Speaker 1: Hello the Internet, and welcome to this episode of the
Speaker 1: Weekly Zeitgeist. These are some of our favorite segments from
Speaker 1: this week, all edited together into one NonStop infotainment laugh stravaganza. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: without further ado, here is the Weekly Zeitgeist. Well, mister walkin,
Speaker 1: we are thrilled to be joined.
Speaker 2: In our third seat Wow by the executive director.
Speaker 1: Of Civil Rights Corps, which is a nonprofit dedicated to
Speaker 1: fighting systemic injustice. He's been a civil rights lawyer, a
Speaker 1: public defender. He was named twenty sixteenth Trial Lawyer of
Speaker 1: the Year by Public Justice. The author of several books,
Speaker 1: the incredibly compelling Usual Cruelty and the brand new Ye Coppaganda,
Speaker 1: which we got to read. An advanced copy of is
Speaker 1: drop in April fifteenth, So good go pre order right now.
Speaker 1: We'll be talking about it. Most importantly a great follow
Speaker 1: on social media, of course, please welcome the brilliant and
Speaker 1: talented Alan Carcasone.
Speaker 3: Thank you all for having me back.
Speaker 2: Oh man, always open door. I got excited when I
Speaker 2: read the word zeitgeist at.
Speaker 3: The end of your book. I was like, oh yeah,
Speaker 3: shout out to the show.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, great word.
Speaker 4: I was thinking of you guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course totally.
Speaker 4: I've been well, I mean, at least as well as
Speaker 4: can be. I'm excited to have this book out there
Speaker 4: in the world, and I think the ideas are so
Speaker 4: important now and at times of rising authoritarianism and a
Speaker 4: real assault on basic notions of kindness and truth and love.
Speaker 4: And you know, so I was I was trying to
Speaker 4: explore the last few years, you know, like what do
Speaker 4: we make of the mainstream media and how they're leading
Speaker 4: us to these really dark places? And I'm just glad
Speaker 4: to be able to be able to talk about it
Speaker 4: now in public.
Speaker 3: I'd give them an a minus.
Speaker 1: I think I think they're mostly nailing it. What do
Speaker 1: you guess? Sorry, I didn't read the book. But we
Speaker 1: like the mainstream media, right, They're cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love the New York Times games.
Speaker 1: I mean, with with many a guest, we like to
Speaker 1: get to know them a little bit better and do
Speaker 1: a search history underrated, overrated, but we got a lot
Speaker 1: to cover, so we want to just kind of dive
Speaker 1: right in, if that's all right with you, Alec. Unless
Speaker 1: you had a search history underrated or overrated that was
Speaker 1: particularly pressing that you wanted to get off your.
Speaker 4: Chest, you know, I don't do anything other than think
Speaker 4: about topaganda. So okay, I said, better just dive right in,
Speaker 4: you know, all right, let's do it.
Speaker 3: I was actually it was funny.
Speaker 2: Yesterday I was hanging out with some people who are
Speaker 2: from out of town, and like they they hit me
Speaker 2: with the is LA Safe because like and I was like, you, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: Kelly's great, man, what are you talking about? Like, because
Speaker 2: I see a lot of like you know, the people
Speaker 2: running into stores and like grabbing stuff and things like that,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, oh, my sweet sweet.
Speaker 3: Child, Yeah, this is uh.
Speaker 2: These are like cherry picked videos that they play over
Speaker 2: and over again to sort of create that narrative like
Speaker 2: crime is.
Speaker 3: Actually going on, Like whoa really?
Speaker 1: Oh? You know.
Speaker 4: One of the things, the thing that I just think
Speaker 4: about a lot is the curation selectively of anecdote.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: You know, you could you could take a video montage
Speaker 4: of every missed shot that Michael Jordan took in his career,
Speaker 4: put them all together, and you make them look like
Speaker 4: a bad shooter.
Speaker 1: Sorry, he's the worst player in the history of the NBA.
Speaker 1: You can't make a friend shot.
Speaker 4: That's essentially what the mainstream media does with crime. So
Speaker 4: the most effective propaganda, this is such an important lesson
Speaker 4: that I learned in my years of studying this. The
Speaker 4: most effective propaganda is actually based on true anecdotes. Because
Speaker 4: if you do something that's that's blatantly blatantly false, unless
Speaker 4: it's something that people can't really figure out is false,
Speaker 4: you actually lose credibility. But if you use a bunch
Speaker 4: of true anecdotes to suggest kind of false interpretations or
Speaker 4: then you actually have much more sophisticated propaganda's harder to
Speaker 4: tell the difference. And so what we've seen the last
Speaker 4: few years, as the example like you gave, you know,
Speaker 4: there was one video that went viral of shoplifting from
Speaker 4: a Walgreens in San Francisco that itself spawned three hundred
Speaker 4: and nine articles around the country that one little video.
Speaker 4: And at the same time, in that one month period
Speaker 4: that these hundreds of articles are written about it nightly
Speaker 4: newscasts all over the country, by the thousands, there was
Speaker 4: virtually no stories about wage theft or tax evasion, things
Speaker 4: that are happening way way more and that cost orders
Speaker 4: of magnitude more money for people. And that's the selective
Speaker 4: creation an anecdote that gets us afraid of of all
Speaker 4: of the wrong things.
Speaker 1: And in case people are like yeah, but like it's
Speaker 1: better like storytelling or it's like more salient to like
Speaker 1: see the violent thing happening, the wage theft is stealing
Speaker 1: from you, right, Like those people are stealing from Walgreens,
Speaker 1: a massive corporation. Uh, they're doing it like on a
Speaker 1: one off basis, and it's being strapolated into like a
Speaker 1: massive trend. They're ceiling from a corporation, and the wage
Speaker 1: stuft is happening to you and it's not getting reported on, right,
Speaker 1: and the Walgreens story is being you know that we've
Speaker 1: got to protect Walgreens. And that is why I gave
Speaker 1: them an A minus instead of a straight a, you know,
Speaker 1: because they do they have some lapses.
Speaker 3: Sure, andrew T.
Speaker 1: We do like to ask our guess, what is something
Speaker 1: from your search history that's revealing about who you are?
Speaker 3: All right? Get ready, motherfuckers.
Speaker 5: So this is no uh, this is probably there's a
Speaker 5: reasonable chance this has already been one of my search histories.
Speaker 5: But I'll do it again if I have it, but
Speaker 5: maybe not. I made a fucking caved and made a
Speaker 5: viral ish recipe. I made tempora Inoki mushrooms, which were
Speaker 5: billed as this is like fucking vegan chicken vegan like
Speaker 5: fried chicken tenders or whatever. But you take an Oki
Speaker 5: mushrooms such you're in a video episode. You take the
Speaker 5: nooky mushrooms, cut the little roots off, and you have
Speaker 5: a bundle of mushrooms that grow long ways, and you
Speaker 5: cut the bundles into like, I don't know, call it
Speaker 5: like half a center meter maybe three quarters or of
Speaker 5: a centimeter like slices, and you batter those motherfuckers so
Speaker 5: that the Enochi mushrooms are individually little thin mushrooms, but
Speaker 5: they come become like strands of if you really are.
Speaker 3: Desperate for it.
Speaker 2: Fake chickens are just fine on their own, and like
Speaker 2: we don't have to Yeah.
Speaker 3: Their lovely. You didn't need to call it that. I'm sure.
Speaker 5: Throw a little MSG into the recipe I found. It's
Speaker 5: you know, NBD.
Speaker 1: But imagine though, as you're biting into them, imagine a
Speaker 1: chicken dying. Yeah, you just like, you know, like get
Speaker 1: that cool. Even feel like you're getting the power of
Speaker 1: another animal.
Speaker 5: You know, I got the power of I don't know,
Speaker 5: probably eighty five mushrooms in that one bite. Though, so wow,
Speaker 5: lot of a lot of a lot of power there.
Speaker 5: So the the thing I'm pretty sure there's a reasonable
Speaker 5: chance I've already said, was what my search history is,
Speaker 5: how do I get rid of all this fucking deep
Speaker 5: fry oil?
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Which just throw it? Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I probably The probably sort of distressing thing is by
Speaker 5: the time I had fried my batch of mushrooms, I
Speaker 5: made several batches, and I deepried it a little.
Speaker 3: In another thing, why am I being coy shrimp fitters?
Speaker 1: Don't be.
Speaker 3: Escapades.
Speaker 5: There wasn't that much oil left, so I just kind
Speaker 5: of like soaked it up with a paper towel and
Speaker 5: put it into a grocery bag and noted that up.
Speaker 3: Harbage candidate.
Speaker 1: I think we'll allow that, all right.
Speaker 2: I just, like I said, I just throw it out
Speaker 2: my window. So whatever, this hippie shit you're doing, like
Speaker 2: fine to each their own, but I.
Speaker 1: Don't need I just go right down the drain man,
Speaker 1: right down the kitchen, down the storm drain It's actually
Speaker 1: the only thing we put in the kitchen, saying because
Speaker 1: for some reason it's stopped draining water.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, you fill them up with water balloons and
Speaker 3: you throw them into the La River. Oh yeah, fuck it.
Speaker 3: I honestly can't be worse. There's no EPA monitoring of
Speaker 3: it anymore.
Speaker 2: I have people from out of town visiting us, and
Speaker 2: we like, like, the part of like the value I'm
Speaker 2: in is right by the La River.
Speaker 3: So we walked by it and we're like, and the
Speaker 3: famous La River And.
Speaker 2: They're like, wait seriously, and I'm like, yep, that's the
Speaker 2: I'm gonna be.
Speaker 5: For real, for real, especially because I'm sure municipalities are
Speaker 5: going to start having to generate their own revenue. LA
Speaker 5: really needs to have a for I don't know, five
Speaker 5: hundred dollars, one thousand dollars. You and your friend can
Speaker 5: ride a motorcycle and a semi down the l I wrote, yeah,
Speaker 5: or off the bridge you can do that one.
Speaker 2: Or the drag race from Greece that also happened right
Speaker 2: there downtown. Yeah, any iconic l A River race.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, just just that killed Keu Reeves in the
Speaker 1: Rush video back when that was my first celebrity crush.
Speaker 1: Every every Paul Abdul music video drop was an event
Speaker 1: in in my little perverted.
Speaker 3: Was she had the chest of the cheetah.
Speaker 2: That was yeah, obviously yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember just
Speaker 2: being a kid like that's the cheat, oh cat, And
Speaker 2: they're like, no, that's true, and I'm like, it is
Speaker 2: that that's the cheat cat?
Speaker 1: It was. It was actually problematic that you can't tell
Speaker 1: them apart, man, don't find me cheating. What is something,
Speaker 1: Kristen that you think is underrated?
Speaker 6: Aging is underrated?
Speaker 1: I agree with this.
Speaker 6: I think people, you know what, like I was raised
Speaker 6: I'm an elder millennial, okay, but I identify as gen X,
Speaker 6: which is the most gen Z thing I can do.
Speaker 6: But I grew up hanging out with gen xers, and
Speaker 6: so we were raised by boomers and they don't age.
Speaker 6: They don't want to age. Nobody wants to be called
Speaker 6: grandma anymore. You know, like they're getting new tits and
Speaker 6: licks into their seventies, and I feel like, no, who's
Speaker 6: knitting the baby blankets. No one's knitting, no one's aging,
Speaker 6: you know. I feel like we should embrace that. Our
Speaker 6: generation should embrace aging, be proud to be a grandparent,
Speaker 6: be proud to you know, retire, play golf whatever. And
Speaker 6: these people they don't want to retire, they don't I
Speaker 6: want to stop fucking. They're out with boner pills, like
Speaker 6: on the loose.
Speaker 1: Crazy right on the boner pills. Yeah, I'm always suspicious
Speaker 1: of like singular explanations of like what is wrong with
Speaker 1: this country. But there's I think I think somebody wrote
Speaker 1: a book that was like Generation Sociopaths, just about how
Speaker 1: like Boomers were all all like these narcissistic sociopaths, and
Speaker 1: they made it checked a lot of boxes for me.
Speaker 1: Let's let's put it that way. They're I don't think
Speaker 1: they're all uniformly like that, and I don't think it's
Speaker 1: the only problem we've got, but like having one generation
Speaker 1: that is hoarding all the money and incapable of, you know,
Speaker 1: being concerned about the generations that come after them, Like
Speaker 1: if like that seems weird. It seems like we're currently
Speaker 1: taking it as like humanity just like wasn't able to
Speaker 1: deal with the challenge of climate change. What if it
Speaker 1: was just like a very selfish generation. It was just like, actually,
Speaker 1: we just don't give a fuck about Once we're gone,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be okay.
Speaker 2: There's another book that kind of touched on that called
Speaker 2: The Death of the grown Up by Diana West, and
Speaker 2: that was sort of talking about how like in the
Speaker 2: sixties all of like the rock and roll shit kind
Speaker 2: of like cows, like like the boomers are like I'm
Speaker 2: never leaving this like mental state either where it's about
Speaker 2: like forever young and all these other things that occur,
Speaker 2: I mean, your wealth.
Speaker 1: And being uninhibited and like not inhibiting other people's sexual
Speaker 1: Oh sorry, no, not those parts, just just the irresponsibility part.
Speaker 2: Guy, young young, I get to not care about other people.
Speaker 6: The only thing they were retained out of woodstock was
Speaker 6: rolling around in mud.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and like one thing yeah.
Speaker 6: No, they did for the generation that like hated their
Speaker 6: parents so much. It's like they really rebelled against aging.
Speaker 6: They invented the term anti aging. There was no creams
Speaker 6: or anything that that phrase didn't exist. And I feel
Speaker 6: like it's embarrassing to watch them just refuse to go
Speaker 6: off into the night.
Speaker 1: It's like, sit down, Why accept the forward movement of time?
Speaker 1: You know? Why? When I'm supposed to just sit here
Speaker 1: and let it happen to me.
Speaker 2: Come on, I'm gonna shoot up my grandkid's blood right
Speaker 2: into my veins. I'm gonna use my grand kid as
Speaker 2: a goddamn blood bank.
Speaker 3: Right, how far we've come.
Speaker 2: It's like, we used to have children to help, you know,
Speaker 2: in the fields for agricultural reasons, and now it's like
Speaker 2: now you gotta have like fourteen blood bags.
Speaker 1: That's right, Kyle, what's up? Do you think is overrated? Uh?
Speaker 3: Fucking robots, robots, real robots. I hate them. I hate robots.
Speaker 2: You just watch electric age too, man, electric states or whatever.
Speaker 7: I'm like, I don't want you to have to I
Speaker 7: don't want anything that does two things.
Speaker 3: I don't like it. I hate you.
Speaker 7: Like when you see posts now that's like, well we
Speaker 7: asked chat GPT what it thinks about.
Speaker 3: I don't care. I don't want to know.
Speaker 7: There's no value to that to me. It doesn't know words.
Speaker 7: I'm so tired of it all. Just yeah, I want
Speaker 7: people to do stuff. I don't want my car to
Speaker 7: have no driver in it. I am just tired. If
Speaker 7: we didn't make any more of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, every anything.
Speaker 2: I think the rule of thumb now in our era
Speaker 2: feels like anything that keeps us away from interacting with
Speaker 2: people is the devil and we should be cast in
Speaker 2: a way because it's obviously like helpful methods and and
Speaker 2: things that robots do that help people and everyone's abilities
Speaker 2: are limited in different ways, and there's positives to this,
Speaker 2: but generally, generally, I'm just like the.
Speaker 3: Robots that deliver food. I hate you.
Speaker 7: Every everyone skirting in the shortcuts are But this is
Speaker 7: all stemming from me just seeing a bunch of stuff
Speaker 7: that's like, well, I asked, we asked chat GPT who
Speaker 7: should be president, and it said, I don't care.
Speaker 3: It's not real if it agrees with you, and what Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's none of it. It's why are we giving it
Speaker 3: weight like it has an opinion.
Speaker 7: It's a calculator. The only word calculators should know is
Speaker 7: boobs upside down. Yeah, and other or go to hell,
Speaker 7: go to hell. Yes for my t I eighty nine hackers. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I'm old. Other than that, I'm just like I've had
Speaker 7: enough of the robots. I'm just I'm sorry. I don't
Speaker 7: think we they're even fine. They don't need equal.
Speaker 3: Weight two people.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, well, I mean those articles are such
Speaker 2: like those are just coming from like chat GPT shill yeah.
Speaker 3: Out.
Speaker 7: You just see whole sports articles that are all written
Speaker 7: by a robot, and you're just like, you know, we
Speaker 7: can tell, I can tell when the art is the
Speaker 7: robot art. I don't know what you think. Yeah, you're
Speaker 7: not tricking anyone. It's a gradient. Yeah sorry.
Speaker 1: Three caps are really have really been taken over by
Speaker 1: robots a way that I'm so tired sucks.
Speaker 2: Oh that And now they're just like just summarizing bodycam
Speaker 2: footage video and under like a true crime genre on YouTube.
Speaker 2: And it's like on March eighteenth, twenty twenty two, this
Speaker 2: man was like, it's they're just basically putting like chat
Speaker 2: gpt ai narration over other videos and just making a
Speaker 2: ton It's that.
Speaker 7: Whole when you google something and it's like, hey, just
Speaker 7: so you know, now we lead off with incorrect misinformation
Speaker 7: and then we'll get to the links and I'm like,
Speaker 7: I don't want I don't I know I can turn
Speaker 7: it off.
Speaker 3: I don't want to.
Speaker 7: I don't want to have to take extra steps to
Speaker 7: stop a robot from telling.
Speaker 3: Me what to do.
Speaker 7: Yeah, just use a different webs This episode is going
Speaker 7: to be how I Die Like this, I'll be in
Speaker 7: front of the Robot Tribunal and yeah yeah yeah, probably
Speaker 7: three years and they'll be playing this back out of
Speaker 7: one of their stomachs.
Speaker 2: That's like did you see like have you I just
Speaker 2: I don't know, just I was fucking bored as ship.
Speaker 3: I was falling asleep.
Speaker 2: But I turned on that Chris Pratt movie The Electric
Speaker 2: State that was with like a big flop on Netflix,
Speaker 2: and that whole premise is about the fucking robot wars
Speaker 2: and how like there had to be a truce between
Speaker 2: human and robot because they were going to rise up
Speaker 2: against the people, and there's like all this anti robot
Speaker 2: and I was just like, dude, this is so stupid.
Speaker 3: I just turned it off, like.
Speaker 1: Anti robot propaganda, like we're hearing from Kyle here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, someone, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was. Somebody was saying that the robot car that
Speaker 1: drives you around way moo. I think like they I've
Speaker 1: never been in one, and they're like, oh, you gotta
Speaker 1: go in one, And I was like, what's good about it?
Speaker 1: Other like, I think it's slow from the gimmick, it's slower,
Speaker 1: and they're like, oh, you know, like you don't have
Speaker 1: to like talk to the driver. I was like, that
Speaker 1: is that? Yeah, that's not that that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I understand that that is the thing that that
Speaker 7: that people have anxiety about, and ultimately it feels short
Speaker 7: sighted to be like I think that that we shouldn't
Speaker 7: remove that simply because you know, I'm just like, I
Speaker 7: don't know, it's all.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Person shouldn't have a job because I don't want to
Speaker 2: talk to them.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I know that there are every time I say
Speaker 7: anything on the internet, I'm like, I understand that there's
Speaker 7: three people who have specific limitations that this could really
Speaker 7: really affect. And I just I want to earnestly be like,
Speaker 7: but I don't mean this if for you, like if
Speaker 7: you are if you have something something that is like
Speaker 7: really affecting you in a real way. I ultimately I
Speaker 7: just am so. I saw a way most stopped in
Speaker 7: Los Angeles because a guy laid on the hood and
Speaker 7: covered the cameras while it was at a light and
Speaker 7: it couldn't go anywhere and the person had to sit
Speaker 7: in it and wait for this guy to get off it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they do that.
Speaker 2: There's another thing I saw in like San Francisco, people
Speaker 2: are putting his traffic cones on the hood and that
Speaker 2: would just completely fucking fry it.
Speaker 3: And they're like, aha, bricked it. Yeah, I'm just so
Speaker 3: tired of it. I'm just so tired of everything being
Speaker 3: a robot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, damn, bro, I know you sound like the
Speaker 2: beginning of the Electric State right now.
Speaker 3: When they.
Speaker 7: Viral marketing for the Electric State, we're actually we're rebooting it.
Speaker 7: We're doing a live action version of that live.
Speaker 2: Action movie, live or action or even live or action.
Speaker 3: Just cleaning it up a little bit. It's liver action.
Speaker 3: All right, let's take a quick break, we'll come back.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about what's going on in the news. We'll
Speaker 1: be right back. And we're back. And there's this one moment,
Speaker 1: as Trump was like taking office and dropping a bunch
Speaker 1: of like fascist executive orders and just attacking trans people,
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal had another op ed on the
Speaker 1: front page of their paper that was all about how
Speaker 1: Colleges two woke and I was just I was kind
Speaker 1: of amazed at that, but it it really just was
Speaker 1: kind of an illustration of how relentless they have been
Speaker 1: and continued to be in painting these institutions. We're going
Speaker 1: to talk about Harvard and Columbia. The New York Times
Speaker 1: and like other mainstream media outlets that the democratic part
Speaker 1: like these institutions that I guess benefit from being like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we are actually very liberal and just basically they are
Speaker 1: there to perpetuate the existing power structures and you know,
Speaker 1: wealth distribution. But yeah, I wanted to start with Harvard.
Speaker 1: There's Harvard gets mentioned a few times in the book. Specifically,
Speaker 1: you talk about the study where two academics who claim
Speaker 1: to be coming from the left and to be like
Speaker 1: really bummed out by the conclusion that they arrive at
Speaker 1: are like, guys, sorry, we were just calling balls and
Speaker 1: strikes here. We're just re doing the math. And unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the only way for us to move forward as a
Speaker 1: progressive society is to like double the number the already
Speaker 1: record high number of cops that we have on the street.
Speaker 1: We just need to like become even more of a
Speaker 1: police state, but just more generally, you write in the book,
Speaker 1: I learned over time the most important qualification for teaching students.
Speaker 1: Oh no, this was actually a tweet of yours. You wrote,
Speaker 1: over time the most important qualification for teaching students at
Speaker 1: elite schools willingness to use your mind, position, and power
Speaker 1: to preserve distributions of wealth and misery. But you just
Speaker 1: talk about like kind of what was this surprising to
Speaker 1: you at a certain point that these institutions like Harvard
Speaker 1: and Columbia were just so in the bag for the
Speaker 1: existing kind of power structure.
Speaker 4: I was pretty naive when I when I got to
Speaker 4: you know, I went to college at Yale, at the
Speaker 4: law school at Harvard, and I was pretty naive when
Speaker 4: I got to these places.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: I was sort of thinking, Oh, these are institutions of learning,
Speaker 4: and they're so prestigious, and like people who come here
Speaker 4: must be smarter, and they must be you know, really
Speaker 4: rigorous thinkers. And that's really not what goes on at
Speaker 4: these places at all. I don't want to speak too
Speaker 4: broad and brushstroke because, like you know, I've a lot
Speaker 4: of incredible friends and relationships that I've made there. There
Speaker 4: are a lot of scholars at these institutions, just like
Speaker 4: at many other universities and colleges and non academic institutions
Speaker 4: around the country. There are people doing amazing scholarship and
Speaker 4: scholarship matters like research and matters. I'm not saying that
Speaker 4: those things are not important. That's not the lesson of
Speaker 4: the book. But one of the key functions of a
Speaker 4: place like Harvard is to launder policies and ideas that
Speaker 4: are divigned to preserve existing distributions of wealth and power
Speaker 4: in our society launder them with a veneer of academic
Speaker 4: backing and of rigorous thought and things like that. And
Speaker 4: you learned very quickly at a place like Harvard, what
Speaker 4: does it take not only to succeed there as a student,
Speaker 4: but what does it take to become professor? What does
Speaker 4: it take to get tenure? And everybody who it's very political,
Speaker 4: and everybody who's there understands that certain kinds of research
Speaker 4: that benefits certain kinds of people in our society and
Speaker 4: certain institutions is going to be a ticket to success,
Speaker 4: and other kinds of research and views are not. And
Speaker 4: and Harvard is a you know, has endownment worth tens
Speaker 4: of billions of dollars, is a huge industry, and so
Speaker 4: a lot of the scholarship that is produced at a
Speaker 4: place like Harvard is skewed by these other incentives. In
Speaker 4: other words, it's not this kind of pure place where
Speaker 4: like the best ideas are espoused and the people who
Speaker 4: are the smartest and best researchers with the kindest souls
Speaker 4: are the ones who succeeded. It's, you know, it's not
Speaker 4: how it works. And I think the example that I
Speaker 4: use in my book, I have a whole chapter devoted
Speaker 4: to this, I think it's one of the funniest. And
Speaker 4: I try to, by the way, throughout the book, I
Speaker 4: try to talk about all these issues with humor and
Speaker 4: get a little bit of joy, because to me, like
Speaker 4: life is not worth living unless you can laugh a
Speaker 4: little bit about these horrific things.
Speaker 1: And these are definitely teetering on the edge of laughter
Speaker 1: or crying one or the other. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And if you can't laugh about two Harvard professors, you know,
Speaker 4: sort of proposing the greatest expansion of policing in modern
Speaker 4: world history by adding five hundred thousand police officers to
Speaker 4: you as based on rudimentary errors that they made that
Speaker 4: are somewhat comical, then you can't laugh about anything, right.
Speaker 4: And these two guys are particularly funny to me because
Speaker 4: they portray themselves not only as progressives but as socialists,
Speaker 4: and they understand something really important, which is very good
Speaker 4: for your future as a scholar at Harvard. If you
Speaker 4: can be seen as one of those, you know, it's
Speaker 4: almost like a false flag operation, right, It's like you're
Speaker 4: parading around as a leftist socialist progressive, but the ideas
Speaker 4: you're promoting are right and serving the interests of the
Speaker 4: people who financially back Harvard and their social circles, et cetera.
Speaker 4: So it's very smart, actually if what you were thinking
Speaker 4: was that you wanted to advance your career. But anyway,
Speaker 4: these guys propose, and I think one especially comical thing
Speaker 4: about it is that in journal that they published this
Speaker 4: call for five hundred thousand more police. And by the way,
Speaker 4: the call for more police is, as I talk about
Speaker 4: in the book, it's absurd they made this proposal without
Speaker 4: counting the social costs of more police. You can't, you know,
Speaker 4: say I want it. It'd be like installing a new
Speaker 4: heater in your house and not only getting the measurements
Speaker 4: wrong for the heater, but you neglected to include that
Speaker 4: this heater spews carbon monoxide into your house, you know, And.
Speaker 8: So you're saying this heater, yeah, They're like, well, you know,
Speaker 8: we're installing this heater in this house and it's going
Speaker 8: to increase you know, the heat by a degree over
Speaker 8: other heaters, you know, And not only did they get
Speaker 8: that measurement wrong, but they also just neglected to tell
Speaker 8: you it's also going.
Speaker 3: To kill your whole family.
Speaker 1: Right, So you can't promote, you don't.
Speaker 4: Make a social policy proposal without even asking the question of, like,
Speaker 4: what are some of the costs and downsides to the proposal?
Speaker 3: Right and anyway.
Speaker 4: But I think like the funniest part about it to
Speaker 4: me is that the journal they published this in was
Speaker 4: created in the wake of the twenty twenty George Floyd
Speaker 4: uprisings by Harvard as a way of pacifying student unrest.
Speaker 4: They were like, we're going to create this Journal of
Speaker 4: Law and Inequality, and it's going to be this new
Speaker 4: thing that people publish to like confront these issues of
Speaker 4: our day. And then just a short time later, that
Speaker 4: Journal of Law and in Equal or whatever they call
Speaker 4: it is already publishing bold please by Harvard professors to
Speaker 4: add five hundred thousand cops.
Speaker 1: Yes, I remember when it came out and we were like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, the mainstream media is going to eat
Speaker 1: this shit, and sure enough they did. There's also just
Speaker 1: a little detail in that because you kind of you know,
Speaker 1: came at this study and pointed out all the ways
Speaker 1: that it was ridiculous and speaking of these two Harvard
Speaker 1: professors as comical figures, just the fact that they were
Speaker 1: using their students to try to construct arguments against your
Speaker 1: critiques of their book was pretty pretty wild. Sure.
Speaker 2: Oh wait, so they were asking the students to basically
Speaker 2: like defend this against evil alec.
Speaker 4: Well, no, I mean I think I don't know that
Speaker 4: they were. I don't think that they were, you know,
Speaker 4: specifically talking about me. But they were instead of like
Speaker 4: testing students on like the basics of first year criminal law.
Speaker 4: You know, one of the professors during the exam was
Speaker 4: apparently asking and the students you know sent me these
Speaker 4: exam questions, they sent in the screenshots of them to me,
Speaker 4: and he was asking for their help developing counter arguments
Speaker 4: to his proposal more police. You know, It's weren't me
Speaker 4: the wrong way about it, but I thought was really
Speaker 4: funny about it. Was like he was he was asking
Speaker 4: students for help with this research project, you know.
Speaker 1: Just like crowdsourcing, like the fleshing out of research project.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it turned out like the students you know
Speaker 4: told me that like we had like raised a number
Speaker 4: of the objections that you've d helpfully with them privately
Speaker 4: before they So it's not like these people just like
Speaker 4: had like a huge brain fart and forgot about, you know,
Speaker 4: a lot of the critiques and they just like didn't
Speaker 4: care to respond or even rigorously address in the first
Speaker 4: place these things. And that's why I think the copaganda
Speaker 4: book that is full of this stuff.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: What I try to do is take some of the
Speaker 4: most outrageous, funniest examples of kind of mainstream liberal institutions,
Speaker 4: whether it's it's professors or news organizations and journalists or
Speaker 4: whatever nonprofits sometimes and illustrate stuff that is actually really
Speaker 4: important that we might miss if we just look at
Speaker 4: the news. Because it's not just these Harvard professors are
Speaker 4: publishing this stuff. It's how does that stuff then get
Speaker 4: translated into the mainstream news that you consume as conventional wisdom, right,
Speaker 4: And that's that's the process that I really try to
Speaker 4: examine in the book with some humor, because you know,
Speaker 4: this is it's you know, there's a lot of upsetting
Speaker 4: stuff in here about about how we're being lied to
Speaker 4: and misled and how many of the institutions that we're
Speaker 4: told to trust are actually really untrustworthy and we need
Speaker 4: to develop better mechanisms of critical thinking. And that's another
Speaker 4: reason why you know this book. We've raised money so
Speaker 4: that any teacher who wants to teach any part of
Speaker 4: this book in school, any person in prison. You know,
Speaker 4: we have free copies of the book available with the people, like,
Speaker 4: obviously I hope that you support the book and and
Speaker 4: all the I don't make any money off the book,
Speaker 4: that any copy that sold, all the royalties go to
Speaker 4: the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which organizes on house people
Speaker 4: and skid row in Los Angeles. But even if if
Speaker 4: you can't afford the book, you know, we can get
Speaker 4: free copies to people because we just want people to
Speaker 4: have a more critical understanding of the news that they're
Speaker 4: being shown.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is like interesting that the way you bring
Speaker 2: up Harvard it immediately relates to the newsroom, right, like
Speaker 2: the way professors and academics can ascend. It's not that
Speaker 2: there's like marching orders, but you can pretty clearly into it.
Speaker 2: You're like, Okay, if I talk about this in this way,
Speaker 2: this is how I get my things pop in, which
Speaker 2: I feel like is another criticism we have of a
Speaker 2: lot of journalism too, where clearly other journalists now, Okay,
Speaker 2: if I write from this perspective or stories with this
Speaker 2: sort of bend to it, that's how I'm able to ascend,
Speaker 2: and that's how it further just sort of reinforces this
Speaker 2: kind of thing, and I think, you know, the New
Speaker 2: York Times is probably a great example of this kind
Speaker 2: of thinking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was really You have a great quote from
Speaker 1: David Graeber, who we talk about a lot on this
Speaker 1: show about like the Superman and Batman where they're both
Speaker 1: essential essentially like instituting fascist policies with their superpowers because
Speaker 1: that's all we can imagine. And like that kind of
Speaker 1: tied back to how I think about the mainstream media
Speaker 1: point that Miles was talking about, where it's like they're
Speaker 1: playing to the audience, like the audience wants to see
Speaker 1: I think there's like a part, at least a part
Speaker 1: of the audience that kind of wants to see this
Speaker 1: fucking fascist like that. That's why Batman does that, That's
Speaker 1: why Superman does that, and so they know they're going
Speaker 1: to get readers, and it's just this like cowardly thing
Speaker 1: that's you know, pleasing their corporate overlords. But I think
Speaker 1: it's also like pleasing some dark, horrible part of the
Speaker 1: audience too that is like, yeah, I want to believe
Speaker 1: that this is the police, good guy, right.
Speaker 2: And this is it It's an easy solve, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I think there's there's definitely part of that, but I
Speaker 2: don't know, because I mean, I think it's easy to
Speaker 2: envision you could have really compelling local news story.
Speaker 4: Like, for example, if instead of of installing a reporter
Speaker 4: to read all the police press releases and regurgitate them
Speaker 4: for the news every day, what if you had a
Speaker 4: reporter whose job was to report on like landlord tenant
Speaker 4: court and every day you had like a bad landlord
Speaker 4: of the day article or a bad employer of the
Speaker 4: day absolute Like I think people would watch and be
Speaker 4: interested in finding out what landlords are doing to their
Speaker 4: tenants across la or across Chicago or across in the country.
Speaker 4: I think if you if you installed somebody at all
Speaker 4: of the sites that are that are figuring out who's
Speaker 4: polluting our drinking water, who is emitting dangerous gases that
Speaker 4: are hurting our children. And you know, by the way,
Speaker 4: air pollution kills one hundred thousand people in the US
Speaker 4: every year. Okay, that's four to five times all homicide
Speaker 4: can buy. There are people every single day in all
Speaker 4: these cities who are actually just emitting stuff that's killing
Speaker 4: our children and people. Yeah, and I think I think
Speaker 4: people would. I mean, I hear what you're saying. I
Speaker 4: definitely think there's part of like they feel like they're
Speaker 4: they're playing down you know, it's like reality TV or
Speaker 4: Law and Order. Like they definitely think they're what they think,
Speaker 4: they know what their audience wants. But I believe audiences
Speaker 4: would tolerate different types of villains and different types of
Speaker 4: stories about who is causing us harm that were more
Speaker 4: consistent with reality. And that's another thing I talk about
Speaker 4: in the book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean you have so there's so many
Speaker 1: wild an like what while the Walgreens shoplifting panic was happening,
Speaker 1: they had to settle a massive lawsuit about like wage theft.
Speaker 1: But get that gets you You make a good point
Speaker 1: about how anytime there are multiple, you know, cases of
Speaker 1: shoplifting or just like viral videos of shoplifting, that becomes
Speaker 1: a wave or a trend or you know, out of control.
Speaker 1: But these things, the you know, the Walgreens wage theft
Speaker 1: settlement is treated as a one off thing. And then
Speaker 1: when you talked to editors, they were like, well, we
Speaker 1: reported on a different company doing that last month, so
Speaker 1: we can't like that that story's been done essentially, which
Speaker 1: is so so wild and don't doesn't really doesn't really
Speaker 1: make any sense unless you're taking into account. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: we can't like make them mad because they are the
Speaker 1: big corporate overlord.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think you have to understand also
Speaker 4: how the news media works. And there's lots of scholarship
Speaker 4: written about how the media functions. But they it organizes
Speaker 4: things into news themes, and it categorizes things so that
Speaker 4: people can understand them. And so I give this great
Speaker 4: example from the late seventies early eighties of this person
Speaker 4: who in this supporter, who was embedded in a newsroom,
Speaker 4: and he watched the creation of a supposed crime wave
Speaker 4: by youth of color against old people. And there was
Speaker 4: this panic that emerged that all these young people of
Speaker 4: color were robbing and stealing from and mugging and hurting
Speaker 4: old people. And every time that happened during this period,
Speaker 4: it was seen as further evidence of this trend. But
Speaker 4: when you take a step back and look several years later,
Speaker 4: you actually see that the only thing that had been
Speaker 4: created was this news categorization, and this news trend. Actually
Speaker 4: incidents of young people stealing and mugging and robbing old
Speaker 4: people were actually down during that period, and this is
Speaker 4: it's very hard for people to understand. But sometimes the news,
Speaker 4: you know, for example, after the East Palestine trained derailment
Speaker 4: in Ohio a couple of years ago, there were there's
Speaker 4: more of an interest in the news media in covering
Speaker 4: train derailments. Those are things that are happening all the time, right,
Speaker 4: there's like, but now that you're focused on it and
Speaker 4: it's a theme of your news, it's going to play
Speaker 4: into this idea and the same thing is happening. There
Speaker 4: was a massive society wide panic about shoplifting and retail theft,
Speaker 4: even though retail theft we now know is down, And
Speaker 4: so how we categorize things, it's.
Speaker 1: Just so it's like the.
Speaker 4: Michael Jordan example I gave earlier. If you're looking for it,
Speaker 4: and if you just only document the missed shots, you're
Speaker 4: going to not capture the full story. And that's what
Speaker 4: makes the media they have such an awesome responsibility because
Speaker 4: they have a choice every single day, out of the
Speaker 4: millions and millions of things that have happened in the world,
Speaker 4: they're going to tell us about ten or fifteen of them,
Speaker 4: or twenty of them. And also they're going to suggest
Speaker 4: in their coverage, how should we think about this? In
Speaker 4: other words, is that wildfire connected to climate change? Or
Speaker 4: is it some isolated event? Is that airline crash connected
Speaker 4: to DEI programs? At you know, like Trump said, right,
Speaker 4: you know, yeah?
Speaker 1: Or like?
Speaker 4: So this is an awesome responsibility because just by juxtaposing
Speaker 4: two stories together or two ideas together, Like I give
Speaker 4: an example in the book where they claim that a
Speaker 4: certain kind of crime went down in a certain city,
Speaker 4: and they say just they just note that also the
Speaker 4: police had been holding a charity basketball tournament. So it's
Speaker 4: like they're suggesting that, like, and what they didn't report
Speaker 4: is that that particular kind of crime had gone down nationwide,
Speaker 4: not just in the place where there's a police youth
Speaker 4: basketball tournament. So these are all these category categories and
Speaker 4: these causes. They're highly manipulable. And if you take nothing
Speaker 4: else away from the book, I want you to take
Speaker 4: away the idea that there are a lot of very
Speaker 4: smart people being paid billions of dollars a year to
Speaker 4: shape how you think about what is newsworthy, what's happening
Speaker 4: in the world, what the causes are, and therefore what
Speaker 4: should we spend money on.
Speaker 1: As the solutions. Right, Let's take one more quick break
Speaker 1: and then I just want to talk to you about
Speaker 1: like where we go from from here, because obviously things
Speaker 1: are shifting. Some of this fascism that has been ignored
Speaker 1: for a long time is getting louder, and so I
Speaker 1: just want to kind of hear your thoughts on on that.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: And we're back, We are back, and the movie we
Speaker 1: all keep hearing about now the Air Up Now, Sorry, Kevin,
Speaker 1: a classic. That was what we were talking about before.
Speaker 7: Brody in that one, Uh yeah.
Speaker 1: He was.
Speaker 2: He was Sally the African basketball player, the Kyle Airs
Speaker 2: up theres.
Speaker 1: What So I I knew that they were making a
Speaker 1: snow White remake.
Speaker 2: Because of the racist backlash, because of the races backlash.
Speaker 1: That's basically how it came on our radar on this show.
Speaker 1: But yeah, they've been having a lot of success doing
Speaker 1: the Like I was blown a way to see like
Speaker 1: a couple of years after it came out, we were
Speaker 1: looking at like the top ten box office grossers, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: movies of all time, and like the Lion King Live
Speaker 1: action remake was like on there. It's like between Jurassic
Speaker 1: Park and like et it's like the quotation.
Speaker 7: Marks around live action are doing a lot of heavy
Speaker 7: rifting in the animals talk movie. I'm not sure how
Speaker 7: many cameras were there, right, that's right, but the plates
Speaker 7: on cameras.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's wild, like a movie that feels like
Speaker 1: it never happened. It's still like one of the most
Speaker 1: financially successful. Like whatever's that.
Speaker 7: You just can't fathom all those people ever being in
Speaker 7: the same room. It's like an ungettable group of people,
Speaker 7: unbookable cast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you just get it. Yeah, and they'll do
Speaker 1: it individually in separate you know, trailers or whatever. Everything's computer.
Speaker 3: That's movies.
Speaker 7: I do like the idea of someone like having like
Speaker 7: explaining to Beyonce how to change her input in garage band.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 7: Oh, I mean she's a recording artist. She probably knows
Speaker 7: how to do that. That's but she's the most famous
Speaker 7: person in the movie. I assume famous people can't use inputs.
Speaker 3: John all of it your second pole, he would be
Speaker 3: to be your second poll from the.
Speaker 1: Second most famous person Beyonce.
Speaker 3: Kevin Bacon, Sabrina Carpenter.
Speaker 2: All Right, so they're somewhat soulless, I guess is what
Speaker 2: I'd say. It feels a little like CGI slot, but
Speaker 2: it's incredibly profitable because so you got the two quadrants,
Speaker 2: all right, You got the people who saw the first
Speaker 2: movie and still like that movie, the first Lion King,
Speaker 2: and then you got these younger audiences who will never
Speaker 2: know the joy of seeing the first movie without having
Speaker 2: this kind of it's like.
Speaker 1: High level AI slop is what it feels like a little.
Speaker 7: Bit that is a good way of like they just
Speaker 7: copy pasted the YouTube link to the first movie.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the other point that people have made is that like,
Speaker 1: like thinking about it like a business person, you're like, well,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of hard work that has already been done,
Speaker 1: Like they've already like designed these shots, and we don't
Speaker 1: have to pay those people at all, Like you don't
Speaker 1: have to pay them get.
Speaker 7: A shot for shot remake of Psycho And we all
Speaker 7: dragged him for it, and then people at Disney were like, yeah,
Speaker 7: but what if we did this with other stuff?
Speaker 1: Yeah? What if he did this like with stuff that
Speaker 1: actually everything we've ever done. Yeah, so this is a
Speaker 1: remake of a nineteen thirty seven film. So I actually
Speaker 1: am skeptical that there's a ton of people who are
Speaker 1: still left over from that initial right.
Speaker 7: We hired a lot of the same animators, right, Yeah,
Speaker 7: the union was stronger back then.
Speaker 3: A lot of people with the same mental state as nineteen.
Speaker 1: Fo Yeah, some reason the history kind of rhymes, but
Speaker 1: apparently it's good. Like the early critical reaction is that
Speaker 1: it's like pretty good for a snow White movie, like
Speaker 1: Rachel Ziggler, who is playing playing the titular snow White
Speaker 1: just you know, her star power shines through, according to
Speaker 1: early critics, and Disney's like burying it, which is weird,
Speaker 1: like that the the very opposite of what they did
Speaker 1: with The Lion King, when when it was just like
Speaker 1: the biggest media event of the year for a thing
Speaker 1: that ended up being kind of nothing.
Speaker 2: It's been so many contras, like the fans, there's so
Speaker 2: many loud ass hater fans from the beginning that it's
Speaker 2: just like hammered Disney like into a corner. And then
Speaker 2: on top of that, like the the Rachel Zeggler saying
Speaker 2: things about the movie that people are like, how dare
Speaker 2: she talk up characterize a thing from nineteen thirty seven
Speaker 2: is potentially being backwards?
Speaker 3: Yeah, she says one more thing has changed in a
Speaker 3: hundred years. I'm gonna lose my mind in my thirty
Speaker 3: dollars house.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they are doing the thing that they like move
Speaker 1: the Flash that Ezra Miller Flash Movie did, where they like,
Speaker 1: don't let press come to the premiere, Like they're still
Speaker 1: throwing a premiere, but they're not letting press come to it.
Speaker 3: What just happened earlier this week?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, it's just the movie costs two hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy million dollars.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, is crazy that they're like, you know how
Speaker 7: much snow White costs Fox?
Speaker 3: Right, we bought that Fox.
Speaker 1: We bought that Fox for that that amount of money.
Speaker 2: We bought all of the things a Fox em since
Speaker 2: right right, Yeah, No, it's because even too. The other
Speaker 2: thing that was really telling is like the pre sale
Speaker 2: for the tickets was like only like a week out
Speaker 2: from the premiere, where anytime you have like a supposed
Speaker 2: tent pole film, you're doing more than like a week
Speaker 2: to try and get pre sale figures up. And it
Speaker 2: seemed like very early on maybe people were yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: already gets to like.
Speaker 3: The Avengers Doomsday movie, right, really.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah in the twenty thirties, yeah, yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: then there, Yeah, there's a controversy. Rachel Diggler has said
Speaker 1: some things hugely controversial about the sexual politics of the
Speaker 1: first movie, which, by the way, like going back and
Speaker 1: watching the first movie. I did this for the Bechdel cast.
Speaker 1: Like snow White is only like anytime she does something
Speaker 1: with her own agency, she like knocks herself out, Like
Speaker 1: she like runs into the woods and like knocks herself out.
Speaker 3: Like brning the buttons to a video game.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the only exactly the only good things that happened
Speaker 1: to her is when she's unconscious, Like literally she's unconscious,
Speaker 1: and then all the animals like fall in love with her.
Speaker 1: She's passed out in like the dwarf's bed, and like
Speaker 1: the they are about to like stab her with an
Speaker 1: ice pick and then or with a X pick axe
Speaker 1: pick axe, and like they just fall in love with
Speaker 1: her because she's so pretty when she's asleep. When she's awake,
Speaker 1: she runs into the woods and like knocks herself out
Speaker 1: by like running into branches. She she eats a poison
Speaker 1: the most clearly poisoned apple of all time in the history.
Speaker 3: Even like even Eve was like whoa.
Speaker 2: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa, whoa, whoa.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then the ultimate thing that saves her.
Speaker 1: She's in a coma in like a weird glass coffin
Speaker 1: in the middle of the woods, and like Prince Charman
Speaker 1: comes by and saves her by like falling in love
Speaker 1: with her again because of how pretty she is while
Speaker 1: she's asleep. That that is her superpower is being pretty
Speaker 1: when she's not making decisions or like messing it up
Speaker 1: by being having free will, she's just passed out. It's
Speaker 1: like fucking Bill Cosby wrote the movie. It's really a
Speaker 1: weird and has some weird angles.
Speaker 2: Even like even when she was talking about she's just
Speaker 2: kind of like, yeah, it's a little you know, it's
Speaker 2: like nineteen thirty seven, so yeah, there's some things that yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: yeah yeah, and it's well again, this goes back to
Speaker 2: the racism because she's you know, Colombian and also Polish.
Speaker 2: That why can't they just focus on the Polish side
Speaker 2: and celebrate that, you know what I mean, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's fine, you know, because they.
Speaker 3: Have joke books in their bathrooms, I know.
Speaker 2: But like you look at too, like even when Homegirl,
Speaker 2: who was Hermione, when she played Belle and Beauty and
Speaker 2: the Beast. She also was saying shit about like how
Speaker 2: you know the new Emma Yes, Emma Watson, Yes, thank you,
Speaker 2: super Catherine. She even had things to say about how
Speaker 2: the remake was like that there were just some things
Speaker 2: in the original that she was like, oh, I don't know,
Speaker 2: but that sort of didn't cause the same kind of controversy.
Speaker 2: But again, because everything is all about yes, they tell.
Speaker 7: The difference in immediate reaction to these two actresses just
Speaker 7: really hard for me to find something that could cause
Speaker 7: a knee jerk reaction from someone ready to be upset online.
Speaker 1: So she is being compared to Gal Gado, who is
Speaker 1: that plays the evil Queen Gal Gadot, who has served
Speaker 1: in the idea, literally served in the idea.
Speaker 3: Hey, Daniel day Lewis got into character early.
Speaker 1: Exactly, has been very outspokenly pro Israel since the start
Speaker 1: of the war in Gaza, and Rachel Ziggler, who's just said,
Speaker 1: you know, pro Palestine.
Speaker 3: There needs to be a ceasefire.
Speaker 7: I think that at least the way they could like
Speaker 7: come together is if Gal could get some sort of
Speaker 7: like vertical video song montage video put together to really
Speaker 7: just let us all unite.
Speaker 1: Try try and imagine a world where that happens.
Speaker 7: Never that I will. I will never forget about that.
Speaker 7: That's the turning point in every in celebrity warship as
Speaker 7: a culture, I believe.
Speaker 1: I similarly think that that was a very important event.
Speaker 1: I'm still waiting for the the long read on how
Speaker 1: it came.
Speaker 7: Back to the all of this Snow White reboot is
Speaker 7: shot in front of Galgadot's like pool side cabana where
Speaker 7: she's trying to relate to people.
Speaker 1: That's right. So it also so at the time that
Speaker 1: it came out, Benjapiro was like, I mean, her name
Speaker 1: is snow White, like that, this is white supremacist, and
Speaker 1: that's a good, a good thing, I guess, so much
Speaker 1: so that he started launched his own version of snow
Speaker 1: White because snow White is a public domain starring a
Speaker 1: conservative like YouTube star.
Speaker 3: And I thought you were joking earlier.
Speaker 1: No, no, no. I thought it was like because.
Speaker 7: Bench Sparro likes musicals and stuff, and I remember his
Speaker 7: reaction to Wicked being like a very viral thing. I
Speaker 7: thought you were actually messing with me.
Speaker 1: No no, no, no, no no. He was like, we're gonna
Speaker 1: bring into our own and it's gonna be snow white,
Speaker 1: and she's gonna be really white. By the way, the
Speaker 1: prison just looks the same amount of white as Rachel Tigler.
Speaker 1: It's not like, yeah, it's not like dizzy He's out
Speaker 1: here trying to fight for diversity. But anyways, they put
Speaker 1: out a trailer looked like shit, and that movie fell apart.
Speaker 1: So unfortunately they won't make it. They'd never made it. No, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 2: Of course, of course she's snow white. Other people like
Speaker 2: this is this is an American thing because it's Disney,
Speaker 2: And I'm like, can do you know anything about fucking
Speaker 2: snow white? Do you know who the brother's grim? Are
Speaker 2: they from America?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So Cleveland, I believe, Yeah, yeah, Cleveland and Germany. They
Speaker 3: explained the energy I have while I'm there.
Speaker 1: But yeah, like, it really doesn't makes it if I
Speaker 1: had to guess why Disney is just completely burying a
Speaker 1: movie that costs them two hundred and seventy million dollars,
Speaker 1: whether it's their objection to Gal Gadot being pro Israeli
Speaker 1: or because they're ashamed that Rachel Ziggler says pro Palestine
Speaker 1: things every once in a while and because they're trying.
Speaker 1: They're scared of being criticized by the right during this administration.
Speaker 1: I don't know which side is more likely here, but yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're just it seems somewhat cowardly to me. It's
Speaker 1: also kind of in keeping with their legacy because they've
Speaker 1: kind of been dicks about snow White from the start.
Speaker 1: The actress who voiced snow White was paid twenty dollars
Speaker 1: a day and was not listed, was not listed in
Speaker 1: the credits, and Walt Disney just blackballed her from ever
Speaker 1: appearing in anything ever again, allegedly so that her because
Speaker 1: he was like, that would ruin the snow White illusion.
Speaker 2: Right, That's why I also have her sleeping in this
Speaker 2: glass coffin in the middle of nowhere, and.
Speaker 3: Right every now and then give her water and food. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I just don't want to destroy the illusion. Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's so wild though too. They like that, like that
Speaker 2: old tiny way of doing this. I mean they're still
Speaker 2: blacklisting actors now, what am I saying? But like twenty
Speaker 2: dollars a day is like it's you can make almost
Speaker 2: double that now.
Speaker 3: For voice acting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but yeah, just like for our whole equipment that
Speaker 2: texture of.
Speaker 3: Being like you, I own you and the voice.
Speaker 2: And I can disappear you, my pretty and that's the
Speaker 2: fucking end of it anyway.
Speaker 7: So the actor I'm just reading the die the actress
Speaker 7: who voice also about being Adriana Cascilotti. I'm sorry, no
Speaker 7: one seeing her would change the image of snow white, right,
Speaker 7: I don't even know what she looks like. I'm picturing
Speaker 7: Adriana from the Sopranos, but purely based on name.
Speaker 3: The mystique.
Speaker 7: I guess there were eight movies then, you know they
Speaker 7: were like, well whoa whoahoa, no one can ride that train.
Speaker 3: It came at the screen, do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Right, they were point there's still that point of like
Speaker 1: movies where they're like, we don't want to ruin the.
Speaker 3: Magic translates what Casablanca turns to. Do you know what
Speaker 3: I mean? He's gonna have some real gripes with where
Speaker 3: that movie took y R Right, what if they.
Speaker 1: Were on the other side, I don't know, just just
Speaker 1: spitball in here, but yeah, they're like that. People are
Speaker 1: if if this woman goes out and goes on like
Speaker 1: one one of these talk shows she's people are gonna
Speaker 1: really like literally, Jack Benny invited her to come on
Speaker 1: his radio show and she was like yeah, and then
Speaker 1: they were like, we checked with Walt. Walt says no,
Speaker 1: because then people will think that the drawing is not singing.
Speaker 1: They'll know that you're an actual person.
Speaker 7: And oh, only Walt Disney knew how dumb people are
Speaker 7: falling her deep fakes now where it isn't even the
Speaker 7: actual real person singing a song. Yeah, show him a
Speaker 7: Snapchat filter. Let's blow his frozen head.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, he's probably fucking he'd probably redie. How
Speaker 3: is that a dog? No? I don't have ears like
Speaker 3: that though, or a big puffy snout.
Speaker 1: All right, that's gonna do it for this week's weekly Zeitgeist.
Speaker 1: Please I can review the show if you like. The
Speaker 1: show means the world of Miles. He needs your validation, folks.
Speaker 1: I hope you're having a great weekend and I will
Speaker 1: talk to you Monday. Bye.