We seem to be in a constant information war these days. And with that, there appears to be a war on sensemaking. What is sensemaking? Simply, our ability to accurately perceive what is taking place and make meaningful decisions based on what we learn.
It seems now that it is like we are in a dark and chaotic cave, with nothing more than a single match to light our path through a noisy and polluted information landscape. “What is true? How can we even know anymore?” are questions so many of us grapple with.
It’s time to get a high powered flashlight! In this episode, we’ll explore what sensemaking, the conversation of fake news, the rise of censorship and perhaps some ideas on how we can improve this important skill both individually and collectively.
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Transcript
Joe Martino: Hope you’re having a good day wherever you are and whatever time it is where you are. today we’re going to be talking about sense making, fake news and censorship. It’s sort of a very vast topic that I’m sure we could talk about for multiple episodes, but we’re going to focus on just trying to make it as simple and concise as possible here. obviously we’re going to get into defining what sense making is kind of what’s going on within our information landscape. we’ll talk about some of the challenges, very specifically with regards to noise and fake news and sort of political bias and all the different agendas at play within our information landscape right now. and then end it up and sort of wrap it up with the discussion of how we’re going to fix this, how we might be able to solve the problem. Of course there’s no clear and simple and all encompassing solution here. this is something that’s going to have to be tackled on many layers and it is a difficult topic to discuss. However, it is incredibly important as, you will see through, the discussion of what sense making is. Now obviously I’ve kind of mentioned news, I’ve mentioned information. What, which brings up this idea of our cognition, our mind, the way we perceive things. and I want to say right off the top that this process of sense making, including going through information and news, is not purely a cognitive one. what I’d like to bring to the table here is how much this actually plays within our physiology, how much it plays within how we see things, within the deeper aspects of our worldview, and how much self reflection and internal embodiment is actually necessary to improve this skill and improve this process, including getting in tune with sort of what we might call a gut feeling or an intuition or some sense of, what’s felt inside. So, let’s begin with a bit of a definition of what sense making is so that we’re all on the same page here. in its simplest form, it is the process in which we as humans perceive, then act. So in essence we make sense and then we make meaning, and then we make decisions, we act from that. So we might be in a situation where we’re gathering a whole bunch of information, from a particular situation and we’re trying to take that information and communicate it with each other and put it together and say, well, what actually happened here or what is going on here? And oftentimes it requires us to have to hold multiple perspectives at once, see different possibilities, be open to different bits of information and facts, sort of changing what the story and what the narrative is. but ultimately, it’s the process of just making sense of what’s happening around us. And this is incredibly important because without knowing what is actually happening around us, we can’t really make decisions very easily. so it’s incredibly important to know how to do this properly. And to be fair, this is something that we already do pretty much every day of our lives. we do it for smaller things, we do it for larger things. And then we can also talk about how we do this on a collective scale. Right? And this is where we get into news and information a little bit more. But to give a simple example of how you might encounter this on your daily basis, when it comes to maybe a larger decision in life, let’s say you wanted to move and you had your house, your house value, you had your savings and what you had. you discussed with your family. How much money do we want to spend on buying a new house? What do we need, in a new home? What are some of the factors at play, like, can we afford to, upgrade our house? What are the interest rates at right now? what’s the potential marketplace like? Are people buying our houses going for lower than listing? Are they going for higher? The point here is that we have all of these sort of unknowns, but what we can do is we can look out in our environment, we can run a number of different calculations, and this particular case, we can talk to some experts, we can hear from different people, and we can gather information, put it together, and make sense of how we’re going to make our choice about whether it’s a good time to move or not. And if we decide that, hey, things are really not good and, hey, we really can’t afford it, then it’s really important that we gather the right information so that we know whether we can or cannot afford to move. Now, if we gather the wrong information or we were given bad advice, we may be making decisions that were. That were bad. So we see here that good sense making creates good decisions, bad sense making creates bad decisions. so at the end of the day, that’s a simple way of looking at it. Now, of course, again, when we expand that out, and for the purposes of what we’re talking about here, we’re talking about news, we’re talking about information, we’re talking about what’s happening in our world, we’re talking about things like climate change, Political, ways of looking at things, new and emerging technologies that can change the way humanity functions, that can solve, issues and problems for humanity. When we, when we look at all these things, it’s much harder to navigate, because it’s much larger, right? And a lot more people are involved. There’s a collective involved, but regardless the collective. For us to make good collective decisions, to solve problems, right, Whether they come from something like COVID 19, whether they come from climate change, whether they come from new and emerging technologies, just to make good decisions and to solve problems collectively, we got to have good collective sense making, which means we have to get on the same page. Well, how do we make sense of what’s going on? It’s the news and information landscape. So what is happening within
00:05:00
Joe Martino: that news and information landscape right now that is kind of problematic. And that’s kind of what we’re going to discuss here a little bit more today. But just to sort of wrap up the definition, sense making usually involves things like logic, intuition, communication, imagination, self awareness, collaboration, curiosity, accepting uncertainty, creativity, and thinking outside the box. So all of these things are incredibly important in our journey. And the fact is, is that we are seeing, as I mentioned, a sort of decline in overall collective sense making right now as we become a little bit more fundamental in our thinking. Now this relates a lot to the meaning, crisis episode that we talked about last time where we’re looking at this sort of, this loss of meaning in life. We’re looking at this being feeling withdrawn. Maybe we don’t feel a place in this world at times and we don’t know what’s relevant anymore. And it might feel like nothing matters at times. And this sort of feeling produces, as we said, sort of nihilism and cynicism. it produces maybe a state of depression or anxiety. Maybe it produces fundamental thinking and very, you know, black and white type thinking. Now if you were to take that type of thinking and put it into a complex information landscape, you can see where the issues start to form. We start getting into a place where we want to hear absolutely what is happening. And once we start to believe that, it’s very hard for us to change our minds as we go. And so we’re very much in a position where our sense making is breaking because we’re not as curious, we’re not as wondrous about what is actually going on. We’re sort of, hearing something, getting into an idea and then getting stuck in it, a little bit more. So there’s very Much a link between this sense making crisis and the meaning crisis that’s playing out. So what we can look at here is sort of this idea of truth seeking, right? Sense making and truth seeking. We’re trying to understand what’s happening. There’s kind of an overlap there. And truth seeking today is either seen as hey, I’m going to go look at what the government or mainstream media says. And you know that’s, that’s what probably the truth is and that’s great. the best scientists in the world from the World Health Organization or the CDC or whatever it may be, they’re going to have the answer, right? And we’re seeing that a lot of people might believe that. and then on the other side you might also have people going, well, the deeper I go down a conspiracy rabbit hole into all of the things that are kept from humanity, the closer I’m getting to truth. I’m the ultimate truth seeker. I’m trying to get down to the bottom. And in both of these situations oftentimes we are left with ah, sort of a lack of curiosity, in sort of breaking some of the narratives that start to build and we start to usually get into more extreme points of view that are hard to put into the way our world currently functions, the way our current world currently works. So you see people feeling on the conspiracy side for example, very much like I want nothing to do with the world that we have today in any way, shape or form. They become so withdrawn that they’re almost disengaged from sort of contributing to creating some sort of change within it. and then on the other side it’s almost like people are so invested in the existing mainstream narrative that they can’t see where the mainstream narrative is actually faulty or controlled or helping say powerful figures and actually harming the people that are believing, the narratives that are coming out of the mainstream space. And of course all of these things, all of these challenges that we have today and in terms of the breakdown of our general collective sense making and news and information, you know, the idea of I don’t even know what to believe anymore when it comes to news, can relate back to social media in many ways. We have this situation where almost anybody can create a podcast now, almost anybody can create a website and start producing news, which is fantastic. It gives a lot of people a voice. But at the same time there are downsides that come with that. Right, because we can actually create things that can go viral. They have the potential to go viral on social media. That may not be coming from as complete or as experienced, perspectives on creating this information. And therefore we are actually putting out noise and sort of pollution into the sense making sphere. So you have this really sort of complex situation where on one hand it’s fantastic that anybody can have a voice and say something, but on the other hand, you know, not all of us are understanding the wholeness of an experience in different, in different ways and we might actually be making it more difficult to understand what’s going on. So the quality in a lot of cases of media is actually diminishing. Now this is my perspective. Maybe not everybody agrees with me, but when I look at the general quality of information out there these days, it’s really, really hard to sort of land on something that feels like this was well thought out and this isn’t just sort of a very, very limited perspective of what’s going on. So this sort of social media environment and memes and 15 second clips and all these different things which we’re going to talk about in a future episode are actually making it a lot more difficult for us to navigate and it’s reducing our ability to make sense of what’s going on. And so I would say that, you know, in no way, shape or form would I want to see people’s voices being taken from them. But what I do think we need to see is sort of a commitment from all of us to sort of up our ability
00:10:00
Joe Martino: to make sense of what’s going on. So if we are a content creator or if we do share, you know, news and information, or if we just like to, you know, consume, it in general, it’s important that we’re all committed to making sure that what we’re looking through is truthful and what we’re sharing is truthful and what we’re creating and putting out there, is truthful and is complex and admits to uncertainty where there is uncertainty and tries to avoid bringing in a whole bunch of noise, a whole bunch of sort of pollution. And that kind of gets to this sort of discussion of where sort of noise comes from within the sense making space. How does, how does our information landscape become very, very noisy and how do we learn to pick out the signal within that noise that allows us to feel like we’re getting a clear idea of what’s happening. Right? Because if we’re, if we’re looking at what we mean by noise here, it’s like, you know, you’re going onto the Internet and there’s say, maybe, I don’t know, 20, 30, 40 different perspectives on a particular thing that we’re navigating as we’re scrolling through a newsfeed or something like that. And it feels chaotic, it feels very noisy. It feels like you have all of these opinions and perspectives and, almost like, biases and emotion that’s driven into m. So much of what’s happening that we lose sight of what are the actual facts about this particular event that everybody’s talking about? What are the facts that we can all agree on? And then how do we separate those from all of now the perspectives and all of the sort of activism and all of the. I think this is the solution. All of those things that oftentimes become the noise that makes it hard to weed through what is actually going on. And we see this a great deal with, COVID 19, right? It was. It was massive amounts of noise in a quick, fast evolving environment of facts and information. And it became. I probably in the last three years have not heard more than, you know, any other time in history I’ve heard. You know, I don’t even know what to believe anymore. Ah, at one point I was believing the mainstream, and then I was believing the alternative. And now I’m at a point where I just don’t even know what’s true anymore. And that is a great, example of how our information landscape is becoming so polluted with noise, with opinion, with predictions, with this is going to happen, that’s going to happen, this fear, that emotion, that people are just sort of feeling lost and feeling withdrawn and in a lot of ways feeling, like they don’t even want to pay attention to what’s going on in the world, which I do believe is somewhat of a disadvantageous position to be in and can be dangerous. Because then a lot of things start happening, that are not really, in the best interest of people. But people are so withdrawn that I just don’t even want to pay attention to this anymore. So obviously that’s not a good place to land with all of this. But, ultimately we want to start to recognize that signal within all of the noise. We want to start seeing very, very clearly what is happening. and so we need to be able to understand what people’s agendas are, what their political biases. We need to kind, of be able to see that when people are sharing things, their own experiences, their own emotion, their own lenses are coloring in a deep way, sometimes the Facts, it might be leaving out certain facts, it might be adding in things that aren’t relevant. And the more we sort of up this skill, because that’s what sense is at the end of the day. It’s a skill that needs to be developed. It’s a tool that helps us understand what’s going on. but the more that we increase it and we’re going to talk about some, Some ways of doing that, the better we’re going to be at sort of making sense of what’s going on. And one of the things I want to mention just sort of from a media perspective is that if you’re watching, like, one thing to consider when you’re watching different channels, different you know, news sources out there that you enjoy, or different commentators, when we’re talking about this idea of noise, we can look at something as simple as you have people’s political, agenda, right? And a political agenda or what someone believes about something may limit what it is that they’re going to choose to talk about, choose to cover. And the facts that they might add into the story and leave out of the story. Meaning. What I’m saying here is that when we have awareness of this, we can more clearly see where different, presenters, might be sort of being incentivized to leave, in certain things and take out certain things. And that allows us to have a little bit more awareness of like, okay, well, if that person is coming from, let’s say, a political side over here, maybe I will go look at a political side over here and see what type of facts are added in, what type of, details are added in that might have been left out in either one. And we see this happen quite, a lot, is that stories will be framed to push or, to get a particular bias across. And obviously we want to, we want to start to become clear of that, at the end of the day. And then of course there’s. There’s emotion, right? Emotion will add oftentimes a lot of noise. a lot of presenters, you will see, will get very riled up. they’ll get very, let’s say angry in a
00:15:00
Joe Martino: sense. And what’s really fascinating is. And we just did this in an exercise in the Explorer Lounge. it was a group workshop that we did where we were able to see, you know, that emotion doesn’t necessarily have to be loud and all over the place and really driving you, for you to feel what is coming through somebody’s calm voice. Right. You can, you can pick out and you can sense, you know, some of the different emotions being felt in a, in a calm, contained individual, versus when you’re watching some of these commentators that are just, you know, very, very emotionally sort of erratic and unstable, it ends up adding so much distraction and noise to the particular piece, to the particular story, that you as a viewer become less calm. Right? You start to get activated a little bit. And then now you’re, you’re sometimes getting pulled in to their, almost dramatized picture of what’s happening. And the next thing you know, you become energized, ah, by this, and you’re becoming enthralled within this. And now all of a sudden, you’re losing sight of the full story. You’re losing sight of what other people might think about it. You. Because you’re, you’re becoming emotionally pulled in to a particular story in a way that is actually captivating. not just observational, right? I can, I can feel somebody’s emotion. I can observe it and I can sense it and have the freedom to, to scan other places versus when I get captivated and lost in and pulled into somebody’s emotion, I can lose sight of everywhere else. My focus starts to come. If you’re seeing this on video, I’m basically making my hands, come to a more narrow focus. Right? so this is also something that creates noise. And what I’ll say is just as a quick point of reflection, if at any point during COVID 19, you felt very certain about what the narrative was, what was happening, there’s a good chance that either you got caught up in a particular narrative or, you might have gotten caught up in, sort of things that were certain that, weren’t actually that certain. And that could be because of the way it was being presented or the way it was coming across. COVID 19 was actually one of my favorite moments since I’ve been doing this work for the last 15 years, where we got to see how uncertain so many aspects of this narrative were, yet people were so certain about exactly what was going on, and it would change from week to week to month to month. And don’t get me wrong, there were, a lot of facts that, were quote, unquote facts and then were not facts. Like, for example, oh, the lab leak theory is complete conspiracy. That’s a fact to now all of a sudden, the lab leak theory is not a conspiracy. I’m not talking about those types of facts. What I’m talking about is there’s no way for us to know for certain that the lab leak is the actual way in which the virus came out. We don’t have enough information yet. And so we can go down and sort of take and hold that position that yes, the lab leak was probably a decent hypothesis and explanation for this, but we don’t want to lose sense of being open to other explanations. And this is just, isn’t for the lab leak, it’s for almost everything out there. Right. so we want to kind of have that sense of openness. but going into sort of this discussion of noise and signal again and just kind of getting back to some of the challenges that exist today as we’re seeing, almost like what’s a war between mainstream media and independent or alternative media, which I believe this is probably one of the most important, sort of shifts in the way our, news and information is going to come to us, that has ever happened. This is an extremely important, important time for us to see this sort of change in this back and forth between the mainstream and the alternative. But it’s also important to notice the complexity in what’s happening here because, on one hand, mainstream media, which has always sort of been this, I would say, fairly high standard of information and quality mixed with, oftentimes there’s political agendas. There’s agendas from really wealthy people. They’re not allowed to say certain things. They just won’t say certain things. Right. They’re always going to go along kind of what government says. And It’ll usually take eight to 10 years before they start challenging a government narrative on a major, issue. Right. So mainstream media is kind of this very safe, this very, you know, just walk the sort of the beaten path. And oftentimes things are going to be left out that are really important to a situation and to helping people understand something, you know. And so the alternative came along, alternative media came along and it rose in the last, maybe, we’ll say even 12, 15, 16 years, you know, increasing in how much popularity as the years go on there, there. But it rose because people became so disgruntled with how limited and how basic and how you could say behind the times the mainstream media would be on major, major issues and not questioning basic facts around those issues that need to be questioned. Right. so people generally have this felt sense and this correct intuition. I would say that the, mainstream media is often leaving out incredibly important facts about major events that would change the whole narrative about what’s going on, not necessarily towards certainty, but towards we know that that probably didn’t happen. Right. We know that what they’re saying probably didn’t quite happen like
00:20:00
Joe Martino: that. Right. and yet we see major global events, move along as a result of what the mainstream media says absolutely happened. Right. so it’s important that alternative and independent has come along and really done a great job of bringing in an alternate set of ideas, an alternate set of facts, an alternate set of perspectives to sort of create, I would say, a more holistic picture of what’s going on in a lot of these events. But like I said, there’s complexity within this narrative because with the Independent, with the Alternative, it also meant like what I mentioned earlier, that a lot of people could just start joining the, the information landscape and producing a lot of content and it wasn’t necessarily of the highest quality, it wasn’t necessarily the best thought out. and so there’s, there’s some cons that come with that. And, and you know, going back to that question of signal or noise within the mainstream, there’s always going to be signal within the alternative, there’s always going to be signal. And it’s upon us to start understanding where the noise is in both of these spheres. So we can really start to just focus on the signal and really start to synthesize on different ideas. So, so this is about taking a step back and we’re going to get into this when we talk about some of the solutions here, but taking a step back and starting to really look, look, where is the signal in these different outlets as opposed to. Well, the mainstream media is always wrong and the alternative is always right or whatever. some people sometimes try and do vice versa with, you know. Well, the alternative must always be wrong because they’re just alt. Right. Fake news websites online and the mainstream. Well of course, I mean New York Times is paper record. They’re never wrong. Right. so we need to kind of get out of this, you know, dichotomy and into more of like, let’s take a step back and really look at what’s happening here. and this sort of leads into the discussion of fake news a little bit bit, which ultimately fake news is a very real thing. And I think, to be honest with you, I think it’s more of a problem than, a lot of people like to realize, I’m going to say specifically in the Independent and the alternative space, we talked about this way back, starting in 2014 when Rise of the alternative was kind of really starting to kick off because of social media. And you saw so many different websites, so many different places really, really having a massive amount of reach. they could, on any given day, reach multiple millions of people with a piece of content. And, that was consistent, right? So it wasn’t just like, oh, that went viral. It was like, no, you could make stuff go viral pretty easily. And, oftentimes, and we talked about this because we would get together with certain admins, different page owners, Facebook page owners, different website owners, and we would say, hey, you know, we’ve got to be careful about standards here because if we’re not doing a good job in creating stories that are true, where they’re sourced, where they’re, they’re clearly not fake. Like, you know, oftentimes you’ll see, oh, Mel Gibson said that all Hollywood pedophiles are, sorry, all Hollywood people are pedophiles or whatever. And that would be like a news story that a website would put out. And it’s like, where does that quote come from? What is your source here? Like, you’re just, it’s literally made up, right? And this happens a lot. And a lot of these stories will go super, super viral. And a lot of times what will happen is people will actually just have the incorrect facts about, like, they’re trying to do a good job, but they actually have the incorrect facts because they’re not doing a clear enough job of trying to gather different, perspectives and facts on a story. They just kind of see one thing, believe that it’s true, and then go and create their own version of it. Right? So fake news is an issue. we’ve tried to address this a lot with other content creators. It wasn’t met very well because a lot of people were making a ton of money off of producing these really viral stories that were not true. so I’m here to tell you that, yes, people knowingly spread fake news because they don’t give a crap and they want, to just make money. And people have gotten very upset with me over the course of the years for, I would say, kindly not publicly calling them out for that, and talking to them about it, trying to increase that. Because my perspective was, if this continues, if fake news can just keep running wild per se, how long is it before the crackdown happens? Right? I was saying this back in 2014. Crackdown is eventually going to happen, guys. You’re going to see we’re going to start getting deleted we’re going to start getting stopped, blah, blah, blah. you know, by 2016, 2017, this is exactly what started to happen, with Facebook and YouTube and Google and all these different places. Is anybody that now was producing content that sounded somewhat like the people that were creating all the fake news just went down with, with all the fake news. Now I gotta say too, a lot of this censorship is part of narrative control, right? So it’s not like, well, the fake news created the censorship and the fact checking. No, the fake news was part of why censorship and fact checking was created. but there is also this deep narrative of sort, of this deep aspect of narrative control, right? What we were seeing with the rise of the alternative is, you know, our website, for example, we could reach you know, 25, 30 million people a month, in traffic without having to spend a dollar on actually, marketing that and getting those viewers. We would spend all of our money on creating the content, right? Getting, hiring writers, hiring video creators, that sort of thing. Whereas the mainstream was spending like, you know, a lot of money on trying to actually bring in viewers, right? So they would, they would have a budget every single month, or every single quarter, you would say that is responsible for bringing in a
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Joe Martino: certain amount of viewers. So if we’re able to get the same viewership as mainstream media without having to spend a dime, and mainstream media is spending a whole bunch of money to get these, this traffic to their website, you know, there’s a problem there. And powerful people are going to be like, hold on a second, this isn’t right. We can’t have this. Right? This is at least my perspective of what happens happened. And when you started to see that the alternative could deeply compete and make an impact on the way people saw mainstream narratives, and they started to see the holes in it and they started to see the problems. People that are, interested in maintaining propaganda, that are interested in maintaining narrative, control. This happens all over the world. This is not just subject to countries, that we see as sort of in more like second world or third world countries. Now this is happening in Western countries all over the world. Governments produce propaganda, right? This is all over the place, right? And when those powerful people started to lose that grip, you saw this narrative control, which became fact checking and censorship. So this, sort of leads into this deeper discussion now of, you know, what do we do in the face of this fact checking and in the face of this censorship. Because it is here, it is driven by both fake information and false news as well as this Desire for narrative control. and we again, gotta be able to now somehow weed through. Well, the fact checker says this, but this website that I think is pretty quality and has integrity says this. Well, what’s true, Right? And so this is where we kind of have to up our ability to understand what arguments are being made and what makes sense and what doesn’t, as opposed to just saying, well, the fact checkers are always wrong, because that’s not true. A lot of the times fact checkers are right. But for example, I’ll give you a very, very brief example. When we talk about the discussion of aluminum in vaccines and the danger that that might pose to young children, especially as aluminum can CR the blood brain barrier. We had an article that we wrote about this that talked about research from, Dr. Christopher Exley. now, you know, his particular, perspective was, you know, we’re seeing that aluminum m in vaccines may have, an impact on creating brain issues and potentially even the onset of autism. Right. We need to look at this. Right? That’s what his very, very clear research was suggesting is we need to look further at this. And the fact checkers came through on an article and they created what was called a straw man argument. So they said their article is saying that aluminum in vaccines, absolutely causes autism, which is not what we said in the article. It’s not at all what we said. But then they further went on to debunk that claim, which is not the claim we made. So they created a strawman argument and they debunked that argument in a way that showed no understanding or context of the actual, situation itself. So they brought in a armchair scientist from a university who said, well, hold on a second. The aluminum in the vaccine, is about, you know, the same amount that you would eat in a can of food. Now, if they actually read our article, they would have seen that in the article we talk about, we make a distinction between what the researchers say, which is that, you know, aluminum in food, which gets expelled through the digestion process is not the same as when you inject aluminum into the body and it goes into the bloodstream and it ends up in the brain. Those are two completely different pathological situations. Whereas the armchair scientist is going, well, there’s no issue with aluminum in vaccines because we see that when we eat aluminum, it just comes out through our system. So here they are. They have no idea of what they’re actually talking about, but they’ve debunked our article. So we got to be able to understand and Read what we’re seeing here is we got to take time, we got to look at, we got to read things, we got to try to understand them. which goes back to the discussion that I’m going to wrap up here of just how do we solve this issue, like what do we do from here on forward? And what I’m going to say is that at the end of the day we need to see clearly what is going on if we want to make good decisions, right? We got to have a reminder of that there. If we want to know what is the pathway to creating a better society, what is the pathway to solving problems, what is the pathway to even healing within ourselves, let’s say we need to have a good understanding of what’s actually going on, right? So decisions come, good decisions come from good sense making. So I, ah, hope it’s really clear that how important this topic is because all of the things that we think are important in the world, climate change, whatever, all these different things that we might be activists about, the only way to solve it is through good, high quality sense making. Otherwise we have no idea what we’re doing. So if you think that what I’m talking about is not overly important, it’s incredibly important. It is literally the foundation through which so many things that we’re going to do and we’re going to see are going to come from. And if we have no ability to clearly make sense of what’s going on, we then have no ability to communicate what is actually going on and get people on the same page to then take action, right? If we’re, if we think we understand something very loosely and we, we’re trying to communicate it to people and people are looking at us like what the hell are you even talking about? Then at the end of the day we’re not going to get on the same page, right? We’re going to start going in different directions all over the place. And I hope it’s clear from some of the other things I said, this
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Joe Martino: is not about just moving from mainstream media to alternative media. Let the mainstream media die. Alternative media is the new mainstream. That’s the future, right? That’s not going to solve the problem either because we see there are tons of issues within the alternative sphere as well. Because this process of sense making is not that there’s good sense making in the alternative and bad in the mainstream. It’s that there’s bad m sense making all over the place, but there is signal in different places. And what we want to do is we want to up the amount of signal, in the long run, but in the short, we want to up everybody’s ability to make sense better, to communicate what they’re saying better, so that the amount of signal in somebody’s work is increased and the amount of noise is actually decreased. Right. That’s the, that’s the long term plan here as we continue to move forward. So how do we do that? Right. Well, one of the first things we got to talk about here is one of the challenges of today is the incentive structure of the way a lot of media companies work, right? So if you’re a media company that’s independent, for example, and you have YouTube and you have a website and you have a podcast, whatever it might be, believe it or not, a lot of these companies are extremely incentivized to pick stories, create narratives, to elicit emotion, to, leave out certain facts and focus on other facts as it relates to the audience that they’ve captured. Right? So if I’m a conservative outlet, I want to focus on stories from a conservative lens to keep galvanizing that conservative perspective. And so all of my work, even if it’s not balanced, is going to be focused on that conservative, conservative, conservative. Because I need to keep my viewers. I need to keep my viewers because I need to make money with viewers. You have money. So we have a, socioeconomic system that is basically saying, well, in order for you to make money as it, as an, as an organization, a news organization, you got to be able to make, you got to be able to have an audience so that you can have advertising or so they can donate to you, or they can join your membership or they can do whatever it might be and you are incentivized. So you’ll make more money if you focus deeply on just the thing that they, that galvanizes them, right? So if you are creating balance and you’re saying one thing over here that sort of challenges their perspective, but one thing over here that agrees with them, it actually can make it so that a person goes, I’m unsubscribing. I liked what you said yesterday, but what you said today, I don’t like this. I’m unsubscribing. I’m leaving. I’m going to go find somebody that just agrees with what’s going on. That reinforces my biases all the time. So the challenge here is that a lot of news organizations and a lot of content creators, they know this, they know that this is how they are going to make, More money is by giving their audience exactly what they want. And that sounds great. The problem is that when you’re giving, in the news realm, when you’re giving your audience exactly what they want, oftentimes that can mean bad sense making, more bias, more, confirming of that bias over and over and over again. And a lot of times some content creators, they don’t even realize that this is the mechanism that’s at play. They’re just sort of doing it. So the incentive structure of how these companies make, money, including our own, is already challenging to work around because we try and focus on the balance, we try and focus on the non extreme, you know, taking non extreme positions and leaving things open. And we’ll have people hate us on one day and love us on another day. And it’s a harder time for us to get that really strong, driven, emotional, I will give you money, I will join your membership because you are saying exactly what I want to hear. Because as a collective, we’re not in the space of sense making and really understanding the complexity of what’s happening. That’s not our goal. What our goal is is how do I just find people that are, believe, that are saying everything that I already believe, believe, right, that are going as deep as you possibly can down that rabbit hole. So there’s, there’s a, there’s a call here for us to, on a greater collective scale, to start understanding what’s at play here and commit to that sense making process, commit to that deeper understanding, being able to kind of be more comfortable in looking at things we may not agree with. And so ultimately here you can’t talk about good sense making without talking about embodiment, without talking about slowing down. Right? And we’re going to talk about this a lot more in our social media episode, but this idea of instead of just consuming 50, you know, articles a day and looking at all these memes everywhere and looking at these 15 second clips all over social media, we kind of got to slow down. What is this person actually saying? Why might they be believing what they believe? What information, what experience led them to believe that? What, what are they seeing from their perspective that makes them hold that position? Right? And if we can’t explain what their argument or perspective is on something, it’s usually a pretty damn good sign that we don’t really understand the other side and that we might have gotten a little bit too lost in our own, perspective or our own galvanization around an issue. Right. So some, some good ways of checking in is really just to kind of understand like the thing that I’m fighting against. Can I even make the argument that the other person would make? That’s a very, very strong argument against their
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Joe Martino: position or for their position. We saw this a lot with the COVID vaccine, discussion. Well, Covid vaccines aren’t safe. Okay, what does that mean? Right? What’s the con? Like, are you saying that it’s going to kill everybody? Are you saying that it’s, it’s going to kill a small amount of people or that it’s going to injure, like what, what percentage of people? And you’ll have answers from all over the board. Right. Well, the thing is, is if, if you’re looking at, well, did the COVID vaccine save any lives? Well, the person who’s really against Covid vaccines would say no, that’s didn’t save nobody’s lives. But yet the data from the other side would say, well, yeah, maybe it did save some lives. The problem is each other that believe each different side can’t explain why each other feels the way that they feel because they haven’t looked at the data, they haven’t looked at the information. So we’re left with really, being really far apart from each other on issues versus we all look at the data, we all try and understand each other, we all look. Is there signal in what each person is saying, saying, let’s remove all the noise. And you’ll notice that just by doing that, people will start coming closer together and they might have slightly different perspectives. They might disagree on things still, but they’re going to be a lot closer together. In which case they can maintain communication, they can maintain respect, they can maintain an understanding. And we’re going to continue to move towards synthesis in the long run. And you can see that this is going to be a transition. It’s going to be something that’s going to take some time for us to ultimately get to at the end of the day. But we have to get to the, this more embodied place within ourselves. We have to be calmer. We have to be able to see where am I getting emotionally activated when someone disagrees with me. And instead of just quickly unsubscribing and running away and putting an angry comment, I’m, leaving, I’m unsubscribing instead of that. Why am I getting so activated by this? Well, what about what they’re saying bothers me so much? What is, what is going on within my system? What emotions am I feeling right and how can I sit here and listen a little bit more closely to something I disagree with? Because maybe it’s actually just making me uncomfortable that I might have to change my mind and I don’t want to. And for what reasons do I not want to? Right, so these are some of the questions that we start to ask. The more we get embodied, we slow down, we be a little bit more present. In our Explore Lounge membership, which I invite you to join, we did a whole workshop called the Physiology of Sense Making. It looks at the physiological state that our bodies can be in through high stress and through you know, just, you know, the demands of modern day life and how that can impact our ability to make sense of what’s going on in our world, to listen to other people, to communicate other people, with other people. It changes the way we sort of get cut off from our own sensations, our own feelings, and how we’re feeling about something. And there’s essentially a state within our physiology that’s significantly more advantageous for making sense of our reality, for seeing different perspectives. The more embodied, the more present, the more calm, the more regulated our nervous system is, the better we’re going to be able to make sense of what’s happening around us, the better we’re going to be able to deal with things that we don’t agree with and the better we’re going to be able to communicate. So these are hugely, hugely important pieces here that have a legitimate measurable biological and physiological sort of nature for us to track, to play with. So upping our knowledge on what’s happening in our physiology when we’re trying to make sense of the world is as important as understanding, oh, I can name this particular bias that someone might have. Right? Yeah. But can you name the way their system is being activated? The way your own system is being activated? Can you understand what’s, what emotion is driving you right now? Right. Are we paying attention to that? So this is a, this is a huge piece to this as we got to be able to sit and be with the different ways in which we feel. and so, you know, a lot of this goes back to, as I wrap this up, just this idea of we need to bring curiosity back on board. Right. We need to bring this sense of being uncertain about things and being okay with that. We need to bring the embody embodiment back on board. We need to inquire a little bit more about things like let’s not shut down inquiry once we think we know exactly what’s going on. Let’s, let’s keep it open. Let’s continue to explore, have fun with it, right? We have to be playful within all of this. I know that these issues can feel serious, but the more we make them extremely serious and we start to panic about it, it’s usually a sign that again, we’re letting the emotion take over, we’re letting the stress take over, we’re letting our perception, our limited perception of the situation just sort of drive us into this panicked state, right? As opposed to taking a step back. Look, let’s just explore. This can be fun. This can be enjoyable, right? I’ve not in all the time that I’ve done this work and I’ve talked about a lot of really challenging, stuff and some not as challenging stuff. I’m never in a state of panic, right? I’m playing with this stuff, I’m navigating this stuff. I’ve gone through stress before and I’ve seen how that stress has made it harder for me to do this work, right. But I’ve been pretty good with never getting into a state of panic about what’s happening. And I seen the fruits that, that, that that bears at the end of the day. So you know that that’s a really important piece to this. And I want to invite you as well if you do enjoy join, the Explorer Lounge
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Joe Martino: membership and you check out that physiology of sense making. We also have a bias course. It’s about eight weeks, to do the course, but you can do it a lot faster. It’s a self paced course, so you can do it in a week if you want. but it goes through sort of how we link sort of the sense of embodiment, the sense of playfulness and curiosity with understanding and exploring our biases and noticing it, within other people. And basically the importance of bringing that bias to our awareness. Not so that we are eliminating every single bias we ever have, but being able to see it so that we have the awareness so that we know where else to look that might help us get a different perspective from our own bias, right? So we’re basically empowering ourselves to create better sense making by creating a greater awareness about our own biases. And we do all this by linking the embodiment piece, by linking this, you know, sort of ideal state of being within ourselves to, to sort of navigate this. so that’s there as well, but that’s it, that’s all on the topic here of sense making and censorship. And fake news. like I said, this is a huge topic we could go on all day with this particular one. I hope what I covered kind of gives a sort of baseline, as to this discussion. Like I said, we’re going to be expanding more on these types of things and having greater conversations about them, and going in a little bit more deep detail, on each of the different pieces that I covered because I think it’s important for us to understand a lot of this stuff. But, yeah, I think we have a good foundation now of what’s going on here. So thanks so much for tuning in and we’ll catch you next time. Well, that’s it. That’s all. I hope you enjoyed the show. As always, I want to thank the members of the Explore Lounge who are helping us to continue doing this work. If you want to support this podcast and all of the work we do here at the Pulse and Collective Evolution, consider becoming a member of our Explorer Lounge. As a member, you get access to exclusive video content. You can watch all of these episodes ad free. Free. And you get access to our, private social network where you can discuss and learn about many topics with a like minded community of change makers. It’s truly an incredible place to be. Not just for the benefits that you get, but you’re directly supporting our dedicated team here at Collective Evolution and the Pulse. Visit Explore Lounge 1 that’s dot one to learn more.
