The Daily Zeitgeist - Copaganda: 2 + 2 = 5 (with Alec Karakatsanis) 03.18.25

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

In episode 1830, Jack and Miles are joined by author of Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, Alec Karakatsanis, to discuss… Seemingly Liberal Institutions That Do A Ton of Damage, Copaganda, Mahmoud Khalil Case and more! LISTEN: The Day The Nazi Died by Chumbawamba WATCH: The Daily Zeitgeist on Youtube! L.A. Wildfire Relief: Displaced Black Families GoFund Me Directory See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I recently rewatched that stomp HBO special from the late 90s. Oh, it's stomp. Like, you just remind me. We were like, damn, bro, these people are playing cards, but it's rhythmic. And I just remember being like, oh, they're not even playing drums. They're playing pots and using brooms and shit. I feel like there were a couple things, like just commercials, like the basketball commercial

where like the dude is dribbling, it's like edited together that, or that one Volkswagen commercial where the windshield wiper starts like going to the beat and then everything outside the window starts going to the beat. Dude, the influence of stomp. They started stomp. It was so stomp.

We stomp everything. Everything so stomp. Our iHeartRadio Music Awards are coming coming back Monday March 17th on Fox. Starring Bad Bunny, Glowrilla, Kenny Chesney, Money Long, Nellie, your host, iHeart Radio, LL Cool J. Are you guys ready to have some fun tonight? Plus iHeart Innovator Award recipient, Lady Gaga. iHeart Icon Award recipient, Mariah Carey.

And iHeart Breakthrough Award Award recipient Gracie Abrams. Watch live on Fox, Monday, March 17th. At 8, 7 Central. 45 years ago, a Virginia soul band called the Edge of Daybreak recorded their debut album Behind Bars. Record collectors consider it a masterpiece. The band's surviving members are long out of prison,

but they say they have some unfinished business. They had a day break, eyes of love, but supposed to have been followed up by another app. Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Reality TV and social media have love all wrong. So what really makes relationships last?

On this episode of Dope Labs, poet and relationship expert Young Pueblo breaks down the psychology of love and provides eye-opening insights and advice we all need. You should not be postponing your happiness. Your greatest happiness is not necessarily going to come from a relationship. Your partner should add to your happiness, but your happiness is really coming from within you. Listen to Dope Labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why would you do that to me?

Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true. Let's not forget that David Bloom was a professional con artist. So you didn't stand a chance. But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. I'm Caroline DeMore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, the internet, and welcome to season 380, episode two of... DIR DAILY NIGHT, GUYS! ...a production of iHeartRadio. This is a podcast where we take a deep dive into American shared consciousness.

It is Tuesday, March 18 2025. Yep. Yep. It's national ag day. Shout out to agriculture national sloppy Joe day, national awkward moments day. Yeah. Good times. Good times.

Sloppy jokes. Awkward moments. Oh man. Let's just have an awkward moment. The HR people who are really into these national days being like, oh, okay, awkward. Can't wait to print this one up and put on the bulletin board.

Did not have that one on my 2025 bingo card. No, mine did not, but I had it on my calendar. Yeah, trying to force an awkward moment. You're like, oh, okay, that was so awkward. It's like, no, no it wasn't. Don't you love Joe Biden? Oh, okay, that was so awkward. It's like, no, no it wasn't. Don't you love Joe Biden? Oh, okay. Anyways, my name is Jack O'Brien, AKA Potatoes O'Brien,

and I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co-host, Mr. Miles Gray. Yes, he's still out here. Look, you can actually find me on Lancashire Boulevard from time to time now. Even the Boulevard of Ventura or Magnolia You never know because I'm in the San Fernando Valley the Shogun with no gun. Yes in here. Yeah, stay out here You just started just walking make it turn in the valley into a lot of walking do a lot of walking

Nice a lot of walking. They call me Chris Well, mr. Walken we are thrilled to be joined in our third seat. Wow. By the executive director of Civil Rights Corps, which is a nonprofit dedicated to fighting systemic injustice. He's been a civil rights lawyer, a public defender. He was named 2016's Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice, the author of several books, the incredibly compelling Usual Cruelty and the brand new Copaganda, which we got to read an advanced

copy of. Let's drop it. April 15th. So good. Go pre-order right now. We'll be talking about it. Most importantly, a great follow on social media, of course. Please welcome the brilliant and talented Alec Carrick at

Sonic. Thank you all for having me back. Oh, man. Always. Always. Open door. I got excited when I read the word zeitgeist at the end of your book. I was like, Oh yeah. Shout out to the show. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking of you guys. Yeah, of course. Totally. How you been, man? I've been well. I mean, at least as well as can be. I'm excited to have this book out there in the world. And I think the ideas are so important now in a time of rising authoritarianism and a real assault on basic notions of kindness and truth and love.

And, you know, so I was I was trying to explore the last few years, you know, like what do we make of the mainstream media and how they're leading us to these really dark places. And I'm just glad to be able to be able to talk about it now in public. I'd give them an A minus. I think, I think they're mostly nailing it. What are you guys saying? Sorry, I didn't read the book, but we like the mainstream media, right?

Uh, they're cool. Yeah. I love the New York Times games. I mean, with many a guest, we like to get to know them a little bit better and do a search history underrated, overrated, but we got a lot to cover. So we want to just kind of dive right in. If that's all right with you, Alec, unless you had a search history underrated or overrated, that was particularly pressing that you wanted to get off your chest. You know, I don't do anything other than think about propaganda.

So I better just dive right in. All right, let's do it. I was actually it was funny. Yesterday, I was hanging out with some people who were from out of town and like they they hit me with the is LA safe? Because like, and I was like, are you OK? Yeah, he's great, man. What are you talking about? Like because I see a lot of like, you know The people are running into stores and like grabbing stuff and things like that and I'm like, oh my sweet sweet child Yeah, this is uh, these are like cherry picked videos that they play over and over again to sort of create that narrative

Like crimes actually going down like oh really? Oh You know one of the things The thing that I just think about a lot is the curation selectively of anecdote. You know, you know, you could, you could take a video montage of every missed shot that Michael Jordan took in his career, put them all together and you make them look like a bad shooter. This guy sucks. He's the worst player in the history of the NBA. Can't make a freaking shot. That's essentially what the mainstream media does with crime.

So the most effective propaganda, this is such an important lesson that I learned in my years of studying this, the most effective propaganda is actually based on true anecdotes. Because if you do something that's blatantly, blatantly false, unless it's something that people can't really figure out is false, you actually lose credibility. But if if you use a bunch of true anecdotes to suggest kind of false interpretations, or then you actually have much more sophisticated propaganda, it's a lot harder to tell the

difference. And so what we've seen the last few years is the example like you gave, you know, there was one video that went viral of shoplifting from a Walgreens in San Francisco that itself spawned 309 articles around the country. That one little video. And at the same time, in that one month period that these hundreds of articles are written about it and nightly newscasts all over the country by the thousands, there was virtually no stories about wage theft or tax evasion, things that are happening way, way more and that cost orders of magnitude more money for people. And that's the selective curation of anecdote that gets us afraid of all of the wrong things. And if in case people are like, yeah, but like it's better, like storytelling

or it's like more salient to like see the violent thing happening, the wage theft is stealing from you. Like those people are stealing from Walgreens, a massive corporation. Uh, they're doing it like on a one-off basis and it's being extrapolated into like a massive trend. They're stealing from a corporation and the wage theft is happening to you and it's not getting reported on. And the Walgreens story is being, you know, that we've got to protect Walgreens. And that is why I gave them an A minus instead of a straight A, you know, because they, they do,

they have some lapses. Sure. Sure. I, yeah, I just want to, we're, we're going to get into that because I think you do a great job of like kind of explaining how some of these things that if you ask the average American, if these institutions are right or left, they are going to say left, like the mainstream media, like Ivy League universities, the Democratic Party. You do a great job of explaining how they are some of the main ways that this catastrophic system that we're all living inside of perpetuates itself. But you actually close your book

with some amazing talking points that I just wanna open with because I do think, to your point, they like put people in the right mind frame to have this conversation, if that's all right. So you have one about how police spend, and this specifically relates to what has happened in the past four or five years since the conversation about defunding the police and all these stories that have come out. They're the only thing that we have, and they're the only thing keeping you safe.

You point out that police spend about 4% of their time on what they categorize as violent crime. Such crimes account for only 5% of the arrests that police make. For many years until recent legalization, dozens of states, the police made more arrests for marijuana possession than for all violent crime combined. With marijuana legal in almost half the states, marijuana possession arrests are still about half of all arrests for all violent crime combined. So just that idea, I think because of all the movies,

all the TV shows that we've been fed about police in my entire lifetime. That's the main genre. Right. It's just like cops solving violent crime is like a top genre of movies. It's just, it's not there. It's not there. It's just not supported by fact at all. It never has been.

Yeah. There has never been a time in US history when the significant bulk of police activity has been geared at violent crime. You take a look through the eras, you know, the origin of the modern police forces had to do with capturing enslaved people who had who had run away and crushing union organizing in in the rest of the country. And that's how the modern police force developed. And at that point, they weren't even, they didn't feel a propaganda need to make themselves out as

agents of public safety. They were quite open about what they were doing. And as the 20th century evolved and our sort of collective democratic values started to be articulated differently, police developed more and more and more of a propaganda need to justify their existence, not as preserving distributions of wealth and power and racial and economic hierarchy, but as quote unquote, public safety. And so then you see a massive effort in the modern era through huge investments from the CIA, from the DOD, from the DEA, from local prosecutor offices, to the multi-billion dollar police PR industry today, to shift the way we think through video, through TV, through movies, and then, as I argue in the book, through a massive and mostly secret

and unprecedented network of relationships with the liberal media. And this book, as you mentioned, this book is really about the role of liberal institutions and the way that police and prosecutors and prisons and the multi-billion dollar industries that profit off of them have co-opted each of these institutions that is thought of as liberal from the kinds of research that are done to the kinds of stories you see on your local news. And none of it is about helping us understand the things that are the greatest threats to our safety.

And instead, it's about creating a narrative that the things that we should fear are the things that poor people, immigrants, people of color, strangers do to us. And those are actually not the greatest sources of risk that all of us are exposed to on a daily basis. For example, just to take one example of something that's almost completely ignored by the police, sexual assault or child sexual assault. Almost no police time, relatively speaking, is devoted to this, right? They don't have undercover squads of officers going to frat houses and other places of rampant sexual assault They that's what they do for drugs in poor neighborhoods. You also don't have undercover cops going to frat houses for drugs

Probably doing a lot of drugs, but you can do the lazyest undercover. Being a fucking cop uniform like you guys got some like blow cane or something. Yeah. The Halloween party was last week. Yeah. For years in many major US police departments, they had hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits. And instead, the police were spending tens of billions of dollars on drug enforcement. This had nothing to do with keeping us safe or making intentional, reasonable decisions about which crimes we prioritize and which crimes should not be. It had everything to do with using the police force to control certain populations and huge amounts of profit that could be made from policing of drug cases, which I explain a little bit more in the book, but I think

that's a really important thing to understand. Yeah. I mean, you have the quote from Nixon's assistant to domestic affairs saying, like literally just being like, yeah, this was our plan. Make it illegal to be either against the war or black, or we can't make it illegal to be against the war of black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. Just straight up, we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings.

This is when they came up with the war on drugs in its 1980s, 90s, and kind of modern incarnation. And they just, they straight up had the plan and executed it. And I want you to understand, I mean, just take Chicago, for example, at the height of the civil rights movement. I'm not even going to count the federal officers. So let's leave out the feds. The Chicago police had 500 officers devoted to infiltrating and crushing the civil rights movement. 500 full-time cops, right? Now, the history of our current era has not been written. We really have very limited window into what the current police are doing with their intelligence divisions and the variety of informants they're using. But take a look, for example, at Chicago itself

after the police murder of Laquan McDonald, which the police had a video of and hid for a long time to get Rahm Emanuel back elected. When Laquan McDonald was killed by the Chicago police, they had four full-time dedicated public relations officials at CPD. In the couple of years after it started becoming a scandal, they jumped to 30 and then 40,

and now they have over 50 full-time PR people at the Chicago Police Department. This is affecting the information that you and I see on the news. Right. Full court press all the time. By the way, was it a Chicago cop who grabbed the back of your neck and told you he had your DNA? Was it, or that anecdote blew my fucking mind. Yeah, that was in Texas. Jesus Christ. That was, that was fucking mind blowing. Yeah. Grabbed it was basically like, I now have your DNA. I know. And here's the make- and model of your car and just the most like sinister threatening shit for what I have to assume you were holding up a room full

of people with a handgun? Close. I was suing the jurisdictions around the country for illegally jailing people. So that's just threatening to them. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But that's the thing you have to understand too is a lot of people don't talk about this, but many, many, many people around the country, progressive local and state officials, I've

had judges, prosecutors, mayors, state assembly officials, all come to me over the years and share vivid and well-documented stories of police threatening them and their families, if they took anti-police stances. The organized right-wing police bureaucracy is extremely unaccountable and goes to enormous lengths to threaten anybody. Like even me, just a visiting civil rights lawyer, you know? The idea that they would follow me and document the make and model of my car and take the time to threaten me in that way. And I was also in another situation, I was leading a

spring break trip. I was actually traveling with a New York Times reporter and a law student intern from Harvard. And I was detained by a group of armed sheriffs. They had their hands on their guns on their hips and they locked me in a room. And they started demanding that I answer questions to them about what I was. And all I was doing at that point was asking for publicly available records at a courthouse. So this is the kind of thing that happens a million times a year. You never hear about it, but it deeply shapes how the public officials you see taking pro-police stands. A lot of that is actually driven by fear.

Right. Yeah. I mean, I felt like that in L.A., right, where in the summer of 2020, like there was a lot of pressure on the city council to be like, are you going to address these budgets and like these motherfuckers pulled up like they were going to get like all these cops pulled up to sort of protest that they thought it would be detrimental for budgets to be touched in any way. But it was so menacing that you knew that it wasn't merely to be like, we're concerned about our wages. They're like, you know, fuck around with us and see what you learn how sort of off the rails we can get. And I remember just sort of like that image really sort of, I think always inherently you have a belief

that like these people are not here to protect us at all. But then you could really just see how organized they were in protecting this right to just execute violence on people for whatever reason and get paid for it. That was very, very, very scary. But also part of like, I think what is important about this book is for us to have a bit of an evolution on how we're even looking at it.

Because to Jack's point, we're all raised to be like, yeah, they're the good guys and they like to break dance sometimes at the local basketball court and they're fun people, but then they also keep us safe and these other things while meanwhile, we are hearing directly from their mouths, like in the case of like people with Nixon's cabinet, we're like, no, no, no, like we need we need these people to sort of create the air that people that are sort of opposed to what we're doing as a government or municipality that

this is illegal. And we use the, the activity of the police to sort of connect the dots for people as a shorthand to be like, yes, hippies bad. Yes, yes, this makes sense now. And the other thing you have that I talk about in the book that you have to understand is that what, what we're told now is called in the, in, this makes sense now. And another thing that I talk about in the book that you have to understand is that what we're told now is called in our current sort of propaganda discourse, community policing.

And this idea that you were just mentioning, the cops break dancing, and during the 2020 uprisings, there were some cops that were doing the Macarena with protesters. And every local news station runs a story every now and then about like a midnight basketball league that the cops are running or like a Thanksgiving Turkey giveaway for poor families.

What you have to understand about all that is it's all extremely intentional and it derives from counterinsurgency theory that was developed by the French military in Vietnam and the British military in the Middle East, and it was used to great effect by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan. And there's a huge police training industry and an industry of police consultants that got to work on converting what they used to call counterinsurgency. They knew they need, they couldn't call it counterinsurgency in the U.S. So actually, Harvard made a mistake a few years ago, and they had an ex-military person teaching a class on counterinsurgency. A bunch of Harvard students were going to go into a black neighborhood in Massachusetts and help the police do counterinsurgency. Oh my gosh.

And they just forgot that like, that you're supposed to call it community policing in the U.S. Right. Holy shit. The goal of, and so Harvard had to cancel the class. So they have just called it something different. They could have gone forward and even been celebrated for it, you know? But a lot of liberals over the last 20 or 30 years, and this is something that I try to delve into great detail into the book with lots of sources and recommendations for further reading for people.

But liberals really should advance this idea that we can repackage authoritarian and repressive stuff that our military and other militaries were doing around the world to native populations. We can try the same strategies in the US, but call them reform. And this has been a central feature of the way the news media has covered policing over the last 20 or 30 years. And it's been a central strategic focus of the police to co-opt certain marginalized

leaders in different communities to get them to support these policies, which actually resulted more people being surve resulted in more people being surveilled, more people being arrested, higher rates of incarceration, more profits for the policing industry. They're not a reform in any sense of the word, but they have come to have a whole thing in the book and I've written a separate article, which is also going to be a book on police body cameras, because LA plays a really prominent role in this. For years, police body cameras were this thing that the policing industry wanted so badly, but they couldn't get the money for it. They wanted it so badly that the LAPD got people like

Steven Spielberg to donate body camera technology to the cops. I mean, who better? The guy works with cameras. Exactly. He made Minority Report. I guess James Cameron, maybe? He's going to with cameras. You know, he made minority reports. So Cameron, maybe he's going to issue. Yeah, but minority report really, he's bringing us into the future of policing. But for years, the police dreamed about this because, you know, companies like Amazon and Microsoft and Taser, which then rebranded as Axon after its taser started killing people,

a much less evil sounding Axon. These companies used to talk privately and even shareholders and policing conferences and stuff about how much money there was. This is a multi-billion dollar potential industry if they could get the government contracts, but they couldn't get a lot of these. Most big city local governments in the US are run by liberals. They're run by Democrats and they couldn't get a lot of these most big city local governments in the US are run by liberals. They're run by Democrats. And they couldn't get the funding for this.

So actually what they did was they used Michael Brown's killing in 2014, where there was no video of it. And they used that and Obama, you know, requested several hundred million dollars for body cameras. And it became a mantra of the Democratic Party all over the country. And meanwhile, the policing folks were beside themselves with joy. dollars for body cameras and it became a mantra of the Democratic Party all over the country. And meanwhile, the policing folks were beside themselves with joy because they wanted to connect. They wanted billions of dollars to give every cop in the US a mobile surveillance camera. They could connect to artificial intelligence, facial recognition, voice recognition. They could go to a protest and scan the crowd with their chest camera and have everyone's identity.

They also wanted and they knew that this evidence was only going to be used against very poor people. This is how they were going to get video evidence that the cops controlled to arrest unhoused people, you know, to do drug busts and things like that. They knew it was never going to be used or at least very, very rarely ever used against police. And so we have this situation now where there's reams of evidence, even the federal government admits that body cameras

do not have any positive effect on reducing police violence or making them more accountable, more transparent, but they do dramatically increase the extent to which police can prosecute and get people to plead guilty more quickly because they have these videos that they control. So anyway, that's a good example of something that in the public imagination, and if you look at, and I read every single article that I could find hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of articles about body cameras and the media, they were all portrayed as an initiative for accountability and transparency. When in fact they were developed exactly the opposite. They were built exactly to give police more power

and less accountability by giving police control over what is filmed from what angle and when that film is edited and how it's edited and when they can release it in public. Right. I'm curious just like along with that to create that narrative, like were they also doing like performative resistance to make it feel

like it was like a measure of accountability? Oh no! You're giving us body cameras? Yeah, you know what I mean? Like just to kind of help that because I feel like the flow of an article like that is like liberal politicians like we need the need for it and then there'd be like the police version where they're like I don't think it's quite necessary to sort of create that tension

or was this a sort of like they were like no no go ahead go ahead. Yeah, I think there are a couple of interesting and complicated internal dynamics going on with the policing bureaucracy. First of all, yes, some of it was performative. And I don't know if you've ever watched body cameras, but I've seen hundreds and hundreds of body cameras, especially when I was a public defender,

but the police are trained. So the camera is looking outward from their chest, So the camera is actually not showing what the police officer themselves is doing. And so if you notice in a lot of these videos, the cops are just screaming, stop resisting, stop resisting, stop resisting. Right. That's something they're trained to do so that it, it, it, they're taught that it makes it harder to, to, um, convict them of anything or hold them liable civilly because they're creating what they call a contemporaneous record of resistance, which then justifies their use of force, even though you can't actually see what's actually going on. Anyway, but the internal dynamics were that

some of the frontline officers who have the least power in the policing bureaucracy were worried about you wearing cameras. They were worried that it was going to enable their bosses to spy on them and reduce their ability to engage in some of the activity that might be illegal, et cetera, that they tend to want to engage in. They weren't sure what policies and protocols they were going to be for when they were being recorded and who was going to control the video. But at the same time, police leaders and leaders in the surveillance industry really wanted that because they thought this would enable them to even more completely control the behavior of beat cops. And so initially there was a much stronger appetite for body

cameras among police leadership and the companies that make them and that make the software than there was among beat cops. But then once it became clear that these that they had the right protocols in place that was going to make sure that the cops were, you know, unless the cops really made a mistake, they were never going to be recorded doing something that they, you know, that they didn't want to be recorded doing. And also they could control and edit the video. And also it was by and large going to make it much, much more easier to prosecute the

poor people. Because keep in mind, like the body cameras have no say over like which neighborhoods are we going into and which neighborhoods are we not? Where are we looking for drugs and where are we not looking for drugs? These bigger questions that are really the core of the discriminatory nature of policing in our society, body cameras just ignore all that, right? So cops became convinced that actually body cameras were not going to be a threat to business as usual.

And there's now much more uniform support among even the lowest level line cops for body cameras than there was initially. All right. Just real quick, I also wanted to do the talking point that just, I think, at the broadest among even the lowest level line cops for body cameras than there was initially. All right, just real quick, I also wanted to do the talking point that just I think at the broadest level is helpful for people to learn that this is not normal, is that the US confines people to jail cells

at six times its own historical average, five to 10 times as much as other comparable countries and imprisons black people at six times the rate of South Africa during apartheid. So many people have probably heard that. I think it's worth just stating up top for anybody who abnormal and unfucked. It is very abnormal. And that's why you need so much propaganda. Right. Right. Exactly. Like you've got a bureaucracy that is larger than any bureaucracy in the modern history of the world. Like no country, let alone any country that thinks of itself as democracy,

has ever tried to spend this much money jailing its own people. Right. And in the face of that, you've got enormous bodies of scientific evidence that show that imprisoning people does not make us safer. It actually makes us less safe. And you've got even more robust bodies of empirical research that show the things that make us safer and reduce crime are things like housing, health care, early childhood education.

Like it's obvious. And so you need a giant propaganda apparatus to get people so afraid of strangers and poor people and immigrants that like they inspected what all the evidence shows. They constantly think that they're in fear and danger that the only solution for them is increasing the amount of money that our society spends on police. Right. Let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and we'll focus on some of these allegedly

liberal institutions that are doing a lot of the legwork and what we're talking about. We'll be right back. Our iHeartRadio Music Awards are coming back Monday, March 17th on Fox. Starring Bad Bunny, Glowrilla, Kenny Chesney, Money Long. Nellie. Your host. I Heart Radio. LL Cool J. Are you guys ready to have some fun tonight? Plus I Heart Innovator Award recipient, Lady Gaga. I Heart Icon Award recipient, Mariah Carey.

And I Heart Breakthrough Award recipient, Gracie Abrams. Watch live on Fox, Monday, March 17th. At 8, 7 Central. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? How? Goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all-new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. And Santi was gone.

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They're out of prison now and in their 70s. Their past behind them. But they also have some unfinished business. The end of their break, eyes of love, was supposed to have been followed up by another album. It's a story about the liberating power of music, the American justice system, and ultimately second chances. Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Love at first swipe? I highly doubt it. What's your biggest red flag? No, no, no. What's your ultimate green flag? These days, reality TV and social media have us thinking love is instant. We're marrying strangers at first sight, we're finding love through walls, or we're even judging people by balloon pops.

But what really makes a relationship blast? On this episode of Dope Labs, poet, author, and relationship expert, Young Pueblo, breaks down the psychology and biology of loving better. And he provides eye-opening insights and advice that we all need. It's a big realization moment that you should not be postponing your happiness.

Your greatest happiness is not necessarily going to come from a relationship. Your partner, they should add to your happiness, but your happiness is really coming from within you. Listen to Dope Labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're back. There's this one moment as Trump was taking office and dropping a bunch of fascist executive orders and just attacking trans people.

The Wall Street Journal had another op-ed on the front page of their paper. That was all about how colleges too woke. I was kind of amazed at that, but it really just was kind of an illustration of how relentless they have been and continued to be in painting these institutions. We're going to talk about Harvard and Columbia,

the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets, the Democratic Party. These institutions that I guess benefit from being like, yeah, we are actually very liberal and just basically they are there to perpetuate the existing power structures and wealth distribution. But yeah, I wanted to start with Harvard. Harvard gets mentioned a few times in the book. Specifically, you talk about the study where two academics who claim to be coming from the left and to be like really bummed out by the conclusion that they arrive at are like, guys, sorry, we're just calling balls and strikes here. We're just redoing the math. And unfortunately, the only way for us to move forward as a progressive society is to like double the number, the

already record high number of cops that we have on the street. We just need to like become even more of a police state. But just more generally, you write in the book, I learned over time the most important qualification for teaching students. Oh no, this was actually a tweet of yours. You wrote, over time, the most important qualification for teaching students. Oh, no, this was actually a tweet of yours. You wrote, over time, the most important qualification for teaching students at elite schools, willingness to use your mind, position, and power to preserve distributions of wealth and misery. But can you just talk about like kind of what was this surprising to you at a certain point, that these institutions like Harvard and Columbia were just so in the bag for the existing kind of power structure?

I was pretty naive when I got to, you know, I went to college at Yale, I went to law school at Harvard, and I was pretty naive when I got to these places. You know, I was sort of thinking, oh, these are institutions of learning and they're so prestigious and like people who come here must be smarter and they must be, you know, really rigorous thinkers. And that's really not what goes on at these places at all. I don't want to speak a too broad a brushstroke because like, you know, I've a lot of incredible friends and relationships that I made there. There are a lot of scholars at these institutions, just like at many other universities and colleges and

non-academic institutions around the country. There are people doing amazing scholarship and scholarship matters, like research matters. I'm not saying that those things are not important. That's not the lesson of the book. But one of the key functions of a place like Harvard is to launder policies and ideas that are designed to preserve existing distributions of wealth and power in our society, launder them with a veneer of academic backing and of rigorous thought and things like that. And you learn very quickly at a place like Harvard, what does it take not only to succeed there as a student, but what does it take to become a professor? What does it take to get tenure?

And everybody who, it's very political, and everybody who's there understands that certain kinds of research that benefits certain kinds of people in our society and certain institutions is going to be a ticket to success and other kinds of research and views are not. And Harvard has an endowment worth tens of billions of dollars. It's a huge industry.

And so a lot of the scholarship that is produced at a place like Harvard is skewed by these other incentives. In other words, it's not this kind of pure place where like the best ideas are espoused and the people who are the smartest and best researchers with the kindest souls are the ones who succeeded it. You know, it's not, it's not how it works. And I think the example that I use in my book, I have a whole chapter devoted to this. I think it's one of the funniest and I try to, by the way, throughout the book, I try to talk about all these issues with humor and a little bit of joy because to me, like, life is not worth living unless you can laugh a little bit about

these horrific things. And these are definitely teetering on the edge of laughter or crying. One or the other. Yeah. And if you can't laugh about two Harvard professors, you know, sort of proposing the greatest expansion of policing in modern world history by adding 500,000 police officers to the US, based on rudimentary errors that they made that are somewhat comical, then you can't laugh about anything. Right. And these two guys are particularly funny to me because they portray themselves not only as

progressives, but as socialists. And they understand something really important, which is it's, it's very good for your future as a scholar at Harvard. If you can be seen as one of those, you know, it's almost like a false flag operation, right? It's like you're parading around as a leftist socialist progressive, but the ideas you're promoting are right wing and serving the interests of the people who financially back Harvard and their social circles, etc. So it's very smart, actually, if what you were thinking was that you wanted to advance your career.

But anyway, these guys proposed, and I think one especially comical thing about it is that in journal that they published this call for 500,000 more police and by the way, the call for more police is as I talk about in the book, it's absurd. They made this proposal without counting the social costs of more police. You can't, you know, say I want it'd be like installing a new heater in your house and not only getting the measurements wrong for the heater, but you neglected to include that this heater spews carbon monoxide into your house. You know, you're saying, yes, yeah, they're like, well, you know, we're installing this heater in this house

and it's going to increase, you know, the heat by a degree over other heaters, you know, and not only did they get that measurement wrong, but they also just neglected to tell you it's also going to kill your whole family. Right. So you can't promote, you don't make a social policy proposal without even asking the question of like, what are some of the costs and downsides to the proposal? Right. what are some of the costs and downsides to the proposal. Right. And anyway, but I think like the funniest part about it to me is that the journal they published this in was created in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprisings

by Harvard as a way of pacifying student unrest. They were like, we're gonna create this journal of law and inequality. And it's gonna be this new thing that people publish to like confront these issues of our day. And then just a short time later, that Journal of Law and Inequality, or whatever they called it,

is already publishing bold pleas by Harvard professors to add 500,000 cops. Yes, I remember when it came out and we were like, oh my God, the mainstream media is going to eat this shit. Love this. Yeah. Sure enough, they did. There's also just a little detail in that because you came at this study and pointed out all the ways that it was ridiculous.

Speaking of these two Harvard professors as comical figures, just the fact that they were using their students to try to construct arguments against your critiques of their book was pretty wild. Show them. Oh wait, so they were asking the students to basically be like, defend this against evil Alec. Well, no, I mean, I think, I don't know that they were,

I don't think that they were specifically talking about me, but they were, I don't think that they were, you know, specifically talking about me, but they were instead of like testing students on like the basics of first year criminal law, you know, one of the professors during the exam was apparently asking and the students, you know, sent me these exam questions. They sent in the screenshots of them to me and he was asking for their help developing counter argumentsuments to his proposal. More police. You know, it's... What rubbed me the wrong way about it, what I thought was really funny about it was like

he was asking students for help with his research project. You know? Just like, yeah, crowdsourcing, like, yeah, the fleshing out of a research project. Yeah. And it turned out, like, the students told me that like, we had like raised a number of the objections that you'd lay publicly with them privately before they, so it's not like these people would just like,

had like a huge brain fart and forgot about, you know, a lot of the critiques and they just like didn't care to respond or even rigorously address in the first place, these things. And that's why I think the Coppaganda book that is full of this stuff, right? What I try to do is take some of the most outrageous, funniest examples of kind of mainstream liberal institutions, whether it's professors or news organizations and journalists or whatever,

nonprofits sometimes, and illustrate stuff that is actually really important that we might miss if we just look at the news. Because it's not just these Harvard professors are publishing this stuff, it's how does that stuff then get translated into the mainstream news that you consume as conventional wisdom. And that's the process that I really try to examine in the book with some humor because, you know, this book, we've raised money so that any teacher who wants to teach any part of this book in school, any person in prison, we have free copies of the book available to people. Like, obviously, I hope that you support the book and all the, I don't make any money off

the book. Right. Any copy that sold all the royalties go to the stop LAPD spying coalition, which organizes on house people in Skid Row in Los Angeles. But even if you can't afford the book, you know, we can get free copies to people because we just want people to have a more critical understanding of the news that they're being shown. Yeah. Which is like interesting that the way you bring up Harvard, it immediately relates to the newsroom, right? Like the way professors and academics can ascend.

It's not that there's like marching orders, but you can pretty clearly intuit. You're like, OK, if I talk about this in this way, this is how I get my things pop in, which I feel like is another criticism we have of a lot of journalism, too, where clearly other journalists know, OK, if I write from this perspective or stories with this sort of bend to it, that's how I'm able to ascend and that's how it further just reinforces this thing. I think the New York Times is probably a great example of this thinking.

Yeah. You have a great quote from David Graber, who we talk about a lot on this show about the Superman and Batman where they're both essentially instituting fascist policies with their superpowers because that's all we can imagine. That tied back to how I think about the mainstream media point that Miles was talking about, where it's like they're playing to the audience. The audience wants to see, I think there's at least a part of the audience that wants

to see this fucking fascist. That's why Batman does that. That's why Superman does that. They know they're going to get readers and it's just this cowardly thing that's pleasing their corporate overlords. But I think it's also pleasing some dark, horrible part of the audience too that is like, yeah, I want to believe that this is

the police good guy. Right. And this is it. It's an easy solve. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's, there's definitely part of that, but I don't know. Cause I mean, I think you, it's easy to envision you could have really compelling local news story. Like for example, if instead of, of installing a reporter to read all the police press releases and regurgitate them for the news every day, what if you had a reporter whose job was to report on like landlord tenant court and every day you had like a bad landlord of the day article or a bad employer of the day? Absolutely. Like I think people would watch and be interested in finding out what landlords are doing to their tenants across LA or across Chicago or across the country.

I think if you if you installed somebody at all of the sites that are that are figuring out who's polluting our drinking water, who is emitting dangerous gases that are hurting our children. And, you know, by the way, air pollution kills 100,000 people in the US every year. Okay, that's four to five times all homicide can die. There are people every single day in all these cities who are actually just emitting stuff that's killing our children. Yeah. And there are people doing it. It's not a faceless thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think people would, I mean,

I hear what you're saying. I definitely think there's part of like, they feel like they're, they're playing down, it's like reality TV or law and order. Like they definitely think they're, they think they know what their audience wants, but I believe audiences would tolerate different types of villains and different types of stories about who is causing us harm

that were more consistent with reality. And that's another thing I talk about in the book. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so many wild, like while the Walgreens shoplifting panic was happening, they had to settle a massive lawsuit about wage theft. But you make a good point about how anytime there are multiple cases of shoplifting or just like viral videos of shoplifting.

That becomes a wave or a trend or out of control. But these things, the Walgreens wage theft settlement is treated as a one-off thing. Then when you talked to editors, they were like, well, we reported on a different company doing that last month. So we can't like that. That story's been done, essentially, which is so, so wild and doesn't doesn't really doesn't really make any sense unless you're taking into account. Yeah, but we can't like make them mad because they are the big corporate overlord Yeah, I mean, I think you have to understand also how the news media works

There's lots of scholarship written about how the media functions, but they it organizes things into news themes and And it categorizes things so that people can understand them And so I give this great example from the late 70s, early 80s of this person who is a supporter who was embedded in a newsroom and he watched the creation of a supposed crime wave by youth of color against old people. And there was this panic that emerged that all these young people of color were robbing and stealing from and mugging and hurting old people. And every time that happened during this period, it was seen as further evidence of this trend. But when you take a step back and look several

years later, you actually see that the only thing that had been created was this news categorization and this news trend. Actually, incidents of young people stealing and mugging and robbing old people were actually down during that period. And this is, it's very hard for people to understand, but sometimes the news, you know, for example, after the East Palestine train derailment in Ohio a couple of years ago, there were more, there's more of an interest in the news media in covering train derailments. Those are things that are happening all the time, right? But now that you're focused on it and it's a theme of your news,

it's going to play into this idea. And the same thing is happening, there was a massive society-wide panic about shoplifting and retail theft, even though retail theft we now know is down. And so how we categorize things, it's just so, so important. It's like the Michael Jordan example I gave earlier. If you're, if you're looking for it, and if you just only document the missed shots, you're going to not capture the full story. And that's what makes the media, they have such an awesome responsibility,

because they have a choice every single day out of the millions and millions of things that have happened in the world. They're going to tell us about 10 or 15 of them or 20 of them. And also, they're going to suggest in their coverage, how should we think about this? In other words, is that wildfire connected to climate change? Or is it some isolated event? Right. Is that airline crash connected to DEI programs at, you know, like Trump said, right? You know? Yeah. Or like, so this is an awesome responsibility, because just by juxtaposing two stories together or two ideas together, like I give an example in the book, where they claim that a certain kind of crime went down in a certain city.

And they say, just they just note that also the police had been holding a charity basketball tournament. So it's like they're suggesting that like, and what they didn't report is that that particular kind of crime had gone down nationwide, not just in the place where there's a police youth basketball tournament. So these are all these categories and these causes, they're highly manipulable. And if you take nothing else away from the book, I want you to take away the idea that there are a lot of very smart people being paid billions of dollars a year to shape how you think about what is newsworthy, what's happening in the world, what the causes are, and therefore what should we spend money on as the solutions?

Let's take one more quick break. And then I just want to talk to you about like where, where we go from, from here, because obviously things are shifting. Some of this fascism that has been ignored for a long time is getting louder. And so I just want to kind of hear your thoughts on that. We'll be right back. Awards are coming back Monday, March 17th on Fox, starring Bad Bunny, Glorilla, Kenny Chesney, Money Long, Nelly, your host, I Heart Radio, LL Cool J. Are you guys ready to have some fun tonight? Plus I Heart Innovator Award recipient, Lady Gaga,

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or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. September, 1979. Virginia's top prison band, Edge of Daybreak, is about to record their debut album, Behind Bars, in just five hours. OK, we're rolling. One, two, three, four. I'm Jamie Petrus, music and culture writer.

For the past five years, I've been talking to the band's three surviving members. They're out of prison now and in their 70s. Their past behind them. But they also have some unfinished business. The end of daybreak, eyes of love, was supposed to have been followed up by another album. It's a story about the liberating power of music,

the American justice system, and ultimately, second chances. Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Love at first swipe? I highly doubt it. What's your biggest red flag? No, no, no. What's your ultimate green flag? These days, reality TV and social media

have us thinking love is instant. We're marrying strangers at first sight, we're finding love through walls, or we're even judging people by balloon pops. But what really makes a relationship blast? On this episode of Dope Labs, poet, author, and relationship expert, Young Pueblo, breaks down the psychology and biology of loving better. And he provides eye-opening insights and advice that we all need. It's a big realization moment that you should not be postponing your happiness.

Like your greatest happiness is not necessarily going to like come from a relationship. Your partner, they should add to your happiness, but your happiness is really coming from within you. Listen to Dope Labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back. And yeah, I mean, we have been living with, as your book does a really good job of illustrating,

extraordinary fascism and authoritarianism and injustice for years. Much of the mainstream media and much of these supposedly liberal institutions have been just ignoring it. Now it feels like it's becoming louder and harder to ignore. Like the, you know, the truth comes quietly at first and then it speaks louder and then it's, you know, then it's a shrieking 10 alarm fire. And there are, it seems like we're entering in some ways, kind of a world that's recognizable if like now that, like now that you've illustrated all these

things, once people have read your book, they'll be like, oh, a lot of this stuff has been happening for a while. But it also feels like with the arrests of Mahmood Khalil, and you wrote on Twitter that you've never seen a more clear cut First Amendment violation. It just, it does feel like things are escalating. And so I'm just kind of curious how you're thinking about the position. Has it changed how you're thinking about the situation Americans find themselves in? Yeah. And look, I'm just one person, so who knows?

I mean, I think we're all, all people of goodwill are struggling right now. Think about what can I do? What does one do when society is teetering on the brink of such an abyss? And how do we, how do we come together with other people who care? And I don't report to have all the answers. And I think different people are in a different position to do different things. And we all have to do whatever we can. I think there's, I mean, I offer some tips in the last chapter of the book about, you know, one of the first steps is like, fortifying your own mind against, you know, relentless propaganda and like, what are some things to read and what are some daily practices to employ in your life. Also, it's very important who you surround yourself with and what kinds of sort of critical thinking communities you put yourself in. And then also, I think what's so, so, so important in this moment is the fascists win when people are so afraid but also so hopeless and feel like everything is futile. And I think it's a great time for people to get involved wherever they are in their own

communities, whether that's geographically, like getting involved in your local library or your local school board or mutual aid groups that help people in your community, or at work or at school, like organizing and getting together with people, other people, really any, it could be the smallest little things that you're fighting for together, but when you organize other people and you fight for things,

like something that is really true, something that is in some small way trying to counter the meanness that pervades so much of our society. By the way, I do a lot of work all over the country in rural areas, all over the country in big cities, Democrat, Republican, whatever. It's very different from the world that we see on Twitter or social media. People want to be connecting to each other relating to

each other in community and like it's easy to forget when you see how isolated one feels by just spending a lot of time on social media maybe and maybe that's just me but you have to just remember that like we are we are such a social species and there's so much we can do for each other if we just adopt the spirit of kindness instead of a spirit of meanness. And I keep coming back to that. It's important now more than ever.

And then we all just have to fight. I say this in the book, and this is one of the themes, but I think a lot about Orwell's 1984. And one of the themes of George Orwell's book is that the sort of authoritarian government is constantly trying to get people to say, to think two plus two equals five, two plus two equals five, two plus two equals five. And in whatever way is true to us, we need to be able to every day remind ourselves two plus two equals four, remind the people that we're close to. And that just means the way that I see that, like in our civil rights work,

even if the courts are getting more and more hostile to the kinds of cases that we do, even if people are being jailed illegally and violation of the constitution and just the act of us fighting them is our way of saying two plus two equals four, two plus two equals four, just standing up to that and never becoming, you know, to that and never becoming, you know, like that's why I think it's so harmful about what Columbia has done, what Chuck Schumer is doing, what a lot of these universities do. They are giving in, they are appeasing, they are refusing to say two plus two equals four. And once you do that,

as a society, all is lost. And so we have to just in our own little ways, find our our strength and courage to keep saying two plus two equals four. Yeah, I thought that was really an amazing part of that last part of the book, because I think so many people right now are just in like this fight or flight response to everything. And just looking for like a silver silver bullet answer, like, what do we do now? And you know,, myself included all and I think, I really loved how again, you're talking about what's also important is that

we fortify our minds to sort of repel this kind of messaging and internalizing these sort of like, lies, and making those our reality. But also, like, again, it's like really basic things like you're talking about, like fostering your sense of community, like deepening those relationships with people around you. And then even like, just engaging with art. Also, I thought I was like, that's really brilliant to to just think about again, because you're talking about how different messages are

going to hit our brains differently when they're expressed artistically and things like that. So I just thought, yeah, like this sort of like holistic view of it is really helpful. And I think helps also like when you say the whole thing of like, we got to remind ourselves two plus two is four, that that gives us a better view of sort of like the long term nature of like this endeavor that's in front of us. It's not like, okay, everybody do these three things, and it's over. It's like, no, there are many things that we're going to be doing. But the biggest thing too, is like you're saying, maintaining that sense of humanity and

hope. So I hope I hope we're all able to do that. I feel like that's the biggest thing too is like you're saying, maintaining that sense of humanity and hope. So I hope we're all able to do that. I feel like that's the biggest thing that we want to be able to do right now. Yeah. Well, thank you, Alex, so much for coming on again. And congratulations on the book. It's really awesome. Where can people find you, follow you, and where can they find the book? Yeah. So thank you guys both for having me on. I hope this book sells more copies than my last book, which I think was maybe just my grandma and my parents maybe bought it. This has to do well. This is going to do well. This is where we're going to get it out there. It's going to get the TDZ bump, baby. Oh, the famous bump. Yeah. So people can Google or search whatever you use to find Coppa Ganda and my book.

You can buy it wherever books are sold. I've been encouraging people to buy it from this really great black owned bookstore in Flint, Michigan that I've been working with called Comma, C-O-M-M-A. You can just pre-order it there and they'll send it to you no matter where you live. But also if you have a favorite local bookstore, the easiest thing to do is just go into your local bookstore

and order it from there or ask them to carry it. Because go to your local library, ask them to carry it. That's actually how we get these books out there is people just going in and talking about it. And if you have friends or family who are liberals or progressives who, you know, this book is really written for well-meaning liberal progressive people. Yeah, you know, to, to, or, or, you know, I don't, I hate these terms, but like apolitical people are moderate people who, who, you know, I'm not really writing this book for the far

right. Right. You know, people like that in your life, just encourage them to look up the book. They can also find me on all the social media platforms at Equality Alec and you can look at our work at Civil Rights Core as well, to see some of our civil rights work that really led me to explore the ideas that are in the book. One of the best books I've read in a long time and one of

the best follows anywhere on social media. So go do it everybody. Alec, is there a work of social media or media or anything you've been enjoying? I've been actually reading a book called Ministry for the Future. Yeah. By Kim Stanley Robinson. Yeah. I would encourage people to check that out.

It's really good. We did a whole episode on Ministry for the Future. It's so good. Awesome. Great recommendation. Miles, where can people find you? Is there a work of media you've been enjoying? Yeah, just everywhere they got ad symbols at miles of gray check Jack and I talking basketball on miles and Jack on my boosties. And then I'm talking about 90 day fiance. That's my myself where I really just can disconnect from talking about news on for 20 day fiance. Work of media. Yes. At juniper.beer on B sky. But the I is actually

a one I believe. All right. Maybe an uppercase L. But juniper. This is kind of just funny because it aligns with sort of what we're talking about. It says whenever I see people posting their own ACAB includes blank posts.

I get PTSD flashbacks to four years ago when I posted a police car themed children shopping cart and a segment of Twitter genuinely got enraged at me. It does include's shopping cart and a segment of Twitter genuinely got enraged at me. Hey, it does include that shopping cart. Yeah. You can find me on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien and on blue sky at Jack OB the number one tweet I've been enjoying is from at P P Y ONA tweeted, hate when anxiety gives me stomach problems. Like baby, you were supposed to be a mental disorder. Please stay in your lane.

And I, I, I relate. Uh, you can find us on Twitter at daily zeitgeist and on blue sky at daily zeitgeist, where it's the daily zeitgeist on Instagram. Uh, you can go to the description of this episode, wherever you're listening to it, and you can find the footnotes, which is where we link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode and where we link off to the book, Copaganda, which you have to go buy.

It is an assignment. Get it local. Yeah, also local. Stay local. We also link off to a song that we think you might enjoy, Miles. Is there a song that you think people might enjoy? Yeah, I feel like every 16 months, the internet finds out chumbo wumbas, like this anarchist band,

and they play this like sort of acapella song, The Day the Nazi Died, and this clip resurfaces again at this like 16 month pace, and I saw it bubbling up again, and I was like, oh yeah, people need to hear this. So anyway, it's on their album, but the live version where they perform it in Dusseldorf, Germany is probably like the the vibiest performance of it all.

But Chumba Wumba, The Day the Nazi Died. Chumba Wumba. Yeah. Hell yeah. Never has an anarchist group sounded more like a type of bubblegum. Yeah. The Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever

you listen to your favorite shows. That's going to do it for us this morning. We're back this afternoon to tell you what is trending, and we'll talk to you all then. Bye. Bye. Our iHeartRadio Music Awards are coming coming back Monday March 17th on Fox. Starring Bad Bunny, Glowrilla, Kenny Chesney, Money Long, Nellie, your host, iHeart Radio, LL Cool J.

Are you guys ready to have some fun tonight? Plus iHeart Innovator Award recipient, Lady Gaga. iHeart Icon Award recipient, Mariah Carey. And iHeart Breakthrough Award recipient, Gracie Abrams. Watch live on Fox, Monday, March 17th. At 8, 7 Central. 45 years ago, a Virginia soul band called the Edge of Daybreak recorded their debut album

Behind Bars. Record collectors consider it a masterpiece. The band's surviving members are long out of prison, but they say they have some unfinished business. They had a daybreak, eyes of love, but supposed to have been followed up by another app. Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Why would you do that to me? Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true. Let's not forget that David Blum was a professional con artist, so you didn't stand a chance. But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. I'm Caroline DeMore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Love at first swipe? I highly doubt it. Reality TV and social media have love all wrong. So what really makes relationships last? On this episode of Dope Labs, poet and relationship expert, Young Pueblo, breaks down the psychology of love and provides eye-opening insights and advice we all need.

It's a big realization moment that you should not be postponing your happiness. Like your greatest happiness is not necessarily going to like come from a relationship. Your partner, they should add to your happiness, but your happiness is really coming from within you. Listen to Dope Labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.