*Anti-woke counterrevolutionary podcast focused on the invasive ideological species and the widespread confluence of money, boutique ”news” propaganda, psychology, and hyper-connective tech: The Social Media Disease. Videos on Spotify and ToddzillaX @ YouTube.
Episodes
Wednesday Aug 28, 2019
Wednesday Aug 28, 2019
This quick primer episode is the uncomfortable preface to Jacques Ellul's agitation propaganda. I explore how our Matrix Avatars themselves act as agitation propaganda and the way the informational cyber-swamp has actually managed to monetize it. Also Ellul on the dangerous effects of suppressing innate drives and human nature, the Ideology of Happiness, the universal violent human instinct, the devastating effects of dissolving human domestication to unleash and exploit primal hatred, and the self-defeating ignorance of poking the hibernating Crackerbear.
When it's done, to quote William Munny, "Have a drink, kid."
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747
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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com
Saturday Aug 17, 2019
Saturday Aug 17, 2019
On Ellul's "The Need For Propaganda." We've both developed a tolerance for and a psychological dependency on propaganda's certainty-stoking, justifying, and and self-worth generating narratives, social media is a propagandist's dream, desensitization and an increasing desire for the excitement felt from being immersed in the constant, and necessary stream of propaganda, how our addiction has allowed both traditional media and social media "influencers" to monetize the Outrage Industrial Complex, our role as retained ideological attorneys, and wishful thinking (and possibly disastrous effects) of suddenly eliminating 320-million people's propaganda narratives. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Grab a sammich for this one. And maybe a stiff drink. Hey! I never said this would be easy!
ALSO:
- This is a triage situation; not a search for the "cure"
- Disinformation bit me again!
- Why we won't quit the informational drug
- A possible path to empathy
- The culture war is a War of Narratives
- Chosen perspective becomes "personal truth"
- Provoking shame as a "debate" tool: a boomerang
- Social media "influencers": personal brands hocking a product while posing as "journalists"
- The IDW: agitation propaganda
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747
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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com
Thursday Aug 15, 2019
Thursday Aug 15, 2019
The Propaganda opus resumes with Ellul's take on psychic "dissociation". Includes more on wordknapping, how righteous and simplistic propaganda narratives silence the self and numb natural cognitive dissonance, replacing reality with the electronic eyes of the "verbal universe", the effects of disconnecting a person's personal opinion in favor of an acceptable "public" opinion, and how opposing propagandas affect the target.
ALSO:
- Democratic Socialists: as ridiculous during Occupy as at their "convention"
- Aligned, Premeditated, and Secret Consciences: Individuality and Haidt's Elephant
- Disconnecting thought & action
- Opposing propagandas: political abstention or fanaticism?
- The IDW: Agitation Propaganda
- Data Overload and the Defective Human Mind
- Your congenial host and the Ideological Riptide
- No one's immune. Not even you.
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747
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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com
Saturday Aug 10, 2019
Saturday Aug 10, 2019
Todd, Chris and Rich discuss the Dayton shooter's leftist leanings being swept aside, poking the Crackerbear and how a real conflict between Woke Island and Trumptown might resemble an episode of "Lambs to the Wolves", Los Tíos Tom Blancos and their own dignity, informational chum agitating swarming ideological sharks, how suppressing a defeated ideological Holy War enemy might look in the 21st century, and we revisit "reparations" just to, you know, lighten things up. (Send the bill to Boris!) The Propaganda opus continues next time.
ALSO:
- Chris & Rich educate Todd on "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo"
- The PMRC and the new Left
- Corey Booker's "community"
- The Dragon, Kraken, and your own self-interest
- The absurdity of expecting a Matriarchal Utopia
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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com
Thursday Aug 08, 2019
Thursday Aug 08, 2019
After more shootings, Chris & Rich rejoin the show to discuss our "news" (propaganda) consumption, and the predictably tribal response. We're malleable psychological adolescents and clearly unprepared for this informational responsibility. Also, the same recycled arguments with a few new propaganda twists, did you know the Dayton killer was a self-proclaimed Leftist? Is it coincidence that most "news" coverage is in El Paso? Remote rhetorical assaults and the usefulness of "physical accountability": smacking bullies in the snout.
ALSO:
- "Can I believe this" vs "Must I believe this"
- Snorting pacifists: lambs to the wolves
- Arya Stark: she was fiction.
- "Educated Intellectuals" aren't immune to propaganda; maybe more vulnerable
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*Also check out www.escapingthecave.com
Tuesday Aug 06, 2019
Tuesday Aug 06, 2019
How propaganda acts as an informational virus to destroy critical thought and alienate the person from himself. More on data overload, the uninformed Current Events Man knowing a little about everything and a lot about nothing, mistaking feelings for thought, having to accept or reject an entire doctrine in total, losing intellectual autonomy, and how artificial tensions are often accompanied by dubious solutions.
ALSO:
- Artificial solutions to real needs
- Real solutions to artificial needs
- "Influencers", their product, and their Patreon
- The Tribal Dance of Rhetorical Fuckery
- We're a species of sleazy lawyers and pathological liars
- Self-stereotyping caricatures
- It's fine to generalize then exile sectarian fabricants
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747
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*More: www.escapingthecave.com
Friday Aug 02, 2019
Friday Aug 02, 2019
The conclusion of Ellul's "Psychological Crystallization" featuring the makeup of its slogans & how they're used to replace thought. Also, collective belief and obsessions, self-justification/rationalizations and how they spawn the self-righteous Puritan, the closing of the crystallized mind, propaganda's religious personality, and the bizarre media phenomenon: monetizing your mind rape.
ALSO:
- Marianne Williamson: The New Trump?
- Introducing the father of American propaganda: Edward Bernays
- They know you better than you know yourself
- Propaganda's side-effects and how they mirror the '60's definition of "neurosis"
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747
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"ToddzillaX" on most social media. LIKE, SHARE & SUBSCRIBE!
Thursday Aug 01, 2019
Thursday Aug 01, 2019
Begins with a takedown of "white privilege", self-flagellation vs. self-interest, and the asinine/futile demands of our Social Vengeance Warriors; beware the boomerang, Moonbeam. From there, I move on to Ellul's dissection of how propaganda hijacks the political cultist's mind. The first of two parts, this episode focusses on the distinction between doctrine and critical though as well as homogenous thought, codifying social, political, and moral standards, exploiting latent pre-existing prejudices, and the power of implanted stereotypes & symbols used as triggering mechanisms. The elephant is strong in this one!
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747
ToddzillaX" on most social media. LIKE, SHARE & SUBSCRIBE!
Tuesday Jul 30, 2019
Tuesday Jul 30, 2019
Propaganda isn't what you may think. Ellul's ideas on pre-propaganda, propaganda's conditioned reflexes, myths, and "orthopraxy". Including the triggering of active and passive action (activists, influencers, collaborators), widespread participation by "committed" zealots, the separation between thought and action, exploiting the abyss between what we say and what we do, mobilizing men for action counter to their own values, and being unable to reverse ourselves once "action" has begun.
ALSO:
- Exiling naked sectarians
- Agitation and organization
- How the Internet rejuvenates and revives conditioned reflexes
- Technology indoctrinates us much faster than before
- Presuppositions, stereotypes, and political education disguised as universities
- Mind-hacking thru a broken firewall
- Seizing your intellectual autonomy
- Excommunication is painful. But Necessary.
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747
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Sunday Jul 28, 2019
Sunday Jul 28, 2019
More on agitation propaganda and the psychological effects of propaganda including: loss of individuality, suppression of critical thought, creation of the mob and how critical thought is literally impossible as part of a group, the creation of a fanatically self-righteous social "conscious" leading to the demonization of the out-group, and more on the sphere of the sacred. Then, how propaganda partitions society (identity politics) via verbal fiction creating sects of victims who only speak "to themselves."
Also:
- Propaganda's only heard by its choir creating alternate factual universes: The Echo Chamber
- Manchurian activists primed for provoked outrage & action: Marionettes
- The creation of an abstract verbal universe: Personal Realities spun from Collective Narratives & "fake news"
- Sacrificing self-dignity to "the cause" and the danger of surrendering to "something bigger than yourself"
- Stereophonic propaganda
- Reclaiming individuality by removing your dog from the fight: Privatized Detachment
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747
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*Also check out www.escapingthecave.com
Thursday Jul 25, 2019
Thursday Jul 25, 2019
Congressional grandstanding for the cameras, Mueller's testimony: viewed and spun in parallel universes, deciding whether to read the report, voting your own self-interest (Yes! Do it!), the Current Events Man, asking the right questions, when boutique news becomes fatal, and the sacred Golden Calves.
Also:
- Leaving the mob
- Evolution lurks
- Mythology and the Devil within
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*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net and www.escapingthecave.com
Monday Jul 22, 2019
Monday Jul 22, 2019
The extreme left's totalitarian purity test and its search for Utopia's messiah; self-righteous moral certainty and the narcissistic narratives of the secular humanist religion. Then, agitation propaganda creates armies of proselytes and militants while unleashing an uncontrollable and destabilizing primal hatred for "the evil other." No one's immune; would you even know if you're devouring propaganda?
ALSO:
- Silent Collaborators
- The Sunday School of political insemination
- Political missionaries always rapping at the smart phone's door
- Being right vs. "looking" right
- Ignoring history
- You're solely responsible for protecting and maintaining your own mind
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*Also check out https://toddzillax.substack.com/
Friday Jul 19, 2019
Friday Jul 19, 2019
Todd, Chris, and Rich discuss how the left always inadvertently triggers heated nationalism with its self-defeating renouncement of patriotism and Zinnification: exploiting idealistic naiveté; how Zinnified agitation propaganda attacks national unity by destroying symbols and cohesively fictitious myths.
Also:
- “Racism” isn’t a "white thing" nor exclusively an American trait
- The ridiculous notion that propaganda-farting fleshbots are “changing minds”
- The slow crawl of social progress
- Paying Granddaddy’s social debts
- Immigration and "becoming American"
- “Socialism rules!" Then why was there a Berlin Wall?
- Your special personal experience doesn’t matter
- Child Worship? But, children are literally ignorant
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*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
Monday Jul 08, 2019
Monday Jul 08, 2019
"He who defines is your master." More on twisting definitions as a malicious propaganda tool, how institutional propaganda systems affect a population, and where a species oblivious of its own shortcomings ultimately ends up.
Also:
-Communing with the organic dead
-There's no such thing as collective critical thought
-Intelligence as a handicap
-Foreshadowing a Walter Lippmann re-think
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*Also check out www.escapingthecave.com
Friday Jul 05, 2019
Friday Jul 05, 2019
Definitions, journalism as a euphemism for propaganda, Amash goes rogue, Antifa gets played by Patreon's punching bag, I have a creative reparations solution, FOX gets savvy and begins filling a void. Part two coming soon.
Also,
-What happened to our Nuremberg rally?
-More on these ridiculous Democratic debates
-Justice isn't real
-Is the extremist worm turning?
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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net and www.escapingthecave.com
Wednesday Jul 03, 2019
Wednesday Jul 03, 2019
A digital detox update and re-connecting with the organic world, Trump's 4th of July spectacle and the predictable "outrage", why I'm rooting against the US women's soccer team, the ridiculous debates, and half as many young people consider themselves "gay allies." Why? Beware the boomerang!
Also:
-Social media is the new talk radio
-Visceral emotive manipulation and monetized propaganda
-Algorithms as propaganda delivery systems
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*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net and www.escapingthecave.com
Friday Jun 21, 2019
Friday Jun 21, 2019
Hi New Zealand! Find yourself logging onto to the LaBrea Twitter Pit or Facebook and suddenly you've lost far more time to it than you intended? Me too. More on Digitally Enhanced Avatars, Digital Detox as a treatment for a distorted virtual perception/socialization as well as depression, anxiety, cynicism, and generalized anger.
Also,
-The universal nature of both our inner and shared stories
-Propaganda is a story.
-What happens when conflicting propagandas collide?
-Social Vengeance Warriors moving beyond "justice" and discrimination into thought control.
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*Check out www.christophermedia.net and www.escapingthecave.com
Monday Jun 17, 2019
Monday Jun 17, 2019
Wrapping things up with Chris & Rich, we discuss how public relations is, literally, a euphemism for propaganda, manufacturing opinion, euphemisms and twisting words to fit the propagandist's purpose, informational overload creating political non-entities, and partisanship rotting political, cultural and social institutions.
Also:
-Abandoning basic American principles; Patriotism's vicious backlash
-Social upheaval or an authoritarian police state resulting from the governed revoking their consent
-The Great Utopia is not only impossible, its illusion is held together only by chains
-The ridiculous argument that people are voting "against their own interest"
-Morally self-righteous bigotry and Wokeflakes poking the Crackerbear
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Check out www.escapingthecave.com
Thursday Jun 13, 2019
Thursday Jun 13, 2019
Todd, Rich, and Chris discuss the unwiring of social evolution, totalitarian tribes spawning skittish clones, and an exhausted "center" with nowhere to land that's not infested by puritans. Also: the outright refusal to see our own team's propaganda, the "wisdom" of youth, and more on thoughtless opinions and how "branding" affects Social Media Political Influencers.
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More: www.escapingthecave.com
Wednesday Jun 12, 2019
Wednesday Jun 12, 2019
Cyber Space Monkeys continued. In part 1-of-3, I'm joined by Chris & Rich to discuss the effects of social media on individuals and society as a whole. Propaganda kerosene and the disinformation detonator, the connection between road rage and net rage, much of the IDW: for-profit social media brands and "right adjacent" influencers producing "content" for handouts, Nicholas Carr and how the Internet physically changes our brains, good deeds done solely to post the selfie, and more.
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Friday Jun 07, 2019
Friday Jun 07, 2019
No Politics! Lots of drilling to the "get the f**k away from me!" meltdown core.
-Bulls**t Jousting
-The truth probably won't set you free
-Sausage Party Hope and the fueling Audacity of Belief
-How & why disinformation works: a first person play-by-play.
More: www.escapingthecave.com
Visit: www.christophermedia.com
Also: www.christophermedia.net
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Thursday May 23, 2019
Thursday May 23, 2019
Technology enables, and social media perpetuates, informational anarchy and prioritizes the cheap appearance of knowledge over fostering knowledge itself. Also, how the Internet changes cognition and the abandonment of expertise to the holy opinion: "my ignorance is equal to your knowledge."
Also:
-The DIKW pyramid and drowning in data.
-The Id on Parade, the natural state of man, and Leviathan.
-What happens when reasonable voices abandon the public square to mindless mobs of roving avatars?
-When avatars attack
-A classic full-frontal Toddzilla rant salvaged from The Lost Episode about Twitter, and more.
Elias Aboujaode's Virtually You:
https://www.amazon.com/Virtually-You-Dangerous-Powers-Personality/dp/0393340546
Nicholas Carr's The Shallows:
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death:
https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1558613196&sr=1-1
Need more Toddzilla?
1) Seek help.
2) Click the links.
3) Gorge on your way to therapy.
More episodes/subscribe:
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com
Also visit: www.christophermedia.net
Subscribe: iTunes and Google Play
Tuesday May 14, 2019
Tuesday May 14, 2019
Unsophisticated media consumers and the failure to take personal responsibility for our own intellectual maintenance. The surrender of the individual's intellectual autonomy to the conformist mob. How mobs-cells no longer need to leave the couch and are now free to anonymously molest & terrorize the "other" via Twitter, Facebook, and their phones.
Also:
- Social Media Influencers and how the Media 101 Model applies to them
- Emerson on independent thought, conformity, and consistency
- The abandonment of external truth and the path to authoritarianism
"ToddzillaX" on most social media. LIKE, SHARE & SUBSCRIBE!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjdLR140l--HufeRSAnj91A
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Thursday May 09, 2019
Thursday May 09, 2019
Haidt's elephant and how it relates to our constitutional crisis, rising authoritarianism, and our likely dystopian future. "Evolution didn't end with opposable thumbs."
- The thin veneer of civilization
- Self-dehumanization
- Extremists v. Moderate
- The Social Media Disease
Tuesday May 07, 2019
Tuesday May 07, 2019
Parties, their power-first representatives and constituents, fundamentalist ideologues, extremists, etc. are failing everyone.
Government institutions are melting down and the faith of the governed along with it.
Hey! What could possibly go wrong?!?
Need more Toddzilla?
1) Seek help.
2) Click the links. You can listen on your way to therapy.
More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com
Saturday May 04, 2019
Saturday May 04, 2019
Confused as to why your righteous demands aren't being met? Behold!
- Narratives, mythology, religion, and how they bind us together
- The Grand Design & Ideological Religions
- Making Enemies of Allies
- Haidt's Elephant
- Intellectual refinement and allowing yourself (and others) to make mistakes and change your mind
- External Truth and Reason
- Authoritarian creep
- No Hitler references!
https://soundcloud.com/toddzillax
Use as directed.
Monday Apr 29, 2019
Monday Apr 29, 2019
Are you wondering why every source of "news" and information sucks? It's because everyone from MSNBC to NPR to FOX to Alex Jones to Social Media "Influencers" operate according to the same for-profit model: drawing eyeballs to their product to sell someone else's.
The re-resurrection begins by re-laying the foundation. More on the way.
Need more Toddzilla?
1) Seek help.
2) Click the links. You can listen on your way to therapy.
More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com
Saturday Mar 24, 2018
Saturday Mar 24, 2018
First Social Media Disease antibiotic treatment. Starting with an X-Pod flashback to 2014, Todd discusses Cambridge Analytica before turning to more recent effects of our collective addiction to social media on society and how a bilateral abandonment of a commitment to basic common facts--in favor of tasty propaganda--is having a dehumanizing effect and rapidly eroding the social contract. Also: cyber space monkeys, avatars showing off for each other in the Matrix, and the digital-organic hybrid: meme belching Cyborgs.
Need more Toddzilla? First, seek help. Second, click the links below. You can listen on your way to therapy.
More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com
Monday Mar 12, 2018
Monday Mar 12, 2018
The final episode of the Friar Chris Series begins with a discussion about the differences between bicycle touring and backpacking then moves on to deeper topics, including (@ 15:45) my experience volunteering on the Gulf Coast in the immediate aftermath of Katrina and the corrosive and corrupting effects of tribalism and dogma in the Disaster Relief Industrial Complex. We then move on to (mostly) explore the fundamental ideas behind why he and I chose hitchhiking and what we learned and experienced while traveling the country as “disposable” vagabonds loitering out on the fringe. SPOILER ALERT: Sausage Party Hope lies within!
Cheat Sheet:
36:40 - Institutional incompetence, the loss of confidence leading to the rage that we found everywhere in 2008-9 which, ultimately, gave birth to Tea Party Extremism.
50:28 - The philosophy/theology of a guiding hand synchronicity operating system, audacity, and the (unresolvable?) conflict between unprovable theology and a commitment to truth.
1:04:10 - The driving fundamentals including freedom (and the resulting paradox), the search for purpose, the fear hump/internal narrative feedback loop.
1:38:50 - The re-humanizing effect of organic interaction and the authenticity one can witness when playing the role of the culturally invisible man.
1:49:55 - Hopping the freight train.
1:56:30 - The surprise of a pervasive, unexplained, and unsolicited, generosity.
2:04:40 - The folly of depending on distorting electronic eyes. (Internet/media)
2:15 - Egocentric Identity and the pain of re-birth
2:16 - The Return, The Call/Splinter, and how these ideas transcend mythology and religion
2:28:30 - On Chris McCandless 10-years later
More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com
Tuesday Feb 27, 2018
Tuesday Feb 27, 2018
The first of three expansive (and nearly politics-free!) episodes with Chris Dyson, we discuss the mystical route leading to his founding of The Hof, his hostel in the Cordillera Blanca range of the Peruvian Andes and the difficulties he encountered in being a gringo outsider trying to integrate into the nearby Quechuan community, including the multiple robberies endured during his six and a half years living in Peru. We also discuss working at an ayuahuasca retreat, "The Personal Peace Corp" and the Dennis Doctrine, tribalism, non-caucasian based racism, apocalypse cultism, the epidemic of human disconnection, the related death of the sense of community, and more.
My photos of The Hof: www.upperworldphoto.com
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