Speaker 1: Hello the Internet, and welcome to season two ninety five,
Speaker 1: episode one of Dally's Guys Day. Production by Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: This is a podcast where we take a deep dive
Speaker 1: into America's shared consciousness. And it is Tuesday, July eleventh,
Speaker 1: seven eleven day. Yeah, three slurpees, get them slurpees. It's
Speaker 1: also All American Pet Photo Day, unless that must be
Speaker 1: a company. It's also a National Blueberry Muffin Day, National
Speaker 1: Rainier Cherry Day, Cow Appreciation Day, World Benzo Diazepine Awareness Day,
Speaker 1: Shout Out Benzos. Just like a sponsored placement by Benzos.
Speaker 1: I think it's more just to be like, hey, let's
Speaker 1: be conscious.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like there are adverse effects to, you know, time
Speaker 2: traveling by use of benzo diazepines, World Population Day, and
Speaker 2: National Mohito Day. Don't mix the don't mix the benzos
Speaker 2: with the mohitos.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Please do not worry you will be taken away from
Speaker 2: the world or it'll go from July eleventh to July thirteenth,
Speaker 2: real quick.
Speaker 1: That's right. Well, my name is Jack O'Brien aka Potatoes O'Brien,
Speaker 1: and I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my
Speaker 1: co host.
Speaker 3: Mister Miles grab.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you so much for having me AKA people
Speaker 2: lost Greg Gas there because Jack and I were in
Speaker 2: Las Vegas over the weekend. Shout out everybody who you
Speaker 2: know showed us love out there and all. Just the
Speaker 2: NBA con whole thing was was a good time. I
Speaker 2: bought a Cross Colors bucket hat. Yeah, you take it
Speaker 2: back to eighty nine.
Speaker 3: I bought an.
Speaker 1: Outcast Braves jersey or Outcast Hawk's jersey.
Speaker 3: Tang Nicks jersey. So we were in our elementric millennial mode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, Miles, we are thrilled to be joined in
Speaker 1: air third seat by the best selling author of books
Speaker 1: like John Dies at the End, Zoe Punches the Future,
Speaker 1: and The Dick the Fourth Book, and that John Dies
Speaker 1: at the End franchise if this book exists here in
Speaker 1: the Wrong Universe, and the new Zoe book. He is
Speaker 1: too drunk for this dystopia, which you can pre order
Speaker 1: now October. Drop go out and cop must Cop for
Speaker 1: Parkin fans. He's my former coworker at Crack dot com,
Speaker 1: co creator the Crack Podcast. Welcome back to this show.
Speaker 1: Jason Parjin.
Speaker 4: Says so much about my personality that I perceive that
Speaker 4: I'm on this show all the time. Yeah, because like
Speaker 4: that's how bad I am. Keeping up with people. Is
Speaker 4: a routine for some family member to say, oh, when
Speaker 4: you got to come out, you know, we haven't seen
Speaker 4: you in forever, and I'll be like, man, we were
Speaker 4: just out there for a family a family thing. And
Speaker 4: then I'll look and the family thing was like Christmas
Speaker 4: twenty nineteen, So the same thing here. Like every time
Speaker 4: you invite me on this show, I was like, gosh,
Speaker 4: you know, we can have just it was just on here.
Speaker 4: It's like it has any news happened, And it was
Speaker 4: ten months ago. It was October twenty twenty two when
Speaker 4: I was last on here. But my perception of time,
Speaker 4: I guess because I'm old or because I'm constantly behind
Speaker 4: on deadlines is very strange. So everyone who I've failed
Speaker 4: to keep up with, including all the people in high
Speaker 4: school I've not spoken to since literally high school. Please
Speaker 4: understand from my point of view, it's only been a
Speaker 4: couple months.
Speaker 1: Right, jasus actually tired of seeing you.
Speaker 2: We need a I'm trying to outside of high school.
Speaker 1: Saw you at graduation? All right, guys, Well, when we
Speaker 1: created this new format, we're doing some like longer conversation
Speaker 1: sometimes like you know, book report with author of book
Speaker 1: style things, interview experts. But one of the things, like
Speaker 1: the ideas, we don't have to like be about the
Speaker 1: news for a day. But one of the first things
Speaker 1: I wanted to do is talk to Jason do like
Speaker 1: a deeper thing about a more broad topic. Those one
Speaker 1: of my favorite things we got to do with the
Speaker 1: Crack podcast, And for this one, we're gonna talk about,
Speaker 1: like just broadly the subject of how our brain was
Speaker 1: not designed to deal with the modern world, and like
Speaker 1: the modern world is getting more and more like a
Speaker 1: funhouse mirror for the human brain, just kind of like
Speaker 1: warping and stretching things and magnifying and you know, it's
Speaker 1: the world is more and more complicated, the way we
Speaker 1: interact with it is more and more mediated. So it's
Speaker 1: it is still about the subject that we cover, I think,
Speaker 1: just in more of a macro sense. So that's what
Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about. But first, Jason, we
Speaker 1: do need to get to know you a little bit better.
Speaker 1: It's been ten months. What is something from your search
Speaker 1: history that's revealing about who you are?
Speaker 4: The most recent thing I searched was attractive naked woman.
Speaker 4: Uh huh, So I didn't know if you if you
Speaker 4: could do that on the internet, but you.
Speaker 1: Just found out about that feature.
Speaker 4: Yeah. But then the most telling thing is I had
Speaker 4: just searched the letters xQc because that those letters were
Speaker 4: trending a little bit ago. Because a streamer by the
Speaker 4: name EXCC signed a year, one hundred million dollar deal
Speaker 4: with a new streaming service. Because it turns out he's
Speaker 4: one of the most famous people in the world. And
Speaker 4: yet another example of where one of the most famous
Speaker 4: people in the world flew totally outside my radar because
Speaker 4: they are a streaming personality for the utes and I
Speaker 4: am an extremely old man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm an EXQC head over here.
Speaker 3: No, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 1: I've never seen this person before.
Speaker 2: But wait, platform did they go to?
Speaker 3: I mean I'm aware of one. Yeah, what's the new platform?
Speaker 4: It's called kick, which I thought was already a thing,
Speaker 4: But this is called kick kic K. It is backed
Speaker 4: by a huge online gambling company and they apparently have
Speaker 4: billions to throw around, so they are purchasing a bunch
Speaker 4: of high profile streamers off of Twitch and YouTube and
Speaker 4: the other streaming platforms to get going. Because that's how
Speaker 4: they do it. And this guy got paid one hundred
Speaker 4: million dollars for two years, fifty million a year because
Speaker 4: that is the size of his audience while he played
Speaker 4: video games and chats and eats on camera for ten
Speaker 4: twelve hours in a row.
Speaker 3: There you go.
Speaker 1: Wow, I believe there was a kick, like an attempt
Speaker 1: at a kick social media platform at some point, like
Speaker 1: a decade ago.
Speaker 3: P I K.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was spelled differently and now so now the
Speaker 1: they're like the problem with that one was it's it
Speaker 1: wasn't spelled correctly, And we're going we're zagging where other
Speaker 1: people's Are.
Speaker 4: We leaving the era of tech companies having to be
Speaker 4: misspelled versions of other words like tumboard where they just
Speaker 4: take out like a letter and this is now the
Speaker 4: name of your thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'm like trying to think
Speaker 2: of what the hot is, Like threads is just threads.
Speaker 1: You know, they spelled threads correct with like.
Speaker 2: Th hr ds or something like that, So you know,
Speaker 2: I don't know, it sounds like maybe we're leaving that.
Speaker 1: How's twitch spelled?
Speaker 2: This?
Speaker 3: Twitch?
Speaker 2: Just I know it's like God intended t w T
Speaker 2: and then.
Speaker 1: The old English form, Jason, what's something you think is overrated?
Speaker 4: Loving't you have an opinion on every single thing that
Speaker 4: happens in the news. Yeah, it's okay to just admit
Speaker 4: that you don't know. For example, over the weekend, the
Speaker 4: number one training topic was Jonah Hill. Yeah, because apparently
Speaker 4: some text messages between him and his girlfriend that makes
Speaker 4: it seem like he is very I guess, toxic and
Speaker 4: controlling boyfriend or whatever, And that dominated discussion for like
Speaker 4: a day and a half of everyone having to have
Speaker 4: an opinion of is Jonah Hill a bad boyfriend? And
Speaker 4: I feel like it's okay to just say I don't
Speaker 4: know either of these people. If I tried to approach
Speaker 4: either of them on the street, their bodyguards would just
Speaker 4: rough me up and leave me on the pavement. They
Speaker 4: care nothing about they care nothing about my opinion.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: It feels like you're adding a cognitive load. It's okay
Speaker 4: to say I don't know. I don't know these people.
Speaker 4: Relationships are complicated. You should not be having complex relationship
Speaker 4: discussions over text. In my view, I think that's probably
Speaker 4: bad by itself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm about forty pages in on my opinion that
Speaker 1: I'm writing on the matter. It's kind of like a
Speaker 1: Supreme Court opinion.
Speaker 2: But yeah, and I are working on a huge substack
Speaker 2: entry on this one, just just sort of forensically analyzing
Speaker 2: everything and some of the misspellings. But I think with
Speaker 2: the Jonah Hill thing, it feels like one of those
Speaker 2: things where a lot of people, I think we're kind
Speaker 2: of looking for a reason to not like him, and there's.
Speaker 1: Like an elting Ris factor where yeah, like people fun
Speaker 1: in the scenes have been like he's kind of a dick, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were so many people who are like, I'm
Speaker 2: not surprised. It's like do you even need to tweet that?
Speaker 2: But also that's where we are. I think the other
Speaker 2: version of this Jason that I saw a lot of
Speaker 2: was especially during the Ocean Gate Titanic Submarine thing, where
Speaker 2: suddenly people became like atmospheric scientists, like out of nowhere,
Speaker 2: and I was like, really, like, you're going out there
Speaker 2: with your chest out, like with this opinion about what
Speaker 2: crush depths are, when your previous tweets have been about like,
Speaker 2: you know, puppies in different like Naruto wigs.
Speaker 4: Okay, I feel like there's a pressure people put in
Speaker 4: themselves to feel like they need to have a strong
Speaker 4: strident stance on something, and even if it's something you
Speaker 4: agree with, people will keep trying to find more and
Speaker 4: more technical things. You know, for example, I think racism
Speaker 4: is bad. I think more opportunities should be given to minorities.
Speaker 4: Once you start getting into the fine minutia of how
Speaker 4: Ivy League schools do their affirmative action, right, I don't know,
Speaker 4: you're starting to get out of my depth. If like, well,
Speaker 4: do you think the legacy admissions should be done at this?
Speaker 4: I would need a year to properly educate myself to
Speaker 4: give you an actual opinion. Can I just revert back
Speaker 4: to I think racism is bad and that I'm not
Speaker 4: going to stay here a pretend to understand. And I
Speaker 4: feel like every argument eventually gets to that point where
Speaker 4: it's like I believe in trans right, It's like, well,
Speaker 4: do you think it's okay for a six year old
Speaker 4: to go on puberty blockers? I'm not a doctor. That's
Speaker 4: a discussion with your I don't even know what that is.
Speaker 4: And if you'd say you know what that is, I
Speaker 4: think you're lying too. Yeah, And it's like they keep
Speaker 4: trying to find finer and finer points of like so
Speaker 4: we can finally have something we can nail at each
Speaker 4: other and about fists. Like, man, when you hear a
Speaker 4: subject that you know, like from your work, and you
Speaker 4: hear outsiders yelling about it, they sound so stupid, And
Speaker 4: then you have to realize it to people who actually
Speaker 4: understand submarines, how dumb we all sounded. But it's like
Speaker 4: all these these idiots should have known not to go
Speaker 4: on that things like I wouldn't they charged me.
Speaker 1: I The obsession with that story came from everyone was
Speaker 1: like I wouldn't have gone on that ship.
Speaker 2: A lot of people were like it had a PlayStation controller,
Speaker 2: and then like a few navel people are like people
Speaker 2: you like, those are peripheral devices that are even used
Speaker 2: on like very expensive things, Like it's not don't just
Speaker 2: use that as your example to say that this whole
Speaker 2: thing was a fucked up operation.
Speaker 4: Do you understand that there's like a billion dollars in
Speaker 4: research and development that went into that controller to come
Speaker 4: up with that design, Like Sony did not just crap
Speaker 4: that thing out. That's been iterated across like twenty years
Speaker 4: of play testing and everything else, right, Like they have
Speaker 4: the finest there are more experts designing those controllers, and
Speaker 4: there are designing submarines that it's that pressure to feel
Speaker 4: like you have to And then the people yelling about well,
Speaker 4: do they deserve it because they're rich? It's like there's
Speaker 4: nuance there. The guy running the sub company was a
Speaker 4: dumb ass. But did the nineteen year old kid who
Speaker 4: was invited to go on as he did he deserve
Speaker 4: to die. It's like he went because his dad took him.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: But you know, you know, you're not required to hold
Speaker 4: an opinion on everything. You can feel that weight just
Speaker 4: roll off your shoulders if you just admit, yes, this
Speaker 4: is a thing that happens. It has zero impact on
Speaker 4: my life at all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not much I can personally do about it. As
Speaker 1: I mean, it kind of touches on what we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about later. What's something you think is underrated?
Speaker 3: Old Twitter?
Speaker 4: Here's a trend that drives me crazy, where when a
Speaker 4: thing exists, we do nothing but complain about it. We
Speaker 4: used to call Twitter the hell site, and then the
Speaker 4: moment somebody comes in and changes it or ruins it,
Speaker 4: it's endless nostalgia for the wonderful old thing. So it's
Speaker 4: just negative emotion the whole time.
Speaker 3: I hate it.
Speaker 4: I hate it. I hate it. Well, where to go?
Speaker 4: My life sucks now that it's gone. It's like, okay, well,
Speaker 4: if you miss it that much, can you admit that
Speaker 4: it brought something positive to your life before? Then?
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I don't know. I like the new one.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm kind of kind of a fan of this
Speaker 1: musk guy. I want to see what he's what he's
Speaker 1: doing with this thing. These guys might fuck.
Speaker 2: It's wobbling like crazy now, like with the kind of
Speaker 2: things that I see getting, Like on the suggested part
Speaker 2: where you're like, I don't do you want to put
Speaker 2: like straight up neo Nazi holocaust Denisle tweets in front
Speaker 2: of me like this right now, Like okay, all right, Twitter,
Speaker 2: But I mean to be fair, you were getting that
Speaker 2: even before Elon, just more now they have blue check.
Speaker 1: Marks, right, it's easier to differentiate.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean to be clear, he has broken it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he has completely broken it, and like it from
Speaker 1: that respect, just like appreciating all the work and all
Speaker 1: the things that were happening behind the scenes to make
Speaker 1: a site that large, like operational is definitely something I've
Speaker 1: learned to appreciate in the past weeks months. Yeah, it's yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to think, what was the last thing we
Speaker 2: were all like just complaining about and then the second
Speaker 2: it got like messed, they're like, oh, now you ruin
Speaker 2: the thing we hate, like because it is true and
Speaker 2: it does feel like this very you know, like part
Speaker 2: of our human nature to do this kind of shit.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's every time they update any kind of software.
Speaker 4: It's I don't know, it's every time there's a sequel
Speaker 4: to a game, it always gets negatively compared to the
Speaker 4: previous game in the series. But when it was out,
Speaker 4: all people talked about how they had ruined it. It's
Speaker 4: a fucked it's a weird it's a weird cycle. But
Speaker 4: I guess, you know, in a broader sense, like if
Speaker 4: my WiFi goes down, that ruins my life for however
Speaker 4: long it's down right, like if I have it, But
Speaker 4: when it comes back up, I don't feel joy of like, yes,
Speaker 4: the modern miracle is back. I have access to all
Speaker 4: of the universe's knowledge again.
Speaker 3: Right, it's just like all right, it's likely.
Speaker 4: I can do all the do all my miserable work
Speaker 4: out that it's back up. I don't know. We this
Speaker 4: is probably pick these on purpose because that plays into
Speaker 4: what we're going to talk about, where it's like you
Speaker 4: frame it in the most the most distressing manner in
Speaker 4: both directions.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I even I've heard like people wait
Speaker 1: in interviews with NBA champions, like they talk about like
Speaker 1: the phenomenon you just described of like the losses hurt
Speaker 1: worse than like winning the championship. Like, I think there's
Speaker 1: something psychological to that, like risk reward sort of system
Speaker 1: that we've all we've all put ourselves into a little bit.
Speaker 2: But yeah, well I think, yeah, that that seems like
Speaker 2: more of like yeah, like it like that's sort of
Speaker 2: definitely from our like evolutionary psychology aspect of like we
Speaker 2: had to know about like the threats of things around us,
Speaker 2: so those things stuck with us longer than like oh,
Speaker 2: this pleasant flower. It's like no, that animal, dangerous predator.
Speaker 3: Run. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yes, the fear has to be stronger than the promise
Speaker 4: of ward. It's the carrot and the stick thing, right, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or you get lazy, you get lazy, exactly. I've
Speaker 1: never liked carrots enough for that trick to work on me.
Speaker 1: I've always said, you know, getting beat with a stick
Speaker 1: and then giving me carrot as the only other the
Speaker 1: only reward. You know, it's been tried many times.
Speaker 2: Yeah, quick life, if there's someone dangling a carrot on
Speaker 2: a stick, just look behind you and just deck that full.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and just take this and just take their whole ship. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's the trick to that one.
Speaker 4: All right, give me to the storehouse where you keep
Speaker 4: the carrots.
Speaker 3: That's right? What what you heard me? Motherfucker?
Speaker 1: All right, let's take a quick break and we'll come
Speaker 1: back and keep talking about this. We'll be right back,
Speaker 1: and we're back and back in our crack days. I
Speaker 1: worked on an article about like cognitive biases that affect
Speaker 1: our ability to understand money, and like the piece really
Speaker 1: like zoomed in on examples of how traditional media interacts
Speaker 1: with a brain that was designed millions of years ago
Speaker 1: for an animal that was trying to survive the food chain,
Speaker 1: and like, our brain is designed to process like fairly
Speaker 1: simple visual stimuli in a pretty straightforward way. That tree
Speaker 1: has fruit on it, Remember that tree? And then you know,
Speaker 1: the point in the article was, like if you only
Speaker 1: show the person who won the lottery on TV and
Speaker 1: not the you know, billions of people who lose the
Speaker 1: lottery every day. It creates a imprint of like that's
Speaker 1: the fruit tree, that's that's the place to go, and
Speaker 1: like that is so basic, that's such a basic thing
Speaker 1: that just feels like so quaint and antiqu antiquated compared
Speaker 1: to the modern world that we're existing, where the increasing
Speaker 1: use of AI to create intentionally false stories, use of
Speaker 1: like technology really seems to be accelerating things to in
Speaker 1: some cases like make them worse or at least there's
Speaker 1: a feeling that that is the case in like day
Speaker 1: to day our day to day lives. And so we
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about kind of all the ways that
Speaker 1: the modern world is sort of this funhouse mirror that
Speaker 1: our brand's ability to interact with it it like just
Speaker 1: warps and stretches, and it's not going well. It seems
Speaker 1: like based on some of these statistics that you pulled.
Speaker 4: Jason, Well, I wanted to pull some stance because when
Speaker 4: we talk about like people being anxious or depressed or
Speaker 4: whatever these days, it's not just talking about vibes, Like
Speaker 4: you can look at the statistics. So suicide rates been
Speaker 4: climbing in the USA for the last twenty years. Around
Speaker 4: two thousand is when most of these trends started to
Speaker 4: skew higher. That is a distinctly American phenomenon. Most other
Speaker 4: country suicide rates have been steadily falling. This is an
Speaker 4: American thing, but there's a large number they call deaths
Speaker 4: of despair where they lump together suicide, alcohol debts, drug
Speaker 4: related deaths, and all of that has skewed up since
Speaker 4: two thousand and then since around twenty ten has started
Speaker 4: to like most of them have kind of started to spike.
Speaker 4: Now part of you you mentioned, like the deaths of
Speaker 4: the drug overdose deaths. Some of that is separately just
Speaker 4: the opioid epidemic and fentanyl, but also some of those
Speaker 4: overdoses are intentional, but if there's no note left behind,
Speaker 4: they just put it down as overdose because of course, how.
Speaker 3: Do you know?
Speaker 4: So that's and so. And then anxiety and depression both
Speaker 4: have been rising up, specifically among the youth again going
Speaker 4: back to around two thousand and nine twenty ten. Now
Speaker 4: there's two ways people interpret this that are controversial. You
Speaker 4: can either say that these things have been going up
Speaker 4: in the Internet era and then have accelerated in the
Speaker 4: smartphone era, or you can say, well, these things have
Speaker 4: gone up since nine to eleven and accelerated since the
Speaker 4: financial crisis of two thousand and eight. When we start
Speaker 4: talking about how the media and smartphones and all those
Speaker 4: things make people more anxious, this upsets people because the
Speaker 4: response is always, well, we're not anxious because of phones.
Speaker 4: We're anxious because the world is on fire. Our assertion
Speaker 4: is not that there are no problems in the world.
Speaker 4: Our assertion, or at least mine, is that the way media,
Speaker 4: the media environment, is one of those problems. It's one
Speaker 4: of those things that make things worse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there's a lot of things, like all
Speaker 1: the things that you were saying, like the world is
Speaker 1: on fire nine to eleven, the economic collapse, and then
Speaker 1: also having devices in our hands feeding us a steady
Speaker 1: stream of media that's like specifically tailored to us and
Speaker 1: specifically based on preferences of what makes us angriest or
Speaker 1: most frightened. Like those things can't be good. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there's miles You pulled an Al Jazeera story
Speaker 1: about like outrage headlines increasing.
Speaker 2: Well, because I mean, yeah, again, like we're there's so
Speaker 2: many facets of how we end up with bad vibes.
Speaker 2: The bad vibes decades uh trademarked, but yeah, like I
Speaker 2: think one of them is, you know, like this is
Speaker 2: some version of like mean world syndrome where a lot
Speaker 2: of your media diet are just giving you sort of
Speaker 2: an over emphasis on the terrible things that are happening,
Speaker 2: which can just lead to like being more cynical or
Speaker 2: just being like what the fuck.
Speaker 3: Is going on?
Speaker 2: And yeah, like with Al Jazeera, they analyze like headlines,
Speaker 2: like like tens of thousands of headlines from twenty to
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen just to see what the emotional charge of
Speaker 2: was of some of these headlines, and they've noticed that
Speaker 2: things have just gotten more and more increasingly negative since
Speaker 2: the year two thousand, like you know, headlines that say
Speaker 2: like quote Brazil prison riot leaves nine dead rather than
Speaker 2: things like a new lens restores vision and brings relief.
Speaker 3: And we're seeing just that sort of that.
Speaker 2: Rise in those kinds of headlines be equally sort of
Speaker 2: distributed between the right and left, but there is there
Speaker 2: is an edge on the right, like with conservative media
Speaker 2: definitely having those, you know, a bigger emphasis on the
Speaker 2: fear based kind of headline. And I feel the same
Speaker 2: way too, Like because reading as much news as I do,
Speaker 2: or we have to making this show like that absolutely
Speaker 2: has an effect on me. But then you kind of
Speaker 2: have to take a step back and like, what are
Speaker 2: the statistics saying you're actually getting something completely different?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, but the headlines.
Speaker 4: And again note that there's the year two thousand again
Speaker 4: when going back to the origin of that, what was
Speaker 4: driven by that was the death of news being a
Speaker 4: print medium versus news being an online medium, because again
Speaker 4: with newspaper headlines, like of course, once pon a time
Speaker 4: they had to sell papers that now individual stories have
Speaker 4: to get clicked on. Yeah, and very very quickly, just
Speaker 4: through ab testing. Again there's no conspiracy here. Just through
Speaker 4: tracking user behavior, they figured out that the more emotionally
Speaker 4: charged I mean, we saw this cracked, the more emotionally
Speaker 4: charged headline gets clicked. So now every individual headline because
Speaker 4: you know, once upon a time you'd have a newspaper
Speaker 4: with a big headline across the top, you know, Nixon
Speaker 4: goes to jail or whatever. I don't think Nixon never
Speaker 4: actually went with the other Yeah, yeah, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Would have sold papers and it would have been a
Speaker 1: headline in the modern.
Speaker 4: Area, and then a lot of the other headlines would
Speaker 4: be very boring and straightforward city council votes to do whatever. Well, now,
Speaker 4: if you want people to click on that boring city
Speaker 4: council story, if it's your job as a journalist get
Speaker 4: people to click, there's got to be an angle on
Speaker 4: there that's going to get people mad. And so beyond
Speaker 4: the examples you gave here, you have the news, you know,
Speaker 4: the actual news organization's gathering news. But then you have
Speaker 4: the aggregators of the content like Coffington Post, BuzzFeed, Vox,
Speaker 4: all of these sites that basically would take the headline
Speaker 4: and then do a little blog post about it, and
Speaker 4: those titles would be things like, you know, if you're
Speaker 4: not paying attention to this, you're not angry enough, or
Speaker 4: this clip is going to leave you outraged when you
Speaker 4: see how they treated this disabled man at McDonald's, you're
Speaker 4: going to be furious, Like literally putting the emotion in
Speaker 4: the headline. If you're not mad, you're not a good person, right,
Speaker 4: and making that part of the ethos of the time
Speaker 4: that it's like, if you want to be a good
Speaker 4: person who cares about the world, you must be angry
Speaker 4: all the time because there's so much there's so much
Speaker 4: injustice or whatever. Never Mind that that doesn't help that
Speaker 4: person in the video. Never Mind that you're watching a
Speaker 4: clip from three years ago and everyone has forgotten about it.
Speaker 4: It doesn't matter. It has bubbled up on Reddit and
Speaker 4: now everybody's mad again to no effect, Like it's not
Speaker 4: motivating you to help this person.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What one old, outdated technology I think we're underrating is newsies.
Speaker 1: These headlines are doing. You know, newsies just used to
Speaker 1: yell at you to read the newspaper and people would
Speaker 1: just listen because they were scared of the newsies. But
Speaker 1: now they have to scare us with the actual content
Speaker 1: of the headline, and then I think, you know, we've
Speaker 1: also talked recently about how the number of people who
Speaker 1: identify with a religion or involved in a religion, and
Speaker 1: the number of people who have access to or regular
Speaker 1: contact with a community like both are just on an
Speaker 1: all time low and going lower. And so I think
Speaker 1: that there's a broad kind of you can call it
Speaker 1: spiritual or like broadly psychological level more than ever before,
Speaker 1: where we don't have access to answering some of the
Speaker 1: big questions, and so like we speculated in past one
Speaker 1: of these like kind of broad episodes about the idea
Speaker 1: that like maybe stand culture is coming from that this
Speaker 1: need to sublimate ourselves to something higher and like some
Speaker 1: mythical like godhead figure or like leader person like because
Speaker 1: we're not getting that anywhere else, and so like we
Speaker 1: get stand culture or the stories of the movies that
Speaker 1: make an imprint on us when we're very young, like
Speaker 1: Star Wars or you know, Harry Potter, the Matrix, Like
Speaker 1: these are our mythical stories that we have chosen to
Speaker 1: kind of put put ourselves like derive our meaning from.
Speaker 1: And that that actually made a lot of sense of
Speaker 1: how people react, like how Star Wars fans are like
Speaker 1: fandoms react like there is a religious war when something
Speaker 1: happens that doesn't cohere to the dogma that they were
Speaker 1: raised on. But I think there's a lot of like
Speaker 1: kind of grasping for meaning as technology has isolated us
Speaker 1: from one another and from the communities that used to
Speaker 1: allow people to sort of dissolve their sense of self
Speaker 1: into like a broader, less kind of self centered way
Speaker 1: of viewing the world. And I mean, yeah, we were
Speaker 1: talking about like consumer culture as like kind of another
Speaker 1: example of where we see this, I mean with with
Speaker 1: I guess stand culture is one example of that, but consumerism,
Speaker 1: people have become like very serious consumers, like to like
Speaker 1: on a deep, deeply personal level.
Speaker 2: I feel like, yeah, because I mean like to your point,
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't you know, the lack of religion
Speaker 2: or I think the sense of community more than like finding.
Speaker 2: I mean, people are finding meaning in other things, but
Speaker 2: I don't know how many people are explicitly like I
Speaker 2: just at least something that kind of explains everything. And
Speaker 2: I think the way we pivot to that is just
Speaker 2: to find, like you say, like because we feel so
Speaker 2: isolated where we want to find community in these other
Speaker 2: ways that like interesting to us. Because I'm not interested
Speaker 2: in religion, yeah, but I'm interested in Arsenal Football club,
Speaker 2: and that is the closest way I begin to devote
Speaker 2: myself to something that's like part like there's group, there's
Speaker 2: like a in group where I'm trying to be like
Speaker 2: identify with these other supporters.
Speaker 3: I go through the.
Speaker 2: Religious ceremonies of like watching the matches and getting very
Speaker 2: emotional as I watch them, and be very like emotionally
Speaker 2: moved when things go up or down and so like
Speaker 2: I find that like most people have like a topic
Speaker 2: where they will bring that sort of level of like
Speaker 2: devotion to, you know, like what they're paying attention to
Speaker 2: and what they're willing to debate people on, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Because yeah, like we're all we're all just trying to
Speaker 2: find something that like feels good and helps us feel
Speaker 2: connected at the end of the day at least certainly
Speaker 2: that I can speak for myself in that very narrow example.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is.
Speaker 4: Something else where you can tract in statistics, like the
Speaker 4: average number of friends and close friends a person has
Speaker 4: again has been dropping since the nineties, and it is
Speaker 4: just the people used to meet their friends at church,
Speaker 4: They used to meet their friends at the office, and
Speaker 4: now a lot of people work at home, you know.
Speaker 4: And that's the thing where we can sit here and
Speaker 4: talk about as like a mystical thing, like there's no
Speaker 4: sense of unity or community or whatever, but from just
Speaker 4: a practical point of view, having a friend who will
Speaker 4: give you a ride to the airport, or who will
Speaker 4: help you move or you know, like just as in
Speaker 4: a practical manner, we that's part of what people don't
Speaker 4: get this, It's part of what a church provided like
Speaker 4: the church when one person got sick and couldn't work,
Speaker 4: the other members of the church would bring food to
Speaker 4: their house. They would come help them clean like that
Speaker 4: was and you did it because it's like, hey, we
Speaker 4: all are Baptists or whatever, and we are all on
Speaker 4: the same team.
Speaker 3: And it was.
Speaker 4: That's something that is humans do everywhere that you find
Speaker 4: humans as we organize and get together, but we usually
Speaker 4: have to have something to rally around, a symbol or
Speaker 4: something a tree, this tree siping. We all yeah, whatever
Speaker 4: it is, you know. And unfortunately that also makes us
Speaker 4: go to war with one another. If you see somebody
Speaker 4: in a Red Sox jersey and you're like a Yankee
Speaker 4: fan and then it's like, all right, let's let's go
Speaker 4: punch that guy. But when you talk about and there's
Speaker 4: a term that is for the modern situation, which is atomization,
Speaker 4: where you've adomized people, where now if you need a
Speaker 4: ride to the airport, you're going to you know, pay
Speaker 4: for an uber and so many of these things that
Speaker 4: used to be stuff that friends would do. It's like, well,
Speaker 4: now it's a corporation doing it for you. And I'm
Speaker 4: not saying that the friends you know purely online aren't
Speaker 4: your real friends, but it's a different type of friendship.
Speaker 4: If it's somebody who you can't call when you've broken
Speaker 4: your leg, you need somebody go get groceries for you,
Speaker 4: or vice versa. If you're not the person that like,
Speaker 4: you feel obligator to do that because they're my friend,
Speaker 4: like they depend on me. It means something to be needed,
Speaker 4: to be dependent on, Like to get in a situation
Speaker 4: where nobody depends on you. I'm like, I don't have
Speaker 4: children or whatever, but like I don't have friends where
Speaker 4: that friend's gonna call me in the middle of I said, hey,
Speaker 4: I need you to come bail me out of jail.
Speaker 4: Like that sucks in the moment, but knowing that somebody
Speaker 4: needs you is what keeps you going. When you're that
Speaker 4: isolated from real life connections, it's too easy to just
Speaker 4: drift away. Humans need to be needed. Do we need
Speaker 4: that actual in real life connection.
Speaker 2: Which is interesting too because I see this, like on
Speaker 2: TikTok more and more of people posting like these strategies
Speaker 2: that come off as like the most manipulative sort of
Speaker 2: like sadistic things where they talk about it's like you
Speaker 2: got to be needed, and that's how you do It's
Speaker 2: how you develop even deeper relationships. I do this thing
Speaker 2: with my wife where I unhook the chain from the
Speaker 2: toilet handle so she'll need me, and when the toilet
Speaker 2: isn't working, she will then associate me with someone who
Speaker 2: can come and solve a problem, and then that helps
Speaker 2: create a deeper love. And you're like, oh my god,
Speaker 2: and people are like really like, I mean, it's that
Speaker 2: that's a kind of fringe element of TikTok, But more
Speaker 2: and more people are taking these sort of things and
Speaker 2: sort of finding ways to like manufacture these kinds of
Speaker 2: connections because they aren't happening like normally either, And you're
Speaker 2: kind of like this sounds like sociopathic. But on the
Speaker 2: other side of it, you can see people sort of
Speaker 2: like yearning for like, yeah, how do I cultivate a
Speaker 2: deeper connection? Do I need to sort of gaslight this person?
Speaker 2: And then thinking that the toilet never works and I'm
Speaker 2: the the like magical fixer of that. But again, like
Speaker 2: you see it expressed in so many ways of that
Speaker 2: there is this deeper human thing lacking.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, then a system from it's always sunny
Speaker 4: in Philadelphia, right, right if you don't know that reference.
Speaker 1: Right, But a strange like when one of your human
Speaker 1: interactions most common human interactions is like an uber driver,
Speaker 1: like a person a stranger you can put on quiet
Speaker 1: mode like when you're having a conversation with them. Then
Speaker 1: it makes sense to me that that sort of manipulation
Speaker 1: and viewing other people as a means to an end
Speaker 1: could bleed into how you view like other other parts
Speaker 1: of your life. Right if everything's just sort of a
Speaker 1: transactional and I mean they talk about this new sort
Speaker 1: of information and also like just day to day economy
Speaker 1: as being a way to reduce the friction of that
Speaker 1: like got in the way of some of our consumer
Speaker 1: like spending habits, and like friction in many cases seems
Speaker 1: to be human interaction. So I think one thing we're
Speaker 1: going to say overall human interaction good. Find ways to
Speaker 1: be part of a community, you know, preferably one that
Speaker 1: needs you and gives you meaning.
Speaker 4: My Also, next time you go on TikTok, like there's
Speaker 4: a meta narrative and that video you saw because that
Speaker 4: algorithm floated up to you a video where the actual
Speaker 4: message was people are crazy out there and relationships are weird.
Speaker 4: And toxic these days, you would be shocked at what
Speaker 4: percentage of the feed is some subtle message, some subtle
Speaker 4: version of out there is dangerous.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: Guys are sexist, women are crazy, Their standards are super high.
Speaker 4: You'll be accused of sexual harassment if you ever try
Speaker 4: to talk to a woman in any setting. And there's
Speaker 4: this meta message of the only safe place is at
Speaker 4: home looking at a screen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, women out there and sees people who aren't there,
Speaker 1: which just as you mentioned as a video, like it's
Speaker 1: a person having a mental health episode. That was everywhere
Speaker 1: for like a week, and I never would have seen
Speaker 1: thirty you know, twenty maybe like ten years ago.
Speaker 4: You know, there was a time when that wouldn't have
Speaker 4: even shown up in like the police blaughter your local paper.
Speaker 4: It was a non event. Somebody threw a fit on it,
Speaker 4: but because it was captured on camera. But the message
Speaker 4: is it's scary to fly. There's crazy people out there,
Speaker 4: and any conservative news like you, if you look at
Speaker 4: the comments on any conservative news outlet, it's like, well,
Speaker 4: I won't even drive through this city like it's just
Speaker 4: mac It's like, no, it's not.
Speaker 3: I've been.
Speaker 4: There's people walking around and shopping and eating the restaurants.
Speaker 1: Bit.
Speaker 4: It's like, no, from from their point of view, it's
Speaker 4: just cars on fire, smashed windows. Like if you are
Speaker 4: a white person, the minorities will just drag you off
Speaker 4: the street because they all it's Antifa and the Black
Speaker 4: Lives Matter. It's like, you've got such a weird view
Speaker 4: of the world. But it's all you're only safe at home.
Speaker 4: Like you have people living in the middle of whatever,
Speaker 4: Oklahoma or Montana, someplace where they haven't had a violent crime,
Speaker 4: and you know, like in six months, where they've got
Speaker 4: cameras all over the out side of their house and
Speaker 4: they've got a shotgun under their bed because they're sure
Speaker 4: that at any moment a gang of twenty five guys
Speaker 4: is going to come try to take over their house
Speaker 4: because it's something they saw on the news. It's like, well,
Speaker 4: you know, like in Portland and the Walgreens, old just
Speaker 4: have like twenty five looters show up and steal everything
Speaker 4: that could happen to me at any time here in
Speaker 4: North Dakota.
Speaker 3: Right, It's like, and you see when you see.
Speaker 4: Their fear and how irrational it is from the outside,
Speaker 4: your fear also looks like that to someone else, like
Speaker 4: we all have been put into kind of a little
Speaker 4: a little box, a little fear box.
Speaker 2: Well, I think, like to your point, like especially about
Speaker 2: like I think of things like reddit right, and the
Speaker 2: subreddit public Freakout. There's like a subreddit called public freakout
Speaker 2: that's really popular and it's mostly a lot of people
Speaker 2: just having some kind of like mental health crisis or
Speaker 2: something like that, or just some wild thing that's going on.
Speaker 2: But when you think about like when you're like a kid,
Speaker 2: I remember being like, oh, what's the ocean like? Or
Speaker 2: I'm trying to like, you know, draw on experiences I have.
Speaker 2: Most of them are like media rest friends to memories
Speaker 2: I have like of a movie or something I saw
Speaker 2: on TV that was forming even my own concept of
Speaker 2: what something was. And now that we have like video
Speaker 2: that's like irl type sort of video from cameras that
Speaker 2: sort of that ups the stakes even more where people
Speaker 2: begin to associate well, I did see this one clip
Speaker 2: of this thing happening in this place, Now that that
Speaker 2: is exactly what is going to happen to me and
Speaker 2: has this effect of just ramping up these fears and
Speaker 2: like a good like you know. An example of this
Speaker 2: is like you're saying, Jason, Like, especially on conservative news,
Speaker 2: the way they portray certain cities and what quote unquote
Speaker 2: crime waves are happening. That has this effect on us
Speaker 2: just as human beings, where the more we're put into
Speaker 2: a fear state, the more malleable we become. And also
Speaker 2: it we inch closer and closer to being in a
Speaker 2: mindset or a mind state where solving things violently is
Speaker 2: acceptable because we see just how fucked up and like
Speaker 2: agro and violent the world is, and just looking at
Speaker 2: all of those things on each other, it's like, at
Speaker 2: some point for me, like I realized that the way
Speaker 2: to even break that kind of cycle was first just
Speaker 2: to have awareness because a lot of the time, if
Speaker 2: I am getting caught up on what I read in
Speaker 2: the headlines, it it feeds on like, you know, I
Speaker 2: start ruminating on things that aren't actually necessarily helpful to
Speaker 2: me because it's also not the reality. Because we talk
Speaker 2: about the quote unquote crime waves that were that everyone
Speaker 2: wanted to talk about in the last year that just
Speaker 2: didn't exist, and it's it's much easier to be like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I know I'm seeing a lot of like over emphasis
Speaker 2: on these like visually really like you know, uh, provocative
Speaker 2: images and videos, but that's not actually that's not that's
Speaker 2: not the most accurate depiction on what on what is happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's specifically like designed that way. It's specifically
Speaker 1: based on like it's nothing is based on reality as
Speaker 1: much as it's based on what is going to feed.
Speaker 1: Like nobody was sitting back and being like, what we're
Speaker 1: going to make up a crime wave. It was that
Speaker 1: people's like that that was the story that made people
Speaker 1: have the most scared reaction, and therefore they clicked on it,
Speaker 1: and therefore they got more of it and the media
Speaker 1: you know, keeps feeding them. All Right, let's let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break and we'll come back. We'll talk about climate,
Speaker 1: which I think plays into this in a bunch of ways,
Speaker 1: and also just you know, are there solutions, like what
Speaker 1: can we do?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 1: Then nothing and we're back. So one thing that we've
Speaker 1: talked about in the past, like specifically, I think it
Speaker 1: came up when we were covering the really disheartening trends
Speaker 1: in the mental health of young people. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think for a long time screens were being blamed
Speaker 1: kind of exclusively and then in this latest round, it
Speaker 1: seemed like people were still on screens, but they started
Speaker 1: like bringing the environment into the conversation. And that makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense to me that there is a
Speaker 1: unprecedented like when we talk about like these are things
Speaker 1: that we didn't have to deal with thirty years ago,
Speaker 1: the climate crisis, and like the amount of things that
Speaker 1: are going to need to change in order to address
Speaker 1: it and make the world like habitable for the next
Speaker 1: century is this massive looming threat. So I think going
Speaker 1: into this, I was like nobody's doing anything about it,
Speaker 1: or at least like the you know, corporations are making
Speaker 1: it so it's incredibly hard to do anything about it.
Speaker 1: And I spent the weekend like researching things like Kim
Speaker 1: Stanley Robinson, the author of Ministry for the Future, who
Speaker 1: is like, you know, a leftist who knows more about
Speaker 1: climate policy than I do, and he you know, underlines
Speaker 1: some of the reasons for concern, but he also has
Speaker 1: reasons for hope that I hadn't felt as hopeful about,
Speaker 1: like some of the economic solutions that some of the
Speaker 1: investment that is happening already like seems to be encouraging
Speaker 1: to him, And so you know, it's it's frustrating to
Speaker 1: be hurtling towards a disaster and have like The New
Speaker 1: York Times doing sponsor content for BP. But you know,
Speaker 1: in addition to the investment opportunities that are like helping
Speaker 1: you know, get the amount of money that's being invested
Speaker 1: into making things more sustainable. I feel like one of
Speaker 1: the things I took away from doing that research is
Speaker 1: that there's also like a more meaningful life I think
Speaker 1: waiting for us when the world is able to accept
Speaker 1: the challenge of like the changing the world from the
Speaker 1: current system into what it's going to need to be
Speaker 1: for the survival of the species or like you know,
Speaker 1: well maybe we'll have that acceptance like thrust onto us
Speaker 1: by like a series of worsening climate disasters. But just
Speaker 1: like thinking about that as like the operational you know,
Speaker 1: thing that could give like generations to come meaning I
Speaker 1: think is at least like somewhat in the context that
Speaker 1: we're talking about, Like it feels like, I guess somewhat
Speaker 1: hopeful if we can find a way to bring that
Speaker 1: change in because like there you know, when there is
Speaker 1: a tragedy, when there's a hurricane or massive flood, like
Speaker 1: people work together with like their community with like their
Speaker 1: their neighbor who they thought they hated, and like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's meaning and there's there's work being done that actually
Speaker 1: has results and helps helps people. So yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it feels like we're going to buy necessity need to
Speaker 1: address some of this stuff in the coming years, Like
Speaker 1: we to avoid the disasters, we probably need to be
Speaker 1: further along than we already are. But I could see
Speaker 1: a more meaningful world where where like some of the
Speaker 1: solutions to these problems that we're talking about actually are necessary.
Speaker 4: I guess that's kind of my point though it was
Speaker 4: just if But if you're out there listening to this,
Speaker 4: if believing that we are in the end times, if
Speaker 4: that motivates you to be like a better person, Like
Speaker 4: if you're going out and learning every possible new skill
Speaker 4: because you're like, hey, thirty years from now, I'm going
Speaker 4: to need to know how to do all this stuff,
Speaker 4: and I'm gonna need to be physically in good shape.
Speaker 4: I'm going to need to be able to you know,
Speaker 4: because there may not be doctors around. I'm going to
Speaker 4: need to be able to take care of my neighbors.
Speaker 4: I'm going to need to be strong that fine. If
Speaker 4: that's if that's not what I'm seeing the stance that
Speaker 4: we shared earlier. If the message you're getting from the
Speaker 4: news you're taking in is we're screwed, so why bother
Speaker 4: And you find yourself just glued to the sofa and
Speaker 4: doom scrolling on a screen, that to me is the
Speaker 4: same thing as if I had a friend who had
Speaker 4: a wife and family and the guy was just on
Speaker 4: the sofa all day. He'd quit his job. He's not
Speaker 4: doing not cleaning the house, not doing anything, And I
Speaker 4: asked him why. He's like, well, well, because I'm going
Speaker 4: to die one day. Like once I became aware of
Speaker 4: my mortality, Well, what's the point. What's the point of
Speaker 4: doing anything? Like you would not the way you try
Speaker 4: to comfort him would not be well, you don't know.
Speaker 4: Maybe they'll cure death, Maybe they'll you'll be able to
Speaker 4: upload your brain to a machine. You would say to him, Look,
Speaker 4: you have a wife and child, you have friends, You
Speaker 4: need to you need to work this out. Yes, we're
Speaker 4: all going to die someday. This has always been the case.
Speaker 4: You need to find a way to cope with it
Speaker 4: that lets you get up and live your life. Not
Speaker 4: to be ignorant of it. I'm asking you to pretend
Speaker 4: that death is and a thing. I'm asking you to
Speaker 4: come to terms with it. So there's a meme that
Speaker 4: I've seen going around where somebody's talking about like I
Speaker 4: keep being asked what I'm going to do in ten
Speaker 4: years at a job interview. There's not going to be
Speaker 4: a ten years, right. That is as unscientific as saying
Speaker 4: that climate change isn't real. That's as unscientific as being
Speaker 4: anti vax. There's no scientist saying that civilization won't exist
Speaker 4: in twenty years. And twenty years, you're still going to
Speaker 4: have jobs and memos and dress codes and bills and
Speaker 4: weddings and funerals to go to. No matter, even in
Speaker 4: the worst climate change scenarios, is still going to be there.
Speaker 4: What you're talking about is, you know, things can get
Speaker 4: worse in the way the pandemic made things worse. But
Speaker 4: we have largely even the progress we've made so far
Speaker 4: thanks to the Paris Agreement, thanks to all sorts of
Speaker 4: meaningful actions that has been taken, we've avoided the worst
Speaker 4: most apocalyptic scenarios, or at least we're on track to.
Speaker 4: Because most people are good. Yeah, and most people do
Speaker 4: not want to see the world burn. And even the
Speaker 4: worst of the worst billionaires or stockholders and the oil companies,
Speaker 4: even they're trying to rationalize it away. It's like, wow,
Speaker 4: you know, people need oil until we don't like better, dah,
Speaker 4: it gets it. Maybe it won't be so bad. Like
Speaker 4: even they're not sitting there giggling at the thought of
Speaker 4: the peasants drowning under you know, the sea's rising. Most people,
Speaker 4: even if civilization collapsed tomorrow, we would rebuild it because
Speaker 4: that's how we got a civilization in the first place.
Speaker 4: Most people don't want to see the world burn.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think, I mean the biggest way just generally,
Speaker 2: I think to combat the cynicism or nihilism too, is
Speaker 2: is a I think understanding about like, you know, how
Speaker 2: things are being framed to us in general. You know,
Speaker 2: I think we, like we were saying earlier, a lot
Speaker 2: of these stories are being fed to us and emphasized
Speaker 2: to us for their own like profit, you know, motivation,
Speaker 2: not necessarily because it's out of a thing of to
Speaker 2: say like this is these are the things you need
Speaker 2: to know and that are happening. And this is a
Speaker 2: really balanced depiction of it. I think one of the
Speaker 2: things that helps me through it is to know it's like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm living in a media environment where they're only bubbling
Speaker 2: up the worst shit to me because that's how that
Speaker 2: system grows and profits. And but I also have to
Speaker 2: reckon with okay, when I parse through that, what is
Speaker 2: actually what is is what is something that's telling me
Speaker 2: something that is accurate? And what is this there for
Speaker 2: me to get my sort of outrage antenna going and
Speaker 2: for me to click on and when you kind of
Speaker 2: can give yourself a little bit of room to know
Speaker 2: like that while a lot of these things are true
Speaker 2: that are going on, we're also living in a space
Speaker 2: where the good things are not emphasized enough. And because
Speaker 2: of that that fills me with a sense of optimism
Speaker 2: because now I have to look for it. But as
Speaker 2: I learned to look for it, and the kinds of stories,
Speaker 2: of the kinds of places where I can find those
Speaker 2: stories are that just helps offset those things, because I
Speaker 2: think the worst thing to do is to think, oh
Speaker 2: my god, it's all fucked up. There's nothing I can
Speaker 2: do to da da da, which is just zoom out
Speaker 2: a second and know like we're like in one of
Speaker 2: the worst fucking information environments ever ever, of all time.
Speaker 2: Like we're there right now, and navigating that takes a
Speaker 2: huge toll on us. So I also don't want people
Speaker 2: to think that part of maybe if there's negativity you
Speaker 2: feel is because you're like you're actually assessing all of
Speaker 2: this information and coming to the right conclusion, because we're
Speaker 2: also getting a very skewed version of what is actually happening,
Speaker 2: especially in this country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but not to.
Speaker 2: Say again that it's a utopia. That's why I think
Speaker 2: it's a bit of a slipper slope because we're I
Speaker 2: think so much of what we're doing now is like
Speaker 2: saying like, Okay, that's not bad, but there is so
Speaker 2: much other structural things that we have to address. So
Speaker 2: it's about finding a balance of holding these thoughts to
Speaker 2: be true without completely becoming overwhelmed. And part of that
Speaker 2: too is being able to like contribute to something. For me,
Speaker 2: it's to like the privilege of being able to podcast
Speaker 2: and talk about the things that I hope other people
Speaker 2: want to hear about, or you know, giving my time
Speaker 2: to like do some do things in my community. Being
Speaker 2: able to find those things help offset a lot of
Speaker 2: the other shit for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And in terms of like things that I've found helpful,
Speaker 1: like in you know, trying to stay sane over you know,
Speaker 1: the past five years. Like what one of the ideas
Speaker 1: that is big in the psychiatric world or like psychiatry
Speaker 1: right now, and like also in the spiritual world is
Speaker 1: this idea of like self compassion. And it really comes
Speaker 1: down to understanding that I am viewing the world through
Speaker 1: like a broken instrument, you know, like that that it
Speaker 1: that does have like an overactive like burglar alarm, that
Speaker 1: does have like these thought patterns that I've had since
Speaker 1: I was a child, and so trying to understand them,
Speaker 1: but also like understanding that I'm not alone in in
Speaker 1: those things, and like if I, if I just would
Speaker 1: talk to other people about those things, and I am
Speaker 1: naturally more compassionate to other people than I am to
Speaker 1: myself and more understanding of their you know, having these pitfalls.
Speaker 1: But when you talk to another person and like share
Speaker 1: that stuff, you like that there is a common ground
Speaker 1: like those those problems become a little bit smaller. And
Speaker 1: then the other thing is like what when I have
Speaker 1: feelings of despair, it really rests under on the assumption
Speaker 1: that you guys were talking about just now of that
Speaker 1: I completely understand the situation, Like when I don't have
Speaker 1: this thought, but like when I actually examine what is
Speaker 1: below the surface of a feeling of despair, it's that
Speaker 1: I understand this situation have exhausted all options for doing
Speaker 1: something about it. And that's never that's never the case.
Speaker 1: I am an idiot like that. That is, I always
Speaker 1: take a lot of a lot of solace in the
Speaker 1: fact that I'm you know, we all individually, for the
Speaker 1: most part, are not capable of under understanding all of
Speaker 1: these things. We're pretty limited in our understanding, and that
Speaker 1: there are possibilities that my brain's not able to come
Speaker 1: up with, and so all I can do is focus
Speaker 1: on the things that I can actually affect, and that's
Speaker 1: really all I can do. And trying to understand and
Speaker 1: predict the future, you know, from just a personal standpoint,
Speaker 1: like can be overwhelming, and so trying to steer clear
Speaker 1: of that and just focus on the like kind of
Speaker 1: the next the next day basically, or.
Speaker 2: I think also to the I think for every story
Speaker 2: I read about Moms for Liberty, like it's heartening to
Speaker 2: hear about all of these other grassroots groups of parents
Speaker 2: that have come out to oppose moms for liberty RTT.
Speaker 2: I don't hear enough about and for every time I
Speaker 2: think about private equity and what the fuck's doing, I
Speaker 2: forget that there are organizations that are trying to do
Speaker 2: something very specifically about this issue. But we always but
Speaker 2: we're I think, just societally. We're just so good also
Speaker 2: at just identifying the deficiencies that seldom do we really celebrate,
Speaker 2: you know, like the ways to improve things. That's why
Speaker 2: I think like positive psychology is something that's only kind
Speaker 2: of beginnning to pop up in the last century because
Speaker 2: it's like, Okay, we've mastered the art of telling you what,
Speaker 2: how fucked up something is?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: We haven't, but we're now learning how to figure out
Speaker 2: how to optimize things as much as possible. And I
Speaker 2: think that's the other thing I have to keep in
Speaker 2: my mind is that every for every bad thing there is,
Speaker 2: there is the other side of the coin that I'm
Speaker 2: just not like doing the just a little bit more
Speaker 2: research to begin, like to find that positive side of
Speaker 2: it too. But again, that isn't to become complacent or
Speaker 2: to wish away any problems or to act as if
Speaker 2: these problems don't exist, but to remind myself that they're like,
Speaker 2: ultimately there are people of good conscience that are also
Speaker 2: doing things to work just as actively as the people
Speaker 2: we identify as like threat actors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, monster liberty and like the people who did the
Speaker 1: book bands and the Westbrook Baptist Church are great examples
Speaker 1: of like what we're talking about, because they're like if
Speaker 1: you view them as like underdog stories, these are like
Speaker 1: very small groups of people who managed to hijack the
Speaker 1: media and make everyone think that these problems were huge, insurmountable,
Speaker 1: like massive groups of people grassroots things, and they're actually
Speaker 1: small people who just organize themselves and made a change,
Speaker 1: a horrible change, and like they happen to go with
Speaker 1: the grain of like what is going to get media
Speaker 1: attention in the modern media environment of like outrage, But
Speaker 1: they are small groups that can be countered, and when
Speaker 1: people do it, it does seem to actually have an effect.
Speaker 1: There are things that can be done. But because we
Speaker 1: don't hear about necessarily the stories the people successfully counter
Speaker 1: like pushing back against those small groups, like it does
Speaker 1: create this optical illusion it's hopeless, and it's not.
Speaker 4: When you talk about like looking for good news. I
Speaker 4: think when mainstream news and they have like, well good
Speaker 4: news of the day, it's always like, well, these baby
Speaker 4: ducks fell into a storm drain, but we get the
Speaker 4: dumbest shit. The police came and fished them out, and
Speaker 4: it's like no. Basically, any metric of human well being
Speaker 4: worldwide over the last thirty years, from literacy rates, infant
Speaker 4: mortality rates, cancer survival rates, the percentage of people who
Speaker 4: have homes, who have electricity, who have sanitation, running water,
Speaker 4: all of those are spiked upwards in the last thirty
Speaker 4: years just due to the end of the Cold War
Speaker 4: and just liberalized trade with you know, something like two
Speaker 4: point five billion people have electricity for the first time
Speaker 4: since nineteen ninety. That many about that many people have toilets,
Speaker 4: which is if you have not lived in a place
Speaker 4: without toilets, you do not understand what a big deal
Speaker 4: that is. But in terms of the spread of disease,
Speaker 4: in terms of you know, basically everywhere the one part
Speaker 4: of the world still lagging as Sub Saharan Africa, but
Speaker 4: across China and India, these places have gotten wildly wealthier
Speaker 4: in the last thirty years. And I'm talking about the
Speaker 4: people at the bottom, people getting the first running water.
Speaker 4: Millions of miles of roads have been paid for the
Speaker 4: first time, which again does not sound like a big
Speaker 4: deal until you realize that people could not go to
Speaker 4: school or to the hospital because it meant going through
Speaker 4: a dirt road that turned into mud during the rainy season,
Speaker 4: and they literally could not travel to a place fifty
Speaker 4: miles away. Now they have a paved road to go there.
Speaker 4: It's stuff that we take for granted here where we're sitting.
Speaker 4: But for the most part, the average quality of life
Speaker 4: on Earth has gotten amazingly better by every possible metric,
Speaker 4: including things like the number of people who die in
Speaker 4: natural disasters has gone down, not because climate change isn't real,
Speaker 4: but because building standards have gone up because you've made
Speaker 4: you know, you've made buildings that can withstand hurricanes and
Speaker 4: that can handle flooding better. Infrastructure has gotten better, so
Speaker 4: behind the scenes, every single day there's people working to
Speaker 4: improve every little thing you touch. It's just that that
Speaker 4: doesn't make news because it doesn't get clicked through. Those
Speaker 4: headlines exist, so stuff gets written up. It's just if
Speaker 4: you look at the click through between that story and
Speaker 4: the one story that Fox News dug up of a
Speaker 4: trans person committing a crime, where it's like, yes, we've
Speaker 4: got the thing that we can all yell about. We
Speaker 4: have found a trans person committing a crime near a
Speaker 4: bathroom somewhere, one single person that we're going to talk
Speaker 4: about for the next six months in a nation of
Speaker 4: three hundred million people, And that won't get as much
Speaker 4: traffic as everything else on their site combined. That's just
Speaker 4: the way. That's just the way it works. But in
Speaker 4: terms of solutions as an individual, that media environment's not
Speaker 4: going to go away. It's not you have to. It's
Speaker 4: like it's like somebody is saying, I'm not going to
Speaker 4: go on a until they just stop selling the junk food.
Speaker 4: That's just not going to happen. I wish they sold
Speaker 4: healthier food. That you can't put that off. Like at
Speaker 4: some point there has to be a way to educate
Speaker 4: people or just a culture of I have to recognize
Speaker 4: what media is making me sick, like that this is
Speaker 4: junk food. That a story that doesn't affect me but
Speaker 4: is emotionally charged, that's just pure sugar. That that is
Speaker 4: just junk. It's not making you smarter, it's not making
Speaker 4: you better, and if it's making you hate everyone outside
Speaker 4: your front door, it's poison like you're poisoning yourself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, well I think we can leave it there.
Speaker 1: But Jason Parjan, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 1: Where can people find you? Follow you? You are a
Speaker 1: bit of a TikTok influencer these days. Congratulations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for that tip about the toilet thing.
Speaker 4: The people, yes, the people who knew me from the
Speaker 4: crank days will think it is very funny that I
Speaker 4: have a quarter of a million followers on TikTok. Now
Speaker 4: I'm a Jason K. Parsan on TikTok, but also that
Speaker 4: same username on Twitter and blue Sky and Threads and
Speaker 4: Instagram and Facebook and YouTube. I have to be on
Speaker 4: all of them because in between me and my readers
Speaker 4: of my books stands a wall of billionaires who own
Speaker 4: who own social media platforms, and they I have to use.
Speaker 4: I don't like any of these people. I'm on Threads
Speaker 4: even though Mark zuckerberg Berg has ruined the lives of
Speaker 4: everyone I know. He is between me and my readers.
Speaker 4: I don't know what else to do. I'm sorry, I'm
Speaker 4: not big enough. I'm not Stephen King I'm not big
Speaker 4: enough to just put a book out there and everybody
Speaker 4: suddenly knows about it. If I don't tell people about
Speaker 4: it on social media, not a single copy will sell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll have to have you back on to talk
Speaker 1: about the Zuckerberg Elon musk UFC fight.
Speaker 2: I think that'll be measuring context, which everyone.
Speaker 4: First, that whole thing, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: Which is why it's such a good point with like,
Speaker 2: like I remember with it, like on my phone, I
Speaker 2: had like an update about a new like Alzheimer's drug
Speaker 2: that's been found to be effective like in the early stages,
Speaker 2: and like how does FDA approval?
Speaker 3: And then the next things came up.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, Elon wants to measure Mark Zuckerberg's dick
Speaker 2: because his app is like less potent right now. And
Speaker 2: I'm like, what the fuck? I almost almost lost sight
Speaker 2: of like these other breakthroughs that are happening to get
Speaker 2: into some old fashioned peepe measuring.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Is there a work of media, Jason that you've
Speaker 1: been enjoying? Uh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I as far as like my favorite Twitter post
Speaker 4: I posted on here where somebody took a screenshot and
Speaker 4: Jack maybe already knew this from the Arnold Trustening Classic Commando.
Speaker 4: Can you picture the bad guy that movie in your head?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw so I want to get you got a.
Speaker 4: Chain mail tank top on it. Apparently if you watch
Speaker 4: the film and it's it's HD restoration at his chain
Speaker 4: mail tank top is queer has just made out of yarn.
Speaker 4: Looks like his grandmother knitted him a crocheted tank Topal.
Speaker 1: Oh no, it's just a it's like a loose sweater.
Speaker 1: Those loose sweaters that are in loosely knitted sweater look great.
Speaker 2: Chain mail.
Speaker 4: I I don't know. I just thought it was changing.
Speaker 1: In my memory. It is one chain mail and because
Speaker 1: tank top.
Speaker 4: By the way, yeah, the finale is Donald Troy Stener
Speaker 4: like impales him on like a pole and it's like
Speaker 4: it goes through his armor or whatever and like a
Speaker 4: big like a big pace. How strong must he have
Speaker 4: been to do that?
Speaker 2: It looks like a mesh marina like you know, like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: knit Jamaican, you know. So I thought maybe he was
Speaker 2: from the Islands.
Speaker 1: One of the least physically intimidating bad guys of all time.
Speaker 4: But it was a mismatch a lot of those eighties
Speaker 4: action movies, those people were not physical mattress for Arnold.
Speaker 4: When you look back, it's it's like, no, this is
Speaker 4: just a bully beating up on a very chubby, chubby
Speaker 4: pastry man.
Speaker 1: My favorite stallone versus Lythgal in Cliffhanger, It's.
Speaker 3: Like, Okay, this gets way better in Dexter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Miles where can people find you? As
Speaker 1: the work of Is there a work of media you've
Speaker 1: been enjoying.
Speaker 2: At Miles of Gray where they got them? Including threads.
Speaker 2: I got a new podcast coming out actually tomorrow Wednesday,
Speaker 2: July twelfth, the debut of The Good Thief's This new podcast,
Speaker 2: true crime ish podcast talking about this guy Vasili's Paliocostas,
Speaker 2: who is the Greek robin hood who is literally kidnapping
Speaker 2: millionaires and giving some money away to people and as
Speaker 2: a result, is actually one of Interpal's most wanted fugitives.
Speaker 2: So the podcast deals with kind of the search for him,
Speaker 2: if he's alive, where he's at, trying to find more
Speaker 2: about the man behind this myth. It's just a wild story.
Speaker 2: We talk about the number of times he escaped from
Speaker 2: prison using a helicopter, like multiple times, so it's just
Speaker 2: a wild rise. So please be sure to subscribe and rate.
Speaker 2: And I would really appreciate y'all's support to hear me
Speaker 2: in my more host voice, which is wild because you're
Speaker 2: used to hear me just like rambling here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have a British indubitably and let's see uh
Speaker 1: some and also obviously MOUs and Jackot mad Boosties.
Speaker 2: We were live from NBA Con as well as for
Speaker 2: twenty fiance with Sophia Alexandra. Some tweets that I like,
Speaker 2: I have a couple. Where is the first one? It
Speaker 2: is from the Onion. It's that the Onion that company
Speaker 2: hits diversity quota by claiming new Ai is a woman.
Speaker 2: But like that's we're pretty close to that. Uh and
Speaker 2: then best calb at Best b e LLL tweeted talking
Speaker 2: about the Jonah Hill thing. But this is a very
Speaker 2: LA tweet to say, if you take nothing else from
Speaker 2: this reckoning, never date a man who went to crossroads,
Speaker 2: not in the school that Yeah, that's that's for people
Speaker 2: from LA for sure. Tweet.
Speaker 1: I've been in join David at Underscore Elvis Presley Underscore
Speaker 1: tweeted if you've successfully completed seven different mission impossible missions,
Speaker 1: perhaps the guy in charge of labeling these missions is
Speaker 1: being a little dramatic. I think that's I got into
Speaker 1: a long conversation with my five year old because my
Speaker 1: seven year old can read all the all the billboards now,
Speaker 1: so he's like telling telling his little brother about like
Speaker 1: what what the movies are that are coming out? Like
Speaker 1: what the titles are? And they were like, wait, well,
Speaker 1: like what was the first impossible mission? Okay? What was
Speaker 1: the second impossible Mission? I was like, I don't don't
Speaker 1: have encyclopedic knowledge of the mission impossible, but that there
Speaker 1: is something catchy about that title, I guess, So you
Speaker 1: keep doing it, Tom Cruise. You can find me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at Jack Underscore Obrian. You can find us on
Speaker 1: Twitter at daily Zeigeist. We're at the Daily Zeigeist on Instagram.
Speaker 1: We have a Facebook fan page on a website, daily
Speaker 1: zeitgeist dot com, where we post our episodes and our
Speaker 1: footnotes like off to the information that we talked about
Speaker 1: in today's episode, as well as a song that we
Speaker 1: think you might enjoy. Myles, what's the song you think
Speaker 1: people might enjoy? Uh?
Speaker 2: We're gonna go out on a track called love Us
Speaker 2: l o Vas by Shaka Shaka Lion and singularis, which
Speaker 2: kind of is appropriate. But anyway, this is Shaka Lions
Speaker 2: just kind of takes like these older dub songs like
Speaker 2: reck reggae dub tracks, mixes them up, gives them a
Speaker 2: slightly modern feel, but it still feels very retro. You
Speaker 2: know how I like to do, so check this one out.
Speaker 2: Love Us by Shaka Lion.
Speaker 1: All right, we will link off to them the footnotes.
Speaker 1: The Daily the ZiT Gey is a production of by
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows. That's going to do it for us
Speaker 1: this morning, back this afternoon to tell you what is trending,
Speaker 1: and we will talk to y'all the bye bye