We are tired of the news. We are tired of the "Henny Penny" doom and gloom. We just want good dirt.

This week, we discuss why "unbiased" news aggregators might just be echo chambers with extra steps. We also explore how the Printing Press was basically 15th-century Twitter for spreading lies about Marie Antoinette, and why we are all susceptible to AI hoaxes about boys who cry wolf.

In this episode:

1. The YouTube Pivot: Why serious war documentaries now start with ads for Raid Shadow Legends and sports betting.
2. Ground News (Not a Sponsor): We tried to find the truth, but the algorithm just got confused by our search history.
3. The French Revolution: Proof that misinformation is older than the internet (and usually involves a guy in a basement making stuff up).
4. The Compost Cure: Why ignoring the world to focus on the nutrient density of your soil is the only valid response to modern life.

REFS:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny
2. https://ground.news/
3. https://www.epa.gov/recycle/composting-home

Speaker 1: Bring this in, bring this out, and we’re here. Here we are. Today’s topic... today’s topic is, you know, let me just stop here for a second because I have been watching some YouTube videos before we get into the topic of YouTube videos being doom and gloom without solutions. I watched some YouTube videos and, you know, it feels more and more that the first two minutes of every YouTube video now, they have to promote themselves. They have to talk about their own universe that they’ve created, the t-shirts that they sell, the sports betting app that they have, the podcast that they’re doing also... all these extra things happen and the video just needs to give me the information. What happened to YouTube with that? But really today’s topic is... maybe we should do another topic. That should be another topic: self-promotion YouTube.

Speaker 2: I love it when a YouTuber starts talking about a very serious subject, like, "Guys, one of the wars that’s happening right now," and then two minutes in they’re like, "First, let me tell you about Raid Shadow Legends," or whatever other product they’re promoting. They’re like, "Guys, this game is so awesome," and then immediate complete switch of the flip, flip of the switch, tone change, and they go back to, "Guys, this is really terrible stuff, we really gotta be better about this as people." You know, I think that’s funny. Especially when YouTubers talk about how commercialization of things is bad and then they end on a Ground News ad or something like that.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree with the whole Ground News thing. I remember when Ground News came out and I was into it a little bit—I did the trial and everything—but I just feel like it’s just exacerbating... is that the right term? Exacerbating the issue with news in general in that you can still live in the echo chamber that you want to live in, which is the problem with news. The continuation of separation between parties and people. We have too many outlets, too many things, and it’s circuit overload for over 50% of the population, which is causing a lot of kerfuffle.

Speaker 2: True. It’s just you see something and then a lot of the time you have to pick between, "Do I believe this somewhat or am I immediately skeptical?" You know, you can’t just full-on believe right from the get-go because there’s so much effort you have to put into even a reasonable level of verification. So the best thing you can do is trust certain sources better. But it’s interesting that you say that about Ground News because their whole thing is they’re trying to overcome bias by showing you your biases. And you’re saying that like, "Oh no, that just means it’s an echo chamber with extra steps." Like they’re cool with showing me my bias. Because when I’ve used the app, they say like, "Hey, you should look at this source that’s not your usual way you swing." The thing is, Ground News couldn’t really figure out what I was exactly. It kept being like, "Well, actually this side you’re not aware of, this side you’re not aware of," and it kept flipping sides for me. I don’t think it knows what I am.

Speaker 1: Yeah, aggregators be aggregating, dude. Whenever you go through an aggregator to find a thing, it’s going to be curated. It’s going to be a certain way for you. And that’s just the way the aggregator works. There’s a feature there that grabs kind of your attention and goes, "Oh, oh yeah, look, I’m being better, I’m being less biased." But how do you really know that other than the app telling you you’re being less biased? How do you really know that?

Speaker 2: I guess when you read the article, you would then notice that the article is biased from a different viewpoint from what you would normally see. Or it’s from a source that you wouldn’t normally consider. But I feel like if you are really heavily leaning one way, you would just read a source from the other way and just be like, "Huh, that’s why these guys are wrong, this source is clearly stupid." I don’t think you would take it seriously. I don’t know, I’m curious. Did they have any testimonials, Ground News? Where some guy is like, "I used to be too far leaning one way and I was really ignorant of opinions the other way, and now I’m more in the middle." Is that their aim, just to get everyone more in the middle and reasonableness?

Speaker 1: I think that’s kind of what I’m trying to articulate is like, just because it gives you this bias meter, what are you doing with that and what is it trying to accomplish for you?

Speaker 2: Well, my thinking is it’s good to get sources from a variety of viewpoints when you’re seriously considering a topic. Because there’s been a few things where I hear about it and I immediately go in one direction, and then I hear a little bit more about it and then I’m like, "You know what, my original way I just instinctively went actually wasn’t super reasonable." Because there’s a lot of, you know—I mean, it’s as old as human people. You get one viewpoint on something and it kind of skews the information so much one way that you just immediately assume a bunch of stuff that may or may not be true. And I mean, this isn’t rocket science, this isn’t even political science. It’s just facts, it’s just people. It’s just easy to obfuscate your own mind. I don’t think it’s necessarily done on the whims of some big shadowy organizations that are trying to confuse people one way or the other; I think it’s just how the human brain works. Like we were talking about earlier, man, we’re just trying to do a lot of heavy lifting with very little information because we’re just processing so much information. And I think we’ve gotten better as people at processing more information in general, honestly. I’m pretty proud of us. You know, humans out there, all of us humans, give yourself a round of applause.

Speaker 1: Speaking of a round of applause, this podcast is sponsored by Ground News. Use the Ground News app daily and get your unbiased news there.

Speaker 2: Let’s make an AI app called Air News that just says it’s biased news. This one’s just biased, dude. You log in, you tell it your bias. You just give it keywords for your bias and it just shoves it in your face. Echochamber.com, that’s going to be our—we’re going to lean into it. But yeah, this has been a secret Ground News sponsor the whole time because we’ve been raising so many questions about it. If you haven’t tried it, now you think, "Well, I have to try this app to see if it works on me or not." I should try it. We should reach out to the people at Ground News before this airs and say, "Hey, do you want five more subscribers maybe?"

Speaker 1: I think we only have one, by the way, but you know, we’ll go with that one listener. We love you, Mr. or Mrs. One.

Speaker 2: Sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 1: No, I just kind of feel like I probably ignore news to be honest. I don’t really go to a news source, a daily thing. I miss the days of watching Walter Cronkite, I miss the days of like Katie Couric, I miss the days of when you could go to like the nightly news and that was where you got your news and that was good enough. I don’t really like getting news from social media, I don’t really think that the news itself is that... I don’t know, I just feel like it needs to come from a smart source, it needs to come from a thoughtful source. And I guess to totally take back everything I said about Ground News, at least they’re putting some thought into it.

Speaker 2: Yeah, they’re trying. They’re trying something. And they only pull from publications that are accredited, I believe. I’ve seen some weird publications on Ground News—there’s a lot of them out there, like the India Times and that sort of stuff. Maybe that’s big in India, but just a lot of things I wouldn’t normally read. Which is another good part about it.

Speaker 1: That would be a feature that I would actually enjoy seeing is if they could do some kind of accreditation sort of, you know, like, "They got this right 90% of the time, they get the facts right 92% of the time." Some kind of fact-checker would be a good feature, but I highly doubt—people don’t even know the facts these days. I don’t know how we would put that in an app.

Speaker 2: Verifying facts takes so much effort compared to the very little effort it takes to just make something up and throw it out there. But again, I think we’re getting pretty good at it. Making up shit? Yeah, we’re really good at making up shit. Well, making up shit and also calling stuff that’s made up more and more. Like, a lot of people when they talk about that, they act like we’re completely hopeless dumb animals who will just instantly believe whatever bullshit is shoved down our throats. I honestly think that a lot of people don’t give humans in the information age enough credit. We’ve adapted pretty quickly to a lot of different kinds of misinformation. Look at like AI pictures, man. Like there’s so many things that I’ve seen where people are like, "Oh my god, can you believe like this boy was in the woods and he got led out by wolves or something? Look at these photos that someone got on their trail cam." And then immediately there’s like five comments that are saying, "Dude, this is clearly AI." And AI has gotten pretty good. So it’s like impressive that people are just on it like that. Will AI get good enough to the point where that is not even possible anymore? Maybe. But people do put in effort to point out misinformation. So people who are there in the comments who are like, "Guys, this is fake," this one’s for you. Sometimes people say a real thing is fake. So that’s also, you know, we’re not perfect. We don’t bat a hundred or a thousand or whatever it is.

Speaker 1: But we’re trying. What was our topic about?

Speaker 2: I believe Ground News was our topic.

Speaker 1: Oh, was it? I think it was about doom and gloom without solutions.

Speaker 2: No, I think we moved on. I think misinformation was our topic. Love it. We can do doom and gloom in a follow-up episode. Guys, this is also a teaser for doom and gloom.

Speaker 1: This is actually a teaser for doom and gloom without solution. Because there can be doom and gloom with an offered solution... but we’re on misinformation, sir. We could start doom and gloom right now. Well, I just want to give the teaser. I just want to give the teaser, you know. That’s all I was trying to do. I was trying to say that there’s two types of doom and glooms. There’s doom and gloom without solution, there’s doom and gloom with solution. Tune in next time on Today’s Topic to find out more about doom and gloom without solution—the "Henny Penny" effect as I like to call it, aka Chicken Little, "the sky is falling."

Speaker 2: And that’s our final word? No? You just want to end on a teaser? Okay.

Speaker 1: No, no, no, I’m not ending on a teaser. I’m just trying to... I don’t know, I was into talking about that Henny Penny stuff and we went—and I put us into this rabbit hole of talking about misinformation. So misinformation every step, every step misinformation. I feel like it’s—we’re almost back, you know, we’ve cycled back around to like the early inventions of the printing press where the rich and powerful had access to the printers and would print off crazy ideas and all that stuff to people. And people would be like, "Oh my gosh, there is a werewolf in the woods of France!"

Speaker 2: That’s funny because I kind of feel the opposite in that the invention of the printing press, much like the invention of the internet, offered a great democratization of being able to spread information. There’s a lot of stuff in the history of like the 19th and 18th centuries especially—the ages of revolution, democratic revolution since the French Revolution—where a big focal point of a lot of government efforts to stem revolutionary sentiment was centered around the shutting down of independent printers. Independent printing was a big deal. Nerd alert, nerd alert, nerd alert...

Speaker 1: It’s much easier to shut down a printer than to shut down someone on the internet. All right, well, how about wrong alert, dude? You’re just wrong. Wrong looking ass... no, for real, for real. No, I appreciate the facts here. Let me just restate what I mean when I said the printing press was a thing. I agree, but those were single moments in time when underground presses actually did make major changes. Majority of the printing press was made to spread propaganda and misinformation.

Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s a lot of instances of that. And I think looking at the internet and social media and all that stuff, it’s like a printing press level advancement of cultural technology, you know? So I feel like we’re kind of hitting that right now. And hey, the printing press—a lot of shit happened because the printing press came out. Printing press dropped and people were like, "Dude, have you read that Marie Antoinette thinks that we’re all dickheads?" That sort of shit, like the "let them eat cake" and all that. That came because some guy was like, "That’s great misinformation that serves our agenda, print it." And it was just some Frenchman in a basement who came up with that shit and we still believe it, you know? So information is powerful.

Speaker 1: Information is powerful. And I mean, it’s source is powerful. I think the source from where it comes is also pretty powerful too, right? If you can create an entity that has a lot of trust, you can say some pretty insane things and people will grab onto it and run with it and make their own revolutions without you even being involved, right? That’s kind of the antithesis I feel of where we’re at right now. That’s why I was saying it was a cycle. We’re in this point where there’s so much of it, there’s so much of it that you have to sift through and find the good stuff. And right now we’re being kind of, I feel like, tamped down a bit with being able to actually share the good stuff. I just think there’s so much of it.

Speaker 2: I think at a certain point it becomes so much effort to sift through that it’s also just easy to be like, "Whatever." Like so many people you talk to these days, they’re just like, "I don’t even care anymore, man." And honestly, I fall into that camp. I stopped consuming—like I uninstalled Ground News, the sponsor of this video, because their service was simply too good. I was getting too much good information.

Speaker 1: How much was it? How much were you paying for it a month?

Speaker 2: I never paid a dollar to them, dude, I always used the free version.

Speaker 1: Oh, you just used the free version, okay.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there was something where if you clicked on certain articles—I don’t even know, dude, I got what I wanted out of it. I think I was like googling a lot of articles instead of using it through the app or something, some cheap bastard type shit I was doing. Anyhow, I feel that it’s just so much to take in all that news every day. And a lot of it is just a bunch of people getting blown up internationally all over the place, especially in one particular place. And so when you’re just trying to live your regular day and be all copasetic about it and be happy about shit, hearing about that all the time is difficult.

Speaker 2: And what matters more: being more familiar with people getting blown up internationally and other things that are going wrong and or right, or having really healthy composted plants with a lot of nutrients in the soil? Which one’s going to be better?

Speaker 1: I vote for the former. I want to know how everyone’s getting... that’s not true.

Speaker 2: So at the end of the day, maybe misinformation isn’t actually the core of the problem because there’s always been misinformation. Maybe the real problem is too much information, and that’s my final word. Boom!