TrueLife - The Medium Is the Message — McLuhan Spotlight #2

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

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Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphene. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Welcome, my friends. Welcome to the machine. What is going on out there? How are you guys feeling? Everybody feeling all right? Feeling pretty good about yourself?

I hope you're having a good morning. I've been digging into this McLuhan of Mr. Marshall McLuhan and his ideas about the future being robotic. When you go back and you read some of the literature in which he wrote, it's almost prophetic. It's amazing to me to hear and read and see some of the ideas he was talking about coming to life. now. Let me read you a quick quote from the immortal. Well, I guess he's not immortal, right? If he's immortal, he'd still be alive. But let me read you a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of Seven Gables. Is it a fact that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the world of matter has become a great nerve vibrating thousands of

miles and a breathless point of time. Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence. Or shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but a thought, and no longer the substance, which we deemed it. The level at which technology is part of our lives is a fascinating subject to think about. it's amazing to think that we can become both product and service it's amazing to see the advancement of robotics from a dell computer to Elon Musk's brain chip and how the speed in which our society is changing the velocity of that to me is amazing I'm always curious about the effects on the brain that that's having. I want to read you some excerpts and get into some comments about some of Marshall McLuhan's ideas.

Let us begin right here. All of man's artifacts of language, of laws, of ideas and hypotheses, of tools, of clothing, of clothing, and computers. All of these are extensions of the human body. man cannot trust himself with his own artifacts the tetrad is needed to reveal any artifacts subliminal effects every artifact is an archetype and the ongoing cultural recombination of old and new artifacts is the engine of all invention and drives the subsequent wide use of invention which is called innovation if you have ever seen sat in a hot and airless lecture room trying to follow the speaker's line of argument, you have experienced the psychic nature of a figure. It is the momentary area of your mind's attention. As you sit there, you will notice perhaps successively a sudden shift in the air,

the radiator knocking, an insect buzzing between the screen and the pain, or the pressure of your legs against the chair. Within the context of all the things that exist in that room, points of awareness, attention, will arise and recede. In a larger sense, nothing has meaning except in relation to the environment, medium, or context that contains it. The type on this page, the sound of my voice, is the figure against the ground of the blank page.

The figure of the geometric construct is revealed against the void in which it is imagined. The left hemisphere of the brain is figure against the ground of the right brain in Western culture. and the opposite for the Oriental. In his book, Out of Revolution, Eugene Rosenstock explains how the figure of Western capitalism has persisted in a program of advance by environmental destruction without any policy of replacement of such ground. By contrast, the right hemisphere

man like the primitive hunter, who has learned to move through nature rather than against it, is always intensely aware of ground, and in fact prefers ground and the experience of participation in ground to the detached contemplation of figures. Chiang Yi points to the rejection of visual matching and representation in Chinese art. Verisimilitude is never a first object. It is not the bamboo in the wind that we are representing, but all the thought and emotion in the painter's mind at a given instant when he looked upon a bamboo spray and suddenly identified his life with it for a moment. He further notes, we try in the steps of the sages to lose ourselves in great nature, to identify ourselves.

with her. And so in landscapes, in the paintings of flowers and birds, we try not to imitate the form, but to extract the essential feeling of the living object, having first become engulfed in the general life stream. The Eastern philosopher aspires not merely to love and understand a painting itself, but to probe for a meaning far beyond its confines in a world of the spirit. On these right hemisphere terms, figure painting is a peculiar Western preoccupation that is devoid of satisfaction. Until the advent of the expressionists and the cubist art in the West was enthralled to Renaissance perspective, an individual portraiture requiring a detached observer

by tuning in on the new odile tactile awareness made available these days by our electronic ground copper found that modern physicists were unwittingly retrieving a worldview which is harmonious with ancient eastern wisdom his problems in reconciling

to were entirely those of the hemispheres. I had gone through a long training in theoretical physics and had done several years of research. At the same time, I had become very interested in Eastern mysticism and had begun to see the parallels to modern physics. I was particularly attracted to the puzzling aspects of Zen, which reminded me of the puzzles of quantum theory. at first however relating to two was a purely intellectual exercise to overcome the gap between rational analytical thinking and the meditation experience of mystical truth was and still is very difficult for me it's fascinating to think someone can compare the art of zen the way of zen and physics it seems that both are an attention attempt to stretch the modern monkey mind into an abstract idea or vision of the unexplainable. Have you taken some time to think about modern day physics and string theory and all these incredibly abstract ideas that modern day physicists have?

It's a lot like some of the Zen coens and the Zen ideas. One of my favorite Zen ideas is the idea of modern man living his life expressed this way. Like a silkworm spinning a cocoon, he gets caught up. the same way a man spins his ideas about his life in this world, eventually getting caught up and cocooned in this web of ideas and predicaments, almost like a prison, but somehow more like a cocoon to be reborn. It gives a pretty good visual. everyone is seen

you may not have seen the actual silk worm or you may not have seen the actual worm spinning the cocoon but you've seen a worm and you've seen the cocoon or the chrysalis doesn't it seem like that's what we do as well doesn't it seem that in your life you have this abstract pattern of thought

the reality that you spin is your reality Therefore, it's your truth, but it's not necessarily the objective truth. However, the older you get in life, the more set you are in that cocoon, the more difficult it is to peer through the web of lies, the web of ideas or the web that you've spun for yourself. It's fascinating to think about the two, isn't it? It's an interesting way. Here's another excerpt I think you'll like. As man succeeds in translating his central nervous system into electronic circuitry, he stands on the threshold of outering his consciousness into the computer.

Consciousness, as we have discussed in a previous chapter, may be thought of as a projection to the outside of an inner synesthesia. corresponding generally with that ancient definition of common sense common sense is that peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all other senses and presenting that result as a unified image of the mind erasmus and more said that a unified ratio among the senses was a mark of rationality. The computer, moving information at a speed somewhat below the barrier of light, might in thousands of years of man fragmenting himself. Up to now, the extensions of man have been warring with each other, spear against gun, stagecoach against railroad, engine, television, against radio, and at incompatible,

speeds. The horizontally organized multi-service corporation, or something like it, in its use of information as wealth by electronically predicting consumer needs before the first wheel is turned or button pushed in factory or retail outlet, may be returning us to a state of integral awareness. We are entering the age of implosion. We are entering the age of implosion, after 3,000 years of explosion, the electric field of simultaneity gets everybody involved with everyone else. All individuals, their desires and satisfactions

are co-present in the age of communication. Think about that for a minute. After all these years of expansion, globalization, growth as the word in place of God for corporations. After all this expansion, we have begun to retract, expand and contract, expand and contract, expand and contract. The circular motion of life. Just like the way the planets rotate around the sun, our solar system,

rotates around the galaxy and our galaxy rotates around the universe. Expanding and contracting. Doesn't it make sense that those same cycles would be taking place not only in our bodies, but also in our patterns of living? We are entering the age of implosion after 3,000 years of explosion. All individuals, their desires and satisfactions are co-present in the age of communication. That's another point too. when you look at what's going on in the world today,

how can any one person make sense of what's happening? Everybody's right. There's so many people being taken advantage of. They have a right to be in the streets. They have a right to be calling for blood. They have a right to be calling to tear down statues. They have a right, like they have been, these people have been objectified,

and they have been put in situations, that are horrendous. And when that image is put out across the world at almost the speed of light, how are people around the world supposed to comprehend this particular image that has taken hundreds of years? That one image, while a picture may be worth a thousand words, that particular image needs about a million words to describe what's happening. And based on where you were born at,

based on your color of your skin, based on what you look like, based on your gender, you're going to have a different perspective about that image. How can anybody be expected to decipher that much information? That's the point he's trying to make here. All individuals, their desires and satisfactions, are co-present in the age of communication.

but computer banks dissolve the human image. When most data banks come together into a reciprocating hole, our entire Western culture will turn turtle. Visualize an amphibian with its shell inside and its organs outside. Electronic man wears his brain outside, his skull and his nervous system on top of his skin. Such a creature is ill-timed. tempered, eschewing overt violence.

He is like an exposed spider, squatting in a thrumming web, resonating with all of the webs. But he is not flesh and blood. He has an item in a database, ephemeral, easily forgotten. And resentful of that fact. Earth in the next century will have its collective consciousness lifted off the planet's surface into a dense electronic symphony where all nations, if they still exist as separate entities,

may live in a clutch of spontaneous synesthesia, painfully aware of the triumphs and wounds of one another. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Since the electronic age is total and inclusive, atomic warfare in the global village cannot be limited. There's another key point there that I think everybody should be aware of. And it's this idea that electronic man wears his brain outside his skull and his nervous system on top of his skin.

You know, we're not, as human beings, we're not set up to, interpret the amount of information coming to us this quickly. Painfully aware of the triumphs and wounds of the other. If you spend time on Facebook, you see people putting their best foot forward, most of the times. You see people providing the best possible image of themselves that they can, or at least what they can. think is the best possible image of themselves. Hey, look at me. Hey, look what I'm doing. Hey, look at this.

Look at what I'm eating. You know, you never see anybody post a picture of like, I see a lot of food. People are like, look at this awesome food I'm eating. I got a steak on here and it has a hibiscus flour, but it's really a potato. But the chef made it. And it's got a little bit of gold flakes on I'm also having this incredible margarita that's used with the rare rum from an endangered tree in the Congo you know what you never see you never see anyone like hey I'm eating McDonald's look at this cheeseburger looks like it's all flat and like the buns been smashed look ketchup's running down the side hey look at these cold fries I got over here like you don't ever see that But some of the people I see posting pictures with this rad food,

I know for a fact those knuckleheads. I know where you eat at. Why don't you post a picture of your taco? Hey man, look at me a Taco Bell. I got a number four, man. I got the new Dorito taco, the pink flaming taco, man. It's delicious. And I put the sauce on there.

Mmm. How come we don't post those pictures? You see what I'm saying? You give this idea, this image of yourself that is inaccurate. However, the person a million miles away looking at your picture doesn't know it's inaccurate. They should. But too many people see that image of the person that has and feel sorry for themselves because they have not. it leads to an interesting idea of,

I think it was a philosopher named Gerard that spoke about the main reason for conflict is imitation and desire. And his foundation of that argument was, it's fine. If you're my friend or you have a friend and you both enjoy this one thing, that's awesome.

And you guys can enjoy it together However, when that one thing becomes scarce, then you must compete for that thing. And quickly, the affection of your desire becomes the object of your hatred. You who were once friends now fight over this one thing because you both love it and want it. When in fact, you're both imitating each other. it's a tricky concept to think about however think about two men fighting over a woman they both want to be with this one woman and one tries to show the woman how much he loves her thus the other imitates that same behavior and he tries to show how much they love her and what happens is quickly

the object of affection that may have turned into the object of the object of of affection or the resource the two are competing against turns out to be less than the competition. Does that make sense? The thing you're fighting for is secondary and now it's the competition that's important. And the more alike the people competing are, the more different they think they are. And it's a concept that can be applied to almost anything. It's pretty. It's pretty fascinating if you take time to go through it. I'm probably going to do the next spotlight of philosophy on that particular gentleman. But for now, let us jump back into our good friend Marshall McLuhan. As new technological man races towards this totality and inclusiveness, he will no

longer, as in earlier times, have an experience of nature as nature in the wild. He will have lost touch. And by now we should realize that touch is not simply skin pressure, but a grasp of all senses at once, a kind of tactility. When we lose nature, as a direct experience, we lose a balanced wheel,

the touchstone of natural law. With or without drugs, the mind tends to float, free into the dangerous zone of abstractions. What do you think about that? Do you think abstract thought is dangerous? In some ways, I think it is the foundation of creativity. However, I think what Marshall McLuhan is saying,

when you have abstract thought, there's no right or wrong. When you have abstract thought, you have 25 gender pronouns. When you have the dangerous zone of abstractions, you have eroded law. And it's weird how that can work. It seems to me that the law has already been eroded by abstract thought in people making, say, over $2 million or $4 million or $10 million or whatever that number is. If you're Jeffrey Epstein or Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or a senator, if you're one of the billionaires, if you are Kevin Spacey, if you're one of these people that have broken through the threshold,

then law is in fact an abstract idea that doesn't pertain to you. And I think that's what's filtering down to to, all parts of society is that, well, this is not against the law in my culture. Okay, well, then I guess you're okay. Arnold Toynbee wrote that incompatible societies will always fall into a confrontational situation with each other. That a complex civilization, for example, growing rapidly beside a less developed, tribally oriented group

will rain down a blizzard of psychics. suggestions as a counter-irritant, which will inevitably result in the explosive reaction. This observation, played in reverse, tells us that the inner-directed person, especially one inflated with an almost emersonian view of individualism, will be emasculated by the effects of acoustic space because he is not trained to. perceive it. In this century, the third world has increasingly been manipulating the West. Weaker societies invade and conquer stronger societies, not by arms, but through infiltration in much the same way the people of the Southern Hemisphere and the countries of the Pacific Rim have been

slipping into the United States because the white Anglo-Saxon majority has been unable to see them. right hemisphere oriented people are invisible to those who cannot think in qualitative terms. When the banana republics began to destabilize over land reform in the 20s and 30s, the U.S. reaction was predictably lawyer-like and aggressive, a call to the military to make those knuckleheads behave. Like education and industrialism, the military of the military of the military of the military of the West is the product of the homogenizing effects of the phonetic alphabet. King Cadmus' dragons teeth. Occupation to the U.S. Marines was a container to be filled, not a process to be monitored.

The people of Central America absorbed into the American culture, thrust and blunted it with a lotus light. effectiveness. The multitude has no use for time laid out in intervals, keyed to a demand for results. Only specialists think that way. The person who gives over his life to electronic services, whether he is merely a participant in a cable system or an information manager, will lose the security that proceeds from specialism. Specialism developed in the Western world as a reaction to the new social order devised by so long for his fellow Greeks. Henceforth proclaimed the lawmaker the Athenians will make goods only for export, leaving the agricultural bias of the attic plains to itself.

Soon the Greeks added foreign slaves and profits soared. They began to entertain the idea of a job as a repetitious assembly line method of making goods. which is undoubtedly the source for the Greek word technique art or made by hand the idea of the role was gradually lost sight of that is the multiple holding of partial jobs signifying one's authority over a household the specialist can always be seen to have one salient characteristic he is quite willing to trade his freedom of action for the security and the stability of a closed system. Odysseus undoubtedly felt the sting of this commitment after returning home to Penelope, climaxing 10 years of creative wandering.

Toynbee explains that in a culture of active warriors, the lame and the crippled and the old become specialists, like Hyphaeus, the smith and armorer. Think about professional careers, and fragmentation. When I go to my dentist a while back, I had to go and get a root canal. However, my dentist,

she doesn't do root canals. So as she was digging into my tooth, she goes, oh, this one needs a root canal. I have to send you to a specialist who does root canals. I said, well, why don't you just do the root canal? Oh, I don't do that. And then I got to get, and afterwards I have to get a crown. So she puts on a, she makes,

a mold and then she sends the mold to somebody else so they can carve out a crown a specialist and then i'd go back to her it seems to me that this constant fragmentation this constant referring to specialists in all parameters of business is unsustainable like i don't want to go to 10 different people to fix a tooth problem. And when you peel back the onion, I ask myself, I'm like, why does she do that? Well, she is going to send me to a root canal person

who's going to charge me twice as much. She's going to get a kickback from that for not doing anything except referring me. And they're all going to charge my insurance company and I'll make a bunch of money off of it. Meanwhile, the insurance company is going to get screwed and I'm going to get screwed. And the people that are pushing off their work that they're supposed to be doing

on to specialists are making a ton of money. It's like an exploit. And it just seems to me that that sort of fragmentation, specialization, which I think Marshall McLuhan is actually pushing as a good idea. maybe not so much as a good idea as it is an idea that's developed in the left hemisphere of the brain. Because I think what his argument is going to get into deeper here as I read is the difference in processing between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. But that is for a little bit later chapter. Let's dig back in.

What may emerge as the most important insight of the 21st century, is that man was not designed to live at the speed of light without the countervailing balance of natural and physical laws. The new video-related media will make man implode upon himself as he sits in the informational control room. Whether at home or at work receiving data at enormous speeds, imagistic, sound, or tactile from all areas of the world, the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic.

His body will remain in one place, but his mind will float out into the electronic void being everywhere at once in the data bank. How many people sit in a cubicle and have their mind moved all over the world? If you look at what seems to be happening in a lot of the tech companies right now, is people working from home, especially with the COVID.

There's no need for those people to be in a brick and mortar building when they can work remotely. However, it is yet to be seen the effects of those people's behavior when they live in a particularly conservative society or neighborhood. and they work for a radically left-leaning company. I got to think that those would come into conflict causing some sort of incongruence or some sort of inability to think clearly. Discarnate man is as weightless as an astronaut, but can move much faster.

He loses his sense of private identity because electronic perceptions are not related to place. caught up in the hybrid energy released by video technologies, he will be presented with a chimerical reality that involves all his senses at a distended pitch, a condition as addictive as any known drug. And isn't that exactly what we're finding out now about the social media companies? The methodologies used by the platforms to keep you there, The methodology is used in order to keep you clicking and watching the little shots of dopamine that are released when you get a thumbs up. On a related note, I've been doing a bit of marketing through Facebook.

I tried a three-month experimentation in trying to promote this particular podcast. And because it's relevant to this book, I want to... and to share it with you. So I had spent, say, like, $2,000 over the course of three months. I utilize Facebook's tools of target demographics. They have a very detailed suite of analytics that, excuse me, it makes sense in some ways. And I'm sure to the trained mind of the Facebook marketer,

it makes sense in a lot of ways. And it can be effective. However, after doing fairly well, I got invited to have a consultation and be assigned a marketing expert they called them. And I had a first call a call with the marketing expert yesterday. And she was telling me all these things. things and running me through this stuff.

And she was a very nice person. And she was incredibly intelligent. However, I don't think she really cared from what I was trying to do. She had mentioned to me that she had done a deep dive on what I was doing. However, I don't think she listened to one of my podcasts. I don't think she really cared one bit. However, she did give me some great advice on how to better use Facebook's analytics. And I thought about it.

And our conversation was a few hours. For me, what I came up with, though, is I got to ask her a few probing questions in the midst of asking questions about what we were doing. And she had mentioned to me that she was lead on. several large campaigns. And the ease in which she described achieving the results of the people in her campaigns, whether it was clicks or whether it was getting people to buy stuff, setting up online shops, she was clearly really good at her job. And she was really, like I said, she was really nice.

She was good at her job. And I have no doubt she was incredibly effective. And she told me some things. things to do. However, what I realized after the conversation and some of the probing questions, you know, one of the things she had told me is that if I had multiple campaigns going, that I'm competing with myself, and then I had asked her about her campaigns, and she had told me, oh, yeah, I got tons of campaigns going. I'm not really allowed to talk about them. So I thought to myself, how in the fuck am I supposed to compete with a person like that?

So if I'm on the Facebook platform spending like 2000 is not, it's a pretty good chunk of money, right? If I spend two grand and I spend countless fucking hours, how am I supposed to compete with a person that doesn't have a six, that doesn't have a full time job that doesn't have kids? And this is what they do full time. So I'm spending two grand. I'm spending hundreds of hours trying to. to build a page and build an audience and build a marketing arm of my podcast platform. Spending more time on trying to market the podcast

and actually making the podcast. And then it kind of hit me like, yeah, that's what Facebook is. Facebook is not really a marketing tool. It's a place where there are good marketers that are there that can make it work, but they're there to corral, people like me and working people into spending all their fucking money on a shitty platform. It's just going to take all their shit and then compete against them.

Right. If you have a good product and you can get it in front of a million people, you're going to get a pretty good response rate. However, if you have a good product and the platform you're using to market will only allow you to get in front of like 100,000 people, if you spend two grand, There's no way to compete. They're just going to slow roll you until they fucking take all your money.

So for me, it made me rethink what am I doing on that platform? But it also ties in with what I think Marshall McLuhan is talking about here in that you get caught up in the hybrid energy released

by video technologies. You're presented with this reality that involves all your senses at a distended pitch. It's addictive. You know, it is like a drug. You know, how do you, you start seeing all these thumbs up and all these likes and people saying these kind things about you.

However, how do you know that those thought, like you, say you get a thousand thumbs up or a thousand likes, how do you know that that's just not a warehouse of monkeys pressing the fucking thumbs up button? You paid your two grand and now they feed the monkeys some peanuts and the monkey. and the mongies are trained to hit the fucking thumbs up button. So what are you really getting by spending money on those platforms? Nothing. If you look at the truly successful campaigns,

it's like Toyota, Coca-Cola, all the big-name people. There's no way to compete with that. So, seems I've digressed again. But I think it's pertinent to the whole social media being addictive and finding ways to extract resources, not only from the community, but from your livelihood, from the relationships with your family, from your pocketbook.

And they target your dreams, they target the things that you want to do, and they feed you just enough. I think that that's common amongst most social media campaigns, and I think it's relevant to the book. The mind, as figures, sinks back into ground and drifts somewhere between dream and fantasy. dreams have some connection to the real world because they have a frame of actual time and place, usually in real time.

Fantasy has no such commitment. And in a strange way, it seems that's what the social media platforms are in fact doing, is they are capitalizing on people's dreams and exploiting them to become fantasies. I don't know. Maybe people have fantasies and the platform is trying to help them become a dream. It's hard to say. It's hard to say. But I'll leave that up to you, dear listener. At that point, technology is out of control.

The Greek's very early lost control of technology when they substituted the idea of the private citizen and written legal codes for the pure wisdom of traditional communities. During what we identify as the golden age of Greek literature, Herodotus remarked, that his people were overwhelmed by more troubles than in the 20 preceding generations. In the Western world, we are heading for an in rush of social aims and structures. The group mind will predominate and make us so sensitive to other people's needs and wants

that whole regions will be exhausted by the demands of adjustment. But more deadly than minute and constant calls for change, especially when those affected our unobesioners, aware of its cause is the attitude of mind which has persuaded western man to take on the duties of god sputnik encircling sputnik in encircling the planet made it an object of art that small aluminum ball called forth a view of the earth as something to be programmed like the pilot of the space shuttle man is now captain of spaceship earth in engineering a concept of ecology

of earth, air, fire, and water as an integrated whole. There are no more passengers, only crew. Such a grasp of totality suggests the possibility of control not only of the planet, but of change itself. Constant change for its own sake

threatens everybody. One of the interesting things about continuously mutating technology is that it is one of the prime sources of inflation. In a state of social implosion induced by information moving at the speed of light, those who are part of information monopolies, like the foreign exchange analyst or the book editor or the platform economies or the shopping platforms will not see changes threatening. But when ordinary people do not know who they are, they get anxious and violent.

Many men went to the frontier in the last century to prove themselves. In the border town of the American West, everybody was a nobody until he wrestled an identity through taking a risk and pure grit. The frontier was a hardware society which allowed men and women to define themselves by transforming the land. The electronic society does not do so. It does not have solid goals, objectives, or private identity. In it, man does not so much transform the land

as he metamorphoses himself into abstract information for the convenience of others. Without restraint, he can become boundless, directionless, falling easily into the dark of the mind and the world of primordial institution loss of individualism invites once again the comfort of tribal loyalties.

I'm going to think I'm going to leave it there. Let me just drop that last paragraph on you again because I think it does a really good job at summing up where we're at today. the electronic society does not do so it does not have solid goals it does not have solid objectives nor does it have private identity in it man does not so much transform the land as he metamorphoses himself into abstract information for the convenience of others without restraint he can become boundless directionless, falling easily into the dark of the mind and the world of primordial intuition.

Loss of individualism invites once again the comfort of tribal loyalties. Think about that one, ladies and gentlemen. This guy's a deep thinker. And it's so amazing how true things are today. about what this guy was thinking about yesterday. And it all stems from where we get our information. It stems from how we process our information. The medium is the message.

The medium is the message. If you're reading, if you're listening to something, you are processing information different than if you are watching a video. And it seems to me documentaries are the new books. and it's unfortunate. There's a lot of really good documentaries out there. However, the majority of them show one side.

The majority of them are so good at painting a picture of what it is they want to put in your head that you can't think otherwise. It goes right past the critical thinking defenses. And too often, there's not an opposing view in the documentary. There's only one side. So be careful about how you consume information. The same way you consume food, the same way you consume things in your life. Be careful of the information you consume. I love you guys.

Aloha.