The Daily Zeitgeist - Placebo: How Colors Heal, Zodiac Signs Kill 08.29.23

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

In episode 1539, Jack and guest host Katie Goldin are joined by co-host of Bigfeets and author of Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia, Jason Pargin, to discuss… How Placebo Effect Helped Me Understand the Havana Syndrome, Placebo Works For Certain Things Like Pain, The Brain Is It’s Own Best Pharmacy, Chinese Astrology Kills People and more! Was It an Invisible Attack on U.S. Diplomats, or Something Stranger? Frequency of Adverse Events in the Placebo Arms of COVID-19 Vaccine Trials: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis IBS and Serotonin: The Brain-Stomach Link Lessons learned from placebo groups in antidepressant trials How to Prescribe Information: Health Education Without Health Anxiety and Nocebo Effects The Power of Nothing 4: Explanatory mechanisms for placebo effects: cultural influences and the meaning response LISTEN: Times It By Two by Annie TracySee 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. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just

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

Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. Every great player needs a foil. I know I'll go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Listen to the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese on the iHeart on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you

get your podcast presented by elf beauty founding partner of iheart women's sports hello the internet and welcome to season 302 episode 2 of daydailies i guys stay production of iheart radio this is a podcast where we take a deep dive into America's shared consciousness. Thank you, Katie, for that. That was appreciated. It's Tuesday. You can use it set again. Daily Zeitgeist. There it is. It needs it.

It is Tuesday, August 29th, 2023. My name is Jack O'Brien, a.k.a. I have an a.k.a. here on my phone. So I'm going to bring it up. That's a weird one. A super meta one. Stopping at the moon for Mars connection. We need

moon law cause we got none. We need moon laws cause we got none. That is courtesy of Blinky Heck about the space race to control the ice on the south pole of the Moon. And there's nothing saying who's going to own it.

It's just going to be somebody who gets there. They can say dibs. I'm going to make a nice granite out of it. There you go. A granite. I don't know what the fuck that is, but. It's an Italian slushie. You're so Italian.

Mama mia. Well, who is that voice that uh thick italian accent that you're hearing uh we're thrilled to be joined by a very special guest co-host one of the funniest comedy writers doing it you know her words from the birds rights activist account on twitter some more news with cody johnson uh you know her voice from podcasts like creature feature secretly incredibly fascinating please welcome coming all the way from italy the brilliant the talented katie golden how does she mean when you're doing podcasts there is nothing to be sad hell yeah love it the song of the song of the season song of the year what what is that song it's the all of the dream how does it mean okay if there's yeah if i'm not when the rhythm is glad there is nothing to be sad.

That's right. Danger and dance, clapping the hands. Jack. I'm sorry. I'm not up on anything. We listen to John Williams music in this household at the current moment. My kids are like that. I'm going to play this for you after the episode. You have to.

It's all the rage over all the internet right now. And I will play the finale from the end of Rise of Skywalker for you because it's really 10 minutes long and it covers everything. Anyways, Katie, it's a full crack reunion because we are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by the bestselling author of books like John Dies at the End, Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick. If this book exists, you're in the wrong universe. And the new Zoe is too drunk for this dystopia,

which I believe you can pre-order still? Yes. He is also one of the hosts of the podcast Big Feats, which, if I'm reading this Paris Review article correctly, is the only Mountain Monsters podcast officially endorsed by Big Feet. He's our former co-worker at Cracked, co-creator of the Cracked podcast. Welcome back to the show, Jason Pargin! Now, is it okay for me to do my fake Italian accent that I do sometimes? I don't know. I realize there are some accents

that are inappropriate to keep doing. I'd be deeply, as a 100% non-Italian person living in Italy, I'd be deeply offended. Okay. Then I won't. Because it's one that's so much fun that I don't know if I'm doing an actual Italian accent or if I'm doing a Hollywood accent of actors who themselves were in no way Italian. Right. But just, and did not have a language go serious. Like,

why are you breaking my balls? Mama Mia. There it is. There it is. The American concept of Italian accent is immigrants from Naples who came to the U S and that's it. Like Chris Pratt's interpretation of Mario. Yeah.

Those are the two kind of key texts, the cornerstones. He's a national icon in Italy, actually. People don't think that. But Chris Pratt is insanely popular. One and two. All right. Jason, how are you doing? Where are you coming to us from?

Undisclosed? Sure. I'm in the state of Tennessee, if you coming to us from? Undisclosed? Sure. I'm in the state of Tennessee, if you want to try to find me. There's one guy on TikTok who can locate anybody just from any photo they take. If you want to show up at my house, I'm sure you can do it. Wait, how does he do it? Like, even if you're inside, he can do it? Well, probably not.

But if you're standing, like, just in your yard, he will take the sliver of sky behind you and he can identify exactly down to your address and that's his whole bit. Yeah. That's crazy and terrifying. Katie is coming to us from Europe. Not Italy though, this time.

From Barcelona. Hey, well done on the pronunciation key barth barthelona it's barthelona yeah now that feels like it should be offensive it probably is yeah okay you know i'm in for it all right well we wanted to get together for the special, you know, Tuesday, evergreen, one-subject episode to talk placebos, because they're kind of in the news. Like, I saw a thing fairly recently where somebody was saying that, like, the placebo effect has actually been disproven.

We did a podcast on placebos a long time ago, so I wanted to dig back in on, like, have they been disproven? Was all the stuff that we were talking about back in the day complete bullshit? syndrome, Havana syndrome, even though it's not like that's not specifically a placebo, but it does have something to do with like how meaning affects the human body. Like, are you telling me that it was not a Cuban death ray? It was a sound ray. It was a Cuban sound ray that melted people's brains. A Cuban brain microwave. Exactly. They used sound that nobody else could hear. Right. Anyways, so we're going to talk about all of that, plenty more. But before we get to any of it, Jason, we do like to ask our guests, what is something from your search history that's revealing about who you are?

this like a week ago, phenylephrine FDA. Phenylephrine, if that word and that chemical is unfamiliar to you, I can almost guarantee you, you have ingested it at some point because it is the active ingredient in almost every over-the-counter cold and sinus medication. Tylenol sinus, Sudafed PE, anything's got the letters PE on it. The active ingredient is phenylephrine, and phenylephrine does not do anything. Scientists have known this for a while. Yeah. So what happened was when Sudafed had to go behind the counter because it is obviously used for meth, they knew that would deter some customers from buying anything. So they released different versions of their products that could

be sold out on the shelf. And those are all placebos. Not intentionally so. I think they may have had data at some point that they relieve symptoms, but it has since been completely debunked. It does not outperform placebo, even if you up the dosage bar 400%. So now you will still, there are people listening right now saying, well, that's ridiculous. I take DayQuil or whatever the other ones are, any of the non-drowsy sinus stuff, and it makes me feel better. But the thing about sinus and cold symptoms is one, they are variable. For instance, for most people, it's worse in the morning and gets better as the day goes on. So invariably, it will get better.

And also, your body naturally heals it. So it's like, well, yeah, I took it for like four straight days. Boom. I was good as new. It's like, yeah, but if you had also— Your body would have done that anyways. Yes, if you had taken Tic Tacs for four straight days. And so this is why bringing this up, obviously, the theme of the episode, that's not a placebo

in the sense that this stuff in the garbage aisle of the pharmacy where they've got all of the herbs that will increase focus by selling you some sort of, you know, root or flower something. Yes, focus. That's what I go into that section for. Increased focus. Focus. Below the waist focus. just one laser guided focus that stuff i feel like there's an understanding among educated people it's like well that stuff's placebo it's you take a powder you put it in your tea and then it gives you the confidence to get an

erection when you're having sex because, and it works, like people will buy it again and again because it's like, yeah, it reduces their anxiety because like I'm good. I've taken my, my boner tea and then that actually does help them perform. But I don't, I didn't realize confidence was sort of a key part of the erection. Like if you're just not confident enough, there is a dysfunction. Yeah, I think so. Oh my God, we could do the whole episode about this.

Yes. And also like tea. I feel like you're also just not drinking enough tea. I think those are the two main things. Not enough confidence, not enough tea. Tea gives you boners. Yeah, tea gives you boners. You just drink it with your hands cupped around the tea and give it a little while wearing a cardigan.

That's why the British were super into it. Yeah. But yeah, confidence is definitely important. Yeah. There's crippling performance anxiety to the point that it is like a physical symptom because men feel such pressure to do it right that that can actually, as we'll talk about. So my little scorecards might have been overkill. Causing problems, I see. Play-by-play commentary.

The reviews you left later on whatever website where women leave their reviews. Disastrous showing. Disastrous. Boner Yelp. Boner Yelp. That has to exist, right? Must. Anyway, back on the sentence I was finishing like four minutes ago,

most of us know that stuff is placebo. What a lot of us don't realize is how much of the stuff sold in the rest of the pharmacy is placebo. And I do not mean this in a, I'm not from like the wellness corner of the internet. It's like, oh, Western medicine is nonsense. I mean, literally, the efficacy of like headache medicine, headaches go away on their own eventually. eventually. The percentage of time when you took Excedrin and the headache went away because of Excedrin versus it went away on its own or went away because you drank a cup of coffee and it was just caffeine withdrawal causing your headache, you would be shocked at how many of the pills

you've taken from the real medicine part of the pharmacy didn't actually do anything. Likewise, when I used to go to the doctor for flu, cold, sinus symptoms, they would give me an antibiotic. doctor for a flu cold sinus symptoms they would give me an antibiotic antibiotics don't do anything against a virus but the doctors know you will be mad if you don't walk out of there with something that's a placebo we waste a lot of antibiotics on as the placebo effect it works it will work but it worked because you were going to get better anyway. And they're also making the bacteria stronger and more ready for battle. It's like a bacteria thunderdome. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, the headache thing is really interesting because I've recently discovered this technique for headaches where it's like you think to yourself, like, where is my headache? think to yourself, like, where is my headache? And then you ask yourself weird questions like, what color is my headache? What shape is my headache? What flavor is my headache? And like, you're like really focusing on your headache. And you're supposed to like, actually answer those questions as silly as they sound, you're supposed to imagine a shape for it. Imagine what color it is. And it actually is fairly effective for me when I have like, not for a really powerful headache, but like, you know, like a minor headache. And I think it's interesting because like part of it could be like, your body's relaxing more because you're focused on a task that's like, not, it's not a stressful thing to try to think about shapes and colors. It's also

like making you kind of like think about your head in a weird way it's very strange it's super weird that it works but it does actually work for me yeah that's that's super interesting yeah i think like the thing that i ultimately the conclusion i ultimately came to from doing the research on this and we'll get more into it as we go but is that like there's just this massive like placebo is only a tiny portion of a much larger field that connects like what what is like meaning and like what either social meaning or like personal meaning and like just language with like what is happening inside our body and so it's yeah i don't know. The study that was like the

placebo isn't real, I take the point that there's a reversion to the mean, but I do think that there's also something that is realer than common understanding. When you say placebo, there's something realer than what happens in at least my mind that happens inside the body during a placebo effect. But we will get into that. But Jason, what is, we also like to ask our guests what's something you think is overrated? This is not related to the subject, but I would say just the concept of streaming media. Because for example, I decided I was going to go back and watch the show Westworld on HBO because I thought maybe I had judged it too harshly. Maybe there was too much conversation

around it and found that it is gone from HBO Max. When they canceled it, they pulled it from the library. So now if you want to watch it, you have to go pay for it either episode by episode or by a season. To buy all four seasons is a hundred dollars it's 25 bucks a season so to give you an idea of how skewed the streaming business model was which is obviously this is relevant because of the strikes and the actors and writers all trying to get new deals and you have all the studios saying well our streaming services are losing billions with what money they're losing billions because they set up a bad, intentionally bad business model

that basically rendered physical media all but obsolete and what turned out to be a very bad deal for consumers because they are not going to keep these libraries.

Your subscription to HBO doesn't guarantee you any access to anything that they choose to pull next week. And it's, yeah, but that's really what this dispute was about. There was some series called Willow. I never watched it, but apparently they like released it and then completely obliterated it, like memory hold it after like a month.

Yeah. It was just, it was, it was wiped from the face of the earth everyone who had watched it had their memories pulled from their brains they were actually put in prison right yeah or were made to forced to undergo a horrifying psychological they were lobotomized yeah willow being the show that was like an expansion of the willow cinematic universe right right exactly the w wc which we were all yeah we were looking for so what is something you think is underrated jason i'm gonna say just physical media which by the way i don't own any dvds or blu-rays any i what ones i had i gave away but when netflix had their DVD rental program, they had 100,000 titles they mailed to people.

Netflix streaming service has about 6,000. Yeah. So they lost 94% of their library for this little incremental gain in convenience. Well, it's on demand. I can just sit in my chair and turn it on. It's like you gave up 94% of your access for not having to deal with a disk.

I find that fascinating, but that business model, the move from like physical media to streaming has been bad in almost every possible way except for the frequency with which you have to get up out of your chair to change the disk in the machine, which we will now not tolerate doing.

I will be damned if I'm going to walk all the way across the room and put a thing inside the thing. I want to be able to pull up the show with my remote from my chair. And for that, I will lose everything. Do you remember the smell of VHS tapes? Because, like, those smell good. I like lose everything. Do you remember the smell of VHS tapes? Because like, this smelled good. I like that smell. It's like burning dust is what I always assumed it was. Burning dust.

It was like dust being heated or something. It smelled good enough that I think it killed some brain cells. But yeah, that was, I do miss sort of just the mechanical sounds too that came with like you pop in a vhs and then you hear it working and doing the like and then it's like it's it's it's excitement it's uh you know foreplay to the moving watching experience there was also that moment when you started to feed the tape in and the machine would grab it from you and pull it the rest of the way in. Yeah. That was always great because the machine's like, no, I've got it from here. I'm in charge now. Let me handle this for you.

This is no longer your problem, but it is a little terrifying. It's like, what the fuck? What's going on in there? So we need, we need like robots whose job is specifically to get a VHS tape and pop it in for us. And that'll be the future. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause we don't,

we don't like that out of control feeling of having the, the tape taken from us. Like they've also gotten rid of the ATM machines that like pull your card in also. So maybe that's, we're all just trying to avoid the feeling of like a mechanical object being like i got this from here it is wild like i i guess i hadn't even really thought about the fact that there you could watch anything on on like when you had

the netflix dvd service you could watch anything you wanted like that there wasn't like a oh does netflix have this or does like where do i look for this it was just assumed basically that they were going to have almost anything that you wanted but we've like slowly had that taken away from us and and now it's just like you know i feel like now every time i google something they're like ubi uber has this if you want to like start your free trial for uber and like get some ads from the czech republic in the middle of like this michael man film that you want to watch like is uber an actual one of them or no i think it's, I think there's like Voodoo, Tubi, Verbo. Or is that? No, I think Verbo is a vacation rental.

Yeah, Verbo. Yeah. But see, this is the problem. Bebo. Once upon a time, you had cable channels that the word meant what it was. Like, this is classic movies turned classic movies. Like, boom, you know what you're getting. Yeah. It's like, well, this was classic movies, turn classic movies. Like, boom,

you know what you're getting. Yeah. It's like, well, the history channel alien. Right. Yeah. Nope.

It's free. The that's as close as we get to like it having a meaning. And that doesn't even really make sense. And even then, I don't know what, which part is free. Is it that it's ad-free or it has ads in there for the content that's free?

Yeah, I don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. You can't find that out. Jason, if you're interested, the way you get around that is by having a Plex server. Are you familiar with that? I have seen people on Twitter,

every time I bring this up, tell me, yeah, you can get a Plex server and you can put all of your physical media on there and then it just looks the interface, I guess, looks just like a streaming service, right? Like you can just make your movies on it. Yeah, my dad has like 80,000 movies on his that will never go away.

Just so you know. Yeah, see if I had any sense, I would have kept my old DVD library because I used to have a bunch. Everybody, you know, in the 2000s, I had any sense, I would have kept my old DVD library because I used to have a bunch. Everybody, you know, in the 2000s, I had shelves of DVDs. I had entire shows on there that I loved that now I, you know, but again, I gave all that stuff away because it's like, nah,

I'm not a boomer. I'm a modern man. I'm not doing things the old way. Yeah, so it's a group of people who send him movies. They upload them themselves. They have a physical copy and they just give it. And the quality is higher. People don't realize

that Netflix doesn't broadcast in Blu-ray quality. Even what they're calling 4K, they're not streaming. It's not the way it is off of a physical disc. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and with the internet provider, good luck. Even if it is a high-quality stream, good luck getting that without it stopping every half hour.

Yeah, that'd be like a 25-gigabyte file. They're not going to stream that in real time. It doesn't. No. I personally like the image quality of my movies to look like they've been water-damaged in some way. So that's actually what I'm looking for. But I can see how people who want high fidelity could, I like it.

I like it when it freezes and another actor's face emerges from the face of the frozen actor. That's always a cool effect. Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back and we'll talk placebos. 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 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. 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. I'm Keri Champion, and this is season four of Naked Sports, where we live at the intersection of sports and culture. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry,

Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. I know I'll go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Every great player needs a foil. I ain't really near them. Why is that? I just come here to play basketball every single day, and that's what I focus on. From college to the pros, Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports.

Angel Reese is a joy to watch. She is unapologetically black. I love her. What exactly ignited this fire? Why has it been so good for the game? And can the fanfare surrounding these two supernovas be sustained? This game is only going to get better because the talent is getting better. This new season will cover all things sports and culture.

Listen to Naked Sports on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by Diet Coke. And we're back. As we started talking about the placebo effect again, I think, Jason, I saw you tweet about the congestion medication. And I saw somebody else tweet about how a lot of the studies that assumed the placebo effect was real were just ignoring reversion to the mean. Like you talked about, your body will naturally get better on its own and so when people are responding well to a sugar pill it might just be that they are responding well period

because the human body is good at healing itself but i so the thing i've been thinking a lot about like sort of this bridge between body and mind in like the past few years with regards to the havana syndrome because i i think i was thinking a lot about the stuff we had covered before with placebo effect when i was like kind of going through trying to trying to understand what had happened and like how these people were having the experience that they were having, which was that they felt like they were physically being attacked by like a sound wave ray that left them debilitated. Because I couldn't think of a ray that would cause such a thing. That would have no physical signs. But it's not like they were just kind of making it up for fun. They seemed very much actually suffering.

Which was why I think it caused so much consternation. Because it wasn't just like a prank. These were like, you know, those seem to be the two like that. I think that is just generally where the two ideas that take hold when you hear like, okay, this sci-fi technology that scientists say like couldn't really exist is attacking these people.

You either go with like, okay, everything is what it seems. There is this sci-fi sound ray weapon that is attacking these people you either go with like okay everything is what it seems there is this sci-fi sound ray weapon that is attacking people or these people are making it up and i think like that's why i was thinking about placebos a lot is because it had created this like third option where like the meaning of the story that you're telling yourself is actually creating a physical reality like a an illness that inside your body that like is as real as like the cold or the flu that but by the way a fun thing to do is to be researching a episode on the placebo effect and like the mind body

connection and also coming down with a cold which i have been for the past 48 hours highly recommend it's a real mind fuck i'm actually just coming out of a cold so maybe i placeboed that like in an inception yeah on to you yeah. But I think the best description of like what I ultimately thought was going on and what I suspected before I read this was going on is still this like New York Times piece from 2019. So it wasn't like people had it wrong for a long time and then only recently somebody got it right.

Like this article was written, explained what it was, and then people continued on being like, so what are we going to do about this Havana syndrome story? But I just want to read this. So they basically say it's a functional disorder. It's this meaning-based experience that people are having where they actually feel the symptoms. The symptoms are real. It's just, it is happening neurologically. It is not happening because they have been physically attacked. And so in the article, they say, for all their mystery, functional disorders are not diagnosed simply after eliminating every

possible normal disorder that might be causing a patient's symptoms. Rather, neurologists look for signs and symptoms that are inconsistent, varying even during the course of an examination, signs and symptoms that are inconsistent, varying even during the course of an examination, and incongruent with what they expect to see in known objective disorders caused by a physical injury or illness. One of the most remarkable aspects of the diplomat's illnesses, the people who are suffering from Havana syndrome, is that even if all of them experienced an actual blow to the head shortly before their symptoms appeared, which none of them did, most should have fully recovered in a matter of days, weeks, or months, as is standard following a minor head injury. Instead, many of them experienced symptoms that remained steady or worsened over a period of

months, and some continue to suffer chronic, perhaps lifelong symptoms. So basically, if they'd gotten hit in the head with a bag of rocks or like a sonic weapon, as they claimed, they would have healed along a predictable timeline because the body is really good at healing itself because it's a machine that is like designed to do that like over millions of years. And unless the problem is in the mind in which case it gets complicated and it can linger longer than that but i mean someone might respond that the the cuban death ray just like put some kind of undetectable cancer inside their brain or some sort of like thing that is a chronic condition but yeah but they didn't find anything in mri scans that would suggest any kind of like thing that is a chronic condition but yeah but they didn't find anything in mri scans

that would suggest any kind of like structural abnormality in the brain right they did find like an increase in gray mat like that this this story also like made me you know that i've seen this elsewhere where it's like brain scans can you can get a lot of different interpretations out of brain scans oh there was a big story after this one came out that was like they say there's increased gray matter so they were attacked and everyone i saw was like that doesn't necessarily mean anything well right because brain, like also like if it's increased activity in parts of the brain that you're detecting, that is because your brain is your mind. And if you are having a psychological issue that will actually affect your brain's functioning. So it's like your brain,

your brain and mind is an organ. So it's, it's kind of, it's a weird thing to think about. But even though our mind feels very like non physical, very esoteric, it is a physical organ. So if your mind has some, some issue, right, like you, you have some kind of psychological issue, that is an issue with the organ, that is your brain. Right? So you will So you will see things on scans potentially, like if you say you have depression or some other sort of psychological issue, like you would actually see evidence of that potentially, not always, but potentially you'd see like the functioning of the brain being different in scans. I think that gets to the heart of the issue because we have many, many, many things in society that function the way Havana syndrome does.

You have people who claim that they are allergic to Wi-Fi or to 5G, and they can show where they break out in hives or they have nervous disorder. They have tremors in their hands or headaches or whatever. And again, we are having to say, well, it's just all in their head. It's hard to overstate that. Like you said, they're not faking for attention. witch hunts swore that the local witch cursed them. And ever since the witch gave them a dirty look,

they've had, I can't think straight. I can't sleep. I did that. And it's like, their symptoms are real. Witchcraft is not. And I think the Western idea of the mind being a mystical thing that exists separate from the body, like in our body-switching movies where you're somehow two people's minds switched, but you're in somebody else's body. It's like, well, if you went into someone else's brain... The Freaky Friday philosophy, yes. Yeah. If you went into somebody else's brain,

you would just be them. You wouldn't perceive any switch that happened because it's all there. Like, it's just an organ. So I think that actually screws up the way we think of a lot of health conditions. Because if you say, well, it's just all in your head, it's like, well, are you saying there's magic occurring that somehow my mind can magically make me break out in hives? It's like, well, no, your brain's just another organ. Your body

releasing whatever chemicals or hormones or whatever that cause you to break out or change color or become inflamed, it's all just a mechanism. It's gears. So it's like, well, you're saying my mere thoughts can cause my body to do something weird? It's like, well, yeah, I have irritable bowel syndrome that we treat with an anti-anxiety medication. There's no, it's like, oh, so you tricked yourself into pooping your pants? It's like, no. Your gut produces serotonin, too. It's all part of that mechanism.

You regulate serotonin, your gut's also going to regulate your digestion. There's a reason you feel anxiety in your gut. It's not magic. It's all just nerves. And when I am under a certain amount of stress, my body takes blood flow away from the digestion process, and it doesn't digest very well. That's it. But trying to fix it is extremely difficult. And science, anyone who's ever gone to their doctor for something like this, some sort of physical condition caused by,

they think, anxiety or stress or whatever, it is a frustrating process because they do seem to just be throwing pills at you and they do seem to be trying placebos because you will run into people who say, well, I found this cinnamon tea that is just, it cures my IBS like nothing else. The thing is, it probably does.

And it's not magic. It's not, you know, and same thing, this is terrible, treacherous territory, but somebody prayed for me and that cured my IBS. I personally, my belief is it's the same thing. That the belief that you took action and you did something cured it, it's not

magic. If you stop thinking of the mind as magical, this stuff makes much, much more sense. Yeah, I mean, the brain-gut connection is incredibly strong. You have neural type cells actually like in your gut and that sort of the relay between your gut and your brain is very, very strong.

It's like why when you get nauseous for some reason, you might feel anxious and then vice versa. So it's like maybe you have nausea for some reason, like you have food poisoning, right? And it starts in your gut. You're going to feel anxious from the nausea. It's going to cause this very strong reaction in your brain of like, oh, my God, what is wrong? Like when I got food poisoning, I had a huge, you can have very severe gut problems. And it's not like, it's like you have the physical evidence, right? Like, it's not that diarrhea is imaginary. It's real diarrhea. But it is that your brain is actually causing your gut not to function properly. And then you get diarrhea. So it's like, it is an organ your brain the organ is

causing dysfunction in your gut which it has a very strong connection with and then you know voila diarrhea yeah and some some diarrhea is imaginary but that's like just based in my mind and we've talked about how i should stop talking about that on the show. This sort of materialist idea that like a medication is something that causes. Jason, if you're interested, the way you get around that is by having a Plex server. Are you familiar with that? I have seen people on Twitter every time I bring this up. Tell me. Yeah, you can get a Plex server and you can put all of your physical media on there.

And then it just looks the interface, I guess, looks just like a streaming service, right? Like you can just make your movies. Yeah, my dad has like 80,000 movies on his that will never go away. Just so you know. Yeah, see, if I had any sense, I would have kept my old DVD library. Because I used to have a bunch. Everybody, you know, in the 2000s, I had shelves of DVDs. I had entire shows on there that I loved that now I, you know in the 2000s i had shelves of dvds i had entire shows on there that i loved that

now i you know but again i gave all that stuff away because it's like nah i'm not a boomer yeah i'm i'm a modern man what you know i'm not doing things the old way he also has a group of people who send him movies like the like they upload them themselves they have a physical copy and they just give it and duplicates of it. And the quality is higher. People don't realize it. Netflix doesn't broadcast in Blu-ray quality. Even what they're calling 4K, they're not streaming. It's not the way it is off of a

physical disc. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and with the internet provider, good luck. Even if it is a high-quality stream, good luck getting that without it stopping every like half hour yeah that'd be like a 25 gigabyte file they're not going to stream that in real time it doesn't i personally like the image quality of my movies to look like they've been water damaged in some

way so that's actually what i'm looking for but i can see how people who want high fidelity could i like it by that i like it when it freezes and another actor's face emerges from the face of the frozen actor that's always a cool effect yeah a chemical to go into your body and that chemical interacts with the chemicals that are already there to make you better or did make you like feel different in psychoactive drugs like like that that that's how i've i came to think about like when i thought about medicine or like the the medical world like that's totally what i thought of and i think that that is somewhat unique to our modern condition like what one of the articles that i read for this was talking about how Ben Franklin was like really fascinated by the subject of placebos.

And he said like one of the best doctors he knew told him that he like handed out bread pills and like food colored water much more than real medicine. But like not, not to like prank people, like we said. It was because he was a good doctor and knew that there was a healing component to the belief that people held and the meaning that getting a medicine from a doctor who actually has a career's worth of bedside manner and like confidence and reassurance like built up and like has a gift for this sort of specific interpersonal human connection like that all of that working together with a bread pill that allows you to like focus

all of all of that meaning into something and like take it inside your body like that that works but i feel like in the modern world if a doctor went on a show and was like yeah i'm giving all these people bread pills and it's curing them like they would be you know people would demand their medical license be taken away being bread pilled sounds like some kind of weird internet ideology like you can be red pilled but you can be bread pilled sounds like some kind of weird internet ideology like it can be red pilled but you can be bread pilled where you're like bread is better than dating people it kind of is in a lot of cases yeah i mean god bread is so good i mean it's interesting because like it we're talking both about the placebo effect which is like the bread pill and then the the like the the Cuban

brain wave is a nocebo so like nocebo is a type isn't a specifically an effect where it's actually negative so like so in a treatment that should have no effect actually has a negative effect or an imagined treatment or something has an effect on someone. So like there's actually been research on the nocebo effect in terms of like when people take, say, a sugar pill or a dummy pill when they're testing medications. Like if they're told it has a specific side effect, there's a good chance they're going to actually feel that side effect. That recent, I mean, somewhat recently with like testing the COVID vaccine, there was like a review of the literature that found that like the nocebo effect of the sham COVID vaccine. So this was like, this was just essentially saline in a vaccine, like over 70% of these participants, like the negative reaction to the vaccine was accounted for by the nocebo

effect for the sham vaccine. So a bunch of people were like, oh, yeah, I have my arms sore, like I feel bad. And it was after they got a completely fake, inert COVID vaccine. Yeah, we've seen very dramatic videos of people showing off their horrifying symptoms from what they thought was the vaccine. And we've seen social contagion of like people with eye twitches. contagion of like people with eye twitches like even before there was the vaccine conspiracy theory of like young people on tiktok like having weird twitchy reactions and like claiming you know not not really knowing where it was from not not as part of like some q anon conspiracy but just they're like social contagion is real and yeah there's a long long history of it all right let's say let's take another quick break and we'll come back and finish this out

i'm jess casavetto executive producer of the hit netflix documentary series dancing for the devil the 7m tiktok cult and i'm cleo gray former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me 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

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This new season will cover all things sports and culture. Listen to Naked Sports on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by Diet Coke. And we're back. And just a few things I wanted to hit. So, like, there is this one experiment where

they figured out people who were particularly susceptible to placebos. And they then, like, during the course of an experiment gave them a thing that like blocked the opioid receptors in the brain and the placebo effect cut off, which means that's so cool. I mean, it's that's super weird. Yeah, it's weird, but it's basically it makes sense when you realize when you think about the fact that like the brain is like its own pharmacy.

It's creating the dopamine, you know, the like ADD medication and stuff like that. Or, you know, there are illegal drugs that cause your brain to like make more dopamine to like make you feel even better. But your brain is creating its own dopamine on its own schedule. My brain is my favorite dealer. Yeah. Your brain is its own like drug dealer slash pharmacist. And, you know, then doctors get that what's happening when people experience the placebo effect is that your brain is producing the actual chemical that the medication is supposed

to be producing. It just didn't need the medication to actually be in the pill to get you to get the brain to do the thing that your body kind of knows it needs in that moment. So, I mean, from that perspective, like being susceptible to placebo is such an amazing like superpower where it's just like, oh, yeah, my body and brain can just like make these medications for me. Right. And it's not I think it's important to note it's not like gullibility. It being able to get the effect of a placebo is not that like you are stupid or gullible. There is like a study on seeing like, oh, are people who are easily hypnotized also like susceptible to placebo? And there was no connection there either.

It just seems to be a thing that affects almost everyone in terms of being able to benefit or suffer from the placebo or nocebo effect. Yeah. We understand so little of this because listening to what you guys say, think about how difficult it is to study this and how difficult it is to set up an effective trial that perfectly filters out every possibly confounding thing that could be some form of placebo or nocebo effect. This is why our mental health medications have barely improved in the last 50 years or something like that. It is unbelievably difficult to nail down the effectiveness of something like an antidepressant or an anti-anxiety because, again, placebos work really well for anxiety. When you have somebody telling you, well, my anti-anxiety pills, I go work in my garden. They're not lying. Like repetitive motion, exercise, sunlight, those are physical things that affect all of those biological reactions to anxiety. They're not being

a hippie. And, you know, I don't, you sound like a Scientologist who start ranting about how ineffective these medications are. But the truth is, you get about 75% of the same effect from a placebo for mild depression. Because, of course you do. You know, if you've got some, whatever, fancy tea that's supposed to calm you down, just the ceremony of making it. And give you a boner. Yeah, boner tea. Let's not mince words.

Of making it, sitting down, drinking something hot, drinking it slowly. Yeah, that can have most of the effect of a medication without the terrible side effects. The issue is that is such an incredibly dangerous thing for people to hear because some people who have very severe symptoms who definitely need prescription medication, they tend to be the ones who's like, see, I don't need that voodoo. It is incredibly difficult to nail down the effectiveness of any of these because, as you just said, we even now have doubts about exactly Because as you just said, like we even now have doubts about exactly what's placebo and what's just no treatment at all. Depression is just like a lot of those things we mentioned earlier. It gets better. And different job and the boss that terrorized me is no longer in my life. And also my chronic knee injury stopped hurting

so I didn't have the chronic pain weighing on me. It's like, which of the four million factors in a human life caused your depression to go away? And us people who to sound smart, who like to say, well, it's all just brain chemicals. It's all just serotonin or whatever. That is boiling it down at the simplifying it so much as to make it wrong right i mean it's like it's true that it's like all brain stuff but your brain responds very well to your environment so environmental things are going to have a massive effect on your brain,

like, you know, your general habits, what your life is like, what you're eating, what you're doing, what you're thinking, all these things just kind of like form this like cyclone that can really affect your state of mind. It's also really difficult with the studies on medication for like, say, depression, anxiety, etc. Because the like, everyone's brain is very different. So the heterogeneity effects in these studies are just very hard to compensate for like a medication that works really well for someone may not work at all for another person even though they both have depression because one person's depression and another person's depression it's not like a you know simple like disease it's not like a broken

bone where it's like okay you can kind of like the procedure for healing a broken bone for one person, another person is generally somewhat similar. But for something like depression, it's like, you're you have a totally different thing going on from one person to the next, given how complicated the brain is, and how like, broad spectrum, something like depression is in terms of what's causing it, what's going on. And I mean, the same can be said for a lot of like non-psychological disorders as well. Like there are a lot of diseases where it's like, well, treatment for one person seems to work, but for another person does not work at all because their bodies are different and their

systems are different. So it's like a huge challenge in medicine. Even if they were genetically the same, which they're not, are their diets different? Are their sleep patterns different? Is their home life different? Is their social lives different? Do they have different numbers of friends? All those things can impact how your brain works. Exactly. I mean, your brain structure changes over time based on your environment. It's not like you're born sort of with a baby brain and then it goes like it's genetically programmed to turn into an adult brain like you're born with the very plastic brain that responds incredibly sensitively to your

environment and what happens to you. Yeah. The two examples that jumped out to me this time doing the research, like on the side of like just a straightforward placebo effect, like this is a pill causing you to do, causing your body to do a thing. It's still like the pill color thing is still like so mind blowing to me. Like they gave a group of medical students two new drugs, one a sedative and the other a stimulant. And they were given either one or two blue or pink tablets. And the tablets were all inert. They were sugar pills. But the students' responses on a questionnaire indicated the red tablets or pink tablets tended to act as stimulants, while the blue ones acted as depressants. as stimulants while the blue ones acted as depressants and two tablets had more effect than one and it's not it doesn't really make sense but like you you can't boil it down to anything that

is like happening other than with like meaning like pink or red means like hot or danger and blue means like cool and quiet and right, blue means Cool Ranch Doritos, red means Flamin' Hot Cheetos. Nacho cheese, yeah, exactly. And that's why I wake up, to wake up in the morning, I eat nacho cheese and to go to bed at night,

I eat Cool Ranch. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I can give you an example even without an experiment. I know people who will drink an espresso or drink an energy drink and while they're drinking it, we'll talk about how wired they are.

Like, oh, my gosh, it's hitting me. Well, it takes 45 minutes for caffeine to enter the bloodstream. Yeah. That's you drinking the Red Bull, and after two gulps, it's like, oh, my gosh, I can feel it hitting me. It's like you didn't inject it into your vein. You drank it. It has to be absorbed into your system. But that's placebo effect. And if

you felt it that soon, you just told yourself. So think about, did you need the energy drink at all? If you can talk yourself into bouncing off the walls because you thought that, oh my gosh, the whole 80 whole milligrams of caffeine has slammed into my system, 80 whole milligrams of caffeine has slammed into my system, which, by the way, is not very much. And I personally believe making the can big and with a big, loud, stupid name like C4 Bomsicle, and it's got like a stick of dynamite on it, I think that helps the placebo effect. I think you drink a big bombastic can of something, it's like, man, this is going to hit me like a freight train. I it can have it could be decaf and i think it would hit you mostly the same way yeah i want an energy drink that's just called brain boner juice your brain is gonna fuck so hard and then the the other

example that's kind of in the other direction was they looked at the cause of death between Chinese Americans and randomly selected group of white people in California. And it was found that Chinese Americans, but not the white people, will die significantly earlier than normal if they have a combination of disease and birth year, which Chinese astrology and medicine consider ill-fated. And so it's, you know, Chinese Americans whose deaths were attributed to lymphatic cancer and if they were born in earth years and consequently were deemed by Chinese medicine, like especially susceptible to diseases involving lumps, not nodules or tumors, had an average death age like four years younger than people who were not born in one of those years. And no such,

you know, difference existed among the group of white people. So it's just, and that was true across, like, I don't know the ins and outs of what Chinese medicine believes and like what the different year meanings are, but like, it just, it feels like very strongly determined by like meaning and like the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and that we exist within. I don't know. I find that one kind of hopeful in a

way because you can tell yourself stories and sort of free yourself from some of the stories that we tell ourselves that can be damaging about ourselves like what there was also a study where they told people the truth they were like this is a placebo effect study and like the truth is that like placebo effects have been shown to like help

people and like that it had clear like positive results just by being honest, which I always thought an important part of the placebo effect would be the lying, but apparently not, which doesn't really make sense to me. pill in your mouth and you swallow the water. And even if you know it's a placebo, you've still done the ritual in your body. You may still have sort of this like connection to the ritual and feeling better. So it's, you know, it's like if you've ever found like a calming routine, like some kind of meditation routine or calming routine that you do, like once you sort of get into the typical position that you're in that it's like, well, I start listening to music, I sit on the couch or something. Once you practice it and do it a bunch, it works better. Meditation or calming yourself down works better once you've practiced it because once you start to do it, you make the association between like, well, when I light this candle or listen to this music, I start to feel calm. And then it's like,

even though, you know, it's not like medicine. Yeah. You've come to associate the ritual with feeling better. But yeah, with the, with the,

that study on like the, the Zodiac or wait, is it Zodiac? Yeah. The Chinese medicine, like Zodiac. It's, it makes me think about when we,

when someone has a disease and they're given a time frame for how much longer they have to live. I've always had mixed feelings about that because on one hand, I think it's good to prepare people for like, hey, you have terminal cancer, so you might want to like prepare and get your affairs in order and all this, but having a timeframe in a way also seems like you, you are kind of potentially negating any kind of like placebo effect of like, well, if I can, like, you know, like maybe this thing will kill me eventually. But then if you feel like, well, I'm definitely going to die in like, a year or X months, I wonder if that has an effect on like, how long you actually have. It's not to say that the diagnosis is incorrect, or that something like terminal cancer, you can just think your way out of. But there is something on the margins in terms of like how healthy you are and continue to be based on your mind frame, right? So it's like,

I don't think you could beat a terminal diagnosis through some kind of placebo effect, but I could imagine your quality of life and your length of time left could be affected by whether you feel completely doomed or not within a certain period of time left could be affected by whether you feel completely doomed or not within a certain period of time. Right. I think you stumbled on a big, big thing in our society, which is, for example, to me, it is not surprising at all that yoga cures all sorts of things. You're stretching, you've got a room that's either silent or with

white noise or with music. It's something you often do in a group or a bunch of people all doing something in sync. You know, we humans are social animals. That has its own benefit. It does not surprise me that that helps cure all sorts of things. None of us stretch enough. And just, and it's also, it's exertion. You know, it's very strenuous. If you've never done yoga before, it will kick your ass. You don't, it's not just stretching. Like, it's holding difficult positions.

But part of yoga is that there's a religion around it, basically. And it's all of this stuff that I know is unscientific about, well, this stretch will release any financial stress in your life because financial anxiety tends to store in your hips, right? Or you've got to realign your chakra. The mystical, spiritual energies and the body thetans have to be released through your spine. So the question is, does the mythology make it work better? And once you apply it, think about yoga, you think about all of the other things in society where we tell people a story to get them to behave a certain way. And the story is not true, but it is effective at healing them or making them healthier.

And what are the ethics of that? Because, for example, it is my understanding that studies have consistently found that placebos work better when they are expensive. Yeah. Because you don't want to feel like you wasted your money. So the ethics of selling somebody a powder of ground-up shark bones or something, and this is going to cure your anxiety, and it's like, well, actually, people don't just buy it once.

They buy it for years because they swear by it. It works, yeah. I would like to accuse those people of being thieves, but are they? Right. We should start making it not like shark bones and stuff because sharks are endangered in some cases and it's bad, but like animals that we hate, we should make up stories about their bones and blood and stuff

being good like hey ground up mosquitoes are an aphrodisiac because like who cares they kill a bunch of mosquitoes or like an invasive species of like you know like hey the crown of the crown of thorns starfish you know they're invasive but if you grind them up it'll give you a boner like uh let's let's uh let's like let's start making uh shitty animals the ones that we turn into medicine yeah i think i think a lot of supplements are mostly sawdust by the way like when when they test what's actually in there they're like oh this is oh yes yeah. Yeah. Things like because it's not regulated, that it doesn't have to go through the FDA. And because it also doesn't do anything. So who cares?

But if you buy St. John's wort or ginseng or any of that stuff, you'll often find that the amount in a pill is somewhere between 10% or 400% of what it says in the label. Because they're not being precise about it because you can't overdose on it because it's just an herb or whatever. Yeah. It's also just like medicine is a relatively new science. I know we think of it as being very old, but it wasn't that long ago that we were like cutting holes in people's skulls and thinking that would like take the demons out. And it did sometimes. And it sometimes, trepanning sometimes worked yeah it's not to say you know like i i don't think any of us well i don't want to speak

for anyone but i don't think any of us believes that like medicine is bs like i think you know if your doctor is like hey you need treatment for this thing. You shouldn't be like, yeah, right, jerk. Like there are like medicine, modern medicine is pretty incredible in terms of how it actually like we have actually figured out how certain proteins interlock with other proteins and that affects your body. And that's incredible. But it's also I think there's this separation of like all right here's the real hard physical medicine and then the the mind stuff which is just kind of like you know like a hippie dippy brain stuff it's not real and i think that's i think that's a big problem like i think that a lot of things could be accomplished if we kind of didn't have this disconnect between like the body's health, like the body and the brain and this like separation of like, well, there's real medicine.

And then there's like, you know, like just sort of mind over matter, you know, silly stuff. And I think combining the power of modern medical advancement and the understanding of how the brain impacts the body can help in a lot of ways, like, you know, preventing like over-medicalization of things, but also treatment of things that do need medicine, but could also use like the idea that, you idea that you treat just the thing that's happening in the body without addressing sort of the psychological impacts, I think is kind of limited. I also think we have unrealistic expectations of medicine compared to where we are. We think everything should be able to have an instant diagnosis.

Here's what it is. Here's the pill that fixes it. Including things that are like, well, I'm fatigued all the time. It's like, well, what else do you have going on in your life? It's like, well, I work three jobs and I have a big break. I need you to give me a pill that will make my fatigue go away. Or, you know, this is, ask any therapist and they will have the patient and it's like i'm depressed i need the treatment for depression it's like oh when did your depression start approximately well when my wife died right and my dog died six months later and then i lost

my job because of my i was so sad about my wife dying and now i'm i i got kicked out of my apartment and it's like okay your life is a disaster. You want a pill that will, and I think that, you know, it's not, it's stupid to say we have too much faith in science. It is unfair to ask a pill to fix that. You have a long mountain to climb of getting things back in your, but your body is telling you, you know, man, this sucks. It's not because your brain's producing too much of a chemical. It's because your life is a disaster. It just is. Your life is not as good as it was before. So, part of it is, it's funny because you have part of the population who refuses to believe in science or vaccines, but then you have another

part of the population that, for example, thought that the moment they invent a vaccine for a disease that it just vanishes overnight. It's like, the truth is, these are inventions by humans. They're not magic. They're miraculous in a sense compared to what we were able to do 300 years ago. But no, sometimes you're going to go to the doctor and the doctor's going to say, we don't have a way to fix this yet. And usually patients do not take that as an answer. They demand to walk out of there with a prescription. And lots of times they just gave you something to make you go away. Because it's like, we don't know how to fix this yet. It's just, that's the situation. like felt, oh man, I'm so fatigued. Am I sick? And then I realized it's nighttime, it's bedtime. I have to go to sleep. I'm like, oh God, am I coming down with something? It's like, well, no, it's midnight and I should go to bed. This nighttime fatigue disorder. I did the normal thing where I looked at my phone for four hours after I went to bed and I woke up the next morning feeling like crap. I'm coming down with something. Right.

All right. Well, Jason, Katie, such a pleasure having you guys on the show. Jason, where can people find you, follow you, all that good stuff? Again, the book that is up for pre-order now is called Zoe is Too Drunk for This Dystopia. It's part of a sci-fi series. And one of the Zoe Ash novels. Just look up that title. And it will also show you the other books in the series if you want to read those.

I am Jason K. Pargin on TikTok and all of the other platforms, including the stupid ones that nobody goes to. You're everywhere. Amazing. Is there a work of media that you've been enjoying? Yes, I linked here for you. There's a muscular lumberjack on TikTok named Thor Bradley, and he just chops stumps for his videos, and they

get like 150 million views. He's one of the most famous people in the world, apparently, and he's just a very muscular man who chops stumps with an axe. Is this like an innuendo? Chopping stumps? Is this some kind of sex thing that I don't know about? Oh, no. Watch the video. You'll get it.

Chopping literal stumps. You'll get it immediately. He has many female fans, but also it's many male fans. And it's just a big, muscular, sweaty man who chops wood for his videos. And you watch him until he finally gets through chopping the wood and you feel a little bit better. He is a hero. Wow.

It is nice. Once that stump finally chops, once he finally splits the stump. Oh, man. That was my favorite part. There are entire movies that I have watched that cost $200 million to film that did not provide me as much satisfaction as watching Thor chop his way through that stump. It makes me think about what the stump represents. I couldn't even begin to guess, Katie. Whatever you want. Whatever obstacles in your life, if you just stay, keep at it, you can get through them.

And he's showing you that. I'm going to say it represents a sex butt. A sex butt? Yeah, a sex butt. Some kind of sex butt thing, situation. Really interesting take. Really interesting read. Katie, where can people find you

as they're working media you've been enjoying? Yeah, I mean, I have a podcast on this very network called Creature Feature where we talk about aminals. I've actually had Jason on my show too. So yeah, we have good discussions about animal behavior and sometimes how it relates to human psychology. I just started a TikTok. I just started a TikTok. It is Katie Golden, K-A-T-I-E-G-O-L-D-I-N. I'm doing some animal content on there, a game I play where I have you guess what animal noise an animal is making. It is, I'm brand new.

I have like no followers. So if you check that out, I'd be very grateful. And I think I'm Katie Golden on other stuff too. But you know, like on the the Musk site, which you know, is becoming less and less usable every day. The media that I like is from the Musk site. It is from Twitter user PE Moskowitz, who writes, Twitter user P.E. Moskowitz who writes for sale baby shoes never worn is the saddest story ever told

in six words here's a sadder one in four baby died from exploding that's pretty good that story is actually kind of awesome though unfortunately yeah you can find me on the Muskk site twitter at

jack underscore o'brien and on threads at jack underscore o underscore brian although i don't i haven't checked that in maybe a month tweet i've been enjoying i like p puck just tweeted a collection of cute designs from the distant past. And it's just like really cute. Like one of them looks like a sad character from Bluey, but it's from fourth century BC. Like it's just adorable stuff. I don't know. So sometimes I, you know, like for thinking about history history like doctors in history just being like yeah here's a

blue pill that i just died and like it makes you better like i tend to think of people from history being like stoic people who try to walk off a compound fracture and had no joy in their life and that this this collection of cute designs from the past made me smile, warmed my heart a little bit. And then I also enjoyed a tweet from the writer at Jason K. Pargin, who responded to a CNN tweet saying, Bob Barker, the beloved television fixture who hosted The Price is Right for decades, has died. He was 99. who hosted the Price is Right for decades has died. He was 99.

And Jason wrote, the rumors that he was going 160 miles per hour at the time of his fatal motorcycle accident are not confirmed and people should not be spreading them. Same with the rumors that he was swinging a flail at other drivers. Wait for confirmation. I enjoyed that.

Well done, Jason. All right. You can follow us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at The Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have a Facebook fan page and a website 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 where 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 super producer justin welcome back is there a song that you think people might enjoy? Yeah, so there's this new

artist who just popped up on my radar a couple weeks back. She's an amazingly talented singer, songwriter with a very powerful voice and a real knack for writing songs that just get stuck in my head all day. I played this track for Miles actually the other day and he was commenting on how she kept finding interesting little paths in the melody where she didn't repeat herself too much and I just really respect someone who can bring that kind of talent to the table so this artist goes by the name of Annie Tracy and this track by far and away is my favorite that I've heard from her so far but all of her tracks are incredible this one is called times it by two and away is my favorite that I've heard from her so far, but all of her tracks are incredible.

This one is called Times It By Two, and it's got a really nice R&B vibe. It builds to something very powerful, and I love the message behind it. So this song is called Times It By Two by Annie Tracy, and you can find that song in the footnotes. All right. Well, 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, and we will talk to you all then. Bye. 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.

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