Category: podcast

Are podcasts and audio entertainment the “new normal”, while reading fades away?

May 26, 2020 • 11:00 am

Posting will be lighter this week, as duck duties are consuming an inordinate amount of time, especially protecting the brood (and Honey) from people chasing or disturbing them and from marauding drakes with lovin’ on their minds. Bear with me.

In her New York Times op-ed this week, Bari Weiss ponders the increasing popularity of podcasts, particularly those of Joe Rogan, and floats the idea that podcasts are “eating the lunch” of print media. Now I’ve never listened to Joe Rogan, but several of my friends have been on his show, and I know he has fans everywhere—and wields enormous social-media power. I wanted to discuss two issues, but first read the article:

 

First, I am curious about what readers think about podcasts versus print.  While pondering the future of this website—and believe me, I’m not thinking about ending it and taking up podcasting—I do see that many people who formerly ran websites or wrote books, people like Sam Harris and Lawrence Krauss, are taking to podcasting. In fact, that is now Sam’s main way to disseminate his views and stay relevant.  Why? According to Weiss, two reasons. First, podcasts are convenient—unlike reading, you can absorb them while doing other stuff:

Reading or watching the news is no longer immersive, as it was when you sat down with a bunch of papers or in front of a living room TV. Now it is a fragmented experience, usually done on a cellphone.

“The problem,” he told me, “is that the cellphone also has YouTube videos of the craziest things ever — babies landing on cats and animal attacks and naked people.”

Why would you read a 2,000-word story about the collapse of health care in Venezuela when you can zone out with some TikToks?

“Nobody ever thought: We need to gear our entertainment, our media, to people who cook, who jog, who hike, people who drive. Even books on tape can require too much thinking.” But a podcast, he said, “doesn’t require that much thinking at all. You get captivated by the conversation. One of the things about this medium in general is that it’s really easy to listen to while you do other stuff.”

I do. While I cook dinner I’m likely listening to Rogan, Sam Harris, “The Portal” or “Red Scare.” I go for morning walks and listen to “The Daily.” You can’t cook or walk while reading.

Journalism is one thing that podcasters are competing with: Why read a profile of Elon Musk with staid quotes when you can listen to him get high and riff for two hours in Rogan’s studio? Television is another.

I have to confess that I’m immune to podcasts. When I want to occupy myself, I read print on paper (I’m now enjoying the hell out of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories), and when I want diversion when I’m cooking or cleaning, it would be listening to music or having television on in the background, just for the sound.  This is probably a character flaw of some sort: I am able to absorb information almost entirely through reading, and don’t really enjoy hearing discussions, even when they’re by smart people on intriguing subjects. (That said, I do watch the evening news and am not immune to discussions like the one I recently posted between Ricky Gervais and Richard Dawkins.) I can’t even read stuff online: virtually everything I want to read carefully, or post about, I have to copy and paste into a Word document and then print out. Maybe it’s my age—brought up in an era without Internet. (I even remember rotary-dial phones!)

The second reason, and one explanation of why Rogan just sold his show to Spotify for about $100 million, is that podcasts aren’t afraid to take on controversial subjects, and haven’t bowed to what Weiss calls the increased delicacy of the “prestige press” (which presumably includes the New York Times). Good podcasts, unlike the liberal media, don’t have to frame their stories so they don’t get “backlash on Twitter”.  (The NYT, probably to Weiss’s distress, has become more and more a version of HuffPost, catering to the sensibilities of the Authoritarian Left. See here for one example).  As Weiss says:

The timing of Rogan’s rise and the Old Guard’s disintegration is not coincidental. His success was made possible, at least in part, by legacy media’s blind spots.

While GQ puts Pharrell gowned in a yellow sleeping bag on the cover of its “new masculinity” issue (introduced by the editor explaining that the men’s magazine “isn’t really trying to be exclusively for or about men at all”), Joe Rogan swings kettlebells and bow-hunts elk. Men are hungry. He’s serving steak, rare. Condé Nast, GQ’s publisher, has laid off some 100 employees since the pandemic began. Meantime, “The Joe Rogan Experience” has 190 million downloads a month.

Here’s that cover, which I well remember, touting the vices of toxic masculinity and the virtues of androgynous men:

 

Weiss continues:

. . . Indeed, you can rely on Rogan to talk about just about anything at all.

Take the minefield of gender identity. When he talks about the sensitive topic — one that has become nearly untouchable inside the institutional world — there is none of the throat-clearing I’ve become used to.

“There is no balanced perspective to say: Be free! Change your pronouns, change your name, be whoever you want,” Rogan said. “On the Fox News side they want to say ‘This is left-wing lunacy and everyone’s losing their mind.’”

At the same time, on the left, “there’s an aggressive, progressive doctrine that has to be followed, and followed with full compliance and no room for debate,” he said. “When it comes to competition, especially combat sports, with transwomen fighting biological women, people are so progressive they let that slide, to the point that biological women are getting pushed over.”

“Nobody wants to touch it because nobody wants the blowback.”

In other words, and I emphasize again that I haven’t listened to a single Rogan show, he seems to appeal to those who don’t want a heavy dose of social-justice warriorism: to people like Bill Maher, Bret Weinstein, Bari Weiss—or me.

Other reasons Weiss floats for Rogan’s popularity include his strong anti-censorship stand, even for commercial venues like YouTube that don’t have to follow the First Amendment. As Rogan says, “What has made society better today than it was hundreds of years ago is not just our prosperity. It’s the evolution of ideas. Anything that wants to limit discussion is dangerous to the evolution of ideas.” And I agree with him. 

To Weiss, who seems to fear for the future of not just journalism but also her own job (“Every day it seems another blue check mark with a degree from the right college hangs up her pixelated-shingle, while the rest of us avert our eyes, hoping we won’t be next.”), Rogan’s popularity is evidence against the idea that “the elite left controls the culture.”

So, here are my discussion questions for readers. First, do you think podcasting is the future of news and discussion, and will increasingly replace reading, either from a screen or from a paper page? Do you listen to podcasts more than you used to? If so, why? (I, for one, worry that podcasts will replace novels and nonfiction books, even though those kinds of books—including both of my trade books— are on audio discs or download-able.) Do you read a lot less on paper or Kindle than you used to?

Also, do you listen to Rogan, and if so, do you like the show? If so, why? Do you think his success rests on his flouting the guidelines for the “elite media”?

Joe Rogan, from Man of Many

 

Another interview with Titania McGrath

January 13, 2020 • 12:00 pm

Titania McGrath, who is actually comedian Andrew Doyle, goes on Fox News—who else would have him?—to talk for 26 minutes about Titania McGrath, Her Wokeness. You can hear the show by clicking on the screenshot below

Some of the stuff you might know from the talk by Doyle I posted before, but there’s also new stuff here, too.  One is Doyle’s reaction to Ricky Gervais’s “comedy” monologue at the Golden Globes, where he was host. I’ve put the monologue below, which didn’t go down well at all with the privileged audience who took themselves quite seriously.

Another is that Titania is writing another book—for children! Have a listen.

Gervais’s comedy was really biting, and I pretty much liked it, as did Doyle. You can see why.  My favorite line is this: “If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.”

He also goes after Apple, Amazon, and other corporations. You can be sure that he won’t be hosting this, or any other similar show, in the future.

 

 

Podcast: Dan Dennett and Sean Carroll on illusions, consciousness, free will, and other stuff

January 13, 2020 • 10:15 am

Reader Paul called my attention to a new episode of Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast. It’s two hours long, so of course I don’t have the patience to listen to it (you can by clicking on the screenshot below), but fortunately there’s a transcript you can get by clicking on “Click to show episode transcript” near the bottom.

Everyone seems to be hosting podcasts these days, and I’m not sure why. My best guess is that most people would prefer to listen to discussion than to read a website post or even a transcript, as they can do other things while listening—especially driving. (I read faster than I can listen, and so prefer the printed page, even for discussions.) Also, it’s only on podcasts where you get a spontaneous give-and-take between two people, and when they’re both of the caliber of the physicist Sean Carroll and philosopher Dan Dennett, you get some fascinating listening—or in my case, reading. Oh, and if you’re being interviewed by a savvy person like Sean, you can get your ideas out there in extended form without having to write them down, but they’re preserved on the Internet.

I did quickly read through the transcript, and wanted to say a few words on free will. Dennett and Carroll are both determinists, but underplay that by simply saying there are “no miracles” in one’s actions or decisions. To me that is an overly quick acknowledgment of a problem far more important than simply confecting a definition of free will that comports with how most people conceive it. (Actually, when people are asked for their understanding of free will, most espouse a dualist, libertarian view, one in which one really could have chosen or behaved otherwise through changing one’s will.) But people like Sean and Dan, and other colleagues like Steve Pinker and Richard Dawkins, seem to prefer to comport a definition of free will with what they conceive of as how most people regard it. They’re wrong about how most people regard it, but that doesn’t necessarily overturn their project, for philosophers can make us think about those concepts.

As readers here know, I don’t much care about the semantic games involved in philosophical compatibilism, especially because every philosopher has his or her favorite definition of “free will”—and the compatibilist definitions are incompatible with each other! So what is free will? I prefer to think of it as people always have (except for a few Sophisticated Philosophers): the illusion that we are able to control our actions by force of will alone, i.e., libertarian free will). I also prefer to concentrate on determinism (which Sophisticated Philosophers don’t deal with much) than on the semantic games of compatibilism.

But I digress; here’s the podcast:

The part on free will starts at 1:41:03, and I want to deal with one issue: the social consequences of doing away with the idea of free will (or of telling people that their behaviors are all determined by the laws of physics). Dan and Sean seem to think that people like me and Sam Harris are engaged in “anti-social behavior” and “cognitive vandalism”, and we should just shut up about determinism.

But first, both Dan and Sean aver that they are genuine determinists. Just for the record:

1:41:03 SC: So would we take the same angle on free will, that there’s an aspect of it that’s real, aspect which is an illusion?

1:41:12 DD: Yes and no, of course.

1:41:15 SC: That’s a philosopher’s favorite answer to everything.

1:41:16 DD: Yes, yes. The traditional idea of free will where somehow our bodies or our brains are shielded from causation, that’s crap. It’s just gotta be false.

1:41:36 SC: We’re not laws unto ourselves.

1:41:36 DD: We’re not laws unto… There’s no miracles happening like that. So if that’s what you think free will has to be, if you think free will is incompatible with, say, determinism, then there’s no free will. Then free will isn’t real. It’s an illusion. But I would prefer to say free will is perfectly real, it just isn’t what you think it is.

And that’s the end of the admission that our behaviors are determined. Pity that, because the implications of determinism for behavior are, to me, profound—far more profound than confecting conceptions of compatibilistic free will. Why don’t philosophers like Dan discuss the consequences of what they’ve just admitted? Are they not interesting? (Yes, some philosophers like Alex Rosenberg do talk about that stuff.)

Some of you may say that there’s no real consequences of realizing that all our behaviors are determined by physical laws, but I’d say you’re dead wrong. It’s wrong because the law already takes into account that there are legal mitigations of behavior if you have no libertarian free will. Now just extend that to all criminal acts. No criminal behavior is a free choice. And that means that there are mitigations that have to be considered in every case: what made you do the act? If you think there are no consequences of that musing, you’re doubly wrong. I’m not saying, of course, that we should dispense with punishment, incarceration, or the idea of responsibility, but we need to fix the system of judgment and punishment.

Then Dan offers two different definitions of free will that comport with his (and Sean’s and some other people’s) notion of free will. The first is if you’re coerced into something, then you don’t have free will:

1:42:17 DD: Not just an explanatory role, it plays a huge role in people’s lives, as I was saying before. Since our society has the concept of free will, when I signed the mortgage papers for this house I was asked if I was signing this of my own free will. I said yes, yes I am, yes.

1:42:44 SC: Did the agent have any idea who he was talking to or who she was talking to?

1:42:46 DD: Well, the notary was reading this off a piece of paper and I was only too happy to answer. But some people don’t have free will. Some people are incapacitated. Some people aren’t in control. So there’s a very real difference, and it makes a huge difference in life. . .

What does it mean, though, to be “in control”? It surely doesn’t mean that you can, by your will, control whether or not you sign a mortgage. What it must mean is that your brain is wired in such a way, through both evolution and experience, that it conforms to society’s expectations of your behavior—you appear calm and controlled. And what is “free” about “lack of external coercion”? Maybe you’re signing the mortgage because your spouse or kids want you to have that house, but you don’t. Or you don’t want to commit that kind of money. Is that “free”? Is that “you being in control”? I don’t think so. There are different things that coerce people into doing different things, but none of them are “choices”.  There are just different degrees of weighing up things that make you decide one way or another. All of it can be seen as neural coercion.

Which brings us to Dan’s second definition of free will: that it’s the behavioral outcomes of a complex and evolved brain that neurologically “weighs” different outcomes and then spits out a decision. This is the view he takes in his latest book on free will (I believe it’s Elbow Room), and is instantiated here:

1:43:36 DD: Empirically, we have millions of degrees of freedom, and we’re not in anybody’s control but our own. Or we can try to control people. Parents. I like the idea that parents eventually have to launch their children, and once they’ve launched them, they’re no longer guided missiles. They’re now autonomous. And how do we dare let people do this? We dare let people do this, because we trust that people will have done their best to turn their offspring into self controlled responsible agents.

But what does “self control” mean here? Surely it’s not that we are able to override our neurons and control our behavior when we could have behaved otherwise! No, it cannot be that, for that’s the libertarian free will that Sean and Dan eschew. What Dan means is that some people have brains that make them behave in a way society expects if we’re to operate harmoniously. But whether we do that or not is a function of our genes and environment. The very term “self controlled responsible agents” even implies libertarianism.

As I’ve said before, yes we are responsible for our decisions, but only in the sense that society must hold us accountable if society is to run smoothly. We are not, however,  morally responsible for our decisions, as that implies libertarian free will. Indeed, most people who are asked whether determinism makes people morally responsible will say “no.”

Dan and Sean then decry the idea, which I’ve broached, that many people promote compatibilistic free will because it makes us seem less like puppets, and that’s good for both us and society. And indeed, there is a tradition of trying to find definitions of free will that are compatible with determinism for purely philosophical reasons. I’m just not sure that, at least for Dan, he’s free of the “do-it-for-the-good-of-society” motivation. Here he and Sean reject any of these motivations:

1:45:04 SC: And I know that you said things, I wanna take this opportunity to clarify as much as we can, you’ve sort of hinted at the idea that even though we sophisticated scientists and philosophers know that there are laws of physics and we all obey them we should let the people have their free will in some sense. Because it makes them act more morally. That may or may not be true for me personally, that fact has nothing to do with why I think that it’s sensible to talk about free will. My reason for talking about free will is just the answer you just gave, which is that it does play this role in helping to explain what goes on.

1:45:39 DD: Yeah. Well I think… I don’t think that the idea that we have free will is a sort of holy myth that we should preserve for the good of hoi polloi. No, no, no, we all need it. I think it’s extremely paternalistic, patronizing to say, “Well I don’t need the illusion of free will, but everyday folks they need it.” No, I think that’s… First of all I think that’s just obnoxious.

1:46:15 SC: Right.

But Dan has also said this:

If nobody is responsible, not really, then not only should the prisons be emptied, but no contract is valid, mortgages should be abolished, and we can never hold anybody to account for anything they do.  Preserving “law and order” without a concept of real responsibility is a daunting task.

Well, I disagree vehemently with jettisoning the idea of holding people to account, but I’ve explained that a gazillion times. And it’s a deliberate exaggeration to say that abjuring moral responsibility means emptying out prisons and abolishing mortgages. You can be held responsible, and jailed, without being held morally responsible.

Dan also said this, in his Erasmus Prize lecture:

We don’t want our children to become puppets! If neuroscientists are saying that it is no use—that we are already puppets, controlled by the environment, they are making a big, and potentially harmful, mistake. . . We [Dennett and Erasmus] both share the doctrine that free will is an illusion is likely to have profoundly unfortunate social consequences if not rebutted forcefully.”

That sounds an awful lot to me like the view that rebutting the “puppet” view is important because the spread of that view would harm society. (It won’t, by the way: I know of no hard determinist who has harmed society.)

And then Dan takes off the gloves and punches down at me, and punches on the level at Sam Harris as well, for these statements are clearly aimed at us (my emphasis):

1:46:18 DD: We all go through life, gauging our opportunities, making choices taking them as seriously as we do, which is sometimes not seriously enough and sometimes…

1:46:33 SC: In trying to persuade others.

1:46:34 DD: And sometimes too serious, in trying to persuade others. It’s no secret that this pattern of activity including mental activity, including hamlet-like thinking and mulling and musing and worrying, no secret why it exists, it’s what makes civilization possible. And I for one would rather live in a civilized world.

1:47:07 SC: But so, that’s a very crucial distinction I think that has the danger of slipping by there, it’s not that we need to tell people they have free will to make them civilized. It’s that we have to appreciate that we have free will so that we create civilization.

1:47:22 DD: Yes, absolutely right, yes.

1:47:24 SC: Got it. Okay, that’s very good.

1:47:25 DD: But then that does mean that the free will skeptics, including some heavy hitting scientists.

1:47:34 SC: Some of our best friends. Yeah.

1:47:36 DD: Yeah, some of my best friends. They’re really engaging in a sort of an anti-social behavior, it’s a sort of cognitive vandalism. I try to shock them with that term. . .

I object strongly to this characterization of people like Sam and me as engaging in anti-social behavior and cognitive vandalism. It’s almost an ad hominem argument. The truth of what I talk about—of determinism, which happens to be true for behavior—is independent of its consequences for ourselves or society. (I happen to think that grasping those consequences is in fact good for us and society.) I could respond by saying that compatibilism is a form of cognitive displacement, of sweeping the really important and socially consequential problems under the rug. But I won’t.

Dan tries to land one more punch. Here he’s talking about the experiment in which neuroscientists tell someone they’ve implanted a device in someone’s head that controls their behavior, and won’t let them do bad stuff, but it’s a lie. And then the person goes ahead and does bad stuff expecting to be controlled. What that has to do with free will defies me, because the person’s behavior in that circumstance is still determined—controlled by the environmental input that the neuroscientists have lied to him.

And here’s Dan’s attempted roundhouse (my emphasis):

1:49:19 DD: Okay, so I wonder if Black Mirror has the sequel that I have… So this fellow goes off and reassured that he’s got this safety net, he becomes a little bit slovenly in his decision making and he makes some bad decisions, pretty soon he ends up in court. And the judge confronts him and asks him, “What about this?” He says, “Well, no. I don’t have any free will.” “You know I’m controlled… “

1:49:49 SC: Just obeying the laws of physics.

1:49:52 DD: I just obey the laws of physics. And the neurosurgeons, you know they are… They’re… I’m their puppet.” And the judge calls in the neurosurgeon says, “Did you tell this man that when you put this device in that henceforth that he would be a sort of electronically controlled puppet.” And she said, “Yeah, yeah we did.” He says, “It’s not true, is it?” She says, “No, of course not. We’re just messing with his brain.” Now, she did something evil. Well, if she in her white coat, her scientist white coat is doing something evil for that guy, what about you folks out there in science land who are going around telling everybody that free will is an illusion, that they don’t, that they’re all really just puppets? Why isn’t that the same sort of anti-social behavior that this neurosurgeon, this imaginary neurosurgeon is engaged in?

That’s sort of nasty, and offends me. If we are puppets in the sense that our neurons pull our strings and we can’t affect that by some numinous will, well, that’s an important truth—not “anti-social behavior.” In the end, although Dan denies being motivated in his compatibilism by fear that the notion of pure determinism will harm society, it looks an awful lot to me like that idea imbues much of what he says about free will.

The truth of a proposition is not determined by how it makes people feel. If determinism leads to a bleak world view (I don’t think it does), so be it; but there are real social benefits that come from grasping determinism.  If I’m an antisocial person, and have influenced any readers here to behave badly by promulgating determinism, by all means let me know in the comments! Not that it will stop me, as the laws of physics have made me a determinist!

 

100th Infinite Monkey Cage episode is now video to the world:

July 15, 2018 • 3:30 pm

The other day I put up the podcast link to the hundredth episode of the BBC comedy/science show “The Infinite Monkey Cage”, starring Robin Ince and physicist Brian Cox. Now the video is available to everyone, not just UK residents, and you can see go to its site by clicking  on the screenshot below.

Spot the geneticist! Matthew Cobb is a VIP guest sitting in the front row.

Secular Jihadist podcast today: Ali ‘n’ Jerry

June 17, 2018 • 7:15 am

Today, as Ali Rizvi’s Facebook page notes below, I’ll be on his Secular Jihadist podcast at 11 AM EST. If you subscribe to Ali’s podcast through Patreon, you’ll be able to see it live (it’s a Skype interview); but even if you don’t, it will be available for free later.  Patrons can see the podcast here and there’s also a subscription button on the same page.

I believe that, beyond religion, we’ll also be talking about evolution and the best way to teach the public about evolution and science in general.

Ali is, as you probably know, author of the very nice book The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason. (I think I have a blurb on one of the covers). The screenshot links to Amazon, where you can buy it:

My podcast with Left at the Valley

September 30, 2017 • 4:00 pm

This afternoon I did part of a podcast with Left at the Valley, a Canadian secularist-atheist group in the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. The entire podcast is below (they’re fast!), and I’m on between 41:05 and 1:14:00 (ca. 33 minutes). We covered a lot of ground, but the emphasis was on educating people about evolution.

As always, I can’t bear to listen to these things, but if you have half an hour, it’s below.

Eiynah on criticizing Islam under Trump

March 14, 2017 • 8:45 am

Reader Mike sent me this podcast by Eiynah (“Nice Mangos“) on “The complexity of criticizing Islam under Trump.” He added that it is a discussion that needs to be had, was worth every moment of his attention to the 12-minute podcast, and wanted to know the readers’ feedback. So by all means, proffer some feedback in the comments.

While I think Eiynah is overly hard on Gad Saad and Dave Rubin (I don’t think they undermine liberal critics of Islam, nor do they “promote far-right lunatics who believe in white genocide”), she’s right that Leftists are in the dilemma of having to oppose bigotry against believers while still criticizing the oppressive tenets of religion, Islam in particular. That is, by espousing some of the same criticisms of Islam as do members of the Right, we discredit ourselves by being seen as allies of the Right, which is incorrect but something widely espoused. As Eiynah says, “There are so many awful people piggybacking on things that ex-Muslims say.”

Her dilemma, and ours, is real. In an age when Trump is, properly, seen as a bigot against Muslims, it’s easy to mistake any criticism of Islam for calls for discrimination against Muslims. That is the “Islamophobia” canard. And I agree with Eiynah’s solution: “measured, careful, well-thought out critiques of Islam” combined with criticism of bigotry against Muslims. This is what I’ve tried to do on this site, and while I think it’s the true liberal position, Eiynah is frustrated that it’s not working. Indeed, on some sites I’m characterized as being “right wing.” But I see no other solution, and while I share Eiynah’s frustration, I think we have no choice but to persist.

You can hear the podcast by clicking on the arrow in the upper left corner of the screenshot.

h/t: Mike

My podcast with Hemant Mehta

June 26, 2016 • 9:00 am

Hemant Mehta, the “Friendly Atheist“, waylaid me during the American Humanist Association meetings (he lives in “Chicagoland”) and asked me to do a podcast with him. I readily agreed, as he’s a nice guy, and the podcast, in which I was co-interviewed by Hemant and Jessica Bluemke, was just posted. You can find it by clicking on the screenshot. As always, I can’t bear to listen to these things, but I do remember I made up a Dr. Seuss-like poem on the spot about Regressive Leftism. I don’t know if it made the final cut.

Screen Shot 2016-06-26 at 7.09.23 AM