Welcome back to New Thinkers. My name is Steve Bart with me as always. I could run out for you. How are you?
I'm doing all right, man. How are you doing? You doing all right? Yes.
Yeah. We've moved from DC to Wilmington just settling in. So land of Joe Biden? See from now?
No, to Andrew Kirlan. Okay. Yeah. Or Kaggle Laka.
Yeah. Yeah. How are you doing, Greg? I'm great.
I'm very tired. I'm happy to be here though. You're tired from your trip in Rome? Yeah, just still jet lag.
I've not made it past 9.30 and it's 9.15. So we'll see how this goes. It'll be great. Greg is an early, the better early to rise type and add to that, European time zone where it's like three in the morning.
Yeah. Something like that. Did you get back a week ago? I'd say it's like an hour a day or something like that, recovery for jet lag.
So I should be recovered by now. You're almost there. I'm almost there. I'm older.
I'll do one. That's right. My dad will sometimes make jokes about jet lag like two months later. I was surprised how easy it was on the way there.
Like the next day I was fine. Yeah. On the way back. I was going to the next four in the morning most mornings.
Yeah. I thought it's not a stupid this conversation. Yeah. We should put it.
Are we talking about jet lag? Do this is the new Thinkery folks. Yeah. It's news.
So today we're just working out bits for our understanding of comedy. Some plain stuff here. Yeah. We're today we're talking about a my arms are tired.
Yes. All right. Go for it. Go for it.
You. No, please. No, I'm sorry. We're talking.
Well, you picked the topic. You picked the reading, right? I did. I did.
What's the reading? Great. I did pick this reading. I picked this reading.
It's called depending on papers on the abolition of television. If you're still with us folks at home. This is a piece by George and a stop low. One of the reasons I chose it was just because I thought it would be fun to do something by George and a stop low.
A name that people in our circles might be familiar with but might not know a whole lot about. So I thought maybe we just sort of speak a little about who this guy was and and then turn to this piece that I used to teach actually years ago when I taught introduction American government in other places. Yeah. I'm a stop low.
He was a prolific writer. So he was the student of Leo Strauss, Greek American, very right man. His articles and he had just a universal interest. Interesting all things.
And so he published excellent commentaries on the Declaration and Constitution. No, no, the Constitution bill of rights, I think. He has another great book titled But Not Philosophy. So it's exploration into Eastern philosophy.
So he has a commentary on the Constitution of 1787 and then he has a commentary on the amendments, the second book. Right. Right. Right.
And those are the books. Yeah. And then just he writes about everything. He was so he's famous for a few different or infamous.
He graduated first in his class from the University of Chicago Law School. And at the time the Bar Association made you take loyalty oaths to prove you we're not a communist, which of course on stop low was not, but he refused. And so they even though he graduated first and was primed for an illustrious legal career, he could never, he never, I mean, even though he passed the bar, he couldn't get the stamp of approval. So Strauss wrote him a letter I have here on the 22nd of June, like, You're skipping a lot.
You gotta go through all the things. He was this, right? He then challenges the. Oh, no, no, right.
And he goes all the way to the Supreme Court. Or he has his own case, right? He uses his own case. And he ultimately loses, which is crazy because if there's one thing that I think which should show that you're capable of practicing law, it's competently arguing on case before the Supreme Court.
Right. And now, and then it's on that whole effort, which he was sitting in and stresses classes. You can see Strauss sometimes refers to an estoppo and has him about legal matters and specifically about these events. But yeah, so you want to read Strauss's comedy?
Sure. So this happens and he writes, dear Mr. On stop low, this is only to pay you my respects for your brave and just to action. If the American bench and bar have any sense of shame, they must come on their knees to apologize to you as every year as Leo Strauss, which is a wonderful note to receive.
Of course, on estoppo, never stopped attending Strauss's courses. Larry Arnhart was the professor of mine and close with on estoppo. He invited George over for dinner one night. Describe it.
I think he mentioned that on the stop with drove a camp for nearly two decades to help put food on the table. And so he could sit in on Strauss's courses. Of course, later on, he would get he would become a professor at Loyola University in Chicago. He has a law school.
Oh, the law school. He taught in the continuing education of the University of Chicago. I think his whole career. His whole career.
Yeah. Now he was eventually the Illinois State bar. I think many did. Yeah, right.
They came around and they offered him. But you know, to pass the bar and he refused. He was a law professor who was not never legally allowed to practice law. They're the best kind.
Yeah. So I think he was a current contrarian. And so he went over visited Greece during the Hunta, the military dictatorship. And he was invited to some state dinner.
This is what Arneher told us. Around the table were all these sitting generals. And stop with starts back. Now I think the regime.
So they told him you have 24 hours to hell out of here. But that's just. That was the only time so that that happened. Similar thing happened to him in Russia.
Really? Yeah. Is that right? Yeah.
Giese Leburns told me that Lawrence Burns told, who's very close friends. So they have translated the meaner with them, but lifelong friends. And they would apparently argue all night. Giese was told me that she would go to bed and when she got up in the morning, they'd still be arguing except each would have the other person's position now.
But he told me that at one point some professor got sick or could teach. And their course load of three courses got dumped. And Anastopol's already teaching four courses. And so Anastopol picked up these other three courses for 12 of seven courses in a semester.
And I think somebody asked them, how'd that go for you? And it was difficult for a couple of weeks. And I caught up. Like, so this guy is like singularly capable.
I mean, prolific, just capable of living a full intellectual life. And of comprehending very difficult subject matters quite easily. And being able to speak on them confidently. Like, it seems like almost the uplift of an eye.
I mean, I've heard that he has unpublished me as a resource for books like it. It doesn't. So really? Yeah.
Yeah. You know, a lot of his work is available. He's named, I think there's an active WordPress site. Yeah.
There is. One hand is below it. Yeah. He has zero oxide.
When I was in Chicago, I came across, he was alive at the time. But one of his undergrad TAs or helpers, he said that Anastopol's wife would bake them cookies every single day. So very kind and gracious with his students. So today, Greg, what way can you introduce these?
Sure. Well, as I mentioned, it's just one of the things that I've talked by Anastopol in the past, it's a piece that calls for, quite famously, for the abolition of television. He wants broadcast TV to go away entirely. And in the article or chapter, he sort of makes clear that he thinks that this is entirely constitutionally acceptable.
He also talks at length about the publication of the Pentagon Papers. And so there's this nice juxtaposition of, he seems to support complete freedom in the realm of political speech, but wants to shut down entirely television. And I've taught it in the past. It was in this book by Nichols and Mary Nichols and David Nichols, readings in American government, which was an excellent primary source of readings for anybody who was teaching American politics.
I think it's like 80 or 90 dollars now. So it's sort of priced itself out. It'd be only 20 cents when it came out, right? It was an awful little nickel back in the day when I taught it.
But I always taught it as a kind of, I think in the sphere of Anastopol, I mean, Anastopol, I mean, Anastopol, I mean, it's clearly, it doesn't actually think that we're going to, this is not a serious proposal. It doesn't actually think we're going to actually abolish. Never tell a vision. And so I taught it kind of in that spirit as a way to just kind of get students to think seriously about the pernicious effects of television on their lives, the pernicious effects of mass media.
He published this under another title, some point, something like the mass media and a sort of prequel man's guide or something like that. And so it really is, I think a thinking person, the thinking citizens, sort of guide or some advice to how to sort of properly think about mass media. And to try to sort of get students, it's going to be hard for me in this episode, not to come across as a pre-emergently old man. But television has a very pernicious effect.
And I realized that this is very old fashioned because it's not even clearly the young people watch television at all anymore, that they watch TikTok. But I think that the pernicious effects that Anastopol, sort of diagnosis and television are only amplified even farther in things like the internet and things like apps on their phones, having a small television in the palm of your hand almost seems to just amplify these problems. One of the arguments he has is that TV is so fixated on short attention spans and it's 20, 30, and programs. And now let me TikTok the average time, no idea, but the average TikTok episode would even call that.
I don't know. It's probably under a minute, wouldn't you say? And these things are fine for these things. I think it was usually under 30 seconds.
Yeah, I was going to say it teens of seconds probably. And so it seems like it only exacerbates and amplifies the problems that Anastopol diagnosis. And I actually did send you guys another short piece that he wrote a few years, actually almost three decades after that, I guess, called no such luck to future of the internet, where he says explicitly, the problems I diagnosed in television are just as applicable here. Now that we're talking about the internet, internet is even seeming real more mass media phenomenon than television.
He wrote that first piece, correct? The no such luck the future, the internet was 1999. This talk, the Pentagon Papers and the Abolition of Television, was first written in 1972. Just down the road here at Kenyan College.
Yeah, I didn't know you guys were close to Kenya. He was writing also during a time where the programming on TV was less vicious than it is now. Also, whether he were channels. Well, he was a broadcast television, which was basically all of television in 1972.
But it allowed Carl Sagan's cosmos to be the most viewed thing in television history. So Americans had a common kind of language, so I think that's what helped luckily, tremendously also. No, interesting. That it's something like cosmos does so well.
Because one of the points he makes is that, because broadcast requires, first of all, it's expensive. Expensive to run on this equipment and get it to everybody. Which means, too, you become dependent on advertising dollars, which means the most number of I's, which means you go to the lowest common denominator, or the most common aspect or vulgar aspect. Which means you lose the local, right?
But what's the most high-folute thing you can do is you can put on arts and culture entertainment, right? Like put on like Leonard Bernstein directing a symphony or you can put something on the universe. Because hey, what has, who do we all have in common? We live in the universe, right?
That's about it. But if you start talking about like, you know, what's going on down at Grandpa's cheese bar, even if they're at Grandpa's what? You know, Greg's the only guy watching this. Yeah.
Yeah. And he comes in and out there. He comes in and out there. He's where he gave them half his paycheck.
And that's not in exchange for cheese, but mostly in fines for the. Right. Do you guys see that guy that tweeted about me being in Italy, hide the Parmesan wheels? I thought that was actually quite clever.
Anyway. Oh, this is way too good. This is what's it like. Oh, hey.
He comes pre-hold. So yeah, I think even the point you make is that at the highest level, you're still losing something important, which is the locality of politics. And so I think one of the interesting things about the speech, Greg mentioned this, that it's on the one hand, very broad, almost uninhibited freedom of the press, but extremely limited and in the best case, but not a practiceable scenario, abolish, abolishment when it comes to TV. It's a very counterintuitive, right?
Because we tend to collapse the two of them. I think about both as a kind of freedom of expression, which is not a constitutional right or under freedom of speech in some way. But Anastopolos underlying point is something like this. The freedom of the press presupposes a certain kind of character in your people, willing to stiff through information, deep concern about the common good, trying to understand the issues through good journalism, that character goes, and that freedom's justification is gone.
And so in a way, you see the reduction of press to entertainment and the loss of like national characters. So that's his main sort of impulses. Yeah, you want freedom of the press so that people can be informed citizens. The TV doesn't contribute to that.
In fact, it gets to the way. Yeah, just to clarify that point, the connection there is that television undermines the capacity or the kind of self-government that allows for freedom of the press. Right? The character of the people that needs to be able to, that is capable of sort of having a press that is free, that's undermined dramatically by television.
Sure. I don't. Inability to think through problems. Yeah.
I understand the damage I'd like due to our attention span. Yeah. Because the delivery is bite-sized. But why would Una stop-load assume even for a second time?
The newspaper, the meeting of the newspapers somehow were beneficial or truth-seeking than what's going on in TV. I think part of it is what Alex said with the local aspect that, I mean, this is 1972, right? So local newspapers seem to be more effective, whereas television was national. And so I think he mentions in the article how television undermines federalism.
It puts the president at the front and center of politics. If I were to press this a little bit, he says, on page 268, he says, television lends itself more to presidential and congressional politics. And if you think that the legislative is more attuned or more in line with democratic or republican values and the presidential is more of an article, you can see how television lends itself to people not sort of coming together and thinking about how to discuss political issues of the day. It's one guy in charge.
And I think that's only an amplified my lifetime since 1972. And so there's all, I mean, the sort of attention span is the greater violence, the focus on presidential politics, rather than sort of actually muddling through legislative agendas, these kinds of things, the destruction of local newspaper, the local press, which I think actually, I don't know what to what extent television has contributed to this, but that also seems to have gone by the by as well. Local newspapers aren't fair. That's probably the internet actually.
I was destroying local press. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, I mean, it's easy to look at the personalities and say, well, this is just entertainment, basically, right? This is just beating into a crowd.
Like you can see is like, the New York Times gets more and more, you know, and you're opposed to certain times as well, like they're turning into like sort of manifestations of like Twitter almost, right? But he points the same thing out, right, with news broadcasts, right? The press, which, you know, is sold as a thing to be read, right? You're supposed to sit down and actually read the thing requires a certain amount of attention, right?
That when you bring in news broadcasting, it's like, here's an hour, which is not that much time to read, right? But here's an hour of a guy who didn't do the reporting, just reading you some sort of comment and looking nice and it's all appearance oriented, right? Whereas, and you know, look at it now and you have just opinion media and journalism is increasingly trying to do is easy now to look at it and say, well, yeah, it's all just sort of subject, because obviously the press is prone to its own vanities, right? And always has it and will play as a political actor.
But I think you have to admit at a certain level that the big numbers that the TV pulls in pulls any kind of genuine journalism down and forces it to be, you know, more of the same. And you can't just have the newspaper on in the background, right? Like, you can have the television on, like he talks about how people just mean, it's true. Like, I just walk my dog truck before we got on this evening and he's walked down the street and everybody's living room is lighted up with the television.
And in a way, like, you know, I don't know, where you can just run on to get out of your memory. Like, adults would sit and read the newspaper. And that seems to be entirely gone at this point. Yeah.
I wish I would call cancer work here. And I haven't my notes. I would call cancer say, actually. Yeah, I wonder if all would agree and part and disagree and part because on a stop-low passed away before the Golden Age of Television.
Yeah, or yeah, the this re-founding of television with the shows that cancer would defend his high art, like, deadwood and the Supreme House. He writes, right. He's representing them. And I think he would make the art, he makes the argument in his writing that whenever there's a new medium, it's always denigrated at first until people get used to it.
And so I wonder if I'm a stop-low would meet him halfway with respect to certain programs. Now, the shows that I just listed off those episodes were long. So it's true. Different from the kind of 24-hour television or child, very violent.
That's for sure. Yeah. Sorry. And the other thing, by the way, is I agree, actually, I'm somewhat persuaded by cancer that there is, I think there is actually television out there now.
The shows you mentioned, there's a show called Rectify, which I think is fantastic, that are called Saul, all these ones. But what about news? Is it clear that we're in the Golden Age of television with respect to news? That doesn't seem clear to me.
And as far as the entertainment aspect, maybe you're right. Maybe it did reach, it has become a more impressive medium. Sorry, else. Yeah.
I don't want to speak ill of the dead with cancer, but both these guys are dead, so if I have to take a side. But that's all fine and well. But you look at the sort of thing that's the sort of TV shows he cites, incredible violence, incredible titillation of drugs and things like that. It's got a sort of strong entertainment aspect to it.
And in addition, you lose the sort of local aspect still. Take a look at, when I lived in New Orleans out of Frandy, his wife was involved in theater, and they got a local guy to write a play about a hurricane that was a century earlier, and put it together, and it was local actors and everything. And it was somehow meaningful, right, to the community. I also think, look, yeah, new media always leads to people denigrating it.
But let's be clear about the necessary structure of mass media, right? Like, we never had something that could communicate across such vast distances. To the point that you look at the most popular kind of movies right now, superhero movies, and the reason they're so popular, the reason they're made in such abundance is because there's so little dialogue, so little that's idiosyncratic that you can translate it into Chinese, right, and capture that market, right? And so you end up having a media that ignores any kind of hot button issues between China and the US that is completely devoid of any kind of more meaningful content, becomes a kind of universal escapism and doesn't touch on sort of pressing issues.
He cites the cantor sites breaking bad as a particularly interesting example, there's obviously, I think, really important American issues going on in that show. But yeah, we have to admit that this is much more the exception of the rule, right? Where, yeah, in a time where all you could do to entertain yourself was learn to play an instrument, right? Learn another language, read another play or another novel or something.
That was the only way to occupy it, have a go for a walk. There was something more much more engaged in the particular and the local and its study that you'll ever get from television. Right. This emphasis on the mass aspect, I want to talk about internet too, but before we do this, this mass business, this is on page 262-263.
The television industry, Anastopol says, in its distinctive modernity is representative of the mass media and their infatuation with appearances. This is a feathering to a point you mentioned a while ago, the appearance aspect. Continuing the term mass media aptly records what happens when modern electronic technology is applied to communications, skipping down just a little bit. Does not a people lose its moral and hence political sense when it becomes the, quote, masses.
One may even be obliged to consider whether some previous restraint of the press might not become necessary if the people should because of the debilitating effects of the mass media remain or become so childish as to be able to be unable to govern itself. Excuse me. And then skipping down just at the end of the next paragraph, to regard to people as a mass is to say and perhaps make likely that it will become something that is moved primarily by what Federalist number one called, quote, force and accident, by arousal of passions rather than by appeals to reasons. So this sort of infantilizing effect of the mass media is something I think is important as well.
And it sort of renders us incapable of ruling ourselves. You're absolutely right. There is, I think there's excellent television being produced right now, but the vast majority of it is not high quality television, right? I mean, you get reality TV, superhero movies like Alex was talking about.
And I feel like maybe at the internet will come around eventually, but is there anything like this high quality stuff being churned out on the internet? Yeah, but we're just dancing monkeys and the vast majority of the printed word. Well, that's true too. That's because concerned is not worth much either.
But it's lying, Greg, about the people becoming a massive, therefore childish. Yeah. That's what I was thinking when he says this stuff about right presupposes, character, I think there is a certain point if people become too degraded, then it seems like they're not deserving of liberty, right? It depends into license and it becomes, yeah, mirror light becomes mere license and they become unable to govern themselves and therefore undeserving of the right, the freedom of the press.
And the passion and the constant change in all these things, none of it is developing reason, which apparently is necessary for these other, the use of liberty. Yeah. Let me show something out here that I think is really interesting about this piece. At one point in his discussion of the Pentagon papers, which is long and very detailed and, you know, lawyerly, yeah, I was born in the early 80s, so I don't know any of this stuff, right?
Me too. Me too. You know, 1880s. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Like what's the big of up? I want to read from from page 250 here.
He has reasons for, he was a number of arguments. It's very dilatso, it's really good. It's a good kind of way, right, where it's really presenting arguments working through clearly. But here he gives a really interesting argument, which will show you the trace of Strauss on his thinking at the bottom of 250, he says, it is realistic to recognize explicitly and to help the young recognize even as we attempt to confine legitimate government secrecy to the narrows possible extent that any regime in which public opinion is as critical as it is in ours does have serious limitations.
It is no doubt better to be ruled by wise men than it is to be dependent upon what the public may happen to believe from time to time. Wise men can safely determine, for example, what is salutary to reveal to the public. Unfortunately, there are far fewer wise men among us than there are men who believe themselves or are believed by others to be wise. It must be recognized as well that it is rare when the genuinely wise man who must be distinguished from the ideologue is permitted to rule, even if he should be willing to do so.
It is a mark of practical wisdom for us to recognize that we must often settle for far less than the best possible regime. Considering the dreadful alternatives we have been offered this century, it means Hitler and Stalin, constitutional government, especially when tempered by a sense of his own limitations by people's sense of natural justice and by tradition, maybe the kind of regime available and best kind of regime available in our time. And so with the argument here, I think it's really powerful. The argues for broad-frame the press is absolutely important for people to have informed opinions.
That's only will work against tyranny on the one hand. On the other hand, television seems to reduce the people to such a fate in which they deserve only tyranny. It's a really interesting conundrum because in the discussion of freedom of the press, it's very top down. He's pushing against the government's case not to publish the Pentagon Papers, documents that were leaked illegally to the press and other presses now reporting on.
So there he's arguing against the government for optimal control. And there he takes the position of a people even able to govern itself. And so in a way, if that part's a nobler, when you get to the part about TV, he's like, look how unworthy you've become of a freedom of the press. Look at how deserving of tyranny you might become if you're not careful.
And this is, I think, powerful about this piece is it really, it is kind of like an exordiative function, exordiative to says the chair, which I think there were toward a coposter. You're saying, you know, we're going to take away your TV. Right? He quotes the thoughtless papers a couple of times, which I always try to remind my students was published in a newspaper.
You know, these college students are struggling to understand it and just think about the level of literacy in the 18th century, the end of the 18th century, United States versus the level of literacy now, what people are capable of understanding. And I just want to stress again, I highlighted the last paragraph you read. You know, that to be true, or you just like, no, what's be true? That levels of literacy were higher.
I think what I literacy is greater and so far as more people are capable of reading now than then. But I think, and as we've expanded the numbers of people who are capable of reading what we've done is watered down the level of reading, if that makes sense. The USA is published in an A-free reading level. Yeah, right.
Well, whatever. I mean, like I could find the actual right now, but I looked it up in the past and what's to do and listeners, if you're listening carefully, Greg, who teaches high school teachers through the Ashbrook center, wants to limit literacy in the United States, but to help in novel or rhetoric. Is that what you're saying? Well, I think that television will be a quicker remedy to tell the readers.
It's fine reading this on a stop-low piece of making a shame to read to earth the internet so much. I mean, I don't really watch, but you just transpose that on what we do on the internet. And it's not, it was became so ashamed. Well, that's, I think that's speaks to the rhetorical, absolutely.
I mean, it is extraordinary, you're like trying to induce a sense of shame and a sort of impetus to actually make yourself deserving of the institutions your forefathers gave you. Yeah. You can't read difficult books or even just different styles of writing. If you're not reading a lot of different stuff and even like a simple farmer, right, who was able to read what would they do when they had downtime?
Right? I mean, they had nothing to do but to actually engage in something that was difficult, where I guess sleep when you're tired, right? There's not, so it's just where's the Bible? Which is there?
You know, training grounds, that's difficult. It's a difficult English understanding. Also, what was that quote that Anastopol has in his book on the Constitution or maybe it's on the Declaration of the Pants, but no, it's on the Constitution. And he mentions this, this one tears man, right, saying about Shakespeare, man, that guy was raised on Brahmi, right?
Very American thing to say. Yeah, he was reading Shakespeare, right, which is incredibly difficult. Well, think of Lincoln and how Lincoln became educated. This, I mean, you don't have to have access to much to be able to be very well read.
In fact, I mean, the cases that having access to very little, but it takes time. Yeah. It's actually quite a benefit. Yeah.
Yeah, I think it doggles to in that regard. Yeah, but both those cases, genius takes care of itself. That's a fair point. Should we talk a little bit about his sort of his condemnation of television or he ends the piece with some interesting proposals, I think, that are words sort of discussing.
Yeah, it's on page 272. Yeah. He has seven proposals, magic number. After he sort of confesses that this isn't a real completely abolishing television isn't a real thing.
Yeah. Can we also talk about, like, I realize that maybe folks listen to this, like, oh, it's kind of silly, it's kind of, you know, what we have all established with. And even at the sort of policy level, these aren't good ideas. But as you think about living your individual life, and he sort of mentions this at one point in David, just talking about personally being shamed.
The readers, the individual people might change their lives in concrete ways, right? So like maybe you limit screen time, maybe you decide, we're going to eat dinner at the dinner table. You know, these are things, these are real tangible actions that we can take that will help us out. And I'm just for the record, one of the things he talks about that finishes about television is the identity of the advertisers with television company, right?
And so how commercials are so bad. When I was a kid, you know, by no virtue of myself here, I grew up in Germany, and we only had one TV channel in English, the Armed Forces Network. And I think that that really did help contribute to my having a greater interest in reading and other activities, because we just didn't have television all the time. And it was one channel and it was half of it was aimed at adults.
And so kids didn't watch TV. Occasionally my aunt would send us VHS tapes with cartoons. But like, and there were no commercials. And so all the commercials were like civic might like, you know, pick up your trash when you're right, the bus be a good citizen, you know, America's a good country, watch out for spies, that kind of crap.
And so like, I really think I was inoculated from at a young age up until I was 10 or 11 and moved to the States from some of the more pernicious effects of television. When I see young people watching television, especially in my life, those, and he talks about this too, right? You see the way their eyes are just like, they're captivated by even advertisements. And I'm sort of thankful that I sort of was immune to that in some ways.
But because it does seem just awfully, and I have so much to do that. He talks about these hairy housewives and fathers who sort of like, you know, they're just hiring as they flip the TV on for the kid. I totally understand. I get it.
I do that out. Of course you do. I will. We just pause for a second Greg.
We can go back to talking about how great you are in a second. But one time I've done was just by chance, right? One time I was over at David's house when his oldest was just a child. David loves to sleep more than anything in the world.
He said, what about eating? What about eating? Yeah. I mean, I was after eating.
Okay. Between the two, he has little time for his family. But he was David was so tired. He turned on the TV and just went back to sleep on the couch as his son just stared at this like show of like cars flying through the air.
It was, and his son just walked in, it was mesmerized. And I was like, Oh man, like Ritz like, I guess. He's Alex, the father of the year. No, it's true.
I mean, like, I noticed that even with Mikey, like I allow myself once a day, I'll throw on an episode of Seinfeld. And just to get the kid to chill out for 10 minutes. Seinfeld for the kid? Yeah, because she thinks Kramer's funny.
And then also she dances to the corny music, right? And then I can watch energy gets bored because it's not like flashy. And then I can just watch an episode of sign up and then she go back to playing, you know, in the area. So yeah, it's a remarkable tool to distract your children, but it takes all the work out of parenting.
Yeah. And I like trying to push. I mean, what a perverse society, like you're forced to work all day. Both parents are, right?
So neither content to the children. The children that are entertained is weighted, just kind of keep them off your back as you do the stuff at home. And you're just turning them into mindless drones who will work for like their pennies, pay for their Netflix, go find some dumb nonsense and then die and produce more people like that. Like what a dystopian situation.
Well, when you put it like that, Elle, we both probably watched more TV than was healthy growing up, right? Yeah, obviously more. I mean, I was pretty restricted on my parents. Mom and Dad didn't allow Nintendo in the house.
I had the original Nintendo with kindergarten and Dad saw me playing it too much. And he had also bought me this crisscross CD. They came home, I never forget this. He's like, that's it.
I don't know if he had a bad day at work. He threw away my Nintendo, threw away crisscross. And he declared it a Nintendo free household. Then my father gets on junior year of high school for some stupid reasons that that breaks his own rule and now Julian is a scientist.
So that that's who that shows what happens when you allow Nintendo in the home. But constantly great. Just like you had no taste with you guys zero taste for video games. I have zero taste for video games.
I don't get it. I don't get it. He's a player in college. And then I realized at one point I'm dying.
What am I doing with my life? I was looking at it and kept back to the, the. Can they alienate all their entire audience? I talk about how much we all hate video games.
And I mean, look at the big picture on podcasts. Those are great. Hey, this is this is a conversation. Yeah, conversation.
I get back to the speech, Alex. Let me go. I'll jump to one that I think is. He talks about he, he at one point says there should be politics on television.
If it's going to be on PhD, it's just if there is to be politics on television, the emphasis should be on lengthy talks and extended civic proceedings. It would probably be prudent to reconsider the fairness doctrine. Now they provide an overly sales administration in Washington to create an opportunity to control the political discourse of the country. In so far as television is permitted to provide a form for political discourse is good for us that it should be able to lie on first amendment privileges.
This may be immediately think of C-SPAN. Yeah, how nobody watches it. And then it may be think about well C-SPAN, nobody watches it. You still see politicians screaming angrily.
As we take those and they turn those clips into something for their constituents or as a platform to sort of raising themselves. So it's interesting how even in this case, where you do have civic proceedings, you can see the sort of insidious tentacles of. When I was a kid, I was terrible at how nerdy the kid I was. When I was a kid, I really enjoyed this week with David Brinkley.
I love the Sunday morning talk show. I'm serious. I used to watch that when I was a young man. You know those kids who put their school books, they're coloring books in a briefcase?
Coloring books. What business did I have? I had a Michael G. Fox when he was on that show.
Yeah, family ties. I did. I liked him. I still enjoyed them.
I can't stand the Fox and the MSNBC and the yelling and stuff like that. It's just too sensitive. I can't handle it. Those stations, I think that's now a form of entertainment.
Yeah, I agree. It's not politics. Well, so the secret sauce I think is entertainment factory. Right, right, right.
Can I bring up numbers to you? You can always bring up numbers too. Who does number two work for? The commercial influence upon television in this country should be reduced.
It would be good to experiment with the means by which British commercial television has ensured that there be no identification of advertisers with particular programs. I thought this was interesting because if you take the money issue out of it, then a lot of the incentive to cater to the masses is gone. Right. To sort of bulgress, I could use it.
And it's interesting, you know, if you want to see better television, right, looking at what they produce and bring in as much better, right? That's the case. I think so. Yeah, I mean, like you look at like planet earth and stuff.
They're still making those. Those are wonderful documentaries are available. But the other side of it is because there isn't a lot of money in it. It doesn't necessarily attract as many creative people, right?
There's a lot of crap on British TV. Yeah. PDS thing, like States on Good One for a while. Yeah.
Yeah. You know, it's funny and in their regard is you mentioned several shows that were done by HBO. And so there's not commercial advertising, right? I mean, they sort of they pay for the service and Netflix to the extent that they've had some good television out there.
The same. Yeah, that's true. Then they are still concerned with eyes though. Of course.
And they have another advertising problem, which is how do they get people to know what's on their platform, right? Right. Right. Right.
It's difficult. Usually what you do is just advertise during the news or buy a spot somewhere, right? To sort of get the word out. But here you only know about it if you're involved in it.
So you have to try to work the media in other ways. But, you know, do you guys want to do one of these? Want to jump on or should we? Well, I mentioned like number one, right?
There should be a curtailment in the amount of television available daily. I realize these aren't real. They're not very likely to be sort of adopted. But I think in your personal household, there could be like I will not watch more than hour of television today where I will not spend more than X another time on the internet.
You don't have to just have to be done for the lie. No, no, of course. I'll trade people. I read something interesting and totally unsurprising that the sons and daughters, especially of Silicon Valley workers who well understand the dangers of the internet and what it can do to one's mind, but one's attention stamp, those children are not allowed to just serve the internet all day.
So it's like what honest up, Lewis, saying it's kind of bread and circus for the masses. But the elites, the people that are creating these systems, they keep their children awake, awake for it. I have a sausage to say, Graham. Yeah.
They know what they're trying to accomplish. Exactly. They know what it does to our minds on a stop-load. In this piece where people talk about what it does to our souls, just that moral fashion word seems to have greater gravity for me.
What does it do? It just makes us passive consumers in the way. Yeah. Well, because the act is totally passive.
So that's the difference between watching something on television and reading this. Absolutely. But I think Cantor's wrong in many serious respects. I also think that when you apply a mind like Paul's to a show like Deadwood or The Sopranos, it would invariably be able to intellectualize it.
See that he's imputed to the... Yeah, I think that it's not to be seeing things that aren't there, but I think that he's fleshing out the show in a way that an average viewer couldn't do. He's making connections. And it's all informed, incidentally, by political philosophy.
But the same thing is true. He says of Shakespeare, right? Like the average... And you pointed this out when we've done episodes on Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was mass media. This is what Cantor says, right? So people poo poo at the time and the average audience member would never be able to draw these connections and make these references and sort of see this sort of psychologizing that's going on. But there are people who could.
And so isn't that what Cantor would say about television? But isn't that what Cantor would say about television? Yes, of course. Go ahead.
But isn't mass? I mean, this is the difficulty, right? There's one thing to be like, okay, you're editing all the people and you take your show on the road, right? But you have the locals there and they're gathered in a single place.
But one of the difficulties he points out with TV is that we're all watching it separately, individually, or just our families alone. And it's a false sense of connection. They're speaking to everybody but no one. Right?
Nobody. And I feel like it's only worse now that it's not broadcast TV because people, like you mentioned Seinfeld, I remember when Seinfeld was a big kid and everybody was musty TV on Thursdays. And in a weird way, it did kind of bring people together on Fridays. They talk about it.
I don't think there's anything like that anymore. I mean, I watched the entire Game of Thrones series largely. I didn't think it was fair. I confessed.
I watched it largely to sort of have something to talk about with some of my friends. Because it was one of the only things that everyone watched at the time. New friends. Yeah, that's right.
Wait, so it was them or you? But I think it's interesting because the internet has raised another side, which is that things are mass. They're also more fragmented. So this isn't like just we have three channels.
And so you watch Letterman or Leno. And that's like your Coke and Pepsi choice. Now it's mass. But they're trying to capture maybe a million eyes across the country.
You can just get a small group that really likes you. Then you're going to be really sad. So now it's just called do, which is used to be that you could talk about what did Carson say? That's funny or something.
Or did you see this interview? Now you can't even do that a lot of the time. Because it's only rare that you're going to show like Game of Thrones that's watched by a ton of people. Most of the time, most of my conversations about TV are like, hey, are you watching this?
No. And then you have to watch this. Like, yeah, that's what everybody says about everything they're watching. I feel like I don't have to watch any of it.
Right. And so the conversation stops there. Can we do one more passage on page? Yeah, for sure.
This is his summary. What page? Page 269 at the end of this section here. I think it's a really powerful summary of his critique of television that he has.
And I think it's worth just a good note to end on, but I think it's just a very powerful statement. The social indictment of television can be summed up thus. Each of us is constantly addressed by television, apart from the others. And yet none of us is ever really spoken to.
The ability to read and hence to think and to join in serious common discourse suffers. Every kind of association is filtered through the camera and stripped of its humanity. The community is depreciated, while hollow privacy is emphasized. Communal tastes are reduced to the lowest common denominator and then shamelessly catered to.
Spectacle replaces theater, feeling replaces thought, image replaces character. The world shaped by television is an empty one, starved and frenetic, dreamlike, and debilitating. It can be expected to culminate, essentially, in equippling the awkwardy and perhaps even in tyranny. I mean, that's the, if you want to feel shame at any point, that's the paragraph.
Like, yeah, I am taking time away from thinking and reading. Yeah, I am, you know, putting feeling before thought and spectacle before theater. Right. Yeah, I am becoming sort of disconnected from the community, even from my family, as I'm on my phone or on the internet.
So it's fine. It's just so listeners are clear. I think the three of us think it should now be obvious that this essay is just at home in the digital world, as it was when he first wrote it during the television age. It all just applies.
And as Greg noted earlier, it's just probably applies to him. If I actually read my mind, just this is from the Sledgeri Bhavon. No such left future of the internet. This is a 1999 critical demigortique of the internet.
He says, my impression that it is likely to interfere with serious thinking, undermining as it does intellectual discipline. There can be a lot of irresponsible talk. It can be conspiracy theories, paranoia. This is 1999, by the way, just playing junk on the internet.
It can even be difficult to determine who's saying things. So on so forth. A good deal of the appeal of the internet, I suspect, is that it is an intellectual form of the video games that young people are drawn to. So it seems more sophisticated.
And then on the next page, he says the critical question here is not as to precisely what will happen with the internet and other electronic innovations. Rather, the question is whether what is happening as a legitimate concern of ours as a community, not as individual consumers or participants. I raised a similar question about television at a 1972 conference about the mass media. And so he's saying it's much worse.
And this should be our concern as citizens and as students who want to know. So he thinks that it's only amplified to digital age. And it'll be amplified further when as electronics, as we become a relationship with them becomes worse and biotic. You know, it's increasingly impossible to, like you can't not do these things anymore.
Like a friend of mine gave me a smartphone because he was sick of me not texting and response, right? Like, you know, it's impossible for me to be gay with my friends if I don't have these things. Or you'll get to do them, you know, out of the banking world, everything. Yeah.
So you're a weirdo if you don't do these things now. There's one argument that on Stop-Lote, there's one part of television that he seems okay with, which I didn't understand. Do you guys have some? With porno.
That's definitely something on the internet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He doesn't list that in his list of breeds. I mean, in 1999, that's true.
It was very slow. So he was trying to download a JPEG in 1999. Very pixelated. I'll do a apology.
Dave, do you know Stop-Lote? Well, this is fun. Hopefully we get, maybe we'll do something else by Anastophile at some point. I'll do it in test.
I think these are. I think these are. And we've been kind of working our way through his, but not philosophy. I'd like to do something like I mentioned before, like I mentioned before, like we're working our way through non-western texts.
I really enjoy that. That episode with James Carey. I will say one final thing or seriously, porno is that political philosophy, when you read political philosophers, we'll record Anastophile at that time. But when you read pieces where they apply the lens of political philosophy, the interpretive lens onto a modern day problem, it's very, very interesting.
And I think it demonstrates just how powerful of a tool, an interpretive tool, these great books, but within more in particular, the tradition of political philosophy is for anybody that wants to understand the world. So yeah, I mean, the way that Strauss, in particular, I was just reading this preface, this video says critique of religion. The way that he Strauss came sniffed out of modern a mile away, somebody who's critiquing modernity is just like, whether it's Schmidt or it's Cohen or whoever it is, Heidegger, Wright or Nietzsche, when he senses that there's been an incomplete return, you can just see that his deep learning and history of philosophy has given him a broad perspective that's not lacking a nuance as regards to the particular positions, from which to sort of examine problems, ideas, arguments, people. It's incredibly powerful tool.
You can see Anastophile is right on top of the vestiges of ancient Republican in the regime, and the effects of modern technology and science. And it seems like the best he can do, or his his tactic is to be a kind of moralist. Let me just point one thing out, I think he only uses the word salutary twice, but there's one time about the wise men doing what's salutary for the common good. On page two, he says, I believe it's salutary to argue that there should be an ordinary constitutional circumstances, though that absolute pro, the press and TV stuff is an argument.
So he thinks that argument itself is salutary, that somehow injecting this line of thinking and the sense of shame into the populace is maybe the best one to do. I think that's that might be a sort of point that he's subtly trying to import. I think that's good note, Tandong. And now I go to watch porno.
Thanks for listening, Ray. Like, subscribe, send me. What does that's doing? That's because we didn't talk about porno.
Don't yes. Don't you donate us $69. Yes. To the first person that donates us $69, they just sent a photograph of Greg, Alex and I took through a window.
That's all I'm going to say about it. That's the very only.