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The Gist

Alicia Wanless — "The Ecology of Information"

The Gist

Mike Pesca

News, Politics, Arts, Daily News

4.43.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Carnegie Endowment's Alicia Wanless argues that disinformation isn't new—it's just our latest pollutant. In The Information Animal, she maps centuries of "information ecosystems," from King Charles I's pamphlet floods to the social-media deluge, and shows why attempts to "detoxify" them often fail. We trace the analogies between DDT and digital outrage, ask whether suppression ever works, and weigh how democracies can regulate without strangling truth. Also: China's dirty edge in the rare-earths race.

Produced by Corey Wara


Production Coordinator Ashley Khan


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Transcript

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0:00.0

If you like the gist, I think you do. I think you'll also like Risky Business, a podcast hosted by

0:05.3

Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova. You know them. They're journalists who moonlight as high stakes

0:10.4

poker players, though that might be misstating where their incomes primarily come from. I think it's

0:15.7

to poker. They talk about odds, incentives, and outcomes, and they talk about democracy.

0:21.5

You know, in politics, every moves of calculation, and sometimes our leaders can make bad bets,

0:26.3

and sometimes we as citizens suffer bad beats.

0:29.4

Check out risky business available in your favorite podcast app.

0:38.6

It's Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 from Peachfish Productions.

0:42.8

It's The Gist.

0:43.9

I'm Mike Peska.

0:45.3

And Ukraine's newest strategy isn't about trenches, is it about tank battles?

0:50.5

You can't really win a tank battle, it turns out.

0:52.8

You can't really move a trench much more than a few feet when you're going up against Russia.

0:58.5

Russians can't move the Ukrainians more than a few feet at a time.

1:02.3

So Ukraine decided to go a different route, and they embrace the Flamingo.

1:08.4

The Flamingo is a long-range cruise missile. It goes 1,800 miles. Guess what?

1:13.8

It hits the factories of the urals. It's taking a lot of Russian oil capacity offline. And not only is

1:22.3

the flamingo, that long-legged interloper doing its thing, so too is the beaver. The beaver is a cardboard-bodied

1:32.2

drone that goes 600 miles long and has a bite. Now, I looked it up. Is beaver the same in

1:40.3

Ukrainian as it is here in America or Canada, the Americas? And it is, it is the bobber, which is the beaver, but they think of beavers differently.

1:49.1

It literally means beaver, same animals, same buck teeth.

1:52.0

But to Ukrainians, the bobber isn't goofy at all.

...

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