The Daily Zeitgeist - Bad Vibes or Algorithms? w/ Jason Pargin 07.11.23

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

In episode 1512, Jack and Miles are joined by author of Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia, Jason Pargin, to discuss… Modern Media's Impact On Our Brains & Society and more! Long-Term Trends in Deaths of Despair Reducing the Economic Burden of Unmet Mental Health Needs Trends in anxiety among adults in the United States, 2008–2018: Rapid increases among young adults Bad news: Headlines are indeed getting more negative and angrier U.S. Headlines Expressing Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Sadness Increased Hugely Since 2000 Yes, There Has Been Progress on Climate. No, It’s Not Nearly Enough. Clean Energy Investment Sets $1.1 Trillion Record, Matching Fossil Fuels For the First Time Violent crime is dropping nationwide, report shows Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basic Principles and Recent Advances LISTEN: Lovas by Shaka Lion & SingularisSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. I'm Keri Champion, and this is Season 4 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 Caitlin Clark versus Angel Reese

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Elf Beauty, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti and I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadson. 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. around 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.

Hello, the internet, and welcome to season 295, episode 1 of Dirt Daily's iGuyStay, production of iHeartRadio. This is a podcast where we take a deep dive into America's shared consciousness, and it is Tuesday, july 11th 2023 7 11 day yeah free slurpees get them slurpees it's also all american pet photo day unless that must be a company it's also national blueberry muffin day national rainier cherry day cow appreciation day world benzodiazepine awareness day shout out benzos uh just like a sponsored placement by benzos i think it's more just to be like hey like let's be conscious of

like yeah like there are adverse effects to you know time traveling by use of benzodiazepines uh world population day and national mojito day don't Day. Don't mix the benzos with the mojitos. Yeah. Please do not do that. Or you will be taken away from the world population. Or it'll go from July 11th to July 13th real quick. That's right. Well, my name is Jack O'Brien, a.k.a. Potatoes O'Brien,

and I'm thrilled to be joined, as always, by my co-host, Mr. Miles Gray! Oh, thank you so much for having me, a.k.a. Viva Las Vegas. There it is. Because Jack and I were in Las Vegas over the weekend. Shout out to everybody who, you know, showed us love out there. And just the NBA con whole thing was a good time. I bought a cross-colored bucket hat. Yeah, you did.

To take it back to 89. I bought an outcast Hawks jersey or outcast hawks jersey like i bought a wu-tang nicks jersey so we are in our geriatric millennial mode yeah well miles we are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by the best-selling author of books like john dies at the end zoe punches the future and the dick the fourth book in the john dies at the end franchise if this book exists you're in the wrong universe and the new zoe book zoe is too drunk for this dystopia which you can pre-order now october drop go out and cop must cop for pargan fans he's my former co-worker at crack.com co-creator of the Crack Podcast. Welcome back to this show, Jason Pargin!

Jason! It says so much about my personality that I perceive that I'm on this show all the time. Yeah. Because, like, that's how bad I am at keeping up with people. It's a routine for some family member to say, Oh, when are you going to come out? You know, we haven't seen you in forever. And I'll be like, man, we were just out there for a family thing.

And then I'll look and the family thing was like Christmas 2019. So same thing here. Like every time you invite me on this show, I'm like, gosh, are we going to have anything new? It's just on here. It's like, has any news happened? And it was 10 months ago. It was October 2022 when I was last on here. But my perception of time, I guess, because I'm old or because I'm constantly behind on deadlines is very strange. So everyone who I've failed to keep up with, including all the people in high school I've not spoken to since literally high school, please understand, from my point of view, it's only been a couple months.

Jason's actually tired of seeing you. Yeah. He's like, we need a little space. I'm trying to have a life outside of high school saw you at graduation all right guys well when we created this new format we're doing some like longer conversations sometimes like you know book report with author of book style things interview experts but one of the things like the idea is we don't have to like be about the news for a day but one of the first things i wanted to do is talk to jason do like a deeper thing about a more broad topic that was one of my favorite things we got to do at the crack podcast and for this one we're gonna talk talk about just broadly the subject of how our brain was not designed to deal with the modern world.

And the modern world is getting more and more like a funhouse mirror for the human brain, just kind of like warping and stretching things and magnifying. The world is more and more complicated. The way we interact with it is more and more mediated. So it is still about the subject that we cover, I think, just in more of a macro sense. So that's what we're going to be talking about. But first, Jason, we do need to get to know you a little bit better. It's been 10 months. What is something from your search history that's revealing about who you are? Most recent thing I searched was attractive naked woman. I didn't know if you could do that on the internet. You just found out about that feature? Yeah. But then the most telling thing is I had to search the letters XQC because those letters were trending a little bit ago because a streamer by the name XQC signed a two-year, $100 million deal with a new streaming service because it turns out he's one of the most famous people in the world.

And yet another example of where one of the most famous people in the world flew totally outside my radar because they are a streaming personality for the Utes. And I am an extremely old man. Yeah, I'm an XQC head over here. No, I'm just kidding. I've never seen this person before. But which platform did they go to? I mean, I'm aware. The new one.

Yeah. What's the new platform? It's called Kik, which I thought was already a thing. But this is called Kik. K-I-C-K. It is backed by a huge online gambling company, and they apparently have billions to throw around. So they are purchasing a bunch of high-profile streamers off of Twitch and YouTube and the other streaming platforms

to get going because that's how they do it. And this guy got paid $100 million for two years, $50 million a year, because that is the size of his audience while he plays video games and chats and eats on camera for 10, 12 hours in a row. There you go.

I believe there was a kick, like an attempt at a kick social media platform at some point, like a decade ago. It was spelled K-I-K. Yeah, it was spelled differently. So now they're like, the problem with that one was it wasn't spelled

correctly. And we're going back. We're zagging where other people zig. Are we leaving the era of tech companies having to be misspelled versions of other words like Tumblr where they just take out like a letter and this is now the name of your thing.

I don't know. Maybe. I'm trying to think of what the hot... Threads is just threads. Yeah, they spelled threads correctly. Like T-H-R-D-S or something like that. I don't know. It sounds like maybe we're leaving that.

How's Twitch spelled? Just like God intended. T-W-T and then a made up letter. The old English C-H form. Jason, what's something you think is overrated? Having to have

an opinion on every single thing that happens in the news. Yeah. It's okay to just admit that you don't know. For example, over the weekend, the number one trending topic was Jonah Hill. Yeah. Because apparently some text messages between him and his girlfriend that makes it seem like he has a very, I guess, toxic and controlling boyfriend or whatever. And that dominated discussion for like a day and a half of everyone having to have an opinion of, is Jonah Hill a bad boyfriend? And I feel like it's okay to just say, I don't know either of these people.

If I tried to approach either of them on the street, their bodyguards would just rough me up and leave me on the pavement. They care nothing about my opinion. I don't know. It feels like you're adding a cognitive load. It's okay to say, I don't know. I don't know these people. Relationships are complicated. You should not be having complex relationship discussions over text, in my view. I think that's probably bad by itself. Yeah. I'm about 40 pages in on my opinion that I'm writing on the matter. It's kind of like a

Supreme Court opinion. But yeah. And I are working on a huge sub stack entry on this one. Just sort of forensically analyzing everything and some of the misspellings. But I think with the Jonah Hill thing, it feels like one of those things where a lot of people, I think, were kind of looking for a reason to not like him. There's like an Ellen DeGeneres factor where people behind the scenes have been like, he's kind of a dick, right? Yeah, there were so many people who were like, I'm not surprised. It's like, do you even need to tweet that? But also, that's where we are. I think the other version of this, Jason, that I saw a lot of was especially during the Ocean Gate titanic submarine thing where suddenly people became like atmospheric scientists like out of nowhere and i was like

really like you're going out there with your chest out like with this opinion about what like crush depths are when your previous tweets have been about like you know puppies and different like naruto wigs okay i feel like there's a pressure people put in themselves to feel like they need to have a strong strident stance on something. And even if it's something you agree with, people will keep trying to find more and more technical things. think racism is bad. I think more opportunities should be given to minorities. Once you start getting into the fine minutiae of how Ivy League schools do their affirmative action, I don't know. You're starting to get out of my depth of like, well, do you think that legacy admissions should be done in this? I would need a year to properly educate myself to give you an actual opinion. Can I just revert back to, I think racism is bad and that I'm not going to sit here and pretend to

understand. And I feel like every argument eventually gets to that point where it's like, I believe in trans rights. Like, well, do you think it's okay for a six year old to go on puberty blockers? Right. I'm not a doctor.

Yeah. That's a discussion with your, I don't even know what that is. And if you'd say you know what that is, I think you're lying. Right. Can I not be true to? Yeah. Yeah. And it's like they keep trying to find finer and finer points of like, so we can finally

have something we can yell at each other about. In fact, like, man, when you hear a subject that you know, like from your work, and you hear outsiders yelling about it, they sound so stupid. And then you have to realize it to people who actually understand submarines, how dumb we all sounded. It's like, well, these idiots should have known not to go on that thing. It's like, I wouldn't have. Right.

A lot of people. They charge me. If I had that kind of money. I think that's where the obsession with that story came from, is on that things like i wouldn't have right a lot of people charged me if i think that's where the obsession with that story came from is everyone was like i wouldn't have gone on that shit a lot of people were like it had a playstation controller and then like a few naval people were like people you like those are peripheral devices that are even used on like very expensive things like it's not don't just use that as your example to say that this whole thing was a fucked up operation. Do you understand that there's like a billion dollars in research and development that went into that controller

to come up with that design? Sony did not just crap that thing out. That's been iterated across 20 years of playtesting and everything else. They have the finest... There are more experts designing those controllers than there are designing submarines. But it's

that pressure to feel like you have to. And then the people yelling about, well, do they deserve it because they're rich? It's like, there's nuance there. The guy running the subcompany was a dumbass but did the 19-year-old kid who was invited to go on, did he deserve to die? It's like he went

because his dad took him. But you're not required to to hold an opinion on everything you can feel that weight just roll off your shoulders if you just admit yes this is a thing that happens it has zero impact on my life at all yeah not much I can personally do about it. As I mean, it kind of touches on what we're going to be talking about later. What, uh,

what's something you think is underrated? Uh, old Twitter. Here's the trend that drives me crazy. Where, when a thing exists, we do nothing but complain about it. We used to call Twitter the hell site.

And then the moment somebody comes in and changes it or ruins it, it's endless nostalgia for the wonderful old thing. So it's just negative emotion the whole time. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. Well, where'd it go? My life sucks now that it's gone. It's like, okay, well, Where'd it go? My life sucks now that it's gone. It's like, okay, well, if you miss it that much, can you admit that it brought something positive to your life before then? Right. Yeah.

I don't know. I like the new one. I'm kind of a fan of this Musk guy. I want to see what he's doing with this thing. This guy seems to have an idea. It's wobbling like crazy now like with the kind of things that i see getting like on the suggested part where you're like i don't what do you want to put like straight up neo-nazi holocaust denial tweets in front of me like this right now like

okay all right twitter but i mean to be fair you were getting that even before elon just more now they have blue check marks right it's easier to differentiate yeah i mean to be clear he has broken it yeah he has completely broken it and like it from that respect just like appreciating all the work and all the things that were happening behind the scenes to make a site that large like operational is definitely something i've learned to appreciate in the past weeks months yeah it's yeah i'm trying to think what was the last thing we were all like just complaining about and then the second it got like messed with we're like oh now you ruined the thing we hate like because it is true it does feel like this very you know like part of our human nature to do this kind of shit

i mean it's every time they update any kind of software, it's, I don't know. It's every time there's a sequel to a game, it always gets negatively compared to the previous game in the series. But when it was out, all people talked about how they had ruined it. Right.

How it fucking sucked. It's a weird, it's a weird cycle, but I guess, you know, in a broader sense, like if my wifi goes down, that ruins my life for however long it's down. But when it comes back up, I don't feel joy of like, yes, the modern miracle is back.

I have access to all of the universe's knowledge again. It's just like, all right, finally it's back on. It's back. I can do all my miserable work now that it's just like all right back it's like finally it's back i can do all the do all my miserable work now that it's back up yeah i don't know we this is my pick these on purpose because it plays into what we're going to talk about where it's like you frame it in the most the most distressing manner in both directions yeah yeah i mean i even i've heard people in interviews with NBA champions, they talk about the phenomenon you just described of the losses hurt worse than winning the championship. I think there's something psychological to that risk-reward sort of system that we've all we've all put ourselves

into a little bit but yeah well i think yeah that that seems like more like yeah like it like that's sort of definitely from our like evolutionary psychology aspect of like we had to know about like the threats of things around us so those things stuck with us longer than like oh this pleasant flower it's like no that animal dangerous predator run yeah yes the fear has to be stronger than the promise of a reward it's the carrot and the stick thing right right yeah or you get lazy you get lazy exactly i i've never liked carrots enough for that trick to work on me i've always said always said getting beat with a stick and then giving me a carrot as the only other, the only

reward. It's been tried many times. Yeah. Quick life tip. If there's someone dangling a carrot on a stick, just look behind you and just deck that full and just take their whole shit. Yeah. That's the trick to that one.

Take me to the storehouse where you keep the carrots. That's right. I want all of them. What? What? You heard me, motherfucker. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll come back

and keep talking about this. We'll be right back. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Cle 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 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 members and new, chilling, first-hand 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 that quote. What is it like you miss 100 percent 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. This summer, the nation watched as the Republican nominee for president was the target of two assassination attempts, separated by two months. These events were mirrored nearly 50 years ago when President Gerald Ford faced two attempts on his life in less than three weeks.

President Gerald R. Ford came stunningly close to being the victim of an assassin today. And these are the only two times we know of that a woman has tried to assassinate a U.S. president. One was the protege of infamous cult leader Charles Manson. I always felt like Lynette was kind of his right-hand woman. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI in a violent revolutionary underground.

Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer. This is Rip Current. Available now with new episodes every Thursday. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. And back in our crack days, I worked on an article about cognitive biases

that affect our ability to understand money. And the piece really zoomed in on examples of how traditional media interacts with a brain that was designed millions of years ago for an animal that was trying to survive the food chain. And like our brain is designed to process like fairly simple visual stimuli in a pretty straightforward way. That tree has fruit on it. Remember that tree. And then, you you know the point in the article was like if you only show the person who won the lottery on tv and not the you know billions of

people who lose the lottery every day it creates a imprint of like that's the fruit tree that's that's the place to go and like that is so basic that's such a basic thing that just feels like so quaint and antiquated compared to the modern world that we're existing in where the increasing use of ai to create intentionally false stories use of like technology really seems to be accelerating things to in some cases like make them worse, or at least there's a feeling that that is the case in like day-to-day, our day-to-day lives. And so we wanted to talk about kind of all the ways that the modern world is sort of this funhouse mirror that our brain's ability to interact with it, it like just warps and stretches and it's not going well,

it seems like based on some of these statistics that you pulled, Jason. Well, I wanted to pull some stats because when we talk about like people being anxious or depressed or whatever these days, it's not just talking about vibes. Like you can look at the statistics. So suicide rates have been climbing in the USA for the last 20 years. Around 2000 is when most of these trends started to skew higher. That is a distinctly American phenomenon. Most other countries, suicide rates have been steadily falling. This is an American thing. number that they call deaths of despair, where they lump together suicide, alcohol deaths, drug related deaths. And all of that has skewed up since 2000. And then since around 2010 has started to, like most of them have kind of started to spike. Now, part of you, you mentioned like the deaths of the drug overdose deaths, some of that is separately just the opioid epidemic and fentanyl, but also some

of those overdoses are intentional. But if there's no note left behind, they just put it down as overdose because, of course, how would you know? And then anxiety and depression both have been rising, specifically among the youth, again, going back to around 2009, 2010. Now, there's two ways people interpret this that are controversial. You can either say that these things have been going up in the internet era and then have accelerated in the smartphone era. Right. Or you can say, well, these things have gone up since 9-11 and accelerated since the financial crisis of 2008. When we start talking about how the media and smartphones and all those things make people more anxious, this upsets people because the response is always, well, we're not anxious

because of phones. We're anxious because the world is on fire. Our assertion is not that there are no problems in the world. Our assertion, or at least mine, is that the way media, the media environment is one of those problems. It's one of those things that make things worse. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things, like all the things that you were saying, like the world is on fire, 9-11, the economic collapse, and then also having devices in our hands feeding us a steady stream of media that's like specifically tailored to us and specifically based on preferences of what makes us angriest or or most frightened like those things can't be good and yeah i i think there's miles you you pulled a al jazeera story about like outrage headlines

increasing well because i mean yeah again like we're there's so many facets of how we end up with bad vibes, the bad vibes decades trademarked. But yeah, like I think one of them is, you know, like this is some version of like mean world syndrome where a lot of your media diet are just giving you sort of an overemphasis on the terrible things that are happening, which can just lead to like being more cynical or just being like, what the fuck is going on? And yeah, like without just zero,

they analyze like headlines, like, like thousands, tens of thousands of headlines from 2000 to 2019, just to see what the emotional charge of was of some of these headlines. And they've noticed that things have just gotten more and more increasingly negative since the year 2000. Like, you know, headlines that say, like, quote, Brazil prison riot leaves nine dead rather than things like a new lens restores vision and brings relief.

And we're seeing just that sort of that rise in those kinds of headlines be equally sort of distributed between the right and left. But there is a there is an edge on the right, like with conservative media, definitely having those, you know, a bigger emphasis on the fear based kind of headline. And I and I feel the same way, too, like because reading as much news as I do or we have to making this show like that absolutely has an effect on me. But then you kind of have to take a step back and like what are the statistics saying you're actually getting something completely different yeah yeah what the headlines and again note that there's the year 2000 again when going back to the origin of that what was driven by that was the death of news being a print medium

versus news being an online medium because Because again, with newspaper headlines, like of course, once upon a time, they had to sell papers that now individual stories have to get clicked on. And very, very quickly, just through A-B testing, again, there's no conspiracy here. Just through tracking user behavior, they figured out that the more emotionally charged,

I mean, we saw this is correct, the more emotionally charged headline gets clicked. So now every individual headline, because, you know, once upon a time, you'd have a newspaper with a big headline across the top, you know, Nixon goes to jail, whatever. I don't think Nixon ever actually went to jail. Yeah, yeah.

It doesn't matter. Would have sold papers, and it would have been a headline in the modern era. And then a lot of the other headlines would be very boring and straightforward. City council votes to do whatever. Well, now, if you want people to click on that boring city council story, if it's your job as a journalist to get people to click, there's got to be an angle on there that's going to get people mad. And so beyond the examples you gave

here, you have the news, you know, the actual news organizations gathering news, but then you have the aggregators of the content like Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Vox, all of these sites that basically would take the headline and then do a little blog post about it. And those titles would be things like, you know, if you're not paying attention to this, you're not angry enough. Right. Or this clip is going to leave you outraged. When you see how they treated this disabled man at McDonald's, you're going to be furious. Like literally putting the emotion in the headline. If you're not mad, you're not a good person. And making that part of the ethos of the time that it's like, if you want to be a good person who cares about the world, you must

be angry all the time because there's so much injustice or whatever. Never mind that that doesn't help that person in the video. Never mind that you're watching a clip from three years ago and everyone has forgotten about it. It doesn't matter. It has bubbled up on Reddit and now everybody's mad again to no effect. Like it's not motivating you to help this person. Yeah.

One old outdated technology I think we're underrating is newsies. These headlines are doing, you know, newsies just used to yell at you to read the newspaper and people would just listen because they were scared of the newsies. But now they have to scare us with the actual content of the headline. And then I think, content of the headline. And then I think, you know, we've also talked recently about how the number of people who identify with a religion or involved in a religion and the number of people who have access to or regular contact with a community, like both are just on an all-time low and going lower. And so I think that there's a broad kind of, you can call it spiritual or like broadly psychological level more than ever before,

where we don't have like access to answering some of the big questions. And so like we speculated in the past, one of these like kind of broad episodes about the idea that like maybe stan culture is coming from that this need to sublimate ourselves to something higher and like some mythical like godhead figure or like leader person like because we're not getting that anywhere else and so like we get stan culture or the stories of the movies that make an imprint on us when we're very young like star wars or you know harry potter the matrix like these are our mythical stories that we have chosen to kind of put put ourselves like derive our meaning from,

and that actually made a lot of sense of how people react, like how Star Wars fans or like fandoms react like there is a religious war when something happens that doesn't cohere to the dogma that they were raised on. But I think there's a lot of like kind of grasping for meaning as technology has isolated us from one another and from

the the communities that used to allow people to sort of dissolve their sense of self into like a broader let less kind of self-centered way of viewing the world and i mean yeah we were talking about like consumer culture as like kind of another example of where we see this i mean with i guess stan culture is one example of that but consumerism people have become like very serious consumers like like to like on a deep, deeply personal level, I feel like. Yeah, because I mean, like to your point, I mean, I don't you know, the lack of religion or I think that sense of community more than like finding. I mean, people are finding meaning in other things, but I don't know how many people are explicitly like, just i need something that kind of explains everything and i think though the way we pivot to that is just to find like you say like because we feel so isolated we're we want to find community in these other ways that like are interesting to

us because i'm not interested in religion yeah i'm interested in arsenal football club and that is the closest way i begin to devote myself to something that's like part, like there's group, there's like a in group where I'm trying to be like, identify with these other supporters. I go through the religious ceremonies of like watching the matches and getting very emotional as I watch them and be very like emotionally moved when things go up or down. And so like, I find that like most people have like a topic where they will bring that sort of level of like devotion to, you know, like what they're paying attention to and what they're willing to debate people on, et cetera. Because, yeah, like we're all we're all just trying to find something that like feels good and helps us feel connected at the end of the day.

At least certainly that I can speak for myself in that very narrow example. Yeah, this is something else where you can track in statistics. Like the average number of friends and close friends a person has, again, has been dropping since the 90s. And it is just the people used to meet their friends at church. They used to meet their friends at the office. Now a lot of people work at home, you know, and that's the thing where we can sit here and talk about it as like a mystical thing. Like there's no sense of unity or community or whatever. But from just a practical point of view, having a friend who will give you a ride to the airport or who will help you move or, you know, like just as in a practical manner, that's part of what people don't get.

This is part of what a church provided. Like the church, when one person got sick and couldn't work, the other members of the church would bring food to their house. They would come help them clean. Like that was, and you did it because it's like, hey, we all are Baptists or whatever, and we are all on the same team. And it was, that's something that is, humans do everywhere that you find humans is we organize and get together. But we usually have to have something to rally around. A symbol or something, a tree, this tree. A plus sign.

Yeah, whatever it is. No longer end. And unfortunately, that also makes us go to war with one another. If you see somebody in a Red Sox jersey, you're like a Yankee fan, and then it's like, all right, let's go punch that guy. But when you talk about, and there's a term that is for the modern situation, which is atomization, where you have atomized people to where now, if you need a ride to the airport, you're going to, you know, pay for an Uber. And so many of these things that used to

be stuff that friends would do, it's like, well, now it's a corporation doing it for you. And I'm not saying that the friends, you know, purely online, aren't your real friends, but it's a different type of friendship. If it's somebody who you can't call when you've broken your leg, you need somebody to go get groceries for you or vice versa. If you're not the person that like you feel obligated to do that because they're my friend. Like, they depend on me. It means something to be needed, to be depended on. Like, to get in a situation

where nobody depends on you, and like, I don't have children or whatever, but like, I don't have friends where that friend's going to call me in the middle of the night and say, hey, I need you to come bail me out of jail. Like, that sucks in the moment, but knowing that somebody needs you

is what keeps you going. When you're that isolated from real life connections, it's too easy to just drift away. Humans need to be needed. Yeah, we need that actual in real life connection. Which is interesting too, because I see this like on TikTok more and more of people posting like these strategies that come off as like the most manipulative sort of like sadistic things where they talk about it's like you got to be needed.

And that's how you do. That's how you develop even deeper relationships. I do this thing with my wife where I unhook the the chain from the toilet handle so she'll need. the chain from the toilet uh handle so she'll need me and when the toilet isn't working she will then associate me with someone who can come and solve a problem and then that helps create a deeper love and you're like oh my god and people are like really like i mean it's that it's a kind of fringe element of tiktok but more and more people are taking these sort of things and sort of finding ways to like manufacture these kinds of connections because they aren't happening like normally either and you're kind of like this sounds like

sociopathic but on the other side of it you can see people sort of like yearning for like yeah how do i cultivate a deeper connection do i need to sort of gaslight this person and thinking that the toilet never works and i'm the the like magical fixer of that but again like you see it expressed in so many ways of that there is this deeper human thing lacking yeah working in a system from it's always sunny in philadelphia right right if you don't know that reference look it up we've got that clip but a strange like when one of your human interactions, most common human interactions is like an Uber driver, like a person, a stranger you can put on quiet mode, like when you're having a conversation with them, then it makes sense to me that that sort of manipulation and viewing other people as a means to an end could bleed into how you view like other other parts of your life right if everything's just sort of a transactional and i mean they talk about this new sort of information and also like just day-to-day economy as being a way to

reduce the friction of that that like got in the way of some of our spending habits. And friction, in many cases, seems to be human interaction. So I think one thing we're going to say overall, human interaction, good. Find ways to be part of a community, preferably one that needs you and gives you meaning. Miles, the next time you go on TikTok, like there's a meta narrative in that video you saw,

because that algorithm floated up to you a video where the actual message was, people are crazy out there and relationships are weird and toxic these days. You would be shocked at what percentage of the feed is some subtle message, some subtle version of out there is dangerous. Guys are sexist. Women are crazy. Their standards are super high. You'll be accused of sexual harassment if you ever try to talk to a woman in any setting. And there's this meta message of the only safe place is at home looking at a screen.

Yeah. Women on planes sees people who aren't there, which, as you mentioned, is a video. It's a person having a mental health episode that was everywhere for a week, and I never would have seen 30, you know, 20, maybe like 10 years ago. You know, there was a time when that wouldn't have even shown up in like the police blotter and your local paper. It was a non-event. Somebody threw a fit on it because it was captured on camera. But the message is, it's scary to fly.

There's crazy people out there. And any conservative news, like, if you look at the comments on any conservative news outlet, it's like, well, I won't even drive through this city. Like, it's just Mad Max. It's like, no, it's not. I've been there. It's people walking around and shopping

and eating at restaurants, but it's like, no. From their point of view, it's just cars on fire, smashed windows. Like, if you are a white person, the minorities will just drag you off the street because they all, it's Antifa and Black Lives Matter. It's like you've got such a weird view of the world, but it's all, you're only safe at home. Like you have people living in the middle of whatever, Oklahoma or Montana, someplace where they haven't had a violent crime in six months, where they've got cameras all over the outside of their house, and they've got a shotgun under their bed because they're sure that at any moment,

a gang of 25 guys is going to come try to take over their house because of something they saw on the news. It's like, well, you know, like in Portland and the Walgreens, they'll just have like 25 looters show up and steal everything. That could happen to me at any time here in North Dakota. Right. And you see, when you see their fear and how irrational it is from the outside, your fear also looks like that to someone else. Like we all have been put into kind of a little box, a little fear box. Well, I think like to your point, like, especially about like, I think, I think of things like Reddit, right. And the subreddit public freak out, there's like a subreddit called public freak out. That's really popular. And it's mostly a lot of

people just having some kind of like mental health crisis or something like that, or just some wild thing that's going on. But when you think about like, when you're like a kid, I remember being like, oh, what's the ocean like? Or I'm trying to like, you know, draw on experiences I have. Most of them are like media referenced memories I have, like of a movie or something I saw on TV that was forming even my own concept of what something was. And now that we have like video, that's like IRL type sort of video from cameras, that sort of, that ups the stakes even more where people begin to associate, well, I did see this one clip of this thing happening in this place. Now that, that is exactly what is going to happen to me and has this effect of just ramping up these fears.

And like a good, like, you know, an example of this is like you're saying, Jason, like, especially on conservative news, the way they portray certain cities and what quote unquote crime waves are happening that has this effect on us just as human beings. closer to being in a mindset or a mind state where solving things violently is acceptable because we see just how fucked up and like aggro and violent the world is. And just looking at all of those things feeding on each other, it's like at some point for me, like I realized that the way to even break that kind of cycle was first just to have awareness. Because a lot of the time, if I am getting caught up on what I read in the headlines, it, it feeds on like, you know, I start ruminating on things that aren't actually necessarily helpful to me because it's also not the reality because we talk about the quote unquote crime waves that were, that everyone wanted to talk about in the last year that just didn't exist.

And it's, it's much easier to be like, okay, I know I'm seeing a lot of like overemphasis on these like visually really like, you know, provocative images and videos. But that's not actually that's not a that's not the most accurate depiction on what on what is happening. Yeah. And it's specifically like designed that way, specifically based on like it. Nothing is based on reality as much as it's based on what is going to feed like nobody was sitting back and being like we're going to make up a crime wave it was that people's like that that was the story that made people have the most scared reaction and therefore they clicked on it and therefore they got more of it. And the media,

you know, keeps feeding them. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll come back. We'll talk about climate, which I think plays into this in a bunch of ways. And also just, you know,

are there solutions? Like what, what can we do? No. Nothing. just, you know, are there solutions? Like, what can we do? No. Nothing. 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 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 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. This summer, the nation watched as the Republican nominee for president was the target of two assassination attempts, Republican nominee for president was the target of two assassination attempts, separated by two months. These events were mirrored nearly 50 years ago, when President Gerald Ford faced two attempts on his life in less than three weeks. President Gerald R. Ford came stunningly close to being the victim of an assassin today. And these are the only two times we know of that a woman has tried to assassinate a U.S. president.

One was the protege of infamous cult leader Charles Manson. I always felt like Lynette was kind of his right-hand woman. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI in a violent revolutionary underground. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer. And we're back. So one thing that we've talked about in the past, like specifically, I think it came up when we were covering the really disheartening trends

in the mental health of young people. And, you know, I think for a long time, screens were being blamed kind of exclusively. And then in this latest round, it seemed like people were still on screens, but they started like bringing the environment into the conversation. And that makes a lot of sense to me that there is a unprecedented, like when we talk about like, these are things that we didn't have to deal with 30 years ago, the climate crisis and like the amount of things that are going to need to change in order to address it and make the world like habitable for the next century is this

massive looming threat. So I think going into this, I was like, nobody's doing anything about it, or at least like the, you know, corporations are making it. So it's incredibly hard to do anything about it. And I spent the weekend like researching things like Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of Ministry for the Future, who is like, you know, a leftist who knows more about climate policy than I do. And he, you know, underlines some of the reasons for concern, but he also has reasons for hope that I hadn't felt as hopeful about, like some of the economic solutions, some of the investment that is happening already, like seems to be encouraging to him. And so, you know, it's,

it's frustrating to be hurtling towards a disaster and have like the New York Times doing sponsor content for BP. But, you know, in addition to the investment opportunities that are like helping, you know, the, the amount of money that's being invested into making things more sustainable. I feel like one of the things I took away from doing that research is that there's also like a more meaningful life, I think, waiting for us when the world is able to accept the challenge of like the changing the world from the current system into what it's going to need to be for the survival of the species or like you know well maybe we'll have that acceptance like thrust onto us by like a series of worsening

climate disasters but just like thinking about that as like the operational you know thing that could give like generations to come meaning i I think, is at least, like, somewhat, in the context that we're talking flood, like people work together with like their community, with like their, their neighborhood, they thought they hated and like, you know, there's meaning and there's, there's work being done that actually has results and helps, helps people. So yeah, I don't know. It feels like we're going to, by necessity, need to address some of this stuff in the coming years. To avoid the disasters, we probably need to be further along than we already are. But I could see a more meaningful world where some of the solutions to these problems that we're talking about actually are necessary. I guess that's kind of my point, though, which is if, look, if you're out there listening to this, if believing that we are in the end times, if that motivates you to be like a better person, like if you're going out and learning every possible new skill because you're like, hey, 30 years from now, I'm going to need to know how to do all this stuff. I'm going to need to be physically in good shape. I'm going

to need to be able to, you know, because there may not be doctors around. I'm going to need to be able to take care of my neighbors. I'm going to need to be strong. Fine, but that's not what I'm seeing. The stats that we shared earlier, if the message you're getting from the news you're taking in is we're screwed, so why bother? And you find yourself just glued to the sofa and doom scrolling on a screen. That to me is the same thing as if I had a friend who had a wife and family and the guy was just on the sofa all day. He'd quit his job. He's not doing, not cleaning the house, not doing anything. And I asked him why. And he's like, well, because I'm going to die one day. Like once I became aware

of my, my mortality, like, what's the point? What's the point of doing anything? Like you would not, the way you try to comfort him would not be, well, you don't know, maybe they'll cure death. Maybe they'll, you'll be able to upload your brain to a machine. You would say to him, look, you have a wife and child. You have friends. You need to work this out. Yes, we're all going to die someday. This has always been the case. You need to find a way to cope with it that lets you get up and live your life.

Not to be ignorant of it. I'm asking you to pretend that death isn't a thing. I'm asking you to come to terms with it. So there's a meme that I've seen going around where somebody's talking about, like, I keep being asked what I'm going to do in 10 years at a job interview. There's not going to be a 10 years.

That is as unscientific as saying that climate change isn't real. That's as unscientific as being anti-vax. There's no scientist saying that civilization won't exist in 20 years. In 20 years, you're still going to have jobs and memos and dress codes and bills and weddings and funerals to go to. No matter, even in the worst climate change scenarios, it's still going to be there.

What you're talking about is, you know, things can get worse in the way the pandemic made things worse. But we have largely, even the progress we've made so far, thanks to the Paris Agreement, thanks to all sorts of meaningful actions that has been taken, we've avoided the worst, most apocalyptic scenarios, or at least we're on track to.

Because most people are good. And most people do not want to see the world burn. And even the worst of the worst billionaires or stockholders in the oil companies even they're trying to rationalize it away it's like wow you know people need oil until we don't like that or no it gets it maybe it won't be so bad like even they're not sitting there giggling at the thought of the peasants drowning under you know the seas rising most people even if civilization collapsed tomorrow, we would rebuild it because that's how we got a civilization in the first

place. Most people don't want to see the world burn. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, the biggest way just generally, I think to combat the cynicism or nihilism too, is, is a, I think understanding about like you know how things are being framed to us in general you know i think we like we were saying earlier a lot of these stories are being fed to us and emphasized to us for their own like profit you know motivation not necessarily because it's out of a thing of to say like this is these are the things you need to know and that are happening and this is a really balanced depiction of it. I think one of the things that helps me through it is to know it's like, okay, I'm living in a media environment where they're only bubbling up the worst shit to

me because that's how that system grows and profits. But I also have to reckon with, okay, when I parse through that, what is something, what is, what is it? What is something that's telling me something that is accurate? And what is just there for me to get my sort of outrage antennae going and for me to click on. And when you kind of can give yourself a little bit of room to know, like that, while a lot of these things are true that are going on, we're also living in a space where the good things are not emphasized enough. And because of that, that fills me with a sense of optimism because now I have to look for it. But as I learn to look for it and the kinds of stories or the kinds of places where I can find those stories are, that just helps offset those things. Because I think the

worst thing to do is to think, oh my God, it's all fucked up. There's nothing I can do to do it up, which is just zoom out a second and know like we're, we're like in one of the worst fucking information environments ever, ever of all time know like we're, we're like in one of the worst fucking information environments ever, ever of all time. Like we're there right now. And navigating that has, it takes a huge toll on us. So I also don't want people to think that part of maybe if there's negativity

you feel is because you're like, you're actually assessing all of this information and coming to the right conclusion because we're also getting a very skewed version of like what is actually happening, especially in this country. Yeah. But not to say again, that it's a utopia. That's why I think it's a bit of a slippery slope, because we're I think so much of what we're doing now is like saying like, okay, that's not bad. But there is so much other structural things that we have to address. So it's about finding a balance of holding these thoughts to be true without completely becoming overwhelmed. And part of that too, is being able to like contribute to something for me, it's like the privilege of being able to

podcast and talk about the things that I hope other people want to hear about, or, you know, giving my time to like do some do things in my community being able to find those things help offset a lot of the other shit for sure yeah and in terms of like things that i've found helpful like in you know trying to stay sane over you know the past five years like what one of the ideas that is big in the psychiatric world or like psychiatry right now and like also in the spiritual world is this idea of like self-compassion. And it really comes down to understanding that I am viewing the world through like a broken instrument, you know, like that that is that does like an overactive, like burglar alarm that does have like these thought patterns that I've had since I was a child. And so trying to understand them, but also like understanding that I'm not alone in those things. And like, if I, if I just would

talk to other people about those things and I am naturally more compassionate to other people than I am to myself and more understanding of their, you know, having these pitfalls. But when you talk to another person and like share that stuff, you like that there is a common ground like those those problems become a little bit smaller. it really rests under on the assumption that you guys were talking about just now of that I completely understand the situation. Like when I don't have this thought, but like when I actually examine what is below the surface of a feeling of despair, it's that I understand the situation, have exhausted all options for doing something about it. And that's never, that's never the case. I am an idiot like that. That is, I always take a lot of, a lot of solace in the fact that I'm, you know, we all individually for the most part are not capable of understanding all of these things. We're pretty limited in our understanding and And there are possibilities that my brain's not able to come up with. And so all I can do is focus on the things that I can actually affect.

And that's really all I can do. And trying to understand and predict the future, you know, from just a personal standpoint like can be overwhelming and so trying to steer clear of that and just focus on the like kind of the next the next day basically or i think also to the i think for every story i read about moms for liberty like it's heartening to hear about all of these other grassroots groups of parents that have come out to oppose Moms for Liberty. Right. I don't hear enough about. And for every time I think about private equity and what the fuck it's doing, I forget that there are organizations that are trying to do something very specifically about this issue.

But we always but I think just societally, we're just so good also at just identifying the deficiencies that seldom do we really celebrate, you know, like the ways to improve things. That's why I think like positive psychology is something that's only kind of beginning to pop up in the last century because it's like, okay, we've mastered the art of telling you what, how fucked up something is, but we haven't, but we're now learning how to figure out how to optimize things as much as possible. And I think that's the other thing I have to keep in my mind is that every, for every bad thing there is,

there is the other side of the coin that I'm just not like doing the, just a little bit more research to begin, like to find that positive side of it too. But again, that isn't to become complacent or to wish away any problems or act as if these problems don't exist, but to remind myself that they're like, ultimately there are people of good conscience that are also doing things to work just as actively

as the people we identify as threat actors. Yeah. Moms for Liberty and the people who did the book bands and the Westboro Baptist Church are great examples of what we're talking about because if you view them as underdog stories, these are very small groups of people who managed to hijack the media of what is going to get media attention in the modern media environment of outrage. But they are small groups that can be countered. And when people do it, it does seem to actually have an effect. There are things that can be done.

But because we don't hear about necessarily the stories of the people successfully countering, like pushing back against those small groups, like it does create this optical illusion that it's hopeless and it's not. And when you talk about like looking for good news, I think when mainstream news and they have like, well, good news of the day, it's always like, well, these baby ducks fell into a storm drain. Yeah, we get the dumbest shit. The police came and fished them out. 30 years from literacy rates, infant mortality rates, cancer survival rates, the percentage of

people who have homes, who have electricity, who have sanitation running water, all of those are spiked upwards in the last 30 years just due to the end of the Cold War and just liberalized trade with something like 2.5 billion people have electricity for the first time since 1990. About that many people have toilets, which is, if you have not lived in a place without toilets, you do not understand what a big deal that is. But in terms of the spread of disease, in terms of, you know, basically everywhere,

the one part of the world that's still lagging is sub-Saharan Africa. But across China, India, these places have gotten wildly wealthier in the last 30 years. And I'm talking about the people at the bottom, people getting the first running water. Millions of miles of roads have been paved for the first time, which, again, does not sound like a big deal until you realize that people could not go to school or to the hospital because it meant going through a dirt road that turned into mud during the rainy season, and they literally could not travel to a place 50 miles away. Now they have a paved road to go there. It's stuff that we take for granted here where we're sitting.

But for the most part, the average quality of life on Earth has gotten amazingly better by every possible metric, including things like the number of people who die in natural disasters has gone down. Not because climate change isn't real, but because building standards have gone up. Because you've made buildings that can withstand hurricanes and that can handle flooding better. Infrastructure has gotten better. So behind the scenes every single day, there's people working to improve every little thing you touch. It's just that that doesn't make news because it doesn't get clicked through.

Those headlines exist. The stuff gets written up. It's just if you look at the click through between that story and the one story that Fox News dug up of a trans person committing a crime. Right. Where it's like, yes, we've got the thing that we can all yell about. We have found a trans person committing a crime where it's like, yes, we've got the thing that we can all yell about. We have found a trans person committing a crime near a bathroom somewhere.

One single person that we're going to talk about for the next six months in a nation of 300 million people, and that won't get as much traffic as everything else on their site combined. That's just the way it works. everything else on their site combined. That's just the way it works. But in terms of solutions, as an individual, that media environment's not going to go away.

It's not. You have to, it's like somebody is saying, I'm not going to go on a diet until they just stop selling the junk food. That's just not going to happen. I wish they sold healthier food. That's not, you can't put that off. Like at some point there has to be a way to educate people or just a culture of, I have to recognize what media is making me sick. Like that this is junk food. That a story that doesn't affect me but is emotionally charged, that's just pure sugar.

That is just junk. It's not making you smarter. It's not making you better. And if it's making you hate everyone outside your front door, it's poison. Like you are poisoning yourself. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we can leave it there.

But Jason Pargin, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you, follow you? You are a bit of a TikTok influencer these days. Congratulations. Oh, yeah. Thanks for that tip about the toilet thing. The people, yes, the people who knew me from the crank days will think it is very funny that I have a quarter of a million followers on TikTok now. I'm a Jason K. Parjan on TikTok, but also that same username on Twitter and Blue Sky and Threads and Instagram and Facebook and YouTube. I have to be on all of them because in between me and my readers of my books stands a wall of billionaires who own social media platforms. And I don't like any of these people. I'm on threads, even though Mark Zuckerberg has ruined the lives of everyone I know.

He is between me and my readers. I don't know what else to do. I'm sorry. I'm not big enough. I'm not Stephen King. I'm not big enough to just put a book out there and everybody suddenly knows about it if i don't tell people about it on social media not a single copy will sell yeah we'll have to have you back on to talk about the zuckerberg elon musk uh ufc fight i think that'll be or dick measuring contest whichever one goes first yeah that whole thing jesus christ which is why it's such a good point with like like i remember with it like on my phone i had like an update about a new like alzheimer's drug that's been found to be effective like in the early stages and like how does fda approve and then the next thing just

came up it's like yeah uh elon wants to measure mark zuckerberg's dick because his app is like less potent right now and i'm like like, what the fuck? I almost, I almost lost sight of like these other breakthroughs that are happening to get into some old fashioned PP measuring. Yeah. Is there a work of media Jason that you've been enjoying? Uh, yeah.

I, as far as like my favorite Twitter post, I posted on here where somebody took a screenshot and Jack, maybe you already knew this from the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic commando. Can you picture the bad guy that that movie, in your head? Yeah. Yeah, I saw this, so I won't answer. He's got a chainmail tank top on. Apparently,

if you watch the film, it's HD restoration. His chainmail tank top is clear. It's just made out of yarn. It looks like his grandmother knitted him a crocheted tank top. That really fucked me up man oh no it's like a loose sweater

those loose sweaters that are in loosely knitted sweater it was supposed to be chainmail I don't know on VHS I just thought it was chainmail in my memory it is 100% chainmail a chainmail tank top by the way yeah the finale

is Arnold Schwarzenegger like impales him on like a pole and it's like it goes through his armor or whatever it's like a big how strong must he have been to do that it looks like a mesh marina like you know like yeah yeah Jamaican you know I thought maybe he was from the islands

one of the least physically intimidating bad guys of all time. It was a mismatch. A lot of those 80s action movies, those people were not physical matches for Arnold. When you look back, it's like, no, this was just a bully beating up on a very chubby, pasty man. My favorite is Stallone versus Lithgow in Cliffhanger. Lithgow's way better in Dexter. Yeah.

All right. Miles, where can people find you? Is there a work of media you've been enjoying? At Miles of Grey, where they got them, including Threads. I got a new podcast coming out actually tomorrow, Wednesday, July 12th, the debut of The Good Thief. It's this new podcast true crime ish podcast talking about this guy vasily's paleo costas who is the greek robin hood

uh who is literally kidnapping millionaires and giving some money away to people and as a result is actually one of interpol's most wanted fugitives uh so the podcast deals with kind of the search for him if he's alive where he's at trying to find more about the man behind this myth uh it's just a wild story we talk about the number of times he escaped from prison using a helicopter like multiple times so it's just a wild ride so please be sure to subscribe and rate and i would really appreciate y'all's support to hear me in my more host voice which is wild because you're used to hear me just like rambling here yeah you have a british accent i indubitably and let's see uh some and also

obviously moz and jack got mad boosties uh we were live from nba con as well as 420 day fiance with sophia alexandra some tweets that I like. I have a couple. Where's the first one? It is from the onion. It says that the onion did company hits diversity quota by claiming new AI is a woman. Felt like that's pretty, we're pretty close to that. And then best Cal at best B E L tweeted, talking about the Jonah Hill thing,

but this is a very LA tweet. It said, if you take nothing else from this reckoning, never date a man who went to Crossroads. Not business school. Wow, that is specific. Yeah, that's for people from LA for sure. Tweet I've been enjoying. David at underscore Elvish Presley underscore tweeted,

if you've successfully completed seven different missions, impossible missions, perhaps the guy in charge of labeling these missions is being a little dramatic. I think that's... I got into a long conversation with my five-year-old because my seven-year-old can read all the billboards now. So he's telling his little brother

about what the movies are that are coming out, what the titles are. are coming out like what the titles are and they were like wait well like what was the first impossible mission okay what was the second impossible mission i was like i don't i don't have encyclopedic knowledge of the mission impossible but there is something catchy about that title i guess so you keep doing it tom cruise you can find me on twitter at jack underscore o'brien You can find me on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien. You can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at The Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram.

We have a Facebook fan page and a website, DailyZeitgeist.com, where we post our episodes and our footnotes. We link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode, as well as a song that we think you might enjoy. Miles, what's a song you think people might enjoy? We're going to go out on a track called Lovers, L-O-V-A-S by Shaka

Lion and Singularis, which kind of is appropriate. But anyway, this is Shaka Lions. It kind of takes these older dub songs, like reggae dub tracks, mixes them up, gives them a slightly modern feel, but it still feels very retro. You know how I like to do it.

So check this one out. Lovers by Chaka Lyon. All right. We will link off to that in the footnotes. The Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's going to do it for us this morning.

Back this afternoon to tell you what is trending. We will talk to y'all then. Bye. Bye. to tell you what is trending and we will talk to y'all then. Bye. Bye. 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. I'm Keri Champion, and this is Season 4 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Elf Beauty. Founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadson. 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.