Journos

Setting the Doomsday Clock w/John Mecklin

The news media is a pretty literal biz. It regularly reports on only two metaphors: One is what that groundhog does every February. The other is what the Doomsday Clock does every January. 
The Doomsday Clock is that thing that has been ticking intermittently toward (and sometimes away from) midnight (AKA the end of the world) since it was created in 1947 by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a publication launched by Albert Einstein and some scientist chums after WWII to keep people informed on the risk of man-made apocalypse.
(The Bulletin has since added some categories, like climate change, biosecurity, and artificial intelligence.)
In January, The Bulletin set the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it's been to apocalypse (per the scientists calculating such things). It's because of Russia, of course.
Who would run such a grim-sounding publication? And are they extremely emo?
In this episode, we talk to The Bulletin's editor-in-chief, John Mecklin, about the dangers of nuclear weapons, the power of metaphor, how AI complicates everything, and whether editing The Bulletin is the gloomiest job in journalism ... or the best.
Get ready for the only conversation about existential risk that asks the tough questions, like whether heaven exists as a dimension beyond time itself. 
Oh yeah, we go there.
 
NOTES
A very short statement on AI risk // ... And The Bulletin's take on that statement // Here's OpenAI's Sam Altman talking to Congress. Can you tell if he's really asking for help ... or just trying to distract some easily confused politicians?
 

Elon Musk’s Neuralink Broke a Lot of Animals to Get Ready for Human Trials, w/Valerie Demicheva

(UPDATE: Here's Valerie's story.)
Hold on to your brain stems: Elon's in the news again.
This time, it's because the FDA approved Musk's company Neuralink to begin human trials for its brain implants, which he's claimed will do everything from curing paralysis and autism to turning us into web-surfin' cyborgs.
But on this episode, our second-time guest, Valerie Demicheva, takes us through Neuralink's history of animal-welfare violations, which have led to investigations by the USDA and Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. 
We talk with Valerie about the promise of brain-implants, the questionable effectiveness of animal testing, and Musk's amazing ability to bend media coverage to his will ... perhaps through the invasive implantation of Twitter.
Meanwhile, with this episode, let us implant ideas that may enable you to move your own opinions ... with your mind.

Prince Harry & Meghan vs Florida Man

Used to be, we had forest spirits and talking animals and whatnot. But those days are long over, and now the closest to a mythology we moderns have is celebrities — those magical sprites that materialize in a puff of self-regard and vanish in a flash of cameras. It's not Grimm, but it is grim.
The Great American Fairy Tale added a new chapter recently when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were involved in a post-gala paparazzi pursuit that the royals' PR called "near catastrophic." Since nothing seemed to have happened, it suggests that just being in the neighborhood of catastrophe might be kind of boring.
Still, the event inspired Brandon & Stephen to think about celebs in the media, and that took them to another figure of myth and legend: Florida Man. Where does he come from? Why is he always getting into trouble? And what does it have to do with the state's Sunshine Laws?
But what's a fairy tale without a twist? In this case, it's how laws designed for government transparency can be used to ruin the lives of regular citizens.
If our story has a villain, it's gotta be Gov. Ron DeSantis, "the Florida Man Who Would Be King" ... if he can just manage to shut down anyone trying to tell stories about him. 
In this episode, we tell a tale of swamps and snakes, haunted reputations, the power of sunshine, and a kitten trying to get into a strip club. Gather, children!
NOTES
The Royal Press Agent speaks! // Some Florida Man memes courtesy the NY Post // And USA Today, and here and here // The police like Florida Man stories too // The problem with mugshot tabloids, also here // Louisiana's bill to put juvenile arrest records online // China loves a good shaming! // The DeSantis administration dims Florda's Sunshine Laws, also here and here and here 
CLIPS
The Royal Chase on "The Today Show"
"Good Morning America" has a Florida Man story with a happy ending

A Classic Orgasm Mystery

In this episode, two stories about trying to figure out what’s on someone’s mind.
In the first, we ogle the news media's obsession over the story of a woman who may or may not have had a "full-body orgasm" during a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 at the LA Philharmonic Orchestra. The only folks who hope the music moved her to sexual ecstasy more than the press? The LA Phil, no doubt.
The story hinges on the frustrating fact that we just can't get into that woman's head, and so — speculation is the mother of titillation. But the technology to read minds may now be here, according to a new study out of the University of Texas at Austin.
Participants got fed hours of podcast audio in an fMRI and had their reactions to the words and phrases recorded. When participants were asked later to think of a particular story, the researchers (with help from some artificial intelligence) were apparently able to figure out with crazy accuracy the content of the story.
Naturally, this took us straight into fears of LL Bean reading our minds to find out our deepest feelings on fleece, and we had to dig into the current state of research on "mental privacy."
Come with us (so to speak) and be reminded why the brain is the biggest sex organ ... and why it's a flimsy, see-through little number.
Listen to this so many times a machine can hear it in your thoughts.
NOTES
The "Orgasm Audio" is a sexual Zapruder film // The fMRI technically just reads your blood, not your thoughts // The original performance of Maurice Ravel's "Bolero" also made people a little nutty // The "Bolero" we sampled is from a 2010 Lucerne Festival performance by the Wiener Philharmoniker with conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who went on to (possibly) conduct a woman to orgasm over at the LA Phil. 

A Death *in* San Francisco Becomes the Death *of* San Francisco w/Joe Eskenazi

Sometimes a story isn't a story at all. It's a ball that interested players use to score points in whatever game they're playing — politics, cred, likes, lols.
In this episode, we're talking about one such story.
In San Francisco, a man named Bob Lee, a tech luminary, was murdered in the early morning hours of April 4. He'd been stabbed and left for dead. It was game on for commentators in the world of tech and elsewhere, like perpetual gamer Elon Musk, who used the opportunity to criticize the city's approach to violent crime.
A few days ago, the SF journalism outlet Mission Local broke a huge story: Police arrested the alleged murderer ... and he's a tech entrepreneur who knew Lee. Other major outlets like The New York Times and Washington Post followed up on Mission Local's scoop — even if they didn't credit the site for breaking the story in the first place.
There's still a lot of story swirling around: Who is the alleged killer, Nima Momeni? How did he know Lee? How did it lead to murder? And of course, this being San Francisco, the story still gets bounced around in the blame game of crime, homelessness, and drug addiction.
Lotta bouncing.
Today, we're talking to Brandon's longtime friend and former colleague from SF Weekly, Joe Eskenazi. Joe broke the story of the arrest. He's a lifelong Bay Area journalist who many call the best reporter in San Francisco.
We have him on to talk about the case and the ways it got spun to serve certain agendas. We also talk about those very real and lasting problems the city faces, why it's so hard for the city to deal with them, and how SF is still, in many ways, worthy of the title Joe bestowed on it way back in 2009 with his story, "The Worse-Run Big City in the U.S."
That story is still well worth a read if you want to understand how good intentions, money, and a lack of accountability lead to, as has become shorthand, shit and needles in the streets. 
As for the Lee case, as Joe says in our discussion, "This isn't about tech, and this isn't about San Francisco. It's about something else."
In this episode, we try to dodge the balls and figure out what the game really is.
NOTES
Here's video of the city's press conference announcing Momeni's arrest. We play a clip of SF Police Chief Bob Scott talking human nature in the episode.

Raccoons Are the Real AI Threat, w/Suzanne MacDonald

In our last episode, we talked about the hows and whys of engineering dogs to look like humans, and the consequences of monkeying around with nature. That got us thinking of an interview we did back in 2021 with Suzanne MacDonald, a psychologist at Toronto's York University who studies animal intelligence. She's become, for better or worse, an expert on one species vying with humans for control of our cities: the raccoon.
In this episode, we ask whether we're creating a new, smarter species, one trash can at a time, whether squirrels have a hoarding problem, and who the biggest jerk in the animal kingdom is. The answer may surprise you (but probably not).
Plus, some reader mail ... sort of. (For the record, we're pretty thorough in our consideration of "Don't Look Up" and asteroid mining.)
Put on your mask, and dabble some food for thought in the stream of consciousness with us.

Step Inside and SEE ... the Dog with the HUMAN FACE!

Conspiracy abounds in this episode! We consider the not-so-secret breeding programs of the elite, who have for centuries manipulated the very laws of genetics themselves to produce ... cuddly-wuddly faces that you could JUST PINCH AND PINCH AND PINCH UNTIL THEY HAUL YOU AWAYYY
Yes. This episode is about dogs. Specifically, America's newest number One dog — the French Bulldog. The Frenchie toppling the 31-year-reign of the Labrador Retriever received the kind of media treatment you'd imagine, a lot of it with the ALL-CAPS enthusiasm of the American Kennel Club's own press release (stop yelling, jeez). But look closely and you'll see everyone dancing, lightly or not, over the wheezing, snoring facts of overbreeding. 
Not us, though. We look the uncomfortable truth of designer breeding right in its eerily human eyes and wonder whether we're trying to build a better Good Boy ... or letting our hubris carry us where even nature knows better than to go.
From plastic rocks to engineered pets, this week, we look at the lifestyle choices of the Anthropocene human. If there was ever an episode that could get away with peeing on your rug, it's this one. Help us squeeze its face SQUEEZE ITS FACE SQUEEZE SQUEEZE SQUEEZE AGHHHH
NOTES & EPHEMERA
New rocks, new tricks // The deeply strange history of the French Bulldog // Guest-starring Toulouse-Lautrec // Genetics-wise, there's no turning back for the bulldog // But them dogs are money makers! // Health problems and all // Including that their heads are too big for their, ahem, birth canals // Which is part of why Norway banned bulldog breeding // (Though Brandon suspects it's a conspiracy to raise the profile of the Norwegian Lundehund) // Australia also considers a breeding ban // A TV doctor confronts the fact that we're making dogs look like people // Which, let's consider the weird psychology of liking things that look like us, per a 2018 study // And which causes all kinds of social problems // Dogs as the real social network // "Dogonomics"
 
NEWS CLIPS
Good Morning America
NBC Nightly News
Westminster Kennel Club
Fox 26 Houston
MUSIC & FX
Bach's Minuet
Drumroll
Fanfare

A.I. Is Devouring Artists w/Ted Rall

Future shock? Who's got future shock? In this episode, we dig back into our Official Topic of 2023: the AI Revolution.
OpenAI just dropped a shiny new chatbot, GPT-4. This delighted tech journalists, who turned a product launch into lofty thinkpieces and listicles about all the things GPT-4 can do, from diagnosing illness and generating Madonna jokes to making it easier for everybody to sue everybody.
As AI continues its siege of the white-collar, we wondered what all this will mean for artists.
So, we turned to our friend — cartoonist, writer, and general troublemaker Ted Rall. Ted wrote a piece for WhoWhatWhy about how AI companies are building their extremely profitable tech on the backs of the millions of artists and writers whose work populates the internet. 
His story looks at a lawsuit brought by a trio of artists against some big AI companies. The artists contend that using their work as training data amounts to a kind of 21st-century theft.
Our conversation with Ted roams hither and yon: We talk copyright, collage, Google Books, a vacuum cleaner conspiracy, and lots of other issues facing artists and writers in the age of the all-devouring chatbot.
Is the Cartoonist Singularity nigh? Can Ted finally turn over the pen to the machines and get a bike ride in? Can we use a chatbot to write us a lawsuit to sue a chatbot?
Let us know what you think. Our chatbox is open: journos@journos.net
JOURNOS is produced by Dave Coates

Plumbing the Depths of the Teenage Mind w/Denis Barron, MFT

In this episode, Stephen (who, by the way, used to be a high school teacher) strikes off on his own to discover what went wrong during his wayward teenage years. Well, not really. But he does track down San Francisco-based therapist Denis Barron, MFT to learn more about what makes young minds tick. 
Barron has spent his career working with adolescents, and has some great insights on everything from the reasons teens do the crazy shit they do, to the apparent evolutionary benefits of ADHD. He also gives some great advice on what developmental milestones are most important for adolescent kids these days, along with ideas about what we can do to support teenagers in this weird, modern world. 
Oh! And if you missed our appearance on The J.V. Club with Janet Varney, in which we share some of what we learned in this interview, you can check that out here. (And if you didn't hear our episode talking to Janet, why, scroll back through the feed a few episodes.)
JOURNOS is produced by Dave Coates

Pay No Attention to the Story About that Blown-Up Russian Gas Pipeline!

In this episode, we ask: Must a story be told? What happens if it isn't? Could we be better off?
Brandon & Stephen are somewhat boggled by the existence of a story that seems out of journalism's primordial past. Not a "man bites dog" story, but an even more ancient piece of news: "dog bites man." We consider a story about how, when dogs attack mail carriers, sometimes whole neighborhoods lose delivery service. It seems that, indeed, everything must be made into news eventually.
But — apparently not everything. From postal pith helmets, we look at a story that didn't show up in the Times, the Post, or even the cable-news networks. It's a story about how the U.S. sabotaged a Russian pipeline providing natural gas to Western Europe. Or maybe it didn't? 
What's the saying? "Disinformation is better than no information at all"? (That's not a saying.)
In early February, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh published a post on Substack that set this whole thing in motion. Hersh has broken huge stories in the past — about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, about torture at Abu Ghraib — so it's just ... weird that the legacy media didn't pick it up, if only to refute it.
That's what we wrestle with in this episode: Hersh's story, why it was ignored, and how we citizens should think about and respond to stories in which we aren't sure about any of it. Turns out, it's an act of faith, and a little something we like to call ...
... brave ignorance.
Put on your pith helmet and some long socks, and let's deliver some answers to that ancient question: How do we know what's safe if we don't even know who bit whom?
JOURNOS is produced by Dave Coates
NOTES
Seymour Hersh talks about his journalism philosophy and responds to the controversy over his latest story
Reuters dutifully relays the government's response to Hersh's story and explains who Hersh is, while the administration digs into denials
Not surprisingly, Russia thinks Hersh is onto something
Here's Hersh's 2004 New Yorker story about torture at Abu Ghraib
Here's Hersh talking Bin Laden on CNN in 2015
Another journalism veteran puts Hersh into perspective in a 2018 NYT review of Hersh's memoir, "Reporter"
For the curious, here are some critiques of Hersh's reporting over the years from Slate, Snopes, Vox, and a sort-of one from NYT Magazine
Hersh's reporting of the last decade is carried by the London Review of Books — controversial in part because the stories are built on only a few, anonymous, sources
CNS News uses the pipeline story to go after NYT ... and shill a Mediterranean cruise with Rick Santorum!
Clips you heard in this episode:
Biden's February 2022 press conference where he says he’d take action against Nord Stream if Russia invades Ukraine (C-SPAN)
A 2022 CNN report on the pipeline explosion
CNN's Wolf Blitzer interviews Hersh about Abu Ghraib in 2004
Hersh on CNN in 2013 to talk about the Syria poison gas attacks
A November 1969 ABC News story on the My Lai massacre
The February 2023 Democracy Now! interview with Hersh
Ding and wave sound FX from InspectorJ under a Creative Commons license