The Daily Zeitgeist - Hold On to the Zeit 4/20: 420, Oil Prices, Shake Shack, Protest Lockdown

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

On this edition of Hold On to the Zeit Jack and Miles discuss the 4/20 holiday, Oil prices are plummeting, Shake Shack is returning the money they received from PPP, and people are protesting the lockdown across the country. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Seeing that the most popular cocktail is the margarita, followed by the mojito from Cuba, and the piña colada from Puerto Rico. Listen to Hungry for History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, the internet, and welcome to another episode of Don't Zite the Hand That Feeds You. hello the internet and welcome to another episode of don't zeit the hand that feeds you oh that's a pretty good one from johnny davis i'm just i've said that for the past two i didn't

realize it i don't remember any of this shit spaghetti uh let's go with hold on to the zeit courtesy of miles gray just before we started recording. That was another song that, or Hold on to the Nights by Richard Marks, I think is a song I'm thinking. Another song I only knew from contemporary adult album infomercials. I only know that isolated melody from that song. Oh, really? Yeah. It's funny because the next line is,

hold on to the melody. So. Wow. You held on to the melody, Miles. And the memories. Yes. Yeah. Richard Marks was like very popular for like three years.

And then, I don't know, he completely overlapped with the period during which VH1 was a thing I associated with my parents. Right, right, right. That ended and his career went away. Yeah, VH1 was for stale adults like in the late 80s, early 90s. You're like, dude, I i'm watching those vh1 full it was like an adult contemporary radio station with videos um and and rosie o'donnell stand-up comedy do you remember that uh there was a stand-up show on vh1 yeah it was like stand-up

spotlight i think and she stood in front of like a black background. Was Laura Keitlinger on it? I bet she was. She must have been back then. Paula Poundstone? Oh, yeah. Big Poundstone energy. That's what I want to come in with. All right, let's tell the people what is trending.

4-20. What's that? Is that a police code or something? Yep. Yep. Yep. It's the date, bro. It's April 20th. Oh, right, right, right. What's that? Is that a police code or something? Yep. Yep. Yep. It's the date, bro. It's April 20th. Oh, right, right, right.

Everybody's smoking. I don't know. It's like one of those things I've, yes, it's 420. It's for, ha, ha, ha, you know, for all the weed people. I haven't been that into it for the last few a while maybe since college when i was like it's 420 like we're going we're getting all this food and all this soda and whatever blah blah blah now i feel like you know like a lot of people has kind of been like 420 every day in the quarantine of like being like you know what dude i can smoke as if what's time um and so this 420 feels a

little bit different but i i realize it has the spirit has reactivated uh within me because now i'm like trying to like get get together with people do stuff if you're listening to this uh around 6 p.m you can go to twitch.tv slash 420 day fiance i'll be on there with sophie alexandra but i'm uh yeah shout out to everyone you guys are doing live live twitch streams on uh for 420 day fiance is it like you're reporting well we're gonna there's a new episode of the 90 day fiance there's like a quarantine special where they got a lot of the like it's an update show where they got a lot of people to do like remote interviews or self-tape so it's gonna be catching up with people in the choir but what better day to have that on 420 and plus the show

and like it's like it's like i it's like my cousin works in programming at tlc that's amazing that they had it today look at that so serendipitous that's the those and those are little glimmers of hope i look for i do wonder because, I mean, people who work in entertainment, they're constantly Googling their show. I do wonder if they saw your show and were like, I guess we got a big pothead following. Maybe we should air it on 420. I mean, yeah, that's probably what happened, I'm guessing.

Yeah, I would guess so. You should ask them for money. Oil prices, an equally fun one what's going on with those wacky oil prices well uh they are so right now the cost of one barrel of oil is below zero this is like when it's like a concept you did a flip yeah like when somebody like i i didn't know you could do that i didn't know the triple axle was possible until uh they until they did that i didn't know oil prices could close that negative so they will give you money they will give you three dollars and seventy cents to take a barrel of oil it's more just like this i wish it was it's like hey hey come here come here come here you want this i'll give you three dollars and 70 cents take this whole you know how to refine this

crude um so the whole so all this crude oil basically is getting pumped they have nowhere to store it and consumption is low and there's just all kinds of things. But the lockdown especially has had a huge effect on demand for petroleum and shit like that. So now everyone's saying, right now, no one really wants to trade it because you're at a point where storage is running low. Some people think we could run out of storage within three weeks if we keep pumping it. So yeah, interesting times. This is the first time since the NYMEX oil futures have been trading since 1983 that something like this has happened. So they say it's easily the oil market's worst day on record.

Yeah, it sounds bad. So I mean, overall, the economy, though, doing all right? We're good? Still good? I don't know which which version right if we're if you deal in the economy where it's cool stuff that tv shows that miles likes are airing on 420 oh dude the economy is booming right now uh you look at something like a stock market or just ignore that. Yeah. There's a new podcast from some company night. NYT, uh, that is,

uh, called the rabbit hole. And there, a lot of it feels like it's a spoof of podcast production. Cause they just like do all the tricks, like all the very straightforward, like, okay okay now it sounds like we're changing channels between like different things and now it sounds like there's like i don't

know they they just they went to the radio lab school of uh podcast production but they are talking about a very specific thing about like how uh youtube algorithms algorithms created two separate realities and just how that's happening basically everywhere in the world would be my guess is where it's going. But it seems like it's kind of like one episode of a podcast broken out over multiple episodes where it's kind of zoomed in on very specific parts of the arguments. It's pretty cool.

PPP update slash Shake shake shack are both trending um shake shack gave back 10 million dollars that they got through the ppp the payroll protection program so the loophole that we were talking about when we first talked about ppp was that uh you could apply a small business, even if you were McDonald's, because McDonald's has locations that have fewer than 500 employees, right? Wasn't that the number that you had to get underneath? Yeah, something like that. If you were specifically a chain or if you were specifically a location that had under 500 employees, you could apply. If you were a hotel, I think the example I saw was Hilton.

And Shake Shack got shamed for this. Not a good look. And I don't know. The latest on PPP was that the government announced, they were like, hey, we're out. It's done. Everybody drank up the big gulp.

It's all gone. Everybody kindly go back to your homes. And now the people are kind of looking at how that money was, how that milkshake got drank up. Am I right? Oof. All the way over here. Going way back.

Yeah, now that people are looking at it, it seems like we're going to get some, hopefully a little bit of accountability. I mean, yeah, especially with a company that's doing total revenue into fiscal year 2019, $594. million dollars is what Shake Shack was generating uh and what somewhere around 20 million or so on profits do the yeah so

it's like when you see sort of things like that and you're like you look at the places where the hit can happen it's like well yeah you can absorb some of you can absorb this other people who have smaller businesses are not dealing in this kind of volume of like revenue or transactions it's completely different yeah and i think i don't again this is why we we keep running into this especially with this administration and just the way the american government is but like the this is just such a clear case of just the utter lack of accountability oversight anything that we're it's almost like people should be like hey can we all agree that maybe 10 million dollars shouldn't go to shake shack first and maybe to these other people who

are trying to get on the ppp website and they're like oopsie out of money um i know they're trying to reauthorize more money for that but it's just like when you read stuff like this it just makes you angry yeah at the same time i mean it's it's tough because if there are shake shack employees who they are not going to be able to get a paycheck now but it does seem like yeah shake shack should just be able to absorb it hopefully i mean that's sort of a narrow margin uh but it's still enough to hopefully yeah because you i mean well you see like you know i i hear and read about a lot of business owners who are not dealing with anything close to this kind of scale for their business yeah but are doing things like this to be like whatever like i'll self-immolate this business and completely

burn it down if it means like eating into all of our, anything we have towards the future to like, just try and keep everything going. And that's, and I get it like at a certain point, is that the most practical thing to do in terms of a business owner? But there are other people who are just sort of like trying to do it within what makes sense like okay i think we can operate our business at this loss this year or whatever and long term no we'll we'll be able to grow a little bit more in order to you know subsidize the survival of our employees um yeah and yeah just you it's it's nice to see that but it's also like those are kind of sacrifices sometimes you feel like those aren't the people who should be having to make those sacrifices either uh and finally speaking of uh sacrifices people are unwilling to make protest lockdown uh people uh continue to protest around the country against the quarantine, against the social distancing procedures

by getting out, getting in people's faces in some cases, heckling healthcare workers in some cases, just generally indicates a dark path that this whole thing could go down if the president continues to protest against the government, the head of the government continues to protest against the government.

Yeah, it's, I don't know what the fuck. I mean, again, the details and, you know, evidence and markers of astroturfing are all over a lot of these protests um as they happen all over the country and like these really small groups um and it's again you know a lot of these people don't give it's don't don't be mistaken these people don't care because they're trying to save the economy or whatever they're very narrowly probably in their minds even though they don't realize there are billionaires helping to fund this are saying like yeah man i should be able to do what i want to do

or maybe i'm want to put people who are essential workers at risk because i typically they're in a different socioeconomic class or uh you know uh or different uh ethnicity but with when you look at the kinds of shit that they're protesting it's really just the fact that it's like i want to go back to the movies i want to go back to the store will you go back to work so i don't have to do anything different now this is fucking boring uh when really the protests i hope you know it should be people protesting on behalf of like working people and essential workers and, you know, demanding that we change the way we are living and operating as a country whenever we quote unquote go back to whatever the fuck that is. to see how these protests organically came about. I don't know.

It smells awfully cokie to me, but we'll see. It smells a lot like plastic grass. Yeah, a little astroturf maybe. I just had to underline that in case people didn't get your implication.

Yeah, when I said it up top very clearly. All right. That's going to do it for this Monday, this 420. Thanks, you guys, for joining us. Please stay safe. Be good to each other. Wash your hands. And we'll be back tomorrow with a whole new podcast we'll talk to you then bye later

k hasn't heard from her sister in seven years i have a proposal for you come up here and document my project all you need to do is record everything like you always do what was that that was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions,

sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. What happens when a professional football player's career ends and the applause fades and the screaming fans move on? I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. You mix homesteading with guns and church. Voila! You got straight away.

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