What a Hitman and Marshall McLuhan taught me about the Death of the Mainstream Media
Before I interviewed a well-known hitman in Bangalore in 2008, I told my editor at WIRED that if I didn't report back in 12 hours, I was already probably dead. I instructed him to get in touch with cop that was known to shoot first and ask questions later who was my best chance for a rescue...or revenge. The piece ended up being one of the most important pieces of journalism I ever produced--connecting the boom in the Indian tech economy to major American firms.
The more I think about what I actually needed to do to write that story, the more baffled I am that this kind of journalism ever gets done. See, while I was facing down the real possibility of getting shot and killed, I was also pretty close to dead-broke. I was more concerned with not being able to make ends meet if the story got canned than I was of the much more clear and present danger I was going into. This week's video is a doozy.
The encounter with the hitman got me thinking about how journalism has changed over the last 15 years. Magazines today are much less inclined to take risks than they once were, and how decentralized media distribution is going to fundamentally alter the way you get your news in the years to come. In other words, my encounter with the hitman has spiraled out into an existential crisis that has implications for the entire field of investigative journalism.
From Sherlock Holmes to Batman, anyone seeking superpowers has traditionally looked to the Himalayas for secret spiritual knowledge. But are they really there?
#jedi #kungfu #superpowers
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evY0eyOBb9A
Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman thinks we should shiver ourselves thin, but everyone else who teaches the power of col exposure seems to disagree. In this video I try out his method and show how while it might, technically, be more efficient, the down sides outweigh the benefits.
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Huberman Lab: How To Lose Fat with Science-Based Tools
https://youtu.be/GqPGXG5TlZw?t=2657
Study on Fidgeting:
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/72/6/1451/4729468
Study on Fidgeting in anorexic patients
https://bit.ly/figeting
Rothwell and Stock’s 1981 article on sympathetic activation and BAT
https://www.nature.com/articles/289401a0
Succinate and BAT 2018
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7045287/
Huberman's Official Sources
https://hubermanlab.com/how-to-lose-fat-with-science-based-tools/
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#HubermanLab #Fatloss #science
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTmCz3bCbaY
After every mass shooting the first question the media asks is "what possibly could have motivated someone to take so many innocent lives." Time and again we've had our curiosity answered with the killers' own words.
One hated all women because he couldn't find a girlfriend. Another said black people and immigrants were diluting their gene pool. A couple claimed jews controlled the media. A few others worried that muslims wanted to institute sharia law. One dressed up like the Joker, dyed his hair green and shot up a movie theater just because he wanted to watch the world burn.
And to all this I say — who fucking cares?
I don't care why a mass shooter goes on a killing spree. I only care about how they got a gun in the first place.
Our voyeuristic fascination with gunmen's motives s has driven the national conversation away from the obvious systemic issue. About 44,000 people die every year in America from gun violence. Their individual stories are irrelevant to the one common denominator: in every case someone had access to a gun and used it.
Marshall McLuhan declared in the 1960s that "The Medium is the Message" when he urged social scientists to stop focusing on the words that people say and instead focus their energies on the technologies they used to communicate their messages. He correctly theorized that the printing press changed the world a lot more than the Guttenberg bible ever could. The same goes for gun violence. The shooters are trying to communicate their own insane ideas. But it doesn't matter if they're radical leftists, militia members, racists, zionists, fundamentalist christians, conspiracy theorists or they fashioned themselves a comic book villian. The only relevant fact is that they opted to use bullets to communicate their ideas.
The only way to solve the school shooting problem is to remove the common denominator--the guns themselves. Anything else is a complete waste of time.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKp_Pugufag