The Daily Zeitgeist - Simulation Or Late Stage Capitalism? Western = Colonial 07.19.23

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

In episode 1517, Jack and Miles are joined by Professor of Alaska Native Languages at University of Alaska Southeast and host of The Tongue Unbroken, X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell, to discuss… Pre-Indictment Freak Outs? TikTok Is Convinced That We’re All Living In The Matrix, A Brief Indigenous Review of the Avatar (blue people) Cinematic Universe and more! Pre-Indictment Freak Outs? TikTok Is Convinced That We’re All Living In The Matrix Person freezes mid-stride in TikTok video. Is simulation theory real? Eerie viral TikTok of plane hovering in sky sparks theories of 'glitch in the Matrix' KIDS ON TIKTOK ARE CONVINCED WE'RE LIVING IN A SIMULATION #GlitchTok Viral TikTok Videos Are The Best Way To Creep Yourself Out Top Oxford Philosopher Nick Bostrom Admits Writing ‘Disgusting’ N-Word Mass Email Prominent AI Philosopher and ‘Father’ of Longtermism Sent Very Racist Email to a 90s Philosophy Listserv Physicists Confirm That We're Not Living In a Computer Simulation Tech billionaires are asking scientists for help breaking humans out of the computer simulation they think they might be trapped in A Brief Indigenous Review of the Avatar (blue people) Cinematic Universe LISTEN: Expert Slopes by Estee NackSee 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 capital one founding partner of iheart women's sports hello the internet and welcome to season 296 episode two of their daily zeitgeist a production of iheart radio this is a podcast where we take a deep dive into America, sugar constant. Oh, yeah. And it is Wednesday, July 19th, 2023. Yep. My name's. Oh, yeah. What's 719?

Jack, it's International Retainer Day. Yes. For your teeth, man. Keep your teeth straight. Your parents don't have money. Retainer for your teeth, man. Yeah, exactly. Not for legal retainers.

It's the retainer ad. Hey, man. For your teeth, man. You got that retain money for your teeth man exactly not the legal retainers the retainer ad hey man you got that retainer for your teeth you know your parents paid all that money for your braces you don't want to just go let your teeth get washed out on retainers man i'll wash stuff on retainer wanna uh also national hot dog day i didn't realize that feels late yeah that would be like happy birthday jamie lo birthday anyway yeah shout out jamie loftus uh shout out raw dog the book is fantastic and also so shout out to my grandmother rest in peace because this was a game we used to play all the time national words with friends day uh she used to whoop my ass and scrabble yo she never she was fucking ruthless when we played scrabble. Since I was littering, okay?

Since I could play, my mom was like, or my grandmother was like, okay, so we got a fucking chump tonight. Oh, we got a bitch tonight. Yeah, she's like, oh, Michael Jordan. Yeah, no, Vernon Maxwell. Vernon Maxwell talking about Michael Jordan. I'm sorry. But yeah, that also played into my just hardcore style

because when I played with her, she's like, what are you fucking doing i'm like i triple word scored that shit and like like you were too good and she got like i'm she says i'm like way like i'm not having fun with it yeah like i'm getting because i'm i'm very mad you know you got to be efficient with those tiles to get the most points you can out every word score scrabble is not a fun game to lose at. No, no, exactly. And I have the pain of my grandmother, Carmen, rest in peace, just windmilling on me on Scrabble. But that's how you, you know, I think she was very much like,

don't, you know, teach the kids how it's really out, like what it's like out there so they can, you know, rise. Anyway, shout out words with friends. All right. Well, my name is Jack O'Brien, a.k.a. it's no big secret why Jif O'Bunnyus doesn't work anymore. That was me trying to come up with the equivalent of Van Vought for my name, the AI generated title we covered on yesterday's episode. It's no secret.

It's no big secret why Van Vught doesn't work anymore with a picture of vince vaughn ai is brilliant it's gonna take all our jobs and do them so badly anyways i'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co-host mr miles gray aka tall and tan and young and lovely. The AI called Ipanema AI-ing. And each word she passes, each one she passes. Go. Okay. Shout out to Lockeroni for that. He actually put dolphin noises.

But I just wanted to go, just kind of take it into our dystopian computer world. For those of you who remember those old gi joe psas from early youtube i was taking inspiration from the computer one damn that was yeah that sounded like all the sounds just getting blended together i don't i don't know if i caught the story what is the ai and bonima is that the name of an ai i could be i don't know i just wanted to sing the girl for me i thought it was a reference to a story i didn't know. No, honestly, La Caroni, let me know if that is tied to something, but you win points because I love a bit of the Brazilian bossa nova goat. And it got our energy in a nice way, so I feel relaxed.

Yes. Shoulders are loose. Yeah. Shoulders loose. Head on a swivel. Yeah. The hips got honey in them, so it's time. You know what that means it's time

to be thrilled to be joined in our third seat by a professor of alaska native languages at the university of alaska southeast the host of the podcast the tongue unbroken from next the next Please welcome Dr. Hunay Lance Twitchell! Hunay! Hi, it's me. I'm the problem. I'm colonization. Hey, how's it going? It's so good to see you guys. Yeah, it's good to have you back.

You know, someone tried AI with our Tlingit language. No! No, there's a reporter here in Juneau for the Juneau Empire. And so she had entered a short, she wrote a short story and then she entered it into this thing that had the Tlingit language as an option. And then she sent it to me. She said, could you just take a look at this? And I said, well, those are words, but it's just grabbing words and just putting them at random, including my name. Like my name was in the story like 10 times. And so I said, it's just grabbing words and just putting them at random including my name like my name was in the story like 10 times and so i said wow it's just complete gibberish it makes no sense so the computer like from it from it trying to glean information about cling it that it found your name and it's like okay so this must also be part of the mix yeah yes and here we go here's

your story wait how did you read what it was truly out of out of order just like yeah salad yeah there's a couple of words but like one of the big problems is when you change a verb in our language is it changes a lot and and so to be able to man you could you could develop something that could manufacture stuff in our language but you would have to spend a lot of hours and so what it seems like it did is found a dictionary and just sort of grabbed words but never really looked at what they mean i guess and so it's just like here's a bunch of words here's a word salad and that's your story so you know task complete yeah i mean that's good good to know that ai is still right now it's only fucking up like

english you know yeah right and so but it's probably coming for everything eventually and so but maybe maybe there's a world where you have someone to talk to because with our with our language we have about 40 people left who could speak so it it does get pretty scary. And we have a language north of us that's called Iyak that lost its last living birth speaker. And when she was the only speaker for quite a while, she would say, I talk to my TV, I talk to the walls, I talk to God, and nobody talks to me. So what we're trying to do is keep that from from happening so i started with uh a taylor swift take on a taylor swift song because i thought maybe if we can get the swifties and the beehive on board with decolonization right like they they've got so much energy and commitment and

so i think maybe we'll get somewhere yeah i think it definitely makes sense for taylor swift i feel like she her career has gone from being just like, aw shucks, I don't know. I guess I'm just kind of a good songwriter. We've witnessed her waking up a little bit to the complexities of the modern world. Or at least private equity. Yeah. Which isn't that why I got those new albums, Private Equity. Taylor's version, baby.

Private equity. All lines go back there. Hey. Even a broke clock, you know? Yeah. Seriously. All right. Well, Khudane, we're going to get to know you a little bit better in a moment.

First, we're going to tell our listeners a couple of the things we're talking about. We got a couple, like, word doc length tweets. Truths. Yeah, truths. From donald trump just like freakouts so we're going to talk about that but the big thing we're going to talk about is uh we finally found undeniable evidence that we live in the matrix this tiktok video of a person being frozen like standing frozen for i'd say two two seconds and everyone's like whoa impossible npc right there yeah but this is this is a whole wing of tiktok that we're gonna cover like the glitch talk i think it's called and just the the idea that people now that everyone has phones, we are able to come into contact with glitches in the Matrix all over the place. And it's proof that we're living in a simulation.

We'll talk about that. We'll talk about why people want to believe that. We might talk Avatar. Huney, you offered to give us a brief indigenous review of the Avatar Cinematic Universe. So I'm excited for that. And I mean, just to tease that, did you enjoy it? Well, I could do the whole thing right now because it's really a two-sentence review. Because, you know, as I thought about, I listen to you guys' show all the time.

It's awesome. Thanks for everything that you guys do. Thank you. Indigenous peoples, I would say in North America, it depends on where you live. It might be like one out of every hundred people is indigenous. In Alaska, it's one out of every four. So we have about 25% indigenous people. So you guys should have one out of every four guests on your show be indigenous or somewhere in between there and one out of every hundred.

show be indigenous or somewhere in between there and one out of every hundred so when avatar 2 came out the the water thing i was like oh maybe they'll bring on an indigenous person to give their perspective about avatar and and i'll give you my perspective and to be fair i've never seen any of them but here's my two sentence review of the first avatar one indigenous people are not blue. And two, white people did not stop colonization. And so I think there's a bit of a fantasy world that we see quite a bit. Like it's kind of teased in Dances with Wolves and it's teased in a lot of kind of colonization and white people like fighting against it. Right. Which did happen, but maybe that was like one out of every 10,000 people. 3,000, yeah. Something like that. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we'll definitely get into it. No spoilers in my review though. Yeah. Oh, I'm going big spoilers. We're going deep. But yeah. So we'll talk about that plenty more. But before we get to any of that, Kunay, Dr. Twitchell, we do like to ask our guests, what is something from your search history, and actually, the one thing that I wanted to look at is how many Native American remains, human remains, are in museums and universities. Because I went to a training once on this law called NAGPRA.

And NAGPRA is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. And so one of the things I think about is when you make a law, there's like some reason for it. And so there's a great quote by an author named Walter Echo Hawk, who said, if you dig up graves, you go to jail. But if you dig up Native American graves, you get a PhD. And so, you know, I was thinking about this because I was at this training, because NAGPRA does two things. One, it says you cannot dig up Native American graves. Right.

And so low key, when the Queen of England passed away, I wasn't trying to be disrespectful, but I was thinking, are they going to send parts of her to kind of different colonized places? Because they have lots of our people in their museums and their stuff. But so it says you cannot dig up Native American graves. And the other thing that it says is if Native American people can identify something in a museum that belongs to them, they can get it back. It doesn't mean they will get it back, but they can get it back. And so that's the repatriation part. So I was at a training for this and our trainer said, and I don't know if he was accurate on this after I did some research, but it was still jaw-dropping. He said,

there are about 2 million Native Americans on the earth today. And this was in 2006. He said, there are more Native American remains, human remains in museums and universities than there are walking the earth today. Jesus Christ. And so I'm not sure if that's the accurate thing, but I do know it's well over 100,000 people. And sometimes it's a brain and sometimes it's like a finger or they would chop someone up and send them to different parts. There was someone who resisted people taking their land in the East Coast. He was called King Philip, and that was the English name that he was given. And he was chopped up and sent to, like, his head went to

Boston and his hands went somewhere. And so these are some things that I think about because we're always trying to get stuff back. And I'm always trying to let people know the depth of what colonization is, which is why decolonization is a thing to embrace. And one of those things is because it's a complete separation of people and humanity. And so I think for some people, they'll say, well, these people are not human, so we could do whatever we want to them because they're not Christian, they're not being saved by God. But the reality is, I think people separated themselves from their concept of being human beings and humanity. And so decolonization reconnects the people, the descendants of the folks who are making those decisions to take everybody's stuff and to keep them from speaking their languages and take their children and do all this other stuff. So it's not fun stuff to Google. I'll give you one more because someone sent me a message and said, did you guys feel the earthquake? And I was like, well, I live in Alaska

and that was a big earthquake, but it was 1900 miles away. So it's about the distance from Los Angeles to New Orleans. And so would you feel it? So call someone in New Orleans and say, did you guys feel that earthquake? And they'd be like, no, bro. I was like, just sitting here. And so Alaska's a big place. Alaska's fucking huge. Isn't it? Like, it's the biggest state by, like, orders of magnitude.

Yeah, like orders of magnitude. It's so much bigger than, like, Texas is way bigger than, like, my brain can possibly wrap itself around. is way bigger than my brain can possibly wrap itself around. I've driven through Texas. I've flown around Texas, gone from one airport to the next, and it's like, oh, it's like an hour and a half flight. It's like going from many states over.

And Texas fits into a corner of Alaska. Alaska is... That's Alaska on top of the United States. Yeah. It's like the entire Midwest. It's like eight. Yeah, it is, right. Yeah. And almost all of Florida, too.

Yeah. If you actually extend it down. It's amazing. Yeah, it's a big... And so, yeah, you can go 1,900 miles and you're still... You know, like, that's just air miles. Like, if you just got in a little plane

and just flew for 1,900 miles, you'd still be in Alaska. So it's pretty cool. Do you have to be pretty comfortable with getting in little planes and flying? Or do you do that? Well, my grandma, she wouldn't. And so we'd have to, you know, we have a ferry system that goes through here that's become unreliable and unstable. But it's been wonderful because you could put your car onto

the ferry and then you could go. Cause where we live, you can't, you got like 40 miles of road here and that's, or maybe 60, I don't know. But you, you can go to the end of the road in four different spots and that's all you can really do. And so for some people, like it's really tough for them. You can get a boat and then you could go somewhere, but we do have a ferry where you could put your car onto the boat and then you could drive out from Skagway or Haines or go down into Canada. But small planes are a thing here and they are, they could be pretty scary. So one time I was living in Skagway and we had 60 mile an hour gusts, you know, gusting

up to 80 miles an hour. So I called the airline. I said, oh, you guys aren't flying today, are you? Because I'm supposed to go to this little town called Petersburg. And they said, we're not, but these other guys are. Give them a call. They're pretty drunk, but... And I said, okay, why?

Why? And they said, well, oh, no, it's no problem. Our plane, the wings are on the top, and their plane, the wings are on the bottom, so they can fly in higher winds. And I said, okay, I'll call them. And you know, they said, oh yeah, we'll fly. And the wind was blowing so hard that when that plane took off into the wind, it felt like the plane just went straight up in the air, like a helicopter and then turned around. And then we just got blown down to

Juneau, which usually takes an hour, but it took us about 25 minutes. You just like lift it up and then rode the stream yeah like very close to the ocean like we fly over the ocean it's winter time the ocean's probably about you know 40 degrees so it was uh yeah it was uh an eye-opening experience right that's so cool i i'm very scared of small planes for some reason. But I've been in like a couple of them. And it's, they really move around a lot up there. Little planes are here. And so the one time I took a float plane, I went to this village called Kassan, which has about 40, 60 people,

amazing village. And so the first time I was going there, I flew to Ketchikan. So you take a larger plane to Ketchikan. And then I was going to get on the small float planes and I get on and we take off and we get in the air and the pilot turns to me and he says, so where's Kassan? And I said, Hey, you're the pilot we get in the air and the pilot turns to me and he says, so where's Cassand? And I said, hey, you're the pilot, man.

Like you are the pilot. You know, you need to. And he's like, is it over by this place or is it by that place? I was like, bro, I've never been like this is literally your job. It's just so much more casual. It's like an Uber. Yeah. And he says, how do you want me to go to LAX?

Yeah. I think I remember. And he nailed it. He got it. got it so you know good on him i just love that kind of confidence so too you're up in the air like all right so generally where are we going right now okay okay yeah i got it i got it i got it you are the pilot what is something that you think is overrated okay so my overrated is using the term western in academics and arts to code whiteness and so people people do this stuff like they'll say western and eastern and this becomes the sort of one thing or the other that you use to talk there's only two things yeah like you know western science and they'll say Western art or Western music.

Oh, I do this a lot. And it's tough to get out of. Yeah, it's tough to get out of because for that, if there's Western and Eastern, then what about Africa? Right. And what about Native Americans? And where do these things, then it doesn't fit. And so it's something that we study instead of something that becomes foundational to our own education. And this is one of the reasons why I think people generally don't study indigenous peoples. Like if you

graduate high school, do you know the name of the people who lived where you were or where you are? And they're still there. Do you know what their language is? Can you name five people who have done historically significant things who are indigenous to that particular place? And I think about these things everywhere I go. And so I think about this stuff as well, because colonization is forever dehumanizing indigenous peoples. And one time someone asked me for an example. I said, well, I went to a gathering of high school government leaders from across the state of Alaska. So these are probably high-performing academic kids who are, you know, they're young, and so it's not on them, but it is on their teachers, and it's more so on the system. So I showed him a picture of a guy named William Paul,

and I said, can anybody here tell me who this person is? And there's about 100 to 150 people there, including teachers from all these different schools. And not a single person could tell me who that was. And I said, well, this is a Tlingit man named William Paul. His Tlingit name was Shkundi. And he was the first Native American, he's the first Alaska Native to become an attorney. He was the first Alaska Native to become a territorial legislator. Alaska native to become a territorial legislator. As an attorney, he gained Alaska natives the right to vote, and he also desegregated schools in Alaska in the 1920s. And then he initiated land claims efforts. And I said, he did all of that stuff, and nobody can usually tell me who he is. And I said, could you imagine going into a school in Arkansas and putting up a picture of Martin Luther King? And if 100 people were there, nobody could tell you who it was. And I said, that's what dehumanization is. We don't get to be names and people and faces. We just get to be this conglomerate of a thing. And so

I think if you start challenging yourself, when you say Western, just say colonial. And then you might sort of say, well, that makes me uncomfortable. But then you might sort of say well that makes me uncomfortable but then you might sort of push your brain towards something that has diversity so that you could say oh yeah there's actually like a huge plurality of things and it doesn't have to fit into these two boxes right like because western just being code for the established colonial powers of western europe and it's like well let's let's let's tighten that up so we don't put that much information and yeah to your point about martin luther king i mean like i feel like that is a the slow pace that like american society is kind of moving towards that i'd imagine there are people like i would love in 50 years to go into a room with 100 people and i put this picture

up and they don't know who that is and yeah like yeah that sort of really resonates with how quickly your history can just be disappeared like that in an instant, despite the massive contributions that people have made. Yeah. What is something you think is underrated? So by underrated, there's a friend of mine named Pat Race who floated this idea here in Juneau. And so it tacks onto this idea of land back and language back initiatives, which I think are wonderful. Like if city governments, especially, could just say, you know what, we've got some land here. Let's give a certain percentage of our land base to the Native American tribe that's here. Let's just give it back to the Native peoples. Because there's no legal or rational claim to why people took land from Native Americans. And so one of the difficulties

with federal Indian law is federal Indian law is basically born on this concept that they are not human beings, so they cannot own the land. So it's ours, you know? And plus, you add concepts to that, like manifest destiny, which is basically saying, God sent us here to save these people, and by saving them, we're taking all of their stuff. That's what I mean by saving them, right? And so it's like, if I came into your kitchen, it was just like loading up all your food into a bag, and you're like, what are you doing? Like, bro, I'm saving you. I am really, I'm helping you out here.

You don't know how to use this like I do. So I'm saving you. Yeah, you weren't even using this. So you weren't making use of it the way I envision how it should be used, right? So one of the ways that this can work is I don't think land back and language back should be just the burden of indigenous peoples. And so this is going to be the really hard part. So let's say you have a property tax

or you have a sales tax in your community. So you either raise it a bit or you just take a chunk of that and say this goes back towards land back and language back initiatives, which means when it reaches a certain point, we'll work with the local tribal leaders of the Native American tribe there, and we will let them select a parcel of land to purchase back,

and we'll pay for it, and we'll say, there you go. And we start accumulating a land base with Native American peoples, because if we look at global warming, if we look at the climate crisis, if we look at pollution, if we look at all these other things, there's two things that are really on a parallel. This is really kind of scary stuff. At this particular time, the number of species that are going extinct are at such a high rate that we'll never know how many species that there are right now, but there'll always be less than there are right now. The same thing can be said with languages. There's about 7,000 languages, but we'll never actually know how many because they're going extinct at a rate faster than we could keep track of them. And so if we look at land-back and language-back, so the land-back portion is like,

take a chunk of money, buy land, give it to Native American peoples. If you have land, for example, the town that I was born in, Skagway, Alaska, which we call Skagway, there's a chunk of land that the Catholic Church owned, and the Catholic Church had a Native American boarding school there. And a boarding school was a place where Native American children were sent, usually against their parents' will, and they were forced to speak English, and they were beaten for speaking their own language, and they were usually punished, and there were labor camps. They weren't really given—in some places, they were given a decent education, but a lot of places, it was all about assimilation and killing off their own culture

and language. So if the Catholic Church had a bit of a consciousness that was thinking about doing the greater good and thinking about what did we do in our history that has caused harm, they would have contacted the tribe and said, we'd like to give you this land. Because it was a boarding school, and maybe you could build a school on it that will help your language. But instead, they struck a deal with the city to say, we'll sell it to the city and the city will do it on the condition that the tribe can never put in a claim that they should have that land, right? And so they instead conspired to shut the tribe out. And so I think what cities should be doing is trying to find land that they could give to Native American tribes. Then I think they should be taxing the people who live there to help them buy land back and to fund

language revitalization programs. Because everywhere you go in North America, there's probably an endangered Native American language, and it's endangered because of colonization. So now everyone who benefits from that should be able to contribute something to the restoration of these languages and of the land of peoples. It's wild. Like, you know, right now I feel like there's so many, there are these like parallel movements with like land back and language back and also talking about reparations. And I'd imagine the pushback is probably similar to like what you hear about reparations just like well i had nothing to do with that so why do i need to and i i i mean

i get that the situation and what racism and chattel slavery has done to black people has effects but that had nothing to do with me and i think that's just too much money for one person to get it that's not fair is that i'd imagine those the same criticisms are levied at any at you know any kind of movement or you know uh push to try and give any kind of land back or is it or are people just straight up just kind of being like wait what huh land for who it's it kind of varies like it it depends like for some places you go like you might have a certain number of the population that's kind of they they kind of varies. It depends. For some places you go, you might have a certain number of the population that's kind of, they kind of get it, right? But one of the things I think

that you were talking about a little earlier is how there is a push to just never look at this history, right? So it's basically outlawed from textbooks. I could see a future, probably in Florida, where you say you cannot say people took land from Native Americans. That's illegal to put into a textbook. That's probably something that's coming. And you cannot say slavery. And actually, it shouldn't. I was reading this article

and I was reading this article. It says, well, you shouldn't say slavery. You should just say human trafficking. Because even the term slavery has been just sort of numbed. It's just sort of like, oh yeah, there was slavery, you know? But one of the things I think there's a push from people who don't want to examine these histories to call it like labor, right? They were laborers. And so as we look at reparations and we look at land back and we look at language back, it's difficult to push through people who just want everything to maintain the way it is. Because they say, I have the privilege, I have the power. I mean, I consciously think of that. But why would I want to share? Because sharing, I think, is definitely not an American value in terms of

if you go back to the forefathers and whatever that people like to talk about. I don't think that compassion and sharing and helping each other are true value. I think the values are really like taking and acquiring and securing your own. And so one of the difficulties is if we don't sort of talk about that then we have a difficult time talking about what the alternative could be which is really to share and it's sort of like going against a billionaire mentality it's like hey you know you've got like so much maybe you should just stop and then let other people get some but it's yeah it's too hungry but it's precisely that thinking that is also the cause of so much discomfort that people aren't realizing either.

Is this disconnect is because we live in like the way that our values are reflected back to us is you get yours and you get yours and fuck everybody else because you got to get yours. And a part of that is we feel so disconnected. We feel disconnected from we do we feel disconnected from the places we live rather than realizing like the best times that you feel like alive is truly like when you feel like you are connected to the people around you to the community you're in to the land you live on all of the like all of those things come together but yeah we just like live in such an antithetical mentality to that and still are just like oh god i hate this damn matrix yeah and it's the matrix yeah right and it's stuck there's nothing we could do shucks if we could have done something different and i think another thing that's like a subsurface thing is like when we talk about decolonization we talk

about reparations we talk about trying to make things a little bit closer to right. I think some people think, oh, now it's my turn for slavery. Oh, now you're going to take my land. And now you've just been waiting to do this thing to me that I know in my brain my ancestors did to your ancestors. But it's really that's not the conversation. Like when we say decolonization, we're not talking about buying tickets for all the white people to leave. You know, we're talking about decentering whiteness to say like, you know, there could be other things in the middle. Right. And part of that and part of like healing, not just for the people that have been on the

shitty end of those transgressions, but for the transgressors is to connect to that humanity and offer a hand and say, you know what? My battery is charged at 100 percent. Y'all's is at like 2 percent. Let me give y'all 40 percent. And then we can all kind of get to some level where we all feel that we're, I don't know, at least helping each other. But, yeah, I totally feel that. All right. Should we take a break and come back and talk about how we're all living in the matrix? Hell yeah, bro. Hell yeah, brother. All right. 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. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career,

you have a lot of questions. Like, how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or, can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes. Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do,

like resume specialist Morgan Saner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote. What is it like you miss 100% of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, Caitlin 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 boys. 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. We're back. You know, every once in a while we like to look over at Truth Social just to like see, read the tea leaves. You don't even have to read the words.

You just have to like kind of look at the sheer like tonnage of text that trump is producing on truth and you like get the sense that okay the richter scale in his brain indicates that an earthquake is coming and that an indictment might be on its way so so we're picking up those signals some of the media i think yeah it's you got to put your ear down you got to see what's's going on. We hear rumbling, you know, is it going to be Georgia or the Fulton County D.A. Fonny Willis? That grand jury investigation seems to be at the here's your indictment phase. So it could be there. And it's been clear for the last couple of weeks that Trump has been freaking out over that specific investigation, considering that he went all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court to essentially like attempt to have Willis disqualified and then tried to prevent any of the evidence that was found in the grand jury report, like being presented to a jury. They're like, don't do it. Don't let her do it. And nothing that she learned can't be presented to anyone during a trial. They luckily the Supreme Court unanimously told him to eat fuck. So we have that. So now we are, you know, we're in the like we were seeing some late night truth social screams rather this time. This kind of came in the morning. But he's saying I'm getting indicted and it's not quite Georgia time.

It sounds like Jack Smith has got another one for Trump and this time for trying to subvert the 2020 election, as we all saw. for trying to subvert the 2020 election, as we all saw. And we're just going off the sheer, like Jack said, the tonnage of this truth tweet or whatever truth that he is going to be indicted because he always has a freak out pre-indictment. And rather than just typing, I guess the character count was not set to like, I'm so fucked.

So he had to just export a PDF of a Word document and upload that. And it's so long. I don't even know where to start. I don't want to start, but I'll just say, well, on Sunday night,

while I was with my family, having just arrived from the turning point of in Florida, where I saw a straw poll, like again, it's nonsense. He's talking about first paragraph. They love me in the polls. And then he finds out horrifying news for our country was given to me by my attorneys.

The deranged Jack Smith, the prosecutor for Joe Biden's Jeep, blah, blah, blah. And it goes on for like, this is only page one of the truth. I didn't even put the other fucking word doc that he posted. So he's freaking out. But again, I don't know. I'm like, can one of these just fucking stick already because it almost feels like the more indictments he faces that somehow there's like a higher chance of him walking because like the sheer volume of it's like i don't know what you want me to do man

it's like these are all these indictments can't i just go home but i don't know that's what it feels like when we just see more and more it's like yeah okay okay and come on let's get to the fucking find out phase please yeah yeah yeah more on that later he's if we we get it he did this nobody cares seems to be my concern that's my concern right that it's just like but we've seen him walk before and the more of these we about, the more normalized the fact that a former president and, you know, the likely Republican nominee is going to be indicted. Like the more that seems normal. But like, I don't think that's how the law works. Like, I think, you know, he's going to actually have to face actual charges. We're testing the very limits of whiteness with these indictments. That's what I do know.

And we'll see what happens under this stress test. If somehow his complexion will allow him to subvert elections, steal documents, and all those other things. Wow. Yeah, and I'll just say, if I was the word word truth i would be so pissed off right now i would i would i would sue his ass for just ruining my good name take a truth i was like truth social really yeah yeah oh see that's where we need like wherever there's that citizens united case words need to be people that can sue and also have a vote. Yeah, because I would love to see truth come around to be like, no, this is nonsense. But hey, this is it's a very well constructed grift by having your website be called truth. Yeah. And it's really interesting because like there's so much evidence.

And I think he even said before he was elected, like I could shoot somebody in the street and i would get away with it right and i kind of believe that you know just because he's white and he's a billion you know a billionaire he's a rich white person and like they don't always come for them and so but it's starting to stack up and it's starting you know it smelled bad for a long time there was yeah there was an implied watch this after he said that yeah right i could shoot someone and get away with it watch this now watch what i'm about to get away with yeah it's gonna be yeah it's again we're testing the limits of what his privilege can do but i mean that's why i'm hoping that these are like these aren't just like oh you dodged your

taxes like some white collar crime this is i don't know whatever again i've seen this country do all kinds of wacky shit to to preserve the status quo so who knows maybe we will see him get a favorable outcome here it's a lot he's gonna need a lot of favorable outcomes seems to be the direction that it's headed well he's already begging like the like the court in florida to be like can we just like push my documents case to like i don't know fucking never like quite literally yeah they're like uh no what do you mean like because the judge cannon was like okay we got a mid-august date and the doj came and said, you know what? Let's give him four more months.

We'll do it in December to try and preempt the, like, it's too soon thing. And to that, he was like, oh no, the lawyer's like, it's just unprecedented. He's going to be running for, it has to be at least after the election or who knows, you know, if ever, but you know, he's trying. It is interesting. I do feel like he is particularly vulnerable now because his entire career is built on him doing blatantly illegal stuff, just being like, no, I won't pay you. Then getting into legal battles with people and just dragging it out and like winning via pure shamelessness and being wealthy, privileged enough to, you know, outspend the person. I feel like we're probably seeing something like where he seems as isolated from reality as

probably he's ever been because he just spends his entire day getting his ass kicked by people who think he's somewhere between like a business genius and a like Godhead Messiah. And so I do feel like he's pretty vulnerable at this point. And like the legal strategies that he's coming up with seem to be things that are just like based on wishful thinking. Yeah. Or it's like that moment. I remember like when my mom would be like, you're going to get pimples from eating so much sugar. Because like I would break out a lot when I was a kid from eating like that's why my mom was like have you been like sneaking a bunch of sugar because and i'm like no i don't know and for a

while i was able to eat a lot of sugar and not have my face break out and i remember that moment happened it was causing like i feel i don't know if this is like donald trump but then you're like oh shit i'm mortal to a much lesser degree. And I'm just talking about my skin. That's so funny. My dad thought soda caused his acne when he was in. He was like, yeah, it has to be like boomer logic, right? Everyone was like, oh, you're going to get pimples from eating all those sugars. Then I started working at this grocery store when I was 12 and I got free soda pop.

And then, like, you know, I got a bunch of acne because I was drinking too much soda. How old were you? Twelve. Oh, okay. And then maybe that was around puberty also? No, no, no, no, no, no. Puber what? No, no, no, no.

Puber who? Not that. All right. Well, we like to feel like we're in control of our own breakouts, don't we? We like to think that it's, you know, something we're doing to cause it. We like to feel like we're in control of our reality. Yeah. And there's a new trend on TikTok that is convinced that we're all living in the matrix.

I watched these videos and immediately saw the appeal. So I am target demo for this. I'm like, hell yes yes this is what the internet was built for feed me daddy it's this video this clip of a woman crossing a street looks like in the uk and there's a moment where she just freeze frames in the middle of her stride yes so i'm on board with this her ponytail seems to freeze in the air yeah which to me i would say reeks of doctored video right like they froze the frame and then ken burns effect within that frame to make it look like there was camera movement impossible i don't know that's just me with my like production nerd hat on.

And I'm like, I see how you do this. Cause like it, I get that there's a car that goes by in the foreground, which sort of like anchors this idea that this person has like mid stride been put on pause. But I don't know. She also does a weird thing with her step after where she like, looks like she was frozen like she got like a charlie horse or something and then do you see what i mean like with her stride she like kind of like does a weird like loping thing with her next step after the being frozen yeah or it's like you got your foot stuck in something it kind of looks like you're regaining your balance after you got your foot stuck in something yeah just kind of looks like you're regaining your balance after you got your foot stuck in something. You're just trying to balance yourself

out. I don't know. Again, to me, this is not... I've glitched out like this on the air and Justin just has to edit around it where I just freeze for like 35 to 45 minutes. I've been on plenty of Zoom calls and I see people freeze all the time. Kune, what do you think? Is this

real? I think it's been confirmed. So I just want to write to the great coders who are out there programming the matrix. If you could just put more indigenous content in there, like just throw some of my language out there. Just make it, you know, just alter this reality. Because this reality is, you know, I'm going to give it two thumbs down and just say, you know, I'm going to give it two thumbs down and just say, you know, we got to do a little bit better on what we're experiencing in terms of indigenous peoples and colonization. Like, so can you just run the decolonization program? Right.

Just hit the enter key on that one. And then let's just try and see. And let people freeze. Let them freeze. Let them glitch out. As long as we're decolonizingizing that's all I really care about so in that case you know send I don't know what the indigenous version of the Keanu Reeves character was it Neo? Yeah

People ask me sometimes how to translate this stuff like how would you say the one I was like you know it's not going to really work in our language you know like you could just say Waitek like the one it doesn't work yeah yeah yeah it works good in english right so we had a lot of that like single word concepts people say like can you translate freedom you know and we're like well you know like our concept of

freedom is just living different you know because and so you got to have a lot of concepts of freedom i think in america because you've had a lot of slavery and you've had a lot of stealing of other people's stuff and so i think freedom becomes this huge thing to live by so to the coders more indigenous stuff just just rain it on down yeah we have studio have studio notes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, it could be anything. It could be, you know, a neurological condition this person suffers from because the person says, like, they were frozen like that for a minute. The walker could be doing a performance art thing, or most likely it's an intentional trick trick or even more likely it is proof that we live in the matrix and it's a glitch and everything is frozen there's no way to know but this is

an entire genre of tiktok video that i'm now fascinated with there's another one that went super viral where a plane appears to just be like frozen in midair. And the text on the video said another plane flew past minutes before. So I know for a fact it didn't move. And that's proof because the person's text in the video is like, what the fuck? Okay, sure. Because you said so. It's been like this for 7,000 years.

Hasn't moved. Someone care to explain? Still there. And you can take that to the bank. Also, as we've already discussed on this episode, like sometimes a plane does just kind of hang out up there because the wind at that height is incredibly fast. that height is incredibly fast. And, you know, you're like, the plane is going the equivalent of like 300 miles per hour

because the wind is like going against it at like 250 miles per hour or whatever. Nah, Jack, it's floating. Come on, man. I'm trying to fucking throw water on this. Yeah. So the simulation theory, which, you know, this has been a thing in science fiction forever, but the one that has gotten popular recently where it's like, and I think I heard this before 2000s because like the people credit it to the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in the early 2000s. But I think it's been around for way before that.

I mean, The Matrix came out in the 90s, didn't it? Isn't he also an effect of altruism, Bostrom? Yeah. So Bostrom is also an effect of altruism. Great ideas. This guy's an idea machine. And he's also like on wax being just a straight up racist. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Totally. Openly like saying the N N word in an email. It was a list serve, Jack, from the 90s. Oh, I'm sorry, it was list serve. That I think was his defense. He's like, it was not me. It was the list serve. the idea of that you're living in a simulation is goes back to this racist piece of shit but it's it's also like definitely you know a symptom of something like that this is the reality that we choose to kind of or the the model of reality that i think a lot of people are like that actually makes sense to me it would make sense to me if i just like started noticing like birds glitching out in midair because you live in a computer simulation yeah i must live in a computer simulation and therefore because i just i think people feel isolated right from their reality from the system that rules their lives hey teenage assholes teenage assholes on tiktok

uh it's not a fucking simulation you're just experiencing the fucking ills of capitalism destroying everything around you okay like you think of like the nature of the fucking quote what work is right most people do not have the benefit of doing work that is connected to something they fucking give a fuck about, or even making something that they feel is meaningful, that, or is, does good in the world. I'm like, I mean, few people have that benefit in as they toil or work or whatever you want to fucking call it. And because of that, we feel isolated as shit. We feel like cogs in a machine or in the case of the Matrix, those little fucking battery cells that everybody's in, individualized, where your whole purpose as life forms is to

generate energy or capital for a larger system. So I totally get why you saw the Matrix once, and now you're like, this explains what I'm living now. And it must be the Matrix rather than trying to actually begin to break out of this fucking rigid paradigm of like what we consider work or freedom or what we like, how we even live because we can't live in a normal way. Like we can't just enjoy the world around us. We don't have leisure because everything is fucking private property or you need money just to fucking afford to live or have medical care or breathe air basically so it's dystopian and of course people want to find a way to break out of the simulation but the answer seems pretty simple here like especially when you hear people investing money into being like figure out how we break out of this simulation

i'm a billionaire what what yeah What? Yeah. No, no. Come on, fam. That ain't it. Other evidence that people are pointing to a bird crossing the skyline, but its wings are turned down. There's one where they're like, look at these sheep. They've been standing completely still for like an hour. It's like, as opposed to what? But they like play creepy music over it right yeah playing cards

weren't they like weren't they playing nintendo switch that that shit looks so boring fam you know what's wild i'm i fell victim to that because i asked on twitter because i there is like a person with like a horse nearby and i see like this horse just like chilling you you know, like all day by, by themselves. And I was like, damn, that shit kind of fucked up. And I asked on Twitter, I'm like, yo, do horses get bored? Please let me know. Cause I don't know this fucking people like, nah, they're, they're fine. They're fine. Yeah. But again, that does play on my version of like, they're as smart as me and you would be so bored and you probably want to know what's happening on TV. And I should be telling you, oh, it sucks to be a horse.

Yeah. There's also a trend on glitch talk with people being like, someone's stealing my utensils. I'm down to one fork. I just found a seventh cup even though I only bought a set of six. Well, you know, they never come for the butter knives.

I'll just say that. Right. The butter knives actually multiply. Yeah. I got 30 of them. I got 30. I got four forks, six spoons. Do you currently own a butter knife?

Just a quick check of the room. Does it, people still own like that, like very specific, like flat, like it almost looks like. Oh, the little butter knife? The little butter knife. Oh, like the little tiny one? I just consider the knife, like the one that cut, that I put out at dinner when we're setting the table, a butter knife. Like when you get a silverware set, it comes with like a little fork, big fork, big spoon, and then the knife, the butter knife thing.

Yeah. Wait, what's the butter knife? What's the butter knife? What do you call the knife that has the little, it's like smooth at the top and then has the little serrated edges? Hold on. What's the knife? Hold on guys. That's a peanut butter knife. What the fuck?

Oh, wait, you're just meaning the one that has like, like a round, more rounded edge at the end. Yeah. It's got, yeah.

And it's got like ridges on it. You can't really, probably the knife. No, but like, I think about like the first set that most young people have, which is that Ikea. You buy that whole silverware set at Ikea.

That doesn't have a rounded edge. Is it sharp? Is it cut? I mean, you can't stab with it, but you can cut chicken with it. I wouldn't. And maybe tender... Other tender meats. Yeah, they got some... That's some serious silverware,

I think. When you get a butter knife, it can cut butter. Right, right, right. Maybe you could cut some bread, but you're going to saw that bread up. You're going to have some rough bread. Okay, so that's what I'm thinking. Like this one here, they call that I guess a spreader? That makes sense because it got

that big flat big tip on the end oh for like your fish spread but you're calling this a butter knife that's what i'm calling that's a butter knife that is what google is calling a oh it's calling it a dinner knife a dinner knife get out of town you call it a dinner knife miles i don't even know in my mind a butter knife okay here's the other thing what is the one that i call a butter knife to you in your head what is the word what is this that's just like a shitty dinner knife shitty dinner knife yeah because like it ain't steak you know what i mean like that's a whole

other thing oh yeah like we butter to me always had just it was meant to spread and like that's just like if you need to cut some shit oh and the other reason I'll tell you is in Japan, like when you buy like a, like a container of like soft butter, it's like built for you to put a little butter knife in. So like a lot of Japanese homes have like a very specific butter spreader. But again, that's why I'm like, are we here to even know this whole fucking matrix thing became into what's the definition of a spreader versus a knife? Okay. Between the three of us, we may have figured this out. Yeah, okay. Well, I would even throw the different colored dresses

and the green needle space, whatever, into the thing where it feels like, that was, when those two things happened, everyone was like, we live in the Matrix. Like, this is glitching out. How do you see a black and blue dress? I see yellow and white. So I don't know.

I find this stuff interesting. I mean, yeah, I don't think it means we live in a simulation. No, I think it's just it's only a sign that people are are, you know, becoming of the disconnect that they feel and they're just trying to make sense of it and they lack the vocabulary or tools to like articulate it in a way that makes sense and all we have are fucking movies and elon musk tweets for a certain generation so when he starts when everybody's talking about getting red pilled and shit they're like yeah dude that shit's real like i don't know like what do you think of like i i feel like this is all part of like in the last times you've come on too to talk about how disconnected we are especially from

like where we live in our surroundings and like how that's part of like being able to like in a way make a step towards like decolonizing the way we live because i feel like this is this is like this is a perfect example of how we've completely colonized our own minds into thinking this is the one way that society and the economy can function. That is a great question, Miles. And let's hold that thought and we'll take a quick break and 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. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden.

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

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

to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is Season 4 of Naked Sports, where we live at the intersection of sports and culture. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry, Caitlin 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. Just repeat that question. Yeah, but like I was saying, I think if you didn't just skip ahead, the point being is I think there's a lot of you've spit a lot of facts every time you've come on. But that has really made me think about how much the way that we, this, like, our societies were built and this country was built, how much it affects us now, how much it poisons us now to the point that we have no connection to each other, community, to land and things like that.

Do you see this as part and parcel of that disconnect? Or is there another way you're looking at it? Well, so I guess I think of a couple of things. One is when I was going to school in Hawaii, I was living with one of my teachers named Larry Kimura, who we call him the godfather of the Hawaiian language movement. He's an amazing person. And at one point, he kind of started going off about these people wearing these shirts that say Aloha Aina, which is like love the land. And he says, you love the land? Show me your fingers. You got dirt underneath your fingernails? Have you been out working in the land? You've been digging? You've been planting stuff? You've been doing stuff? And so for me, I think if the world starts glitching out,

go out on the land, right? Just go see what's out there and go get your hands dirty. And then I also, sometimes I have theories that maybe people don't want to hear. So I was in a class on American literature and the theme of the class was paranoia. And at the sort of culminating moment in the class, this was for an MFA in creative writing, and the teacher, who was really, he was a great guy, and he said, well, why do you guys think there's so much paranoia in American literature? And this person had an answer, and that person had an answer,

and that person had an answer, and I raised my hand, and I said, well, I think it's because America stole everything from Native American peoples, and they're just kind of waiting for their comeuppance. And I also think that you can really geek out on sci-fi theories and stuff, so you don't have to assume that your ancestors did something really horrible. no, this is all part of this larger program that we have no control of. I think it's another system to avoid doing the work that it's going to take to sort of start moving towards a sense of equity, which is totally attainable, which is totally possible. But I think colonization sets up all

of these mechanisms, like either it's already in place, it's too late to do anything, Like either like it's already in place, it's too late to do anything, and I'm always paranoid that something is colonization. And I'm usually right, but I'll also say, so that's my matrix that I'm stuck in. So sometimes I'll be dealing with something else like, is this a colonization thing? Or is this a race? Am I getting treated different because of my name or because of who I am or how I look? Are my kids being treated different because of, you know, my name or because of who I am or how I look? Are my kids being treated different? And so I'm always sort of, I'm paranoid myself, but I'm also, I have it,

you know, I don't have the TikTok channel for it, but I've been right quite a few times with this kind of stuff too. So for me, I think it's fascinating and it's neat to look at. And like, I have friends who've seen UFOs and I have friends who've seen, we have our own monsters here that live in the woods. We went camping last weekend and it's fun. It's a blast. We're like, we're in Alaska. You can just walk out your door and you're in the wilderness. dog starts barking, you're cooking some delicious dinner out in the middle of nowhere in the dark. Well, it's not in the middle of nowhere, but far from a hospital. And the dog's barking and looking down the trail and you're like, grab all the food, get in the cabin. We respect the grizzly bear so much that we got two names. So hoots is what we would call it so it means brown bear and we say it's eek for black bear but the brown bear is the one that's it owns the forest and we know that but when we're out in the forest we say yet see neat which means a living thing so we don't even say its name when we're out there because we're like you say its name it's going to be like

you talk to me wait you're in my house. And so we talk to them before we go into the woods and we sort of live this life that's pretty connected to the natural world. So I think the other thing too, is there's a fascination with an artificial world because there's a prescribed disconnect with the natural world in order to maintain a sense of colonization and economics the way that it's required today. You have to be separate from it to say, yeah, cut all the trees down. Yeah, kill off all those buffalo. Yeah, you know, these mountain lions scare me, so just murder them, right?

But in order to do that, you have to remove yourself which you know christianity kind of did that already it's like man has domain of everything including women right and it just creates tons and tons of problems because i think human beings and especially we just narrow it down to one gender don't have enough skills and ability to like manage the universe it's sort of like, actually you should just be in the universe and figure out how you're part of that. Cause you're not, you're,

you're in the food chain. You're, you're in, you're in all these circles, you're in all these cycles and what you do affect all of these things. And so I like the conversations. I think it's fun. I think it's fun to watch this stuff.

You're like, Oh yeah, that is weird. And that's pretty cool. But you can also zoom in on your iPhone. It starts to get pretty grainy and then it's probably pretty easy when you got a camera there's grains in my house what the fuck i think i mean i think that kind of ties nicely into just you know if you have any additional thoughts on avatar but like the reality of you know what we're doing to the world and other humans in the history of what you know

white people have done to the world and other human beings is maybe too uncomfortable for some people to take in and they want to create an artificial reality in the case of the matrix it's like just coming coming up with a system of belief that like we are in an unofficial reality but in the case of avatar it's like creating an unofficial like an artificial reality that you can go live in for a couple hours that also like rewrites that history where you get to like be on the good guy side on the on the side of the victim the people being victimized by colonialism like i i do think avatar is really interesting just as a phenomenon because i don't like i can't think of another cultural pop cultural thing that was that is as successful

as that those movies when they're happening and then as completely embarrassing the second they stop happening like like it happened once with the first avatar and everyone's like man that was weird and like avatar was like a punch line and but then they did it again like he brought avatar 2 out and every everyone went to fucking see that one too and like they are the two of the three most uh top grossing movies of all time but like nobody would put a movie poster of that movie up except ironically and so i don't know i think there's like a weird disconnect and then we also have the thing where like people were experiencing depression after they came out of the movie because they couldn't incorporate it into their lives the way they can a Star Wars or something like that, where they make it part of their personality.

It just feels like Avatar is this thing that is an experience, the thing you try not to think about when you're not at an Avatar movie or something. But yeah, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on Avatar. Well, you know, I think largely there's this fascination with white savior films, you know, and so Dances with Wolves. What was the one? Dangerous something, where there's like a white school teacher

who goes into a black neighborhood. And, you know, and like, there are certainly stories of people who come in and embrace community and become part of it and become something different and and do fight racism and fight colonization you know but it's it's very rare especially when they like they win or something and so i started to think about this stuff quite a bit. And then there's a film called Real Engines, which is spelled R-E-E-L-I-N-J-U-N-S, which is a documentary on the history of Native Americans in film. And it kind's a growing list of, you know, there's quite a few of them who have played Native Americans. And then you also just get really interesting things. Like there is a guy, I think his name was Iron Eyes Cody or Cody Iron Eyes. I can never remember which way it goes, but he played so many Native Americans in films that

he full on believed he was Native American when he died. And to some extent, I think his children do as well. And so he can assume this entire identity. And so I think there's a fascination with that to think about what if there was something different, but then there's a disconnect as well because you don't really see that embraced in people's reality. Because if they come out of, like, let's say they came out of Avatar and said, whoa, like, I should learn an indigenous language, and I should go contribute to a land back initiative, and I should actually do something that's embracing decolonization because the film you could argue is about decolonization right it's it's a totally fictionalized decolonization and so you could like if it translated into real action that would be more interesting to me than just sort of saying well you know it's it's a nice fantasy to say oh yeah well what if what if we had actually done something a lot more humane instead of taking everything from everybody?

Because if you look at some things like, we talked a bit about the Supreme Court, who is all kinds of fucked up. Like just the types of things that they're doing, these decisions are horrible and they're just destructive for movements towards equity. But the one thing they couldn't do is dismantle the Indian

Child Welfare Act, you know. And so the reason why the Indian Child Welfare Act exists is because in the mid to late 1970s, one out of every four Native American children were removed from their homes and placed with white families. In addition, one out of every four Native American women were sterilized without their full consent. This kind of stuff was still happening. And so the removal of people, and so the other thing, I think there's a fascination with the idea that colonization had an endpoint, or it had, we're in this post-colonial sort of world, which we're not. And we could be, but it requires a consciousness that's going to move you beyond going to a movie for two or three hours and completely immersing yourself in this other idea and just saying, actually, we can have

a reality that is kind of close to the Avatar universe, which, you know, I'm not opposed to that reality. But what I'm opposed to is the idea that it exists or that going to the movie is somehow enough right right yeah it's funny too because like if like to your point if you're not coming out of the movie being like wow we got work to do then really then i don't know how good it's doing because most people come out of that movie and be like why isn't pandora real why can't i go there so the message was maybe like secondary or tertiary to like the wow isn't this shit fucking cool anyway like then there's like some other shit happens to these blue people whatever i came out inspired to be seven foot six

with a tail my name did yeah with a tail because that does help with balance it turns out yeah and they're my coffee with sex too apparently yeah well who and i it's such a pleasure having you back on the show where can people find you follow you all that good stuff yeah well uh i have a podcast called the tongue unbroken and season two is launching in November. So we're going to launch during the start of the Native American Heritage Month. And the NextUp initiative is fabulous. And I really encourage you to just go check it out. It's the NextUp initiative with the iHeartRadio. And look at the current, this whole new generation of NextUp initiative folks who are coming out. And I'm really excited to hear their podcast and to be a part of this movement where we're trying to find voices in the margins and pull them closer to the center.

So you can find me sometimes on Facebook, sometimes on Twitter, although Twitter has gotten a lot less interesting as they used to be oh you know this this billionaire bought it and like uh and now his tweets just keep popping up like you know and so I tried to mute one of his tweets and says this will make Twitter a better experience for you and I was like it will actually make Twitter a better experience for everybody if we saw a lot less of that voice yeah I've been getting a lot of ai ads that are just like really insult like here i screenshot one crazy thing happened with x ask data.co today still in shock i was troubleshooting with a customer on zoom and he had just gotten his person and it's like, keep reading, meet data, get it done. And it's like a promoted post for fucking some bullshit. They're all over the place. Anyways, I'm glad I interrupted for that. Yeah. The other thing I really want to promote is just indigenous

language revitalization. So if you're not familiar with what the Hawaiian language movement is, or Ojibwe, or Mohawk, or the Salish of Spokane, go look at what they're doing. It's very possible. So on The Tongue Unbroken, we like to talk about how do you do it? How do you take these steps? If you have a thousand speakers left, if you have 10 speakers left, if you have no speakers left of your indigenous language, what kind of steps could you possibly take? And we like to envision a world where we dream the impossible dream and we get back to a place of strength, which takes action, which takes courage, which takes determination, and also takes a bunch of harm to people. It's like also the indigenous people internalizing that harm and then hurting each other, which we got a lot of work to do with that as well. Amazing. Is there a work of media, social media that you've been

enjoying? Yeah, I think there's two. There's one that's really just funny where there was a girl who gets in a car on instagram and says like i worked 10 hours all i want is wing stop fucking drive i mean can we get the audio real quick of that you said it in the email that shit watched it a hundred times just comes in enters the car on like 1,000. And this guy puts it to a metal song and it's a brilliant piece of social media.

Stop. Fucking drive. Her friends are dying laughing in the background they're like yo we just picked her up it's just such a brilliant mashup and then i think the second one was uh on tiktok there's a maori just a wonderful explanation of what decolonization is and isn't. Because a lot of people, they get really scared of that word. But I think we don't need to be scared of that word. I think we need to understand what people are saying. And it's not the removal of whiteness. It's not going back to some pre-contact state. Because sometimes when we talk about decolonization, people are like, well, then give me the keys to your car and your fucking phone right and it's like no that's not what we're talking about

like it's a lot more complex than that and i think this clip explains it really well yeah colonization is less about returning to a pre-colonial society and more about recognizing that we live under a colonial system that things things are the way they are, not by accident, but because a particular ideology has systematically erased others while normalizing itself. Once something is normalized it's hard to imagine anything else. We become confined within that particular ideology and then the mindset of, it's always been this way, starts to creep in. And then the origins of the colonizers, which in our case was a very violent one, can be forgotten. We start sweeping things under the rug and that's why many people are confused by things like the Māori Health Authority

and even iwi settlements. And so when we're able to recognize these structures through what will be a never-ending process of decolonization, it helps us move forward towards a society which doesn't just draw inspiration from a diversity of spaces, but is also self-aware. Boom. Boom. Awesome.

Amazing. Thank you. Miles, where can people find you? What is the work and media you've been enjoying? Just miles of gray where they got at symbols. Don't really have anything i've been watching i haven't been on the internet's medias much late oh i'll just say hey my new podcast actually time to plug that the good thief uh about the greek robin hood vasili spalio costas it's really dope episode

two comes out today thank you so much for everybody that's been listening. And if you haven't, I'm telling you, I'm killing it on this podcast. The sound design is amazing. The production team is killing it. And this is like a really easy listen, so if you could support, it would mean a lot. But yeah, other than that, you know where to find me. Yeah, find me on our basketball

podcast, Miles and Jack. I'm at Boosties. And also talking 90 Day Fiance with Sophie Alexander on 420 Day Fiance. You can find me on Twitter at Jack underscore podcast miles and jack i'm at boosties and also talking 90 day fiance with sophie alexandra on 420 day fiance all right you can find me on twitter at jack underscore o'brien yeah uh tweet i've been enjoying david underscore j underscore roth tweeted my father-in-law is watching a youtube channel where a guy searches for and sometimes finds old silver dimes his catchphrase is it's dime time. As far as I'm concerned,

my father-in-law is the only person using YouTube properly. I would add Chris Crofton to that. Yeah, Crofton's up there. And then Bergs at A Serious Man tweeted, I hate when I grab a live wire and everyone sees my damn skeleton. You can find me on Twitter

at Jack underscore O'Brien. You can find us on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien. You can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at The Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have a Facebook fan page and a website, DailyZeitgeist.com, where we post our episodes and our footnotes, 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. Well, is there a song that you think people might enjoy?

I think we're going gonna go out on this track by sd knack e-s-t-e-e-n-a-c-k just some good old-fashioned head nod rap for you hearkening the times of golden era and golden era hip-hop of new york uh this this track called expert slopes 2000 2000 not poobah though uh but yeah this is just like a dope track and you know for you you sample heads out there this is like such a for i'm getting into production lingo and i can already hear uh marcella making fun of me but this sample is chopped up so wacky that it just has like its own swing to it that it's really dope and i just want to put a bubble jacket on smoke smoke a blunt, and stare well. So anyway, this is Expert Slopes by SDNAC.

All right. Well, we'll link off to that in the footnotes. The Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That is going to do it for us this morning. Back this afternoon to tell you what's trending. And we'll talk to you all then. Bye. Bye.

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

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