Pod Insights Jocko Podcast 004 Jocko Manual: The War for Your Mind About this episode >Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe
How the 24-hour news cycle morphed into a 24-minute news frenzy — and how social media’s algorithms are engineered to hijack your attention. From dopamine loops to emotional triggers, discover the hidden mechanics keeping you glued to a screen, and why switching to “manual mode” might be the only way to take your life back.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Jocko Willink? This is the manual podcast number four, sitting here with Kerry Helton. And I'm gonna talk to you about this, you know, uh, this is something that started in the eighties. In the eighties, this is when I grew up in the eighties, as a matter of fact. It started with CNN and it was the 24 hour news cycle. So they went from like a half an hour of news a day into this 24 hour news cycle. And once you make the news 24 hours, once you've got a channel that you're supposed to fill with news for 24 hours, then you've got to start to do things in order to fill that news cycle. So I got to see this transition because when I was a kid, the news only came from Walter Cronkite. Do you know Walter Cronkite is? I do.
0:45 Jocko Willink? Okay, that was it. Now Walter Cronkite's news started as a 15 minute show. And then in 1963, it expanded to a 30 minute, we're gonna have, we're gonna talk about news for 30 minutes. Right? Which by the way, with commercials, 22 minutes. So 20 in two, in 22 minutes, you knew what you needed to know about the world. And that lasted for a long time. But then I think 1980, I think it was like 1980, maybe 1981, something like that. CNN kicked it off and said, we're gonna do news 24 hours a day.
1:27 Jocko Willink? And, and then came the financial news network and then CNN two, which I think they called headline news and then CNBC and then Fox News and then MSNBC and then Bloomberg Television and Fox Business and Newsmax and News Nation and One American News Network. You see where I'm going with this? Not to mention you got foreign things like BBC. So there's all these channels. And they're going 24 hours a day, not 22 minutes a day, 24 hours a day. And when you do that, when you want it, when you, when you gotta fill 23 and a half hours a day with news, you gotta create stories, you gotta create drama.
2:10 Jocko Willink? And you, and what you have to do is you gotta keep people watching. Why are you gonna keep people watching? You gotta capture the attention of people.
2:18 Jocko Willink? That's how you get people to watch. That's how you're gonna get paid for advertising and make that skrilla.
2:26 Jocko Willink? You see what I'm saying? You gotta make that money. You gotta get people to watch. So, the way that we get people to watch, we gotta draw them in. Now, we know psychologically what's gonna draw people in. We know it, cuz when we're driving down the road and there's a car accident, why is there a traffic jam? Cuz there's a car accident. The car accident's been cleared to the side. Why are we slowing down? Cuz everyone wants to look at the car crash. That's the human nature. And that's why the press knows that if it bleeds, it leads. If we can show some freaking bloody chaos, we're gonna get people to watch. Or we can show some big negativity, we're gonna get people to watch. So that's what starts happening.
3:11 Jocko Willink? And then you gotta inject the emotion in there, right? We gotta inject some emotion in there. Because if you feel emotion, you're gonna watch. Like, why would you go see a scary? You ever seen a scary movie before? Oh, yeah. Do you like them? Nah. My wife can't even watch a trailer. Like, she won't even watch a trailer to a horror movie. She'll run away. Right? But my, and like Rana, she'll go, my daughter, she'll go to a movie, a horror movie? And she'll, I'll say, oh, how was it? And she was like, it was horrifying. Like, I'm not going, you know, outside. Well, did you like it? Yeah, it was awesome. So, people like to have that feeling. Or like, why would you go see a sad movie? Right? What's a sad movie?
3:57 Jocko Willink? Old Yeller? Old Yeller. Like, these are movies that are sad movies. They make you sad. Why would you go see something that makes you, well, it's gonna trigger, it's emotion? And so people are drawn towards emotion. And both those, like, being horrified and being sad, those are negative emotions, right? They draw them in. So, but, so we get this news cycle, and now they're running stuff. They're running, another way is just by giving opinions, right? If I give my opinion about something? If you hate my opinion, you'll keep watching. If you love my opinion, you'll keep watching. But I don't care as long as you keep watching. That's what my goal is. So then you take this 24 hour news cycle. And then you throw in the social media activities, right? Twitter, X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube,
4:42 Jocko Willink? Substack, Patreon, like you got all these things. And they're all doing the same thing, which is they're trying to get you to pay attention to them as well. And they're doing whatever they have to do. To sucker you in for 15 more seconds, or 30 more seconds, or one more minute, or 10 minutes. Or half an hour. Or five hours. I had friends of my kids. Tell me that they had to take TikTok off their phone. Because they'd wake up in the morning and four or five hours gone. Four or five hours daily. Gone, poof. And these.
5:27 Jocko Willink? People, like so that the content creators, they're want your attention. And then of course, the algorithms being. Given to you, what you want. So you give them time and your, your time is gone, but they got what they wanted. And what they got was your eyes on. And so it's gone from this 24 hour news cycle to a 24 minute news cycle. It's 24 minutes, man. Like if a news story breaks, when a news story breaks. Within 24 minutes, there's reaction videos, there's commentaries, there's debates, there's conspiracy,
6:06 Jocko Willink? there's shock journalism, right? That's what's happening. Like a story breaks and we are gonna be there. With the commentary and with the like, oh, that shouldn't have happened, or this is what the cause was, the debates are coming, the conspiracies are kicking off, like it's all, it's all coming.
6:28 Jocko Willink? Shock journalism, right? This is used to be called yellow journalism, which broadly meant exaggeration, scandal mongering. I like that one. Right? Oh, we gotta find out about that scandal. Gotta find out. Especially, you know, I've explained this to people back in the day, there was a magazine called, I don't know if it still exists, but the National Enquirer. Does it still exist? Do you know?
6:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, I believe so.
6:56 Jocko Willink? So why does that exist? All it's doing is just talking smack about people, right? Am I right?
7:02 Speaker 01 Yeah. Was that the National Enquirer? Was that like aliens are?
7:05 Jocko Willink? It was part aliens are, but I think it was, and maybe I'm confusing with some others, but they're, they're similar vein, which is, you know, so and so celebrity got a drunk driving accident. So and so celebrity.
7:17 Speaker 01 It's like TMZ magazine.
7:18 Jocko Willink? Yeah, TMZ magazine, right? Why do those things exist? Cause people want to watch them. That's why they exist scandal mongering, misinformation, whatever could be done to provoke an emotional response and get people to pay attention. That's where yellow journalism was. So people writing headlines, dramatic freaking headlines.
7:38 Jocko Willink? So that's what's happening.
7:41 Jocko Willink? That's what, that's what's going on. And there's
7:46 Jocko Willink? literally millions of people that are trying to get you to watch.
7:54 Jocko Willink? And it's working. It's doing exactly what it's designed to do, right? It's doing all the things. It's got all the little psychological and physiological things that it's supposed to have. The dopamine, little reward loops, right? The very, it was actually Echo Charles that explained variable rewards to me because I didn't know about it. But if you give, and then I learned this from dog training as well, you don't give the same reward every time. You don't, like you could have like a nice little cube of prime rib for your dog. And if you give them that same, you know, one inch by one inch cube of prime rib, eventually that's just kind of what's expected. You gotta keep them guessing a little bit.
8:37 Jocko Willink? Sometimes you give them prime rib. Sometimes you don't give them anything when you're training a dog. Sometimes you just say, good dog. Then maybe two times later, you give them a little, little, little hunk of that prime rib and they're feeling good, right? But they come back for it. Call that the jackpot. The jackpot. The variable reward. By the way, yeah, like you're right. This is what leads to addiction. This is why slot machines give you like a little reward, a big reward, a little reward, no reward. They do this over and over again. This is psychological engineering. Variable rewards. That's part of it. Dopamine hits, reward loops, endless scroll.
9:19 Jocko Willink? Endless scroll.
9:22 Jocko Willink? Endless content.
9:25 Jocko Willink? That's there. You don't ever have to stop. It's gonna give you, there's one, there's another dopamine reward variable size in one finger swipe and you can't say no to it. You're programmed not to say no to it.
9:38 Jocko Willink? And by the way, all the things that they're gonna show you are made, tailor-made for your brain to draw you in. That's what you're going, that's what's going on. It's made for, it's personalized for you. Isn't it amazing? Isn't it amazing that Instagram can show you exactly what it is you're interested in?
10:03 Jocko Willink? Little emotional triggers are in there. They show you things that piss you off and they show you things that you love because it doesn't matter. If I hate it, I'm gonna share it. What an idiotic take this is. Share. Or this guy's got it right. Share. Either one.
10:23 Jocko Willink? That emotional level that I get to makes me wanna share it with other people. And then of course, on top of all that, you get the validation, right? We get the lights and the comments and the views and all that.
10:37 Jocko Willink? Another thing about this that draws us in is it gives you a level of a weird form of control because
10:48 Jocko Willink? because you get to have a strong opinion about something, right? You get to say, "Man, this is bullshit," or "I can't believe this person did that." You get to, you get, you get like a control over it.
11:03 Jocko Willink? And you feel strongly about it, and it feels good to feel strongly about something like that feels good.
11:11 Jocko Willink? You get to have a little bit of an emotional release over something, right? Even if it's only five seconds long, you go, "Damn, I'm gonna reshare. I can't believe that happened. I can't believe this person did that. I can't believe that person's doing that thing." Like that, it feels good to people.
11:29 Jocko Willink? Except for none of the thing that you're investing this emotion in, none of it, doesn't matter. It does not matter at all in any way, shape or form. It does not matter. It only feels like it matters, but it doesn't matter.
11:42 Jocko Willink? But that's what we're up against. Dopamine, variable rewards, endless scroll, personalization, emotional triggers. That's what we're up against.
11:54 Jocko Willink? Things specifically, specifically engineered
12:01 Jocko Willink? to distract you and steal your attention and make you pay attention to something that literally does not matter at all.
12:10 Jocko Willink? But they engineered it that way.
12:16 Jocko Willink? So what, so what are we supposed to do?
12:20 Jocko Willink? What are we supposed to do? I'll tell you what we're supposed to do. Go to manual mode.
12:24 Jocko Willink? That's what you have to do. If you go in cruise control, you will scroll until you are dead.
12:32 Jocko Willink? You have to go into manual mode. You have to turn the trash off and get away from it.
12:42 Jocko Willink? Because if you don't go into manual mode, I'll tell you what's gonna take over. Your natural, psychological and physiological instincts will take over. They'll follow the path of least resistance. They'll, they'll be with their hands out begging for that neurochemical release. That's what's gonna happen.
13:05 Jocko Willink? You have to deny these things from happening. You have to switch into manual mode. And get out of the 24 minute news cycle.
13:21 Jocko Willink? And get your ass into the real world that's all around you.
13:28 Jocko Willink? Right here.
13:32 Jocko Willink? Real life.
13:37 Jocko Willink? Go live it.
13:42 Jocko Willink? And that's what I got. If you want to go support what we're doing here, go to JacoFuel.com, OriginUSA.com, JacoStore.com, EchelonFront.com. Thanks for listening. Now stop listening and go get after it.
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