, which is to say,

and I'm from what, you know, I'm kind of old school on this. I think there's nothing. new under the sun. And we were talking about the best and the brightest during the days of Vietnam in the 1960s. And, you know, how could you go wrong? We had the best and the brightest working on that war. George W. Bush had the best in the brightest working. They got into Iraq. That turned into a disaster. We got the great recession in 2008, despite the fact we had the best and the brightest on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C., who were working on all of the financial architecture and yet all of that fell apart. It's not hard to see. that if you don't see yourself reflected in any of those institutions or any of those

groups of, you want to call them the ins as opposed to the outs, why you get Donald Trump, why people are just sick to death of all of this. And they've decided, you know what? Let's just blow the whole damn thing up and we'll figure out something else. And that's where we seem to be right now. Discuss. It's, I mean, we're we're putting things into these huge categories, but It is interesting that Donald Trump is kind of like the first Marxist president in that this is a class war. And the class happens to be the Janus of the world. And you and me, frankly, but it's the, you know, it's what Richard Flore called the creative class.

Yeah, more her, right? The professional managerial class. And I can't remember who it was that came up with that term back in the 40s or the 50s. But, yeah, it's an anti-elite phenomenon. And, and, and, and, and, our friend Michael Sandel at Harvard has been writing about that, by the way, but for some legitimate reasons. Yeah. I mean, these voices were ignored for far too long. Correct.

And the, and the results of the financial crisis, the Iraq war, China's entry into the WTO, which all expert opinion said, you know, would lead inexorably to China's further democratization. Didn't quite work out as the, as the expert said. No, not the case at all. But, you know, as we tried to sort of figure, okay, I totally understand why Fox News became the phenomenon that it became, because obviously too many people did not see their reality, I think probably in what they used to call flyover country, which is a terrible way to describe the red states between the two coasts. Yeah. But they did not see themselves reflected necessarily on ABC, CBS, and NBC's nightly news. And so they got a different option, and they now see themselves reflected there. My issue, and I'll ask you two about this is, my issue now is that it's got to a point where Fox News has this expression, we have to respect the audience.

Not that we have to respect empirically provable facts. We have to respect our audience and all of the inherent biases that come along with that audience. And I think that's a problem. That means Fox viewers are only going to be told whatever's in the Fox wheelhouse and that's it. And they're not going to run into any facts that might be contrary to what Donald Trump wants them to know or, you know, the MAGA world, that kind of thing. And I don't know what you do about that because it makes a billion dollars a year and who's going to tell them they need to change. Look, it's a huge problem, right? It's a huge problem.

Because I think what you really want is you want mutual respect between the audience. Yes. Right? And the news source. And the only way the audience is ultimately going to respect the news source is if they cue as closely as humanly possible to the facts. And if you have a new source that ultimately distorts, denies, and feeds people some of what people are being fed by some of that, what passes for new sources today, see, sure, it can inflame and it can be a very good business. But I think that's a short-term bet. Ultimately, what people want is as close to whatever the truth is.

Now, truth is a very complicated subject, and it's debated all the time. And it's really, really hard. I mean, on some issues, we're never, they were so single truth. But if you're not grounding your arguments and evidence, and if you're not saying, hey, your facts are wrong here, that's not what happened ultimately this is ideology it's propaganda but not new no done had it right before when he said we've moved from you know a left wing versus right wing to kind of a fact based to a BS based world and i'm not saying one side is is you know overwhelmingly more in it or out of it you know both both extremes of their problems on this let's be

let me just be a little more optimistic for a moment. We have the growth. Well, because this is such a, let's try to be a little more positive as people listen. Because it's the season, Steve. Yeah, that's right. So, you know, people look at, it's very true, newspapers subscriptions are, you know, declining in an incredibly rapid rate. I ask my students, how many of you read a newspaper every day?

almost nobody where do you get your news from i get it on my phone and so you get short snippet but at the same time there's a growth of long-form journalism um that is huge people are not it's huge people are even you know so so again i i think about what my students tell me what do they get their information from they'll start with their phone but then they'll dig around And they read a lot of long-form journalism and that's better and a higher quality than what was in a lot of much of it, not all of it. It depends on who you're reading.

But that's an improvement, frankly, because traditional media in newspapers didn't have space for that. And so this is not an entirely bleak picture. the picture is what it is fractured there's no common water cooler right and that's tough on a community if you go first of all people don't all go into work they don't see each other secondly they certainly are not reading the same thing so they can't turn around as i could did i say hey what do you think of that story i thought that was wrong and he will have read and we can have a discussion so the bonds of community bills are really free as a result.

The multiplication of news sources, it's not that the news sources are all back. Not just news, not just news, information sources. Yes. And I would ask you, Janice, as a political scientist, wouldn't you say that that's the first order problem that we're facing right now? Yeah. Is that we, I mean, you can take all your good intentions and all the policy ideas you have about global warming, about peace in the Middle East,

about Russia and Ukraine, if we cannot agree to disagree civilly or at least work off the same sets of facts. Those are not the same thing. I just have to interrupt you. Okay. There's actually civil discourse that is the, and I have, you know, I use it all the time at the university. We need to have a civil conversation.

But that's the start. Yeah. Okay? Because if you're just polite to each other, but you may. make no space for evidence. Yep. And it's just about opinion. And there were no facts in the discussion.

That is not good now. And it's certainly not good enough for a university. Just so? Yeah. Friends, let me put a final quote on the table here. And Don, I pluck this out of your speech and I'll get you to react to it. Okay. You wrote, we need informed, thoughtful awareness of the political, economic, and social forces that

govern the world we live in. that seems like a very reasonable mission statement for life my question is how do we get there from here yeah call okay so well i actually did some thinking about that very topic for obviously because i didn't want to just end the speech describing i didn't i didn't just want it to be a miserable recitation of what's going on we need a bit of a road forward i i did so so so So what I would say is you've got to start with, number one, you've got to start with humility. And you can't possibly know everything, right? And so instead of trying to know everything, my advice to people is to try to cultivate trust incredible knowledge systems.

And I'll explain what I mean by that, because it goes to exactly what Janice was just talking. talking about it. So my shorthand list for how you stay informed and not drive yourself crazy is number one, get off social media, right? It's permanently or just from time to time? No, get off of it. It's permanently. Don't just stop doing it. Delete the apps. Yeah. It doesn't reflect public discourse. It is designed to distort public discourse. Get rid of it. Number two, turn off cable news. As I said before, When you have to fill 24 hours of programming, every day, everything becomes breaking news and nothing is proportionate. So that's number two.

Number three, and we just touched on this a couple of seconds ago, is cut back on opinion journalism. Steve, when we started the agenda, you and I had a term. We came up with a term called ammunition journalism, and we said we did not want to do ammunition journalism. right if you if if if if if if the opinion journalist that that you're following is not unless they're doing real reporting i will bet you 99.9% of the time you know what they're going to say before you've read it or before you've seen it right that is not you're not learning if you're taking that and all you're doing is reloading right for it's and you're collecting bullets for your next argument and the only thing that kind of journalism is

reinforces as your own confirmation bias to bring back something that Janice mentioned earlier. So if we're talking about news, how much news do you actually need? My news consumption, Steve, has probably declined 75% since I left the agenda. And I still consider myself. Well, hold on. I'll get to that. But just on a daily basis, what do I do? I scan the headlines.

I do a deeper dive if there's something that's unfamiliar. I absolutely look at well-curated weekly digests, whether it's the F.T., the economist, or the Sunday times, and I am a voracious, I make sure that I am getting things from different sides of the aisle, as it were. I just don't want this to turn into a discussion about which sources, okay? Number five, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read history, right? History is, Reading a really well-written history of Russia and Ukraine is going to tell you so much more than about which 300 meters Russia took over today or which 100 meters Ukraine pushed back on. But not just history is the great contextualizer, so I really strongly urge people to read history

if they want to be informed, but also read fiction. It's really important to read fiction. Fiction teaches us empathy, right? And these are the kinds of things that will give us the ability to withstand the manipulation or the propaganda that Janice was talking about. And finally, you really got to curate narrowly. Don't trust platforms. Trust people.

Trust specific journalists. Trust specific researchers. Trust specific thinkers, specific authors, and the institutions that support their work. And those have to be the ones that have earned your trust through a really disqualification. process of, as Janice was saying, having evidence, showing their evidence, and correcting it when they got it wrong. If you follow those kinds of rules, right, you will find that you can be an informed person without driving yourself crazy. Janice, what do you think? Well, I, you know, look, I agree. I think picking out, you know, of that list, I would say the top two priorities for me

done, you know, of social media. Social media is just, I mean, it's just a way to go up a ladder, frankly. And whatever it is, if you want to go up the ladder that day, go ahead and say, you know, read a thread in social media. But it's just not, it's a bad use of your time. And I don't do it. I simply don't do it. The other thing is, read a book.

Read a book. Okay. Reading books is good for you. Reading books is the best thing there is for your mental health, frankly, because you have to sustain attention over a longer period of time. It's not designed to make you crazy in five minutes flat. And there's lots of ways to get access to good books because people write reviews and you don't always agree,

but that doesn't matter. But reading a great book, fiction or nonfiction, is one of the truly great pleasures of your life. But you know what? At Dunn talked about this, you need to slow down to do it. Slow yourself down to do it. And part of the reason we're all having so much trouble

is because the volume of stuff, I know the volume of my email now is now off the chart. I can do nothing else but answer email all day long. You could. Yeah, but how useful the day would that be? You know, would I really help by doing that? So you have to put that stuff in some kind of time gets straight and make time every single day to read a book.

And that will change the whole pacing for you. And you know what's really great? And again, I'm trying to be really positive here. Books are selling. Books are selling. They publishers have not gone out of business in an age of day. digital everything, people want a book, a printed book, some of them for their or some, or an e-book or audio book, but it's the point about having a structured format that

you're getting at. I just read a book. And the requirement to stretch those muscles. And to accept some friction in your life that not everything has to be immediate. And I don't want us to all sound like Steve, I hope that you're trying to reach people that are under 60 with this podcast because I don't want us to all sound like. you know, hey, junior, read a book and get off that social media. That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying if you want to be informed. Janice is saying if you want to be less anxious, you know, if you want to actually resist the kinds of negative aspects of this modern contemporary information system or ecosystem, this is what you can do and still stay informed and be an active citizen and feel better about yourself. Yeah. You know what I liked about this conversation so much? It reminded me of probably 4,000 similar conversations that the three of us would have, along with some of our other friends, in the green room before doing diplomatic community, before doing Studio 2, before doing the agenda, whatever. You know, let me leave you with this.

I just read a book. I'm not going to tell you on the air, which it is, but I just love this book, really in book, 670 pages, written on, published on the most board. paper. So turning the pages was a literally a tactile question, right? Because the paper was so beautiful. The type was beautiful. It was fiction. But I learned more from that book than I can't, than I have from anything I've read in quite a while. But boy, is it great that writers are writing publishers are publishers and book lovers are buying. That's great in the speeded up world that we're in because that's closest. Amen. Don, I know you're not a big fan

of anti-social media, but where do people get a hold of you if they want to see your stuff? Oh, um, I, it's a good question. Are you on X anymore or you're not on X? No, no, I got off of it. I'm not on Facebook. So, you know, I mean, email you. Email. Yeah, people are happy to email me. That's a really good question, Steve. I did have a Facebook page where I was posting this stuff too. I haven't kept it up. And geez, I wish that I want to give your email address or no? Yeah, sure. People can email me at Dan Dunsky at gmail.com. D-A-N-D-U-N-S-K-Y at gmail.com. I'd be happy to strike up conversation. I just, there's unfortunately no single repository of, of speeches and.

and writing. It shows you what's important to me. Yes. And now in yours, Steve. Amen. Thanks for this, you too. This was terrific. Ladies and gentlemen, as we'd like to say.

Can we wish everybody, Merry Christmas. Yeah, do it, Janice. Do it. Happy New Year. And sneak away from the family and the kids and the noise and the cooking and the decorations and everything like this. We'll sneak away for an hour and find a quiet. I'd like to sneak away from this bubonic plague that I've been feeling for the last week,

but that's another story. Anyway, everybody, from the Pagan podcast, yes, my voice is not great and the rest of these not great either. You hadn't noticed, right? No. Don't I look like I just Greg? You sound great. And this was a lot of fun, by the way.

I really enjoyed myself. Thank you. Terrific. So glad. Peace and love, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye, everybody. You know,

Thank you.