Show notes, citations & transcript: https://psychgrind.com/001/
Repeat and Repeat · episode 001 psych grind - Introductory episode highlighting the mere exposure effect and normalcy bias.
This podcast discussion is about the information landscape with a focus on influencers and the content creator gig economy, and the effects on society with your hosts CHLOE HUMBERT and MATT STRACKBEIN. Music and interludes by MICHAEL STRACKBEIN without use of A.I. Chloe Humbert has a weekly newsletter and podcast on substack called Don’t Wait For Everybody. Matt Strackbein, aka The Letterhack, makes comics and livestreams at YouTube.com/TheLetterhack.
References:
Redirects from “Birtherism” -Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories - From Wikipedia
BBC - Oxford University: Goldfish do have good memories, scientists find 13 October 2022 Scientists have proved goldfish do have good memories and are able to navigate their surroundings. A team from Oxford University trained nine fish to travel 70cm (2.3ft) and back, receiving a food reward at the end. Researchers said it showed the fish could accurately estimate distance. The study disproves the long-held belief goldfish have little or no memory.
Internet Archive - “George Orwell - All Art is Propaganda : Critical Essays” George Orwell: Charles Dickens. Inside the Whale, March 11, 1940 - I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his “message,” and almost ignoring his literary qualities. But every writer, especially every novelist, has a “message,” whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art. As I said earlier, Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives. The question is, What is there to steal? Why does anyone care about Dickens? Why do I care about Dickens? That kind of question is never easy to answer. As a rule, an aesthetic preference is either something inexplicable or it is so corrupted by non-aesthetic motives as to make one wonder whether the whole of literary criticism is not a huge network of humbug. In Dickens’s case the complicating factor is his familiarity. He happens to be one of those “great authors” who are ladled down everyone’s throat in childhood. At the time this causes rebellion and vomiting, but it may have different after-effects in later life. For instance, nearly everyone feels a sneaking affection for the patriotic poems that he learned by heart as a child. “Ye Mariners of England,” the “Charge of the Light Brigade”- and so forth. What one enjoys is not so much the poems themselves as the memories they call up. And with Dickens the same forces of association are at work.
Times Leader - Coal Miner Mentality November 2, 2008 Joe Leonardi, chiropractor and college lecturer “Coal Miner Mentality” is a phrase that is boorishly bandied about to describe many here in Greater Pittston and to a larger extent all of us who reside in Northeast Pennsylvania. Along with hard scrabble and coal cracker, this terminology is not meant to compliment, congratulate or commend. It is most often intended to demean, deride or dismiss the good people of, as Steve Corbett extols, “Hard Coal Country.” How little those outside of the anthracite arena know the offspring of the miners whose labor fueled the industrial revolution. My grandfather was an owner/operator of a few mines here in the valley. Unfortunately for my bank account he was not a coal baron. However, fortunately for my character he was a coal man. We, all of us, are the heirs to the throne of king coal – we are the ones responsible to maintain the legacy of those who took from the ground the hard black carbon.
Acid mine drainage From Wikipedia When the pH of acid mine drainage is raised past 3, either through contact with fresh water or neutralizing minerals, previously soluble iron(III) ions precipitate as iron(III) hydroxide, a yellow-orange solid colloquially known as yellow boy.
Steamtown NHS (National Historic Site)
Company towns, network states, freedom cities… Jun 1st, 2025 Next to the top hat man is a yellow sign that is at an angle where it can’t be read, so the image has a closeup next to the photo showing the yellow sign which has a one line quote from J.P. Morgan saying I owe the public nothing. The caption on the image says Steamtown National Historic Site Scranton Pennsylvania USA. photo by chloe kaczenski humbert.
WNEP - Rep. Farina’s Facebook Message on Power Plant Debated JESSUP — He made his announcement the way many modern elected officials do: via Facebook. Author: Dave Bohman April 7, 2015 When she read Representative Farina`s online message on the plant, she saw red. She’s particularly mad when Farina criticized the region`s “coal cracker mentality.” “’Coal cracker mentality. We`ll work harder for less,’” said Paciotti-Mosher, reading from Farina’s Facebook page. “That`s basically like saying we`re hillbillies. We`re stupid. We don`t know any better.” “Misconceptions, misinformation, and instilling fear,” countered Rep. Farina. “And I just want to get the facts out there.” Farina stands by his online message and his support of what could become one of the largest power plants in the state.
Times Leader - Room To Grow Corporate Express Call Center Is Now Ready, Willing And Open To New Businesses, Employees - March 28, 1999 But, company and city officials believe those numbers are just the beginning. Operations Director Joseph Pickett heads a business still realizing its promise. The Corporate Express promise is also a promise for South Main Street, downtown Wilkes-Barre and, ultimately, the region. Mayor Tom McGroarty has pinned much of his hope for a renaissance of downtown on the Colorado-based company, whose primary business is selling office supplies and services. Ultimately, the company’s local work force is expected to grow to 2,000 employees taking 2 million orders per week for as many as 36 direct-order companies. How soon? That depends on the company’s ability to attract business from other companies that sell by telephone and don’t want to do the work themselves. Already, employees take orders for Fredericks of Hollywood lingerie, Six Flags Great Adventure tickets, bottled water and professional sports products. Center gets off to a rocky, slow start The road to Wilkes-Barre was bumpy.
Word Of Mouth Public Perceptions Of What Call Centers Are All About Not Always Right, Businesses Say Pamela C. Turfa Times Leader Staff Writer April 5, 1998 The Luzerne-Lackawanna region has been identified by trade journals as ideal for call center companies looking to relocate or expand: It offers a good basic education. With a higher unemployment rate than the state and nation, it continues to have available workers. And, the cost of living is about the national average and much lower than East Coast population centers. But call centers, with starting salaries in the $7 range, aren’t popular with the public. Barrouk acknowledges the criticism that followed last year’s announcement that Corporate Express would be expanding from Maryland to Wilkes-Barre. The public expects the chamber to bring in high-paying jobs, not positions with starting salaries a dollar or two above minimum wage. But he defends the operations as filling an essential need in the community’s economic structure. The chamber, he says, must develop a range of job opportunities, and back office operations like call centers are one of the target areas. Call centers, which are willing to locate in urban settings as well as business parks, are a way of getting people downtown.
The Morning Call - ‘Like shooting fish in a barrel’ former Crime Commission head says as Lackawanna probes heat up - Author By Borys Krawczeniuk | Scranton Times-Tribune and Terrie Morgan-Besecker | Times-Tribune (Scranton) (TNS) PUBLISHED: January 21, 2019 at 3:08 PM EST | UPDATED: January 21, 2019 at 8:10 PM EST “If you grow up in this area and you see people engaging in politics to enrich themselves and they don’t get caught … you are basically schooled on how to go along to get along,” said Thomas Baldino, a political science professor at Wilkes University. David Sosar, a political science professor at King’s College, said a “coal-cracker” mentality still plagues the region. “We were under the thumb of coal barons for a long time,” he said. “What we did is trade coal barons for financial barons and political barons.” Too few people are willing to speak up when they see something wrong, partly out of fear, which is an attitude that survived the coal era, Sosar said “There are the rich, the wealthy and powerful and then there is you at the bottom,” Sosar said. “To get along, you didn’t ask questions or cause problems. They controlled too much.”
NBC NEWS - Corruption is king in Pennsylvania coal country In the coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania, federal agents have spent a year rooting out government corruption in a hardscrabble region known for its pay-to-play politics. Jan. 24, 2010, 1:51 PM EST / Source: The Associated Press The ongoing federal corruption probe has sent tremors through an insular political culture where graft, patronage and nepotism have been accepted practice since the golden age of anthracite coal a century ago — when waves of European immigrants arrived in this mountainous region 100 miles north of Philadelphia to work in mines, breweries and railroads. Their descendants still live in the tiny patch towns and tightly packed houses built by long-defunct coal companies. Cash gifts at the core Most of the charges filed over the past year involve public officials accepting cash or gifts — a $1,500 suit, for example — in exchange for helping contractors win government work or some other benefit. A few officials are charged with the outright theft of taxpayer dollars. The FBI is also looking into allegations that candidates for public school teaching positions paid bribes to school board members to land jobs. “Things have been like this for so long that I don’t think many people see a lot of wrong in what they’ve done,” said Skrepenak, 39, a former offensive lineman who played for the Oakland Raiders and Carolina Panthers in the 1990s. “I believe any elected official of the last five years is at risk” of prosecution, he added. “I don’t think many of them truly know what they can and cannot do.” Few in the coal region are surprised. Machine-style politics has flourished here for decades; government jobs and other taxpayer-funded goodies are often doled out to the politically connected, not just in Luzerne County but throughout the area. Federal prosecutors, in fact, have set their sights on the courthouse in neighboring Lackawanna County, and indictments are widely expected.
Bandwagon effect From Wikipedia It is a psychological phenomenon whereby the rate of uptake of beliefs, ideas, fads and trends increases with respect to the proportion of others who have already done so.
The Psychological Forces Behind A Cultural Reckoning: Understanding (hashtag) MeToo February 5, 2018 VEDANTAM: Not long ago, I was talking to my wife over dinner about this story. I was trying to understand, why now? Why are women being heard in a way they were not heard before? My wife, Ashwini Tambe, researches gender issues and recently wrote about this topic. ASHWINI TAMBE (UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND): I’m an associate professor of women’s studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. VEDANTAM: What she told me about was the theory of horizontal violence. TAMBE: Horizontal violence is when people turn on other people in their own lives when they are not able to actually effect change against more powerful targets. VEDANTAM: It’s a term used by the 20th-century psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon. He wrote about how people living under brutal colonial rule dealt with oppression. TAMBE: Because it’s so difficult to attack or target colonial rulers, what Fanon found was that people were lashing out against people in their own lives. VEDANTAM: Think about pressure building up in a container. The energy needs a way to escape. If it can’t blow the top off, it might explode sideways. TAMBE: I think that the election of Donald Trump has served as a trigger, and it has provoked a great deal of fury and impatience because he represents, for many people, the ultimate unpunished predator. VEDANTAM: Fanon used the term horizontal violence to describe rage that was misdirected or misplaced. Ashwini says horizontal action is a better term to describe how many women have channeled their rage over Trump’s election to call out the men in their own lives who have sexually harass them. TAMBE: It feels very, very important in this moment to topple those perpetrators who are within reach because, at this moment, Trump remains unreachable, even though Trump shapes the context in which enormous anger against misogyny and sexual harassment has risen.
Reboot - November 4, 2021 Everything You Need to Know About Normalcy Bias Normalcy bias is also known as status quo bias, analysis paralysis, and fittingly, the ostrich effect. It’s also commonly called, “denial.” (...) “We believed that the “normal” experience would overtake the abnormal one, and so we did not act, believing falsely that the return to normalcy would be swift. This was normalcy bias at work, and it is behind some of the most devastating tragedies in the human experience.”)
Normalcy bias From Wikipedia Normalcy bias, or normality bias, is a cognitive bias which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings.(1) Consequently, individuals underestimate the likelihood of a disaster, when it might affect them, and its potential adverse effects.(2) The normalcy bias causes many people to prepare inadequately for natural disasters, market crashes, and calamities caused by human error.
Appendix E: A Brief History of Checklists Aviation has taught us a lot about error and human factors and it has also introduced a number of novel solutions. One of the most important of these is the humble checklist. Like many advances in medicine, the safety checklist has its history rooted in the military
The Present Age What’s Up With The New Yorker’s Weird “Masks Forever” Article? More than 500k US deaths after her last piece chiding people for still caring about COVID-19 in May 2021, Emma Green shared another head-scratcher. Parker Molloy Jan 03, 2023 The piece is about a group called the People’s CDC, which is described as “a ragtag coalition of academics, doctors, activists, and artists who believe that the government has left them to fend for themselves against COVID-19.” In and of itself, this sounds like a really interesting premise for an article. Unfortunately, with Green as its author, the piece was doomed to become a “wokeness gone mad” piece, as Michael Hobbes referred to it on Twitter. As Hobbes pointed out in his Twitter thread, Green’s story “casts left-wing activists as hysterical while also acknowledging that they’re correct on the merits.” For instance, in this paragraph, Green portrays the People’s CDC as pushing conspiracy theories (“Although the People’s CDC tends to see large corrupting forces at work behind shifts in public-health policy, sometimes the actual explanations are more mundane”), ignoring that the People’s CDC’s claims are either defensible on the merits or are being wildly misrepresented for the sake of continuing Green’s “Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown” narrative of the COVID-cautious as being detached from reality.
Dispatches From A Collapsing State | Jared Yates Sexton Preparing for the Storm: A Brief Guide to Getting Ready for What’s Coming We’re close to the inauguration and the beginning of something very dangerous. It’s time to get ready. Jan 01, 2025 “Resolve today to view our media and politics through this lens. This means giving up on finding just one trustworthy place to find your news and, instead, starting to read between the lines of all news you come across. This take rhetorical skill and critical thinking, which has largely been exorcised from American education. Ask yourself when reading every article or viewing every video, who is this for? What is the purpose? The idea that our media is unbiased is ludicrous. You make decisions with every story, with every sentence, every word.”
False equivalence From Wikipedia A false equivalence or false equivalency is an informal fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed, faulty, or false reasoning. This fallacy is categorized as a fallacy of inconsistency.1 Colloquially, a false equivalence is often called “comparing apples and oranges.”
Alarm is appropriate, the volcano is erupting Chloe Humbert Jul 06, 2022
NBC News: Pompeii family’s final hours reconstructed (“75 to 92 percent of the residents escaped the town at the first signs of the crisis”)
Sightseeing Tours Italy: Did anyone survive in Pompeii? (“Archaeologists have determined from past documents and artefacts that there were around 20,000 people living within the city at the time of the eruption. From studying the skeleton remains, they estimated that around 2,000 people died in the eruption.”)
Democracy Americana The Anti-Liberal Left Has a Fascism Problem - Prominent leftwing intellectuals are allowing their singular, disdain-driven focus on (neo-) liberalism to completely distort their perspective on the Right THOMAS ZIMMER MAY 24, 2024 I’d be very interested to find out what happened here. Maybe I missed something, but I couldn’t find an acknowledgment anywhere in the anthology that the selected pieces might have been altered and updated. In the credits, it merely says “reprinted.” The update, clearly, has been made to reflect that something major had happened in between the original publication and the reprint, something that in many ways directly contradicted a key argument. Robin’s overall assessment in 2021 was that Liberals needed to calm down since the Right wasn’t ever exercising its power in the way Liberals decried, the liberal doomsday scenarios were never coming true. But in Dobbs, the Right did exercise power in a dramatic way, stripping half the population of bodily autonomy and equal rights.
Tech Won’t Save Us with Paris Marx - 22 12 08 [#145] Trusting Tech Billionaires is a Recipe for Disaster - Douglas Rushkoff But what I realized was, what we were looking at was a bigger guilt paranoia, where they have always been trying to build a car that could go fast enough to escape from its own exhaust — that they’ve been living with trying to escape externalities. And back in the days when it was people of color in faraway places and their resources that you were taking and their children that you were enslaving, it wasn’t quite as bad as when it was right in your own country. When your own Northern California, Indigenous-made log cabin Wigwam is now being singed with forest fires from your own deforestation practices. What do you think’s going to happen? Now they’re starting to worry, when they see the storming of the Capitol. It got a lot of them scared. It’s like: Uh oh, what power have we unleashed? It’s one thing to not let my own kid use any of the stuff and they don’t. Their kids are going to Rudolf Steiner Schools and Waldorf academies.
Gilded Rage Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley Jacob Silverman (Author)
An Evening with Ray Bradbury 2001 University of California Television (UCTV)
The New York Times - The Alchemy of OxyContin By Paul Tough Published: July 29, 2001 Paula is taking me on a driving tour of Man, the tiny West Virginia town where she has spent her entire life. Because I don’t know my way around the hollows and gullies and creeks that carve through these hills, Paula is at the wheel. And because Paula isn’t a morning person, we’ve set out on our tour at midnight. It’s dark; the only illumination comes from our headlights cutting through the mist that rolls down from the hills. The tour Paula is leading isn’t sanctioned by the local chamber of commerce; there are no stops at Civil War plaques or scenic vistas. It’s a pillhead tour: an addict’s-eye view of the radical changes that a single prescription drug, called OxyContin, has brought to the town of Man. OxyContin abuse started in remote communities like this one more than two years ago; more recently, it has spread beyond its origins in Appalachia and rural Maine to affect cities and suburbs across the eastern United States. I came to Man to try to understand how America’s latest drug problem started, to see its roots and trace how it has spread.
Sackler Embraced Plan to Conceal OxyContin’s Strength From Doctors, Sealed Testimony Shows - As OxyContin addiction spurred a national nightmare, a member of the family that has reaped billions of dollars from the painkiller boasted that sales exceeded his “fondest dreams,” according to a secret court document obtained by ProPublica. by David Armstrong February 21, 2019, 1:45 pm In May 1997, the year after Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin, its head of sales and marketing sought input on a key decision from Dr. Richard Sackler, a member of the billionaire family that founded and controls the company. Michael Friedman told Sackler that he didn’t want to correct the false impression among doctors that OxyContin was weaker than morphine, because the myth was boosting prescriptions — and sales. “It would be extremely dangerous at this early stage in the life of the product,” Friedman wrote to Sackler, “to make physicians think the drug is stronger or equal to morphine….We are well aware of the view held by many physicians that oxycodone [the active ingredient in OxyContin] is weaker than morphine. I do not plan to do anything about that.” “I agree with you,” Sackler responded. “Is there a general agreement, or are there some holdouts?”
Andrea Bowra, Amaya Perez-Brumer, Lisa Forman, Jillian Clare Kohler, Interconnected influence: Unraveling purdue pharmaceutical’s role in the global response to the opioid crisis, International Journal of Drug Policy, Volume 133, 2024, 104604, ISSN 0955-3959, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2024.104604. A total of 39 actors and 99 relationships were visualized based on the relational thinking that actors who are heavily interconnected with others are rendered important. Centrality measures identified the socio-technical centrality of Purdue in influencing the response to the harms it caused. Purdue exerted influence through various avenues, most prominently through the creation and cooptation of pain advocacy groups, their close ties with United States elected officials, and through embedding pro-opioid messaging in international guidance documents. In doing so, Purdue was able to extend the reach and impact of their opioid promotion, while simultaneously limiting the capacity of regulatory bodies to pursue accountability and implement policies to mitigate opioid-related harms. Conclusion This study advances understandings of the complex interplay between transnational pharmaceutical companies, global health systems, regulatory bodies, and public health.
Reuters - Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show - Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’ By Jeff Horwitz November 6, 2025 On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states.
Center for Countering Digital Hate - YOUTUBE’S CLIMATE DENIAL DOLLARS. How Google is breaking its promise to stop profiting from ads on climate denial videos. Published: May 03, 2023 Repeated research projects by the Center for Countering Digital Hate show that Google has repeatedly broken its promise not to profit from ads on climate denial content: Tests indicate that 63% of popular climate denial articles still carry Google ads. Google allowed Daily Wire to run ads on searches for “climate change is a hoax”. YouTube videos promoting climate denial with millions of views still have ads.
YouTube to Reinstate Users Banned for Misinformation About 2020 Election and COVID Lawyer for parent company Alphabet says Biden administration sought to ‘dictate’ COVID-related content policies By Todd Spangler VARIETY Sep 23, 2025 12:52pm PT The news was included in a “statement of facts” from Alphabet, the parent of YouTube and Google, sent in response to subpoenas issued to the company by the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). The letter sent to the committee, dated Sept. 23, was signed by King & Spalding partner Daniel Donovan, a lawyer representing Alphabet in the matter. (A company rep confirmed that the letter, posted by the House Judiciary Committee, is authentic.) Today, “YouTube’s Community Guidelines allow for a wider range of content regarding COVID-19 and elections integrity,” the letter said. “Reflecting the Company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect.” The letter continued, “YouTube values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse. The Company recognizes these creators are among those shaping today’s online consumption, landing ‘must-watch’ interviews, giving viewers the chance to hear directly from politicians, celebrities, business leaders, and more.”
Pluralistic: Facebook’s fraud files (08 Nov 2025) Author Cory Doctorow Posted on November 8, 2025 A blockbuster Reuters report by Jeff Horwitz analyzes leaked internal documents that reveal that: 10% of Meta’s gross revenue comes from ads for fraudulent goods and scams, and; the company knows it, and; they decided not to do anything about it, because; the fines for facilitating this life-destroying fraud are far less than the expected revenue from helping to destroy its users’ lives: The crux of the enshittification hypothesis is that companies deliberately degrade their products and services to benefit themselves at your expense because they can. An enshittogenic policy environment that rewards cheating, spying and monopolization will inevitably give rise to cheating, spying monopolists
The Shady World of Surveillance Pricing (Ft. Lina Khan) Robert Reich Jun 10, 2025
WIRED - By Morgan Meaker Apr 9, 2024 2:00 AM Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism In Yanis Varoufakis’ latest book, the former Greek finance minister argues that companies like Apple and Meta have treated their users like modern-day serfs. In its most compelling stretches, Technofeudalism argues that Apple, Facebook, and Amazon have changed the economy so much that it now resembles Europe’s medieval feudal system. The tech giants are the lords, while everyone else is a peasant, working their land for not much in return.
Transcript:
MATT STRACKBEIN
I’m Matt Strackbein.
CHLOE HUMBERT
I’m Chloe Humbert.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Welcome to The Psych Grind.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Psych! I’m Chloe Kaczenski Humbert, but you can call me Chloe Humbert. Hello, Chloe Humbert. Well, I guess you can call me Chloe. Okay, Chloe. I’m Matt Strackbein, a.k.a.
MATT STRACKBEIN
The Letterhack.
CHLOE HUMBERT
I’m not calling you The Letterhack here.
MATT STRACKBEIN
That’s fine. We don’t have to use code names.
CHLOE HUMBERT
We may need code names after this. So I think people would be interested in our backgrounds, Matt, the Letterhack.
MATT STRACKBEIN
I thought you weren’t going to call me that.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Well, just this once. It’s relevant in context.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Oh Okay.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Oh, so Matt, The Letterhack, cartoonist from the left. And I’m also an artist, but not nearly as good. We both have a background in design and worked in advertising in the past, and we’re both extremely online content creators of sorts. And I’m also disabled and a retired civil servant.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Extremely online, but not what they would call terminally online, just to be clear. We have lives outside of the internet. I’m also one of the co-founders of the online media collective This Space, and I livestream interviews with a wide variety of guests discussing journalism, politics, art, and comics.
CHLOE HUMBERT
When I first mentioned we should introduce ourselves or say what led to this, you know, talking about the current state of the media grind, how things are rigged and how a system and tactics are used to harm ordinary people and the information space and the working class in the information gig economy,
the trickery from a political organizing perspective, why we want to critique PR and cognitive attacks from the cheap seats Well, I said to Matt the Letterhack, I said, so you need to come up with something to say about why you want to do this. And Matt the Letterhack said,
MATT STRACKBEIN
The number one reason I wanted to do this podcast was because I wanted to do a podcast co-hosting with Chloe Humbert.
CHLOE HUMBERT
And I said, I don’t want to do a podcast with Jimmy Fallon. I’m not falling for being shined on. The whole point of the podcast is to counter that, not have me as the target recipient.
MATT STRACKBEIN
No, no, this is more of a classic team up. You’ve been on my show several times, so we already have a rapport and we work well together. And I’d hope that if anyone is listening to us individually, even more folks will listen to us together. And if they aren’t,
then I can only assume people are happy being manipulated because we’re here doing an online media landscape critique with a focus on the culture surrounding influencers in various forms.
CHLOE HUMBERT
The grind in the information space. The weaponization of everything gigs. And this is not new, of course. I’m reminded often of that deep-fried Garfield meme with the caption, you are not immune to propaganda. And it’s true. None of us are.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Weaponization is something I can do with my comics at any time, but I resist the urge because I’d rather use it for communicating a message rather than as a tactic, feels like trickery.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah well weaponization has a very clear negative connotation, but influence is everywhere for better or worse, good or bad. So we’ve long known that art, entertainment, even fiction, has these elements of influence. Most of us don’t think about this much, and the subtle forms of influence sneak in. But I think more people are becoming aware of it.
MATT STRACKBEIN
When it comes to media and the news, people may understand there are tactics at play, and you may even know how or think you know what’s going on. But here are the details.
CHLOE HUMBERT
The deets for the peeps, if nothing else but for validation.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Speaking of validation, that’s related to the cornerstone of all influence. It’s about repetition. Back when my work had more of a focus on the marketing of things, there was a rule that people needed to see something at least eight times before it sank in. Overkill was never considered a bad thing in terms of convincing consumers they
really wanted something they didn’t actually need.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Hmm. David Feldman often mentions repeating things three times. I think we first met through David Feldman.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Yeah, I know who Feldman is. We both attended FU.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Good times. I never heard that specifically about the eight times when I worked in advertising. I did start noticing that it turns up a lot in podcast ads, though. And some podcasters have actually mentioned that when they’re given an ad read, they’re required to say something three times.
MATT STRACKBEIN
like in a public service announcement, I wish important information was repeated more than once. So it can certainly have its benefits.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Sure. The point is that repetition is foundational to why advertising works because of the cognitive phenomenon in humans called the mere exposure effect. After repeated exposure to something, it becomes familiar. And even if it’s false or bad, it can become to be viewed as true or acceptable or even favorable simply because it feels familiar.
This is how even nasty, horrible stuff becomes quote-unquote normalized. People can even become inured to misery. And you hear people say, it is what it is.
MATT STRACKBEIN
I can’t stand that phrase.
CHLOE HUMBERT
It’s a grim resignation to what feels familiar. I’ve heard people say this about nepotism and corruption, which has been rampant where I live for generations now.
MATT STRACKBEIN
There are other names for this, including the reiteration effect, the illusion of truth effect, the validity effect, illusory truth effect, and the truth effect. Ever hear the false claim that a goldfish supposedly has a three-second memory? Or how about birtherism and that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.? ? Both are false.
But the sad truth is the more things are repeated over time, the more likely people will assume they’re true.
CHLOE HUMBERT
I looked this up and I found a BBC article from 2022 that says, quote, Scientists have proved Goldfish do have good memories and are able to navigate their surroundings. A team from Oxford University trained nine fish to travel 70 centimeters and back, receiving a food reward at the end.
Researchers said it showed the fish could accurately estimate distance. The study disproves the long-held belief goldfish have little or no memory, unquote. It’s funny because I don’t think I ever heard that myth about the goldfish before you brought it up. I have heard of birtherism,
but it wasn’t until Donald Trump was running for president before I heard that the birther conspiracy fiction actually got traction in the media largely because of him. And I had no idea, but I had avoided anything to do with Donald Trump before. I could never understand why people even watched that show he was on.
But propaganda started long before television shows. George Orwell said, All art is propaganda. That’s the title of an essay from 1940 where he was talking about the works of Charles Dickens and said that. Quote, Every writer, especially every novelist, has a message whether he admits it or not,
and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art. As I said earlier, Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing.
He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics, and above all, by conservatives. The question is, what is there to steal? Why does anyone care about Dickens?” Unquote. Well, nowadays, I think Dickens’ stories are, again, more relatable. Abusive employers, corrupt government officials, and people imprisoned, especially because of debt.
These are all familiar to us in today’s America, but there’s more to it than that. The essay goes on to the heart of the matter, In Dickens’ case, the complicating factor is his familiarity. He happens to be one of those great authors who are ladled down everyone’s throat in childhood. At the time, this causes rebellion and vomiting,
but it may have different after-effects in later life. So the callback to the familiar— I’m in Appalachia. I live in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and I was born here. And there’s a term here in the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania that people call coal cracker mentality. And it’s a hot button term.
So let me explain the coal cracker mentality because it’s used and misused for political and business propaganda. But people use it to explain what I think is very much the mere exposure effect and normalcy bias. I need to acknowledge that there are also people who wokewash the coal industry as
something to be proud of and make it sound like you can’t criticize the coal tycoon robber barons or, you know, you’re disparaging the coal miners, supposedly. You might find that trick familiar because they do that with anti-war, claiming you’re disparaging soldiers if you’re against a war or against the military industrial complex. Of course, that’s not true.
Some of the most anti-war people I have known are war veterans.
MATT STRACKBEIN
I’m not sure I’d trust someone to be more anti-war than a vet who has had firsthand accounts. Obviously, they, more than anyone, have the best perspective. there’s nothing wrong with being proud of hard work, although that doesn’t mean the work itself is essential or couldn’t be substantially improved, especially on behalf of the workers.
CHLOE HUMBERT
So, wokewashing coal mining is definitely something that turns up in op-eds in the region from time to time, glorifying the coal industry of the past, using phrases like, “we’re all heirs to the throne of King Coal”, and ridiculous claptrap like that. But my grandpas were both coal miners,
and they talked to me about the mines and specifically how awful it was and how shitty the employers were and how uncaring the management. My one grandfather went to work in the coal mines as a child, and he specifically stated to me that he didn’t want to see that happen to me or
any other child ever again because it was wrong. He also talked about how awful the pollution of the river was from the coal mines. We lived along the Lackawanna River, which was stained orange with yellowboy. And I was shown on a map how the pollution went into the Susquehanna River and all
the way down to the Chesapeake Bay. And he talked about tycoons in a very negative way, saying they couldn’t relate to the little people because they were corrupted by having so much power and money. He always used the word tycoon with a real edge to it, which is why I probably prefer that word today.
So nobody thinks ill of the workers. The workers are always good. Criticizing robber barons is appropriate for their exploitation. There’s a whole museum at the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton that’s largely devoted to showcasing the gross reality of the inequality of the railroad and the associated industries.
There’s one area of the museum where they have quotes on a wall and statues, and it includes a panel on the wall that says, quote, I owe the public nothing. And this quote is attributed to J.P. Morgan, who is described as just simply tycoon.
MATT STRACKBEIN
That guy would surely qualify as the worst neighbor ever.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Very likely. I can only imagine he probably did the worst locally where he lived. causing trouble in people’s lives and then not taking responsibility for it, saying, I owe the public nothing. That was their mentality. But this coal cracker mentality isn’t actually a term that’s meant to disparage the coal miners.
but it’s sometimes used to disparage the descendants of coal miners. And that kind of usage made the news about a decade ago when a politician locally used it on a Facebook post, disparaging local townspeople who were opposing a new gas power plant at a time when we were being told We are pivoting to renewables, by the way,
and how it was framed in the article from WNEP News from 2015 about the politician’s Facebook post. A Democrat, by the way. And the article said someone, quote, saw red when she saw the Facebook post and said, Coalcracker mentality. And the article quotes her, quote, Coalcracker mentality.
We’ll work harder for less, said Paciotti-Mosher, reading from Farina’s Facebook page. That’s basically like saying we’re hillbillies. We’re stupid. We don’t know any better, unquote. And that is how some rather clueless people try to deploy the term. But what it has actually come to mean is not that we’re ignorant here. It’s not that we don’t know better.
Of course we do. But that we’ve been accustomed to working harder for less. We’re inured to being treated worse. And the elites are used to feeling free to treat ordinary people worse. I remember back in the 1990s, politicians were crowing about bringing a call center to the city of Wilkes-Barre.
They said it would be a renaissance of jobs. The call center HR manager actually told people at interviews that the company came to the area because they could get cheaper labor compared to other places. It was just unbelievable.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Damn, as compliments go, thanks for nothing, pal.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah, not a compliment. And there was an article in the news in 2019 regarding a local corruption probe. The article’s headline was, like shooting fish in a barrel, quoting a former Crime Commission official who said it was more strange that there hadn’t been a corruption probe in northeastern Pennsylvania in a while.
The article was by Times-Tribune reporters and published in the Allentown’s Morning Call. Though it’s behind a paywall now, the article said, quote, if you grow up in this area and you see people engaging in politics to enrich themselves and they don’t get caught, you are basically schooled on how to go along to get along, said Thomas Baldino,
a political science professor at Wilkes University. David Sosar, a political science professor at King’s College, a coal cracker mentality still plagues the region. We were under the thumb of coal barons for a long time, he said. What we did is trade coal barons for financial barons and political barons.
Too few people are willing to speak up when they see something wrong, partly out of fear, which is an attitude that survived the coal era, Sosar said. There are the rich, the wealthy, and the powerful, and then there is you at the bottom, To get along, you didn’t ask questions or cause problems. They controlled too much, unquote.
And this is something I hear people say to this day, and there have been big corruption scandals in the area my whole life. One NBC News article from 2010 was titled, Corruption is King in Pennsylvania Coal Country. In the coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania, federal agents have spent a year rooting out government corruption in the
hardscrabble region known for its pay-to-play politics. The article said, quote, Most of the charges filed over the past year involve public officials accepting cash or gifts, a $1,500 suit, for example, in exchange for helping contractors win government work or some other benefit. A few officials are charged with the outright theft of taxpayer dollars.
The FBI is also looking into allegations that candidates for public school teaching positions paid bribes to school board members to land jobs. Things have been like this for so long, I don’t think many people see a lot wrong in what they’ve done, said Skrepenak, a former offensive lineman who played for the Oakland Raiders and Carolina Panthers
in the 1990s. I believe any elected official of the last five years is at risk of prosecution, he added. I don’t think many of them truly know what they can and cannot do. Few in the coal region are surprised. Machine politics has flourished here for decades. Government jobs and other taxpayer-funded goodies are often doled out to the
politically connected, not just in Luzerne County, but throughout the area, unquote. Ironically, the football player quoted. He himself did time for taking a bribe as a politician.
MATT STRACKBEIN
in his Wikipedia page, quote, Skrepenak stated that he resigned due to a clash between longtime cultural practices in county politics and the higher standards of public office and the law. Specifically, he was formally charged with accepting a $5,000 bribe from a developer for voting to accept the developer’s project into a government-funded tax incentive program, unquote.
CHLOE HUMBERT
The inequality is baked in from the coal baron days, the corruption by business and the money of politicians. It’s all been normalized. That’s what the so-called coal cracker mentality refers to. It’s the mere exposure effect, the way it’s always been, just the way things are. It is what it is.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Okay, are we going to have to ban that phrase from the podcast? Because I feel like it’s going to keep coming up.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Sorry. Ironically, the politician that was inappropriately using the term on Facebook that I mentioned that made everyone mad and see red, well, but unfortunately his replacement turned out to be dubious as well. But that guy who said that people had a coal cracker mentality for opposing the gas power plant,
which was the opposite of what it should have been, He did actually get that project pushed through despite opposition. So it’s a data point in sort of solidifying the idea that it was unstoppable and that people ought to just be resigned to it. this type of buying into the inevitability is not confined to Northeastern Pennsylvania.
I listened to public comments from Menomonie Wisconsin town meeting on data centers in August 2025 and made a podcast commentary on this. And the one longtime environmental advocate somehow just stated as fact, which it isn’t a fact, it isn’t a fact, that data centers are inevitable, of course, that’s just what the industry wants you to believe.
That’s why you hear it everywhere.
MATT STRACKBEIN
It’s going to happen or it’s unstoppable. The future is now
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yuck.
MATT STRACKBEIN
and it’s amazing how quickly we got to it’s here to stay with AI as if it’s something which can’t be undone or discontinued
CHLOE HUMBERT
right and that’s not true uh but it’s the bandwagon effect
MATT STRACKBEIN
I think most people know what that means, but for all the folks who are using phrases without knowing the actual definitions or origins, bandwagon effect from Wikipedia says, quote, it is a psychological phenomenon whereby the rate of uptake of beliefs, ideas, and trends increases with respect to the proportion of others who have already done unquote.
CHLOE HUMBERT
My spouse, who also worked in advertising, calls it the stamp of approval effect.
MATT STRACKBEIN
or the seal of approval.
CHLOE HUMBERT
There was a FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting back in May 2025. I wasn’t chosen to speak, but I listened to the public comments, and it was filled with anti-vaxxers sounding off. What I found notable, was that even a few of the people who gave ostensibly pro-vaccine public comments—
like in support of vaccination and vaccines, some were still parroting right-wing anti-vax and COVID-contrarian talking points. Almost like they were cowed into apologizing for wanting vaccines, like half-hearted or something. Phrases like personal risk assessment and personal choice and hedging. And this is the exact opposite of public health. And that’s what vaccines are about.
And public health is about encouraging best practice and vaccines are best practice. It was noticeable because the anti-vaxxers didn’t apologize or hedge. They didn’t shrink from full-throated support of their wackadoo positions. And when I do public comment, I go in and I state my case. You don’t pussyfoot around like a jellyfish.
MATT STRACKBEIN
And who are we even apologizing to when we back away from a position or take it upon ourselves to weaken our stance on things that we believe in? There shouldn’t be a predetermined power structure for taking a stance on things that matter and what amounts to our basic human rights that dictates we won’t get
the exact policies that we need. Democratic Socialist and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani hasn’t backed off anything in a way that would, appease his opposition. And by opposition, I’m mainly referencing the people in his own party who constantly kowtow to conservatives. If we back off anything,
It should be the notion that reaching across the aisle to Republicans or cooperating in the spirit of party unity means making concessions to the point of zero progress. There are no alliances to be made when all we do is unilaterally disarm, especially after the voters have made their voices heard at the ballot box.
CHLOE HUMBERT
And I think that that’s why Zohran Mamdani, I’m not going to apologize for being who I am, people really like that. It’s significant. I was listening to an interview David Sirota did with Robert Reich. Excellent interview. Highly recommend. But in the interview, Robert Reich said he thought Obama was afraid to seem too liberal. And I wrote
down while I was listening. Obama didn’t want to seem too liberal because most people want to be understood and for others to see them the way they see themselves. In other words, I think Obama didn’t see himself as too liberal. You shouldn’t have to apologize, though, when you have all the facts and the ethical standing.
But now I feel I have to mention that there was one doctor who gave a public comment at that meeting, the FDA meeting, who wasn’t apologizing. And in disclosure, it’s a pal of mine, Dr. Kaitlin Sundling. And this was one person who gave a perfectly unshrinking comment in support of vaccination. So...
Back to the meeting in Wisconsin on data centers, there were a few people who gave public comments that were similarly resigned the way the environmental person was resigned. And they made it clear that they just wanted to be heard. They didn’t expect anything else. The chairman of the neighboring town,
the town being annexed by force to put a data center there, quote, I’ve resigned myself to the fact this is going to happen because you’re just going to rubber stamp just like every other organization, every other governmental body, unquote. And that felt really familiar to me. Three states over and a thousand miles.
And I knew just how he felt. The thing is, in this case, opposition got enough traction and the data center plans were scrapped for now there in Wisconsin, in Menomonie, and as has happened in other places where they said it was unstoppable. So it wasn’t inevitable after all.
MATT STRACKBEIN
the opposite of it is what it is could just be the image of an environmental activist who has chained themselves to a tree or a tractor. We should all at a minimum embrace that activist’s mentality in the face of corruption and bullying from corporations and politicians.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah, I hear it is what it is all the time. And I’ve had many people chastise me for complaining about nepotism or corruption. Like, it’s just the way it is. It’s the way it’s always been. It’s just the way things work. There’s something that’s well known as being typical of operating under authoritarian situations, actually.
And that’s where horizontal violence or lateral bullying takes place. People feel they can’t fight the power coming down from the very powerful, and so they start policing those around them. And I think it’s sometimes at play with this sort of mentality, too. Some people accepted it, so they want me to accept it,
or at least shut up about it so they can continue not to think about it.
MATT STRACKBEIN
When in reality, we don’t have to accept any of that.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Right. Corruption can be uncovered and people held accountable. Workers can unionize and bargain for higher wages. I had an organizing mentor once say to me about things that seemed immutable. He said, of course, things can change. Things change all the time. That stuck with me.
There’s this interpretive sign that’s on the Cedar Swamp Trail in a natural area in northern New Jersey. And it has the title, Only Change Is Constant. It was talking about how this mountain swamp has changed over time. It’s a really nice walk, and I always think about that, and that sign only change is constant.
But if we get accustomed to something, it seems normal only because it feels familiar. It’s accepted as quote-unquote normal.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Normalcy bias. A website called Reboot describes normalcy bias starting with the This Is Fine Dog cartoon meme, which is honestly the reigning champion of memes, in my opinion, where the dog is sitting in that room on fire having a coffee saying, this is fine.
The website says, quote, normalcy bias is also known as status quo bias, analysis paralysis, and and fittingly, the ostrich effect. It’s also commonly called denial, unquote.
CHLOE HUMBERT
The Wikipedia page on the topic says, quote, normalcy bias or normality bias is a cognitive bias which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings. individuals underestimate the likelihood of a disaster when it might affect them and its potential adverse effects. The normalcy bias causes many people to prepare inadequately, unquote.
MATT STRACKBEIN
The Wikipedia page describes something from a book titled The Unthinkable, Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why? by Amanda Ripley, and it describes the issue this way, quote, Ripley found that people were likely to deny that a disaster was happening. It takes time for the brain to process information and recognize that a disaster is a threat.
In the deliberation phase, people have to decide what to do. If a person does not have a plan in place, this causes a serious problem because the effects of life-threatening stress on the body, tunnel vision, audio exclusion, time dilations, out-of-body experiences, or reduced motor skills, limit an individual’s ability to perceive information and make plans.
Ripley asserts that in the third and final phase described as the decisive moment, a person must act quickly and decisively. Failure to do so can result in injury or death. She explains that the faster someone can get through the denial and deliberation phases, the quicker they will reach the decisive moment and begin to take action. Unquote.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yes, and that’s why it’s good. Having a plan is good. And why checklists are so useful, which checklists sort of originated as a protocol in aviation. Interesting history there. But oddly, when I was preparing references for this topic, I had previously referenced a certain website for biases in the past.
for topics like normalcy bias or the false consensus effect. But I don’t reference that particular website anymore because, tons of that org’s webpages are now pushing AI hype like nobody’s business. They’ve pivoted hard to rather uncritically promoting the idea that AI is the inevitable future, full of promise and miracles,
and have worked it into some of the pages on biases. But perhaps even more ironically is that they don’t mention AI at all on their page about the bandwagon effect.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Of course not. It’s too late. There’s no turning back. The future is written. It is what it is.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Oh wait, now you’re saying it?
MATT STRACKBEIN
Look, the road behind us has been completely erased. And actually, our heads don’t even turn around to look in that direction anymore.
CHLOE HUMBERT
So back to the Reboot Foundation website, which also says about normalcy bias, quote, We believe that the normal experience would overtake the abnormal one, and so we did not act, believing falsely that the return to normalcy would be swift. This was normalcy bias at work, and it is behind some of the most devastating tragedies in human experience,
unquote. And so this is widely acknowledged to be a problem. There’s two things working against us. We like things that seem familiar and then assume that the familiar will stay static. And I think certain forces, especially people interested in keeping the status quo and controlling the public or controlling other people, very much leverage these tendencies in us.
Under the justification of maintaining order, sometimes they thwart the people, especially first movers and divisive action in the face of a threat or seeking a solution to the problem. They say it’s alarmist or whatever. And this is related to elite panic.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Oh, we’re going to have to save that topic for an entire episode so that we can really go off.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Right. So back to just focusing on normalcy bias and how it is being leveraged by those who would prefer to be unopposed. Remember when we kept being told that Roe versus Wade was settled law because to some extent I believed it, even though I knew there was a big project to overturn it,
but somehow I didn’t expect it even still.
MATT STRACKBEIN
So, wait, it isn’t what it is.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Right. I have to talk about this story. I mean, it was a psych-out in the media. And this actually came after I’d long nailed the coffin on subscribing to the New Yorker magazine. I was already done with them when they ran a piece that weirdly disparaged people for wearing respirator masks and red-baited public health advocates I was
organizing with. But... That’s just another data point on the pitfalls of major media institutions and how you can’t trust any of them to not insert PR. It’s not that they don’t do good reporting. It’s that mixed in is a lot of PR placed crap. A lot of people ask, well, where can I go for reliable news?
And I think the best response to that is something I heard on a podcast from Jared Yates-Sexton.
MATT STRACKBEIN
quote, resolve today to view our media and politics through this lens. This means giving up on finding just one trustworthy place to find your news and instead starting to read between the lines of all news you come across. This takes rhetorical skill and critical thinking, which has largely been excised from American education.
Ask yourself when reading every article or viewing every video, who is this for? What is the purpose? The idea that our media is unbiased is ludicrous. You make decisions with every story, with every sentence, with every word, unquote.
CHLOE HUMBERT
And I agree with that. I don’t think being biased means being wrong either or that you can’t trust something. But if you’re going to be tricked about what the bias is or that there’s no bias, then that’s a problem. It’s kind of like when somebody says partisanship or polarization is bad and you
should try to get along with people you disagree with. But what if they’re literally saying they think I shouldn’t have rights? Is that just a disagreement? Because sometimes that’s where we’re at nowadays, and it’s best to be very clearly communicating the difference. But that’s not often the case,
and I hear supposed information or media experts or journalists sometimes bending over backwards to do false equivalencies all the time.
MATT STRACKBEIN
In the interest of clearly communicating, let’s define false equivalency. The Wikipedia page description says, quote, a false equivalence or false equivalency is an Informal fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed, or false reasoning. This fallacy is categorized as a fallacy of inconsistency.
Colloquially, a false equivalency is often called comparing apples and oranges. Unquote.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah, so sometimes the false equivalency is because of the desire to both-sides-ing things. Journalists want to sound fair and nonpartisan and most of all sober, like serious people. And sometimes I think it’s about chastising others for raising appropriate alarm. Some of these people would try to shame the people who fled Pompeii and lived out
their lives without getting pyroclasted into a grim posterity. In 2021, Corey Robin had an essay published in The New Yorker magazine arguing that fear of fascism and the overturning of Roe v. Wade was overblown and essentially alarmist. All these people said Roe v. Wade was settled law. Don’t worry.
Then a year after that was published, Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court. Historian Thomas Zimmer pointed out in May 2024 that after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, apparently the New Yorker magazine quietly changed the wording in Corey Robin’s article, apparently to move the goalposts, to keep chastising people as overreacting,
even while acknowledging that what they said wouldn’t happen absolutely happened.
MATT STRACKBEIN
I’ll quote here from Thomas Zimmer’s Substack post titled Democracy Americana. The anti-liberal left has a fascism problem. Quote, I’d be very interested to find out what happened here. Maybe I missed something, but I couldn’t find an acknowledgement anywhere in the anthology that the selected pieces might have been altered or updated. In the credits, it merely says reprinted.
The update clearly has been made to reflect that something major had happened in between the original publication and the reprint, something that in many ways directly contradicted a key argument. Robin’s overall assessment in 2021 was that liberals needed to calm down since the right wasn’t ever exercising its power in the way liberals decried.
the liberal doomsday scenarios were never coming true. But in Dobbs, the right did exercise power in a dramatic way, stripping half the population of bodily autonomy and equal rights, unquote.
CHLOE HUMBERT
I highly recommend the whole article, which mentions a piece from Jacobin written shortly after the J6 insurrection where someone named Daniel Bessner and Ben Burgis reportedly, quote, vehemently rejected the idea that the assault on the Capitol had been part of an attempted coup, unquote.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Calm down. They were just tourists, right? It was a minor scuffle at best.
CHLOE HUMBERT
This is fine. It’s fine. That op-ed seems quaint now. That almost five years ago, people writing for Jacobin were seriously thinking that big tech companies would oppose fascism, chastising socialists for saying insurrection or fascism because they thought tech tycoons were liberal when... They have surely been revealed by now to be the most authoritarian extremists of them all.
And the point is that we should be saying that because there are Democrats who are in bed with the right-wing extremist authoritarian tech types. But if you don’t call them that, then it just looks like quote-unquote normal, bipartisan cooperations on the issues of the day. It’s as if Douglas Rushkoff’s story about meeting billionaires to talk about their
future plans wasn’t a good enough hint for lefties that the tycoons themselves, they want a coup. Jacob Silverman’s new book, Gilded Rage, and all the reporting about the network state idea and all that kooky stuff they’re doing will finally put a nail in the coffin and disabuse everyone once and for all. that it’s real.
And what Curtis Yarvin spelled it out blatantly about wanting a regime change and monarchy and whatnot. And that’s what galls me really is that all of this stuff is hiding in plain sight. But if you’re not looking, if a lot of people are not getting that information, it’s not breaking through for whatever reason. And that’s a problem.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Whenever someone says do your own research, I want to reply with just read anything at all for once. If I’m critical of our society for any reason, it’s out of a desire for everyone, all of us, to be more switched on. Being uninformed is complacency and it’s a choice and it paves the way for a ruling class.
Sci-fi author Ray Bradbury used to urge people to read one poem and one essay every night on any topic at all just for fun. He wanted people to have a delightful life because after a year’s time or whatever, your way of thinking would be, in his words, like a popcorn machine in your brain.
It would motivate people to look at the world in all new ways and to even create your own art and writings.
CHLOE HUMBERT
putting things together, it’s critical thinking. It’s a big deal. It sounds like he’s encouraging thinking things through. We can get fooled into thinking things will remain the same or that things are normal or that things will get back to normal or we’re conditioned by exposure to accept things as this is fine
Then people accept it, almost as if it was always that way and will forever be this way. So then you start to see how dangerous those tendencies are. The mere exposure effect doesn’t just make a soda brand seem cozy. It can inure people to things we really don’t have to accept unchallenged.
And normalcy bias can be just so dangerous. And so to sort of have a mental checklist ready and to recognize these things, it’s important to be able to name them, at least for me. Somehow, that’s how I figure things out. And having a name for stuff seems to be like really important.
MATT STRACKBEIN
A lot of podcasts focus on various aspects of these, the effects, what’s being done, and why. True crime podcast about scams, journalists covering cybersecurity, political pundits covering corporate crony capitalism, industry propaganda, and cults.
CHLOE HUMBERT
A lot of great podcasts, and I listen to a ton of them. But even the most media people on the left don’t talk about the tactics actually used very much. Even though once you start looking at these things and hearing all the stories that are covered very well by the media and especially independent media,
the more you look at these things, it’s obvious that the same mechanisms, the same tools are being used.
MATT STRACKBEIN
And in many cases, these are documented and named tactics that people know about. In some countries, they’ve started teaching media literacy, for example.
CHLOE HUMBERT
but for the most part, people aren’t even warned at all anywhere about the pitfalls or even about the deliberate trickery involved. And there are reasons people don’t talk about these things. Many reasons.
MATT STRACKBEIN
One of the big ones is that by revealing effective tactics, they are at risk of being immediately neutralized. But these tactics have been normalized as a means of getting monetized and there is no money or profit in pulling back that curtain.
CHLOE HUMBERT
I think one of the things that trips people up to and keeps people from naming the cognitive pitfalls at play is that some people assume that you can’t talk about cognitive attacks unless you’re accusing somebody of something. But it’s true that some of these mechanisms at play arise out of the system.
They don’t have to be, quote-unquote, perpetration of fraud. They don’t have to be someone, quote-unquote, lying. And most significantly, they don’t have to be, quote-unquote, criminal at all.
MATT STRACKBEIN
though some of it is used criminally.
CHLOE HUMBERT
And there are a lot of things that are legal that shouldn’t be. So we want to describe the problems that actually hinder people being warned about these cons and cognitive tricks and how they’re deployed and not always obvious if you don’t know what to look for, if you don’t know that you’re being cognitively attacked.
MATT STRACKBEIN
And a lot of times there’s no direct action with spelled out evidence because it’s rare anyone just does stuff outright and then says, I did that.
CHLOE HUMBERT
unless it comes out an internal documents leak or a court case in discovery or a whistleblower talks. And usually that happens way later. Then you find out that the Sackler family knew the problem with their pain pills and did PR and promotion anyway. Decades ago,
there were reports in the New York Times that it was already a problem spreading beyond Appalachia by 2001. But it’s 2019, but by the time you have a ProPublica headline about the court case, quote, Sackler embraced plan to conceal OxyContin’s strength from doctors, sealed testimony shows, unquote. And they’re quoting discussions that took place in 1997,
in a research paper published in 2024 titled Interconnected Influence Unraveling Purdue Pharmaceuticals’ Role in the Global Response to the Opioid Crisis. And they describe the leveraging of networks, advocacy groups, and politicians in 2024.
MATT STRACKBEIN
These tricks apply to political misinformation, degradation of science, scams, cons, and the ever-increasing enshittification of everything.
CHLOE HUMBERT
like Meta’s big vig taking a big cut off the top of billions of scams every day on social media. A story in Reuters from November 9th, 2025 by Jeff Horowitz. Quote, Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads documents show. Meta projected...
10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show, and the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day, among its responses to suspected rogue marketers charging them a premium for ads and issuing reports on scammiest scammers, unquote.
It’s not just Facebook and Instagram. All these tech companies make fortunes on crummy products, scams, and disinformation. YouTube has been profiting off climate denialism for years. And that’s before you even get to sometimes downright disturbing ads on YouTube, including disinformation purveyors previously banned. They’ve been invited back. The... The health misinformation people, they’ve been invited back.
Cory Doctorow said, this is part of the enshittification process with the two big to care companies. And I see enshittification everywhere anymore. I imagine I’m not the only one who deals with sifting through bad service, even with legitimate products and services sold by straightforward companies.
Lina Khan was trying to make a dent in that when she was at the FTC in the Biden administration, and even some Republicans apparently supported her efforts. Now, Lina Khan was hired for Zohran Mamdani’s team, I’d say, but corporate conservatives certainly don’t see it that way. Their PR is
invoking conspiracy theories to try to trick the working-class conservatives, working class conservatives against the efforts to rein in big business and corporate corruption of society. When most people hate the corrupt, feudalist or cloud feudalist-type system being pushed on us by privatization, corporations, the business lobby, and unchecked billionaires.
And a lot of this is pushed with cognitive trickery by industries with lots of money to pepper the media full of their PR. On and on, again and again, over and over.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Repeat and repeat. Well, I think this was a good introduction episode.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah, good intro.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Should we outro?
CHLOE HUMBERT
Well, if you want.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Not me, Chloe. We’re co-hosting, after all.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Got it. Onward.
