Some More News - Ye on Tucker, Halloween Rainbow Fentanyl Panic, and EVEN MORE TikTok Algorithms

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Hi. Jason Pargin (@JohnDiesattheEn) joins Katy and Cody to discuss Ye's disturbing antisemitic comments, Tulsi Gabbard leaving the Democratic Party (say it ain't so!), and the media's insistence on pretending that drug dealers are sneaking rainbow fentanyl into trick-or-treat candy. Support us on our PATREON: http://patreon.com/somemorenews Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews?ref_id=9949 SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh Please fill out our SURVEY: https://kastmedia.com/survey/ Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news  Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews  Make sure your online activity and data is protected with the best VPN money can buy. Visit https://ExpressVPN.com/morenews right now and get three extra months free.  Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at https://www.stamps.com/MORENEWS. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! Athletic Greens is going to give you an immune supporting FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit https://athleticgreens.com/morenews today.  Support the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome back to even more news the first and only news podcast. My name is Katie Stoll. My name is different. It's Cody Johnston. I'm still on this show though so same show different name hi heck yeah and joining us today for the second time i want to say second time is author blogger podcast guest person twitter and tiktok phenom jason pargen have i only been on here once that That sounds right, but also seems impossible. But then again, it's all a blur. My life is just a blur of podcasts. Yeah, with a similar cast of people that you end up doing different people's shows.

There's crossover. Although for the release window of this book book i'm only doing your show oh beautiful didn't gonna take you at your word there i believe you uh we're gonna chit chat a bit with jason i'm on behind the bastards like literally today it's doing a four-parter yeah oh god yeah that's fun when you're like yes i'll do it we recorded that all in one shot it took six hours yes it does you say yes then you realize later that you should have asked how many episodes today october 13th is national train your brain day i guess that means like puzzles and whatnot okay this one's better though no offense jonathan i found this

one on twitter today had to do it national i don't actually maybe it's not national it just says no bra day i am wearing a bra some of the best if you wear a bra i'm not comfortable if i don't it's to encourage breast cancer awareness oh that's more information that's probably important for this context okay it might be i suspect that some some of the boosting of that hashtag and the posting on twitter might be from men who actually don't care about breast cancer that i that is pure speculation i'm not it seems like you're right i think it's i think it's fair to assume that much like with like what breathe a nipple on instagram yeah breathe a nipple do it yeah i whatever you want me to agree with by far the best form of female empowerment is more nudity show more of your bodies ladies

don't don't be shy feminism as as an ally i patriarchy that's making you cover yourself as an ally post those photos yeah and along those lines uh friday october 14th national be bald and be free day everyone out there just just be bald wait be bald and be free yeah they didn't need to add that part also the whole day but i mean free from here i like my hair i don't i guess i don't understand yeah i don't either it's just to celebrate baldness those who happen to be bald or just have less hair than others you can be free you can be free with as free as the haired how do we i'm sure you get this question how do we celebrate it like what specifically am i to do should i donate to some organization like this last thing was for a charity and for

horny dudes on twitter but what's like what do i how do i observe this holiday um naturally so question on the website for this this day how to observe be bald and be free day naturally we want you to share your bald selfies with us on social media the day offers an opportunity to support those going through treatment as well and definitely be sure to use be bald and be free day as a hashtag to post on your social media accounts also give a shout out to those you know who are clean on top whether using the day to tease or support a friend be sure everyone enjoys the day i just want all of my bald friends to know that i want them to enjoy this day and i'm going to put them out there i'm just going to celebrate them for being blah i'm going to post pictures of all

my bald friends but if you are a guy out there who's bald, you know, I think men are extremely, extremely paranoid about baldness. But, you know, there's some bald dudes out there just having tons of sex. Like Patrick Stewart. I don't think he ever, even now, he's 90, 98, 98, 99 years old. I'm sure he may be happily married. I don't know. But I'm sure that there's, you 98, 98, 99 years old. I'm sure he may be happily married. I don't know. But I'm sure that there's, you know, you ran into Patrick Stewart in a bar. You're not going to turn him down. Like his baldness was never a turnoff.

You just need to be as charismatic as him. Yeah. No big deal. Oh, yeah. You're Statham's Tucci Renaissance, you know. Stanley Tucci. Yes. See?

See? You hear that? You hear that, folks at home? You see how she said stanley tootsie just now i fully fully god i'm i'm about to stand i cannot believe i've never said i fully stand but here it is coming out of my fucking mouth sounds weird man sexy confident you rock it out voldemort all the greats yes oh my god voldemort, all the greats. Yes. Oh, my God. Voldemort. Yes. Stanley Tucci as Voldemort would have been a weird choice. It's like you couldn't possibly make the case that it would have been good.

Like, yes, a weird choice. You're right. Okay. Enough of that chit chat. Here's some different chit chat. Jason, I have teased the fact that you are a TikTok phenom, but you kind of are getting a lot of engagement over here. I am afraid of TikTok. I'm not afraid of it. It's just like I don't

understand it. I don't understand how it works. I don't understand what I should do with it. And tell me what I should understand about TikTok. You should understand that until August or so of this year, I swore I would never get on TikTok because it seemed like the most insidious of all the platforms.

But everybody telling me all of the traffic has gone to TikTok. Like, you do not know how dead Twitter is or how dead Facebook is or how dead Instagram is until you go to TikTok. Facebook is or a dead Instagram is until you go to TikTok. And especially for authors, that BookTok and the book review, TikTok is this whole scene, and that if you want any hope of the next generation of kids to read your books, and I do need that, otherwise my readership will just slowly die over time, then you have to be on TikTok. So I reluctantly made an account and spent weeks observing how it works, and then started doing posts. And, you know, face to the screen doing, trying to do some sort of comedy or something was not something I was

looking forward to. But yeah, I now have more in the two months I've been on there. I have more followers on there now than I have on Facebook. And that's a Facebook page I've had for 15 years. And in two months I have 22,000 followers, something like 15 million views on my videos. I have one with 4 million, one with 2 million, another with a million. Like I've had these just, and there is mostly just me reading my failed old tweets, tweets that got 37 likes. And on there, just the size of the audience and the way engagement explodes.'s like oh everybody's here i didn't realize everyone had left the party and that so now in this last two months this is more people i've reached at any point in my life except for that one brief window at crack where the columns were doing

millions of hits and and yeah i had a couple going that went absolutely crazy the 2012 era 10 years ago it was like jesus yeah but i've now like i've that one tiktok that's reached four million people that's now like my third most popular piece of content of my lifetime like of all the things i've touched in my entire writing life of everything is that stupid TikTok post. That's how many people are on TikTok. And I'm not doing anything crazy with it. I'm just doing my old bit. But that's where all the people are.

No, you're not. Yeah. And that's when they put it like whatever. Yeah. You also don't even need to like follow people necessarily just like pops up in people's feeds because that's I mean people just spend hours to scroll like flip through flip through flip through so if you get that one time spent on tiktok blows away every other platform like combined it is so super addictive and again i don't want to be a part of this dystopian mind control software but if you want to reach people it's like well if i'm talking people into putting down their phones and reading this book i wrote then that's

at least something because it's better for them to read a book than to stare at their phone for you know 12 straight hours i mean i still don't understand how it works but i understand now that i should do it but you know what i all just you you are being you're not trying to i mean i don't know i don't know all of your tiktok i i've already admitted i don't use the app but like there's all these dances that you're supposed to do and certain ways you're supposed to do music and i'm like there's you don't have to what you do that's what I thought. I thought it was 15 year old girls doing viral dances.

That's five years ago. Oh, TikTok has expanded, has expanded to everybody. And they have intentionally tweaked it and changed the platform so that the old people are on there. The famous people are on there. And like you still see people doing like syncing stuff up to viral songs because that's a big thing. You can take a sound and then lay your own video over the sound. And like the navigation like encourages you to do that. Like you can grab the popular song of the day or the popular clip of the day and you lip sync to it. But like in my feed, I now get none of that because you train the algorithm for you.

So I get, you know, like the soothing woodworking videos or the interesting people doing gardening stuff or the funny animal stuff. Like it's filtered it down. Like I filtered out all of the, you know, the anti-vaccine craziness and the women promoting their OnlyFans like doing basically sex worker ads. But it takes weeks to train it.

But once you've trained it, it hones in on just what you want. And it's like, it is a social media in on just what you want and it's like it is a social media platform made just for you and it is weird yeah that was one of the uh because i i still haven't like engaged with it and like made tiktoks but like i've i'm dabbling and trying to like get my feed tolerable basically that was one of the the more like alarming things when i first downloaded it and i was like this is like blank feed this is like what they give you and it was just like a lot of just upsetting garbage i guess yes it's trash it's outrage stuff it's it's viral fights and

stuff like that like the default is like this is garbage yeah like pandora's box you open you close it real yeah but then like you start liking stuff and like no this kind of thing and then it adjusts and and improves slightly for example i think there are somewhere out there there are like 15 year old girls who realize i've blocked them on there and think that that i'm mad at them or something it's like no when i first logged in their algorithm fed me a lot of dancing 15 year old girls and i wanted to make it really clear i'm not here for that like i i this is you should only be feeding that to other 15 year olds you should not be saying hey this guy's in his late 40s he'll want to see this no you should it's like no no no uh no give me give me some guy like like fixing up guy's in his late 40s. He'll want to see this. No, you shouldn't. It's like, no, no, no.

No, give me some guy fixing his fence in his backyard and it's soothing to watch him do farm work or something. Give me that. Something that's relaxing and that is not triggering my outrage and definitely not like, hey, you know, these girls will be legal in a few years. Why don't you watch this? Yeah, you got to do a little work to make it tolerable, I think.

To the point that the first time I saw it, I was like, this is a nightmare and I'm not using it. And people kept telling me, no, no, no, you got to click not interested, not interested. Like you got to be really harsh with it. And you got to like block the conspiracy. You got to really signal your boundaries. Yeah, I was going to say firm boundaries. You know, no time to feel bad. you need to make it clear right and it's not enough to just scroll past you have to really say like no that's correct uh that's something that is crucial too uh i was like oh

i can like stuff but like no i scroll past it quickly that means i don't like it no you need to say i do not like this i do that on an instagram feed too but first guys we got to talk about some news other than oh thank goodness news hey there you smell great yes i can smell you i always could have you heard of stamps they're little art pictures that you stick on to mail because mail carriers love art they look at the art while they deliver your mail and the more art you give them, the faster they run. Anyway, stamps.com is a thing you can do if you're too busy to go to the post office. They let you purchase and print stamps right in your home,

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Visit expressvpn.com slash more news right now and get three extra months free through my special link. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash more news. Expressvpn.com slash more news to learn more. Thanks and goodbye. So interrupt me anytime because a lot's happened over the last week. So I'll just start going through this yay timeline and we'll see what happens here. So first he was at Paris Fashion Week with Candace Owens wearingens wearing a white lives matter shirt okay stop uh it's fine uh i just wanted to so we actually have a if you're

listening you can check it out it's from like four or five years ago a video specifically about like the relationship between candace owens and kanye or yay um and like the pragerU sort of ecosystem and their views and how they sort of have leaked into his worldview and apparently expanded quite a bit over the past few years. But continue, sorry. Yeah, that's a good stop and a good reminder. So pause this.

Watch that. Go watch it, yeah. What is it? Two hours, three hours? You know what? I'm going to interrupt you again and say don't pause this. Write a note to yourself

i mean that's probably easier right finish one thing then go to the other but write it do write a note and go find it yeah stay organized unpause so after after paris fashion week he uh tucker carlson invited yay to come on the show two nights of his show were dedicated to this interview um which i've watched way too much of not the whole thing that's the interview where Tucker Carlson invited Ye to come on the show. Two nights of his show were dedicated to this interview, which I've watched way too much of, not the whole thing. That's the interview where he said things like the Gap knew about the Uvalde shooting before it happened. No, I haven't watched this interview, actually. I've seen some clips.

Please explain this to me. I mean, there's nothing to explain. No, that's just it? It's a rambling, kind of chaotic interview. How did the Gap knew? The Gap. Well, oh, he didn't,'t like give his evidence for no like the clothing store the gap yeah yeah yeah yeah and if that's true then god you better loop like banana republican there i'm pretty sure they're owned by the same

company i mean so so this interview airs a lot of clips get shared online it's very odd the uvaldi one did not really get a lot of attention uh this is the first time hearing of it maybe am i losing it on the kanye he did say that like i i heard about it yeah i only realized it like a day ago it wasn't i'm just saying it wasn't like part of like the big burst of like can you believe yay said this and this and this? Yeah. Never trended. I'm on Twitter all day.

Unfortunately, I never saw a trend as a thing. When we're done, I'll look. You get certain trending topics different than me. I'm always like, I think they're giving me specific trending topics, but.

Yeah, that's a good point. We'll look into the mystery, but regardless, there was a lot of stuff about Kanye in the past week. It's easy to imagine that something might get buried because this one isn't explicitly like racist or anti-semitic you know this is just bizarre just bad just conspiracy stuff and he's talked about this

in the past like uh interviews like with specifically like this paranoia of like you think every you look around you think everybody is like out to get you and this sort of like conspiratorial way of thinking that he experiences. OK, I'm going to get to the meat of this. So sorry. At the same time, Metta suspends Ye's account after he shared a text conversation with Diddy in which he accused Diddy of being controlled by Jewish people. Then Ye goes to Twitter. He had his account is active, but he hasn't been on in like a year and a half. He shares a photo of him and Mark Zuckerberg, and he criticizes Zuckerberg for kicking him

off Instagram. Elon Musk tweets, welcome back to Twitter, my friend. And then I think it's the next day or maybe even that night when Ye tweets, I'm a bit sleepy tonight, but when I wake up, I'm going death con three on Jewish people. Funny thing is I actually can't be anti-Semitic because black people are actually Jew. Also, you guys have toyed with me and tried to blackball anyone who ever opposes your

agenda. Man. Follow it up with who do you think invented cancel culture? Oh, sure. Which is also referring to Jewish jewish people yes we have to assume oh boy we kept interrupting you and then i lost i'm like halfway through the timeline here yeah i didn't realize it continued after that

yeah yeah there's a lot more i mean we can save can save it. Keep... I don't know. This is going to... Whatever you say or whatever jokes you make or whatever, I suspect is not going to age well because it feels like this is going to become tragic in a couple years or a few years. So it's one of those things where, well, knowing how the story ended, looking back at how we were kind of making fun of him, it feels, I don't know. Because in this case, like if he is, and I know we don't want to diagnose him from afar. If he is in a truly, like he mentally, if he's having a mental breakdown, then kicking him off of a platform like Twitter is doing him a favor. Because you're just turning him into a sideshow. And actually, if you're Tucker Carlson or you're Candace Owens and you're having him on your show for free clout or whatever it is you think you're doing. It's for their agenda. It's really the black man who agrees with us. And it's clear that he's not connecting thoughts like logically, like he's just seeing stuff. And that's predatory, in my opinion. And I think they are actually more I because they're not crazy. They're not mentally ill. They're just doing it for this is traffic. This is cloud. This is whatever. And so giving him a platform to spout craziness because it's like we're owning the libs, you know, I'm not I'm not excusing anything he said.

I'm just saying that if no, no, it's I mean, it's like, well, because they've been used. I mean, they've been using him for a long time. And like, obviously, like they have this relationship. The worst part to me, it feels that feels gross and predatory and like they're taking advantage of someone who's clearly not in a good place. And I think that's a really important thing. I was going to get through the timeline to bring up the mental health aspect of it because it is like watching a tragedy play out. He's also spewing hateful ideology

that he has been saying for a long time. People have been editing it out. We're going to get to that. And so it is also something that it seems he believes. And so it's a complicated and tricky thing to actually unpack fairly or, yeah, in a way that will age well. But you are also 100% correct that the reason this is happening is because people with an agenda are giving him a platform and it's incredibly manipulative also what he is saying is awful and is a disgusting undercurrent not even undercurrent anymore like because we're going to get to that too but yeah

it's kind of a window into just sort of like the stuff that most most most stuff said are like dog whistles because of because of what he's going through we kind of assume what he's going through um maybe unfairly but like because of that he's sort of letting all of it out that is normally sort of like kept at bay by people who are do have this agenda right and are and are using him to push it and sort of maybe like slowly realizing like oh wait this is actually like irresponsible and he's saying he's saying these things that we're we're we're quote not supposed to say out loud um i don't know. The whole thing is just very odd. And I think everyone listening to this probably knows someone,

either a friend, family member, co-worker, or just somebody they've seen on the internet who started dabbling in conspiracy stuff and started saying some odd conspiracy stuff and kind of like hinted at Pizzagate or they were like, well, you know, really, Epstein, that kind of proves it was all true, blah, blah, blah.

Within months, they're talking about the Jews. There's a mechanism by which, and this is a case where if you are a little bit unstable or just susceptible or just have a type of personality that is paranoid, the internet can draw you in and it all leads back to the same place. Like a lot of the rise of antisemitism that I believe is just due to the conspiracy machinery, because this is why I don't laugh off any conspiracy theory easily. And I don't, I tend not to just laugh at them because it so much of it, the talk of the deep state, the talk of anything like international finance, all that stuff. It always if you scratch one inch deep, you get overt anti-Semitism.

So that's the thing is it's not just that it's it's a particular school of paranoia that causes real harm. People will die because of this. And the internet, it's one of the bad things the internet has given us, the way how easily conspiracy stuff spreads and how easily you can get locked into a bubble of paranoia with thousands of people telling you you're right. Like imagine trying to free yourself of that, falling down that rabbit hole

when you've got thousands of people in some community or subreddit or wherever you're getting your your re your affirmation from reinforcing you every day it's like no no you're if anything you're not paranoid enough go farther yeah you need to pill you even more and so on and people just want answers to things they want a person to pin shit on they want something to point to and you go start looking in all these this this network of conspiracy theories and you see this disgusting through line and yeah anyway i'm just reiterating what you guys said you know this happens or at least has for the last several years, every couple years, we'll get like a Kanye cycle. And, you know, the thing about it is it works so well for people like Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, because they're not getting the criticism right now, when like, Tucker featured him for two days on his show, let him say whatever he want, agreed with him at several points, several points and then says hey we're just asking questions here and so it's tucker really highlighting all of these things and yet he gets to sit back and get the ad money on his show and not really get the criticism that should be focused

on him pretty much week in and week out for spewing these ideas overtly every week. And for, yeah. And for preying on people who, yeah, are in various States. I mean, even like even his, his, uh, presentation of the interview was that look,

Kanye is fine and everything he's saying is reasonable and he's doing well. Um, and if you look at like the things he cut out, which we'll then we'll get to. Yeah. Yeah. Let's get to that because I feel like that's actually the key to all of this.

It's really important. So earlier this week, Vice published several clips from that Tucker interview that were not aired, including that Ye is vaccinated. He says offhand that he's vaccinated. Tucker cut it out. There's more conspiracy stuff in there

about where fake children were planted in his house to manipulate his own children which is a really disturbing and again something i want to interject and just say it speaks to he himself has talked about publicly the fact that with his the stuff that he deals with he is subject to paranoia that he is subject to conspiracy thinking you know and this is so alarming and obviously indicates that in this present moment this is a man who's not well he hints at you know being truman showed kind of thing and then there's some other anti-semitic things that got cut out he said i prefer my kids new hanukkah than kwanzaa at least it will come with some financial engineering which is i mean that's just uh all of that is a nod to everything we've just talked about for us yeah there was another one he said he said like he trusts working with uh latinos yeah um and not well and then he like

paused like well not i won't say it let's just say certain businessmen yep uh something along those lines i think the exact quote um but yeah it's more more of that kind of thing but not as oh not as oh like not like they kept the not as overt stuff in the interview they cut this stuff that's very very concerning and framed it like everything's fine actually which is so so many words it's really grotesque and cynical and irresponsible. And before we unpack some of this, I just want to add that there's an ex-TMZ staffer. You know, we've mentioned this, that 2018 rant where they, you know, they cut out that Kanye saying that he loved Hitler and Nazis. That was along with that slavery.

It was a choice. It was a choice. It was a choice. Situation. Yeah. There's other, there are other situations of this. Not just right now is my point. Oh,

is there still more in the timeline or is it, oh, I guess there's the thing from this morning. The banking thing is yeah. Now that's okay. Most updated thing on the timeline. So several business partners have reportedly ended their relationship with Ye, including Adidas, which says

it's placing its partnership with West Under Review and JPMorgan Chase, which is reportedly ending its relationship with the Yeezy brands, but it's interesting because that news comes from a Candace Owens tweet with a letter from JPMorgan and it's

not overt, but she is kind of like, wink, wink, oh, look, a bank is cutting ties with Kanye. That's, you know, that's... It's the same message that they're getting across, you know? Here's the thing. Here's the trap. Here's why that conspiracy theory works so well and why it has persisted for ever.

I don't know, since the Bible times, any action that anyone in a place of business or finance takes against you for saying the anti-Semitic stuff now becomes evidence in your paranoid brain. See? See? Look who controls. It's like, well, yeah, God forbid this should just be capitalism and these businesses not wanting the stink of this scandal on them because, you know, businesses, no business wants that unless they think they can get away with it without anybody finding out. But no matter what action you take, like if he gets banned from Twitter again, if he gets banned from like immediate, it's like, see, see, they're scared of the truth. So everything that happens, every consequence, whether you're talking

about a celebrity like him, or whether you're talking about some random guy in Virginia who has gotten his kids taken away because he's ranting and raving and doing crazy things, like, see, see, they control the arms of power and they can like it is very hard to rescue somebody from that it is almost a type of like cult thinking i guess where oh yeah any it's all it's packaged so that anything that happens just is evidence it's the same thing where it's like well you know i i've looked for evidence. This is true. And there's no evidence. Like, that's just proof of how powerful they are. They can get rid of any records. And, you know, I don't know. And again, this is trolls will try to say,

well, you either have to, you know, you have to condemn what he says, or you have to acknowledge that he's just mentally ill. It's like, well like well no it's the words are damaging to anyone who hears them because they don't know his state of mind but also he seems badly in need of help for all of these million other instances of him saying things that he clearly is yeah not i mean even like the thing about his kids is like so alarming it is because like you're you have these kids at your house and you think that they're like out to get you that's really and the idea of feeling like he's on the truman show i mean look he's a he he's suffering from something that brings out paranoia and he's a very very very famous person every time he goes anywhere he is document he is

on camera he does have a weird power over our zeitgeist and um yeah we we have to take a break soon tangential to this exact conversation i want to add in that this week tulsi gabbard um surprised everybody with the shocking news that she left the democratic party and in doing so called it an elitist cabal of warmongers and i wanted to add that to this conversation because you know she's a fox newser she's also in line with everybody she has obviously been in line with them for a very long time but this language you know the this this conspiracy minded anti-semitic coded coded word language for anti-semitism you know it's just it's very yeah and like and like what you're uh jason kind of what you were alluding to earlier about like the the explanation is that it's how capitalism works like any like

any like woke thing that a company does it's like well it's not because of this conspiracy or this it's because they know that they'll lose money if they're associated with this and if they if they claim that they believe this then they'll make more money because they want to maximize their profits yeah right when when conservatives burn colin kaepernick jerseys it's owning the libs but when like a major corporation is like we don't want to be associated with this vitriol then it's like cancel culture and trying to hide the secret truth. Yeah. Anyhow. Both parties are warmongers. Right. Those, the one, the one thing, the one bill that never. The United States is a warmonger.

Yeah. The one bills that never get stopped in the Senate are the defense appropriation. Like that's the one thing that both parties, those sail through like, like 93 to seven. We agree on nothing else. You could not, you could not pass rules for clean drinking water, anything else that would not be a fight to the death. The tacking on an $80 billion to the defense budget, no problem. But that's like screaming that they're warmongers. That has now become the realm of extreme libertarians and weirdos or whatever. And that is really weird because that should be more of a

mainstream there should be at least one mainstream party that's against like whatever ukraine whatever that specific situation the one party that's like it's we're too quick to send cruise missiles to places um and right now but that so she's right about that but wrong about everything else everything right and like why it's happening too right it's like they want they want people make money from selling weapons and like giving weapons and like i mean warmonger is correct but she's wrong in what she's saying and specifically the language that she used to say it is tapping into something pretty insidious anyway we got to take a quick break for advertisements as they say other places they do but we will be back so quickly so soon for even

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Slurp your way to success with AG1. And we are back, as promised, for even more news. Jason, you are a dream podcast guest because, you know, you're smart and articulate. And also, you pitch ideas for stories. And so this is this is a jason suggestion let's talk about fentanyl in halloween candy cool i can i can kick us off so again again stop real quick everybody if you're listening we've done an episode of some more news about fentanyl and how all the fear around it is bullshit, specifically about Halloween candy and this myth. Anyway, we're back.

Let us clarify that fentanyl will kill a bunch of people this year. It will not kill children trick-or-treating. To be clear, opioids are savaging this country, and it is a nightmare. For some reason, we insist on making up a fictional version of this crisis. And we always do this. We always do this. Yeah. It's not killing kids or the cops. Let's just say that. So what I'll just say, what I'll just say, I'm sure there's more things that I'll say, but

yeah, fentanyl is actually a problem and there is much to be said about it. However, not this story. And stories like this diminish the conversation that actually should be happening, which is, hey, adult, maybe be careful what you do on Halloween evening. But like that's separate from what your children are getting in their trick-or-treat bags anyway a lot of you out there who think you're shooting up innocent heroin it's actually got fentanyl either mixed in it or it is entirely fentanyl and somehow you won't believe me it is way worse than heroin anyway but but it will not kill you through skin contact it will not kill you because a police officer was arresting somebody and they touched someone

and then they went into cardiac arrest because the fentanyl seeped through their skin. It does not work that way. It works because regular old addicts, a lot of them who got addicted to painkillers through pharmaceutical companies and are looking to continue their addiction, the old fashioned addiction way. But please, I'm sorry, jonathan tell us about the stupid rainbow story i just want to give the background which is this started this current panic started with a dea press release on august 30th that said the agency was seizing more multi-colored fentanyl

pills and powder they have a picture of it it looks very they're very colorful little pills the press release and this seems odd for a government agency speculates that it's a quote deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults the press release said nothing about halloween but then this really kicked off on fox news you got laura trump and members of congress shelly more capita you've got the attorney general of florida all saying that they're intentionally for for some reason, going to try to sneak candy into the baskets of trick-or-treaters, which makes zero sense if you were trying to... First of all, if you want to make money off fentanyl, you're not going to kill kids?

Because that's what it would do. It's not like, oh, the kid's addicted to fentanyl now're not gonna like kill kids because that's what it would do like it's not like oh the kid's addicted to fentanyl now it's like no that kid's dead that's not a good business plan well year olds don't have a steady income to buy fentanyl with such a good point it does no good to get someone addicted at age nine or ten and and you know if anything if you poison a child they're going to find you like child, they're going to find you. They know they're going to be able to track exactly what houses that kid went to. Right. The drug cartels are not having meetings saying, okay, you know what our next revenue stream is? It's suburban allowance money.

We're going to get it in $10 and $15 increments by getting nine-year-olds hooked. It makes literally no sense, but you'll just see people repeating this. I have a clip of Lara Trump on Fox News if you want to listen to it for a 30-second clip. I'll share my screen. I'm going to go use the bathroom on you. You have to ingest it.

Yeah, you look at the police officers who, when they just pat people down and they find it, if it touches their fingers, they literally go into shock. Panic attacks. Some, I think, have died from it. The idea that you could have a kid anywhere in America, if one child dies from this on Halloween,

I got to tell you, we have to take action to stop this right now because parents are terrified and we have no answers. What are we supposed to do? You have no answers. So Democrats ruin Halloween too. The Democrats ruin Halloween. Okay, you're we're having this conversation i'm like what do these fucks have against halloween it's it's yeah just fear-mongering uh democrats the border open borders even though they seize all the drugs all the time and they're like look the border is

open they're seizing all these drugs like isn't that what you want it's so silly the idea also real quick that guy who's that guy that guy from the real world one of those hosts is from the real world san francisco oh no is it is that puck yeah yeah no it's uh i forget his name it's not it's definitely not park and to talk about the ramble fentanyl scourge, Puck. It's incredible. I mean, he's just as qualified as everybody else there. I don't know. Let's find out. I can't answer that. Nobody Google Puck. It's not going to brighten the mood.

It's not going to be good news. David Rainey lives. Oh, Jesus. But one of these hosts is from the real world San Francisco. He's the same guy who like four years ago, it was like after one of the many shootings that we experience uh in this country and he was talking about the marxist that killed gabby giffords gabby giffords is not dead no she is not um just so

everybody knows anyway he's right that they have no answers. So they nailed it. That they also don't have the right questions either. Do they now to be clear right now, there are children in proximity to fentanyl in trailers and in small rundown homes in Appalachia and in many parts of the country because their parents are just old fashioned addicts and they are careless and they're leaving it sitting around. Again, contact is not the problem with fentanyl.

It is the old fashioned way. But for example, ask anybody who deals with the homeless, and fentanyl is ravaging that population. It is eating them alive. It is so dangerous. It is so addictive. And these people are already in frail states of health. The homeless population, like the condition they're in versus 10 years ago, it is frankly terrifying. It is terrifying what fentanyl has done to that population. No one on Fox News could give a shit about that. It's because they're picturing like these white cherub-faced children trick-or-treating the most innocent of holidays with their plastic pumpkin and some evil person in the neighborhood who just purely through evilness wants to distribute rainbow fentanyl. because of the Democrats, because as we know, the opioid addiction crisis can be traced back to the giant corporation that the Democrats ran, Purdue Pharma, and the Democrat, the famous Democrat pharma industry. And Joe Biden's famous open border policy, which is what they're really

trying to target in. And again, we've never had an open border president. That's never been a thing. Obama loved to deport people. That's never, that has never been a thing. And are you guys, you guys are younger than I am. You guys, I'm a Gen X, which anybody knows the moment they see me because they're like, you're so like extreme. You're from the extreme era the 90s um you guys are uh millennials gen z whatever i don't know what i don't know what ages you're putting out there for yourselves um early 20s early gen i'm

in my early 20s for sure did you guys in school did you have the scare about the razor blades hidden in halloween because i know it's a meme now, people making fun of it, where people will break open a snicker bar and there's like a gun in there. And it's a joke on Twitter. And I am surprised that the younger people know what that is, because I thought that was an 80s era scare. I did not know that was a thing that persisted. I think it lingered into the 90s.

It was 90s too. Cool, because it's like, it's something every couple of years i and like it's fentanyl this time uh there's a period where it was like weed gummies right they're putting they're making the gummies uh the edibles and they're putting it in the candy so i feel like it's something it really is every year and like i do remember the razor blades in the 90s, too. Okay. Which, again, that is based on like one incident where it was like an abusive parent doing it to their own children. The idea that there was ever a house in the neighborhood just giving out masses of booby-trapped fruit or whatever was never real. Because, again, that's not a crime you can get away with a parent's going to remember where they the house they gave out the apples because the kids remember to vandalize those

houses they gave out fruit like that's right trust me the kids remember who gave out the apples on candy night it's not a crime you could like like that it's such a weird idea of how the world works that you think that on a night when a kid may have only gone to 25 houses, that you're not going to remember which house gave you the apple that had the razor blades inserted into the skin. Very obvious wounds there where they've, like, it was never a thing. But we had cops come to our school every year on Halloween saying, do not take, you know, unwrapped candy from strangers. Do not take like home-baked goods from strangers. It can be laced with poison, whatever. As if this is just the way the world works. Every third adult wants to, you know, as a sadist who wants to harm children. Now, to be fair, any kids listening, I know you're about to go trick-or-treating.

If there are any children, I know you have a lot of children who listen to SpyFan. Primary demographic. You can go trick-or-treating in a couple of weeks. If there is an adult handing out unwrapped candy bars, I will say don't eat those. Oh, yeah. Make sure there's, eat the stuff that's still in the package. Exposed Kit Kats, maybe don't eat those. That is a little, that is a little weird.

I've not run across it, but the person who has given you this stuff or maybe got a bite taken out of it, don't go ahead and eat the rest of it. We are obsessed with this idea of, it bothers me because, again, right now somewhere there is a child who is being harmed and or killed by their own parent or their own caregiver.

It happens all the time. And it happens due to substance abuse, mental illness, whatever. It's brutal, horrible divorces and parents that are feuding with each other and get back to their kids. There are sadistic things being done to children. It is not overwhelmingly, it is not being done by strangers. It is not being done by the godless hordes out there it is being done by people they know yep same thing with them like i don't know if because

you're you're a famous tiktoker now you've seen i'm sure like a lot of videos about like you know parking lot kidnappings for sex trafficking and stuff and like you know it's obviously very good it's good to be safe and be aware of your surroundings because you never know what's going to happen but again the same situation where like most of most sex trafficking is done in like in families um and people you know and it isn't just random like it is not at target right our our precious middle-aged white women at target being kidnapped out of parking lots which is the trend that's on tiktok it, look, if you see a zip tie tied to the rear handle of your

Honda Accord, that's how traffickers flag women for kidnapping. It's like, I'm not saying that's never happened. I'm not saying human trafficking is not a problem. It is a massive problem. Millions of people and youths are trafficked around the world. They are not Midwestern

white women coming out of Target. Those are not the people that need to feel threatened yeah but obviously like you know like like again important to protect yourself and be aware of your surroundings but like framing it in this way of like watch out for this watch out for this this is all the sex sex trafficking going on it's like well it's honestly very similar to the conversation we had earlier about yay and conspiracy theories in a different way it's just and you're amplifying this for these fearful reasons again with about where it's like if if you actually look into the topic it's actually about this and this group of people this population and they don't actually care about that um it's just these little point things like even Dan Crenshaw tweeted about the Halloween candy fentanyl. And it's like who there's nobody reasonable or serious.

Well, yeah, Chuck Schumer was sharing this around as well. This was like one of. Yeah, Chuck Schumer was like, I mean, that's the claim and stuff. But again, it all goes from like one. They go from one picture of colored, it looks like colored little pills with completely context list to you have to be very afraid. Parents should be very afraid. And then one group takes that and goes, and here's why the Democrats are ruining Halloween. Well, here's allow me to share a conspiracy theory I believe in.

You are free to disagree with me. I believe that social media and cable news, that the information skews heavily toward a message of the only thing that is safe to do is to stay inside and stare at a screen. And that whether they know it or not, like from their point of view, all they know is that the ratings go up when we scare people. Yes.

But ultimately a lot of us know older people who their life has become staying at home and staring at either Fox news or they've graduated to one American news or they they're on the internet and they're watching Alex Jones do a show for five hours a day. But it, it is a drumbeat of outside your door are savages. or they're on the internet and they're watching Alex Jones do his show for five hours a day. But it is a drumbeat of outside your door are savages. There are the streets, there people are roaming the streets, just snatching people off the streets, your children.

It's not safe to go outside. It's not safe to go outside after dark. If you go outside, you need to have a gun. You've seen those funny photos on the internet of the guy who's at Subway, the restaurant, not the transportation. And he's got like a pistol on his back and an AR-15. He's there to get a sandwich. Like that's what he wore out. He went out with 600 rounds of ammunition to get a meatball sub.

And it's like that is somebody who is just drilling into his brain every day out outside outdoors is just this is terrifying it's a nightmare it's a dystopia and every person outside too not just like the the environment or like society or like not trusting anybody or other people are your enemy yeah keeping people afraid and making it everyone is also i mean that's how you how we're controlled you know it's how we're manipulated it's how we buy the stories and the answers that specific people want to sell us yeah and you have uh this sort of uh graduation i guess uh well yay reference for you uh graduation from uh 24 hour news to this where well now it's all in everybody's pocket so they can they can keep you even more if you if you are sensationalizing every single moment well you don't

have to be glued to a tv now and you have you have to you can be in bed scrolling you know you can you can take it wherever you go in your house um constantly be onto the next thing. Yeah. They don't have to openly tell you the only safe activity is to stare at the screen because if they're delivering, if every segment is here's something else that can kill you. Well, the consequences of not watching this show mean you're not going to be aware

of the next candy fentanyl crisis. So you'd better stay glued right here because this is and it is such a miserable way to live and this is why i am one place where i am i truly have an unpopular opinion is when i see a group of like q anon crazies and you see that they're like in their 50s and 60s, and they're right there in their QAnon gear, and they've got their banner they made, and the movement is dangerous. Again, somebody will die because of this, because they're being pushed to, it's like, this is a war.

They're going to start rounding us up and killing us any day now, any day. That's the message. I think each of those people is a victim. I think they are miserable. I think it has severed the relationships in their lives. I think there are millions of people who don't talk to their grandparents anymore or their aging parents

because they have fallen down the One American News rabbit hole and they just can't have a conversation with them anymore because it steers into this paranoia stuff. You're living in different realities. You can't even have the same language to talk about anything. And I think it is simultaneously okay, like what I said about Kanye, to say what he said is repugnant. And also, I think he is miserable.

I think he's legitimately terrified. I think he probably doesn't sleep at night. I think he probably does not function normally. Because he's walking around thinking that his children are playing with actors, with child actors that have been planted there. Like, that is a horrible way to live. It's not like he's getting away with anything. Now, Tucker Carlson is getting away with something.

Alex Jones is getting away with something. They're profiting massively off this paranoia. But the people themselves who have the paranoia, who wake up every day with it, who go to bed every day with it, it's an awful way to live. They can't make friends. They can't live a normal life because how can you be friends with somebody who's part of the evil cabal or whatever the language is this week?

Right. And the friends they do make are just going to push them deeper down. It's because it's that cult thinking of you can only be friends within the group. Otherwise, you're, you know, because only we have like the secret language and only we understand each other because they've all got this. The terminology they use or whatever, and it's stuff that's only identifiable to other QAnon types. And it is it's awful in a lot of ways it's also very very sad yeah it's sad

and concerning um that's the the tension and the real frustrating part is that it's they're just being preyed upon um and some people are easier to prey upon uh for various reasons in their situation and they know they know that they're doing that um which makes it all the worse i'm just reading um guys we had so many stories to talk about but instead we really got a lot out of these first two and i loved it but now it is time for us to talk to you jason real quick before we go about your new book which is called called If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. Promote it.

Promote the book. I don't know. Every time I go on the former Cracked People show, which again, it's only yours, but I never know what percentage of the people know me or from, because you've obviously grown your show beyond Cracked as a brand.

And probably some people listening to this don't know until this very moment that like I, you know, we all used to work together until 2017 or whatever that cursed year was. Whatever meta took the reins. And yeah, the next episode, we will talk about that. But the other thing that I'm known for, aside from working at Craig's, I wrote a book called John Dies at the End that became a film and that launched a book writing career for me. Well, this book is part of that series. It's a John Dies at the End. There's a series of books that are episodic.

You can read them in any order, but it stars the same characters. This is the fourth one. And some people have been waiting for four years for this to come out and it's a big deal. And then other people have no idea who I am or what I'm talking about. But it's called, if this book exists, you're in the wrong universe. It is out next Tuesday, October 18th, 2022. If you're listening to this episode three years from now, for some reason, it's out there. Get it at a used bookstore bookstore it has a big lime green cover it's very easy to spot have it imported into your quest two where you're stuck all day with the headset we're all using in the future the vr that we we of course

have all migrated to yeah yeah look it up we've resisted it for years and they're like all right i guess that's where everybody is so i guess we we'll do that. I didn't realize this is the fourth book. That's incredible. Is there going to be a fifth? Are you going to keep going? I am under contract for a fifth. It's coming in 2026. Excellent.

But this is my sixth novel overall. I have the Zoe Ash sci-fi novel so that it is as surprising to me as anyone else. I'm under contract for, I just signed a deal for three more books. I'm under contract for book seven, eight, and nine. That's incredible. That's so exciting. Really cool. Yeah, it is exciting,

but it is also when you're living your life like one yearly deadline at a time, time moves really fast. Yeah, I bet. Really fast. And there's people I've not talked to for six months and it's like, well, we just spoke. It's like, no, that just spoke. It's like,

no, that was, that was an April. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we thank you for taking the time to speak with us.

This was great. Yeah. Check all, all the books out there. Bizarre and hilarious. Yeah. Do that. Follow him on all the platforms.

I'd say. Yeah. The username is Jason K. Pargin, P-A-R-G-I-N, but it's same username on Instagram. If you're still one of the old people using Instagram, which I guess is now, I thought was new and I still don't know how to use Instagram, but we're moving on. And the kids have moved on to, what are we doing? Now the kids are moving on to Snapchat.

What's the one? I think Snap is still hanging around. Telegram. What do the kids use now? Clubhouse. I think the kids use Snapchat to DM each other. Yeah. Because it's like Instagram and Snapchat are just how they chat.

Yeah. Snapchat, they try to make it like a platform. Like, look, you can get your news on Snapchat. I don't know if that ever really took hold. Okay. But now that everybody's parents are on TikTok, the kids will move elsewhere. So what's the kids new? Are they on LinkedIn?

Truth Social. Newspapers. They're going analog and retro. They're communicating via the classifieds in newspapers now. Messenger pigeons. Oh, wouldn't that be great? Like the vinyl resurgence. It's like, let's get into like analog news

and post classified ads. That'd be fun. It would be fun. Yeah, in real life. In real life, we'll see each other because that's the one thing they can't spy on yet. Yeah. Is if we just meet at a house

and just hang out together. Leave your phones at the door, though. Otherwise, you're going to get targeted ads for whatever you talk about. God, it's so fucking true. Okay, I'm wrapping this up. This has been wonderful. Follow Jason.

Follow us. I don't know. Oh, God. Yeah, why not? Just why not? Why not do it? You probably do. You're listening to the podcast.

You probably already do. Don't unfollow. Just follow. No. Okay, we're done. We love you very much. Very much.