Four hundred years of propaganda is way too much. Here's how we can push back.

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This week, Andrea Pitzer traces the introduction of the idea of propaganda and its role in nearly everything bad that's being sold to the American people today. She begins with the pope's recent encyclical warning of the dangers of AI, and then steps back to another pope, one from the seventeenth century, who introduced the idea of propaganda to the world. In between, she looks at Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who created wartime propaganda and then made a killing using the same tactics to sell cigarettes to women.

From misrepresentations to stunt marketing, the half-truths and open lies of propaganda are still very much with us. All these tactics boil down to treating human beings as things, cheating people, and dividing humanity. Andrea considers the useful tool that machine learning could have been if the billionaire class had been satisfied to develop it for use in the big-data, tech, and science worlds that reflect its actual usefulness. Instead, they've sought to maximize profits by selling humanity a lie about how it can be a companion, a therapist, and a creative genius. Andrea closes with how to recognize the dangers and build a world that's more resistant to propaganda.

0:00 – AI, Propaganda, and the World Being Built Without Your Consent

0:40 – Pope Leo's Encyclical: What the Catholic Church Gets Right About AI

1:57 – Edward Bernays: The Father of Propaganda and the World He Made

5:52 – Cigarettes, Coups, and Corporate Manipulation: Bernays' Real Legacy

8:04 – How Social Media Primed Us for a Concentration Camp Society

16:16 – AI Is the New Propaganda: Tech Billionaires and the Myth of Intelligence

23:08 – Father Coughlin to Trump: A Century of Demagogues and Groupthink

26:24 – How to Think Beyond Propaganda and Build the World You Actually Want

26:46 – The AI Resist List: Global Movements Pushing Back on Big Tech

28:36 – Say What You See: Anti-Propaganda as a Radical Act