The Daily Zeitgeist - Weekly Zeitgeist 282 (7/10/23-7/14/23)

Episode Date: July 16, 2023

The weekly round-up of the best moments from DZ's season 295 (7/10/23-7/14/23)See 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 this episode of the weekly zeitgeist uh these are some of our favorite segments from this week all edited together into one uh non-stop infotainment laughstravaganza. Yeah. So without further ado, here is the weekly zeitgeist. What is something from your search history that is revealing about who you are? I yesterday was looking up the public pool hours in New York because I'm a huge, huge, huge advocate of going to the public pools in New York City because everybody's like, I mean, ew, gross, the public pools?

Like, I'd rather go to a hotel. And I'm like, okay, but the pools are run by the city and have, like, really intense guidelines about how clean they have to be. And you know who doesn't have those guidelines? Any hotel. I don't know if any hotel pools are getting cleaned in the way that the public pools in New York are. So I am a huge fan. They're freezing cold. If you live in New York, they're super – because they're like cooling centers.

Like they're for people, especially who don't have air conditioning in the summer. They're also the location of a lot of the free lunches that get, you know, for students. So in the summer, you're not in school. That's where they do it. I love, love, love the public pools, but I was, I've never gone early enough to know what time they open. So I was like, I guess I should find out. And it's 11, which I think is a little close for me. So I don't know if I'll ever get there at opening, but noon feels right. Right, right, right. Did you grow up in New York? noon feels right right right right did you grow up in new york in new york no yeah i grew up in maryland but i've been here for 16 or 17 years now okay which is crazy because i'm 20 um god you're so much just kidding i would never want to be 20 again my god um oh yeah some of

the most chaotic times in my life uh okay because like la the pools in la are just some of the most chaotic times in my life. Knew nothing. Because like LA, the pools in LA are just because of the ambient heat. Not always like super cool, but you definitely cool off. But then we also just have like all those like splash parks now, which is basically the equivalent of like an open fire hydrant. But in a like foam ground area to make it safe for kids. Yeah, for kids. I love the public pools in LA though, too. I used to go swim in those when I lived there.

They're the best. I love pools. I guess that's something about me. I love pools. It's unique. I've talked before on here about how my first job out of college was as a pool boy at the Soho House, the roof deck of the Soho House, when that had just opened. And I was in charge

of, just to your point about them not having regulations, I was in charge of just to your point about them not having regulations i was in charge of like the chlorine levels also you were yeah they were like like there was oh no i had somebody who like knew more about it who checked with me every once in a while but i was like doing the ph testing and yeah and was in no way equipped to do that i had to like pull a drowning kid out of the pool one time i was there i was there during the blackout of whatever year that was 2003 yeah 2003 and everybody like came to that pool it was a tiny pool it was like yeah halfway between a pool and a bathtub yeah it's like the size of a

couch. But everyone thought it would be a cool place to hang out. And it was like milky by the end of it. Oh, yeah. Because I didn't know what I was doing. They just like put whoever's up there in charge of like the chlorine levels.

Yeah. Because like on the other side, like in Vegas, their pools, like if you open your eyes under the water, it will just strip like membranes from your like eyeballs. So yeah, your eyes will turn

like five shades lighter. Yeah. You just have white walker eyes after you open them underwater. What is, what's something that you think is overrated? I think that Wes think is overrated i think that wes anderson is overrated

let the chopper sing what exactly about wes anderson is overrated i think look i he just tells the same quirky little story over and over again. Granted, I have not seen Asteroid City yet. So maybe this one will just blow me away and I will be excited again. To be clear, there was a time period where I did like his work. But I don't know, maybe I think it's just like too repetitive. I don't know. But like it's just like too repetitive i don't know and but like yeah i get it like he's an auteur so he's gonna have a distinct style that he kind of just keeps recycling over and over but like i don't know i just like find his quirky little quirkiness

a bit tiresome these days yeah what era of when were you in yeah yeah i would say well the peak for me was fantastic mr fox hell yeah that's probably my favorite of his and leading up to but then like after that i felt like there was just a decline moonrise kingdom i think that one was like oh okay fine and then all right and then again another controversial take here but i thought that isle of dogs was speaking of toilets yeah oh gosh i think that's totally fair i okay here's my experience watching almost every wes anderson film just like gosh that's really pretty oh look owen wilson he's always delightful costumes should get credit wow the fits are fitting that movie was that i'll never watch

it again and don't revisit wes anderson films they're like very beautiful i feel like they have just enough story to avoid being museum pieces you know what i mean you ever seen a movie in the museum yeah right but it's like tell me the plot of any wes anderson movie you can't like i can't do it like i don't remember like they just don't stick with me i feel like it's just like you see a frame and you're like wow look at all that headroom that's nice and look at this mise-en-scene woohoo and then you're like but what was the plot and also why did i watch it yeah i feel like he is going to be the least likely filmmaker to for you to be like oh he really surprised me on this one this is this is not i did not see this one coming i think his

like french dispatch was his attempt to do something different and i think it's like it's definitely my least favorite of his movies i skipped it i couldn't be bothered yeah think it's definitely my least favorite of his movies. I skipped it. I couldn't be bothered. Yeah. But it also seems like I don't see that many people riding for that one. Usually, I feel like his movies are... Some people really like it. Some people really hate it. And, you know, it's kind of random.

Like, I really like Grand Budapestest hotel but i don't like a lot of the ones around that and that's kind of the only later era one that i really enjoy but a lot of people like really love the life aquatic i've never really connected with that one but yeah french dispatch felt like people were like huh we're not we're not going with you on this one there's some like really good performances in it yeah i don't know i like part of me wants to see the asteroid city one because i don't know it it just looks like the he's instead of trying to do something different he's like i'm going to do the same so hard. Oh, you didn't like it when I tried something new? Well, fine.

I'll do the thing again. Yeah. How about if Wes Anderson tried to make a Wes Anderson movie? He got jealous of all the people being on social media being like, what if your day was a Wes Anderson movie? It was so wild to me that he was upset about that. Like, I was really trying to. Was he upset about that like i was really trying to was he upset about that i was yeah oh wow yeah he came out he was like i would never look at those and people

were like it's like people are just homaging your film for like that i think the highest form of flattery is like the entire internet got together was like i think your aesthetic is so utterly charming i'm gonna place myself inside of it. It was, I really liked the meme. I thought it was cute. Disappointing. Court your fan base,

please. I think it's, this is the best a parasocial relationship can be. It's just to say, Hey guys, I see you. And I liked what you did and thank you. And then just move on.

Yeah. I don't know. I wonder if it's also like, it would just be like, he's worried. It would like fuck him up a little bit to see everybody's like version of him. The way that like seeing someone do an impression of you can be a little unnerving for the first time, you know. That is fair. That.

OK, maybe. Or maybe he's just an asshole. I couldn't possibly imagine a universe where that's true. That's from Wes Anderson. That's got his quote directly. So, okay. So Wes Anderson said about the memes. I'm very good at protecting myself from seeing all that stuff.

If somebody sends me something like that, I'll immediately erase it and say, please, sorry. Do not send me things of people doing me. Because I do not want to look at it thinking, is that what I do? Is that what I mean? I do not want to look at it thinking, is that what I do? Is that what I mean? I don't want to see too much of someone else thinking about what I try to be because God knows I could then start doing it. So to your point, Jack, this is a form of self-protection and not a dismissal of his fans. Yeah.

All right. he he does betray in that quote like a little bit of like a thing i always suspect about anybody who got famous before like a certain point like that they just like don't know how technology works like if someone sends me something i erase it like what do you mean you erase it the link that they sent to you you like yeah they delete it from internet.com oh man the link that they sent to you? Yeah, they delete it from internet.com. Oh, man. What's something you think is underrated, Teresa? Okay, there's this really cool taco spot right

around where I live. It's like my neighborhood, but it's just a guy who sells tacos in front of his house and he's really cool. It's underrated obviously because you guys don't know about it but i want to shout him out because i love this so much literally i feel like it it's like i i don't want to say i manifested it because obviously this man is an individual person who has his own life and needs but i was thinking right before i moved like

oh it'd be really cool to just I think I was just having existential dreams about you can't tell like what's my future and livelihood so I was like what if I just like opened a little restaurant in my garage but that was mostly like I don't actually want to do it but I was just thinking the idea of like let's just go back to it reminds me of like Taiwan where people just have these little eateries and you know your neighborhood and you enjoy your community and it's nice and and it doesn't have to be you know a chipotle or bought by facebook but then like the first week i lived here um i saw a sign that was just like handwritten it was just like in spanish that said like tacos vienes y sabado like fridays and saturdays and my first

thought was like oh that must be good because if it's a handwritten sign it's not advertised he's only doing it two days a week just out of sheer love of the game yeah but friday comes around i'm like oh i can't wait it's first time i go and he said it was the first time he was doing it too so oh timelines coincided yeah and so and did you go like i made you do this like i'd never heard of tacos before yesterday he's like i just spontaneously appeared but um no he like started this little business in front of um his house and he it's so good he just like starts cooking in the afternoon on fridays and then around five he started telling it like i was trying to buy it like at like two

and he was like it's not ready yet and then no right now i'm manifest but they're so good and it's so cute and he's been doing it now for the last couple weeks every friday saturday and there's like a crowd and he started he goes by papa's talk tacos papa jose and like every week i go there there's like a new sign now like he's like adding more marketing. Now there's a sign down the street along the main street that has an arrow that says tacos. And then the other day there was one that you could scan the QR code and follow him. Tacos Papa

Jose. This is actually a brilliant marketing strategy. Could you actually give him my number? I actually want to reach out to him about getting his brand online. That's really a cool thing because I feel like the lemonade stand model like you you never hear that applied to anything else it's just like kids trying their first taking their first whack at capitalism and it's like very and they don't know it's because

they're cute that's why they're selling it yeah right right but like if you're good at making stuff why not do a little taco it's so good and it's like like it's homemade and there's like you know people sitting around there's usually like a tv and his family's hanging out so it's like really nice but also like the first weekend i think there was a graduation so a lot of people were coming but also he just said he i asked him how he advertised and he just said he was posting on facebook so i mean whatever fuck it zuckerberg but like that's kind of nice i don't know there was something really like sweet about just like it's good and he's just urgently trying to do it that way but in my mind i'm like oh my god what if this is the next sting type phone because that's

how you hear about these like huge eateries they always start from just okay so then maybe you need to get in as an investor yeah like you You're like, I want to buy in. Ground floor investor. This is how you get the buildings named after you. Yeah, you do stand up and tacos. Next time you show up, it's going to be called Tacos Mama Teresa. I did a leveraged buyout. I got chased this ass out of town.

It's all mine now. This idiot made the mistake of showing me his process for making these tacos. His proprietary recipe. Oh, my God. True capitalist. They're also only $2, and they're very good. That's the other thing. I'm like, oh, it's so near Salazar.

And I'm like, Salazar's great, too. But I'm like, this place? That's great. Yeah, I love local food, local eateries. It's so funny when you meet people. I don't know, maybe it's just being an Angelina. Like I've never grown up with like the fear of street food. And also maybe just like in Japan too, in Asia, like they're just like in Japan, they're called Yatais where they're just like fucking people just throw up a tent and shit and a

grill. Like they're serving outside of a train station. In Taiwan too, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, it it's it's always funny when people are like i don't know about that i'm like you have clearly not felt the love of street food that also you can't get sick of you know like when i went back to taiwan and i hadn't been for a while and i just like late i got something that probably had been out for

hours i was like no it's your weak american gut like yeah you gotta be a little savvy about what time and where which stands you're going to. I like to just say, yeah, it's because you've been out of the country too long. It wasn't their fault. It was you being an American. No, it wasn't their fault. They were like, why would you buy this meat thing? They were like, it was clearly

a shoe on a stick. I don't know. I thought it was like a gag, like a fun shape. Alright, let's take a quick break and we'll come back and talk about cocaine. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jamee 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 percent of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself.

Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 L.A.-based Shekinah Church, an alleged cult that has impacted members for over two decades. 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.

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

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

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

them have kind of started to spike. Now, part of, you mentioned like the deaths of the drug overdose deaths, some of that is separately just the opioid epidemic and fentanyl, but also some of those overdoses are intentional. But if there's no note left behind, they just put it down as overdose, because of course, how would you know? And so, and then anxiety and depression both have been rising, specifically among the youth, again, going back to around 2009, 2010. Now, there's two ways people interpret this that are controversial. You can either say that these things have been going up in the internet era and then have accelerated in the smartphone era. Right. the internet era and then have accelerated in the smartphone era. Or you can say, well, these things have gone up since 9-11 and accelerated since the financial

crisis of 2008. When we start talking about how the media and smartphones and all those things make people more anxious, this upsets people because the response is always, well, we're not anxious because of phones. We're anxious because the response is always, well, we're not anxious because of phones. We're anxious because the world is on fire. Our assertion is not that there are no problems in the world. Our assertion, or at least mine, is that the way media, the media environment is one of those problems. It's one of those things that make things worse.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of things. things worse. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things like all the things that you were saying, like the world is on fire, 9-11, the economic collapse, and then also having devices in our hands feeding us a steady stream of media that's like specifically tailored to us and specifically based on preferences of what makes us angriest or most frightened, like those things can't be good. And yeah, I think there's, Miles, you pulled a Al Jazeera story about like outrage headlines increasing. Well, because I mean, yeah, again, like we're, there's so many facets of how we end up with bad vibes, the bad vibes decades trademarked. Buted. Uh, but yeah, like I think one of them is, you know, like this, it's some version of like mean world syndrome where

a lot of your media diet are just giving you sort of an overemphasis on the terrible things that are happening, which can just lead to like being more cynical or just being like, what the fuck is going on? And yeah, like without just zero, they analyze like headlines, like, like thousands, tens of thousands of headlines from 2000 to 2019, just to see what the emotional charge of was of some of these headlines. And they've noticed that things have just gotten more and more increasingly negative since the year 2000. Like, you know, headlines that say like, quote, Brazil prison riot leaves nine dead, rather than things like a new lens restores vision and brings relief. And we're seeing just that sort of that rise in those kinds of headlines be equally sort of distributed between the right and left. But there is an edge

on the right, like with conservative media definitely having those, you know, a bigger emphasis on the fear based kind of headline. And I and I feel the same way, too, like because reading as much news as I do or we have to making this show like that absolutely has an effect on me. But then you kind of have to take a step back and like, what are the statistics saying? You're actually getting something completely different. Yeah. Yeah. The headlines and again, note that there's the year 2000 again when going back to the origin of that. What was driven by that was the death of news

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

Just through tracking user behavior, they figured out that the more emotionally charged, I mean, we saw this is correct, the more emotionally charged headline gets clicked. So now every individual headline, because, you know, once upon a time, you'd have a newspaper with a big headline across the top, you know, goes to jail whatever i don't think nixon ever actually went to jail yeah yeah it doesn't matter would have sold papers and it would have been a headline in the modern era and then a lot of the other headlines would be very boring and straightforward city council votes to do whatever well now if you want people to click on that boring city council story if it's your job as a journalist to get people to click, there's got to be an angle on there that's going to get people mad.

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

so much injustice or whatever. Nevermind that that doesn't help that person in the video. Nevermind that you're watching a clip from three years ago and everyone has forgotten about it. It doesn't matter. It has bubbled up on Reddit and now everybody's mad again to no effect. Like it's not motivating you to help this person.

Yeah. One old outdated technology I think we're underrating is newsies. These headlines are doing, you know, newsies just used to yell at you to read the newspaper and people would just listen because they were scared of the newsies. But now they have to scare us with the actual content of the headline. people who identify with a religion or involved in a religion and the number of people who have access to or regular contact with a community, like both are just on an all-time low and going lower. And so I think that there's a broad kind of, you can call it spiritual or like broadly psychological level more than ever before, where we don't have like access to answering some of the big questions. And so like we

speculated in the past, one of these like kind of broad episodes about the idea that like maybe Stan culture is coming from this need to sublimate ourselves to something higher and like some mythical like Godhead figure or like leader person, like when we're very young like star wars or you know harry potter the matrix like these are our mythical stories that we have chosen to kind of put put ourselves like derive our meaning from and that that actually made a lot of sense of, of how people react, like how star Wars fans or like fan fandoms react. Like there is a religious war when something happens that doesn't cohere to the dogma that they were raised on. But I think there's a lot of like kind of grasping for meaning as technology

has isolated us from one another and from the communities that used to allow people to sort of dissolve their sense of self into like a culture as like kind of another example of where we see this. I mean, with I guess Stan culture is one example of that. But consumerism, people have become like very serious consumers, like to like on a deep, deeply personal level, I feel like. level, I feel like. Yeah, because I mean, like to your point, I mean, I don't, you know, the lack of religion or I think that sense of community more than like finding, I mean, people are finding meaning in other things, but I don't know how many people are explicitly like, I just, I need something that kind of explains everything. And I think the way we pivot to that is just to find, like you say, like, because we so isolated we're we want to find community in these other ways that like are interesting to us because i'm not interested in religion

yeah i'm interested in arsenal football club and that is the closest way i begin to devote myself to something that's like part like there's group there's like a in group where i'm trying to be like identify with these other supporters i go through the religious ceremonies of like watching the matches and getting very emotional as I watch them and be very like emotionally moved when things go up or down. And so like I find that like most people have like a topic where they will bring that sort of level of like devotion to, you know, like what they're paying attention to

and what they're willing to debate people on, etc. Because, yeah, like we they're paying attention to and what they're willing to debate people on, et cetera. Because, yeah, like we're all we're all just trying to find something that like feels good and helps us feel connected at the end of the day. At least certainly that I can speak for myself in that very narrow example. Yeah, this is something else where you can track in statistics like the average number of friends and close friends a person has, again, has been dropping since the 90s. of friends and close friends a person has, again, has been dropping since the 90s. And it is just, the people used to meet their friends at church. They used to meet their friends at the office.

Now a lot of people work at home, you know, and that's the thing where we can sit here and talk about it as like a mystical thing. Like there's no sense of unity or community or whatever. But from just a practical point of view, having a friend who will give you a ride to the airport or who will help you move or, you know, like just as in a practical manner, we that's part of what people don't get. This is part of what a church provided. Like the church, when one person got sick and couldn't work, the other members of the church would bring food to their house. They would come help them clean like that was. And you did it because it's like, hey, we all are Baptists or whatever, and we are all on the same team.

And it was, that's something that is, humans do everywhere that you find humans as we organize and get together. But we usually have to have something to rally around. A symbol or something, a tree, this tree. A plus sign. We all, yeah, whatever it is, you know, and unfortunately, that also makes us go to war with one another.

If you see somebody in a Red Sox jersey, you're like a Yankee fan. And then it's like, all right, let's go. Let's go punch that guy. But when you talk about and there's a term that is for the modern situation, which is atomization, where you have atomized people to where now if you need a ride to the airport, you're going to, you know, pay for an Uber. And so many of these things that used to be stuff that friends would do, it's like, well, now it's a corporation doing it for you. And I'm not saying that the friends you know purely online

aren't your real friends, but it's a different type of friendship. If it's somebody who you can't call when you've broken your leg, you need somebody to go get groceries for you or vice versa. If you're not the person that like you feel obligated to do that because they're my friend, like they depend on me. It means something to be needed, to be depended on. It means something to be needed, to be depended on. Like to get in a situation where nobody depends on you. I'm like, I don't have children or whatever, but I don't have friends where that friend's going to call me in the middle of the night and say, hey, I need you to come bail me out of jail. Like that sucks in the moment. But knowing that somebody needs you is what keeps you going.

When you're that isolated from real life connections connections it's too easy to just drift away humans need to be needed yeah we need that actual in real life connection which is interesting too because i see this like on tiktok more and more of people posting like these strategies that come off as like the most manipulative sort of like sadistic things where they talk about it's like you got to be needed and that's how you do that's how you develop even deeper relationships i do this thing with my wife where i unhook the uh the the chain from the toilet uh handle so she'll need me and when the toilet isn't working she will then associate me with someone who can come and solve

a problem and then that helps create a deeper love. And you're like, oh, my God. And people are like, really, like, I mean, it's that it's a kind of fringe element of TikTok. But more and more people are taking these sort of things and sort of finding ways to like, manufacture these kinds of connections, because they aren't happening like normally either. And you're kind of like, this sounds like sociopathic. But on the other side of it, you can see people sort of like yearning for like, yeah, how do I cultivate a deeper connection? Do I need to sort of gaslight this person into thinking that the toilet never works? And I'm the, the like magical fixer of that. But again, like you see it expressed in

so many ways of that. There is this deeper human thing lacking yeah working in a system from it's always sunny in philadelphia right if you don't know that reference right look it up we've got that clip but a strange like when one of your human interactions most common human interactions is like an uber driver like a person a stranger you can put on quiet mode, like when you're having a conversation with them, then it makes sense to me that that sort of manipulation and viewing other people as a means to an end could bleed into how you view like other parts of your life, right? If everything's just sort of a transactional. And I mean, they talk about this new sort of information and also like just day to day economy as being a way to reduce the friction of that,

that like got in the way of some of our consumer like spending and friction in many cases seems to be human interaction. So I think one thing we're going to say overall, human interaction, good. Find ways to be part of a community, preferably one that needs you and gives you meaning. Miles, next time you go on TikTok, there's a meta narrative in that video you saw because that algorithm floated up to you a video where the actual message was people are crazy out there

and relationships are weird and toxic these days. You would be shocked at what percentage of the feed is some subtle message, some subtle version of out there is dangerous. Guys are sexist.

Women are crazy. Their standards are super high. You'll be accused of sexual harassment if you ever try to talk to a woman in any setting. And there's this meta message of the only safe place is at home looking at a screen.

Yeah. Women on planes sees people who aren't there, which, as you mentioned, is a video. Like, it's a person having a mental health episode that was everywhere for, like, a week, and I never would have seen 30, you know, 20, maybe, like, 10 years ago, you know? There was a time when that wouldn't have even shown up

in, like, the police blotter in your local paper. It was a non-event. Somebody threw a fit on it, but because it was captured on camera, but the message is, it's scary to fly. There's crazy people out there. And any conservative news, like if you look at the comments

on any conservative news outlet, it's like, well, I won't even drive through this city. Like it's just Mad Max. It's like, no, it won't even drive through this city. Like, it's just New York. It's like, yeah, no, it's not. I've I've been there as people walking around and shopping and eating in restaurants. But it's like, no, from from their point of view, it's just cars on fire. Yeah. Smashed windows.

Like if you are a white person, the minorities will just drag you off the street because they all it's Antifa and the Black Lives Matter. drag you off the street because they all, it's Antifa and the Black Lives Matter. And it's like, you've got such a weird view of the world, but it's all, you're only safe at home. Like you have people living in the middle of whatever, Oklahoma or Montana, someplace where they haven't had a violent crime in, you know, like in six months, where they've got cameras all over the outside of their house, and they've got a shotgun under their bed because they're sure that at any moment, a gang of 25 guys is going to come try to take over their house because of something they saw on the news. It's like, well, you know, like in Portland, in the Walgreens, they'll just have like 25 looters show up and steal everything. That could happen to me at any time here in North Dakota.

everything that could happen to me at any time here in north dakota right and you see when you see their fear and how irrational it is from the outside your fear also looks like that to someone else like we all have been put into kind of a little a little box a little fear box well i think like to your point like especially about like i think i think of things like reddit right and the subreddit public freak out there's like a subreddit called public freak out. That's really popular. And it's mostly a lot of people just having some kind of like mental health crisis or something like that, or just some wild thing that's going on. But when you think about like, when you're like a kid, I remember being like, oh, what's

the ocean like? Or I'm trying to like, you know, draw on experiences I have. Most of them are like media referenced memories I have, like of a movie or something I saw on TV that was forming even my own concept of what something was. And now that we have like video, that's like IRL type sort of video from cameras, that sort of, that ups the stakes even more where people begin to associate, well, i did see this one clip of this thing happening in this place now that that is exactly what is going to happen to me and has this effect of just ramping up these fears and like a good like you know an example of this is

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

that everyone wanted to talk about in the last year that just didn't exist. And it's, it's much easier to be like, okay, I know I'm seeing a lot of like overemphasis on these, like visually, really like, you know, uh, provocative images and videos, But that's not the most accurate depiction on what is happening. Yeah. And it's specifically, like, designed that way, specifically based on, like, nothing is based on reality as much as it's based on what is going to feed. Like, nobody was sitting back and being like,

we're going to make up a crime wave. It was that people's, that was the story that made people have the most scared reaction. And therefore, they clicked on it. And therefore, they got more of it. And the media keeps feeding them. All right. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back. We'll talk about climate, which I think plays into this in a bunch of ways. And also just, you know, are there solutions? Like, what can we do? No. Nothing. Nothing. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series,

Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and LA-based Shekinah Church, an alleged cult that has impacted members for over two decades. Jessica and I will delve into the hidden truths between high-control groups and interview dancers, church members, and others whose lives and careers have been impacted, just like mine. Through powerful, in-depth interviews with former members and new, chilling firsthand accounts, the series will illuminate untold and extremely necessary perspectives.

Forgive Me For I Have Followed will be more than an exploration. It's a vital revelation aimed at ensuring these types of abuses never happen again. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions. Like, how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed?

Or, can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes. Each week we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do, like resume specialist Morgan Saner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote. What is it like you miss 100 percent of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep.

Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. And so the latest Mission Impossible dropped last night or two nights ago.

It's getting great reviews. It does indeed seem to be about Ethan Hunt battling a self-aware AI program just like okay well that doesn't really make sense to me or like it's not like really a thing and and that does when people are critical of the movie they seem to say like all the stuff about ai kind of drags a little bit but and visually it is depicted as basically an evil screensaver from 1999 like it's just okay i'm here with like white dots of light 300 million dollar movie by the way but it can so the main claim that the movie makes about this ai and i guess in general, is that the program can also see the future, like very specifically through its predictive technology. And that's like based on what we're seeing in news headlines, like the, you know, deep learning, teaching computers to predict the future is like a headline I feel like I've seen a hundred times.

Spooky artificial intelligence can accurately predict the future, and it's about to be asked more questions. AI can now predict crime before it happens, as we'll get into in a moment. Oh, you mean like that movie Minority Report, also starring Tom Cruise? Tom Cruise? Yeah. Tom Cruise. Yeah, he's he I feel like his sense of reality is probably more blurred by the movies he's in than any other movie star. Well, yeah, because he has an entire organization blurring his reality. Yeah. Before he hits set. And then you're in that magical landscape where he's made himself king. Yeah. I mean, that guy's not living on planet earth he doesn't need to yeah the this movie actually was like written it was supposed to come out like years ago but the production famously shut down due to the coronavirus outbreak which according to reports in february 2020 was putting a real damper on offshore location shoots wow he gave us the tom cruise thing where it was clear that he thought

he was the last barrier between like the end of the world and you know coronavirus just like killing everyone where where he was like shouting at everyone but first of all i just want to say to ai speaking of i'd like to issue a big where were you on that one dipshit today i'm predicting the global pandemic like we couldn't we couldn't see that one coming a lot of people saw it coming people just mere people saw it coming but yeah the the whole predicting the future thing seems to be vastly overstated like there's a so the mit researchers who had created a computer that could supposedly you mean mission impossible technology mission impossible technology mi technology yes yeah they are loosely associated but it was basically like they were predicting they would show the computer a picture and then the computer

would predict like what would happen for the next 1.5 seconds in that picture and like that it was like someone walking across a golf course and they were like yeah that thing's about to keep walking across that golf course they were like holy shit you guys or like one was a wave crashing they were like i think it's gonna keep crashing call me crazy and they were like fucking a thing is brilliant this thing's magical and yeah and then like mit uh mission possible technology also developed an algorithm that could predict how people will greet each other and got a lot of cool headlines for that. It was trained on YouTube videos and reruns of The Office and Desperate Housewives. Amazing.

And it was only right just over 43% of the time. We never greet each other like we do on Desperate Housewives. I wish we did, but like I can't just walk up to my enemy and slap him across the face. It never greet each other like we do on Desperate Housewives. I wish we did, but like, I can't just walk up to my enemy and slap him across the face. It's not reality. I know. But, and that sucks.

And hopefully we'll get to that world. Soon. That's my future that I'm hopeful for. But so one second away from the greeting, they could only predict it 43% of the time. This is what I'm always wondering. Like what, how does that compare to humans? Humans making the same prediction were right 71% of the time.

So much better than this AI that everyone... Did you guys ever see the 60 Minutes where they... Like, the 60 Minutes about AI, I think it came out, like, back in March or April. And, like, I think it came out like back in march or april and like i think it's scott pelly like one of the old journalists on 60 minutes is just like okay like write a speech for me about this and then he seems to be blown away by like the amount of text it produces like he's like that just wrote a whole speech in four seconds like he's it's like he's never seen a computer before but i i do think we're at a weird place where people will you can just be

like magic ai is bad guy in movie and everyone's like yep that makes sense because like we we should be afraid of ai but people don't really know why necessarily we should be and so we just you know like it's the same thing that happens with all our conspiracy theories and you know we should be scared about the pandemic we should be scared about the government's response to the pandemic. But people create vast conspiracy theories just to make sure they're scared about it for nonsensical reasons. It's like we need that cognitive dissonance transference happening. And I feel like we're starting to see that with AI. We're like, AI is going to be magic and tell us everything that could happen to us for the rest of our lives and that's that's not the scary thing

about ai right the scary thing is like skynet and that's the thing like movies have been having ai as the villain for like decades now and i feel like i don't know what my point is going to be, but remember Terminator 1? I do. Remember the Matrix from 1999 over 20 years ago? Like, I just think it's funny that AI, I guess, hasn't evolved very much in movies. Yeah. I don't know. No, I mean, for real. We've been knowing, though, is what I'm saying.

Yeah. And I think it's interesting. Movies, by their very nature, have to heighten and dramatize in order to effectively bring home their message, particularly if we're looking at genre films. has always been like it you know turns into a cop and now it's hunting you or right you know it's it takes away your freedom of choice you know if we look at uh the matrix yes what's the other one the uh minority report yeah minority about minority report like they're saying that's like also might commit a crime and it's set in the. It's like a sci-fi movie. Right. Sorry. Mission Impossible is supposed to be, like, even though they can take masks off that make them look exactly like the other person. Like, you wouldn't see Tom Cruise fighting robots necessarily. No.

You know, that feels like it's a step into this is shit that can actually happen. Yeah. Yeah. And I appreciate the grounding. I think we got there because it's so much more tactile in this moment. concerned about self-checkout for like over a decade a lot of those stores are unionized and have actively been like hey you're taking jobs from like checkout counter people some of whom are elderly and this is like the last place they can work and make money consistently to the writers and actors who may be on strike by the time this comes out. And their fear that not only could AI be used to take their job, but I mean, for performers,

can my face be doing things long, long, long after I'm dead? And what will that look like? I think as we're sort of confronting these things, AI is a really frigging dope tool. I'm so much more concerned about these executives who are like, oh, great. Now I don't have to pay people. Did you guys see the io9 article that was written by AI? They came out a couple days ago. They have the internet in a tangle. Yeah, that's this is like I've ever since I've been, you know, working on the internet,

Like ever since I've been, you know, working on the Internet, creating, trying to get us to like do that just like there was like scale how do we scale and like that's been you know that that intersection of tech and media has always been scary because it's very easy for them to just create 99 million articles using technology now that like yeah pass like a little bit like you have to like read a paragraph to be like wait this this wasn't written by a human was it yeah so the article was like ranking the star wars movies in like chronological order i think yeah and they got the dates wrong on many of sometimes they weren't even listed in chronological order the way they were dated the information in individual movies was incredible it was just error filled like no logical sane editor would have been

like and publish and what's crazy is i don't know his entire union that's actively been like hey we do not want this it does not make sense to ask an ai program that cannot consistently write fact-checked articles to be publishing these and then asking somebody an editor to like go through and essentially rewrite this incorrect work that isn't benefiting anyone because who needs this list we have 27 000 of this very specific well this is dumb uh and it's wild that you know i'm glad the internet roasted the editor-in-chief pretty intently i'm really hoping that brings them back to the table and there can be more discussions about how this company decides to use ai in the

future but it's that kind of stupid shit that's like really draining i think on workers across job titles it's just like what are we what are you trying you just want to force people out of work and that's not a logical thing for you to do to yourself you need people to have money yeah to your point the product sucks like the product the ai is bad as it's's bad at its fucking job like with regards to like the self-checkout thing the the ai like can't stop people from stealing stuff and so the companies are like losing massive amounts of money on theft and then in order to combat that they're just like making claims that like everyone's shoplifting when it's just like no like you just put a like inadequate program like as the thing in charge of like making sure people can't steal stuff or like that they don't want to steal stuff

and it's just not going to it's not gonna work but they made it way too easy because when i was in college we would for sure bring up like a full roast chicken as like some grapes bam we're good stop no uh if there's a person there's no possible way you could get like that used to be somebody's job to scan and bag your stuff there's no possible way to get around that's what i'm saying though like none of these things are thought out they just see a way to potentially preserve money without looking at the long-term costs. And then they still have to hire someone to monitor the self-checkout area. So it's like, well, how much money are you actually saving, Mr. Grocery? Yeah, Big Grocery, which are now owned by just like two companies in all of America. But yeah, so they've also been using it in like predictive crime fighting

technology. But of course, first of all, the data that is being fed is from police data. So it's, you know, using the, it's not predicting crime, it's predicting like where police are spending their time is essentially, which is in low income and, you know, nonwhite neighborhoods. And it's just complete bullshit. There's one great anecdote where Chicago's predictive policing software created by the Illinois Institute of Technology compiled a list of people most likely to be involved in a violent crime. Oh, no. Ha ha. AI, baby. Check out this. Because it was generated by AI,

you can trust this. And then an investigation later found that the software's list of future criminals included every single person arrested or fingerprinted in Chicago since 2013. Whoa. So it was just like copying off of another data set. That's all AI can do is it can gather and redistribute information using keywords that the person using it inputs, which means it's logically going to be flawed because it's not understanding the words.

It's just reorganizing them in a way that it thinks makes sense to you. It's not a thinking machine. Yeah. The technology is not there yet and people are way too eager to jump into it in a way that would almost assuredly collapse society which is why it's insane to me that we're still having to like explain this to people to be like they're like did you see the article from uh was it the hollywood reporter that came out about the executives and how they're choosing to fight the unions yeah by just

waiting them out yeah essentially and the the key part that's resonated with me was like this is a necessary evil yeah was the verbatim words from this quote story so we're pretty sure this is a scare tactic to get sagged to not strike and then saying hey we'll rate out the writers we'll wait out the actors as well but i think what's really happened is they've fired up the base of unions to be like um excuse me unnecessary evil is not destroying the beautiful industry and community that people have tried to create here for literally over a century it's nonsensical. I can't understand the end game other than, I guess, 40 people will be a little bit wealthier. Yeah, that's all it is. Yeah, I don't think it's going to cause society to collapse.

It'll just accelerate the thing that's already happening, which is just like grotesque inequality gets worse. And they're able to hire fewer people to do jobs. And like they're able to hire fewer people to do jobs. And also the other thing that that seems to be happening is like the quality of everything is getting worse. people can no longer afford bread that's when they riot in the streets and take out leaders and get very serious about their actions because bread is everybody's base staple for survival then if we have a fairly large the entertainment community is huge i know some people think this is like a very small or elite space but it's ginormous and most of the people working in it are like working class people. And so if you eliminate everyone who, I mean, because essentially what if when AI gets good enough, when it's actually usable, it will eliminate everybody who is of average talent, right? What you do is you write pretty cute Hallmark stories and you're pretty good at that.

And they're successful enough to get commercials into air frequently. Then great. You can probably buy a house and you can feed your kids and send them to college and you can have a very comfortable life. If AI can do that job, then you're wiping out hundreds of thousands of jobs. And that is really, really bad news for like Los Angeles,

the County. I just, to me, I know it's like a small first step, but to me, like the dominoes seem large and looming. Oh, for sure. And absolutely like probable, like if things are not stopped immediately.

And I really think that that's the takeaway from the WGA strike. And I really do hope SAG joins because it's not just going to stop with the entertainment industry. It's going to continue to sprawl out toward like we are one American workforce. Yeah. And we're all about to be impacted by this shit.

It's crazy. All right. That's going to do it for this week's weekly zeitgeist. Please like and review the show if you like the show means the world to miles. He he needs your validation, folks. I hope you're having a great weekend and I will talk to you Monday. Bye. Thank you. 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 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.