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Now administering third eyedrops

Welcome back, dearest wonder dippers, Michael Philip here, and something, I don't know how to describe it amusing, terrifying, and novel, I suppose, just occurred to me

that I have to share with you, and it's that information seems to be both somehow paradoxically more dangerous and trivial or disposable at the same time, I'm definitely still forming my thoughts around it, but I thought it'd be fun to play with this a little bit.

So on the point of information being more trivial and disposable, I think that's pretty obvious, we're still clearly revving up the informational metabolism, you know, informational turnover is at an all time high, and this is not a new observation or a particularly fresh one, but it is necessary to the larger point I'm trying to make.

So just to get it over with, I'm sure we all continue to notice how quickly news stories fade memes go from a hilarious to unfunny in a matter of hours, you listen to a song and you never think about it again.

Yet at the same time, if that information has one very important quality, if it's information we don't like, we don't care for, it's apparently very dangerous, very threatening, it's seemingly never enough just to disagree.

I mean, if you look at people on either side of the binary sociopolitical equation, at least here in the States, we've apparently basically been reduced to tribal children throwing psychic turds back and forth.

It feels like it's always the most extreme adolescent emotionally charged all or nothing all the time, you know, it has to be either banjo rogan from the internet or purge critical race theory from our schools or whatever we're all going to die from the virus or the virus is nothing.

It's, it's just a cold you baby, you know, this really is basically what the collective discourse feels like right now.

It's as if both sides of the spectrum are pulling so hard on their respective edge of society that the stitches are about to pop or something.

Like I said, my thoughts are still under construction, given the fact they're under construction, I am not about to give some kind of canned advice on how to deal with this, but I will say it can be surprisingly fun to just let information be information to just not have an opinion to just not have an emotion to be Michael Jackson in that popcorn meme.

While everyone's that that's a meme that has some staying power, by the way, but to be like that, while everyone else's emotions and opinions are running their lives, turning them into a ideological regurgitation automaton or something and I'm not saying not to have an opinion, but this does go quite a bit deeper, you know, Plato, for instance, famously warned about letting your emotions corrupt your ability to reason.

You know, Stoics like Marcus Aurelius are constantly talking about remaining level headed, not complaining. He's got a great quote along the lines of never be heard complaining not even to yourself.

Anyway, now we are getting uncomfortably close to canned advice and this has become a big old tangent to be sure.

However, this topic of informational toxicity and erosion and the erosion of media literacy in particular does feature quite a bit in this conversation with journalist and author Ethan Liu from there, I recall we get into the concept of Robert Anton Wilson's reality tunnels and how subjectively different.

The world seems to different people, particularly people of different cultures and I'll also say I guess this is a little bit of a different kind of wonder dip because we also chat a bit about geo politics and crypto and some other fair that doesn't get a whole lot of air time on the pot.

But on that note, let's get into it. Ethan, as I mentioned, is a journalist who's written for a bunch of major publications. He's also the author of once a bitcoin miner.

I guess it's a kind of memoir, a kind of documentary style book that covers his wild ride in the world of crypto, which took him all sorts of places to North Korea to brushing shoulders with several people who'd wind up being criminals

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