Podcast 498

In Digital Media It’s All News. A tour through YouTube videos that predict the end of the world, a collision with a massive planet on a 3200 year elliptical orbit through our solar system, a massive conspiracy that includes mind controlling top entertainers like Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Coldplay and Kei$ha, FEMA camps and Walmart, and much much more. More of us get our news from videos on FaceBook, Twitter and YouTube on their smart phones everyday. As our devices get more and more powerful and sophisticated, digital media grows in reach and importance. Conspiracy theory videos some might think are ridiculous get millions of views. As we act more and more like tribes, we derive our information from sources our tribe approves of, sharing facts with only those in our ‘newsfeed’, or our list of friends, our tribes. In Digital Media It’s All News. With so many people watching it all, can our subconscious minds tell the difference between media designed to manipulate and media designed to give us facts? Do we have the discernment necessary to understand facts and context? What is the difference between the ‘real’ news and a conspiracy video on YouTube. Sometimes the videos on YouTube are done just as well. What is the difference between CNN and Fox and RT? Or InfoWars? Or a blogger you like. What prevents the kind of political action that solves problems. What happens when you go against your tribe? Are fear and ignorance driving the country, politically. You can’t stop it. No law passed will turn it off. We’re going to have to go through it, and somehow maybe learn the art of discernment. Meanwhile, gotta get back to the video about this planet coming it on the outer edge of our solar system. It’s gonna wreck everything. Sponsored by Hydrus Performance and Brush Studio in the West End, Saint Louis Park, Minnesota.

Podcast 401

Back To School. At some point in our childhood, most of us remember looking up somewhere around the middle of August and realizing we only had two or three weeks left in the summer. We’re getting that old back-to-school feeling at the Bob Davis Podcasts. Somewhere around this time, you’d end up at The Gap, or JC Penny, or Sears buying your new sneakers, jeans and shirts. You’d bring them back home, and try them on, and they’d feel like cardboard, and you’d be grateful for the few waning days or weeks of summer. This has been a great summer of events in the Mobile Podcast Command Unit, covering some politics in Wisconsin and Iowa, the EAA Air Show, Sturgis and heading up to North Central Wisconsin to hang out with old friends. Now it’s time to re-engage in the political sphere. And yet, it feels … dirty. In this walk and talk podcast late on a Sunday night, with the buzz of bugs and power lines in the neighborhood, some final thoughts about summer and some thoughts about what awaits us ahead. That feeling that we are at the end of a political and social era, perhaps even the end of a cycle of history is almost … palpable. Scanning and reading up on the news brings the conclusion that despite the carnival barkers in the echo chamber who urge you to follow the bouncing ball (which is what they’re doing), we may remember this time as that moment before … rather than a time that contained anything of any real lasting value. While the circus rages on, and the ‘pundits’ work harder and harder to predict the future based on someone’s email, or someone’s blathering on yet another Sunday morning talk show no one watched, or someone getting shouted off the stage, or someone’s latest studied plan to solve some earth shattering national problem, one gets the impression 99 percent  of this isn’t going to matter this time next year. One thing is for sure, something is coming and no one can predict it. Thank God there’s still time to sit in the sun and read a book about something … anything else. Sponsored by Ryan Plumbing and Heating of Saint Paul