The Daily Zeitgeist - Alec BaldTrend 6/5: '7M' Documentary, Spotify, RealPage, Trump, Alec Baldwin, Venom

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

In this edition of Alec BaldTrend, Jack and Miles discuss the '7M' documentary on Netflix, Spotify raising their prices, RealPage getting investigated by the FBI for rental market price fixing,  a Trump trial update, Alec Baldwin's new reality show on TLC, the trailer for the new 'Venom' movie and much more!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just starting your career. That's where we come in. Think of us as your work besties

you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jess Costavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shekinah Church. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is season four of Naked Sports. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. Every great player needs a foil. I know I'll go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game.

Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Listen to the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese on the iHeart on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast presented by capital one founding partner of iheart women's sports hello the internet and welcome to this episode of alec bald trend the new bald trend a bald trend lie um hey that tire's got some bald trends on it. Oh. I mean, come on.

Hey, everybody, seriously, check the treads on your tires. For real. So many people out here do not understand how fucking precarious your situation is. Tires looking like fucking inner tubes out here. Yo, when your tire's out here looking like my head after I just shaved it. Yeah, you don't want that. You don't want that you don't want that baby's bottom dangerous i'm jack o'brien that well that's miles gray yeah

uh and christopher uh these are some of the things that are trending on this wednesday afternoon miles breaking news you and i started watching uh the 7m documentary uh that just on our own independently uh living parallel separate lives yeah yeah yeah yeah it's i think the number one thing on netflix maybe it is the number one thing on netflix so we're not alone um it's not that crazy that we start watching it at the same time no the algorithms made us i was excited to watch uh my wife and i had the had date night last night i love a tuesday date night you know usually we're thursday but sometimes we push it forward because we got a alternate and a tuesday date night getting that in early in the week what do you do this is gonna

stay at home date night or you went to like so last night we went to uh a korean dessert place with shaved snow and just got a little dessert had some chicken wings before um uh-huh and then came home and watched i thought we were going to be able to watch uh the new link later movie uh hitman because i like richard link later movies and i love the premise of this movie which is essentially that hitmen don't really exist which is something we kept running into in uh something we kept running into at cracked when we were like we kept finding these stories where people would try and hire hitmen and they would always be fbi stings it was just always fbi stings every over and over again and so like wait did hitmen get invented by movie genres and like they don't actually exist or wouldn't like richard kuklinski

be like the only person you could kind of call it there's like mob man yeah there's like mob people for sure but like in terms of people who are just like a set of skills i'm a hitman who's just like all purpose um doesn't really exist and so they do they're called our our modern law enforcement hey watch it sorry okay sorry gotta go but this documentary anyways came home that movie doesn't come out on netflix until friday so we watched the 7m documentary one long walk to tell you why i started watching this documentary everyone's watching um i gotta say it's in a korean church yeah it's interesting because i remember seeing the trailer and i was like man i don't give a shit about no tiktok dancing shit like like the trailer sadly i'm so fucking depraved i was like where's the murder at and i'm like this ain't a cult then like this ain't a cult i need to

fucking know about like where are people getting fucking carved up and served up to the tiktok lord um but when you watch it it is a very interesting look in how you know fame and the pursuit of stardom combined with many other factors like fitting in and having like you know financial stability can turn you into a servant of this pastor who apparently is just a pipe hyper cult he takes the kids from their family uh and they cut their family off they cut all their old friends out of their lives and he's like i'm gonna make you rich and famous um yeah and it's wild too because some of the people were like i mean and i was getting money so it was even though i had to give 50 to him and the all these tithings and shit uh it's it yeah i don't know

but i think it's really interesting and i'm i'm gonna finish it i'm two episodes in and they're like very successful dancers like the people who uh are part of the cult have like millions of followers on instagram and like there there are ads that they show like them getting this like toyota ad where they're like dancing their way into you know some some new model of toyota um and i was like that looks familiar but right i think that seems like it's all look the same now yeah yeah but anyways no word on what the seven m's stand for i don't think as of yet uh we do have a uh a story tomorrow about 3m yeah you can look forward to but we're just knocking out all the uh numbered m uh evils in the world um but yeah i think it's uh yeah it's just a it's

interesting i think like it says a lot to me it said a lot about like i feel like the pandemic was also a huge thing that drove a lot of these creators into this business relationship because this guy had a house and it's sort of like hey man there's not work right now but we can figure out a way to do it etc etc yeah um but yeah yeah so we will uh i i don't know if I'll continue watching it. Uh, my wife grew up in a Korean church and was like, this looks like all the shots from inside the cult, like look like what she grew up around, but obviously they weren't forced to like move into a giant, uh,

housing complex together where like he determined who, who you live with. Yeah. I gotta say though her the choreography she does in her tiktok so it's pretty next level yeah and she did just announce that she signed with 7m but that's more for business purposes and the reason jack isn't in the videos anymore is because he's taking a little bit of a break from the o'brien's family account yeah yeah oh i still do have the main problem that you are mentioning

that like this could just be like a couple years of them yeah they're like yeah they weren't talking to us anymore um for a little while but then they got over it you know like the the actual stakes might not be no but i think you realize i think i and also for me being like a new parent like just when you see like this sort of contorted looks of pain on the faces of these parents who are like, they're like, my kid literally doesn't talk to me anymore. And like,

they shun me because they've now, this person is their new everything. It that's, I get those stakes, but yeah, maybe it'll, I'm like, I'm like in my mind,

like, does it need to be more salacious than that for you to actually engage with it? And part of me is like, maybe, but no, but no, I might stick around. there's a wild part where they're like the parents go out to california they're like from detroit and they're like just going around looking at the background of the videos and trying to like geo match it with like this neighborhood that they think that she might live in and they like successfully do it

they're like wait there's a water tower back there oh google water i mean honestly if you had some shit like that i feel like the freaks that i've seen on the internet who can look at just random street view pictures and be like this is bulgaria yeah and you're like what that's wild yeah and listen all right uh spotify is raising their prices again um whereas grocery stores target walmart aldi are all lowering prices on some items mcdonald's even mcdonald's even so i don't know we've been hearing for years uh now that it's just inflation these are complicated market forces that are beyond our control and uh really the only person we can blame is like joe biden and uh the fed and uh you know or whoever's president

and uh something something balance the budget except we're getting more and more evidence that prices are going up because they the people realize that there's not enough competition to have any reason not to raise prices on people. So basically, this is where capitalism stops working. So for instance, with Spotify, the company underwent three rounds of job cuts last year. So people are pointing that being like, so they got to raise prices to get some more money. You look at that, company must be in some rough shape. No, wait, they reported a record profit of $183 million in the first quarter of 2024. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I think at this point, we really have to stop

even mentioning inflation as a thing anymore because it's become so clear. It's just prices have gone up in so many sectors purely because they kind of looked around. They're like, hey, man, you raise prices, too, and they're still buying it? Yeah. Okay, then maybe let's raise it a little bit more and just start making more money. I don't think they really know. We can just keep saying it's inflation and shit like that yeah we're just basically finding out that they will raise they will charge you as much as they can get away with not so they can like pay for innovation but so that their shareholders and

executives can take that money and put it in their bank account. Right. Like that's, that is what the out of control inflation is. So for it with target Walmart, I'll be like that. Nothing happened all of a sudden up the, you know, supply chain. It's just,

they recognize, okay, customers seem to be bothered by this. So now there's an opportunity for us to lower prices. I'm not complaining about that it's just interesting that you know the media that's supposed to be charting this and talking about how it's like out of their control and there's nothing that can be done is no longer raising those like out of control you know market forces that are as unshakable as gravity

now that they're lowering prices it's just like yeah so they're gonna try this to see if they can you know, market forces that are as unshakable as gravity. Now that they're lowering prices, it's just like, yeah, so they're going to try this to see if they can get more money. The other detail that came out in the past couple of weeks is that the FBI recently rated a corporate landlord as part of an investigation into, uh, their artificially increasing rents through collusion. And so the investigation centers around the use of something called RealPage, which is a software that these different corporate landlords use to set prices for rent. But what it's doing is technically making it so everybody raises prices at the same rate uh in the same areas so there's no competition there's one central price setter and they are the thing that is that they're

interested in is making as much money for landlords as possible yeah and that's illegal that's called collusion dude they're even telling even telling on themselves. Well, it feels like they don't know that this is illegal. They're like, wait, what? Right. The morality aside, they're like, I think you can do this. Yeah. And just turn the volume up on people. Yeah.

Landlords that are supposed to be in competition with each other outsource daily pricing and ongoing revenue oversight to RealPage. And the company allegedly or the company like basically says it in their literature. They're like, we allow corporate landlords who are technically competitors to work together to make us all more successful in our pricing. Put a evil fucking statement. Yeah. to make us all more successful in our pricing put a evil fucking statement yeah to make us all more successful and i want i want more success in my pricing yes yeah exactly you mean fucking squeezing every last penny out of something anyway wow yeah uh fbi i hope this leads to something but it's just we've completely lost track of how capitalism is supposed to even work because it's just been so out of control, deregulated, and all of the communication has been taken over by the corporate side of the conversation. So that there's nothing pushing back on.

Well, except for now, people just being fed up and it's just all going to manifest and just instability but even this massive price fixing like collusion scandal like doesn't get picked up that much it's pretty crazy like the FBI raided their corporate headquarters and is like this is

wild this is not just a local story this is nationally like this software is being used nationally to set prices and like prices have been going up, I think 30% year over year around the country. Yeah. So, uh, but maybe good news, maybe, maybe people are getting fed up enough that we're going to, people are going to start paying attention to shit like this.

Uh, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back i'm jess casaveto executive producer of the hit netflix documentary series dancing for the devil the 7m tiktok cult and i'm cleo gray former member of 7m films and shekinah church and we're the host of the new podcast forgive me Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and LA-based Shekinah Church, an alleged cult that has impacted members for over two decades. Jessica and I will delve into the hidden truths between high-control groups and interview dancers, church members, and others whose lives and careers have been impacted, just

like mine. Through powerful, in-depth interviews with former lives and careers have been impacted, just like mine. Through powerful, in-depth interviews with former members and new, chilling firsthand accounts, the series will illuminate untold and extremely necessary perspectives. Forgive Me For I Have Followed will be more than an exploration. It's a vital revelation aimed at ensuring these types of abuses never happen again. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente.

And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions, like how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or, can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes.

Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do. Like resume specialist Morgan Saner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote. What is it like you miss 100% of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career

without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How do you feel about biscuits? Hi, I'm Akilah Hughes, and I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel Spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the Rebels, into something everyone in the South loves, the Biscuits. I was a lady rebel. Like, what does that even mean?

The Boone County Rebels will stay the Boone County Rebels with the image of the Biscuits. It's right here in black and white in print. A lion. An individual that came to the school saying that God sent him to talk to me about the mascot switch. As a leader, you choose hills that you want to die on. Why would we want to be the losing team? I'd just take all the other stuff out of it. Segregation academies.

When civil rights said that we need to integrate public schools, these charter schools were exempt from that. Bigger than a flag or mascot. You have to be ready for serious backlash. Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back. Just a little detail from the Trump trial.

Some people are floating the theory uh most notably us in the right now uh that trump lost in new york because his legal team was constantly bloated and drowsy from the shit diet that he forced down their throat one of his lawyers uh todd blanche uh just appeared on a legal podcast and described how his criminal defense was fueled by junk food including mcdonald's um and there's images of just giant like it looks like the secret service is doing uber eats yeah secret service has returned from a costco shopping trip dude they don't even have like the regular hand like these mcdonald's bags have fucking handles on them yeah so much fucking each there's like the biggest mcdonald's bags you can

possibly three secret service agents bags in both hands some have multiple bags in each hand and man the stress eating in there must have been fucking out of control if like everything was mcdonald's it's like yeah all hands on deck man just more burgers pizza i just need to be farting i just need to be farting so i can stay awake folks yeah this does shed some light and into i need to fart to wake myself up um but it does shed some light into like the thing that we heard about him in court was that he was very sleepy and farting um yeah and hey processed foods to do a body terrible and when it wasn't mcdonald's it was quote pizza or quote other non-healthy alternatives to mcdonald's that is such a funny description so the lawyer had to like stop eating he was like so i had to like eat on my way to court or on my

way home and i ended up losing eight pounds as a result um wow yeah yeah that's wild i mean i just again i love that they're like other unhealthy options you could have just said it was just other junk food but just like really being like yeah i wonder what that would have been if he's not eating what what does he pivot to if you're a mcdonald's guy like it's not burger king yeah do you like maybe maybe it is just burger king mr president what about shake shack what no too healthy too healthy yeah totally i feel like would be too healthy. I love a fucking Fiesta Bowl. Remember that when he was running for president?

He said he had the best taco bowl. Yeah, I love a taco bowl here. Fantastic. He really is just Richie Rich as an adult. He can't even comprehend that a team of grown-up legal experts would not want fucking McDonald's three meals a day i know it's so

but i mean that's how far like you know you talk about people who have sycophants around them they completely lose touch but to lose touch to the point where you think you can subject other adults to three square meals of mcdonald's a day and that's gonna I don't even know if I would have done that at my highest as a teenager. Be like, yeah, dude, McDonald's breakfast, McDonald's lunch, McDonald's dinner. It must have smelled like absolute shit

in that room. And then in the courtroom too. That can't be. There are all these hacks of you wear glasses on the stand or when you're a defendant and it makes you look more innocent. But I wonder if they have smell hacks where they'll just be unleashing Filet-O-Fish farts in the courtroom. Come on, you don't fart off Filet-O-Fish, man.

It makes you stronger. Nah, man. Okay. That's the one health food had no idea that's the when i feel healthy that's again yeah i think i mean that's why i think why i would always eat subway tuna because even though it is actually like calorically that may be like worse because it's just basically mayonnaise and yoga mats crunched up together um part of me is like man it's a tuna though that's that's natural it's

from the sea you might have those forever chemicals though bro yeah look you'll hear there's another revelation that jack breaks on my absolute dome piece in the episode tomorrow and you'll lose even more respect for me you're mostly microplastics at this point yeah it's fine it's fine all right uh alec baldwin has a reality show now yeah noted asshole and his wife hilaria noted fake spaniard um announced that tlc tlc has made the terrible decision to give them a fucking reality show yeah about their family the only thing that i feel like that for people at like a network like tlc to be like how many kids they got oh nine they got nine kids under 12. yeah we're having that putting up them octomom numbers come on yeah oh wow putting up throwing up the oc yeah so this is

a show there's not really much details about it but like it's got to be half like pr resurrection attempt for you know alec baldwin given everything that happened with the rust shooting and i don't know like is eladia gonna why is hillary gonna be speaking english is she gonna be doing she's from massachusetts right that's what we ended have discovered her name's hillary and she was like i went to spain so much like i can't hold it like that kind of how you say cucumber cucumber ah cucumber yes see see yes see um but yeah i don't know i mean is who in your mind who is the alec baldwin reality show viewer i know people will hate watch i'll probably hate watch the first episode just

to understand what we're dealing with here yeah but i think people people who saw the how you say cucumber video uh people who just yeah hate watch and just want want to see like i i'm curious and i don't i don't really fuck with reality tv but like i'm curious what kind of hell uh what kind of yeah the guy who is calling his daughter like a disrespectful little pig or whatever like yeah let me see what you look like with another swing at it here while you're on fucking camera or nine more swings at him it's like yeah dude he called his like fucking daughter a bitch it was kind of fucked up

seven years old yeah like I don't know if this is good for Alec Baldwin yeah but yeah here we are here we are doing their thing giving me the shit to watch all day um finally have you watched any of the Venom

movies? No. That was... Sorry for that long pause. I was really being like... I know I've seen a Venom character. Is Tom Hardy Venom?

Tom Hardy is Venom. I don't think I've even watched the trailer for the first two um this trailer kind of got me oh yeah it gets me miles oh shit okay go on is joellen bead winning an nba championship it's called uh venom the last dance presumably it's about uh venom's nba career coming to an end but it's just and i took that personally yeah it's like super pat like he has like matrix superpowers when the symbiote takes over uh there's a dance sequence the action looks fun i don't know i i was not interested in any of the other Venom movies but apparently they all did so they're in the same boat

as like Madam Web and what was the Morbius they're like non Spider-Man Spider-Man the Sony branch of the Marvel tree and apparently they've all done like really well like it and

they they're going back to the well one more time for a third one and according to people who saw the first two like this one looks better um so well i don't know the first one made nearly a billion dollars globally uh which what the fuck all right so um i don't know there's there's also this trend where like uh he co-wrote it the uh tom hardy co-wrote it i'm seeing that happening more like with star like the the hitman movie the the guy from uh top gun maverick glenn powell glenn powell co-wrote that one so like stars are getting in on the writing. Is that like a sweetener for them to sign the deal? Yeah.

To be like, we'll give you a writing credit. Or are they like, dude, I got a fucking idea for how Venom could be really sick. Like Tom, just we need you and your beautiful mouth to not be seen and just be in a suit the whole movie. You're kind of one of those actors we don't like to see on camera have your face covered is that possible but yeah i don't know i mean like everybody no i mean i think like any anything in any industry people are like if that if there's another bag i can get then yeah give me that producer credit let me get let me get that get that writer credit that story behind we get that director um anyways they so they just dropped the trailer i thought

it looked pretty good yeah you guys can determine for yourselves but um i think like i think it looked like a good time it's funny like it might look good and then here meanwhile here i am i'm like oh the new j-lo ai movie that's gonna be absolutely terrible i gotta help i got some i got two hours for that shit yeah this looks like a good bad time. Yeah, at least this, even from the stills, about him turning into a symbiote stallion gliding through the air looks more interesting than

the thing I just watched where it's such a fucking AI industry love letter. Just gotta learn to love AI. Just gotta learn to love it and embrace it and give it all your secrets so that you can be powerful Okay That's gonna do it for today

We are back tomorrow with the whole last episode of the show Until then be kind to each other Be kind to yourself Get your vaccines, get your flu shots Don't do nothing about white supremacy And we will talk to y'all tomorrow Bye Later about white supremacy. And we will talk to y'all tomorrow. Bye. Later.

I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host

of the new podcast Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shekinah Church. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just starting your career. That's where we come in.

Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is season four of Naked Sports. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry.

Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. Every great player needs a foil. I know I'll go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Listen to the making of a rivalry,

Caitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.