The Daily Zeitgeist - Weekly Zeitgeist 396 (8/25/25-8/29/25)

Episode Date: August 31, 2025

The weekly round-up of the best moments from DZ's season 403 (8/18/25-8/22/25)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, it's Daniel Fischel. Rider Strong. And Wilfredel from PodMeets World. We are back in Las Vegas and giving the people what they want, a full week of Y2K content. Tell me why. Well, for the Backstreet Boys residency, it's fear, of course. We joke and say this is our second marriage, but it takes a lot of communication.

Plus, it's carrot top, baby. And finally, Ashley Simpson-Ross joins us to talk about her upcoming sold-out Vegas residency. Listen to PodMeets World on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of the unpurposed podcast, and today I'm joined by one of the greatest athletes. of all time Novak Djokovic. He's won 14 grand slams in a glittering career. Novak Djokovic. When you reach your 30, you start counting your days to your retirement.

I'm 38 this year. How long can I push my own limits? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hello, the internet, and welcome to this episode of the weekly zeitgeist. These are some of our favorite segments from this week, all edited together into one nonstop, infotainment, laugh stravaganza. So without further ado, here is the weekly zeitgeist. Mort, we are thrilled to be joined in our third and fourth seats by two of the creators behind my very favorite podcast.

One of the best podcasts, podcasts is doing it anywhere on a fucking heater right now, you guys, with the fucking Cohn brothers. Please welcome from Blank Check. It's producer Ben Hosley and Griffin Newbe! Thank you for the very kind of words.

Oh, you've been unbelievably supportive of us over the years. In many ways. It's been hard. I'm just, I'm a huge cast out of society. I came to you late, and it is absolutely, love it. I love rediscovering. Discovering, like, I hadn't really watched a lot of Miyazaki before I

heard you guys a series on Miyazaki. It's been so cool to, like, have the knowledge that comes from your podcast and, like, introduce my kids to Miyazaki, like, when they're at the, you know, age, uh, ponio is my seven-year-old's favorite movie. So that's been, it's just been a very cool, uh, thing. And, and I love movies. And it's, it's a total blast. You guys are, uh, you had Seth Rogan on the Big Lobosky episode. That episode just dropped yesterday. Yesterday. Zach Crager on the Fargo episode,

the week that weapons was destroying the box office. It made all the money. They got every dollar. There's no money left. Nope. Yeah, it's sad kind of. But we're all happy for it also. I wouldn't have gone to a nicer guy.

Yeah. Yeah, he seems super nice. I had forgotten that he came from the wayest kids you know. People keep asking us because we have had quite a astounding run of guests in short order, and they're like, oh, you guys are really leveling up. What changed? And we're like, literally, it's just we're doing the Coen Brothers. Right. Yeah, yeah. And that a lot of these people are folks that we've been like messaging with for a couple years. We found at some point listened to the podcast. And they're like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't do that many podcasts. Or I don't know if I should talk about someone else's work. Right. Or I, you know, I'm waiting for a film that's really one of my favorites. And we like, we like, we. We do a March Madness thing every year, where once a year we let our listeners vote on which director we're going to cover next. And we do a whole career. We go through every film, one episode at a time. And they voted for Cohen Brothers and their infinite wisdom this year.

And like suddenly five of our dream guests were like, oh, sure. Yeah. It just opened all the doors. Yeah. I mean, at a time where it's like can be a little bit challenging to be real proud of America. It's like, you know, the Cohn brothers make us feel good about living in a big part. They're also in a weird state right now where, like, Ethan just released a movie that he directed with his wife. Right.

And Joel is about to start directing a new film. I think that he's, that Francis is starring in, or at least producing. Yeah. So they're in this sabbatical of working separately of both becoming a wife guys. Right. Which has made their core filmography of the, like, 21 movies they made together. Right. I think feel like a little bit more of a totemic fixed work.

We're all hoping they will eventually make things together again. Yeah. But I think it puts them in an interesting place to talk about all those films. Your reader or your listeners nailed it in terms of the timing of this is like so perfect. And I, to your point, getting back to Fargo and Big Lobowski these past two weeks has just been nice. Like those are so foundational than I realize. Like obviously they're movies I've seen a hundred times. But like just rewatching them, I'm like, oh, I think about this line.

five times a day. Like, I think about, like, this is, like, my brain is made out of these two movies, like, in a way that I hadn't fully appreciated. It was, it was crazy, like, I'm learning in real time trying to remind myself, you can't say, I, to say Seth and not Rogan, because if you talk about podcasting with Rogan, people jump to a different assumption. Yeah, yeah. Even though saying Seth feels overly from all year, but he was talking about how many things in his career and all the movies he's gotten to make are pulled directly from Lubowski. Super open about that. Not even in homage ways, but like that's so effective. I want something like this and using that and talking to different departments or directors. Showing a scene to the person

who's working on the scene with and being like this is what we're doing. And he had like 20 examples of that. And then it also felt like there were 20 examples he in real time realized. Yeah. Oh, I didn't even figure out that. Right. Yeah. The Super Bad Trifecta is kind of similar to the Donnie Waltz. Right. McLevin trifecta. You know that like. Yeah, man. I saw. I I saw Big Lobowski nine times in the theater. That's wild. Yeah, because it flopped. Yeah, I know.

And me, we were at, like my sister, I had seen Blood Simple, my sister, whatever, she was cool. She showed me these, like, cool indie films, you know? And then just a sad little high school nerd and my friend Paul went and we're like, are we in Saners? It's the greatest movie of all time. Like, what? We thought we were, yeah, so I'm very proud of being ahead of the curve.

That's a real bragging right thing. Because people were not with it. But it was, it's so beautiful. beautiful and hilarious. Right. Yeah. Yeah. They weren't on to. I want to talk about that because it definitely is a movie that has like pervaded the culture in a way that's crazy even though it was like a box office flop. So I want to talk about the concept that you guys talk about about like whether a movie exists or not. What is something from your search history that's revealing about who you are? Well, to keep talking about the Star Wars prequels, because I need to just plug this door as much as possible. But I did search for this, and I'll tell you why. I searched for Palpatine's lightsaber color because I have been brainstorming a list of possible, like, drinks, beverages for the venues that we're performing at to, like, kind of create a special drinks menu for our show. and so I was like, oh, a Palpatini, and it should be red because of Palpatine's lightsaber color being red. And then here, let me just pull up the list of other drinks I've crafted, you know, listeners and Jack and Mort.

You're welcome to riff on this as well. Let's see. The Quigong gin and tonic. I mean, unbeatable. Obvious. That's beautiful. A Darth vodka and cranberry or any vodka-based drink? Dark vodka actually means Dark father.

So that actually works pretty well. Does it really? No, Darth Vader. That's an like apocryphal thing. People were like, and actually everybody would have known that his name, that he was actually Luke's father if you knew the German translated to Dark Father. And then you actually look it up and it like doesn't mean shit. It doesn't mean it at all. It doesn't translate.

It's just like a fun thing. I think that's a joke from like pitch perfect where Anna Kendrick is like, Vader means father in German. So obviously. Yeah. But the important thing here also is that the vodka that should be used should be Anakin Sky Walker vodka. Now we're having some fun.

Now we're having fun. And then of course there's also, and then this is where things get a little bad. Obi-1 can-no beer. And I'm sorry, did you say this is where things get brilliant? Yeah, sorry, sorry, I misspoke. And then finally, Mace, wine-dew. Wine-dew sounds like it's, I'm going to get some Mountain Dew in there, do I? Is it a mixture of wine and Mountain Dew?

Wine plus a Cabernet Sauvignon plus Mountain Dew. Actually, that sounds kind of good. I'm in. I have 17 years sober. I will relapse on that if you make it. Please. Yeah, sorry, but. It'll be worth it.

Is it relapsing if you just inject it directly into my veins, but it doesn't, like, I don't have to drink it. It just goes right into my veins. That's probably fine, right? Yeah. Yeah, injectables is fine. Those are great. And do you think that you're going to get cooperation from the venues?

I hope so. I emailed all of them and said, like, here's my brilliant menu, do with it what you will. And if they don't do it, it, that's their loss. They're losing out on millions of dollars that they would have generated at our show. Yeah, untold millions. A part of my ignorance, but I did have to look up Palpatine. I can't believe his name's not Jiz. He looks not great. Is he all right? He's not doing it. He doesn't look like doing great. He seems bad. All the people, all the force people seem bad. Like you would think that all the power

they're like this is the best feeling it feels so good and they're just like dying like the whole time they just look like absolute shit which does seem to also be what happens to people who just embrace conservative politics like they look like shit

but they also live forever they also have force lightning powers they have finger a lightning that comes out of their fingers yeah they should call whatever disease Van and Steve Bannon has the palpatine. Yeah, he's got some, he's palpeteen and big time. Yeah, where your skin melts and you never die.

The guy's been drinking a couple of palpettini's by the look at his nose. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I know what you're saying. What is something from your search history that's revealing about who you are? Sperm whale phonetic alphabet. Uh-huh. Ooh. I like out.

You just, you stopped listening. You're listening, but you stopped after sperm. based on your right based on the noise you made you creep that was for whale oh okay

yeah yeah yeah so do you guys have pets do you like animals or are you monsters or what's going on like you're coming at us like you're introducing

the concept of animals to us have you guys I got a crazy pitch yeah you can own an animal if you've liked you got to feed it

that sucks yeah i love uh whales specifically and i'm becoming more interested in animals and what's going on there what's up with them yeah as i as i get older okay all right guys this is the thing working on a couple of recent recent episodes about the question of can people talk with animals. You know, we know humans are animals that are just kind of stuck up, right? But instead of talking at or two, your pooch, your doggo, your furred, feathered, or scaly friend, can you speak with them? Can there be an equal peer-to-peer conversation or discourse? This turns out to be pretty crazy because a lot of the research is

under fire, right? Like Coco the gorilla is a famous example or Alex the African gray parrot who... Yeah, I thought we were like having conversations about Cocoa with Cocoa the Grilla. Yeah. Right. Like Cocoa the Gras is like a guest on this podcast.

Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Because you guys bumped to Robin Williams, I think, and Mr. Rogers. That is the famous one, right? Yeah. Is Robin Williams? COVID-the-Garilla finding out Robin Williams died? Yeah, that's apparently a bit of a confirmation bias on the behalf of the very well-intentioned scientists. No, honestly.

However, I'm waving my hand. Like, I can just sort of say, these are not the droids you're looking for, or whatever. What we did find was that in recent, quite recent years, Researchers have leveraged large language models, algorithms, AI, per Will Smith, to analyze the communication of different types of cetaceans, specifically sperm whales, and it turns out that they might have a language. So my search history is fucking rocked and ruined because I had to put the word sperm into all these research things.

And our buddy somewhere at the NSA is like, okay, sperm, whale. Sure, man. All right. But whales might be able, might have a language that humans can translate and maybe talk with them. Yeah.

Sperm whales must be even harder to study because they live so deep in the ocean, right? Like, it must be hard to listen to them. I'm saying that as if I'm concerned. I'm like, God, this is going to be so much work going into this. Well, they got to come up sometime. That's what I always say. I'm a whaler.

I should say that. I flinch whales. And so I just sit there at the surface with a harpoon saying they got to go out sometime, brother. Melville of podcast. Yeah, yeah. They call you. That's so. That's wild that the, the, so when the apes were doing sign language,

Mm-hmm. Was it like the, like, sign language interpreters who will go behind a speech and, like, actually not know sign language and just be doing, like, and we just assume they're actually doing it when, just because we don't speak sign language? What was happening? Those folks are on the forefront of comedy. Yes. Right. Koffman could never. Right.

Exactly. Yeah. Secondly, you are absolutely correct. The controversy goes into the concept of interpretation, right? Like Clever Hans, the world's most famous math horse. Right. The math horse I've heard is purely just like they were looking at their owner or like the human that they knew and like interpreting their face as like, okay, that's what they want me to say.

Klop, plop, clop, clop. Cleverhons. Cleverhons is. I had never heard of this. It's all my favorite things. Clever Hans, the math horse is like a drug. Like, you just gave me a hallucinogenic drug

by saying those words. Sorry. Clever Hans, the math horse. All right. I got a tap out of this one. No, you got it. It's too much for me. That would be a great nickname that like,

for a boxer. Yes. The Clever Hans. The Meyer and Mike. Clever Hans the math horse. It's Mike Tyson. It can be clever Hans or math horse. You can't be so greedy that you have clever Hans with a math horse.

I mean, you would have to be very good at boxing to support that moniker. The kind of sting, the man of iron, clever Hans, the math horse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This boxer keeps kicking us with his hind legs. Guys, do you think he knows that he's boxing or is he just looking at his trainer for Q's? so yeah the controversy as we learn with cocoa in particular and with other primate experiments was that people thought she could understand something like 2,000 spoken words in English and communicate them through some version of sign language that I'm making up here

and the idea then became that she was able to connect words to make concepts which is a very human type of communication. So she might know the word for trash, and then the word for cat, and then you'd show her a raccoon, and she would say, oh, trash cat. And people are like, you're fucking amazing. That's so smart. She's basically a poet. That's actually what we should call raccoons.

Well, that's the search history. It's ruined sperm alphabet. Yeah. It's over for me, you guys. Sperm alphabet. that's done that yeah i've heard i've read like studies okay i listen to them on a podcast about like prairie voles being or prairie dogs one of the prairie animals having pretty complex or like easy to decode languages and like that they were able to like figure out that one of them was like for color so like somebody

they'd be like okay yellow guy coming and red guy coming and it's all chirps does yeah Little chirps, but they were able to record enough of them and get a sense of, like, they had words for, like, attack from above and, you know, red shirt guy, attack from red shirt guy. From red shirt guy, attack from a shirt guy. Yeah. The scientists maybe should have stopped attacking them, I feel. Yeah, maybe that would have been. Not good science.

What is something you think is overrated, Kyle? Those, I can cuss, right? Oh, hell yes. Those fucking Jubilee videos. Oh, not that one, Kyle. I hate the Jubilee videos so much. Did you see? I hate them.

I hate them. I can't tell when they're satire or not. I don't think they're helpful. Maybe I'm wrong and too closed off and too like pessimistic about it. But ultimately I'm just like who's the who's, it's just to me it's like a musical chairs for a bigot. Who's the fastest bigot? Not even fastest, quickest. And then they come in and they're, every one of them is like, hey, will you.

change your mind? And that person goes, no. And then they're like, all right, we should talk over each other for a minute. Right. Which is pretty fun. Have you seen Yasser Lester's thing that he photoshopped him in the surrounded background? And he was like one light-skinned N-word versus a bunch of white conservatives, but they don't know I got a gun on me. See, I would watch that. I get so, I really, and it's something that I'm not happy to admit I find unhelpful because maybe it is just me closing myself off and it feels like a very sort of like I don't know I feel very pessimistic to be like I find these wildly unhelpful and I'm sure I'm very open to being incorrect about it but God I have never seen a clip of them and thought this helped

anyone at all except everyone could sit at home and be like uh-huh yeah he told him both sides are getting like are being like yeah exactly yeah it's another watch where everyone feels right I think like I watch a lot of the political commentators online and I think they help me with talking points so in terms of understanding talking points or history then I'm like okay like I didn't

know about that or like this other argument or whatever but I also think that the people involved are like very happy to debate and I'm like unhappy to debate in that I think we shouldn't have to fucking debate human rights you know what I mean so I think

that that's the the part where I'm like, okay, this is a bit self-indulgent in that, yeah, like, maybe it'll help more people, like, understand, like, the history of the talking points, like the politics of it all, but also, like, we're not super changing any minds on there, and it does give these fascists a platform. Like, now I know some of the faces of these fascists as a whole circle of them, but like, people just admitting to being fascist. And I find it to be, like you were saying, the, what we have normalized, I hate saying stuff like normalize. I hate, you know what I mean? You feel.

crazy using what we have allowed to be the normal debate is so far outside of what is like reasonable or or or anything like lincoln hitler debates you're not debating like an allocation of taxes in a community versus near a city or something where you're like i could you know we're we're allowing equal footing to such there is a objectively correct and incorrect answer that we're allowing people to talk about like there isn't and it involves people being alive And then someone's monetizing it, of course. But it's just, I, I am, maybe I just want to get booked on one. I don't know.

I'm tired. What's overrated? This YouTube show that won't book me. They reached out on the clip of this and they're like, Kyle's been, we had to get a restraining order against Kyle. We watched it. A digital restraining order. We were like, wow, we were really unsure of which side Kyle was on this whole time.

Kyle did the worm He said Please let me I don't know It's one of the things I felt a little bit guilty About feeling is overrated If that makes sense

But I'm just sort of like It makes me think we are It doesn't feel healthy It doesn't feel healthy And it feels like you make You think something is equal If you are giving it a platform like that Yeah

Like it feels like it comes from the same place As people being like We don't need moderators on Reddit because, like, this is free speech. And then you just, like, get shouted down by, like, 30 fascists.

And it's, it does, I think it helps my visual imagination for, like, what fascists can look like. Yes, I was going to say that. Okay. They do have glasses like that. I'm like, it's your local NB barista. Yes, exactly.

It certainly is, that has been a jarring discovery is, Unmute, not knowing who would believe what has been a tough thing to come to. Right. Where it used to be, you know, on mute, I know who's got a teaky torch. Right. Exactly. They all kind of, all those teaky torch guys looked like, I would expect people carrying teaky torches to look like. And now they look like.

A lion? Yeah. Exactly. They wouldn't appropriate, right? They look like the stars of sitcoms that had like special, we go to Hawaii episodes. from like the 1950s, you know, some dockers. When a producer wanted to go on vacation, they're like, we're actually having a nice story arc here.

But yeah, they hipsters can be fascists too. Frequently they are, according to Jubilee videos. That's what I've learned. I also can't tell, like, I understand what you mean by like not normalizing it or like wanting people to have shame, but also like as a brown person, like I would rather know what people actually believe in their hearts.

And I've had interpersonal experiences where I, where somebody's fully switched up on me. And I'm like, okay, so that's in my neighborhood. That's good. Like, I would rather fucking know, you know. Yeah, yeah. Sure. Do you like hate watch them? I have really, really tried to cut out of my life doing that with things.

But it's sometimes they really, you know, a certain back and, like the one that was just the guy going, yeah, I'm a fascist. Yeah, I'm a white nationalist. You can't avoid that. And so I saw a lot, yes, I saw a lot of clip from him. clips from his of the various people, but especially that one guy. Like telling him to go leave, like. Yeah. Yeah.

You just sort of like, I don't know, maybe I just. But I mean, he kind of has a similar view because he was saying like when one of them was like, yeah, I'm a fashion. He's like, stopped. He's like, I don't have conversations with fascists. Oh, you are a fashion. He just like sat there and I appreciate it. I have so, I commend the people who can sit there and do that. And I just, I think rationing.

Oh, ultimately. I feel guilt about the amount of consumption you do and what you cut out and what you're aware of and things like that all the time. And then I'm also trying to like take care of myself in a physical and manner. And you're just like, it's crazy to small picture and big picture yourself through all of this. It's very difficult thing to balance. Yeah. I did like, and this is probably a bad thing that this is what gave me like hope was that the guy who he was like, oh, I don't debate with fascists. there you a fascist and he was like, yeah, you know, I'm a fascist.

And like, sort of like ugly laughing. They are all clowns. Yeah, he got fired from his job. And like, I was like, oh, so there's like still some institutional pushback on fashion. But then he started a go fund me where he raised like a fuck ton of money for being a fascist. That's true. Which is like, that isn't, that's the thing where I'm like, this is encouraging people to like try to become like influencers and like make politics content. And that's, that's the part that I'm like, if you.

don't fucking know or you're a bad person, just stay out. There is something. It seems like that is a new, it's like a quick, quicker than going on a dating reality show or The Bachelor or something is to go and go viral in a Jubilee moment and launch yourself into something. That's right. I do want to, like, see what the process is for, like, putting those rooms together. Like, do how, where are they going?

Like, is it where, what pool are they fishing from, you know? They're going to these, they're going to these cities that, uh, fascists and Republicans love to live in that they say they hate. they'll go somewhere where they're also like they're also influencers before like a lot of them are like debaters the other people who sit yeah a lot of them have either been like worked for jubilee like some of the people are like picked by jubilee multiple times some of them are like podcast hosts or something like some of them are already like they'll take um damn kyle there might be a chance yeah he worked up he was like one guy keeps trying to do movie puns he keeps saying the wolf of Wally Street in the Jubilee video about border control I do appreciate all it is just it's such an odd feeling for me

and I don't know what it is about them that feels bad and weird and it feels terrible yeah you do but there is something to like it's just like jarring you just never thought you would see people be like yeah dude I'm a fascist You never think you'd see someone say that.

But then it's like, it's so normal now, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, I'm like honestly, I think the moment of political shock I had was the 2016 election. And like I had an experience just like that S&L moment where like Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle were like, yeah, this is what America is. And all the white people were like, what? Because I was with like my white friends and we were all freaked out. And then I like later in the night I was like at a mic where it was like a lot of black people and they were like laughing. And they were like, yeah, this is just normal for America.

So like since then I haven't. been shocked. Yeah. I haven't been shocked at anything, honestly, since then. Shock is hard to have. Yeah. You just, it's weird that I let myself continually have disappointment. Yeah. I think that's beautiful, though. Let's stay disappointed. Yeah.

It proves that there's like some hope inside. Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick break. We'll come back. We've got to get to the big story. Travis and Taylor are married. We'll be right back. Jeez. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop.

Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, it's Danielle Fischel. Rider Strong. And Will Ferdell from PodMeets World. And we're bringing you Viva Las Content. That's right. We are back in Las Vegas, the city of Sin, and giving the people what they want.

A full week of Y2K content. Wait, we're back in Vegas? Tell me why. Well, for the Backstreet Boys residency, sphere, of course. We sat down with Kevin Richardson and A.J. McLean just minutes before they took the stage, and our very own Wilfredel basically became the newest member of the band. Boy band, please. Plus, the man who has the longest running comedy show on the strip joins us and gets his props.

It's carrot top, baby. And finally, we all L-O-V-E-Hur. Ashley Simpson-Ross joins us to talk about her upcoming sold-out Vegas residency. It's a full week of nostalgic interview. you don't want to miss. Listen to PodMeets World on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of the on-purpose podcast, and today I'm joined by one of the greatest athletes

of all-time Novak Djokovic. The world's number one male tennis player. He's won 14 grand slams in a glittering career. Novak Djokovic! You've been through so many injuries, losses. Oh, he's got himself. What has? Novak Djokovovovic.

What goes through your mind when you lose? I just want to be left alone. What has it taken to become Novak Djokovic? It's a consistent practice. It's prayer work, mindfulness, meditation, conscious breathing. It requires more responsibility from you on a daily basis to prepare yourself for the biggest battle. When you reach your 30, you start counting your days to your retirement.

I'm 38 this year. How far can I go? How long can I push my own limits? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The U.S. Open is here. And on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain, I'm breaking down the players from rising stars to legends chasing history. The predictions will we see a first time winner and the pressure. Billy Jean King says pressure is a privilege, you know. Plus, the stories and events off the court and, of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open.

The U.S.S. Open has gotten to be a very fancy, wonderfully experiential sporting event. I mean, listen, the whole aim is to be accessible and inclusive for all tennis fans, whether you play tennis or not. Tennis is full of compelling stories of late. Have you heard about icon Venus Williams' recent wild card bids or the young Canadian, Victoria Mboko, making a name for herself? How about Naomi Osaka getting back to form? To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain. I heart women's sports production in partnership with deep blue sports and entertainment on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. And we're back. We're back. That still goes. Yeah, it does. Start a Zoom call with a friend or maybe a new acquaintance. Or a boss. Yeah.

It still works. The great podcaster, Matt Apodaca, who we now work with, has really shown me the, he's I'm making it sound like he was the first person to do. I think I started doing it, but he approved. And that's, uh, I don't want to dismarch his good name. That guy's name sounds like a spell. It is. It is a spell, actually.

Yeah. Yeah, he is a, you're right. It's a Harry Potter. I don't know Harry Potter well enough to make a reference. So I just said, it's a Harry Potter. Maybe shut up. Ben, maybe shut your mouth. Maybe shut your muggle mouth.

You're walking in waters. You don't swim well enough to trade or something. Ben, what's something you think is underrated? For right now, mustaches, we scooped ourselves. a bit in the beginning, but we spent some time pissing off our producer off air because I have a mustache that my girlfriend is clowning me so hard about. I did the grown thing, you know, I shaved and went through, as you said, Jack, the permutations. And I got, oh, I got, I got told that I got roasted hard. So I got told I looked, I looked so. I got so.

Belgian that I might have to look Belgium. I have specific opinions about chocolate, French fries, and King Leopold. Yeah. And worst of all. Yeah. And it's kind of a wide mustache. It does, you could be wearing a old-timey one-piece bathing costume in that mustache, I feel like, and lifting like a barbell that is, has round weights on the ed end of it yeah or triangle weight you know what i mean like it's that's that's kind of what i'm picturing it does it does like kind of change your vibe in a fun way i do like it not i like i like non-mustache bent also you know oh that's very kind you know next time i'll

go whatever the old old testament thing is where it's the beard without the mustache and it's just like the what's that what's that called the chin strap thing yeah yeah chin strap neck beard old chin strap neck beard i feel like there's a specific amish or mormon name for it yeah that sounds fancier you've come to the right place if you want the omish or mormon name for the brigham yeah yeah i go to spurnside general ambrose burnside yeah it does feel it feels civil warian yeah that one what is something ben do you think is overrated laboo boo boo boo are you guys familiar with this lebobooboo They're making the greatest libubu.

Yeah, we're familiar as people who have a podcast about the zeitgeist. Yeah. We've been aware of this one. So I was overseas recently, and the liboo boo-boo-boo thing was, again, like, you know, let's be honest, with this mustache, I look at the guy, I look like the guy who is a cop at the protest. trying to be cool, you know, like, hey, guys, you'll be, you'll be really kickass if we all exchange names, addresses, and, you know, like places we go routinely. Yeah, yeah. And so with that, he knows all the tricks.

So he's, he's, he's real plugged in. I am very plugged out. I learned about Labubu like anybody else who was uncool by getting yelled at about it by people cooler than me and I realized there is this global conspiracy of people

carrying around Labuboos and they're like fucking Freemasons man they just nodded each other they have it hang in from like their bags or their backpacks and then and I don't know if they have a secret handshake. Like, I don't know how deep this goes. But I do think it's overrated. And you said the pronunciation of it in particular? Oh, no. I added pronunciation as overrated because you said you

one time pronounced on we. Oh, oh. Oh, got, got to got it. So that's another thing I think is overrated. Pronunciation is fine. Yeah. Pronunciation pronunciation in general, overrated. Yeah. By the way, we have learned from Super producer, Catherine, that the beard and no mustache is called the whaler, appropriately enough. The whaler? Okay, Melville. Melville.

So I guess I got to see what that looks like. I think that was a type of facial hair that I experimented with at a young. No, I can't think of you. Really? Oh, big time. My God. Big time. My.

Yeah. Big time. It was like pre when I could grow a full beard. So it was just like shape. Shaggy Whiskers. Shaggy Whispers is what I want to say. Shaggy Whispers versus the math horse. Okay. Shaggy Whispers is my slash fiction about the Scooby-Doo universe. Yeah, yeah.

A tell-all book, Shaggy Whispers. That's right. All right. Let's, should we get into the old, well, that's not good update of the day? We might as well. Well, that's not good. I want to hear about that, yeah. So what you want to hear from a doctor and also, you know, the opening line of a news story written by a Canadian about your country. Well, that's not good. Someone with perspective, right?

Yes. So just weeks after being confirmed, CDC head, Susan Menares has been fired. She was initially asked to resign, but refused and was fired by HHS, which I guess she was like, I can't really be. fired by them, I would need to be fired by the president. And he was like, okay, I don't know if you remember who the president is. It's kind of my thing. It's my favorite thing. Now, yeah, love you boo-bye. Bye-bye. So she's fired because Susan Menares is not aligned with the president's agenda of making America healthy again. And this was because she wouldn't, quote, rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations that, quote, flew in the face of science, which is bad.

Like, we had a sense. It might be coming. It's just going in a real worst case scenario direction with RFK Jr. As the head of, we had a sense, maybe. I don't know, putting this, putting a guy who was a vaccine skeptic, kind of famously, that was what he was famous for, putting him in charge of health care for the entire country, that that could go badly.

And it seems like things are going. very badly, several other CDC senior officials have resigned as a result. I'm somewhere between can't these fucking idiots do a single thing right and can't these fucking idiots do a single thing that isn't exactly the wrongest thing you could possibly do at that moment, you know? Like it's like, I'm not even asking that they do it right. It's like just that they not be fucking like just exactly wrong seeking missiles. That's the issue.

right how at what threshold past what threshold does incompetence become uh intentional malevolence right like how randomly can one random that's that's my reaction to this this is so random this is oh my god you guys this is this is giving random we are winning the lottery of bad choices I was in college a lot of the girls I do would like to refer to things as random and I think that is the funniest way to possibly refer to this whole

Oh my God, this presidency is so random Randy Randosa one of them would say and that person is a gene whoever came up with Randy Randosa is a genius. Is a genie. He's a genie.

Is a gin. Yeah. Is a gin. But yeah, I, I don't know. We also learned this week that they're scaling back food safety monitors. Finally. For food-borne disease. And you've been pushing for this for a while, Ben.

Yeah. I talk on that. Yeah. Go ahead and talk on that. You upton, Sinclair. Yeah. You know how it is. You walk through a grocery store.

Why shouldn't it be a casino? You know what I mean? I'm in aisle 12. I'm in aisle 11. We got some canned stuff. Is it beans? Let's roll the goddamn dice. Yeah.

These splash guards are fucking constricting. I want the food sitting out. I want nothing to stop my spit, my clean American spit from getting on this food that I don't know how long it's been out for. It's none of my fucking business. If we needed to guard the food, let's put the National Guard there. Let's put the National Guard in here. This clear plastic. No more Sneeze Guard, yes, more National Guard.

Yes, more National Guard. The only protection against the salad with a bad cough on it is a National Guard member. It's a good salad with a good cough on it. Justin, please fix that in post. Right. Yeah, Justin, that's easily fixable, right? Hey, Justin, in post, could you make me sound smart and sane? Thanks very much.

Thank you. Because you can sound less like I'm on the verge of just buckling under the pressure of our collapsing society. Thanks, Justin. Thanks, Justin. Thanks, Justin. CDC is in Atlanta. So this is a matter of local import, right? With, I would argue, of course, national, but indeed global consequences, right?

They're replacing it with a, uh, bass pro shop yeah another one I just feel like they could like redesign the CDC to like have more

of a brass bass pro shop vibe to Charles Barkley lives there now yeah yeah when you guys

have him on the show he'll be like fun fact about me my house used to be do you guys remember the Center for Disease Control

and Prevention remember back then so just a little bit more on the food the food stuff because this is one of those things that is, like, fairly invisible.

Like, a lot of the jobs that are being taken away and, like, you know, the government spending that's being cut are these things that are, like, just don't get any attention. And, like, Donald Trump only cares about things that get ratings. And so these are the invisible, you know, scaffolding behind the scenes that, like, saves people's lives. And it just under a Trump administration where, you know, as we talked about in the run up to the election,

Like, the scary thing about this second administration, the first administration, he, like, you remember that first meeting with Obama where he was like, what the fuck just happened? And he seemed scared. And he was like, I'm going to let the professionals handle this one. Like, I kind of did this as a joke. And it took him a while to, like, ramp up his indignation about not being able to, like, you know, do whatever he wanted. And now he is doing whatever he wants. And it's he's not. meant to leash a complicated government that is saving many people's lives in very

boring ways. He's just like, he doesn't have the attention span for it. So, you know, the Dr. J. Glenn Morris, whose name I don't know, never wanted to know, the director of Emerging Pathogen Institute at the University of Florida is, you know, making sense of this and has said that he helped create FoodNet in 1995. And we've been benefited. fitting from it unknowingly for the past, however many years it's been since 1995. I've got to think at least 15, 15, does that seem right? Anyways, he said, essentially CDC is backing off one of their best surveillance systems. And this article that is in, I think it's like on CBS.com, but it just keeps adding,

they're like, which is bad because in April, Reuters reported that the Food and Drug Administration was suspending a quality control program for testing dairy products. A week before that, Reuters reported that the Trump administration was suspending a quality control program for its food testing laboratories as a result of staff cuts. That news came two weeks after, and it just keeps going with the Department of Health and Human Services announced wide-ranging cutbacks at federal health agencies, including scientists who tested food and drugs for contamination of or deadly bacteria. That news came two weeks after the Times reported the FDA delayed. By nearly three years, implementation of a requirement, and this is kind of a harsh requirement, like, this is anti-business, all right? When I explain it, you'll understand why they had to cut this. A requirement that food companies and grocers rapidly trace contaminated food through the supply chain and pull it off the shelves.

Okay, guys, let's not go crazy here. Wow, all right, or well, yeah. The day before that, the Times published, the newspaper ran a related article that noted. The FDA freezes on government credit card spending. They were just like they froze the FDA's credit cards that they used to like fund their research. They froze that so they could no longer, it impeded staff members from buying food to perform routine tests for deadly bacteria. So like they. Who were they my wife, freezing credit cards?

I mean, what the hell? Right. Let me spend. That's my Draft King's credit card, babe. Yeah. Did you not think about the cash back? The list keeps going. The Times also reported that the administration has slowed or stopped some

testing of grocery items for hazardous bacteria monitoring. Monitoring of shellfish. So far, the specific ones that they've stopped monitoring are dairy and shellfish. You got to keep an eye on them. Those are the two. Those are two of the ones that I want somebody keep an eye on, I feel like. Yeah. Also, just to be clear, we are doing Gallo's humor. There is no whistle like a graveyard whistle. So I think it's safe to say that we are fans of this kind of infrastructure. It's kind of like how if you're human, you don't notice that your heart is beating all the time, right? Until it's not. And that's when you run into a problem. This kind of stuff is. man you just

you just I'm thinking about it don't get in your head about it don't get in your head about it what's happening oh bad I don't like it I don't like it

for any time if you want to know what it was like to smoke weed with me and the answers we do and we just I think it's going too fast I think it's going too fast

I see everything I can't take a deep enough breath am I breathing here do my hands are they are they are they are they are they

are my hands but this is this is pretty pretty concerning and I don't I obviously I don't think any of us want to feel

like a baton death march or whatever but the the stuff that is getting cut I think really speaks to you guys' idea about incompetence

versus malevolence Like, how can you be that specifically bad at innocuous things that often? I think yesterday we were talking about this thing that Trump's doing with the environmental policy where he's like keeps saying, well, windmills like don't work when the wind stops blowing and the, you know, you can't have energy produced by windmill. And like really, and like the windmills are killing whales. And like, these things that seem really dumb and, like, have no scientific backing. But they come from a bunch of research, like millions of dollars of research being done by the smartest people, like, the smartest Ivy League graduates all come out.

And the jobs that pay the most are, like, going to work for oil companies and doing research on, like, how to counter program, like, messaging about climate change. How to redact. Right. How to redact research. I'm a professional redactor. I make $900,000 a year. So, like, there's all this energy and money being put into whatever is going to make the most money. In that case, like, getting rid of any environmental policies that stand in the way of oil companies making as much money as they possibly can.

And I think with shit like this, where, like, these policies get in the way of food. companies being able to make as much money as they want to, and they're, like, annoying to food companies to have to, like, pay attention to this shit. So all this stuff that seems like malevolence is just them doing the, you know, taking away of any policies that get in the way of companies, you know, get in the way of money, like flowing as quickly and, you know, frictionlessly as possible to the biggest corporations. Like, I think that's where all of this is coming from. regulatory capture. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Another scary thing, too, like getting back to, is it Minarez? Is that how you pronounce, Susan's? Yeah, that's what I'm going. I heard a newscaster say it that way, and that's where we're going with. That's what we're, that's what, that's what Wolf said. So that's, that's the same who you can't stop watching, but my favorite. That's the scariest thing is that she is someone who's fucked up enough for Trump to be okay to a point to that position to begin with.

and this person won't even this is a bridge too far yes what they're asking her to do a trump appointee she's like well that's gonna like be so bad right like obviously i can't do that and they're like well then you're fired this is not a holdover from like the jimmy carter administration no right this is this is fresh this is a fresh hire i take a d plus at this point like you said like like a heat seeking missile for like being wrong the exact wrong move It's not even like we're asking for an A plus, you know, because that's impossible. It's like anything but an F minus. Like, if we can get a D plus, a C minus is a going to happen.

Yeah, but now. Well, I think we're inside a system that has been fucked by unregulated capitalism for decades and decades. And so anything that is just worsening that is going to seem like it's exactly the wrong thing because it is. It's exactly the worst possible thing that could happen to. the country at this point, but because our options are either the existing market-driven thing that everybody, we now have like three decades where people are like, no more of that and, you know, there's no opportunity for socialism or like they'll find a way to like try and fight that away. So there's no like official version of like a left wing opposition. The only

other option is fascism. And so that's what we now have. Yes. Yeah. The final resort, right, of fear. I think also, dear Zeitgang, how the U.S. slipped from descriptions of civilians to consumers. You hear that more often, right? What happened to the pension? It became the 401K, which comprises no less than 40% of the stock market. Let me look. Sorry, guys, I stumbled on this soapbox. Let me step off this. Yeah, get it. No, get up there. Careful, careful. Careful. Careful. Careful, careful. Oh, geez. Well, we're speaking to the choir while those are still allowed, right? In modern day America. And how weird is the only choir. Yeah, that's actually the only music we're going to have is choirs. That's a good point. To collect your universal basic income, you will have to go sing in the choir. Oh, gosh, yeah, full handmaid's tail. But like, how could this, how could this be a thing we cut?

Like, who learns about the idea of food-borne illness and says, I don't know, man, kind of. Corporations whose job for whom it is expensive to not do food-borne illnesses, I think. Those are the people. And, yeah, but that would be my, that would be my assumption. Because, yeah, it does, it does seem almost, like, when you're just viewing it out of context, it's like, it seems weird that they keep doing exactly the wrong thing, like, on purpose. But, yeah, the, the vaccine thing, I don't, like, that one's just, like, ideologically driven, incorrect is going to kill a lot of people in a way that, like, seems like it's going to be pretty transparently their fault. But this, that's not going to help. It seems to me where this is always to your point, it's either business and money or quote-unquote traditional values.

And I'm going to push actually back against you, Jack, where I think this is a traditional values thing, where they want to get back to the era of getting so sick whenever you eat, you know, like back the good old days. Yeah, pray and then like have a doctor travel by foot from six hours away. Yeah, yeah. Bloodletting. Like, we need to bring back bloodletting. Make America bloodlet again. Make America die from diet. Yeah.

Yeah. Diarrhea deaths. Time is come. More death by diarrhea. Yeah. Myspace.com slash diarrhea death. Here's how it happens. I love it.

MySpace diarrhea by death. This is how it, this is how what happens. It's never going to be a full frontal thing. It's going to be some information management on, you know, whatever your local favorite Fox News is, where someone, someone says, Hey, this just in toilet paper price. are through the roof, which has a lot of people talking about whether diarrhea is good for you.

We're going now to the last doctor left in the Trump, or just the last doctor. The final doctor. The last doctor. By the way, many people die of diarrhea every year, I should say, especially young children. Right. Yeah.

Well, there's going to be more. Yeah, it should be more common. It should be a thing that we're all talking about, you know? That's the issue. Great. Because it's funny, and that'll be funny. I don't make things funny. Make America.

And unavoidable. Can we laugh again? We're making comedy legal again, folks. Make America go far again? You can't say anything anymore. We'll be right back. You're listening to Daily Zichis on the IHeart Media Network. I was waiting for it.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. And we're back. And I feel like World War II, probably the most depicted movie or war in the history of film, maybe the most depicted event in the history of film.

Vietnam is probably doesn't have as many movies but I feel like it's so iconic. Like it's so, like it exists because of these

like classic movies that depicted Vietnam. We were talking about how the song, Fortunate Sun, like if you hear that, you picture yourself descending in a helicopter

above like rice patches. Like for, I think from For example, scum, maybe. But the current wars that are, like, being fought by America, like, don't exist in the same way, I feel like. And I'm just curious to, like, hear you guys' thoughts on, like, why that might be the case or might not. Like, why, you know, I think Vietnam ended. I sound like Walter from Big Lebowski. It, like, had a fairly definitive end, and then people started making movies about it like after the fact a little bit like you know while vietnam was happening they

made mash but it was like about the korean war because they didn't want to like actually touch that and so maybe it's just that like we're still doing this like in the middle east and so people can't deal i think i think yeah i think the forever war part of it is really big because there's no ability to get closure or distance right and i you know there was the spat of like very ambitious ecstasy war movies that I feel like really started up around the second Bush term that the audience just went like no fucking way to all of this, right? Like movies like rendition and like stop loss and things that were very earnest and like we're really, we need to dig into this. And people were just like don't don't want to talk about any of this. No thank you.

We got no distance. We're stuck in it. I don't want to be reminded of it. Yeah. You know, I think there was a very similar thing of people trying to make things about. the lockdown during the lockdown. Exactly. You know, where studios were like, oh, it's great.

We'll do a sitcom over Zoom. And it's about friends hanging out over Zoom. And it's like, I don't want to fucking watch this. Yeah. And I don't want to watch it five years later anymore. I don't want to relive that, you know? It took Ice Cubes, the War of the World for us to finally come to terms with it and want to watch it.

Right. Finally. Finally, we understand. There's something to, there was such confusion around Vietnam. And I really think that is a war that the movie. the movies processed for the public in a way. Even more than anything else, there was so much kind of like corruption and confusion and smoke screening,

even with journalism and the government and everything at the time, that I think there was just something with that timing out with the new Hollywood movement and studios getting less controlling and artists coming in who were willing to like touch the nerve where we all had to kind of, I say this, we all, none of us were fucking alive. But, you know, the culture used movies to work through this shit. And I think partially because of Vietnam, not that all the reporting and the government communication was better in the Forever Wars has been at any point. Right. But there's been more of a collective conversation and obviously the growth of the internet, the ability to not just need to rely on what like one person is telling us.

Right. Then makes it so that like, I don't need a movie to fucking tell me about this. Right. Especially if we don't yet have an end point that we. can look back on and step away and go, what was this all about? Right. And I feel very similarly about, like, last year, last two years in particular, there's a wave of movies that feel very lockdown inspired to me that I think are very pointedly not about the pandemic at all explicitly. But like, I weirdly think Oppenheimer very much comes out of that. Not just in the fear of like

a thing that can change the world forever, but even in like the building of Los Alamos and everyone needing to like create this bubble and barbie that same year is like about this kind of bubbled living you know and like relationship to culture i think there were these movies asteroid cities another one where like a lot of our biggest commercial artists were making these movies that exist in these small like hypercharged bubbles of a brief moment los alamos in that is the NBA bubble like that in the metaphor right yeah and like i love eddington and it's a masterpiece but the public very much went no thank you right because it was explicitly a about. Right. Yeah, yeah. Well, and Superman also has a fairly clear metaphor for Palestine and Israel, which is, like, kind of incredible that they got away with that, especially in, you know, something like this. And James Gunn interviews has been like, look, I wrote this movie three years ago. Like, you're all astounded by how directly it maps onto Palestine and Israel, but we've been in some version of this for decades. Yeah, the Palestine and Israel thing has been going on for decades. But be, there are like seven other analogs. You can look at Russian Ukraine. Right. You know, and I

think it's like we're more willing to process these types of things as an element of Superman rather than making the whole movie out of that totally because it's too terrifying to look at it directly and also we're getting it directly beamed into our phones as well which changes everything like our response to it and i mean i think court locker is the only war film to win best picture in the last 20 years i'd say like explicitly war film uh and that's a movie that is a character study right it was the only one that was well received in that run of films right because it's not a political but it's about what it is like to be a soldier in a war rather than the war yeah the other two that i think exists are american sniper in zero

dark 30 yeah and those are the two where they can make america the hero like you know what i mean like they can find a way one because they're just basing it on a memoir of a guy who's like you know making shit off kind of and then zero dark 30 is like well we're fucking killing them lot. And obviously it's like, you know, more morally complex than that. But I think that might, but those two being the only two that like broke through an American sniper broke through in like a major one like was huge. But Zero Dark Theory was also like a very big hit and was seen as the best picture frontrunner until many senders spoke out against it and kind of like made it too much of a hot potato. Yeah, yeah. But I think those two breaking through be makes it that like that's

where I get the idea that it's like because we don't want to be complicit. We don't like the fact that it's still happening. We feel we feel guilty that it's still happening. And so we just like need to just leave it over there unless you can tell us a story where we're like, oh, hell yeah. We're like, we're doing a thing that matters. I think also like killing Bin Laden closed a loop. Oh, yeah. You could break off a story. Yeah, exactly. A movie I find very fascinating, but one of the things I like about is the ending of the movie is this kind of like, Dustin Hawkins sitting in the bus at the end of the graduate being like, fuck, what do I do now? Yeah. It has this very like striking ending of Jessica Chastain having completed the thing. Clearly with this expression on her face of like, what now? I don't feel good. We haven't

solved this, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're stuck in the aftermath of this. We got the guy, but it doesn't like vindicate anything. That's why I love thin red line. The entire movie is mostly like beauty and confusion. You're never, it's like it's truly an anti-war film. Because at no point or you're like,

like, hey, that's pretty badass, actually. You know, like, yeah. I also, it was like, right after Hurt Locker, she's like, I want to do the, the Bin Laden movie. Yeah. And she sets it up before they got him. Oh, really? She had written it and cast it.

Rune Morrow was going to play the Jessica Chastain part. They had, like, half of the supporting cast set. They were prepping it. And then the SEAL Team 6 rate happened. And she was like, I got to rebuild the movie. Wow. And the first version of the movie, I think, would have not. worked at all beyond the fact of like imagining coming out in the world where there was an ending

that the movie wasn't acknowledging right i don't think anyone in that moment would have wanted to see that right whereas the actual movie came out like two years after with enough distance yeah and i think it was speaking to a desire of like if we're stuck in forever wars is there at least a way to break this into volumes yeah we can start to process one thing as complete of course a new hope right yeah well story a huge aspect of storytelling is conclusion. You know, we need, we need things resolved. An American sniper has like a very dark resolution.

Yes. You know, by framing it around one guy and being like, and you died. Right. Yeah, tragically. And therefore, you don't have to like feel weird and like think about too much what he was doing over there because what he was doing at the end was undoubtedly good. So we're all good here. Right.

Good. Yeah. Yeah. We don't have to ask the question. How do we actually feel about sniping? We really love sniping, you know? two movies that come together or I'm thinking of

as we're talking through this is like where it's like it doesn't really come to a conclusion is a Sicario. Yeah. You know that it's like this secret war just the shady side of how we're conducting ourselves as a country

and these other countries and it's kind of at the end like a shrug of just like hey yeah this is fucked up. Yeah. Which is like the opposite of propaganda basically. You know, but it connects to one of my favorite Vietnam era movies, which are the Rambo films, which start with a morally complex one about, like, the, you know,

moral weight of, like, what we made soldiers do over there. This is the business end, the psychological trauma of what we put people through. And then the second one, he just goes back and wins Vietnam. And then Sicario has, to a lesser degree, but it has a sequel that's just like, fuck, this is fun. This is, like, an amazing action movie. version of the first one without all the nasty guilt and like ambiguity ambiguity and then i predator i think is a fascinating almost like response film to rambo of sure oh so you guys just want to

see the biggest guy go in and solve the jungle yeah right right like yeah fucking he's going to get eaten by a monster right we're we're like walking into things we don't understand yeah yeah the ultimate ramifications if we're talking about war films with cultural staying power by the way we should acknowledged the infinity war. And the many heroes we lost in the blip. That's right. We got them back, thankfully.

Yeah, well, I'm still grieving. I mean, I'm sure we got them back. Never forget. Never forget. Should we actually just moment silence? Yeah. I think 20 minutes. Full 20 on the podcast.

But that's a war we got closure to. That's right. That's right. You know? The good guy did the snap. Everything's good now. I really, my hope is that one day we'll be able to make movies. so well we won't have to do war anymore it'd be great that'd be pretty cool i've always said the

only solution to a bad guy with a snap is a good guy with us speaking of uh the avengers real quick we'll do a speed round of a couple ideas i wanted to hit do you guys buy into the idea that like sex has gone away from movies and that like there's a great essay uh everybody's beautiful nobody's horny or something along those lines that talks about how like our blockbuster movies are full of like attractive people who like don't even have like sexual energy really they're not like you don't think of them as sexual beings and that you like we had a whole genre of movies that was just like Michael Douglas Fox and like is horny. That's a whole type of movie. And those movies are like explicit in every sense. They are like sexually visually explicit but they are also like textually

explicit. Yes. I think the thing that we've lost more is like movies that have sexual energy right right like one i think of all the time is pelican brief where they cast denzil was white yes everyone freaked out even in a fucking 90s america they were like people might revolt if denzil washington julia roberts kiss and so that is a movie that is loaded with sexual chemistry that never actually like comes to a pass right they were too worried about showing them visually do anything and yet the movie feels horny as hell right right and i think almost all Hollywood movies used to have that. Right. Like there is this

innate voyeurism two films where it's like we want to watch hot people be together. Yeah. And either they're doing stuff or we're like charging the space in between them of like, oh, I hope they do stuff. What if they do stuff? And it's also like, you know, a lot of this is, I'm guilty

of this as well. A lot of this is blamed on like, is there a younger generation that is like more skittish and like sort of anxious, you know, neurotic about ideas of sex. Right. power dynamics and all of this and is that why movies don't want to touch them. But you're also like shipping culture has only increased for the last 25 years, you know? Right. And like to an extent where people are just like, I like to imagine that these two side characters that don't even

talk are dating and draw them in this kind of way. I think a lot of it is like this, that the 2000s, especially the 2010s, were really defined by this obsession with the global box office. And like Hollywood films as being this exported product where for a couple of years, the international grosses of movies were overtaking the domestic grosses. And you read about in different countries and different territories,

they just have, like, entirely different cultural standards. In some cases, like very extreme censorship wards, but also the Hollywood got really in their head about learning, like, you know, in China, you can't release a movie with ghosts. Right. You know, suddenly there's why Star Wars tanks over there.

Yeah. There are all these metrics they have to process that I think just kind of blanded a lot of things out. They just don't want to offend anyone. Absolutely. I also want to say that we should also consider the fact that sex is icky. It's gross and it's bad. There is like an undercurrent of... I mean, yeah, honestly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like a lot of young people are like, don't show me that. That's gross. Like, stop putting that in my movies. But then, like, I wonder how much of it. So, like, I'm off two minds about this. One, I think there's like something weird and interesting. happening with, you know, how Starship Troopers is, like, has sex, but it, like, doesn't really have, like, sexual energy. It's just, like, it's, like, nudity that's just, like, completely cut off. And it's a movie about fascism. Like, I think that that's an important part of

fascism is, like, beautiful people without, like, sexual energy. And, like, it's a beat that Verhoeven repeats twice. He does in Robocop and Starship Troopers, where he's, like, this is a culture where men and women can shower together. Right. And there's no sense of sexual danger. Like in both of those films, you have like locker rooms, like cops and like soldiers. Yeah. Who are just fully naked in a mass space.

Yeah. And they can like slapping asses like they're on a fucking football team. And Starship Troopers, there's like kind of like, well, they won't they jousting like banter. And even still, there's no threat of actual physical things happening. Right. We've almost become a post-sexual society. Right. Despite the incredible proliferation of pornography, which is all.

Right. So part of me thinks like it's interesting that like this, you know, everybody is like in great shape, hot and like not horny for one another is happening as we're like descending into fascism in our country. Like maybe those two are related. The other part of me is just like, oh, it's because like porn's everywhere. And everyone's like, no, I see that over there. Get this the fuck out of my movies. And I think the shipping thing is also about romance. It is. Right. So I think that's an interesting place for movies to convert. But once again, it's like that's about. tension like it doesn't need to escalate to nude scenes to physicality you know but a lot of that energy has dissipated where I feel like sometimes the shipping is like my head cannon is and you're like imagining a dynamic that is not actually depicted in the film because in a way they're almost longing for any sense of that tension existing yeah even if it doesn't have to be the center I also think perhaps a culprit that is not discussed as much is the rise of like pay cable television, which got very sexual, right?

I don't say this in like a pejorative way of they got so sexual, but like, you know, suddenly HBO and then Showtime and then like Synax and all these things were making prestige shows, not like Skinnamac softcore films. Right. Or prestige shows that started leaning really hard into nudity and sex scenes. Right. Where it was almost like a prerequisite. And then you're starting to see shows where you're like, did they green like?

Californication solely because it's a perfect format to have 12 boobs an episode, you know, or masters of sex or whatever. Like, it felt like things were skewing that way. Right. And I think a lot of that was a pushing of these are things you thought you could never see on television. Sure. TV's getting serious.

It's growing up. Right. We're showing you the most forbidden things that you're not used to seeing at home. And did that kind of swap the power dynamic where then sex scenes and movies? started to feel like a TV thing yeah because even in like Game of Thrones I remember seeing it was like there was nudity but it felt like the weirdest like

soft core porn nudity with like this is in Dragon Time but also these clear these women have fake breasts like it was just very weird all the Spartacus shows are very horny like all those things I do think something shifted there yeah yeah and you did refer to Game of Thrones as Dragon Time I remember

yeah well I believe that's canon let's put it on it's Dragon Time it's 2000 and Dragon was the year. All right, I feel like we can keep this conversation going for three hours, but we have to stop. 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.

It means the world to miles. He needs your validation, folks. I hope you're having a great weekend, and I will talk to you Monday. Bye. You know what I'm going to be able to be. Oh, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon,

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