Most of our media are owned by a handful of tech billionaires, but there's one place that still operates like the internet was never invented.

On the new season of the divided dial from On the Media, we're exploring shortwave radio, where prayer and propaganda coexist with news and conspiracy theories, and where an existential battle

for the public airwaves is playing out right now.

Listen to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.

Good morning, Prokaptan.

Welcome back.

Remember, this month is all about oikiosis, and what is more oikiotic than knowing what we're supposed to focus on

when it comes to our concerns what exactly is ours to appropriate as concern i want to start by saying

that this episode isn't entitled five steps to discovering Discovering What You Should Care About.

For a Stoic cannot avoid caring about far more things than they can concern themselves with.

So before continuing, let me distinguish between caring about something and concerning oneself with something.

As an American living in rural Kentucky, for example,

you absolutely should care about an atrocity happening in a country thousands of miles away.

However, as an American living in rural Kentucky, again, for example, concerning yourself with that atrocity isn't just impractical,

it's also almost absolutely ineffectual, and will certainly come in an opportunity cost

because of the effort it will take to be concerned with something incredibly distant

versus something much more proximal that you can be much more effectual in

concerning yourself with. To care is to feel sympathy. To concern oneself is to play an active role

in changing something. Since there's a limitation to how many things we can do in a lifetime,

it is obviously true that there's a limit to how many things we can do in a lifetime, it is obviously true that there's a limit to how many

things we can truly concern ourselves with. If there are one million things broken in the world,

you'll only be able, in your lifetime, to work to resolve a few dozen of them in any meaningful

...