The Episodikal Podcast

Weapons of mass distraction

Episodikal Media Episode 18

In this episode, we tackled some heavy topics, including the way mass media overloads us with information to distract from what’s truly important, the paradox of increasing productivity without a corresponding decrease in work hours or retirement age, and the true meaning and limitations of democracy. Plus, we discussed the importance of making your voice heard.

Forum "Global Crisis. Our Survival is in Unity", November 12, 2022

8 Foundations of the Creative Society - prosperity of humanity

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​Alexey: Hello guys, and welcome We would like to remind once again that this episode will be available not only on all podcasting platforms, but also on YouTube and Rumble. You will have the opportunity to watch us speak if this is something that you like. And today we wanted to talk with you that it is very difficult, we mentioned a couple of episodes back, that it is difficult to make vital information rise above the noise of everything else. Before we had this informational void, that information was just withheld and not available, and now it is so I can't even say abundant. It's overflowing. We are receiving information from everywhere. I think that soon our fridges and coffee machines will also show you some tweets or something like that so that you are being brainwashed going to your kitchen without even taking your phone out of the pocket. And this is something that really is concerning, because how can people discern what's important and what is not? What is true and what is not? We've been pondering on this for quite some time and, well, the only option we came up with is do your own research and see what makes sense and what doesn't. Because, more often than not, common sense is not what we see in our lives. We see people ready to believe anything that is shown on the mainstream media, and they completely reject things that are really disturbing, and actually that are true. And people say, well, this can't be true. And you ask them, but why? Oh, just people, they did something, they photoshopped it, they, it's not true. You know it's not true. And I don't even know what to tell people when they're telling me this because they don't want to consider any alternative views. What do you think about this?

Taliy:

Yeah. You know, When we were growing up, I remember we had a TV, we had seven channels on it, and that was the only choice you get, like whatever is in there. And we used to think it's diversified because you have seven different owners for those seven media channels, and now we live in a completely different world. We have so many platforms, but majority of them belong to the very same people. And even when you have slightly different point of view, that's already considered to be a threat by the opposite camp, by the opposite side of the discussion. So for a while it was considered that there has to be a unified position on this and that, and whoever is against it can be easily shut down, canceled, and so on. With recent years we're seeing that big amount of people there, there is a big demand for a little bit broader view into it. I would say right now the problem is not that we don't have alternative sources of information, the problem is really that we have too many sources of distraction. And that is where it really is. Well, okay, something really important happened in the mass media. Let's take example that took place 13 years ago almost. It's the example with Climategate when, all of a sudden, it's a very specific topic because Climategate is something that when it's not that popular demand usually to know what climatology that much. People not that much interested in this topic, generally, climatology, but for the first decade of 21st century, it was extremely hyped up that anthropogenic CO2, we have to fight it. And then the, these emails are being published, which exposing the lies behind the graphs, temperature graphs, and the whole CO2 proofs. What did the media do? First of all, they silenced the story. They did not report on it, anything. And second of all, they distracted you with a completely different story of private life of Tiger Woods, how he got into a car accident, what kind of relationship he has with his wife. And when later people checked on the internet, the amount of requests on Google for Climategate and Tiger Woods was exactly the same, like about a hundred thousand per day per each one of them. On TV, it was one-sided story. Everybody were only talking about Tiger Woods making it look like nothing is happening to Climategate story at all. And then the only time they played an episode about the Climategate was during some NFL game where everyone's attention was on the football game. So you can find a way to have that information there, but still distract people's attention into something way less important. I think right now there are many different terms to talk about this. You can call it some kind of informational campaign, right? I'm sure these people who are getting paid really good money in the media to create the agenda. They're very good with it. We can see how much in the political spectrum the media has one-sided agenda, and they talk about certain things under certain angles and completely ignore the opposite side of the story, which might be very well, even much more important and people have demand for it. We don't live in informational field, in the free market space. That's one of the things that was considered like free market. We have free market on which news media outlets compete with each other and whoever is making best story that sells best, that gets the best number of requests, the biggest number of demand. That story sells well. So you're gonna sell that story. No, we live in a different world. Now, we live in a world where media controlled by the people who already have money, and they use their media outlets to push their agenda. There was a very interesting interview I was watching not so long time ago with a person who has multimillion dollar fortune, and what he was saying that, at the certain level, when you passing 20 million dollars, there is not much to buy. He says, it was the biggest shock to me. When I passed 20 million dollars, there is nothing more to buy. Once you have all the diamond watches and 5 million dollar cars, there's nothing more to buy. So you start investing for the sake of investment. You just think, okay, I might just make more money. I might just influence the public opinion in certain way and get political power, because what else can you do with your money? You want the influence. So we see that somehow our informational field evolved into where it is right now. And, right now there is still relatively large amount of independent platforms, which used to be not that much popular, but recently with all the cancellations of public figures and so on, we see them go into these independent platforms, which mainstream media try to marginalize. Say that well, you see, that only people with radical views go there. We would like to have a different kind of story, and we would like to see them speaking freely across all platforms. And here's the question, well, how do you shut down the hate speech or so on? I truly believe that there should be a strict punishment for any sort of propaganda of violence.

Alexey:

I totally agree with that. Even this word combination propaganda of violence. When we start thinking about who might be interested in spreading this kind of information, spreading violence, when on the outside, everyone seems to be for peace and peaceful coexistence, and absence of any form of violence, at least this is what's being portrayed everywhere, right? Everyone is saying, guys, we need to fight the crime and everything, we need to stop all the wars. And yet what we see is constant pushing of division in all forms. We have more and more, let's say, ways to divide people. Not only social status, race. Now we have many genders. We will not go into this, but this is something that also is being done not only for the purpose of perverting the whole fabric of society, but to divide people even more.

Taliy:

Ha, have you heard that joke? If you guess correctly the gender of your barista at Starbucks, you get free coffee?

Alexey:

No, this is something new. Oh, poor guys. Poor guys. Yeah. Oh, but thi this is, the more you analyze things when you see people acquiescing all sorts of crazy stuff. I don't even know who is inventing this. This is not natural. So this is not something that people could just discover by, I don't know, going somewhere, it's not something that you can find in the books. Someone came up with these ideas of more and more division. And what you can see is that there is a big divide. Even if you take the example of how Jordan Peterson became really popular, he was the first to refuse to use these pronouns in Canada, in his university, in his class. And he was already a brilliant teacher and professor, writer, but he was not as known as he is today. When we see this situation from this point of view, yes, of course, so he tells great things that make people think, his voice is heard more and more. At the same time, you can see how, not him, but how the society is divided between those who support the idea of having people randomly choose what kind of one of the 50 something genders they came up with, people who say No, look guys, it's total BS. There are two genders and this is. It's even very strange that someone has to think about it or that we need some additional proofs or anything else. But you see that people are clashing violently on Twitter and everywhere else. What is it that they are trying to defend? Or what is it that they're fighting for? Why is it so important? And these are the questions that I've been asking myself for quite some time. And the, you know, only idea that I came up with for the moment is that everyone wants to be unique, right? Different. And somehow we still fall into these traps. That, oh, I will be one of these many genders, and I will be unique. But no, this is not what makes you unique. You are already unique as a personality. Only you have this life that you lived. The conditions that you live in, they differ and inner world is different. So this is something that everyone has. You don't need to fight for it. You don't need to prove anything to anyone. And yet people fall into these traps, and this is very sad that instead of uniting, because this is what we need the most right now. We've been talking about this for quite some time, that unity is the only way out of the situation that we are finding ourselves in. No matter from which point of view you approach everything that's happening today, all the crises and shortages and, from what I've seen, everyone is still thinking about him or herself. They think, oh, okay, they will cut off the electricity. I bought some camping gas, and pasta, and beans, whatever. I'm ready for the winter if there are electricity cuts. And some people say, well, yeah, yeah, if yeah, you want, I will invite you and we will be able to cook. I said, yeah, this is cool, but this is, this will not solve the problem globally, right? This will not solve the problem for everyone. And this is also, another thing that we can talk about, is that people are readily jumping on solving the problem that was created for them. This problem reaction, solution mechanism. And they already, they don't even think that this problem shouldn't be there at all. The government made everything possible not to have enough electricity. And yet that they don't question this, they don't unite with other people to say, okay guys, we need to do something about this. How is it possible that the government apparatus is bigger and bigger in every country? It's eating more and more of the taxes, and yet they cannot assure us at least a decent level of life with everything that first world countries should have, like electricity, heating, water. I don't know. It really seems that people are ready to swallow everything government has come up with for us, and we are just thinking, okay, we need to do this. Because this is something that we've been programmed to do. Okay, you need to do this, so this is the situation. You need to do this. Okay. So here's another problem for you. How will you cope with it? And we are going from one problem to another, and working more and more well, because everything is more and more expensive, right? So you need to work more. And now they've pushed again, for example, in Switzerland for one more year the retirement age for women. Now it's 65 years. Imagine, I guess they made their calculations of what should be the retirement age so that they don't pay for long the retirement funds. Yeah. There's so much to talk about. Don't want to go into this negative spiral of everything that's happening, but, I would encourage people to think why they're doing what they're doing. Why are they even trying to solve the problem without thinking where did it come from, and what to do so that this problem is not, is not realized ? It's not happening.

Taliy:

Yeah, guys, it's actually, it's so funny when you think about it that we don't even consider it the really, really important topics to be up for discussion right now, like workforce productivity. At the beginning of the 20th century it went up by so much that it was possible to reduce the number of working hours from 16 to only eight per day, which was amazing accomplishment. And it was calculated by 1930s that by the end of 20th century, the workforce productivity will be so much higher that it will be possible to only work four days a week, four hours a day, and make much more income and make much more product comparing to the beginning of the century. And what do you think, how did it go regarding the workforce productivity? Exactly as predicted. Even better. We have even better than predicted productivity of workforce, and right now we about to have another leap on which productivity will be even higher. We're gonna be able to achieve amazing results, yet so much more for so much cheaper with mass robotization. But guys, excuse me, did we forget something on the way? Where is our reduction of number of working hours? No, we've being convinced in the complete opposite. We're being told that it's impossible. We have to work more. Now we have older generation. Our population is getting older. We have to put the working age higher, we have to raise the limits for the working people, and that is crazy. We getting less and less social benefits and we are being used more and more just as a human labor force, and we are not even discussing this. We're not even thinking why, we're not asking those questions. And you know why? Because we're too distracted. We're too distracted thinking what that pop star said yesterday. Oh, have you seen her concert? Have you seen her new dress? Oh wow. And this kind of, I cannot pick a better word other than brainwashing with star and celebrities life. It's quite fascinating how people discussing Hollywood stars thinking that they have something to do with it. Like it gives them perception as, when they discussing personal life of this star or that star, that is they somehow related to it. Don't fool yourself. It has nothing to do to you. It's their personal life that should never ever affect you by any means. But we invest so much attention into there. We even invest so much attention into fighting and standing for the rights of people to call themselves certain genders and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Guys, we are all screwed beyond recognition. If we don't do anything about the certain topics, like, check out the numbers of climatic refugees. Tomorrow, you're gonna be one of them, but who cares? Today it's much more important to discuss the topics of how do we call each other, how many genders there are, and so on. Not saying it's not important to give people freedom of self-identification. People are free to call themselves whatever they want, but for some reason when we having people thinking outside of the box and really becoming popular on exposing certain human qualities on their TikTok accounts like aliensoul was doing. So this girl who claims that she is coexisting with an alien soul inside of her body. She exposing certain things and she was rejected to self-identify as an alien, even though all the visual checks, all the tests of her video were proven to be legit. Guys, same thing happening with ecology and climate change. People are fiercely fighting and spending tons of their calories on fight for sorting plastic, which end up in the very same garbage landfills, but people don't spend time to find out why the planet is warming from the inside. And that's very interesting that just a year ago, this was a complete conspiracy theory, nobody would talk about it beyond a small group of people who actually studied geophysics and geothermal activity. But today it's a known fact. It's a fact that's been discussed in mainstream media. And it works like that. The more people actually invest their attention into something, it becomes more and more well-known fact . And even the funny example, if you take the most absurd thing possible. If somebody's gonna say you have to paint your ears into green color to actually be accepted in the society. They gonna laugh at you first, they gonna say, what a nonsense. But the more and more we invest our attention into it, first thing's gonna happen, we're gonna see some people that actually painting their ears into green color. And after a little while, it will be impossible for someone to walk in the streets without ears being colored green because it'll be socially unacceptable not to do it, and we see it happening now. Something that has been socially unacceptable has been turned into a complete opposite, guys. But can we use the very same mechanism for the positive things? Of course, by itself, one person cannot do much, but if we unite, we can. We definitely can. How do we do it? Actually, anyone who has seen the conferences by Creative Society Global Crisis can make this difference. And I'm actually really fascinated by how many people joining us, but people who watching us and kind of watching in a shadow mode, they seeing us, but they don't post anything out there. That is the problem, guys, that if you consume content but you don't create any, you're just wasting your attention. So the most important thing as, when I was meditating on it, thinking about how can we make a difference, the secret is to fill up the informational field with your thoughts. Like share-it. And people are afraid to say something wrong. of course the, there is a huge pressure of being canceled, fired, and whatever whats on. I would say execute your freedom of free speech and get good at it. There is no other way to get good at it other than practice, because practice makes perfect. And Jordan Peterson didn't become Jordan Peterson in a day. It took him decades. And if you see how he was working, how he was precisely thinking on the same thoughts over and over again. I don't agree with everything he says, but there is a lot to it. For example, he strongly advocates for a strict structure and management, and he says there has to be concept of power. He's confusing management structure with power, there has to be no power in one person's hands. But if responsibility. Yeah, totally. The manager has more responsibility. And that's it. That's the whole difference. And the whole argument is people making an argument in a place where should be no argument because they missing some piece of the puzzle. For example, we taking the climate change action. People don't know what's happening inside of our planet, so they arguing about the ecology, about plastic recycling and so on, because they don't know the rest. It's not because our mindset is weak, it's because our mindset is lacking certain pieces of a puzzle. That's why our judgments are weak. Not because our mindset is weak, but because our picture of the world is not complete. It's missing certain parts. So I never assume I know more than I do. I only make judgment based on the information I know. But in the field where I'm making judgements, I'm trying to expand it as much as possible, get as many sides of the argument as possible. And you know for a while you, when you are only given choice between two sides, you looking at two of them and you're trying to figure out which one should I support? Is it Democrats or Republicans? These guys are pro-choice and these are pro-life. Which one is better? This guy's trying to expand base of voters by forcing them to give birth, and this one's trying to bring aliens from neighborhood countries. At the end, both of them only interested in expanding their power. But there is a third way that you're not being told about. The third way is not to empower any structures, but to execute your power through online platforms and build a self-governing society. And that is something that has been an option on the table for more than a decade. We've been having all necessary technologies to make it come true, but we have not yet executed this option. So, will we, guys? That is the question. And how to let people know that there is this option on the table, Alex, because I've been thinking like, okay, this is right there, but people don't even know about it.

Alexey:

How? Well, we are working on the how for quite some time already, right? We are trying to invent different things, go to different platforms. We are doing TikTok lives, answering people's questions. We do forums, and there will be much more coming in the months. We already know of at least three or four planned for different parts of the world, but they will be streamed obviously for everyone. And you know, I've been thinking also about this thing that every social network that we have, theoretically, and I also think in practice, they would like to have the entire population of the planet on their platform. So they are ready to expand the server base, scale it to accept everyone. And we have polls everywhere. Every group on Facebook or Telegram. I don't know exactly what's the limit right now. Is it 2 million people in one group or something like that? It's not billions, but some networks they count in billions, like Facebook, even though people are fleeing it, but you can see that we have the technological possibilities. If we want, we have these possibilities. Everyone wants to have a say in things that matter to them. And these things can be as local as possible. Like the house where you live, the apartment house, or your neighborhood, or your city. I don't know, maybe a district or your like counties, whatever. People would be willing to do it if they knew that this would make a difference. That what they are choosing, that if they had an opportunity to see how these decisions are being implemented. And we are coming back to the transparency, to the fourth foundation of Creative Society. We are coming back to the transparency of information. Of course, only transparency will not work. We need to repeat that the eight foundations have to be implemented altogether as a framework, as the basis of, of legal system of every country. Once you understand that we have the technological possibilities, have already all the ideas, and I know our group of lawyers, specialists, participants of the Creative Society Project, they work, they have like weekly calls, and they work on different aspects. They talk about how this can be implemented in this country and in that country. The only thing that's missing is the unity of people that decide that we need this. And of course, for people to know that there is a choice, they at least need to be informed about the existence of this choice that they can make. I would say the best way to do it is to understand yourself, what you're talking about. Just go to creativesociety.com and read, watch the videos. Or, you can hit us on any social network. We are @episodikal everywhere. Or you have all the Creative Society official channels everywhere. Instagram, Twitter, Telegram. Everywhere you go there are people, that would be really happy to answer your questions, and the more people understand the beauty of this idea and the feasibility that it is possible to make it already with what we have today. It's not something that we need you know, to come up with some sort of mechanism. We have already all the mechanisms. It's just a matter of deciding and a little bit of reorganization just to say that, okay guys, we want to do it. And all the things that we've been talking about on this podcast, all the crazy stuff that's going on in the world, we can get rid of this. We can decide that we are not living anymore following orders made by people that don't have your best interest in mind, for sure. Look how we lived for the last 10, 20 years. Did it get any better? Would we say that just having smartphones or better computers, better cameras, is something that has really changed our lives for the better? No. Of course, yes, we can say that now we have the possibility with the internet and everyone having a smartphone connected to the internet, now we can unite more easily. This is true. But are we using this possibility? Are we using really this possibility to unite, or we're using it to divide once again, as we started this conversation today ? We talked about all the different ways that we, people, are finding to distance from each other. And we are still using the same tools that could be used for the good. We are using them to make things worse. So maybe it's time to reconsider and just think, okay, we tried this way. We really tried it very hard to live as we are living today, and we see that things are just getting worse. Every day something bad, something new is announced. Like this article that you sent me that Switzerland plans to ban electric cars. Well, good luck with that. You were convincing people to switch to electric for the past several years, and people invested in electric. It's not only with this, I think I mentioned this couple of times already, that in one of the apartments where we lived, we had the electric heating. And it was promoted as the best new thing and the only way to go, as the electric cars. Now, the electric heating is banned already, this is done. Now they're going to ban the electric cars. Maybe not, because they have another project, right in, Europe to completely stop production of gas powered cars by 2035. Well, guys, we have bad news that there will be no need for cars in 2035, because there would be maybe no roads to drive on. But yeah, we should really stop and think. This is something that we also talked about today that we are always trying, jumping on finding the solution, running wild to execute. Okay, here's the problem, just go find a way to deal with it. And this is not how you are being taught. I can speak from the perspective of diving, for example. What you are being taught when you have a problem is just stop, think, and then do. We should stop. We should stop and think, and this is something that a lot of people don't think they have the possibility, but everyone has the possibility to stop for at least half an hour, an hour, and really, try to have an honest look on your life of people around you, will you be able to say that things are going in the right direction for anyone you know? Independently of their social status, of their wealth? I see people, very wealthy people, who also have to change habits now, because things are changing for everyone. It's just they're changing on a different level, and, independently, none of us likes the changes in our routines, in our possibilities, and it would be okay. We showed how our lives could be during the forum. Beautiful videos of life and the possibilities of people living in the Creative Society. Every time I think about this video, I start smiling, because it's like a dream, really is something that we can do, and for this we need to unite, not divide. So yeah, I would really, really encourage everyone to make an idea for yourself, what is Creative Society for you? Let's make it like a homework for everyone. Think what is Creative Society for you?

Taliy:

What is Creative Society for you? What's your vision of the future? Many people these days don't have the vision of the future, and that's also, we're coming back to the topic we discussed before. You gotta create your informational field. If you only consuming and you're not creating, then you only consuming somebody else's vision. Either it comes to social media creating content, or on a global level on the vision of our future as a society. Before there is anything happening in the material world, there's always informational foundation to it. Whether you have a thought, whether you have a vision. I'm not saying we have to visualize, but we have to at least know how it's gonna be. And when we're talking about all the amazing technologies that have been presented, and I think it's the brilliant part about "Global Crisis. Our Survival is in Unity" conference, excuse me, online forum, that people, finally, get to see what it might look like. And, the best part, people watch it and they be like, oh, it's 150 years from now, maybe. You're like, no, it can be our reality within five years, because we already have most of the technologies necessary for it, and it would take a little bit to develop the rest. The problem is not that, the problem is social and economical problem is the biggest problem why we don't put them to work, already existing technologies. They just sitting there on shelves because nobody knows what to do with it. If people stying silent, people don't do anything, then it's useless. Think about us as a society in general. If you zoom out little bit and take a look from space, we live at this very small, relatively small planet, you can get from one side to another just in half of a day. These people cannot get along. There is so many of them on this planet Earth. But they all serve to some rulers who rule by the borders that a while ago someone conquered. There was some rulers, some savages, some sometimes ago, that decided this is their land, and they forced their people to accept certain laws, and now we, the grand grandchildren of those people, have to obey, and they even make us be proud of serving to a certain dictatorship. And they call it freedom. They call it even nice words like democracy and other things. They don't say that democracy is demos cratos, and demos is a privileged layer of people. It was never about all people, because all people plebos, it's a different word. Even in Greek language, they never had a right to vote at those central squares where they used to make decisions, the forums, right? Yeah. So when we have Global Forum, for all the people. Another question that is being asked, like how can we make a society in which everyone has a voice? Because some people think they are privileged, they have the voice, but the others are apparently not so advanced. Guys, will live in a society which purposely interested in making you not free people, let's put it this way, right? With no ability to think comprehensively, for example, and to be easily manipulated. Unfortunately, this is true. We like it or not. And the question is, if we want to thrive as a society, we have to build a society where each one of us is contributing and has abilities to contribute on a larger scale, on a smaller scale, on any scale, but is very valuable as a human being because each one of us has a potential, and if we apply all of it into one, I don't wanna say image, but one concept of a future, we can make it happen. So it's much easier to accomplish. I would like to ask all of you in the comments to write one thing that you are excited about our future. What is the most amazing, thing, besides flying cars, of course. Those are cool, guys, but not sure when those are coming around. But something that you would like to see happening in our nearest future. What are you excited about? Please let me know when the comments below. And to me, it's of course the passport of the citizen of the world, because that video has been booming on the internet. It went viral, and everyone has been asking, is it real? Is it real? Are we gonna be able to travel around the world with this passport of the citizen of the world? And without borders, without visas, without all the humiliations we have to go through at the borders. Taking your shoes off. Put your hands up. We're gonna put some radiation on you, and, guys, come on! We can make it work much safer. The technology is already there. There is a video where ex-president of the previous president of the US, he went into Middle Eastern countries, and he was like, holy guacamole, their airports make our airports look like medieval times . Like that, they, this is how some countries went with their glory, with their beautiful structures and so on, and we can spread the very same beauty across all of our planet and make it just as safe, and make our people feel just as protected, and everyone has a voice to speak up. That is really exciting thing about the future. I'm really looking forward.

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