Marc Ambinder of USC Annenberg School For Communication and Journalism Informs Strategic Thinking

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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. In today's Oodacast, I have a friend, Mark Ambender, a highly recognized journalist, an author, a historian, a teacher, a professor. Right now you're with the USC Annenberg School of Teaching. Misinformation, how to Mitigate Misinformation, Focused on local and state elections. And, Mark, did I get that right?

Yeah. My dean would want me to make sure that you give the full name of the school, because it's quite important. The Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at usc. But that's. Yeah, that's. That's. It's. The campus is empty today, but, boy, is it beautiful. And welcome to everyone from Los Angeles, the city with the cleanest air in the United States. And that is not misinformation. That is apparently true.

For a career as a Navy intelligence officer and then working at TRW and Northrop Grumman, I would fly to Los Angeles all the time. And while I was at trw, you know, there's major facilities there, TRW space, and I'd be there just all the time. And then I flew out maybe two years ago for a new client we had, and I was shocked. There's mountains around Los Angeles and, you know, and for the first time in my life, recognized that.

It'S not. And that. And then, of course, with the pandemic, with no cars, the air, when you go outside for a walk is just like this is air. That reminds me of summer camp in the middle of Pennsylvania when there was nothing producing any pollution around at all. It really is amazing. It makes you wonder what would happen if you talk about a radical solution to climate change. If we scheduled a month of no driving everywhere on Earth for one month, whether we could, you know, reverse the curve of global climate change, which. That's probably a completely different podcast.

Yeah. But now it's the kind of thing that we can imagine based upon all this stuff we're going through. And, Mark, the kind of things I wanted to talk about today, I thought we'd break it into past, present and future. Because I've known you for quite a while now. I've known you as a journalist who asked hard questions and digs for the truth and analyzes stuff and is then able to tell great stories no matter what the topic is. And you published in all the major periodicals and journals that I know of. You've been a White House correspondent, and you've written some fantastic books. Your Most recent one called the Brink. And the Brink talks about history in a very interesting pivotal time in Cold War history that I think a lot of people don't realize had the nation right up on the brink of war.

Without realizing it, and two nations backing into a potential nuclear conflict without realizing it, without senior leaders in government realizing it. And in fact, the people who realized it were spies, espionage sources on the ground, on both sides, who had to work frantically, certainly in their own interest, but often with their, their families under threat to speak truth to power and to get the right information and to get the right information into the hands of decision makers and then have decision makers do the right thing with that information. And so the story, it's true story, but it shows you how clear thinking and understanding of how your own cognitive heuristics can trap you into narratives that are disabling and potentially deranging for an entire country and how you can overcome them. I mean, some of the heroes in the story are CIA analysts who were constantly saying, what we think we know about the Soviet Union is not what we actually know. And these gaps in our knowledge which we fill in from our brain are dangerous. And to his credit, President Reagan realized that around this time, in part because of what he learned happened during the period of this intense brinkmanship, and helped turn things around, realizing that face to face contact between leaders was imperative, confidence building measures were imperative, but also accurate intelligence and responding to the intelligence was imperative. And there were also efforts because the nuclear threat and the nuclear establishment itself is in some ways the organizing principle of our entire modern defense and has been for 70 years, that by itself, the machine can get out of control. And there are ghosts in the machine at so many different levels. And to understand where those ghosts are requires a president to take control and say, I'm the responsible person here. So it, it's an interesting allegory in some ways to what we're looking at in terms of presidential leadership in the middle of a pandemic. No one is. You're not blaming. I can't. One would not blame Ronald Reagan for the existence of nuclear weapons. Or if you, for example, are not, you know, if you're not a fan of nuclear weapons. The entire nuclear establishment existed before Ronald Reagan and certainly had views of it and what we should do with it. But you can't blame him for that. But what you can blame him for are the things that he had under his control and the actions that he was able to do. And he did some things early on which raised tension and Things which significantly decreased tension and sometimes fighting against his own Department of Defense in order to do so, because he had, in his mind, a higher priority than the perpetuation of the status quo.

How does the core events of this story take place?

1983 and then into 1984. So it spans the first part of the Reagan administration, the defense buildup, both sides, the Soviet Union and the United States responsible for provoking each other, and both sides not really understanding the essence of what each other's posture and positioning were. And then both sides also secretly having intelligence programs designed to undermine the faith that each country had in its own nuclear command and control systems. And then overlaid on top of that, the entire Cold War mythology. And very rapidly, a series of misunderstandings, technological glitches, turned into what amounted to a, you know, a slow boiling war scare that kept getting worse and worse and worse. And the finger on the trigger, to use a metaphor, actually kind of like the. For nuclear stuff. I kind of like the. The safety hash, because your nuclear. The nuclear weapons are going to go off, and unless you. You. You've locked them securely, and so your finger is always on the safety catch. But the. The. We really almost got to a point where we would have misunderstood a slight provocation, and that could have pushed us over the threshold where there might have been actual conflict in Europe, probably starting in Germany, that, given NATO's war plans, would have very quickly led to a tactical nuclear weapons exchange in order to beat back Warsaw Pact forces who were much more numerous, and who knows what would have happened? And that's true. And that's what the weight of the historical evidence shows. We were almost to that point, and nobody wanted to get to that point. But again, decision making from the top at the federal level, led by President Reagan, led by George Shultz and many others. And of course, a corresponding degree of responsible decision making eventually from the Soviet Union, helped pull everyone back from the brink and established, in a sense, a reset for the next three or four years, which saw a cascade effect of arms control agreements, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and then eventually the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Fascinating. And I think it's just. It's also very interesting that 1983, the movie War Games came out.

You remember that? Yeah, yeah, it's. It. That's sort of an evergreen because, you know, that movie was based on events that happened in 1979, when a tape of a war game was accidentally transferred from an exercise computer to a real computer at norad, and suddenly all of NORAD screens lit up with incoming ICBM missiles. And there was a conference call convened with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor, said, by the way, sir, we have missiles on the way. That actually happened in 1979. So that formed the basis for war games that could still happen today. That's another. We should do it. We should do a podcast on the sort of ghost in the machine in terms of nuclear decision making at an acute level, because there's also a huge human factors cyber equivalent there. But it concentrates the mind watching that, watching that movie. And it's still, you know, the graphics are kind of hokey, but still there's.

A fantastic and important story. And Fred Kaplan used that story in his book Dark Territory to kind of kick off the history of information warfare. Because according to what he uncovered, President Reagan saw that movie and turned to his chairman of the Joint Chiefs and said, is this possible? And the answer that came back is, well, sir, we have some issues we need to talk about.

Yeah. Is this possible? No. Well, it happened actually. There were three different events that happened in 1979 and that, you know, we know a lot about today. And you just look at them and you're like, ah, yeah.

And as maybe as a segue into today, I brought that movie up again in a dialogue with some friends online who were asking about, and this is maybe in February and things are starting to go crazy with the COVID virus and news around the world in early March. And someone asked, what would you do if you were me in the stock market? And I thought back to that movie and the famous line from the ending, strange game. The only way to win is not to play. Maybe it's a different scenario than the COVID virus and the stock market, but it was the same kind of feeling I had, which is sometimes don't play the game.

Yeah. You know, there's a. Just the latest paper I've read that is we're increasing a lot of our weapons and weapons platform are dual use, conventional purposes, regular bombs and missiles, they can be reapportioned, reappropriated for nuclear weapons as well. There used to be a fairly hard hard line precisely for signaling reasons, because. And now precisely for signaling reasons, a lot of platforms are dual purpose. So there's a lot of academic work being done on, okay, if a missile or an unknown object is coming from one of these dual purpose platforms, is it conventional, is it nuclear? And you know, what is the bias that we have to response? These questions are, at least in the nuclear realm, are perennial and nuclear War is one of those issues that again, it's not a black swan issue. It's unlikely, but it's foreseeable and in theory preventable. The pandemic that we're experiencing now, as you pointed out to me, is the most thinkable of all of the unthinkable scenarios. A, because it's happened before. B, because we've been warning collectively, our scientific and intelligence establishments have been warning about it for years. And governments, George W. Bush's administration, the Obama administration, took it seriously enough to change laws and policies and contingency scenarios to account for it and to build expertise to account for it. Things they didn't do, certainly that they could have done and things that perhaps were not foreseeable. But when people say no one saw this coming, I mean, no, everyone saw this coming. And it's scary to think that of all the foreseeable scenarios that we saw coming, a failure in government. For in a completely foreseeable scenario where government interventions at certain points could have made significant differences and are making differences in some areas to be fair, because the government has done some things that are right, even if they did it later. It's scary.

It really is.

Its institutions are already the institution that. I've been working in journalism for a long time. Governments, people have no faith, confidence, trust, whatever word you want to use. They're not shaping anymore. They're simply there for people to utilize and exploit. And it's hard. You wonder whether this is going to change that or make it a lot worse.

Yeah, and I certainly don't know, that's for sure. And I'd love your opinion on all this. But one thing I think you could build an argument that says the US Government's response to the pandemic resulted in the worst government failure in our history. Now, maybe as a historian, you could debate me on that. Maybe you could say the invasion of Iraq was a huge blunder, resulted in trillions lost, hundreds of thousands of people displaced, killed, our own casualties also. But still, this seems big. And it is definitely something that we didn't blunder into. We did nothing on for too long. So we could talk about government failures, but there's other institutions globally. You could look at China and failures there that contributed to this. World Health Organization is in the news. They have some issues. Our own government includes institutions like the Centers for Disease Control that were part of this mistake. But there's non government entities. Well, we could also say government is not just federal, but state and local. Some states were all over this and seemed to Move quickly. California, for example. Here in Virginia, I think our state moved quickly. Ohio, I'm hearing great things about. Others didn't. Cities. Some cities totally dropped the ball. It's disgusting to me what's happened in New York City, for example. So you have different layers of failure. And then you mentioned journalism. And I love your take on this and why I want to build up to this. And that is, I think journalism has also failed us. I can't think of any institution in journalism that got this right. Some people reported little bits on what something was going on in China. So there's a little bit on the nightly news. Something's going on over there. And then they might report, oh, there's something. One case in California, a couple cases in Seattle, but it's just the flu. So does journalism bear some responsibility for not informing the people the right way so that we couldn't take the right action? Any views on any of that?

A couple of things. Journalists, like everyone else, are susceptible to the same bias against the catastrophic that certainly parts of the federal government bought into. At the same time, the journalists who are experts in the field of pandemics, Helen Branswell at Stat, Donald McNeil at the New York Times, the people that the editors listen to or people that we're listening to now or should be listening to, they got this from January and they were beating the drums that something was going on. And some health journalists at other levels did that. Couple of things, though. The level of expertise in journalism, just like every other slice of the pie in journalism, is just shrunk to a level that is totally insufficient to meet the needs of informing a public. And this is one of the reasons for truth decay generally. So you have fewer trained journalists working on big stories like this, at least early on, especially to inform people at a local level, not so much on a national level, but on a local level. What's going on? No one has Washington correspondence now if they have a paper in Birmingham, Alabama. So you're just going to get an Associated Press dispatch or something like that. And your trust in news that comes from national sources is much less than still the trust that you have in news that comes from a local source. I think that when I look back at the journalists who wrote about, were trying to somehow forecast, and usually in a sense of, oh, this is not going to be that bad, as you point out, what's going to happen. What I wonder is how much of that is based on a wishful thinking that we all collectively have that we don't want this to Happen to us. How much of it is based on a wrong intuition about scaring the public? I think people don't like to be responsible, they think, for scaring people. I actually have undergone myself a sea change in how I appreciate that and I hope journalism adopts this as well. I certainly think there's a lot of overhyping which is very different than you could call rational scaremongering. And by that I mean it is much better to have a public that is prepared in terms of the information that they have in their minds for the worst case scenario, even at the risk of people feeling afraid, than it is for the worst to happen. And then people's expectations suddenly blow up. That's how you get panic. Panic isn't from telling people something bad is going to happen. Something really bad is going to happen. That's not how you get panic. Most elected officials think that's how you get panic. So let's not scare people. Let's not scare. No, scare people. Yes, scare people. Do so deliberately. Give them something that they can use to channel their fear into making a difference. Be realistic. Share with them what you know as you know it. And don't think that you have some sense of protecting people's feelings. And don't think that you're going to instantiate panic, particularly if you have well grounded reasons for telling people what you're going to tell them. You've seen leaders who tell people what the worst case scenario is, what they should do and make make decisions based on that. And you see how people comply with those decisions without panic or rioting. And then you see how decisions creep up on certain cities because the reality changes based on what people's expectations were because we're just told this is not really something to worry about, or I don't want to close the schools because all these things could happen and it's just not the time. And all of that is based on a precautionary principle that is weighted towards not scaring people, rather than a precautionary principle that is weighted towards the public health. And I think definitively we have seen here what the right answer is and how compliance. Again, I was saying I'm lucky I can stay at home and work from home and my life is not as unsettled. I understand. So you can look at my opinions in that context. Lots of people I know don't have that luxury who are out of work here in California, who are struggling in a much more material, visceral way than I am, still are complying and they're complying because they know what the government knows in California. They know the common set of facts. They know they haven't been lied to. They were told to expect this and so they're living through it. That is crisis communication done well in a pandemic in the 21st century in the United States. Yeah.

More about crisis communication. But I wanted to also mention, I think you've touched on multiple aspects of human nature here. I'm just convinced of it. It's not that these people are evil, but they're humans and we need some institutional ways of mitigating these issues. But the fact is, here's proof that it's human nature. Remember the movie Jaws?

Yes.

There was the mayor of Amity who didn't want to close the beach. And it's just the same thing we're seeing now. You have people who don't want to cancel events or Governor DeSantos in Florida doesn't want to close the beaches. And the governor in Georgia is like, no local city can close their beach. I'm keeping them all open. It's just right out of the movie Jaws. So it must be human nature.

It's, and it's, you know, and it's now a cliche to, you know, to read, you know, Albert Camus's, you know, La Peste the Plague. But it's all in that too. It's, it's, you know, the functionaries in the city where, you know, the plague ravaged in the book say exactly the same things that the political officials and people who are trying to minimize the scope of this and telling people not to worry are saying. That doesn't mean, for example, that if you're going to put a model that forecasts a million deaths out into the public and you're a scientist, you don't have a corresponding responsibility to explain to people what a model is and what inputs are into the model. At the same time, I also, this is another failing of journalism that we need to constantly be reassessing. Information here is always going to be partial and incomplete. We don't know a lot about this virus. Still we don't. We're learning new things every day. The studies that people are releasing are of course pre peer reviewed studies. So many of them won't be able to be replicated, meaning they probably don't correspond to the actuality of the virus. But of course you want to read them because they might provide some insight. So educating people to understand that we don't really know what the death rate is and won't know for several months or even a year until we can analyze the statistics. Getting people to focus on the most important metrics and not hyper. Being hyper. And I've seen this a lot, being hypersensitive to okay, suddenly now it's a brain disease or it's a blood disease or it's a this or that and changing whiplash, this is. That's, that's. There are ways you can report on developments without being, without conferring the sense of, okay, now we know X, now we know Y, now we know Z, because we still don't. We really, really don't. And there. Which is also why in many ways over preparing makes sense. Does seem as if the number of people who are going to die from this is by orders of magnitude less than a lot of people had feared, which is great news. But this is 60,000 deaths on top of a very bad flu. I mean, it is not. It's a completely separate and concrete phenomenon that's, you know, that's still ongoing and we don't have our arms around it. And we can't act like we know everything about it. Which is also why taking precautions that are invasive and sometimes don't make sense actually makes sense. The less we know about something. But the fact that we know that it is dangerous and deadly suggests that there are just things that we have to do that are, you know, that are harsher. And I think the media has to do a collectively better job of communicating that. I also, you know, I've talked about how I think that the prime vector for misinformation comes from the top here of our government, the head of our government. And it's extremely hard for the media to figure out how to deal with that. And I advocated early on and joined a list of journalists signings, you know, an online petition saying that the press should not cover President Trump's briefings live. They should report on news that come out of them, or they should cover the part when the health experts are talking, not because of any animus about President Trump. If President Trump were to come up and say, this is what we know today, these are the statistics, this is what I'm announcing, and then leave the press conference and give it, devolve it to the others in the room, you should cover it, but as a source of harmful misinformation, the media amplifies by many orders of magnitude the harm that that misinformation can cause by broadcasting these remarks. And you're seeing different experiments on how to do that now, but we We've been a lot of journalistic journalism critics have been saying this is an approach that journalists should have been taking throughout the entire Trump administration. And, you know, I have different feelings about that. But, Mark, I want to add. Yeah.

I want to mention your two other books because as a segue into what you're doing right now, which is extremely important, but also talk a bit more about the pandemic.

One is, and by the way, not sponsoring anything, just happen to have a Diet Coke.

You wrote a book on the intelligence community and the multiple secrets around the intelligence world. Deep State, you called it.

So you put. Well, before that term was. Yes, well before that term became known for something that it wasn't. Yeah.

I also want to say that your book, the Command was.

It's red.

Like, it was very exciting to me because, you know, I had been around the edges of that world a little bit, but didn't really know it until I read your book. And the reason I want to mention both those now and also in context of the brink is I think we need that kind of thinking as we examine our national security establishment today and how it's responding to the pandemic. And I wanted to ask what your plans are when it comes to writing about. Are you bringing your skills and your network and your sources to bear on any writing today's response to the pandemic?

I do. I have a piece that will be out in the Atlantic fairly shortly on how we need to now listen to the government doomsayers that have operated in many cases mostly in secret. You don't want to give the adversary or enemy a blueprint for the vulnerabilities that your government faces in a crisis. But just to give you one example that will make sense, the government has a set of plans for every agency, including national security agencies, to move to an alternate site in the event of a catastrophic emergency, meaning they move a lot of the key staff to an alternate site so that people could function in a secure environment without being exposed to the dangers at hand. That doesn't work during a pandemic when you can't arbitrarily divide your workforce because your workforce could get sick without, you know, reference to the decision of a government manager. And everyone working from home is the safest possible scenario. And a lot of national security work, because of the law, cannot be done from your home. You cannot right now, as of today, create virtual, sensitive, compartmented information facilities in everyone's home. So a lot of the contingency planning that's been put into place and Exercised informs our current response very little. So what I'm discussing in the article are some principles going forward, when the types of events that will be the most potentially damaging, which include, for example, cyber events, cyber sabotage, or cyber terrorism that cuts off communication sectors or cuts off the country's 911 system, or bioweapons, an anthrax attack again, or a smallpox attack that, you know, smallpox has an R, meaning a replicable rate that links to the transmission cases that is as high, if not higher, than the current pandemic, which is why that seems to inform a lot of government scenarios. But you can't in those scenarios use the old plans that still have Cold War scenarios, Cold War assumptions built into them. So there, there's going to be an entire, on a government level, I think, I hope, what I'm arguing for, a complete reappraisal of telework, of how government employees communicate with each other, of how people communicate with each other in emergencies, of who's deemed success, who's deemed an emergency, essential employee, for example. Why is it that essential emergency people who must work during emergencies aren't already given as part of a package, you know, 20 masks, 20 sets of masks and gloves so they can work from home, or at least try to work from home. And then honestly, I've had, I've had, you know, people who are, you know, who had, you know, lots of metal on their chests tell me it's time to allow people. We have to figure out a way to do that. There are always going to be immense vulnerabilities, but we have to start doing it now, which is the more people in government who are working during a crisis, the better the federal response will be. That means that you got to find a way for people to do work that is classified from their homes. Yeah. That makes everyone like, oh, no, no, security. You can't do that. Well, you can't do it now, but you can do it. I mean, the technology exists, some of it's classified for classified information sharing. Right now disa, the Defense Information Security Agency, and this is something I have in the article, is participating or starting a two week pilot program that tests using secure devices and secure apps on personal devices that the government makes to allow and transmit information that at the secret level from anywhere, not just from places where you can, you know, in government institutions, imagine, you know, undoing 70 years of security culture to do that. There's a lot to think about, but these are the types of unthinkable scenarios now that continuity planners are thinking about and we'll have to think about going forward because they're the most likely sources of our government catastrophes. Right?

Mark, I want to talk a little bit more about misinformation because, frankly, let me put it this way. If you'd have asked me just a few weeks ago, what's the greatest threat to our democracy? And it's this thing you're working on right now. It's the ability of hostile actors to manipulate us, our citizens, our own governments. It's the ability of not just hostile foreign actors, but hostile actors inside our government or inside our country to influence our democracy. Now we're in the middle of a pandemic, and that's also a threat to the democracy. And it takes a lot of serious work. But I'm not sure which of those two is a bigger threat, and both of them are extremely serious. And I would like to spend a few minutes talking about what you're doing today when it comes to teaching people how to recognize misinformation and disinformation and how to mitigate it. So can we start by maybe you saying, what are you doing today?

I mean, there are. We're training state and local election officials, part of a USC election cybersecurity initiative that the entire school is participating. And I wrote and conducting the dis and misinformation trainings. And those are interesting sessions because you see how desperate people are to have something to hold on to and believe that, you know what, we can actually figure out how to do something about this. And it's gratifying when people realize, oh, we actually can do things about. I mean, there are ways that in some sense, the proliferation of misinformation seems overwhelming, and doing anything at scale is next to impossible. But the training that I do is it can. And again, we can scale it from six hours to two hours to one hour to a half hour even. Although I, you know, an hour at least is kind of what I do. A It gives people very specific, actionable pieces of advice, like how, okay, you've identified something, for example, related to the integrity of your election on Twitter, that is wrong. What do you do? We go through the steps of what you actually do to not only report it, make sure it's taken down, and then contain the network effects because this information is spreads rapidly. One of the main messages that I have that is fortunately based in political science and isn't just coming out of my hair is inoculation early on about the most likely sources and topics of misinformation is extremely effective. So if I'm an election official today, my social media account from now until the election, and by the way, not just mine, but I'm getting people in my community like firefighters and police officers in certain communities, people you can trust, people certain communities trust police officers, others don't. It's faith leaders, it's people who are committed to the integrity of election all amplifying and repeating an inoculation message which is a, you have to frame it. There's going to be disinformation about this election. You don't want to fall for it. Here are the sources of information to go to and then it's okay, you're going to see a story about how there's foreign sources of machine parts in our election infrastructure. This is the truth about that. I'm going to repeat that four or five times now in the election you're going to see a story about how election voting machines can sometimes accidentally we have people report, oh my God, I pressed a button for this candidate and it showed this candidate. I'm going to explain to you visually why people think that happens and how it doesn't. And I'm going to repeat that message until the election day. People are going to say, oh, I destroyed, I was able to, you know, destroy absentee ballots. I'm you know, winning, winning it for the, you know, the liberals or the Democrats or the Republicans, conservatives. I'm going to show you why that's not possible because I'm going to show you how the chain of custody of ballot works. A pre inoculation message is extremely effective, as is making sure that in your community, the media that covers the election. And again this is back to the fact that the media is a fraction of the size that it was. But the media has to develop a counter disinformation plan and has to understand that amplifying a claim that something is wrong, even to debunk it often simply increases the spread of that information. So you have to amplify it, you have to debunk it without amplifying it. And there are some very specific narrative devices that I show people how to use and indeed that have been used effectively to shut down a piece of misinformation. So it's a mix of theory a little bit so people understand why we're doing things a certain way and then showing them exactly how to do it. But it requires a follow up from people and a commitment for people to use the tools that they have of communication effectively.

Fascinating. And how do you get this training out to folks there's 18,000 counties in the U.S. there's 50 states, all the major cities and localities. And how do you get this in a way, that's everybody.

You know, we're doing all 50 states. I have offered because often I'll get an email after from, you know, a local county official who says, could you do this training? You know, for people think that they need to pay me for it. And it's like, no, just happy to do it. And I mean, we can't get to everyone. So. But the pandemic has allowed us to increase at scale the number of trainings we could have because we were literally traveling around the country and then doing these in person. Went to seven or seven states before we were shut down. And we've done two, we've done three since then. So we're up to 10 states. We're going to constantly be doing these. And I have, I want to do more of them. I want to do them for an audience on Twitter. I want to do them for anyone who wants to see them. So we're just trying to figure out the distribution mechanism now through the. Under the auspices of the program. But I'll tell you, if anybody in your audience wants free counter disinformation training, let me know. I want to do it. I mean, I know it's helpful. I know it's interesting and at least gives people a sense of, okay, this problem is not catastrophic. In the end, Bob, though, we get back to the first thing. But it's a huge problem. It's a problem that results from factors that are beyond any individual's control. It's something that the platforms, Twitter, Facebook, Google, have to work at at scale. I've had and am in discussions with people in those organizations about how to better integrate these types of principles and what their efforts are. And I see unfortunately, also that, you know, we don't have a national counter determination strategy. Taiwan had one before their election, has one, Ukraine has one, Sweden has one. We don't. So in the absence of one, how do we find, how can we scale this training? Well, we have to look at the places where people go to get their news and information, and those are the platforms. So I'm kind of focused on that now. And I don't know what that's going to look like in a couple of months, but that's how we at scale convince people, at least that you can do it. It's an arms race. This is the, you know, it is. And there are, we are to go back to the, you know, the founding premise of, of this show, Bob, there are places in the cycle that you can intervene and places in the cycle that you should not intervene. And helping people figure out where and when is what we're trying to do.

Great, fascinating. And it gives me great hope, frankly. I'm glad that you're on this. We need you and your talents and many other people too. This is a big, big national, should be a national priority. It should be a bigger priority than it currently is. And I just wanted to mention one other thing. Three or four times in the last three minutes, you mentioned the same words that we use to describe the current pandemic viral information, the need to pre inoculate. And it's interesting how both of these are threats in different ways, but both of them have that spread that you need to intervene with and stop. And maybe it takes the same level of national effort to defeat misinformation as it does to defeat a pandemic, although you hope it's not by socially distancing digitally. We want people to have all the information, but inoculate them in a way where that information doesn't infect them.

Let me give you, let me end on one measure of hope. I have long been advocating that Facebook do something like they just decided to do today. And they didn't do it because of me, but it's just something they should have done. So instead of just taking down accounts that spread misinformation, I've always said, why don't you notify people who spread the information that an account that they spread or shared or engaged with was fake. They don't do that. Now they're going to start doing that. That is an intervention at scale that 100 million people are now going to at least have some behavioral modification imposed perhaps that allows them to know that they've been unwittingly spreading misinformation. That's important. The platforms should do more than that and more of that.

I like that. And it's like contact tracing in the virus world.

It is, it is. It's exactly equivalent to that because the vectors of spread don't realize their vectors have spread or they don't care until they realize, oh wait, this is wrong. Some people are going to be resistant to it for ideological, partisan, identity based reasons. That's, you know, that's human nature. But a lot of people are probably going to think a little bit more carefully about sharing misinformation, disinformation so quickly when they're the ones, they realize who are responsible for it. That's why I advocate a little bit of shame as part of this. Like you don't want to be that. You don't want to be that guy or gal who did that? Well, nobody, you know. So that is a motivator. We have to look at all different types of motivations.

Hey Mark, I want to say thanks. I really appreciate this, this great, great context from your books, your early days in journalism, the stuff you've been working on currently. It was great discussion about what's coming next and I really, really appreciate it.

Every time I've talked to you for the past 20 years, I always learn, I learn a lot about how to think about the world and I love those conversations. So likewise, Bob.

Awesome. Well, thanks, Mark.

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